What’s the Matter with Men?

So how many aimless and unmotivated young men do you know?
If physician and research psychologist Leonard Sax is correct,
doubtless you know many of them—or are one yourself. Do you spend
most of your time playing video games? Are you taking medication for
ADHD? Are you indifferent to school or a career? Then this book is
about you.

Young women, on the other hand, seem to be surging. Elite colleges
have a glut of accomplished female applicants, but have to work to find
enough qualified men to achieve something close to a 50-50 male-female
admissions ratio. By age 35, 35 percent of American women have earned a
college degree, while only 23 percent of men have done so. Some experts
say that within 10 years, twice as many women as men will have finished
college.

And when these men and women form relationships or marry, all too
often the woman is out conquering the world while her husband simply
continues what he was doing before they got together—which is to
say, not much. Even stay-at-home dads are in too many cases merely
sitting around eating ice cream and watching TV with the kids, leaving
the heavy housework to the mom when she finally gets home from
work.

This territory has been covered
before, but Boys Adrift:
The Five
Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys
and Underachieving Young Men presents a straightforward argument
that incorporates solid research and, thankfully, does not blame
feminism. What he does blame is a combination of social and scientific
factors that have taken place over the last 30 years. These include the
way students are taught in school, prescription drugs, video games, the
ubiquity of environmental estrogens caused by pollution, and the
devaluing of positive masculine roles on TV, in the movies, and in real
life.

Today, Sax writes, schools have “abolished” competitive formats and
emphasize simulated over physical experience. “Nature,” he writes, “has
been replaced by computer screens and fancy indoor toys.” Schools have
also accelerated the early elementary curriculum, which works against
the way most boys’ brains develop. For instance, Sax writes, because
boys mature more slowly than girls verbally, “trying to teach
5-year-old boys to learn to read and write may be just as inappropriate
as it would be to try to teach 3-year-old girls
to read and
write.” All of this turns boys
off to school at a young age and
causes
behavior problems.

Many of these behavior problems end up being labeled ADHD and
medicated with Ritalin. In 2007, boys are 30 times as likely to be
taking medication than in 1987. Sax is no fan of the drug. “What
parents don’t know,” he writes, “is that even relatively short-term use
of these drugs, for just a year or perhaps less, can lead to changes in
personality.
The boy who used to be agreeable, outgoing, and
adventurous becomes lazy
and irritable.”

Video games fry your brain, too. “Playing video games,” Sax writes,
“gives boys the reward associated with achieving a great objective, but
without any connection to the real world.” The games “have the power to
displace and distort the motivation of boys and young men, so that they
no longer have the same interest in real-world success and real-world
achievement.”

And what about those endocrine disrupters—the ones that change
whole rivers of male fish into females? Hormone-disrupting chemicals
are found in everyone’s bodies these days, a product of the ubiquity of
plastic. Girls are now starting puberty at age 8, but boys’ development
seems to be slowed. As a result, “middle school has become a very
strange place,” with the girls appearing to be about 16, but the boys
about 10.

Finally, where are the positive, mature male role models? Boys, Sax
argues, must be taught to be men—and right now, most boys aren’t
seeing anyone much better than Homer Simpson or 50 Cent to live up to,
in real life or on TV. “What does it mean to be a man today,” he
writes, “a mature adult man?”

Sax recommends pulling the plug on the games, making Ritalin a rare
prescription, changing teaching methods in the early grades, and
getting all these boys outside already, to play real games on real
dirt.

He does manage to get his message across without being too nostalgic
for an idyllic past that never actually happened. (After all, worries
about the damaged masculinity of American boys go at least as far back
as Teddy Roosevelt’s laments about what the end of readily available
Indian killing and buffalo slaughtering would do to the character of
the nation’s white male youth at the end of the 19th century.) Sax also
makes sure to remind us that he doesn’t think girls have it easier. But
at a time when it is almost unusual to find a young man with drive and
direction, Sax’s work is an important part of a growing public
discussion.