Growing Up to Be Boys

By Lakshmi Chaudhry, In These Times. Posted March 23, 2006.

When CBS unveiled its short-lived series "Love Monkey" in January, leading male television critics could barely contain their enthusiasm. The New York Times' Alessandra Stanley was far less impressed, especially with its lead male character, thirty-something music producer Tom Farrell, whose "endearing foibles" included "self-absorption, wanting what he cannot have and an inability to commit."

Based on the eponymous 2004 novel by Kyle Smith, "Love Monkey" offered the latest iteration of "lad-lit," a genre popularized by the likes of Nick Hornby, whose novels inevitably featured a confused, neurotic, discontented man-boy being dragged kicking and screaming into adulthood, usually by his girlfriend.

But where "lad lit" authors disguise the dumbing-down of adult masculinity with witty prose, advertising executives are less subtle. Commercials for cell phones, fast food, beer and deodorants offer up an infantilized version of masculinity that has become ubiquitous since the rise of "lad" culture in the '90s. These grown men act like boys -- and are richly rewarded for it. A recent cell phone ad, for example, features a guy who responds to being dumped by his girlfriend -- because "you're never going to grow up" -- by playing, on his cell phone, an '80s pop song that tells her to get lost. Of course, this immediately earns him the attention of a younger, prettier woman walking by.

While these ads pretend to mirror a male fantasy -- say, of walking down the wedding aisle armed with a six-pack of Bud Light -- they in fact reflect a corporate executive's dream customer: a man-boy who is more likely to remain faithful to their product than to his wife.

This shift in the dominant image of manhood is most evident in the evolution of the so-called "Family Man." The benevolent patriarch of the '50s has been replaced by an adult teenager who spends his time sneaking off to hang out with the boys, eyeing the hot chick over his wife's shoulder, or buying cool new toys. Like a fourteen-year-old, this guy can't be trusted with the simplest of domestic tasks, be it cooking dinner for the kids or shopping for groceries.

These pop culture images are all the more striking because they directly contradict the experiences of men in the real world. Women may still bear the greater burden of domestic work, but American males today do more at home than their fathers, and are happy doing it. According to the Families and Work Institute, the percentage of college-educated men who said they wanted to move into jobs with more responsibility fell from 68 percent to 52 percent between 1992 and 2002. A Radcliffe Public Policy Center report released in 2000 found that 70 percent of men between the ages of 21 to 39 were willing to sacrifice pay and lose promotions in exchange for a work schedule that allowed them to spend more time with their families.

Yet popular culture continues to fetishize the traditional, '50s model of masculinity, but in a distilled form -- kick-ass machismo stripped of the accompanying values of honor, duty and loyalty. We seem to have carried with us the unreconstructed sexism of the past -- the objectification of women, inability to connect or communicate -- but discarded its redeeming virtues. Where traditional masculinity embraced marriage, children and work as rites of passage into manhood, the 21st century version shuns them as emasculating, with the wife cast in the role of the castrating mother. The result resembles a childlike fantasy of manhood that is endowed with the perks of adulthood -- money, sex, freedom -- but none of its responsibilities.

At least part of this image is rooted in a real cultural trend, according to State University of New York at Stony Brook sociology professor Michael Kimmel. His upcoming book, Guyland, argues that men "are resisting becoming men longer and longer," doing their best to postpone all the decisions that mark the passage into adulthood -- getting a job, moving out of their parents' home, getting married, and having kids -- in order to enjoy the lad lifestyle of "online porn, drinking, and poker." This trend has its big-screen avatar in the hero of the film "Failure To Launch," which stars Matthew McConaughey as a thirty-something slacker whose desperate parents "hire the gorgeous and talented girl of his dreams to get him to move out of the house."

More significantly, however, this resistance to adulthood is closely associated with a market-driven consumerist culture that feeds and sustains a Peter Pan version of masculinity. "To be grown up is to be settled, comfortable, stable, responsible, and secure," Kimmel says. "Those are bad conditions for advertising, which depends on our sense of insecurity, anxiety, and incompleteness."

The market also has little time for the old-fashioned male virtue of self-denial, the imperative to do the "right thing" at the expense of pleasure. A stoic John Wayne has been replaced by the "metrosexual," a man who is all about self-indulgence and defined almost entirely by his wallet. At the beauty salon, designer boutique or exclusive health club, a metrosexual spends, therefore he is.

Susan Faludi foreshadowed the rise of the metrosexual in her 1999 book, Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man, which describes an "ornamental culture" that tells men "manhood is displayed, not demonstrated. The internal qualities once said to embody manhood -- sure-footedness, inner strength, confidence of purpose -- are merchandised to men to enhance their manliness. What passes for the essence of masculinity is being extracted and bottled and sold back to men. Literally, in the case of Viagra."

Lakshmi Chaudhry is a senior editor at In These Times and a former senior editor of AlterNet.

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