The Cultural Celebration of Masculine Immaturity
Newsweek ran an interesting article recently
“Why Young Men Delay Adulthood to Stay in Guyland”
http://www.newsweek.com/id/156372/page/2
What this article identifies and attacks is the cultural celebration of masculine immaturity. The celebration of this aversion to responsibility in men can easily be seen in men living their college party years far into adulthood, or mooching off their parents well into their 30’s, whose mothers keep track of their checkbooks and pay their car insurance. Men well into their 20’s or 30’s who do nothing but party and play video games, who do not conceive of looking beyond the expediency of the moment and who subsequently can not pursue long term goals.
Some notes from this article particularly astounded me
- To turn on television or see a movie is to find a smorgasbord of regressive adventures for the single man of every stripe. Movies like "Pineapple Express," Judd Apatow’s latest celebration of beta male bonding; TV shows like HBO’s hypermasculine pal party "Entourage," and beer commercials like Miller Lite’s "Man Laws" ads make delayed adulthood seem like a lark—roguish, fun and, most of all, normal.
- According to a study released last month by the Parents Television Council, prime-time broadcast audiences are three times more likely to hear about people having sex with pets, corpses or two other people simultaneously than they are to see a blissed-out married couple between the sheets…"Today’s prime-time television," the PTC concludes, "seems to be actively seeking to undermine marriage by consistently painting it in a negative light."
These particular examples relate to my previous post “Your Philosophy and Your Culture.” Here we see a philosophical attitude creeping into the mainstream cultural manifestations of male adulthood. Sex, all of our media shouts to us, is not something a loving husband shares in intimacy with his wife, but is something you chase after perpetually with as many different partners as possible. Life is not the long term pursuit or a continual salient progression of rationally identified goals but is merely the means by which one parties and is entertained. To choose to engage in an intimate monogamous relationship is not the long term rational choice bringing you to a more fulfilling life, but a sellout of ones soul and psychological impediment on the pleasurable life style. To pursue a promising career is not recognition of the tasks necessary to live a fulfilling life, but selling out to the man of corporate boredom and monotony.
I feel the fashion trends of uncombed hair, pre torn and faded clothing, to be manifestations of this as well. I doubt we will ever see a mainstream idea of women being ‘dressed up’ to be something which includes hair artfully styled to look like it is not styled at all, or wearing pre-torn, pre-faded, and pre-stained ‘new’ jeans. I’m always inclined to laugh when I see a ‘dressed up’ man with disheveled hair and torn $100 jeans next to his dressed up girlfriend, who looks stunning.
Almost unbelievably, the article states this
- Almost 20 percent of college guys said they would commit rape if they knew they wouldn’t be caught
If true, an absolutely stunning manifestation of the pejorative morality being integrated into college men, which teaches that it is ok to do something as long as you can get away with it, and that other humans are not ends of their own, but merely means in order for you to achieve your goals, even when they are limited to the short range hedonistic moment.
- College guys believe that 80 percent of their friends are getting laid each weekend, says Kimmel, whose survey of 13,000 kids, mostly 18 to 22 years old, puts the actual figure at closer to 10 percent.
Here we have an almost religious faith based concoction. There is a garden of eden out here, where the best man, characterized by the most skillful partier and seducer, can have a different woman nearly any time he desires. That this life is not characterized by a hollow ringing shallowness that comes from having no objective sense of self worth, but is instead is full of a brilliant egoistic ladies men. But men can only fool themselves for so long before the shallow truth shines through, as we see in this next quote.
- But on their own and without their liquid courage, there is also isolation and discontent. A 28-year-old Emory graduate, who declined to be named for fear of ridicule, talked of feeling ashamed of his life, which has led to countless conquests but not the literary success he’d hoped for; he’s living at home in New Jersey and working at a hotel front desk in the meantime. Another guy, 26, an Arizona State alum who lives in Tempe, is a coupon-book salesman, but clearly self-conscious: he carries fake business cards touting him as an MTV entertainment executive
Absolutely pathetic!
The hedonistic pleasure for it’s own sake life, full of parties, sex, and drugged euphoria’s, is characterized, more than any other lifestyle, by the economists concept of the “diminishing margin of utility” What this fancy term means is that the more you do the same thing over and over again, the less value you derive from it. Ultimately, if you do it too much, you are merely swimming against a current stronger than you. Expending all your energy but moving nowhere, or even backwards. Diminishing marginal utility, if left unchecked, leads to disutiliuty. The perpetual conquest of video games, women, and consciousness, leave a man nowhere to go but downhill. Each successive conquest is less meaningful than the previous ultimately spiraling into an unfulfilled unhappy confusing mess.
By contrast, the value based goal orientated productive life, Aristotlean Eudaemonism, is the only life characterized by a perpetual increasing margin of utility. Our goals must be rational, and achieving them leaves us with an objective standard of our ego, we feel confident that we can face the world, and succeed in it, not by manipulating other men, which is in essence living parasitically off of them, but by engaging in voluntary beneficial trade for every other man, and wanting what is best for each person for their own sake, as they do for you. Our goals must be productive, our lives should be full of intellectual, physical, and emotional stimulation and challenges, not the parasitic conquest of women, but the conquest of nature, the vagaries of existence, and responsibilities and challenges of consciousness.
On Happiness, the article states:
- A raft of recent studies suggest that married men are happier, more sexually satisfied and less likely to end up in the emergency room than their unmarried counterparts. They also earn more, are promoted ahead of their single counterparts and are more likely to own a home.
Psychology shows us that happiness doesn’t just come from the achievement of values, but the non-contradictory fulfillment of rational life affirming values. Why non-contradictory? Because finding fulfillment at achieving a value which blatantly contradicts another value can create only a muddled confusion between joy and sadness. Hedonism is a celebration of pleasure for it’s own sake, whether a drug induced euphoria or a sexual binge. Pleasure, psychologically, is the joy we receive from achieving something we value. The more meaningless our values, the more hedonistic pleasure is possible, and so we have people with a psychological motivation to derive as much pleasure as possible with as little effort as possible. It is not WHY something brings you pleasure that we concern ourselves with, but only that it does, and anything that does must be pursued.
Thus we are led to a culture which idealizes sex, partying, the evasion of responsibility, the pejorative Machiavellian manipulation of individuals. You might rightly call this attitude, the of celebrating masculine immaturity, as the “Peter Pan culture” or, as one of the most interesting blogs I’ve found on it refers to it as “Pyschological Neotony” [http://alfin2100.blogspot.com/search/label/Psychological%20neoteny] which is this psychological state that comes from a parental shielding of children from challenges in life, from the things that might hurt their feelings, and from deliberately avoiding challenges and growth in life. This parent usually does not prepare their child to live a life on their own, but instead shields them from all the difficulties of life, leaving a child psychologically crippled with they face their first real challenge.
Lest you paint me an advocate of traditionalized marriage, let me espouse my major qualifier. As most well know, about half of all marriages end in divorce. Of the remaining half, it’s safe to say a large portion of those (my guess will again be half) are bad enough to warrant a divorce but one or both members are too afraid, cowardly, abused, or confused to seek one. Of the remaining quarter, half of those are probably merely mediocre, stifled and without passion, with partners just going through the motions. Of the now remaining eighth, let me suppose that half of those are ok, or even pretty decent by most standards. To determine these real numbers a detailed philosophical and psychological study would be required, in lieu of such a large study my educated guesses will have to suffice for the purpose of this article. That leaves us with about 1/16th of marriages being fulfilling, happy, perpetually positive, and even encompassing a increasing marginal utility, to use that economics terminology. Another term might be capitalizing on the growth of the compound interest of mutual admiration, respect, and quality interactions can provide.
My guess is that only 1/16th of marriages are good? Well, the outlook is not so gloomy, the reason why so many are so poor is because so few people hold their partners up to any significant standards. They associate love as a mystical quality or an emotion of duty, feeling obliged to love someone because that is what they are supposed to do, promised themselves they would do, or have been convinced by society to do. But the rational integration of a few core values, and an objective estimation of one’s self and one’s partner, coupled with a mutual ideal of striving for a fulfilling relationship together, can do marvelous wonders for a marriage. It is the fact that so many people put up with poor behavior that so many people perpetually get away with it. When we are taught that love is unconditional, the abusers and thieves receive as much love as the honest hardworking compassionate respectful partner. When we abandon our standards for love, it is those who are least deserving of it that benefit the most, and those who are most deserving that are hurt by it.
Imagine the life of the Peter Pan man as he attempts to convince a seemingly virtuous girl of his worthiness as a partner, that sleeping with him will give her an elevated sense of self esteem. And by her surrendering to him, his self esteem is superficially boosted as well. The worth of this interaction is the doubt, the ‘challenge’, the control, and the conquest. Repeated affairs with the same person are of no value, the chase and conquest are over. The short term elevated sense of self comes only from the conquest, not from the tribute that such an act represents. Now imagine this situation removed of all pretenses. The woman says to the man that she is his, he has won her, perpetually. She will sleep with him at any time. She likes him as he is; there is no race, no challenge, no competition, but only the naked and explicit recognition of self worth. At first, the man will derive value from sex with this woman, it still holds the potential of a conquest and challenge. But as the sincerity becomes more obvious, the source of their spiritual fuel for their ego is put in doubt, and the sexual act is robbed of the stolen value and relegated to a mere physical hedonistic act. Ultimately, the man would stop sleeping with this woman, because he’s all ready got her, he already conquered her, and so gained his short term ego boost. Sex to him is not a celebration of self worth, existence, and admiration and respect for his partner, as it is for her. It is little more than a Machiavellian power struggle sometimes topped with an orgasm.
Conversely, consider two partners who have a deep respect and admiration for each, even through their non-essential faults, and who both strive to be the best person possible, who embody to a significant degree the core values of each other. When sexual they will be celebrating their own ego, celebrating their own self worth, celebrating their love for existence and paying the greatest homage they can to the person most important to them. They both continue to grow and change, in a positive direction, and with each other. These are the people who find fulfillment and lifelong love.
A person can not have a thousand best friends, both logistics and psychology prevent it. Similarly, he can not have 10 loving partners that he shares the deepest of intimate connections with. The depth and strength of an intimate connection is inversely proportional to the number of people one tries to have that connection with and directly proportional to the quality and length of time of interactions with the few individuals they choose to wholly devote their intimacy with.
It’s not just that marriages generally produce happier people, who live longer lives, who are less stressed. A bad marriage can sabotage all of those, it’s important not to confuse the average with the particular. The point is that that a good marriage can be all of those things, but can also ultimately produce the most fulfilling life possible to us, forged on the most profound intimacy once can share with another human being built up over time with the best match possible and sharing the best quality interactions possible.
On this, the author sums up nicely
- “Guyland is not without its charms, but it pales next to what I have known with my wife over the past three years.”
The Peter Pan syndrome is a radical confusion on the nature of happiness and fulfillment. It’s hedonistic pleasure sought for it’s own sake, not pleasure or joy which comes from the achievement of values, nor joy which comes from explicitly identifying the most fulfilling life possible characterized by always striving for ones best. It is the deliberate avoidance of values, the deliberate avoidance of real challenges in life, and subsequently creates a real absence of self esteem and fulfillment. It psychologically cripples men, turning them from potential productive rational beings into sniveling children full of deluded senses of self and unable to cope with the real world.
