{"id":34933,"date":"2017-12-31T01:00:24","date_gmt":"2017-12-31T06:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=34933"},"modified":"2018-09-18T11:03:42","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T15:03:42","slug":"qotd-the-rise-of-the-man-child","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/12\/31\/qotd-the-rise-of-the-man-child\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The rise of the man-child"},"content":{"rendered":"

I just turned 51, and a disturbingly large percentage of men in their twenties and thirties seem like spoiled narcissistic man-children to me. I thought for a while that this might mean I was turning into the sort of crusty old fart I laughed at when I was twenty-five, until I noticed that the percentage of man-children varied a great deal depending on my social context.<\/p>\n

At the martial-arts school where I\u2019m training, zero to not much. Even the teenage boys there are pretty manly, on the whole \u2013 not surprising, since manliness is very nearly defined by stoicism and grace under pressure, and a martial-arts school should teach those things if it teaches nothing else. Anywhere firearms are worn or displayed openly, ditto \u2014 go to a tactical-shooting match, for example, and you\u2019ll see even prepubescent boys (and, though rarely, some girls) exemplifying quiet manliness in a very heartening degree.<\/p>\n

On the other hand\u2026when I go to places where people are talking rather than doing, the percentage of man-children rises. Occasionally my wife Cathy and I go to screenings at the Bryn Mawr Film institute, most recently to see Sergei Bodrov\u2019s The Mongol<\/em>; it\u2019s pretty much wall-to-wall man-children there, at least in the space not occupied by middle-aged women. If our sample is representative, my wife is manlier than the average male art-film buff.<\/p>\n

How does one tell? The man-child projects a simultaneous sense of not being comfortable in his own skin and perpetually on display to others. He\u2019s twitchy, approval-seeking, and doesn\u2019t know when to shut up. He\u2019s never been tested to anywhere near the limits of his physical or moral courage, and deep within himself he knows that because of this he is weak. Unproven. Not really a man. And it shows in a lot of little ways \u2013 posture, gaze patterns, that sort of thing. He\u2019ll overreact to small challenges and freeze or crumble under big ones.<\/p>\n

One of the things this culture badly needs is a set of manhood ordeals. Unlike the tribal societies of the past, we\u2019re too various for one size to fit all \u2014 but to reliably turn boys into men (or, to put it in more fashionable terms, to help them become mature and inner-directed) you need to put them under stress in a way that, except for the small percentage that go through military boot camps, we basically don\u2019t any more.<\/p>\n

Instead, we prolong adolescence into the twenties and thirties. With dolorous consequences for everyone\u2026<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Where the men are”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2008-12-15.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I just turned 51, and a disturbingly large percentage of men in their twenties and thirties seem like spoiled narcissistic man-children to me. I thought for a while that this might mean I was turning into the sort of crusty old fart I laughed at when I was twenty-five, until I noticed that the percentage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[41,13],"tags":[262,1235,504],"class_list":["post-34933","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-culture","tag-esr","tag-teenagers"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-95r","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34933","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34933"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34933\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":34934,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34933\/revisions\/34934"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34933"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34933"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34933"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}