Never-Ending Party, for Some: The new normal for guys

At my 3rd fantasy football draft (that is an issue in of itself right there) someone went around the table and asked:

“Is everyone here back at their parent’s house?”

No one even had to respond because we all knew the answer was “Yes”.

I don’t totally agree with the “everyone needs to get married to grow up” philosophy but some of the things in this article hit pretty close to home.

Panic is slowly setting in.

The follow up question was “What happens when you bring a girl over?…

“You don’t.”

It’s “booze o’clock” on a recent Thursday night on New York’s Fire Island—a rolling, inexact hour when 10 vacationing guys decide to kick off their nightly binge. Between tequila shots and pulls of beer, the sun-baked twentysomethings roar on the deck of their rented beach house, sounding the depths of maledom: sexual conquests, mastery of fire (“I’ll grill that potato salad”) and escape from the monotony of girlfriends and work. “I like starting things,” says one guy, as if to sum up his generation. “Then it gets boring.”

The banter may seem like an open dish-session between friends, but masculine law chokes out the sissy stuff. There’s scorn when water is used to dilute a whisky, and disbelief when one of the crew suggests dinner that night to celebrate his birthday. “This isn’t a friendship trip,” chides one of the guys. “We’re here to get women.” During the week, most of the guys say they’ve reached their goal—a few more than once.

Once the preserve of whacked-out teens and college slackers, this testosterone-filled landscape is the new normal for American males until what used to be considered creeping middle age, according to the sociologist Michael Kimmel. In his new book, “Guyland,” the State University of New York at Stony Brook professor notes that the traditional markers of manhood—leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father—have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from “a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life.” In 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30. Today, less than a third of males that age can say the same.

“What used to be regressive weekends are now whole years in the lives of some guys,” Kimmel tells NEWSWEEK. In almost 400 interviews with mainly white, college-educated twentysomethings, he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it’s more like all the old ways—drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing—turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility. Kimmel’s testosterone tract adds to a forest of recent research into protracted adolescents (or “thresholders” and “kidults,” as they’ve also been dubbed) and the reluctance of today’s guys to don their fathers’ robes—and commitments. They “see grown-up life as such a loss,” says Kimmel, explaining why so many guys are content to sit out their 20s in duct-taped beanbag chairs. The trouble is that the very thing they’re running from may be the thing they need.

At least, that’s what I hope. On the weekend this story goes to print I am getting married in a loft in midtown Manhattan, tying the knot at 27—the national average for guys. But by the way some of my single male friends reacted, you’d think I was appearing on an episode of “Engaged and Underage.” “Maybe you’re making a big mistake,” said one buddy when I told him of the engagement. A 27-year-old technology consultant living in New York, he can’t remember the names of the women he’s slept with (let alone the number), and gives them nicknames like “Biff,” “Dino” and “the Little Maniac.” I’m happy to take in the night with him every few weeks, but still a little uncomfortable belting out “Sweet Caroline” to a bar full of people, and tickled pink when I’m back home with my girlfriend—soon to be wife. Guyland is not without its charms, but it pales next to what I have known with her over the past three years.

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