The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It

106 Pages·2012·1.7 MB·English

by  Philip Zimbardo

The Demise of Guys
Why Boys Are Struggling and
What We Can Do About It
By
Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan
The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It.
Copyright © 2012 by Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan.
All rights reserved.
Published by TED Conferences, LLC.
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First edition.
First published May 2012.
ISBN: 978-1-937382-12-4.
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Table of Contents
A search for solutions
The demise of guys
Behind the headlines
TED survey: the tribe has spoken
What’s going on?
Bros before hos: Social intensity syndrome (SIS)
Get everything, do nothing
Changing families
Unstable role models, tarnished trust
Helicopter parents
Where’s Dad?
The media isn’t doing you any favors
The truth shall bite thee in the ass
Why buy the cow when you can have the milk free?
High costs of living driving down personal and social values
School’s out — now what?
Who’s failing whom?
High on life, or high on something
Back away from the doughnut
Just press Play: Porn and video games
Dynamics of porn
Chronic stimulation, chronic dissatisfaction
Dude, where’s my erection?
Sex education vs. porn
Dating and the objectification of women
Dynamics of video games
When video games go wrong
Preparing for cyberwar
When video games go right
Billy is in his room
The rise of gals
What we can do
Next steps: Join us
Notes
Recommended resources
About the authors
About TED
A search for solutions
This book is a discussion about young men and some of the important issues and
challenges they face. We’re presenting this work in the hope of finding solutions.
Fair warning: Our discussions will be frank and our language direct. Problems
get dealt with and maybe solved only when they are talked about openly and
honestly. When you’re done reading, please visit our website
(demiseofguys.com) to continue the discussions we’ve begun. Or watch the
original TEDTalk “The Demise of Guys?” on ted.com.
The demise of guys
Everyone knows a young man who is struggling. Maybe he’s undermotivated in
school, has emotional disturbances, doesn’t get along with others, has few real
friends or no girl friends, or is in a gang. He may even be in prison. Maybe he’s
your son or relative. Maybe he’s you.
In record numbers, guys are flaming out academically, wiping out socially
with girls and failing sexually with women.
Asking what’s wrong with these young men or why they aren’t motivated the
same way guys used to be isn’t the right question. Young men are motivated, just
not the way other people want them to be. Society wants guys 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, means or places for these young men to even be
motivated or interested in aspiring to these things. In fact, society — from
politics to the media to the classroom to our very own families — is a major
contributor to this demise because they are inhibiting guys’ intellectual, creative
and social abilities right from the start.
Consequently, many guys lack purposeful direction and basic social skills.
They’re living off, and often with, their parents well into their 20s and even 30s,
expanding their childhood into an age once reserved for starting a family and
making a career.
Many young men who do manage to find a mate 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 dudes, who appear to
be tragically hopeless. Recent films such as Knocked Up, Failure to Launch, the
Jackass series and Hall Pass present men as expendable commodities, living
only for mindless fun 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 Vince Lombardi victory creed (“Winning isn’t everything.
It’s the only thing.”) These guys aren’t interested in maintaining long-term
romantic relationships, marriage, fatherhood and being the head of their own
family. Many have come to prefer the company of men over women, and they
live to escape the so-called real world and readily slip into alternative worlds for
stimulation. More and more they’re living in other worlds that exclude girls —
or any direct social interaction, for that matter.
Over the past decade, this pattern has escalated into adulthood where grown
men remain like little boys, having difficulty relating to women as equals,
friends, partners, intimates or even as cherished wives.
We believe this demise can be traced to the rise of technology enchantment.
From the earliest ages, guys are seduced into excessive and mostly isolated
viewing and involvement with texting, tweeting, blogging, online chatting,
emailing, and watching sports on TV or laptops. Most of all, though, they’re
burying themselves in video games and in getting off on all-pervasive online
pornography.
In this book, we focus primarily on guys investing too much time and energy
in the last two factors: playing video games and watching freely available
Internet porn. Video game production companies are in fierce competition to
make games that are ever more enticing, more provocative and, now, in 3-D. The
same is true for pornography. Pornography is the fastest-growing global
business, with production companies churning out daily doses of porn flicks in
seemingly endless variety. The high-definition 3-D porn wave may also be
coming (pun intended). The combination of excessive video game playing and
pornography viewing is becoming addictive for a lot of guys. The next phase we
imagine is transferring the player’s viewpoint onto the body of the protagonist to
mesh realities and make digital environments totally egocentric.
There are also other factors contributing to the demise of guys: widespread
fatherlessness and changing family dynamics, media influences, environmentally
generated physiological changes that decrease testosterone and increase
estrogen, the problematic economy and also the dramatic rise of gals.
Behind the headlines
This is the first time in U.S. history that our sons are having less education than
their fathers.
— Warren Farrell, author of Why Men Are the Way They Are and The Myth of
Male Power1
Failing at school
Are academics now more of a girl thing than a guy thing? It seems so. Girls
outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school through graduate
school. By eighth grade, for instance, only 20 percent of boys are proficient in
writing and 24 percent proficient in reading.2 Young men’s SAT scores,
meanwhile, in 2011 were the worst they’ve been in 40 years.3 According to the
National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), boys are 30 percent more
likely than girls to drop out of both high school and college.4 In Canada, five
boys drop out of school for every three girls who do.5 Nationally, boys account
for 70 percent of all the D’s and F’s given out at school.6 It is predicted that
women will earn 60 percent of bachelor’s, 63 percent of master’s and 54 percent
of doctorate degrees by 2016.7 Two-thirds of students in special education
remedial programs are guys. These effects are much greater for males from
minority backgrounds. The NCES also reported that boys are four to five times
more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention-deficit (hyperactivity)
disorder (ADHD),8 and therefore are more likely to be prescribed stimulants,
such as Ritalin, even in elementary school.
Video games: Mastering the universe — from your bedroom
Here’s an astonishing fact: People spend a collective 3 billion hours a week
playing video games. A week. Additionally, more than 174 million Americans
are gamers. Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the
Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., estimates that the average young
person will spend 10,000 hours gaming by age 21.9
To put this figure in context, it takes the average college student half that time
— 4,800 hours — to earn a bachelor’s degree. (This calculation is based on the
average university requirement of 120 credit hours, with each credit hour
involving 2.5 hours of homework and class time. Take an average of 15 hours of
actual class time and 22.5 hours of homework outside of class each week — 37.5
hours — multiplied by 16 weeks per semester, multiplied by eight semesters, and
you’ve got 4,800 hours. See also the table “Time Bandit.”)
Some gamers are women, there is no doubt; and video game companies are
very aware of this (FarmVille, anyone?). Still, girls don’t play nearly to the
extent that guys do — only five hours per week to guys’ 13.10 The video game
business is expected to be a $68 billion industry by the end of 2012.11 Compare
this with the size of the entire U.S. publishing industry, which in 2010 had net
sales revenue of $27.9 billion.12
Porn: The marketplace of virtual pleasures
The porn business is one of the fastest-growing industries in America and is now
a nearly $100 billion industry worldwide. America is the top producer of
pornographic Web pages, with 244.6 million, or 89 percent, of all porn Web
pages worldwide.13 Just type “porn” into Google and you’ll get 1.38 billion
results, with the entire first page of hits offering free instant streaming videos.
Back in 2005, approximately 13,500 full-length commercially available
pornographic films were released. Compare that with the 600 or so films
released in Hollywood annually.14 Today there are many companies and outlets
generating porn clips directly online in quantities not possible to accurately
calculate.
Who views all this stuff? You guessed it. One in three boys is now considered
a “heavy” porn user, with the average boy watching nearly two hours of porn
every week, according to University of Alberta (Canada) researcher Sonya
Thompson.15 And that’s the average; just imagine what the outliers are doing!
Add to the mix older guys watching adult videos online, at work, at home or in
hotels across the country and around the world.
One consequence of teenage boys watching many hours of Internet
pornography every week, says Penny Marshall, British columnist for the U.K.’s
Mail Online, is they are beginning to treat their girlfriends like sex objects;
according to a 16-year-old girl in Britain, “Boys just want us to do all the stuff
that they see porn stars do.”16 As a result, says Cindy Gallop, a dynamic TED
speaker and author of the TED Book Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s
Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior, young men don’t know the difference