The summer after I finished college, my boyfriend and I packed up his car and drove out to Washington, D.C., one of the handful of destination cities for ambitious young graduates. Each of these cities has its own lunch-money generator for young aspirants — San Francisco has its tech sector, New York has its arts and finance, Boston has its university endowments, Washington has the federal government and its tributaries, and Portland instead eschews money and runs on a barter economy of organic vegetables. Once in D.C., we discovered that most people in our situation opt for what is called a “group house” — a multi-bedroom dwelling with a shared kitchen whose maintenance is under constant dispute, and a revolving cast of roommates selected almost at random from a Craigslist ad. Beware of mistaking the “group house” for the “group home” for troubled youth — the etymological and physical similarities can be confounding.
Already part of one social trend — rootless and restless college graduates in search of “personally fulfilling” careers — we soon found ourselves swept into another. My boyfriend moved into a house shared by three other men, all fresh out of college and variously working for defense contractors or going to graduate school. However, their life’s meaning was to be found in neither work nor school, but rather in Xbox. After a long day at work, they came home and played video games. On weekends, they unwound from all that video gaming with video games. At first, one roommate had a girlfriend, whom he would invite over to watch him play video games. Soon, the girlfriend left, but the video games did not. Sometimes at 3 a.m., you could lie in bed and hear the pew-pew-pew! of simulated machine-gun fire pierce the silence of sleeping suburbia.
This is the tale of woe now unfolding in the great youth metropolises of the country. Kay S. Hymowitz’s new book, Manning Up, offers a stupefying array of statistics demonstrating that young women are outperforming their male peers on every measure of achievement — they do better in school, get more degrees, get better jobs, make more money, buy more homes, and so on. The only thing they don’t do is marry the men they’ve left in their dust. Indeed, they don’t really marry anyone — if they want children, they cut out the middleman by ordering his sperm online. The median age of marriage for women in 1960 was 20; now it’s 26, and closer to 30 for those with graduate training. The strange thing about this development is that no one seems very upset about any of it — men are either content with their lot or indignantly defensive of it, and women whine faintly about the depletion of the marriageable pool but don’t want marriage badly enough to settle for some bottom-dweller or to search among the over-30 crowd.
Manning Up, a witty tour of this new social world, arrives in time to join the recent outpouring of coverage of the rapid economic ascent of women that is permeated with crisis rhetoric; for instance, Hanna Rosin’s article on the trend in The Atlantic bears the foreboding title “The End of Men.” Some on the right have pointed a finger at an overly feminized education establishment, accusing the schools of waging a “war against boys” by rewarding girly cooperative virtues like organization, diligence, rule-following, and teamwork at the expense of things at which boys have traditionally excelled — fighting, clowning around, shirking their work, and disrupting class. With their “high-spirited” natures stifled in the classroom, boys wilt, losing interest in academics and dropping out in large numbers, lowering men’s overall life achievement and contributing to the growing prison population. Here we have something that resembles a real social problem, and to counter the poisonous effects of so many hard-working and high-achieving girls, these critics call for a return to single-sex education, which, after all, used to turn out successful men.
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