What it means to be a man in the 21st century

I don't recall the precise moment when I turned David Brooks off.  For a long time, like for many left-of-center people like me, Brooks was the go-to pundit who looked at America from a right-of-center perspective.  We liked to understand the other side and we thought he might be of use.

And then I shut him off.  

Though I don't know when it was, I know the two main reasons behind my decision.  One was that his columns were beginning to be filled with bromides and platitudes.  And the other was this: The guy talked up, and even wrote a book on morals and virtue, but then divorced his wife and later married his much younger research assistant!  A man dating/marrying a woman who is young enough to be his daughter is a puke-inducing turnoff for me, more so when he talks about virtues and morals.

Every once in a while, I make the mistake of reading Brooks' "punditry."  I am human and I make mistakes!  That's how I ended up reading his column on the crisis of men and boys.

Brooks is essentially doing a book report in that column.

Richard V. Reeves’s new book, “Of Boys and Men,” is a landmark, one of the most important books of the year, not only because it is a comprehensive look at the male crisis, but also because it searches for the roots of that crisis and offers solutions.

Brooks writes that he "learned a lot I didn’t know."  Good for him. About time!

Setting aside that pundit, let me tell you this: The crisis of men and boys is not an issue that I don't know a lot about.  In fact, I have been blogging about it for years.  I have been talking about it for decades.  Through the samples below, I want to impress on you the urgency of the issue.

In one post, I reminded readers about the "save the males" that I have been writing about.  For one, boys are getting lost all the way from middle school on.  They are falling behind.  We have not been able to articulate for them what it means to be a man in a changed and changing world. Right from the mid-1990s, I have been talking with people and cautiously writing in op-eds that we were not paying attention to the developing trends of boys being neglected.

It is not that we--parents and society--are systematically neglecting boys and young men like the malignant neglect of girls and young women in the fundamentalist Islamic societies of Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan.  But, we are failing to notice that boys are falling behind.

While we are systematically redefining, and rightfully so, what it means to be a girl in the changing world, we have not been doing the same with boys.  And boys are falling behind in schools.  Men are falling behind in colleges. Masculinity is being re-made and men are not readying themselves to be a part of a new world.  I wrote in another post that trying to get people--students, in particular--appreciate the urgency in understanding what masculinity means in the 21st century has been a frustrating failure for me, and yet I try again and again.

I complained about the sheer unwillingness to acknowledge the problem.  I did not, and do not, understand what it will take for American society to start talking about this.  But then we are the same people who don't talk about guns, about racism, about ...

Perhaps the only time we talk about the lost young men is when we want to be sympathetic towards a white young man who grabs a few assault rifles and goes on a shooting spree.  Otherwise, we continue on with our lives as if there is no crisis of boys and men.

At universities, like the one where I was a professor until I was laid off, "gender studies" programs do not address such issues, and they continue to operate as if the world has not changed in the last fifty years.  I do not mean to suggest that patriarchy has been destroyed.  It is alive and well, indeed.  But, to focus only the patriarchy while not addressing the changes is one hell of a professional failure.  For that matter, changes like how the continuing patriarchy leads boys to assume that pussies are theirs to be grabbed, only to find out that only their dear leader can get away with such crimes!

Only a couple of weeks ago, in early September, I hoped that mothers will convince their young boys that real men aren't afraid of the kitchen and the laundry room, and that real men know what bed skirts and duvets are. What it means to be a boy is not that different from the question of what it means to be a virtuous boy at home, right?

In talking about kitchen and laundry, I am merely re-telling Benjamin Franklin's take on what it means to be a man: "Drawing on the Latin word vir, or virtue, he characterized manliness as tranquillity, resolution and orderliness"

Tranquility. Resolution. Orderliness.

Teach your children well because world peace, which every Miss America contestant wishes for, depends on testosterone-filled boys and men not having crises!