The Hen House

[KGirl]

This is quite the conversation

Train's post on the first page really struck a chord with me...ohhhh boy. H has two sisters, and his mother has outright said she may have done him a "disservice" by babying him and treating him differently than his sisters. She made haircut and dentist appointments for him all the way through college. Whereas my parents made me take an inter-city bus an hour home from college when I was coming home for the weekend, she would drive the hour each way to pick him up and drop him off for the weekend. She still to this day brings him extra groceries. She does not do these things for her daughters - why is that? I do feel like it contributed to him not taking care of things later on, me feeling like I had to step in to make sure things got done, and then over time he felt like he wasn't being an "adult" (or felt emasculated, I guess?) and rebelled. One time I jokingly said "it seems like your ideal wife would be like your mom - cook, clean, run all the errands, do everything for you and not say a peep about it, but still be someone who's hot and you want to have sex with." And he said "yep, pretty much" in a not-joking tone. He said he wanted to "act like an adult" and take care of things on his own, which is why he wanted to split, but hasn't really stepped up to do those things he said he would do.

I also concur with the statement made that all of these different things may confuse men about what it "means" to "be a man." I work in higher education and the topic of men and their success in college is big lately, lots of articles and conference topics about it. Women now outpace men in college enrollment, persisting through college, and graduating in a timely manner. Men are more likely to drop out, having drinking problems, and take longer to graduate. When a parent calls me 9 times out of 10 they are calling about a male student, and not with concerns about their female student (and 9 times out of 10 it is moms calling and not dads). There are a lot of theories, some pretty controversial, about why men are falling behind - could it be because they've been taken care of so much earlier in life that when they get to college, they don't know what to do and struggle living independently? Is it because men are socialized to think that showing you care about grades or doing well isn't "cool," and that it's better to be a slacker "bro" who doesn't care about things like that? Is it because women have had to be more flexible (and therefore are able to get ahead in the workforce and other aspects of life more quickly nowadays) than men (who are still clinging to the "old ways" of doing things that just don't work anymore, because they've never really had to adapt in the same way to get ahead?) This is one of the more controversial theories.

I was just reading about a book called "Manning Up" which talks about men being stuck in a permanent stage of adolescence - some quotes from the article about it: " Hymowitz argues that the real problem is our changing culture, which has become detrimental to men. Fifty years ago, men in their mid-to-late twenties were expected to be financially independent, married, and well on their way to starting families. Society expected men to grow up—so they did.

The "knowledge economy" has changed all that. The modern world encourages people to stay in school well into their twenties, all the while accumulating debt that makes it even harder to become financially independent and start a family. Plus, the skills required by a knowledge economy are skills that come more naturally to women. Jobs like those in the design and communication fields emphasize traditionally feminine skill sets. Even the traditional male bastions of law and management are becoming increasingly dominated by women.

Instead, today's men are tending to live lives free of most responsibility. Hymowitz criticizes the empty male culture of Maxim magazine, Spike TV, and lives lived with frat-boy abandon. Instead of shouldering responsibility, many American males have become experts at shirking it."

That may have gotten off-topic but to summarize: I do see a lot of different ways in which men may feel "emasculated" nowadays. Not necessarily all from us W's, as I'm sure we don't help, but there seem to be many other contributing factors.