Kay Hymowitz has a theory about boys who won’t grow up.  You can read her article in The City Journal. She calls the phenomenon the “child-man.” She says they are everywhere, and they are a bane to women. It reminds me of Robert Bly’s references to the soft male archetype from the 1960s and 1970s. Mr. Bly is a poet, and the author of Iron John, a book that has stirred a good deal of controversy, and which is a personal favorite of mine. He talked about men who got so absorbed in being peaceful that they couldn’t lift a sword, even in a symbolic ritualized situation. The child-man is different in temperament. He replaces wimpiness with vanity and conceit. This translates into shallowness and arrogance toward women and a lot of false bravado that each one reinforces for the other. At least the soft male was servile and would take out the garbage without being reminded. The child-man is contemptuous of women and just wants to leer.

Ms. Hymowitz sees today’s equivalent of the soft male obsessing over video games and scorning any sort of commitment to another person.  She sees Maxim magazine as the iconic centerpiece for their model of endless adolescence. I’ve only seen the online version  of Maxim, and it is not a site I plan to bookmark. Ms. Hymowitz says the Maxim reader “prefers lists, which make up in brevity what they lose in thought.” They like lists of the best this and the worst that. The child-man enjoys putting people down, and the magazine feeds that appetite. The soft male only put himself down.

I’m out of touch with this child-man development. I’ve not been monitoring this aspect of the social scene, and child-men wouldn’t feel welcome around me, so I don’t encounter them up close. I know there is a lot of self-indulgent television programming, and the newstands have always been stuffed with adolescent fantasy materials, so that’s not new. But what of this reported groundswell of smugness? Is it a big deal, as she says, or just an anecdotal fluke? Is this just another turn in the cycle of people my age complaining about the young generation, or is it something significant?

I despised the popular movie Sideways because the male leads were both child-men. The father in Little Miss Sunshine was a child-man. Both movies got great reviews. Maybe the news has been in front of me all this time and I just averted my gaze. Maybe child-men are everywhere, and are even reviewing movies.

What’s going on with this? I welcome your comments.

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