Response to Kay Hymowitz: The child-man
“It’s 1965, and you’re a 26-year-old white guy. You have a factory job, or maybe you work for an insurance broker. Either way, you’re married, probably have been for a few years now; you met your wife in high school, where she was in your sister’s class. You’ve already got one kid, with another on the way. For now, you’re renting an apartment in your parents’ two-family house, but you’re saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house in the next town. Yup, you’re an adult!”
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/dn/opinion/points/stories/DN-hymowitz_27edi.ART0.State.Edition1.378ca5b.html
I think what most people have overlooked is that sensational news is done for a purpose. In this case Kay Hymowitz penned an opinion column for the Dallas News on a controversial tropic that she knew would expand her audience.
What I think Kay fails to understand (or conveniently forgets) throughout this little escapade of social reminiscing is that generational happiness is not pursuant on a fixed variable. Culture changes (augments) to an influx of new traditions and ways of thinking, and is dependent on the existing tools and technology that is available. She is right to postulate that society does make the individual through the institution of social contract. The problem here, however, is that social norms and traditions do not easily equate into a construct because they are dependent on an underling culture which is unpredictable, inconsistent (repeated) and ever changing.
Second, I dismiss outright her premise that marriage and settling down are required for a man to mature. Nor is a sense of purpose needed to define (and thereby make a man). All men are simply such at eighteen years of age. The varying levels of maturity are most likely individuals testing the established social norm. We saw this with the various cultural revolutions that were so much apart of (her lost generation, the Baby Boomers).
Finally, the very criticism that she applied to young men living within America are very much limited in reach to her own structural categorization. I choose not to see the world with her set of blinders and, therefore her arguments really are not very consistent.
I think maybe it is about time that we move beyond the pettiness of generational (and for that matter gender) politics and begin to realize that the cultural changes that are taken place are a necessity for our survival as specie (technological adaptations and an every changing definitions of maturity).
For more information on Kay Hymowitz, it might be helpful to read some of her other recent work (and with it you will find the usual inconsistencies of a woman who is no more secure with herself than the people she tried to debase in this article). She is not reflecting on her past, but rather creating an alternate veracity in which the faults of her own character are transposed onto a new so-called generation of slackers that have a hard time with authority (in this case societal norms). The only changing variable throughout time seems to be what mechanism is the select generation supposed to submit to.
