The Guys Are Alright

"Girls rule, and boys drool" goes the old playground taunt. And do they ever. Girls now out-perform boys in school. They collect the majority of college degrees, and they are poised to take over the workplace. Angelina Jolie is a bigger action star than Bruce Willis. Hot sitcom wives lord it over their hapless, henpecked husbands. But while girls are kicking butt on screen and off, guys are stuck in arrested development, helplessly drooling over the latest must-have techno-gadget and Maxim centerfold. Perhaps males are actually the weaker sex. From sitcoms dads to the raunchy comedies of Judd Apatow, it's a portrayal of men that's become increasingly common — and, to some, increasingly worrying.

So how did American men get themselves into such a mess? And how do we get them to grow up already? (Or should we even try? For guys in crisis, the slacker man-children in Apatow's movies seem to be having an awful lot of fun.) No matter. It's time to put away childish things — and that includes the remote, the copy of Playboy, and the Wii. Or so say man's latest self-appointed saviors, columnist Kathleen Parker and sociologist Michael Kimmel. American masculinity is in crisis, both say, and something must be done.

With Save the Males, Parker aims to make the world safe again for "real men." Real men, she tells us, are "under siege," disrespected by the culture as a sad assortment of "dolts, bullies, brutes, deadbeats, rapists, sexual predators, and wife beaters." In their place, we've been given the "metrosexual" and the Apatow-esque "child-man."

Naturally, Parker has a culprit: radical feminists. She sees their emasculating agenda everywhere: from school curricula to TV sitcoms, from single-mother households to bare midriffs. Parker has some serious points — her section on the importance of fathers is fine — but she mixes them up with others so silly, it's hard to imagine anyone outside the Glenn Sacks, Feminazi-hating fold being convinced by her arguments. Toddling tawdry Eves, we're told, are corrupting the OshKosh B'Gosh set; high-end barber shops are turning men into "perfumed ponies;" men are attending Lamaze classes and (gasp!) showing interest in the birth of their own children. Yes, even in the delivery room example, Parker senses the malign influence of liberal feminists like Andrea Dworkin. By staying to watch the birth of their children, fathers, she tells us, are being "conned into playing a minor role in a feminist morality play," aimed once again at proving the superiority of women. The feminist conspiracy knows no bounds!

Of course, it's probable that Parker is mostly joking about the perils of Lamaze classes — which is part of the trouble with her book. A collection of her syndicated columns, it's wildly scattershot in both tone and content. One moment she's cracking mildly funny jokes about the differences between Mars and Venus; the next moment she's ominously declaring that we're on the brink of "cultural suicide."

At times, she seems more interested in scoring points (or getting laughs) than making a coherent, sustained argument. She berates the media for depicting fathers as inept "Mr. Moms" who don't know "how to run a household with the same efficiency as Wonder Wife." But only pages later, she's sniping at feminists for ignoring gender differences by insisting men should clean house too. It turns out men, those loveable galoots, just aren't wired to do housework: Her own husband, she good-naturedly chuckles, has an "uncanny ability" to avoid taking out the trash even when it's piling up by the door. Soon, someone — could it be Wonder Wife? — takes it out for him. She castigates mothers for letting their tween daughters dress like streetwalkers, but gives dads a pass since everyone knows men don't notice stuff like that. Yet let no one suggest they are careless or disinterested parents — like those man-bashing sitcoms!

Forget the sitcoms. If noticing such things as your daughter's skimpy attire or handling a midnight feeding or two for your newborn means you've been "feminized" as a man, men might need saving from Parker as well as the radical feminists. Parker claims that she's fine with whatever set-up men and women work out between themselves: "There's nothing wrong with any of it—women working, men diapering. Whatever works." This, however, is her depiction of a day in the life of a career woman (naturally, she's divorced) as compared to that of the happy housewife: "She [comes] home exhausted from work, toting Chinese takeout and sending the kids off to instant message their porn buddies while she pours a glass of wine and looks for the child support check." Later, looking at a Fortune cover about career women and their stay-at-home husbands, she muses, "Behind every powerful woman is…a happily emasculated man."

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Kimmel's Guyland. Whereas Parker wants guys to be free to be guys — or at least her narrowly defined vision of what counts as "guys" — Kimmel wants them to get in touch with their feelings. Taking a page from Susan Faludi's Stiffed and William Pollack's Real Boys, Guyland argues that young men today are pressured to conform to a constricting "Guy Code," which forbids them from admitting weakness or showing emotion. At the same time, these men are angered by their loss of privilege as women and minorities gain access to once closed-off fields. The result is a "new demographic" of repressed man-children who pour their pent-up frustrations into violent video games, loveless hook-ups, and hazing.

Guyland provides a decidedly different diagnosis than Save the Males, but it shares in a similar cultural hysteria. Guyland, as Kimmel depicts it, is a dark and violent world of rampant homophobia, sexism, and racism. But his apocalyptic vision fails to account for the fact that violence between intimate partners has dropped precipitously since the early '90s, and that the rate of sexual assault has fallen by over 80 percent since the 1970s. Indeed, his portrayal of male culture is so exaggerated that even the New York Times Book Review thinks Kimmel exaggerates the extent of homophobia among young men.

Kimmel tries to get around this by arguing that while a few bad apples might be responsible for the most egregious actions chronicled in Guyland, all men participate as "bystanders":

Most guys are not predators, not criminals, and neither so consumed with adolescent rage nor so caught in the thrall of masculine entitlement that they are likely to end up with a rap sheet instead of a college transcript. But most guys know other guys who are chronic substance abusers, who have sexually assaulted their classmates.

But does simply knowing those who engage in such behavior really make one guilty? Kimmel's point, that such behavior is confined to a relatively small number of cases, seems self-defeating. The same is true when he argues that while he might not have any definite proof that men are more loutish or violent today, it doesn't matter. Thus, while discussing the prevalence of fraternity hazing, he writes, "Even if it was worse back then, which it probably wasn't, so what? The point is, of course, that standards change."

For Kimmel and Parker, then, it's actually something of a problem that things aren't worse for men (and are, in fact, demonstrably better). As a result, they end up hyping and hyperventiling in hopes of making the situation seem more dire than it is. Sure, more men have choosen to put off marriage and the adult responsibilities that come with it. But that "extended adolescence" is merely extended. As Kimmel himself points out, the median age for a first marriage nationally is now 25.5 for women and 27 for men — hardly old age. And delaying marriage comes with positive effects, too: they tend to be more stable and more egalitarian. Far from being threatened by women's success, as Kimmel suggests, many guys want a partner who is on a similar educational and career track.

It's true, of course, that guys — especially in groups — do things that experts might not advise (and that women don't understand — see: anything on Jackass.). They can be immature, gross, and irresponsible. But these traits alone shouldn't define them: they're stronger, more resilient, more versatile, and more capable than their so-called saviors seem think — capable of juggling a job, a family, and a joystick too.

Cheryl Miller is a contributing editor to Culture11.