{"id":687,"date":"2008-12-15T22:16:05","date_gmt":"2008-12-16T03:16:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=687"},"modified":"2010-07-19T01:56:14","modified_gmt":"2010-07-19T06:56:14","slug":"where-the-men-are","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=687","title":{"rendered":"Where the men are"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>A commenter wrote:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nThink about it: guys like Leo Dicaprio or Owen Wilson for example.<br \/>\nThese guys are not exactly manly men but seem more like teen boys.\n<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>There&#8217;s no need to invoke exotic theories like endocrine disruptors; they&#8217;re just reflecting the zeitgeist.  I just turned 51, and a disturbingly large percentage of men in their twenties and thirties seem like spoiled narcissistic man-children to me.  I thought for a while that this might mean I was turning into the sort of crusty old fart I laughed at when I was twenty-five, until I noticed that the percentage of man-children varied a great deal depending on my social context.<\/p>\n<p><!--more--><\/p>\n<p>At the martial-arts school where I&#8217;m training, zero to not much.   Even the teenage boys there are pretty manly, on the whole &#8211; not surprising, since manliness is very nearly defined by stoicism and grace under pressure, and a martial-arts school should teach those things if it teaches nothing else.  Anywhere firearms are worn or displayed openly, ditto &#8212; go to a tactical-shooting match, for example, and you&#8217;ll see even prepubescent boys (and, though rarely, some girls) exemplifying quiet manliness in a very heartening degree.<\/p>\n<p>On the other hand&#8230;when I go to places where people are talking rather than doing, the percentage of man-children rises.  Occasionally my wife Cathy and I go to screenings at the Bryn Mawr Film institute, most recently to see Sergei Bodrov&#8217;s <cite>The Mongol<\/cite>; it&#8217;s pretty much wall-to-wall man-children there, at least in the space not occupied by middle-aged women.  If our sample is representative, my <em>wife<\/em> is manlier than the average male art-film buff.<\/p>\n<p>How does one tell?  The man-child projects a simultaneous sense of not being comfortable in his own skin and perpetually on display to others.  He&#8217;s twitchy, approval-seeking, and doesn&#8217;t know when to shut up.  He&#8217;s never been tested to anywhere near the limits of his physical or moral courage, and deep within himself he knows that because of this he is <em>weak<\/em>. Unproven.  Not really a man.  And it shows in a lot of little ways &#8211; posture, gaze patterns, that sort of thing.  He&#8217;ll overreact to small challenges and freeze or crumble under big ones.<\/p>\n<p>One of the things this culture badly needs is a set of manhood ordeals.  Unlike the tribal societies of the past, we&#8217;re too various for one size to fit all &#8212; but to reliably turn boys into men (or, to put it in more fashionable terms, to help them become mature and inner-directed) you need to put them under stress in a way that, except for the small percentage that go through military boot camps, we basically don&#8217;t any more.<\/p>\n<p>Instead, we prolong adolescence into the twenties and thirties.  With dolorous consequences for everyone&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A commenter wrote: Think about it: guys like Leo Dicaprio or Owen Wilson for example. These guys are not exactly manly men but seem more like teen boys. There&#8217;s no need to invoke exotic theories like endocrine disruptors; they&#8217;re just reflecting the zeitgeist. I just turned 51, and a disturbingly large percentage of men in&hellip; <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/?p=687\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Where the men are<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[8],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-687","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-culture","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=687"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2356,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/687\/revisions\/2356"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=687"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=687"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/esr.ibiblio.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=687"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}