Boys to men: Why guys aren’t growing up

After interviewing hundreds of 16- to 26-year-olds across the U.S., sociologist and gender studies expert Michael Kimmel found a trend of “guy” culture that is marked by the inability to have healthy relationships with women, murky career goals, and the desire not to grow up. In his new book “Guyland,” Kimmel writes about why many young men are trapped between adolescence and adulthood. An excerpt.

Jeff* is 24, tall and fit, with shaggy brown hair and an easy smile. After graduating from Brown three years ago, with an honors degree in history and anthropology, he moved back home to the Boston suburbs and started looking for a job. After several months, he found one, as a sales representative for a small Internet provider. He stays in touch with friends from college by text message and email, and still heads downtown on weekends to hang out at Boston’s “Brown bars.”

“It’s kinda like I never left college,” he says, with a mixture of resignation and pleasure. “Same friends, same aimlessness.”

Andy is 17, a high-school senior in the San Diego area. Affable, slightly chubby, and wearing glasses, his Chargers jersey signals his interest in sports. At the moment, he’s waiting to hear to which University of California campus he’ll be accepted. Or if he’ll be accepted. Once a reasonably good student, he says he now worries that he’s spent so much time playing video games and hanging out in online communities that he hasn’t studied hard enough and that his grades have suffered. “I just get kinda lost in there, you know?” he says. “My parents think I’m doing homework all the time, so I sorta keep it a secret.”

While he was hoping for UCLA or Santa Barbara, he is also sending in a few applications to other, less competitive state colleges, just in case. “My parents are going to freak if I don’t get into UCLA,” he says, wincing.

Brian is 21, a senior chemistry major at Indiana. Serious and earnest, he is putting himself through school by working two jobs off campus — waiting 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 friend, 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 then 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 then. He had been putting himself through 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’t understand Dave, never did,” Brian says. “But he’s my friend 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 such 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 apartment 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 graduate? 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 young men you will meet in this book. They’re among the nearly 400 I’ve interviewed over the past four years — on 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 reasonably 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, but I also made sure to talk with high-school grads who never went to college but 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 era, these guys would undoubtedly be poised to take their place in the adult world, taking the first steps toward becoming the nation’s future professionals, entrepreneurs, and business leaders. They would be engaged to be married, thinking about settling down with 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 hard but are soft on studying. They slip through the academic cracks, another face in a large lecture hall, getting by with little effort and less commitment. After graduation, they drift aimlessly from one dead-end job to another, spend more time online playing video games and gambling than they do on dates (and probably spend more money too), “hook up” occasionally with a “friend with benefits,” go out with their buddies, drink too much, and save too little. After college, 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 for 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 with a simple “it’s all good.”

Video   Why won’t men grow up? Aug. 27: Michael Kimmel, author of “Guyland,” discusses why young men have such a hard time growing up. Today show

You can find them in New York’s Murray Hill, or Silver Lake and Echo Park in Los Angeles, Houston’s Midtown, or Atlanta’s 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 still sport the T-shirts or flannel shirts of their college days. They are the “friendsters” with their wi-fi computers looking for love, friendship, or hookups, or on monster.com looking for next month’s job. In a scene that makes the TV show Friends appear more like a documentary, they double and triple 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 people that just graduated from college than any other neighborhood in the city,” gushes one very happy Manhattan realtor, who estimates that 90 percent of his rentals go to young people aged 21 to 25.

At night, 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 so many recent Dartmouth grads in the city who congregate there. High school may be over at eighteen, college at twenty-two, but the same social life often continues for another several 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 for someplace to go.

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