Isn’t it someone’s job to inform me when something that stupid is going down? Because this article is the quintessence of End of Men hysteria.
How bad is it? It says, in all seriousness, this paragraph:
Something, it seems, is sucking the life out of guys quite literally. One-third of male college students say they’ve experienced erectile dysfunction. Leonard Sax, a family physician for nearly 20 years who authored the book Boys Adrift, saw more and more of them in his Maryland office, asking for Viagra and Cialis. Constant access to porn has desensitized them; they can’t get it up with live girls. “We’re seeing the replacement of penile sex with oral sex,” says Sax, “with the girl on her knees, servicing the boy. Boys and girls both end up losers.” One in five men ages 18 to 25 are now classified as “sub-fertile” because of low sperm count and quality, both of which have been dropping in the developed world for the past 50 years. Curiously, 50 years ago, around 64 percent of all college students were male.
I… I don’t even get what the point of that is. Huh? “Men can’t get it up, porn is evil, OMG BLOWJOBS THE WORLD IS ENDING, men have lower sperm count and this is related to the number of college students that are male probably!”
Like most End of Men articles, it makes a token gesture to the reality that most of the reason men are more likely to live at their parents’ home than women can be summed up in “the economy,” and then throws it away, all the better to complain about how men in this generation just aren’t manning up. Yes, men are more likely to live with their parents than women. The reasons? Women tend to get married younger than men do and men are more likely than women to move in with their parents for economic reasons, such as those caused by the fucking recession. Why that is is an interesting question, but somehow I imagine fulminating about video games will not provide an answer to it.
Also like most End of Men articles, it relies entirely on anecdotes, to the point that the only thing the article proves is that there are men who are slacker bloggers and women who work for Nickelodeon and are sad that they can’t find a boyfriend. Gee. That is completely against everything my “people of all genders are people and do lots of different things” theory would predict.
Sociologists cite five “markers” or “milestones” that have traditionally defined our notion of adulthood: finishing school, moving away from the parental home, becoming financially independent, getting married, and having a child. In 1960, 65 percent of men had ticked off all five by age 30; by 2000, only a third had.
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Here’s a hint: there’s no such thing as a normal life. You can’t just say “our definition of adulthood has traditionally involved moving away from home and having a child!” and then assume that that’s good enough. Are adults who live with their parents (and their parents) happier or less happy than adults who don’t? Are people who have children more satisfied with their lives than those who don’t? Is it a good idea to get married before 30, or does it make marriages more likely to end in divorce? Also, nice job with that 1960 thing, the number of men who had done all five by 30 definitely has nothing to do with living in one of the most prosperous times and on the tail end of literally the biggest Baby Boom in American history.
“I’m astonished, just astonished, that kids are moving back home,” says Barry Schwartz, a longtime psychology professor at Swarthmore College who studies happiness and satisfaction. “My kids never came home once they left. They would have seen coming home to live as an absolute failure—the worst thing in the world.”
So… the word “failure” is having less of an irrational effect on people? How is that a bad thing? Would you rather that people be homeless out of stubborn pride? What is your goal here, Mr. Schwartz? (Okay, well, other than his fetish for the 1950s.)
The median age of male marriage keeps getting pushed further back—more than three years (which is an eon to sociologists) since 1980, to 28.2. That leaves young men with a long, long stretch of sowing wild oats—while young women tap their feet impatiently.
Uh, that’s actually a good thing. Later marriages are less likely to end in divorce, which I’m pretty sure most people would consider to be a good thing. Also, why are we assuming that women aren’t sowing their wild oats, or that any gender is particularly eager to marry? This article just seems to take “women sob at bridal magazines while the men they love fuck strippers” as a given.
Prior generations of men, she says, would leave their tight-knit communities of college friends, move to new cities, and become isolated. That made relationships with women more attractive, since women typically organized social life. “Now, Facebook makes it so easy to keep in touch with your old friends, to make plans and coordinate,” Bogle says. Guys can actually do it themselves.
And clearly we should go back to the old way, in which men were compelled on pain of eternal loneliness to date the first woman who comes along. That definitely sounds like a recipe for happy relationships.
If you don’t even have to leave the house to find sexual gratification—much less put on a tie, make small talk and pay for dinner—why would you bother?
Please raise your hand if you would like to get married to someone who is only marrying you because they’re tired of their lone dogeared copy of Penthouse. (And, I guess, because they don’t have any friends otherwise. SUCH A CATCH.)
Fuck, this thing is like a thousand words and I’m only on page two. Part two tomorrow!
“Something, it seems, is sucking the life out of guys quite literally. One-third of male college students say they’ve experienced erectile dysfunction.” Or one third of male college students are comfortable enough admitting this for the first time in history. “Constant access to porn has desensitized them; they can’t get it up with live girls.” “Live” girls? I think he forgot the “XXX” ad the end of that XD. At any rate, lying this at the feet of porn is lazy. Porn has been around for a long, long time. If it actually gave people ED we’d have died out… Read more »
Enough of your Earth logic, or I’ll zap you with my vagina-ray. 😉
Isn’t ED an early sign of heart disease? It sounds like it has more to do with the obesity epidemic than anything.
Is it just me, or is there no printer friendly or single page version of that article? Also, does anybody know if it is possible to access the comments to the article without posting one? I have to admit I have read Boy’s Adrift, and political agenda aside (segregated schools are NEVER a good idea. Ever. For any reason.) the author has some interesting observations. There is a lot of talk about “sensory addiction” that I frankly don’t believe though. The problem is that positing that the reason boys are leaving school, men aren’t pursuing higher education, and/or men are… Read more »
Modern reproductive strategy seems to lean toward producing a smaller number of quality offspring. I think this would favor men with lower sperm count and sex drive, as they would produce fewer children but give them each more of their time, resources, and energy. Additionally, with the advent of birth control and abortion, a man’s reproductive success becomes more and more dependent on whether he can find a partner willing to go off birth control and then carry the baby to term – when fewer babies are created accidentally, a high sperm count and being horny 24/7 year-round is no… Read more »
Talk about an entitled woman writing an article (the one linked in your article). Wahhhh, how dare men enjoy leisure activities like gaming. How dare they not want to be tied down with marriage so early, how dare they enjoy casual sex. It’s funny when I see these articles written, why don’t the female authors and any other women who are upset about “men being boys” take a long hard look at their own behaviour in relationships, maybe…just maybe….some women are turning men off to relationships. Every guy that fits the description of what she is whinging about that I… Read more »
See here as well about lower sperm counts: http://www.cbc.ca/documentaries/doczone/2008/disappearingmale/chemicals.html
Decent documentary in my view.
While I share the author’s hate on for this article, the low sperm count thing has nothing to do modern young men and everything to do with something going on in our environment. Unlike all the other BS about “the end of men” this thing about sperm counts is real, objectively measurable and has a real impact on life in a fundamentally biological way. Every decade or so (so I’m told by my pediatrician friend), the sperm / mL of semen cutoff is reduced. Sperm counts are dropping and have been for decades. No one (and I mean no one)… Read more »
“a fundamental aspect of the males of our species is their ability to fertilize eggs.”
Transphobic/cisnormative statement, please amend it.
Really? Isn’t “male” a purely biological idea rather than social construct? If he said “men” or “masculinity”, I’d maybe see your point. But surely, there is some immutable, clinical understanding of xy chromosome’d, smaller gamete’d creatures that we can agree to use?
Hugh, all I’ve got to say is “Call the waaaaaaahmbulance.”
It is what it is. Deal with it.
Is the author suggesting that porn causes a lower sperm count? I’d never heard that one before. If it were effective enough, watching porn could be a form of birth control…
Are young men really losing interest in sex? I keep seeing this allegation but since I’m in my 40’s, I have no way of knowing. Can anyone closer to that generation enlighten me? I don’t know whether to write this off as media hysteria or start worrying about it. I don ‘t know how to test it unless I start asking random 20 year old guys about their views on sex, which might either lead to some interesting conversations, or get me arrested. The idea that any 20-something guy would dislike actual sex is a shocking idea to me and… Read more »
Well, its not that the interest has waned, its that it has become fixated on, and readily satisfied with, fantasy to the point that real sex with real women has become much less exciting (and less motivating) than it used to. Of course, everyone just assumes that’s a bad thing, but I don’t believe many are thinking of the happiness and well-being of the young men in question. Usually they fret over the jobs their no longer doing and the young women their impacting as a consequence. Perhaps someone should actually ask these men if they’d rather return to the… Read more »
Huh. Why is that though? Is it that real women can’t live up to the perfect women in porn? Is it because real sex is too boring because most women won’t do the extreme or ncomfortable things that happen in porn? Is it because relationships with women are too much trouble? I am genuinely curious.
Guys preferring blow jobs to sex doesn’t surprise me, though, that’s always been true. 🙂
It has something to do with increasingly numb dopamine-receptors and constant dopamine bombardment that require a person to seek out increasing quality and quantity of stimulation to achieve prior levels of fulfillment (I’m not a doctor, clearly). Its a bit like if you used to get chocolate once a year, but you now get it everyday at breakfast, lunch and dinner on demand. It was once really exciting, now its just “meh”.
“Why is that though?”
Because I get all the human connection, emotional support and physical closeness I want through platonic relationships, and porn does not demand I fill (because of my gender) an initiator role I’m neither comfortable or competent in. Neither does it expect you to jump through a dozen other gender preformance hoops for the chance it might be interested.
I can only speak for myself however.
Is it that real women can’t live up to the perfect women in porn? Is it because real sex is too boring because most women won’t do the extreme or uncomfortable things that happen in porn? I think this probably cuts both ways, and stronger so for people with little sexual experience (and my guess would be that there are more male virgins than female virgins among young people). One partner I had, who had no prioir sex partners, imagined many things to be easier and feeling different than they were in real life – I couldn’t live up to… Read more »
Something caught my attention: If a woman finds sex to be boring, the usual assumption is that there’s something wrong with the partners she’s had/having. If a man finds sex to be boring, the usual assumption is that there’s something wrong with him.
Not saying that those are your assumptions, as you really do ask and are actually interested in the real reasons.
Well, agreed, everyone needs to take responsibility for their own satisfaction. If a woman is bored with sex but never says anything to her partner, she can’t just blame him. I think my question was directed more at the idea (which I’ve heard but can’t prove) that porn has “taught” men to expect a kind of sexuality which is very focused on male pleasure and kind of neglects female pleasure (or expects women to find things pleasurable that often aren’t actually very pleasurable). Like I said, I don’t know if that’s true, it’s just an allegation I’ve heard about the… Read more »
One thing porn can help with is not needing to lower your standards and dating someone you aren’t into just for some decent sexual pleasure. Of course you don’t get the emotional aspect, but jerking off to porn can be better than dating a very negative woman, “bitch”, or whatever. Less need to settle basically.
I guess the problem of boring sex is in a way analoguous to boredem at a rock concert: If the audience is bored, the band sucks; if the band is bored, the band sucks. Is it problematic to see the man as the performer and the woman as the “audience” when it comes to heterosexual sex? Yeah, it sure is, but it is unfortunately quite a common view, among women and men. Back to porn: I’ve heard the complaint/observation that apparently, many young men are trying to reenact porn they’ve seen instead of trying to have sex driven by their… Read more »
About sexual boredom and getting a woman in the mood. When a man makes me feel like the most beautiful, hottest, sexiest woman in the world, I’m always in the mood. I don’t need him to buy me stuff, look like Idris Elba, or even SHOWER for me. Just make me feel like a WOMAN. Don’t compare me to other women or make me feel insecure. That’ll make me lose my woman boner real quick. Smack my ass or jiggle my boobs and tell me how amazing they are. Look into my eyes with love. It takes like..5 seconds to… Read more »
I’ve seen this floating around too, and heard the “guys are just finding it easier to beat off than have sex, even if relationships” and wondered if it had something to do with women trending towards wanting focused-on-them sex too – therefore sex isn’t just a she-lies-there/sucks-and-he-gets-off-and-goes-to-sleep deal, but an event with foreplay and taking turns and figuring wants and desires that day and cuddling afterward… soo much more effort! Really just easier to masturbate, and, as my husband put it “then just go to sleep.” Not to say that there aren’t men that for them their partner getting off… Read more »
Just asking, because tone doesn’t always translate too well over the internet: Do you have a negative opinion of guys (in a relationship) who, when feeling horny at the moment, rather just masturbate instead of first trying to get her girlfriend in the mood for sex (which may or may not succeed), possibly first mask their desire for sex because the girlfriend wants sex “to happen naturally”, and afterwards forcing himself to keep engaged in a conversation or keep on caressing his partner’s back while trying his hardest not to fall asleep until he finally fails to do so, because… Read more »
As a nearly 20 year-old guy (less than a week till adulthood holyshit!) I can assure you my friends and I aren’t losing interest in sex. I’d argue that we’re just as horny as previous generations – although of course, there’s no way to objectively quantify it. I do think, however, that my cohort has a much different relationship to sex then previous generations, and porn plays a very interesting role in it. Simply put, it allows me and my friends to be pickier when it comes to girls. We have no need to string things along in doomed or… Read more »
Actually, I doubt that a *healthy* relationship is a major energy suck. Not that it doesn’t take energy to keep a relationship going, but it’s a bit more like jogging: Yes, it takes time and energy, but it also gives you a lot of energy, *if you aren’t doing it wrong* (or so I heard). I just think that it’s important to know that an intimate relationship isn’t supposed to be draining you of your energy – if you feel your relationship is burning you out instead of firing you up, then there is a problem in your relationship you… Read more »
“…. while young women tap their feet impatiently.’
And did you notice this one too? This is a BAD THING because it’s impacting young women, cheating of their right to a man, any man, (regardless of what he may actually want.) Won’t anyone think of the women???!!!
“I’m astonished, just astonished, that kids are moving back home,” says Barry Schwartz, ….”
What do you wanat to bet that his grandfather moved his grnadmother into the family home, while his parents were still very much alive, just the way my granadfather did and just about everyone else’s Presentist much?
“Won’t anyone think of the women???!!!” Um… I think the point Ozy was making is that the women who eventually might marry these men (or not) are plenty busy with their own careers and occupations and hook-ups and don’t particularly want to get married right now, kthx. So “think of the women” becomes “think of the stereotypical image of womanhood; the flesh-and-blood ones are busy living their lives, thanks”, which seems desperately unproductive, overall. And what, exactly, is the problem with everyone playing through their 20s and building a life and figuring out what they want and deciding to commit… Read more »
Well said…as one of those women who was busy doing my own thing for decades and is now happily partnered with one of those slacker guys (yeah, we pretty much do whatever we want when we’re not at work and it’s AWESOME), I say AMEN to your post 🙂
““Won’t anyone think of the women???!!!” Um… I think the point Ozy was making….” Ozy wasn’t making the point about young women tapping their feet impatiently, she was quoting it, with disapproval. “And what, exactly, is the problem with everyone playing through their 20s and building a life and figuring…” Who is this directed at? Do you think it’s a response ot something i have said? I am objecting to criticisms of young men’s life choices, whatever they happen to be, based on how they affect young women or fail to give them what they happen to feel entitled to.… Read more »