Today’s young male ‘continues to act like ‘man-child’ well into adulthood’
By ANITuesday, February 22, 2011
NEW YORK - A new book has claimed that many men in their 20s are stuck in ‘pre-adulthood phase’ due to financial and sexual hierarchies.
Author Kay S. Hymowitz has said that ‘Peter Pan syndrome’ is the latest affliction to hit today’s young male as they continue to act like ‘man-child’ well into adulthood, reports the New York Daily News.
Her book ‘Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys’, excerpted in the Wall Street Journal, discusses the ‘novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance’ that characterizes many young men in today’s society.
Though she attributes a number of elements to the notable emergence of this boy-to-man subculture, chief among them are financial stability and changing sexual hierarchies.
“Like adolescents in the 20th century, today’s pre-adults have been wait-listed for adulthood,” said Hymowitz.
“Marketers and culture creators help to promote pre-adulthood as a lifestyle. And like adolescence, pre-adulthood is a class-based social phenomenon, reserved for the relatively well-to-do,” she said.
“Those who don’t get a four-year college degree are not in a position to compete for the more satisfying jobs of the knowledge economy,” she added.
Women have risen to positions of power in the meantime, with 34 percent of American women between the ages of 25 to 34 holding college bachelor’s degrees, versus just 27 percent of men, and this imbalance further cultivates these so-called ‘man-children’, Hymowitz argued.
Her commentary rings true with the trends of Hollywood, which picked up on the phenomenon in Judd Apatow’s streak of man-child films ranging from ‘Knocked Up’ in 2007 to ‘Step Brothers’ in 2008. (ANI)
