By now, the basic claim — that men’s aspirations seem to have diminished as women’s ambition has increased –- is familiar. What’s less obvious is another byproduct of the man crisis: the frustrating degree to which so many young men increasingly turn to the women in their lives not merely for emotional reassurance, but for direction, order, and stability. While there’s nothing new about women nurturing their boyfriends and husbands, in the past -– at least among the American middle class -– that emotional encouragement was part of an explicit quid pro quo. However imperfectly the ideal was lived out in practice, the goal was usually the same: men provided, women soothed. For a host of reasons, guys are providing less financially than ever before. At the same time, men’s yearning for comfort, reassurance, and direction from women seems to be getting louder and more urgent.
If the “guy crisis” wasn’t already placed at the center of the national conversation, Hanna Rosin’s Atlantic article-turned-strangely-punctuated bestseller The End of Men: And the Rise of Women has certainly done the trick. Pundits across the political spectrum have embraced Rosin’s basic thesis: boys and men are falling behind academically and professionally because guys are less “flexible” than women, less capable of adapting rapidly to an economy that’s increasingly “indifferent to brawn.”
Whether or not this masculine malaise is as widespread as Rosin claims is debatable; whether men are comparatively more rigid and less adaptable than women is at least partly contradicted by historical experience. (During the industrial revolution, for example, countless men made the rapid and difficult transition from an agrarian to a factory economy with varying degrees of ease.) One thing is indisputable: Rosin’s book strikes a powerful chord with women who are exasperated by the aimlessness, the uncertainty, and the absence of urgency that seems to infect so many young (and, sometimes, not so young) men.
In a rebuttal to Rosin’s claims that the end of men has also heralded an unprecedented era of female empowerment, Chloe Angyal argues in the Atlantic that the hit HBO series Girls reflects “a fuller picture of what it might mean to be a young American woman in the age of the end of men.” Angyal’s point is that the young women on the show are also “floundering… lacking the tenacity and follow-through that Rosin sees.” To the extent that Girls accurately reflects the culture, that’s a valid criticism. But there’s another aspect of the series that supports Rosin’s thesis: the troubling ineffectualness of so many of the male characters.
Men may not be at end, but in Girls their psychological dependency is on display like never before. Think of Charlie, Marnie’s boyfriend. While having make-up sex in his painfully neat apartment, Charlie starts begging “don’t abandon me, okay, don’t make me feel safe and then abandon me.” Marnie –- who wanted Charlie back -– is so horrified by his desperation that she breaks up with him mid-coitus. We laugh in both disbelief and uncomfortable recognition at Charlie’s childlike, frantic craving for safety. We empathize with Marnie’s disgust with this hopeless man-child who decorates -– and verbalizes — like a woman but who crumbles like a thoroughly modern dude.
That same male need not only for validation, but for rescue and direction, is on full display in 2010’s critically-acclaimed Blue Valentine. Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams play a young couple whose marriage is failing; in the film’s wrenching penultimate scene, Gosling’s Dean pleads with Williams’ Cindy (script here) :
The look of sheer desperation across Dean’s face…
DEAN
I don’t know what
to do, I don’t know what else to do. Tell
me what to do, tell me what to do.
CINDY
I don’t know what to do.
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