Manhood as a kegger…
WPost Book World this week surveys the surge of men-in-trouble books released by publishers this fall. Writer Dan Zak taps out a nice lede:
Men are in trouble, and it’s feminism’s fault. Decades of go-girl cheerleading have shorn our metaphorical whiskers and reduced the proud American patriarch to either a feckless manboy or a serial abuser. The ocean of gender equity has heaved toward women. On the other side, men flop, gasping like fish out of water on the exposed sand.
At this point in the review, we pause to allow women to expel a thundering, collective scoff. This notion is bogus, for sure. Right? Has to be. There’s no way 40 years of feminism have pulverized millennia of male domination. Nevertheless, four books rolling out this fall are standing up for men by saying maybe we’ve been too focused on women’s advancement to realize that boys are withering in school, stumbling blindly through adolescence, living recklessly during and beyond college and slouching toward manhood.
He then goes on to review guy books, Michael Kimmel’s Guyland, Kathleen Parker’s Save the Males, Peg Tyre’s The Trouble with Boys and one I wasn’t aware of, Gary Cross’s Men to Boys.
I haven’t read the books by Kimmel and Cross, so I’ll pass on commenting. I did pan take a look at Parker’s book, however. These are just the first wave of books on this topic, which suggests the need for a framework for viewing them. Books such as Men to Boys and Guyland view the adult world and analyze what’s wrong with that world (as does Parker’s book, but her book is too ideological to warrant consideration).
Describing the shifting gender relationships in the adult world is important. That’s one reason I write so often about issues such as how college social relationships change when gender balances become too lopsided. People notice what’s going on in college. They notice how the workplace is changing. Ultimately, however, that attention is valuable only in redirecting gazes back to what people don’t notice — the dramatic changes taking place in K-12 schools that have sapped boys of their academic aspirations.
So, if you have the time and money to indulge in only one of these books, choose Peg Tyre’s Trouble With Boys. It’s a serious attempt to analyze what’s creating those adulthood problems.
