After America - Mark Steyn [89]
So, even if constrained in all other rowdy boyish inclinations more or less since nursery school, guys are still free to abandon women in greater numbers than ever before. In 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old white men were married. By 2000, it was 33 percent.116 The remainder don’t have wives, kids, homes—in the sense of mow-the-lawn wash-the-car paintthe-spare-bedroom homes. So what do they do? Well, they drink, they listen to music, they hook up, they lead teenage lives on an adult salary. Males 18 to 34 years old play more video games than kids: according to a 2006 Nielsen survey, 48.2 percent of men in that demographic amused themselves in that way for an average of two hours and forty-three minutes every day—that’s thirteen minutes longer than the 12- to-17-year-olds.117
When these games were first produced, parents used to fret that they were taking boys away from baseball and tree-climbing and healthy outdoor activities. Now they’re taking men away from ... what? their midlife crisis? “For whatever reason,” concluded Kay Hymowitz in City Journal, “adolescence appears to be the young man’s default state.”118 Anthropologists are generally agreed that wherever you go on the planet, what suppresses (to use an unfashionable concept) adolescence and turns boys into men is marriage and children. When you marry ever later and have children ever later, manhood also comes much later—if at all. “The conveyor belt that transported adolescents into adulthood has broken down,” declared Dr. Frank Furstenberg after studying the “adultescence” phenomenon.119 But the belt didn’t really “break down.” It was systematically slowed down, then cut up and recycled into extra-strength condoms. Among the general, swift, and transformative re-ordering of social structures, the percentage of homes with two parents and children has fallen by half since 1972, while the percentage of homes with unmarried, childless couples has doubled.120
As Gloria Steinem proclaimed, “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Today, in our feminized aquarium, we have all but eliminated the bicycle, save for a few rusting barnacle-encrusted spokes on the bottom. The full impact of our endlessly deferred adulthood is not yet known, although its contours can already be discerned. What kind of adults emerge from the two-decade cocoon of modern adolescence? Even as the western world atrophies, not merely its pop culture but its entire aesthetic seems mired in arrested development. In his book Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, Gary Cross asks simply: “Where have all the men gone?”121
Like George Will, Victor Davis Hanson, and others who’ve posed that question, Professor Cross is no doubt aware that he sounds old and square. But in a land of middle-aged teenagers somebody has to.
NO MAN’S LAND
“It is easier,” said Frederick Douglass, “to build strong children than to repair broken men.” But what if, as a matter of policy, we’re building our children to be broken men? And broken not just psychologically but biologically. Headline from the Daily Mail, 2004: “Concern as Sperm Count Falls by a Third in UK Men.”122
Don’t ask me why: I’d blame Tony Blair’s cozying up to Bush were it not for “Sperm count drops 25 % in younger men”123 (The Independent, 1996), so maybe it was John Major pulling out of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.
Do we still need sperm?