Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Also by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita D. Coulombe
Title Page
Dedication
Preface: Note to Readers
Introduction: Just Drifting
Part I: Symptoms
1. Disenchantment with Education
2. Men Opting Out of the Workforce
3. Excessive Maleness: Social Intensity Syndrome (SIS)
4. Excessive Gaming: Mastering the Universe from Your Bedroom
5. Becoming Obese
6. Excessive Porn Use: Orgasms on Demand
7. High on Life, or High on Anything: Over-reliance on Medications and Illegal Drugs
Part II: Causes
8. Rudderless Families, Absent Dads
9. Failing Schools
10. Environmental Changes
11. Technology Enchantment and Arousal Addiction
12. Sour Grapes: Entitlement vs Reality
13. The Rise of Women?
14. Patriarchy Myths
15. Economic Downturn
Part III: Solutions
16. What the Government Can Do
17. What Schools Can Do
18. What Parents Can Do
19. What Men Can Do
20. What Women Can Do
21. What the Media Can Do
Conclusion
Appendix I: TED Survey Results
Appendix II: Social Intensity Syndrome – Scale and Factors
Notes
Recommended Resources
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil
The Time Paradox
The Time Cure
Shyness: What It Is, What to Do About It
Psychology: Core Concepts
Psychology and Life
This ebook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorized distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.
Version 1.0
Epub ISBN 9781473527690
www.randomhouse.co.uk
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
Rider, an imprint of Ebury Publishing,
20 Vauxhall Bridge Road,
London SW1V 2SA
Rider is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com
Copyright © Philip Zimbardo and Nikita D. Coulombe 2015
Philip Zimbardo and Nikita D. Coulombe have asserted their right to be identified as the authors of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Rider in 2015
www.eburypublishing.co.uk
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9781846044847
To my grandchildren, Philip (Panda) and Victoria Leigh (Bunny)
– Philip Zimbardo
To my husband, Chris, and three brothers: thank you for your support
– Nikita D. Coulombe
Many trends are born and magnified in the tech-heavy San Francisco Bay area, which is where we both lived when we started writing this book. There wasn’t one event that inspired the book’s creation; rather it resembled a light rain that slowly turned into a torrential downpour. While one of us had started clipping articles out of the newspaper about boys’ poor academic performance and noticing the dwindling number of male graduate students in his class, the other had started to notice her male peers crowding around computers and video games at parties, rather than having conversations. We began to wonder why more young men didn’t care about getting their driving licences, or moving out of their parents’ homes, and why they preferred to masturbate to porn than be with a real woman. Down the rabbit hole we went.
Around the same time, I (Phil) was asked by the TED organization to give a five-minute talk on a topic of my choosing. I wanted to discuss what we were observing. At the end of my short but provocative TED Talk in 2011, I made clear that my primary goal at the conference was to raise awareness and even alarm people into action about an impending disaster. After the talk was greeted with much enthusiasm, Nikita, already familiar with the issues as my assistant, came on board and together we wrote a short TED eBook inspired by that talk in 2012 called The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It. Demise was a polemic meant to stimulate controversy and conversation around these topics and encourage others to do research on the different dimensions of these challenges.
Man (Dis)connected is an elaboration of Demise that delves much deeper into this important discussion about young men and the complex issues and challenges they face. Man (Dis)connected has also been restructured by symptoms, causes and solutions, making the issues easier for readers to understand and navigate.
We felt it was important to approach the topics from multiple angles. This book weaves together the perspectives of a young female, Nikita, who, as a millennial, has grown up in the thick of changing technologies, and an older male, Phil, who has an abundance of life experience, along with the views of many young men and women, making it a unique collaboration. In order to challenge our personal views, we developed a detailed online survey with a host of questions that touched on different aspects of Demise. We created a survey related to this topic and posted it alongside the TED Talk, asking questions such as, ‘How would you change the school environment to engage young men?’ and ‘How can we empower men in safe, pro-social ways?’
Remarkably, in barely two months, 20,000 people took the short survey referred to throughout this book. About three-quarters (76 per cent) of the participants were men; more than half were between 18 and 34 years old. But people of all ages and backgrounds and both sexes shared their thoughts and feelings about these issues and their subplots. In addition, thousands of respondents were sufficiently motivated to go further by adding personal comments, from a sentence to a page long. We also conducted an additional smaller survey with 67 high school students from across the UK to get a better feel for their concerns (which we’ll refer to as our ‘student survey’ throughout to distinguish it from the larger study). After reading all of the replies, we followed up with some of the respondents for personal interviews, and their opinions and experiences will be shared later on. You can find more highlights of the survey in Appendix I of this book. Additional supportive statistics can be found in the endnotes.
Our book is presented with the intention of finding solutions to the problems we highlight, and also inspiring men, and those who love them, to find their voice and create positive social change in their lives and the new world that surrounds them.
Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?
– Mark Twain, nineteenth-century American novelist
IT’S A NEW world out there for everybody, but amid the shifting economic, social and technological climates, young men are getting left behind. Unlike the women’s movement, there has been no cohesive men’s movement to give a much-needed update to men’s roles in society. Instead there are a record number of young men who are flaming out academically, wiping out socially with girls, and failing sexually with women. You don’t have to look too far to see what we’re talking about; everyone knows a young man who is struggling. Maybe he’s under-motivated in school, has emotional disturbances, doesn’t get along with others, has few real friends or no female friends, or is in a gang. He may even be in prison. Maybe he’s your son or relative. Maybe he’s you.
Asking what’s wrong with them or why they aren’t motivated the same way young men used to be isn’t the right question. Young men are motivated, just not the way other people want them to be. Western societies want men to be upstanding, proactive citizens who take responsibility for themselves, who work with others to improve their communities and nation as a whole. The irony is that society is not giving the support, guidance, means or places for these young men even to be motivated or interested in aspiring to these goals. In fact, society – from politics to the media to the classroom to our very own families – is a major contributor to this demise because it is inhibiting young men’s intellectual, creative and social abilities right from the start. And the irony is only compounded by the fact that men play such a powerful part in society, which means they are effectively denying their younger counterparts the opportunity to thrive.
Whenever we want to understand and explain complex human behaviour, it is essential to resort to a three-part analysis: first, what the individual brings into the behavioural context – his or her dispositional traits; next, what the situation brings out of the person who is behaving in a particular social or physical setting; and finally, how the underlying system of power creates, maintains or modifies those situations. That sort of analysis, which was featured in Phil’s book The Lucifer Effect, helped to explain the abusive behaviour of guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment, and also the brutalizing behaviour of US guards in Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison.
In applying that reasoning to understanding why today’s young men are failing academically, socially and sexually we first highlight aspects of their dispositions, such as shyness, impulsiveness and a lack of conscientiousness. Next, we take into account situational factors, such as widespread fatherlessness, the availability of exciting video games, and free access to online pornography. Finally, systemic factors enter in to add another layer of complexity, including the political and economic consequences of legislation that recognizes women’s needs but not men’s, environmentally generated physiological changes that decrease testosterone and increase oestrogen, media influences, the resulting lack of jobs from the recent economic downturn, and the widespread failure of school systems in many nations to create stimulating environments that challenge the curiosity of boys.
This three-pronged attack has resulted in many young men lacking purposeful direction and basic social skills. Today, many live off, and often with, their parents well into their twenties and even thirties, expanding their adolescence into an age once reserved for making a career and starting a family. Many would rather live at home under the security blanket of their parents than head out on their own into a world of uncertainty.
In the United States, only one in three millennials headed up their own household in 2013, and half of 18- to 24-year-olds who are not enrolled in university lived at home with their parents.1 It is true that since the economic downturn, across the globe, young people have fewer opportunities for employment, to demonstrate their abilities and professional attributes. The diminished opportunities are a problem for men and women, but young women under 30 years old are surpassing their male counterparts academically and financially for the first time. Young men are also 25 per cent more likely than young women to be living at home with their parents.2 Relating it to gender role expectations, since women are better able to take care of themselves financially than men their age, they are less likely to find a male partner of similar status, which consequently creates new challenges for men. Society has a hegemonic view of masculinity, and for men, there are no socially acceptable alternatives to being a warrior or a breadwinner. All the possible new roles threaten the traditional concept of masculinity and any male who embraces them gets less respect from his male peers and fewer social and romantic opportunities with the opposite sex.
A couple of the most common examples are the ways in which stay-at-home dads are seen as losers, and ‘nice guys’ don’t get dates. One father, commenting in a New York Times article about the stigma of paternity leave, said he would almost prefer to tell future employers that he had been in prison than admit he had taken time off to be a stay-at-home dad.3 Across the blogosphere countless posts are written by women claiming there is a lack of nice and respectful men to date, while there are about as many posts written by ‘nice and respectful’ men asking for dating advice because women have told them they come across as too nice, passive or desperate. This gridlock of men’s roles makes it difficult for young men to want to change, and for young men and young women to relate to each other as equals.
Because of the new difficulties facing young men in this changing, uncertain world, many are choosing to isolate themselves in a safer place, a place where they have control over outcomes, where there is no fear of rejection and they are praised for their abilities. Video games and porn are this safer place for many young men. They become increasingly adept and skilled at gaming, refining their skills, and they can achieve high status and respect within the game. This is not something you see women doing, because they often don’t find those kinds of competitions meaningful, nor do they receive respect for developing their gaming skills. Generally, chat rooms have low expectations of female gamers. Additionally, men may become more easily hooked on games. When Russian researcher Mikhail Budnikov broke down the propensity to become addicted to computer games into low, medium and high levels of risk, he found that women slightly outnumbered men in medium-level risk while men were more than three times likelier than women (26 per cent versus 8 per cent, respectively) to have a high level of risk.4
We have nothing against playing video games; they have many good features and benefits. However, when they are played to excess, especially in social isolation, they can hinder a young man’s ability and interest in developing his face-to-face social skills. In addition, the variety and intensity of video game action makes other parts of life, like school, seem comparatively boring, and that creates a problem with their academic performance, which in turn might require medication to deal with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), which then leads to other problems down the road in a disastrous negative cycle, as we will see.
Porn adds to the confusion. Porn itself is not as great a problem for casual viewers, or for those with some personal sexual experience to juxtapose it against what they see. But for young men that have had no sex education or real-life sexual experiences, it can be very problematic. Many, we have learned, are developing their sense of sexuality around hard-core porn, not around real people. During our research, a lot of young men told us about how porn has given them a ‘twisted’ or unrealistic view of what sex and intimacy are supposed to be, and how they then found it difficult to get aroused by a real-life partner. For many of them, a real-life sexual encounter can be a foreign and anxiety-provoking experience because communication skills are required, their body needs to be engaged, and they must interact with another flesh-and-blood person who has their own sexual and romantic needs. Other young men told us about how other areas of their life are affected, such as concentration and emotional well-being, by watching excessive amounts of porn because they noticed massive positive shifts in their personal lives and outlooks once they stopped masturbating to it. Other experts noticed this same phenomenon. Physiology teacher Gary Wilson, creator of YourBrainOnPorn.com and author of Your Brain On Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction, has collected hundreds of self-reports from online forums where young men have been experimenting with giving up online porn. They recount how social anxiety improved drastically – including increased confidence, eye contact, and comfort interacting with women. The young men also often reported more energy to get through their daily lives, concentration became easier, depression was alleviated, and erections and sexual responsiveness were stronger after voluntarily engaging in a ‘no fap’ challenge (no masturbating to online porn).5
Like video games, we emphasize the overuse of porn as a problem. Overuse is difficult to define however. Though there are more and more studies being done on porn’s physiological and psychological effects on adults, most studies do not control for personality or other extraneous factors, and there are no similar studies done on children below 18 years old, only the occasional survey. It is also difficult to find a control group of young people that has not watched porn online. One University of Montreal study that initially sought to compare the behaviour of men who used porn versus those who didn’t could not even find a single 20-something male participant who had not seen porn.6
Plus, most health and psychology communities do not officially recognize porn as something a person can get addicted to. In some circles it is thrown in with Internet addiction disorder (IAD), which has only recently been acknowledged as a legitimate problem. Despite this, many young people, mostly young men, are beginning to speak up about how porn is affecting their motivation, ability to focus, social and sexual abilities, and perceptions of the world,7 and their testimonies should not be ignored. Their symptoms are real, and shouldn’t be brushed aside as merely a phase or ‘all in their heads’.
Again, we’re not saying women don’t play video games and watch porn, they do. But they don’t do it nearly as much as men do. And the concept of watching porn is definitely a male thing. For their book, A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World’s Largest Experiment Reveals About Human Desire, researchers Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam sifted through over 400 million Internet searches and found that 55 million of them (about 13 per cent) were for erotic content. Who is doing these searches? You guessed it: guys (mostly). Though more women seek out erotic stories than men, Ogas and Gaddam determined that men preferred viewing erotic images and movies more than women six times to one. Indeed, on popular pay sites like Brazzers and Bang Bros, the audience is about 75 per cent male, but when it comes to actually paying for porn, only 2 per cent of all the subscriptions are made on credit cards in women’s names. Even CCBill, the popular billing service used by adult sites, flags female names as possible fraud.8
Why the differences? Certainly there are many female porn connoisseurs and men who enjoy erotic literature. Ogas and Gaddam explore this by delving into men’s ability to be aroused by ‘or’ and women’s need to be aroused by ‘and’. They explain that men have single-cue arousability: nice breasts or a round butt or a hot MILF [mother-I’d-like-to-fuck] will do; whereas women need multiple cues: attractive and nice to children and self-confident. Though most women are actually physically turned on by just about any kind of porn, they only become psychologically aroused when the ‘and’ threshold is met. The woman herself must also feel safe and irresistible and physically healthy. The ‘Power of Or’ exists to help men exploit opportunities for sex. Women do not work the same way. In stressful environments, for example, a man’s libido goes up while a woman’s libido goes down. Male brains separate sex and romance, neural systems that are united in female brains, while female brains separate mental arousal from physical arousal, which are united in male brains.9 Men and women just pick up on different erotic cues, have different ways of processing those cues, and behave differently in response to those cues.
If you look at why young men are gaming and using porn you’ll find that those factors are both symptoms and causes of their overall decline. There is reciprocal causality where a person may watch a lot of porn or play video games to excess and develop social, sexual and motivational problems, and vice versa. This perpetuates a cycle of social isolation. We are concerned that the more provocative and lifelike video games and porn become, the more reality will mesh with virtual reality, and the more egocentric young men will become – living entirely in their own media-centric world.
Overuse of either outlet can result in real-life problems, but it’s the combination of excessive video game playing and porn use that creates a deadly duo, leading to ever more withdrawal from usual activities, social alienation and inability to relate to anybody, especially girls and women. Porn and video games have addictive qualities, but it’s not the same as other addictions. With alcohol, drugs or gambling you want more of the same, but with porn and video games you want the same … but different; you need novelty in order to achieve the same high. The enemy is habituation to a regularly experienced stimulus. We call this arousal addiction; in order to get the same amount of stimulation, you need new material, seeing the same images over and over again becomes uninteresting after a short time. The key is novelty of visual experience. Both these industries are poised to give users that endless variety, so it’s up to each individual to find what the best balance is for engaging in these digital outlets along with other activities in their lives – especially with constructive and creative ones, not just consumer ones.
Diversion is a double-edged sword. We have more information at our fingertips than ever before, but we can lose ourselves in alternative worlds. These alternative worlds are not even necessarily more efficient, as many of them purport themselves to be. They are just more distracting. For example, a busy New York restaurant was perplexed as to why the number of customers they served hadn’t changed in the last ten years, despite adding more staff and reducing the number of items on the menu. When they watched a surveillance tape from 2004 and compared it with a tape from the same time in 2014, they found out it was not such a mystery. Between customers taking pictures of the food, pictures of themselves, asking waiters to take photos of themselves and their friends, and then sending their food back to be reheated, customers took twice as long to dine.10
One of our strengths and weaknesses as humans is our natural inclination to shift our attention from one thing to another. We do this so we can be aware of what’s happening all around us in our environment. Having nearly everything available instantly at any time on the Internet exacerbates this impulse. ‘Clouds’ – virtual storage spaces accessed through the web – act as a second brain where we can put our memories and tasks, allowing us to focus on the present instead of the past or future. They are an incredible technology that goes wherever we go, provided we have the means to access them. The flip side is that this makes us more focused on ourselves and less conscious of the world around us and other people, because we don’t have to remember as many details about them, nor do they seem as relevant to fulfilling our immediate needs.
In 2007 neuropsychologist Ian Robertson took a poll of 3,000 people and found that while almost everyone over 50 years old could remember a relative’s birthday off the top of their head, less than half of people under 30 years old could do the same. The rest had to reach for their mobile phones to find out. Clive Thompson, a writer for Wired, says the reflexive gesture of reaching into one’s pocket to find the answer epitomizes the problem. By offloading data onto computer memory, we’re remembering fewer basic facts. Thinking about the future, Thompson wonders whether our growing dependence on machine memory will disrupt other ways of understanding the world, eventually causing people to be mentally impaired when they’re not plugged in.11 Whether he’s right or wrong, the externalization of our thoughts and memories to technology and the Internet is only going to become more pronounced, especially as younger and younger children access them regularly.
Writing and reading enlivens people’s experiences of life and nature through thoughtful consideration, reflection and imagination. Yet writing anything by hand is going extinct, and books and newspapers in their current form are becoming obsolete. Many newspapers and magazines have either gone out of business or now focus on the web as their main way to distribute content. It’s great for the forests, which, paradoxically, don’t get visited by many young people. Instead, the web has become our loyal companion and our preferred place to find, process and share information. It’s clear that companies pay a price if they don’t have a presence on the Internet, losing readership, sales and business from advertisers. Western schools too have ‘lost’ students’ interest with static and under-stimulating lesson plans and outdated technologies.
In 2013 the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) published a report saying children now spend more time engrossed in media than they do in school: ‘it is the leading activity for children and teenagers other than sleeping’. The imbalances were even greater if an adolescent had a television in their bedroom, which the majority of teens do. Though the AAP believes that media can be pro-social and teach children ethnic tolerance, and a variety of interpersonal skills, they recommend children have no more than one to two hours of screen time per day.12 But as they pointed out, many youths are spending five to ten times that amount of time in front of a screen, and their brains are becoming accustomed to it.
Sherry Turkle, cultural analyst and founder of the MIT Initiative on Technology and Self, says that all the tweets, texts and ‘sips’ of online communication don’t add up to one big gulp of conversation because we learn how to have productive inner dialogue through our conversations with others. Thus, limiting in-person communication with others can limit one’s own ability for self-reflection and deep thinking. Turkle observed that people were becoming so used to functioning with fewer real conversations that many almost felt they could get through life without having any direct conversations with other people.13
Our ability to engage in the deep thinking required to understand printed material and engage in lengthy conversations is slipping away as the physical make-up of our brains adapts to short spurts of information. The more we are required to shift our attention from moment to moment, the less able we are to experience the more profound forms of emotions, including empathy and compassion. Underdeveloped emotions combined with a lack of engagement with others can stunt future social and romantic relationships, which require going beyond superficial considerations.
Over the past decade, this pattern has escalated into adulthood where many grown men remain like little boys, having difficulty relating to women as equals, friends, partners, intimates, or even as cherished wives. Some have come to prefer the company of men over that of women. Through our survey, we discovered that many young men aren’t interested in maintaining long-term romantic relationships, marriage, fatherhood and being the head of their own family – which is, in part, due to the high percentage of young men who are growing up with physically or emotionally absent fathers. Others, who are either sheltered by their parents or are working on becoming ‘the next big thing’ or simply becoming financially stable, are reluctant to move out of their parents’ houses.
Today many of the young men who do manage to find a partner feel entitled to do nothing to add substance to that relationship beyond just showing up. New emasculating terms such as ‘man-child’ and ‘moodle’ (man-poodle) have emerged to describe men who haven’t matured emotionally or are otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves. Hollywood has caught on, too, to this awkward bunch of males, who appear to be comically hopeless. Recent films such as Knocked Up, Failure to Launch, the Jackass series, The Hangover series and Hall Pass present men as expendable commodities, living only for mindless fun, ‘bromances’, and intricate but never-realized plans to get laid. Their female co-stars, meanwhile, are often attractive, focused and mature, with success-oriented agendas guiding their lives. The sense of being entitled to have things without having to work hard for them – attributed to one’s male nature – runs counter to the Protestant work ethic, as well as to the US football coach Vince Lombardi’s victory creed: ‘Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.’ Feeling entitled to have things done for you or to you, without having to work for it, just because you are a male, is a dead-end in any relationship with women, except those who are desperate to have any guy, even a loser, rather than being alone.
Through illuminating the symptoms and causes of these gloomy trends, we hope to shed more light on how we arrived at this state of affairs as well as provide context for the solutions we will present to you in Part III.
NEW YORK TIMES columnist David Brooks wrote that the information age is liberating because it allows us to offload mundane mental chores to ‘cognitive servants’.1 At some point in the future Mr Brooks may be right. But for now, as liberating as this ability to externalize is in many ways, it is making the world – as spoken-word artist Gary Turk succinctly put it – full of ‘smart phones and dumb people’.2 The problem with this notion, explains Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, is ‘the proponents of the outsourcing idea confuse working memory with long-term memory. When a person fails to consolidate a fact, an idea, or an experience in long-term memory, he’s not “freeing up” space in his brain for other functions.’3 Carr argues that storing long-term memories does not bog down our mental powers, rather it increases our level of intelligence because it makes it easier to learn new ideas and skills in the future. In other words, we think we’re smarter than we actually are.
As a culture, we are losing our ability for sustained attention. The more we ‘outsource’ the less we retain, and in turn, the less we know. While 76 per cent of Americans said they watched, read or heard the news on a daily basis, only 41 per cent said they went beyond the headlines.4 So there’s this potential illusion of knowing. It is the danger of having a superficial level of knowledge about anything, but believing you know everything. A retired English professor mentioned to us that towards the end of his career he noticed that although his students thought they understood something, when they were asked to describe the topic they stumbled over their words. One student even dropped the class after refusing to do revisions on his work. This example is a microcosm of the ‘giving up before you try’ attitude that has permeated the minds of young men en masse.
Some people think it’s been a case of boys not doing well in school and giving their teachers hell since the beginning of recorded history. A recent large-scale meta analysis of over 300 studies that reflected the grades of more than 500,000 boys and nearly 600,000 girls revealed that, for many decades, girls all over the world have been making higher grades than boys in all subjects.5 The authors suggested that this data undermines the ‘boy crisis’, but we have to disagree. Good grades have become crucial to earning a living wage – and it is all the more reason for society to show boys the importance of doing well in school. Boys also used to have far more motivation to compete and succeed in every other aspect of life – moving out of their parents’ house, getting a girlfriend or wife, setting long-term goals and embarking on a career – which they are sorely lacking now.
For the first time in US history, boys are having less education than their fathers.6 Moreover, academics are now more of a girl’s pursuit. Girls are outperforming boys at every level, from primary school through university. In the US, by 13 or 14 years old, not even a quarter of boys are proficient in either writing or reading, versus 41 per cent of girls who are proficient in writing and 34 per cent who are proficient in reading.7 Young men’s SAT (a standardized test that measures scholastic aptitude) scores, meanwhile, in 2011 were the worst they’ve been in forty years.8 Boys also account for 70 per cent of all the lowest grades given out at school.9 Similar achievement gaps between the genders have been documented worldwide. The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) found that boys are more likely to repeat school years than girls, had poorer grades and got lower pass rates on school leaving examinations. In some countries, such as Sweden, Italy, New Zealand and Poland, the girls scored so much higher than the boys on reading in the PISA Assessment (a global measure of skills and knowledge) that they were essentially a year to a year and a half ahead in school.10 Internationally, in just over half of the countries that participated in the 2009 PISA Assessment, boys outperformed girls only in mathematics, but the mathematics gap was only one-third the size of the reading gap.11 In the UK, girls and boys performed more equally on all PISA Assessment subjects.12
In her book, The War Against Boys: How Misguided Policies Are Harming Our Young Men, Christina Hoff Sommers, a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, described even more imbalances. She said that girls not only outnumber boys in student government, honour societies and after school clubs, they also do more homework, read more books and outperform boys in the arts and in musical abilities. Meanwhile, more boys are suspended from school and more are held back from advancing to the next grade level. Simply put, girls are more ‘engaged’ academically.13
In a 2002 National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) survey asking students how often they came to school unprepared – without books, paper and pencil, or their homework – three out of ten boys answered ‘usually’ or ‘often’ compared with one out of five girls. Predictably, students with the lowest test scores who came to school unprepared outnumbered the unprepared high-scoring students more than two to one.14
Rates of ADHD diagnoses increased 5 per cent every year between 2003 and 2011; boys are between two to three times more likely than girls to have ever been diagnosed in their lifetime,15 and therefore are more likely to be prescribed stimulants, such as Ritalin, even in primary school.
On top of this, boys are far more likely to drop out of school.16 NCES notes the ripple effects of this trend:
dropouts ages 25 and older reported being in worse health than adults who are not dropouts, regardless of income … Dropouts also make up disproportionately higher percentages of the nation’s prison and death row inmates. Comparing those who drop out of high school with those who complete high school, the average high school dropout is associated with costs to the economy of approximately $240,000 over his or her lifetime in terms of lower tax contributions … higher rates of criminal activity, and higher reliance on welfare.17
The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, a study that began in 1997 and ended in 2012, found that by 27 years old a third of women had received bachelor’s degrees compared with one out of four men.18 By 2021, in the US it is estimated that women will get 58 per cent of bachelor’s degrees, 62 per cent of master’s degrees and 54 per cent of PhDs.19 Abroad there are similar trends. In Canada and Australia, 60 per cent of university graduates are women.20 Fewer than three boys apply to university in England for every four girls who do, and in Wales and Scotland, 40 per cent more girls apply than boys,21 a gap that widens among those from disadvantaged backgrounds.22
Two-thirds of students in special education remedial programmes are boys. It’s not a question of IQ – young men are just not putting in the effort, and it translates into a lack of career options. These gaps are much greater for males from minority backgrounds: only 34 per cent of college bachelor’s degrees awarded to black students go to black men, and 39 per cent of bachelor’s degrees awarded to Hispanic students go to Hispanic men.23
It is obvious to us that it is time for a loud wake-up call, to be sounded in every nation around the world where young males are failing to perform adequately in academic domains. The consequences for them, their families, their communities and even national destinies could be catastrophic unless dramatic corrective actions are taken soon.
WHERE HAS THE Protestant work ethic gone these days in the minds of young men? Between 2000 and 2010 the percentage of American teens participating in the workforce fell 42 per cent and the number of employed 20- to 24-year-olds dropped 17 per cent.1 In the UK, the unemployment rate for 15- to 24-year-olds is 21 per cent, nearly 5 percentage points higher than the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average.2 Male unemployment between the ages of 25 and 34 in the US is more than double what it was in 1970. Other countries, such as Italy, France, Spain, Sweden and Japan, have all seen more than a five-fold increase in young men not employed. The OECD records show that the global average unemployment rate for men in their late 20s and early 30s has jumped from 2 per cent in 1970 to 9 per cent in 2012.3 That is an enormous increase, and means millions of young men are not working.
The growing interconnectedness of the world’s economies means that modern boom and bust cycles have further and deeper reaching consequences for all nations. The global recession of 2009 was the worst recession since the Second World War, causing unemployment to skyrocket. On a personal level, job losses hit men harder than women. In the US, the male unemployment rate doubled between January 2008 and June 2009. Manufacturing industries that de-emphasize manual and technical skills in favour of technological advances – such as the car industry – mean that many developed countries no longer make things, creating an atmosphere of uncertainty for many men. Even having a higher degree is no guarantee of employment.
Health care – a major female-dominated industry – was relatively insulated, while industries such as manufacturing and construction, where most employees are men, accounted for about half of the 6.5 million US jobs lost since the most recent recession started.4 At the same time, personal care and home health aides are projected to be the fastest-growing occupations, and women are predicted to fill a large portion of these new jobs.5 Yet this new landscape of opportunities offers rather a grim harvest for bright young men, compared to what would have been available to them only a generation or two ago.
But there’s more – an entitlement curse. Although the adverse state of the Western economy has contributed to fewer men in the workforce, a highly educated female colleague alerted us to a new phenomenon. Some males now feel a sense of total entitlement simply because they exist as males. And they do not have to do anything to earn that special privilege. Many now seek long-term shelter either with Mum and Dad or within their marriages or relationships with a live-in partner. A surprising amount of men don’t seem to want to work at jobs that will bring in money or even help out with household chores that will keep their living space tidy. These guys are content just to hang around doing ‘their thing’ but perform nothing that traditionally resembles ‘work’.
Some of these men have even reframed dependency to make it look like an accomplishment and not a social failure, and they feel it is their right to absent themselves from having to make money or do drudgery around the house. In a sense, they are like old-fashioned gigolos, attractive men who were taken care of by older women in return for being charming dates or sexual adventurers, except this new breed of males want it all while giving little in return. Consider a couple of the vignettes that our colleague shared with us:
A physical therapist I know married a guy who basically quit his job once they got married. She did all the work and all the housework. She would come home after a long day at work, schlepping her heavy equipment through the rain, and he would not even come out to help her carry anything. When she got in, he would ask her what was for dinner, and she would have to go back out to the store and come home and cook. He sat on his ass all day and did nothing. Nice guy, handsome, but did not work or want to work. She divorced him after four years of marriage.
Another academic I know gets together with this guy who quits his job to go back to graduate school. He incurs a $100,000 debt and is not able to get a steady job. She supports him although he is not willing to get married nor willing to help with any house chores.
Why do women stick it out with such guys? Even their mothers might call them losers. As we’ll explore in more depth in Chapter 20, the depressing alternative for these well-educated women appears to be no man at all, so they stick with their bad decision until it gets so unbearable that they decide to dump the deadbeat.
Aside from not understanding that all relationships involve a negotiation of rights and obligations, what this entitlement suggests to us is the abandonment of a sense of having to work for anything. The stigma of unemployment still exists, but isn’t even close to what it used to be. These men don’t make the connection between responsibility, paying dues and success. Some of them don’t care. Others are acting as if one gets what one wants just by being at the head of the queue when the doors open or the party starts.
A young man told us this in his survey comments:
It is my belief that entitlement can help shape men. What they are entitled to is responsibility. The achievement is fulfilment of responsibility that will let the world trust them to shape the future. Yes, men can be strong if they care about others. Responsibilities – such as being gentle and a gentleman, manners to others to show courtesy, to take on duties to reassure others, being selfless – will help a young man find himself … The key to being a man lies in responsibility. The responsibility to care about oneself and not ruin or abuse oneself, to care about others and not ruin or abuse them.
We could not agree more. But it seems to us that this new sense of male entitlement is different from what it may have been in the past. It is more generalized, spreading to more settings and activities that tend to undermine any meaningful social or romantic relationships. These men seem to be emulating successful media celebrities and personalities such as David Beckham, the swimmer Michael Phelps, and entrepreneur Mark Zuckerberg, who appear to have it all; but they only see and admire the desirable outcomes and products. What is missing from the analysis is any appreciation of what goes into any kind of success: a lot of hard work, trial and tribulation, practice and failures that are part of the process of trying to attain a goal. The good things in life usually take a commitment to success, to delaying gratification, to putting work before play, and to understanding the importance and vitality of the social contract – not expecting more than what is being put in.
SHYNESS PLAYS A key role in the complex causal cycle between the self-imposed social isolation of many young men and their excessive time spent on watching porn and gaming. Traditionally shyness implied a fear of rejection by being socially unacceptable to certain social groups or individuals, such as authorities, or those a person wished to impress, such as members of the opposite sex. In the 1970s and 1980s when I (Phil) pioneered the scientific study of shyness among adolescents and adults, about 40 per cent of the US population rated themselves as currently shy people, or dispositionally shy. An equal percentage reported that they had been shy in the past but had overcome its negative impact. Fifteen per cent more said that their shyness was situationally induced, such as on blind dates or having to perform in public. So only 5 per cent or so were true-blue never-ever shy.
Over the past thirty years, however, that percentage has steadily increased. In a 2007 survey of students by the Shyness Research Institute at Indiana University Southeast, 84 per cent of participants said they were shy at some point in their life, 43 per cent said they were presently shy, and just 1 per cent said they had never been shy. Two-thirds of those who were currently shy said that their shyness was a personal problem.1