Sat. February 16
The Plight of Lower-Middle-Class Men: Charles Murray’s Fishtown and MTV’s Buckwild
Not much has changed for men since Shakespeare’s day. Today, the average American male finishes college and works for several years before marrying at age 28.[1] Contra Romeo & Juliet, a European male in the early modern era was not much different, waiting until his late twenties to tie the knot.[2]
The reasons are similar. As Kay Hymowitz observes, college takes a while—comparable to the credentialism of medieval guilds—and graduates entering the workforce switch jobs frequently, intensifying the rootlessness that discourages family formation. At least that’s the story for the college-educated men that Hymowitz reflects upon. For non-college-educated men, it’s a lot worse. The fundamental problem is structural, except this time it’s the dearth of manufacturing jobs[3], not land, that causes unemployment and, ultimately, the delay of marriage and the creation of healthy communities.[4]
This has consequences for men. Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle might call it a case of the “Waddle-I-Doers.” Instead of treasure hunts, however, these men watch television[5]. These are not “the odyssey years” of competitive pressures and healthy experimentation in pre-adulthood described by David Brooks. A better name might be the Buckwild Years, after the MTV show that profiles the lives of six college-aged boys and girls in the backcountry of West Virginia.
In the show, the boys are perfect stereotypes for the lower-middle-class men of Fishtown in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. Two of the boys, Joey and Tyler, started a lawn-mowing business during the summer to make some money. They quit before they even finish the first lawn. The majority of their time is spent muddin’ or re-enacting countrified Jackass-esque stunts. When Joey was in a relationship with one of the girls, Shae, he wouldn’t acknowledge her as his girlfriend just like Tyler, who hooked up with several girls, yet declined to call any of them his girlfriend. When Shae asked Joey for some level of commitment, he demurred preferring their status as “friends with benefits.” It’s only until Shain’s parents—the only parental figures in the show—tell Joey to man up and ask her out on a date that he relents and takes her out to dinner. As the dog days of summer come to a close, Shae is headed back to school and asks Joey what he’s going to do. He deflects the question with “I’m gonna do something,” but it’s clear he has no idea, the precise “decay of industriousness” that Murray has observed.
Hymowitz is rightly pessimistic about college-educated layabouts, but at least they have opportunities. If Buckwild and Charles Murray are any guides, lower-middle-class men will have a harder time becoming men again because manliness, at its core, is aggression with a telos[6]. Similar circumstances may have existed under Good Queen Bess, but without the desire to “survive with honor,” in the words of Harvey Mansfield, men no longer reject “the safety of self-preservation in favor of the glory of risking one’s life to vindicate one’s rights and deserts”[7]—the glory of jumping off of railway bridges into shallow rivers will suffice.
[1] US
[2] http://www.faqs.org/childhood/Co-Fa/Early-Modern-Europe.html
[3] http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/erik.hurst/research/charles_hurst_noto_manufacturing.pdf, http://www.cfr.org/industrial-policy/after-manufacturing/p27589
[4] Where are the Mothers in Shakespeare? Options for Gender Representation in the English Renaissance. Mary Beth Rose. Shakespeare Quarterly , Vol. 42, No. 3 (Autumn, 1991), pp. 296. Published by: Folger Shakespeare Library in association with George Washington University. Article Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2870845
[5] Coming Apart by Charles Murray, pg 181
[6] Manliness by Harvey C. Mansfield, pg 49
[7] Pg 56-57
Editor’s note: This piece is part of a symposium in which a variety of writers and thinkers weigh in on the question: “Can men be men again?” See earlier takes by Emily Esfahani Smith, Mark Judge, Ryan Duffy, Mark Tapson, R. J. Moeller, Ben Domenech, a second post by Emily Esfahani Smith, and Abby Schachter. All of the posts are compiled here.
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Is it proper to say that “much hasn’t changed” since Shakespeare’s England? It somehow implies an unbroken trend since then of marrying later. The article referenced seems to show that during times of relative peace and prosperity, marriage would be delayed. Though after epidemics and wars couples would marry earlier and have more children. I do think Shakespeare’s England is properly compared to our current society in terms of enjoying this relative peace and prosperity, at least within our borders. There is something about having time to sit around and NOT worry about food or invasion which allows for people to, well, become stupid.
Tiresome – Another computer-generated article bemoaning the lack of ambition in men.
Well, first we have a student-loan industry that artificially inflates the cost of college to the point where there is no longer the return on investment there once was.
Two, many women over-value their social science degrees, viewing them as proxies for intelligence or sophistication, while wrinkling their noses at men who display intelligence in mechanical aptitude or other male-preferred arenas. They mistake their extra years of collegiate partying as a sign of true intellectual growth.
Three, men in the workplace are treated to all manner of touchy-feely diversity programming and endless sexual harassment antagonism, to the point where many men are afraid of asking a woman out for fear of being fired.
Four, women are being given opportunities and promotions to further “female empowerment”, with no regard for the fact that each time a job is given to a female for the purposes of “evening the score” the job did not go to a man who might then use that job to prove his provider credentials to a woman looking for a family. It never occurs to these women that there are not an infinite number of high paying status jobs.
Five, the 80/20 rule. A recent study of online dating showed that men considered 50% of women to be above average in attractiveness, and 50% to be below – in other words, mathematically accurate. The women, bless their little hearts, rated 80% of the men as “below average”. Yes, there is a hookup culture, but it is 20% of the men who are getting 80% of the female attention. It is only after a decade of failing to get some “non-committal jerk”, that the women start thinking about settling.
Guys do not want to be ignored for ten+ years, then suddenly be harped on by editorialists to “man up” and bail these picky, promiscuous women out of the hole they dug for themselves.
I, fortunately, escaped this mess. I have a very high paying job that also has a certain cachet to it, and I avoided marriage. I have girlfriends, but I will never marry, for the reasons above stated. Yes, the girls have suddenly got their heads on straight and have figured out that guys like me are a good deal. But marriage is off the table. I am no longer young, dumb, or horny enough to be duped into that misery.
There are two kinds of men now: Men who have lots of options, and men who have zero options. I will not surrender my options just because women decided to stay on the dating carousel just a little too long.
I was the “good man” who they intended to marry later, after they had their fun serially fornicating with whoever struck their fancy in high school and college. Well, I spent the wedding ring budget on a motorcycle for myself, and could not be happier.
The luxury liner HMS Marriage has sailed, perhaps we could interest you in a steerage cabin on the USS Dutch Treat?
There is very little incentive to be a good man anymore. Because it will not change you from the zero-options group to the lots-of-options group.
If women do not reward men for being good, all the matronly scolding in the world will not make them be so.
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