Considerations

Guys seem to be tak­ing their dat­ing mar­bles and going home in the mod­ern world of a dat­ing ser­vice, dat­ing web­sites, and any dat­ing agency:

Guy­land is the world in which young men live. It is both a stage of life, a lim­i­nal unde­fined time span between ado­les­cence and adult­hood that can often stretch for a decade or more, and a place, or, rather, a bunch of places where guys gather to be guys with each other, unhas­sled by the demands of par­ents, girl­friends, jobs, kids, and the other nui­sances of adult life. In this topsy-turvy, Peter-Pan mind­set, young men shirk the respon­si­bil­i­ties of adult­hood and remain fix­ated on the trap­pings of boy­hood, while the boys they still are strug­gle hero­ically to prove that they are real men despite all evi­dence to the contrary.

So writes soci­ol­o­gist Michael Kim­mel, author of the new book “Guy­land.” As a twen­tysome­thing guy who used to live in the col­lege town of Boston, I’m not sur­prised at his find­ings. I would see this all the time in the neigh­bor­hoods of All­ston and Brighton, where recent grad­u­ates and young pro­fes­sion­als would live exactly the way Kim­mel describes.

Peo­ple will only do some­thing if they believe that the reward is worth the risk. Peo­ple do a sub­con­scious cost-benefit analy­sis for nearly every pos­si­ble action that they may take. It seems that twen­tysome­thing and thir­tysome­thing guys may have decided that mar­riage, and per­haps even tra­di­tional dat­ing, is no longer worth it.

And fem­i­nism is to blame. Or, more specif­i­cally, the unin­tended con­se­quences of feminism.

Men used to be the pri­mary providers. Our social upbring­ing and nat­ural instincts moti­vated us to gain an edu­ca­tion, work hard, and ensure that our future wives and fam­i­lies would be secure. And we were happy to have this role. It made us feel use­ful, pro­duc­tive, and appre­ci­ated. How­ever, in recent decades, women have become just as edu­cated and suc­cess­ful as men. So now men have lit­tle moti­va­tion to work and study hard enough to have the abil­ity to care for any­thing beyond our per­sonal needs and wants. Since we can devote less time to being pro­duc­tive, we can focus more on sports, the Inter­net, and bars. On a sub­con­scious level, the orig­i­nal role that men once played in soci­ety no longer exists, so we are now unsure of our place. So we are now aim­less and directionless.

But there is more to it. Women them­selves have changed, and the response of men has been almost entirely neg­a­tive. As Ph.D. stu­dent Ken Mond­schein notes in this essay in his excel­lent “His­tory of Sin­gle Life” series, the idea of “social cap­i­tal” fig­ures promi­nently in the dat­ing world. Men and women want to secure a mate that is as high on the social lad­der as pos­si­ble. For men, sex appeal plays a large role; for women, it is mon­e­tary resources and social assets. As I note in a lengthy essay, women become more picky as they become more suc­cess­ful because they always want to date “up” in terms of social capital. In Guy­land, men are seem­ing to with­draw from the dat­ing world rather than play a game that is now stacked against them. There is also a related issue: girls are act­ing in a way that is sim­i­lar to guys. I can­not count the num­ber of twen­tysome­thing women I know who are also actively avoid­ing seri­ous rela­tion­ships because they just want “to have fun,” or they want to focus only on their edu­ca­tions and careers. (A 27-year-old friend of mine broke up with her won­der­ful boyfriend to go to grad­u­ate school across the coun­try. Essen­tially, she chose to pri­or­i­tize her career over her relationship.)

But there is still more. Fem­i­nism made pornog­ra­phy and female promis­cu­ity both per­mis­si­ble and com­mon, and this has had a neg­a­tive effect on the dat­ing world. Men no longer need to make an effort and promise a rela­tion­ship in order to obtain sex. If a woman wants to take it slow, then many guys, unfor­tu­nately, will imme­di­ately move on to count­less oth­ers who will not. But, in the end, easy access to free pornog­ra­phy on the Inter­net mave have done the most dam­age. If a guy can, if you’ll excuse me, plea­sure him­self in a few min­utes and then go out to play foot­ball with the guys, why should he spend count­less hours and money endur­ing stress­ful and frus­trat­ing dat­ing games to woo a picky woman in order to obtain the same result? In a ratio­nal cost-benefit analy­sis, per­haps dat­ing itself is no longer worth it to men.

And this apa­thy also extends to mar­riage itself. In a world in which many, if not most, mar­riages end in divorce, why should a man risk get­ting mar­ried when he might lose his chil­dren and half of his assets even though his wife likely makes as much (or more) money as he does? Fam­ily law needs to be updated for the mod­ern world.

The exis­tence of Guy­land proves the cen­tral theme of my ear­lier essay: As a result of fem­i­nism, men and women have become so inde­pen­dent and sep­a­rated that they no longer need each other. I’m not sure if there is a way out from here.

Else­where: Why Some­one is Leav­ing ‘Guyland’

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