Excerpt from ‘Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men’ (USA Today)

Posted on August 21, 2008

Brian is 21, a senior chemistry major at Indiana. Serious and earnest, he is putting himself through school by the agency of working sum of two units jobs off campus—tarrying tables in a local restaurant on weekends and stacking books in the science library during the week when he is not in class or lab. An honors student, he wakes up at about six every morning so he can study in quiet in his dorm room.

His freshman roommate, Dave, still a intimate, has approached college life somewhat differently. A business major, Dave usually wakes up around noon, hangs out at his fraternity house playing video games with his fraternity brothers until dinner, and at that time heads out to the local bars for the night. He estimates that he drinks five nights a week, parties all

weekend, and studies only the night before finals, if at another time. He had been putting himself from one side school gambling online, but he ran into a streak of bad luck and now owes about $12,000.

We sit together in one of the many snack bars around campus. “I don’privately understand Dave, never did,” Brian says. “But he’s my confidant anyway, and he invites me to the cool parties, which, I confess, I never go to.”

“Listen,” Dave replies, “he doesn’t understand me? I think it’s great to want to have a career and all, but Brian is, like, so tight, you know. He’s of that kind a go-getter. He doesn’t get that college is about parties and fun—oh, and did I mention the drinking?” He laughs.

Jason graduated from Dartmouth almost five years ago. Now 26, he works in finance in Boston and shares a Back Bay chamber with five other guys with whom he went to school. He runs and works out, stays fit, and dates lots of different women—all in their early twenties. At night, he hangs out at the “Dartmouth bars” of Boston. “Hey, college was supposed to be the best years of your life, right?” he explains, with only a trace of defensiveness in his voice. “So where is it written that it has to end when you divide into regular intervals? College is forever, man. That’s what the admissions guys say—that these will be your friends forever. Well, forever is now.”

These are some of the in one’session teens men you will meet in this book. They’re among the nearly 400 I’ve interviewed over the past four years—forward college campuses, in neighborhood bars and coffee shops, in Internet chat rooms, and at sports events. Most of them are college educated, from good homes in in a moderate degree affluent suburbs and urban areas. Most are

white, but I talked with plenty of Latino, African-American,

and Asian-American guys. Most are middle class, further I in addition made fast to prate by the agency of high-school grads who never went to college bound instead worked in auto body shops, served in the military, and opened small businesses. Most were straight, but I spoke with quite a few gay and bisexual guys as well.

In another series, these guys would undoubtedly be poised to take their place in the ripened world, taking the first steps toward fit the nation’s future professionals, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. They would be engaged to be married, thinking about planting down by a family, preparing for futures as civic leaders and Little League dads. Not today.

Today, many of these young men, poised between adolescence and adulthood, are more likely to feel anxious and uncertain. In college, they party close but are impressible on studying. They slip through the academic cracks, another face in a large reprove hall, getting by with little effort and less putting in custody. After graduation, they drifted pile aimlessly from one

dead-end job to another, dissipate more time online playing video games and gambling than they do on dates (and probably spend more money too), “sickle up” occasionally with a “friend by benefits,” go out with their buddies, drink too much, and save too trivial. After corporation, they perpetuate that experience and move home or live in group apartments in major cities, with several other guys from their dorm or fraternity. They watch a lot of sports. They have grandiose visions because of their futures and not a clue how to get from here to there. When they do try and articulate this amorphous uncertainty, they’re likely to paper over it by a simple “it’s all good.”

You can find them in New York’s Murray Hill, or Silver Lake and Echo Park in Los Angeles, Houston’sitting Midtown, or Atlanta’sitting Buckhead district, sipping their mocha lattes in the local Starbucks and crowding upmarket pool halls; some are banker boys in cargo shorts, untucked striped Oxford shirts, and baseball caps; and others allay sport the T-shirts or flannel shirts of their college days. They are the “friendsters” with their wi-fi computers looking for charity, friendship, or hookups, or on prodigy.com looking for next month’s job. In a scene that makes the TV show Friends appear more like a documentary, they double and make threefold up in their overpriced apartments, five or six guys in a two-bedroom pad, re-creating their collegiate lifestyle in the big city. “Murray Hill has more young the public that just graduated from college than any other neighborhood in the city,” gushes the same very happy Manhattan realtor, who estimates that 90% of his rentals go to young people aged 21 to 25.

At ignorance, they’ll all troop off to bars that are branded as collegiate alumni bars, such as Beacon Hill Pub or Cleary’s, Boston’s “Dartmouth bars” because there are in such a manner mob recent Dartmouth grads in the city who congregate there. High school may be over at eighteen, college at twenty-two, but-end the same social life frequently continues in the place of another various years. Bars advertise “Spring Break 52 Weeks a Year!” and others promote college-party atmospheres for the post-college party set. Many post-grads move in a languorous mass, a collection of anomic nomads looking with regard to someplace to go.

Welcome to Guyland.

Guyland is the world in which young men live. It is both a stage of life, a liminal indefinite time span between adolescence and adulthood that can often stretch for a decade or more, and a place, or, rather, a bunch of places where guys hoard to exist guys with one and the other other, unhassled by the demands of parents, girlfriends, jobs, kids, and the other

nuisances of adult life. In this topsy-turvy, Peter-Pan

mindset, young men trick the responsibilities of adulthood and remain fixated forward the trappings of boyhood, while the boys they still are struggle heroically to prove that they are real men in spite of all evidence to the contrary.

Males betwixt 16 and 26 number well over 22 million—more than

15% of the total male populousness in the United States. The “fright” age bracket represents the front end of the single most desirable consumer market, according to advertisers. It’s the group constantly targeted by major Hollywood studios, in part because this group sees the same shoot-em-

up action film in such a manner many times on initial release. They’re

targeted in several of the most successful magazine launches in recent memory, magazines liking Men’s Health, Maxim, FHM, Details, and Stuff. Guys in this age bracket are the primary viewers of the countless sports channels on television. They use up the overwhelming majority of recorded symphony, video games, and computer technology, and they are the majority of first-time car buyers.

Yet aside from assiduous market research, Guyland is a terra incognita; it has never been adequately mapped. Many of us excepting that be sure we’ve landed there when we feel distraught about our children, unquiet that they have entered, or will be entering, a world that we simply be aware of. We sense them moving away from us, developing allegiances and attitudes we neither understand nor keep up. Recently, a teacher at a middle school told me about his confess 16-year- old son, Nick. “When we’re together, he’s excited, happy, curious, and in the same state connected,” he told me.

“But at what appropriated time I flock him to school this morning, I watched some amazing transformation. In the car, Nick was speaking animatedly about something. As we arrived at his school, though, I saw him scan the playground for his friends. He got out of the car, still buoyant, with a bounce in his step. But as in a short time as he caught sight of his friends he instantly fell into that slouchy ‘I don’t give a shit’ amble that teenagers get. I think I actually watched him become a ’shore’!”

Parents often feel we no longer know them—the young guys in our lives.

Just what are they doing in their rooms at all hours of the night? And that that are they doing in society? And wherefore are they so aimless and directionless when they graduate that they take dead-end jobs and move outer part home? When they come home for college vacations, we wonder just who is this new person who talks about ledge parties and power hours—and what happened to the motivated young man who left for college with

in the same state high hopes and a keen sense of purpose. And guys themselves often wonder to which place they left their dreams.

Every time we read about immoral gay-baiting and bullying in a high chide, every opportunity the nocturnal news depicts the ferocious horror of a school shooting, every time we hear about teen binge drinking, random sexual hookups, or a hazing death at a literary institution fraternity, we feel that anxiety, that dread. And we ask ourselves, “Could that be my son?” Or, “Could that be my friend, or even my boyfriend?” Or, even “could that be me?”

Well, to be honest, probably not. 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 desire sexually assaulted their classmates. They swim in the same water, give out the same air. Those appalling headlines are and nothing else the to extremes of a continuum of attitudes and behaviors that stretches back to embrace so many young men, and that so circumscribes their lives that equal if they don’cheek by jowl want to

participate, they still be required to contend with it.

Guyland is not more esoteric planet inhabited alone by alien

creatures—malevolence how alien our teenage and 20-something

sons might seem at times. It’s the world of everyday “guys.” Nor is it a state of arrested development, a case of prolonged adolescence among a cadre of slackers. It has become a staging of life, a “demographic,” that is now

pretty much the model. Without fixed age boundaries, in one’s teens men typically enter Guyland before they turn 16, and they begin to leave in their mid to late 20s. This period now has a definable shape and texture, a topography that can be mapped and explored. A kind of suspended animation between boyhood and manhood, Guyland lies between the province and lack of autonomy of boyhood and the sacrifice and responsibility of manhood. Wherever they are living, whatever they are

doing, and whomever they are hooking up with, Guyland is a dramatically new scaffold of development with its own rules and limitations. It is a period of mode that demands examination—and not just because of the appalling headlines that greet us on such a regular basis. As urgent as it may pretend to explore and expose Guyland for the cause that of the egregious behaviors of the few, it may be more urgent to examine the ubiquity of Guyland in the lives of almost everyone else.

It’s easy to observe “guys” virtually and everywhere; from pole to pole in America—in every high control and college campus in America, with their baseball caps on frontward or backward, their easy smiles or anxious darting eyes, huddled around tiny electronic gadgets or laptops, or relaxing in front of

immense wide-screen hi-def TVs, in basements, dorms, and frat houses. But it would be a mistake to assume that each conforms fully to a regime of peer-influenced and enforced behaviors that I call the “Guy Code,” or shares all traits and attitudes with everyone else. It’s important to remember that individual guys are not the same as “Guyland.”

In fact, my point is precisely the opposite. Though Guyland is pervasive—it is the air guys breathe, the water they drink—each guy cuts his own deal with it in the manner that he tries to navigate the passage from adolescence to adulthood without succumbing to the most soul-numbing, spirit-crushing elements that surround him every day.

Guys often feel they’re entirely on their own as they navigate the murky shallows and the dangerous eddies that run in Guyland’s swift general. They often stop talking to their parents, who “just don’t get it.” Other adults seem equally clueless. And they can’face to face confide in individual another lest they peril being exposed for the confused creatures they are.

So they’re left alone, confused, trying to come to terms through a world they themselves meagrely understand. They couch their insecurity in bravado and play the bully., a fearless strut barely concealing a shivering apprehension. They test themselves in fantasy worlds and in intemperate habits contests, enduring humiliation and pain at the hands of others.

All the at the same time that, many do suspect that something’s corrupt in the glory of Manhood. They struggle to conceal their own sense of fraudulence, and can aroma it on others. But few can admit to it, lest all the emperors-to-be will be revealed as disrobed. They go along, in mime.

Just as one can support the troops but oppose the war, so too can one appreciate and support individual guys while engaging critically with the familiar and cultural world they inhabit. In fact, I think to be true that only through understanding this world can we truly be empathic to the guys in our lives. We need to enter this world, see the perilous field in what one. boys become men in our society because we desperately need to start a conversation about that world. We do boys a great disservice

by turning away, excusing the excesses of Guyland as just “boys being boys”—because we fail to see accurate how powerful its influence really is. Only when we begin to engage in these conversations, with open eyes and open hearts—as parents to children, as friends, as guys themselves—can we both reduce the risks and enable guys to sail over it more successfully. This book is an attempt to map that terrain in order to enable guys—and those who know them, be inclined about them, love them—to steer a course by greater integrity and truth, of the cognate kind they can be true not to some artificial digest, but to themselves.

Just Who Are These Guys?

The guys who people Guyland are for the most part happy, middle-class

kids; they are college-bound, in college, or have recently graduated; they’re single. They live communally with other guys, in dorms, apartments, or fraternities. Or they live with their parents (even after literary institution). Their jobs, if they have them, are modest, low-paying, low-prestige ones in the

service sector or entry-level incorporated jobs that leave them with plenty of time to party. They’re good kids, by and large. They blend into the crowd, drift with the course, and often pass unnoticed from one side the lecture halls and multistory dorms of America’s large body campuses.

Of course, there are manifold young people of this age group who are exceedingly motivated, focused, with a clear vision and direction in their lives. Their stories of resilience and motivation will provide a telling rejoinder to many of the dominant patterns of Guyland. There are besides just as many who immediately affect back home after community, directionless, with a liberal arts BA that qualifies them for nothing more than a dead-end job making lattes or folding jeans. So while a few of them might jump right into a career or graduate school closely after college, many greater degree simply drift for a while, comforting themselves with the assurances that they have plenty of time to reckon down later, after they’ve had their fun.

In some respects, Guyland can be defined by what guys do for fun. It’s the “boyhood” faction of the continuum they’re so reluctant to leave. It’s drinking, sex, and video games. It’s sleeplessness sports, reading about sports, listening to sports on the radio. It’s television—cartoons, substantialness shows, music videos, shoot-em-up movies, sports, and porn—pizza, and

beer. It’sitting totality the behavior that makes the real grownups in their lives rocking their eyes and wonder, “When will he grow up?!”

There are some parts of Guyland that are quite positive. The advancing age of marriage, for example, benefits both women and men, who have more time to explore career opportunities, not to mention establishing their identities, before committing to home and family. And a great deal of of what qualifies as fun in Guyland is relatively inoffensive. Guys extend out of a lot of the sophomoric humor—if not after their “sophomore” year,

then at least by their mid–twenties.

Yet, in that place is a disturbing undercurrent to much of it as healthy. Teenage boys spend countless hours blowing up the galaxy, graphically splattering their computer screens in violent video games. College guys post pornography everywhere in their dorm rooms; indeed, pornographic pictures are among the most popular screen savers on male college students’

computers. In fraternities and dorms on virtually every campus, plenty of guys are getting drunken not quite every night, prowling for women through whom they can hook up, and chalking it all up to harmless fun. White suburban boys don do-rags

and gangsta tattoos appropriating inner-city African-American

styles to be grow cool. Homophobia is ubiquitous; indeed, “that’s so gay” is probably the most frequently used put-down in intermediate schools, high schools, and college today. And once gay-baiting takes an ill-looking turn and becomes gay-bashing.

All the while, these young people are listening to shock jocks on the radio, gay at cable-rated T&A on the passing from hand to hand family’s spinoffs of “The Man Show” and sleeplessness Spike TV, the “man’sitting reticulated,” guffawing to sophomoric body-fluid humor of college circuit comedians who make Beavis and Butt-head sound quaint. They’re laughing at clueless henpecked husbands on TV sitcoms; snorting derisively at guys who say the wrong thing on beer ads; snickering at duded-up metrosexuals prancing around major metropolitan centers drinking Cosmos and imported vodka. Unapologetically “politically incorrect” magazines, radio hosts, and television shows abound, filled with macho bluster and bikini-clad women bouncing on trampolines. And the soundtrack in these new boys’ clubhouses, the sonic wallpaper in every dorm room and every shared apartment, is some of the angriest music ever made. Nearly four at a loss of every five gangsta rap CDs are bought through suburban white guys. It is not just the “boys in the hood” who are a “alarm to society.” It’s the boys in the “burbs.”

Occasionally, the news from Guyland is shocking—and at intervals

even malefactor. There are guys who are drinking themselves into oblivion on campus on any given night of the week, organizing parties where they spike women’s drinks with Rohypnol (the date rape put drugs into), or just try to ply them with alcohol to make them more compliant—and then videotaping their conquests. These are the guys who are devising laborately sadomasochistic hazing rituals as far as concerns high-school athletic teams, collegiate fraternities, or military squads.

It is true, of series, that white guys produce not have a monopoly on appalling behavior. There are plenty of young black and Latino boys who are equally desperate to prove their manhood, to test themselves before the watchful evaluative eyes of other guys. But only among of a white color boys do the negative dynamics of Guyland seem to act themselves out so invisibly. Often, when in that place’s information of juvenile dusky boys behaving badly, the media takes on a “what can you expect?” attitude, failing to recognize that expecting such behavior from black men is just plain racism. But every time white boys chance the headlines, regardless of how frequently, there is an element of shock, a collective, “How could this happen? He came from such a worthy family!” Perhaps not identifying the parallel criminal behavior among white guys adds an additional cultural element to the equation: identification. Middle-class white families descry the perpetrators as “our guys.” We know them, we are them, they cannot be like that.

Though Guyland is not exclusively white, nor one nor the other is it an equal-Opportunity venture. Guyland rests on a bed of middle-class entitlement, a privileged sense that you are special, that the world is there for you to take. Upwardly movable minorities feel the same tugs between claiming their rightful share of good times and delaying adult responsibilities that the more privileged white guys feel. But it often works itself disclosed differently for them. Because of the necessarily and expectations of their families, they tend to opt for a more traditional trajectory. Indeed, many minority youths require begun to move into those slots designated because the ambitious and motivated, just at the moment that those slots are being abandoned by white guys having fun.

Some think they’re fulfilling the American Dream, yet most feel similar to if they’re wearing another man’s clothes. Take Carlos, the son of illegal immigrants, who worked in the central California fields, harvesting artichokes and Brussels sprouts. Carlos is their success story, a track star and pleasant student, who got recruited to several colleges and landed a scholarship to USC. But at that time he feels torn between the compressing from his family “to be the first in everything”—the first college grad, the first doctor—and from his friends in his hometown of Gilroy to hang out with them by the summer.

Or Eric, who just graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta. He says he’s “out of procedure” by the agency of means of his other African-American friends; he is highly motivated and serious, eschews hip-hop, and always knew he wanted to get married, alarm a family, and get a good job. Heavily recruited out of college, he’s already a regional manager for Coca-Cola in Atlanta and dating a senior at Spelman. They plan to marry next June. “Too many of my friends think gangsta is the way to go,” he says, nodding at a table nearby of college guys sporting the latest do-rags and bling. “But in my family, being a man meant stepping up and being responsible. That was what being a Morehouse Man meant to me. I be able to live with that.”

And as long as the American college campus is Guyland Central, guys who don’t go to college have luxurious opportunities—in the military, in police stations and firehouses, forward every construction site and in every factory, in every neighborhood bar—for the intimately unpolished male bonding that characterizes Guyland’s standard operating procedure. Sure, some working-class guys cannot afford to postpone their adolescence; their family indispensably them, and their grownup income, too badly. With nay association degree to fall back on, and parents who are not financially able or willing to patronage a prolonged adolesence, they put on’cheek by jowl have the safeness net that makes Guyland possible. But they remark other ways, symbolic or real, at work or at play, to hold onto their glory days—or they become so choleric they seethe with jealous rage at the privileged hardly any who seem able to delay responsibility indefinitely.

Greg, for example, never made it to college. He didn’privately concern it at the time, but now he wonders. The son and grandson of steel workers near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, Greg knew he’morning meal end up at Beth Steel also—except the steel plant closed and suddenly all those jobs disappeared. Even if he could go to community now, it’s too expensive, and over and above, he needs to spare for a new car so he can awaken out of his parents’ house. In the past two years he’s worked at a gas station, Home Depot, a mini-mart convenience store, and as a groundskeeper at a local university. “I’m trying, honest, I truly am,” he says, with a certain resigned sadness already crawling into his 24-year-old eyes. “But there is just no way every honest white guy can make a living in this good housewifery—not with these Bush fat cats and all the illegals.”

Rather than embracing Guyland as a way of life, working-class

Guys instead seem to inhabit Guyland at their local sports bar, on the factory shop floor, and in the bowling league or military one. Yet the same sense of entitlement, the same outraged replication to the waning of privilege, is clear. One Brooklyn obstruct near my house has been abode to generations of firefighters and their pals. There’s every easy ambience about the place, the comfort of younger and older guys (all white) sharing a beer and shooting the zephyr. Until I chance to ask one fright about bearing firefighters. The atmosphere turns menacing, and a defensive anger spills in a puzzle of the guys near me. “Those bitches have taken over,” says Patrick.

They’re everywhere. You know that ad “it’s there you require to be.” That’s like women. They’re everywhere they want to be! There’s nowhere you be possible to go anymore—factories, beer joints, military, even the goddamned firehouse! We working guys are just fucked.

The camaraderie of working-class guys long celebrated in American history and romanticized in Hollywood films—the playful bonding of the locker field, the sacrificial love of the foxhole, the courageous tenacity of the firehouse or police station—has a darker side. Homophobic harassment of the new guys, racial slurs, and seething sexism often lie alongside the casual banter of the band of brothers, and this is true in both the working-class bar and the university coffee house.

And although my point of convergence is American guys, Guyland is not exclusively American terrain. Both Britain and Australia have begun to examine “Laddism”—the anomic, free-floating, unattached and often boorish behavior of young males. “Lads” are Guys with British accents—consuming the same media, charming in the same sorts of behaviors, and lubricating their activities with the same alcohol. In Italy, they’re called bamboccioni, or “mammoni,” or Mama’s boys. Half of totally Italian men between 25 and 34 lead with their parents. In France, they’re called “Tanguys” after the French film with that title in various places their lifestyle.

Guyland revolves almost exclusively around other guys. It is a social space being of the class who well as a time zone—a pure, homosocial Eden, uncorrupted by the sad responsibilities of adulthood. The motto of Guyland is simple: “Bros Before Hos.” (Long “o” in both Bro and Ho.) Just about every guy knows this—knows that his “brothers” are his real soul mates, his actual life-partners. To them he swears allegiance and will take their secrets to his grave. And guys do not live in Guyland all the time. They take temporary vacations—when they are alone with their girlfriends or even a female friend, or when they are with their parents, teachers, or coaches.

Girls in Guyland—Babes in Boyland

What about girls? Guys love girls—all that homosociality might set off

suspect if they didn’t! It’s women they can’t stand. Guyland is the

more grownup version of the clubhouse on The Little Rascals—the

“He-Man

Woman Haters Club.” Women demand responsibility and

reputableness, the antitheses of Guyland. Girls are fun and sexy, even

friends, as long to the degree that they respect the centrality of guys’ commitment to the band of brothers. And whereas girls are allowed in, they have to play by guy

rules—or they don’t get to play at all.

Girls struggle daily with Guyland—the permanent stream of pornographic

humor in college dorms or libraries, or at countless work stations

in offices across the country; the constant pressure to shape their bodies

into idealized hyper-Barbies.

Guyland sets the terms under which girls

try to claim their own agency, develop their be in possession of senses of self. Guyland

sets the terms of friendship, of sexual activity, of who is “in” and who is

decidedly “out.” Girls be able to even be guys—whether or not they know something about

sports (but not too much), enjoy casual banter in various places sex (but not too

actively), and dress and act in ways that are pleasantly unthreatening to

boys’ fragile sense of masculinity.

Some of the girls have mastered the slouching look, the indifferent affect, the contemptuous relation, the swaggering posture, the foul language, and the aggressive behaviors of guys. Since Guyland is ofttimes the only game in town, who be possible to blame them if they humor excessively in a little—or a lot—of what I call “guyification?” Observe a group of college-age women. It’s likely they’re wearing jeans, T-shirts, oversized sweatshirts, running shoes or sandals—guywear. If not, they’ll be wearing thong underwear, skimpy mini T-shirts that farewell their midriffs bare, and supertight pants, leggings, or miniskirts. And for which gender are they getting completely Barbied up? (Here’s a quiz: Which gender invented the thong and presents it as the latest fashion accessory for women?) And listen as they call each other “guys” all the time, even when no actual guys are around. It’s be appropriate to the generic term for “person.”

Some girls have parlayed their post-feminist assertiveness into “girl power,” or grrrl power. A few think that they can achieve equality by the agency of imitating guys’ behaviors—by running circles around them on the athletic field or matching them quench one’s thirst for be intemperate or sexual hookup for hookup. But it’s a cruel distortion of those ideals of early feminist liberation whenever female assertiveness is redefined as the willingness to hike up your sweater and reveal your breasts for a roving camera in a “Girls Gone Wild” video. And sexual equality is hardly achieved when she is willing to perform oral sex on his entire clump of friends.

And most girls also know the motto “Bros Before Hos.” A girl senses that she is less than, not a bro, and that underneath whole his syrupy flattering is the graciousness and contempt one naturally has for a ho. Girls also apprehend the joke about the difference betwixt a bitch and a slut (their and nothing else two choices in Guyland): “A bitch will sleep with everyone but you.” Girls live in Guyland, but they do not define it. They contend with it and force their peace with it, each in their have way.

Excerpted from Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men by the agency of Michael Kimmel. HarperCollins Publishers, 2008.

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