Tuesday, February 12, 2008

Young Men Are (Statistically Speaking) " Social Retards"   [Jonah Goldberg]

A dismaying, fascinating, intriguing, link-rich, post by Bill Voegeli. An excerpt:

The women who heed Gottlieb’s advice to “settle for Mr. Good Enough,” however, may have to settle down – way down. According to Kay Hymowitz in City Journal, “Today’s single young men hang out in a hormonal limbo between adolescence and adulthood.” This limbo is filled with drinking, hooking up and video games, she says, pointing out that 31% of white men were single in 1970 but 67% were in 2000. (For 30-year-olds the figures were 15% and 42%.) The “child-man” who is Maxim’s target demographic – and has made the magazine massively profitable – is a “social retard” who would “like to forget that he ever went to school.”

Update: From a reader:

Jonah: You can pretend to be above it all now, what with the book and the marriage and the family and all the outward trappings of Ward Cleaverism, but on the inside... "One of us. One of us. One of us." Best,

Me: Guilty as charged. I still have a slight scar on my left thumb from the "reverse" button on the Defender video game to prove it.

02/12 09:23 AMShare