Explaining what’s wrong with articles by Kay “guys should man up” Hymowitz is kind of like shooting fish in a barrel entirely full of salted herring. Nevertheless, I am in a ranty mood, so.
Hymowitz’s first article, from the Wall Street Journal, is all about this brand-new “preadulthood” thing, which is where instead of getting married and popping out babies, twentysomethings are getting drunk and/or watching Star Wars and/or being unemployed.
I’m currently one of those “preadults”; most of my friends are “preadults” too– geeks, bronies, starving artists and writers, comic book readers, Star Wars fans, regular users of a wide variety of interesting psychedelics, gamers, the unemployed and underemployed. And this whole idea of “large numbers of single young men and women living independently, while also having enough disposable income to avoid ever messing up their kitchens”… fuck, Hymowitz, have you heard of the recession? Have you heard of the massive amounts of college students graduating into one of the worst job markets in recent history?
Man. I am so pleased to discover that I was just hallucinating all the people who had to move back in with their parents, and the people who are on food stamps, and the people hoarding their college cafeteria money because once it runs out they don’t eat, because the entire world looks like the two hundred people Kay Hymowitz knows in New York.
After all, my friends eat in restaurants all the time! When I’ve craving Chinese and pay for their meal in exchange for company! When you can get a burrito for five dollars with free chips and if you’re clever get two-and-a-half meals out of it! When they get free dinner as one of the perks of waiting tables! I mean, there’s that one guy whose roommate is an underemployed professional chef, he eats restaurant-quality food almost every day!
This is not even getting into the problems with writing a sociological argument about The Nature Of Men In America and fingering one of the major causes as “college degrees take a lot of time.” Do poor people not exist in Hymowitz-land?
This is not even getting into the scientific fact that Hymowitz hates happiness. First, she talks about how “[preadults] are looking not just for jobs but for “careers,” work in which they can exercise their talents and express their deepest passions.” As it happens, job satisfaction is well-correlated with overall happiness. Second, she is pissed as fuck that people are waiting to get married, even though higher age at first marriage is correlated with lower risk of divorce. Finally, here is a short list of things that Hymowitz guys should not do:
- Watch Star Wars.
- Given her rationale for why guys shouldn’t watch Star Wars, consume any media with an intended demographic of children (e.g. Pixar, My Little Pony, Harry Potter).
- Play video games.
- Be in a rock band.
- Go to Vegas.
- Be a maladriot geek.
- Smoke pot.
- Watch Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network, or Spike.
- Watch movies starring Steve Carell, Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will Farrell, or Seth Rogen.
- Watch movies featuring car crashes, fart jokes, breast or crotch shots, beer pong competitions, or fratboy pranks.
Like I said. I think she hates joy.
The way I see it, there are exactly two rules you need to follow in your life:
1) Don’t hurt people.
2)Try to live a life as happy, fulfilled, meaningful, and fun as you can without violating #1.
If you’re following those two rules, and you get a life in which you work shitty stress-free slacker job to pay the bills while smoking pot, playing video games, being in a rock band, and watching Comedy Central, Star Wars, and car-crash movies, awesome! Get down with your bad self.
I mean, if you’re living off a parent or romantic partner who is decidedly Not Okay with the “slacker job, pot, Star Wars” plan and wants you to contribute to the family budget already, you should probably work on the whole not living off them anymore thing. (Although the shitty economy and high unemployment rate can make that impossible for a lot of people, and that is pretty much not your fault.) But other than that, dudes? Your worth as a person is NOT based on how well you fulfill the Success Myth or hegemonic masculinity. You do NOT have to spend your life slaving away to enrich the corporate overlords. Being happy is enough.
Hell, if you think about it, being a dude who’s proudly and happily ignoring the Success Myth is fucking up the gender binary as much as being a chick who’s proudly and happily ignoring the Beauty Myth. Slacker masculists are exactly like hairy-legged feminists!
I think Hymowitz’s idiocy can be summed up in one quote: “[preadult men] live in rooms decorated with “Star Wars” posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys.” One of these things is nooooot like the others, one of these things just dooooooesn’t belong.
Star Wars and beer do not hurt people, hence they do not violate Rule #1, hence they are viable life choices. Being a misogynistic fuckhead does hurt people, hence it does violate Rule #1, hence it is NOT a viable life choice. These are the problems you get into when you put “being a dickhead” and “liking Star Wars” in the same category of “not being a Real Man.”
This gets brought to a head in more recent Kay Hymowitz article, which features The (He)artist(e) formerly known as Roissy, because I died and went to Ranter Heaven. Kay Hymowitz wishes to inform you that men are bitter! No, they are not bitter over being unemployed and unemployable, having their job prospects fucked in the ass by Wall Street, the cancellation of Firefly, or anything else sensible. No, they are bitter because women are bitches.
Why are women bitches, you ask? Well, because women are different! Some women want to be asked out, and some women want to do the asking out! Some women want men to be chivalrous, and some women want to be treated as equals! Worse, some women may want different things at different times! They may want casual sex sometimes and relationships other times! They may want to split the dinner fifty-fifty and a ton of roses on Valentine’s Day! Anarchy! Madness! Riots in the streets!
Hymowitz is the only person who can write a set of sentences like “Men say they have no choice. If they want a life, they have to ask women out on dates; they have to initiate conversations at bars and parties, they have to take the lead on sex. Women can take a Chinese menu approach to gender roles” and come to the conclusion that what we need to do is stuff women back in the gender-box too. Everyone is miserable! Equality!
Here’s the deal, people. If you are confused what your girlfriend wants, ask her. If she lies or plays games, inform her that you are not a mind-reader and that if she wants things she has to fucking communicate. If she regularly refuses to communicate like a grown-ass adult, dump the motherfucker already. If she has told you, don’t read Fox News telling you about the “five feminist demands she wants you to ignore” and fucking ignore her. That’s shitty.
If you don’t want to date women and would prefer to spend all your time with, to quote someone quoted in the article, “PlayStation 3s, 24-hours-a-day sports channels, and free Internet porn,” don’t date women! Tell anyone who gives you shit about it to mind their own fucking business. As long as you are not a sexist asshat and otherwise do not violate Rule #1, it is perfectly all right to decide you don’t want to date people. If nothing else, it really pisses Hymowitz off, which is pretty much the noblest cause around.
Daisy_Deadhead: “I think large groups of people living together is good. I am hoping the recession makes us all question the “single person in an apt” thing… that is a huge waste of resources. Sharing washing machines and toasters and cable TV and stuff is GOOD.” Thankyouthankyouthankyou. I thought maybe I was the only one who noticed that living with parents and siblings (even while helping out) is a helluva lot more sustainable than everybody having his or her own house or apartment. If Mom, Dad, the son, and the daughter each want to eat dinner while watching the news… Read more »
” (while also complaining about how they have to travel for hours to see an “American” doctor because their local practice was taken over by a Hindu or a Korean first-generation immigrant), ” Those are self-selected, cream-of-the-crop types. Globalism makes that kind of competiton happen in societies that welcome it. This society in particular has been practicing that for centuries now – that’s why we had our industrialization on the backs of cheap imported European labor rather than expensive native-born Euro-and African American labor. Discarded populations are a signature feature of American history. As for insisting on a doctor of… Read more »
@Developers^3 I’ve been reading critiques of Hymowitz’s “Man Up!”, posts for almost a full year. The amount of responders in those threads who openly castigate/worry about “demographic change” would astounded you. They have the same commentary for “the Muslim threat” in Europe (I’ve lived in Europe, its nowhere near as bad as they think) or the “herbivore” men in Japan (men who refuse to marry for fear of failure to meet their wife’s demands.) At its base, “Man Up” literature strikes me (personally speaking) as a call to make more of “our own”. I mean, I work in healthcare. I… Read more »
Yes, and people can use not having a strong social safety net to hurt people. Like, the whole “people starving to death” thing. I am pretty sure that people are hurt by that. I am personally of the opinion that I am hurt less by paying for food stamps and welfare (even for people who are “not deserving,” whatever that means) than other people are by starving. The thing that you can’t hurt someone through the lack of a safety net any more than you can hurt someone by refusing to give them some other piece of your property. The… Read more »
Hymowitz’s article strikes me as the economic equivalent of slut-shaming. Excoriating young men for not having 1%er jobs or interests may be a propagandist means of instilling self-blame in the underemployed. Her disdain for the low-stress job and its workers is a subtle indication that the office bullies have lost valuable targets, but gained an apologist with a literary agent.
@Ozy:
Love this post. Thanks. 🙂
D3: Yes, and people can use not having a strong social safety net to hurt people. Like, the whole “people starving to death” thing. I am pretty sure that people are hurt by that. I am personally of the opinion that I am hurt less by paying for food stamps and welfare (even for people who are “not deserving,” whatever that means) than other people are by starving. Talking about whether divorce makes people unhappy is difficult, because if you think about it it’s wrong to compare divorces to marriages, because the set of marriages includes a lot of happy… Read more »
I do not entirely see what the idea “regulation and a strong social safety net lead to better outcomes than the converse” has to do with “your life duties are ‘don’t hurt people and try to be happy.’” The thing is that people can use the strong social safety net to hurt other people. If you go off and smoke pot every day, get lung cancer and require government subsidized treatment, then you are hurting everyone who pays into the system. You can say the same thing for all sorts of irresponsible behaviour. It becomes nearly impossible to do anything… Read more »
1. As was mentioned earlier, Kay Hymowitz is an Upper East (or maybe West) Side-dwelling Manhattanite. I live in NYC and I can tell you that the people who live between 60th and 90th streets in the city are among the worst people on the planet (in terms of self-absorption and ego.) 2. Whenever you read a news article about male underachievement (written by or from a white person in a white country), go ahead and add the words “Or ‘non-white’ people will take over”, to the end of their screed. Are there *benefits* to the standard monogamous lifestyle? Most… Read more »
“The way I see it, there are exactly two rules you need to follow in your life:
1) Don’t hurt people.
2)Try to live a life as happy, fulfilled, meaningful, and fun as you can without violating #1.”
There’s a name for that: http://wiki.mises.org/wiki/Principle_of_non-aggression
Debaser: Well, yes, but I do think the happiness and fun is part of it! For the majority of people, I think a happy life involves working on things that they’re passionate about and fulfill them sometimes AND eating fajitas and then playing Magic until dawn sometimes. S’why I put down “fulfilled, meaningful, and fun.” D3: I do not entirely see what the idea “regulation and a strong social safety net lead to better outcomes than the converse” has to do with “your life duties are ‘don’t hurt people and try to be happy.'” I am also not entirely sure… Read more »
Life is not about “happiness” and “fun”. Life is about fulfillment and flourishing.
“This is one of the reasons that, while I agree with much of Kay Hymowitz is saying, I’m a bit bothered by how she’s saying it in this article. Let’s face it, some of these ‘maladroit geeks’ are busy building everything from the Linux kernel to next generation of manned spacecraft. Some are even happily married. If that’s not advancing civilization, I don’t know what is. ” My geekery doesn’t involve hacking or doing engineering. It involves passing time and amassing encyclopedic amounts of information about virtual worlds basically no one in real life cares about. And this should be… Read more »
I’m currently one of those “preadults”; most of my friends are “preadults” too– geeks… You know, I tend to think of “geek” as a synonym for “hacker” or “engineer” long before I think of “obsesses over obscure pop culture”. That being said, I think your point stands here. The silliness about video games and Star Wars really doesn’t make you less of a productive member of society. To be honest, it’s a bit of a red haring. This is one of the reasons that, while I agree with much of Kay Hymowitz is saying, I’m a bit bothered by how… Read more »
HumanBeing, I’d bet that you will eventually reach a point in your life where staying up all night will lose its appeal, regardless of your family situation, financial situation, etc. Ageing is an adventure that the young can’t imagine. Ah, but my sleep cycle is perpetually stuck on the second or third shift. It’s actually gotten worse the older I’ve gotten, and even my ADD meds make little difference. On weekends, I like nothing better than staying up until 6 am and sleeping in until 2 pm. I thought this was really strange, but I did some research, and it… Read more »
dungone writes:
Huh. I thought men kissing women’s feet was a male fantasy. I imagine if a man kissed Kay Hymowitz’s feet, she’d say, “What are you, my child? You’re not acting like a real man, you creepy weirdo!”
Wait, she interviewed Roissy? She’d say, “You’re acting like a herb!”
I keep getting the feeling she is miserable at her wasted life, and now she wants everyone else to be as miserable as she is.
HumanBeing,
I’d bet that you will eventually reach a point in your life where staying up all night will lose its appeal, regardless of your family situation, financial situation, etc. Ageing is an adventure that the young can’t imagine.
@ HumanBeing: You are, for today, my favorite person in the world. Kudos.
Oh, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t add that overpaid corporate media shills like Hymowitz are also irate partially because they have no idea what it’s like to be a young adult these days, and are insulated from real life from their media castles. The generation after ours – Echo Boomers, Millennials, whatever we call ’em now – went to college in an era when education costs are at an all-time high and grants and scholarships are at an all-time low. Then, they entered a workforce oversaturated with bachelor’s degree holders, with 8 applicants for every job, and a… Read more »
Awesome! I hope when my husband and I are 40, we’ll still have refused to succumb to adulthood. Staying up late and sleeping until 2 pm on weekends, not having kids to drag our lifestyle down or loose sleep over, no mortgage to anchor us to a city or a job we hate, and the flexibility to do what we want, when we want it. I enjoy it when my peers call me selfish because I REFUSE to accept the hallowed “milestones” of adulthood. Dig a little deeper, and they’re carping about how horrible “kids’ stuff” is – clubs, movies,… Read more »
Yeah but that’s a fictional character that doesn’t actually exist? I mean insofar as most erroneous and misinformed stereotypes on that show don’t exist. But what do I know? As a 25 year old guy with a housemate, a band, X-men tattoos, a big screen tv and a sizable comic book collection, I’m clearly not fitting in to Hymowitz’s definition of an adult despite being in a successful and happy relationship for 5 years and being employed as a social worker.
Howard in Big Bang Theory maybe? If he had more than extremely marginal success with dating.
The thing I find so amusing about this Kay Hymowitz person (we don’t have her here but I’ve gathered that she’s a horrible person) is that the people she’s describing…I don’t think they exist. Like, I know a bunch of people who have their bedrooms decorated with Star Wars posters and who play video games and stuff like that. But they don’t know how to TALK to women let alone treat them like disposable toys (and these guys are collectors, you don’t *dispose* of toys!!! You don’t even take them out of the packaging!).
@Suturexself, I think you’re both right. The fact is, universities are part of a complex system of industry and labor and in a lot of ways they take part in the redistribution of resources. What you’re doing when you pay tuition is a) pay for free corporate R&D that benefits the 1%, b) provide risk-free profits to the banking industry, and c) provide a risk free* source of skilled labor. *It’s risk free in the sense that corporations can seize upon an economic opportunity and expect that trained workers will just be there, as if by magic. And if they… Read more »