Take a culture. Any culture (or sub-culture, really).<\/p>\n
Deprive them of choices.\u00a0 Stuff them into ghettos, literally or figuratively. Punish them just for the simple act of being who they are<\/em>. Make their identity the subject of scorn and abuse within the larger society.\u00a0 Actively denigrate their traits, their identity – their being<\/em>.\u00a0 Lather, rinse and repeat for a few generations.<\/p>\n What do you get?<\/p>\n Cultural pathologies.\u00a0\u00a0 The world’s full of them:<\/p>\n And now, a full 49% of American society.<\/p>\n We’ll come back to that.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n A couple of stories popped up on the radar the other day that led me to a topic I’ve been stewing over writing for quite a while now.<\/p>\n Author Kay Hymowitz is the author of the best-seller Manning Up<\/em>, which argues that twenty and thirty-somethings today are putting off adulthood, preferring instead to remain in a sort of arrested adolescence she terms “pre-adulthood”.<\/p>\n The Wall Street Journal<\/em> published excerpts; she got some feedback.\u00a0 And she wrote about it in the Daily Beast<\/a> by way of defending her premise:<\/p>\n But a lot of the responses unwittingly proved my point\u2014and another one: Men are really, really angry. Consider: \u201cWe\u2019re not STUCK in pre-adulthood, we choose it because there aren\u2019t any desirable American women. They\u2019ve been bred to abuse men.\u201d This fairly typical response that appeared at the Seattle Post Intelligencer website: \u201cSorry ladies. In the age of PlayStation 3s, 24-hours-a-day sports channels, and free Internet porn, you are now obsolete. All that nagging, whining, and stealing our hard earned cash have finally caught up to you.”<\/p>\n Shocked? I wasn t. During the last few years researching this age group, I\u2019ve stumbled onto a powerful underground current of male bitterness that has nothing to do with outsourcing, the Mancession, or any of the other issues we usually associate with contemporary male discontent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Hymowitz focused largely on “men as potential mates for women” and the dating lives of the age group, of course, and her observations reflect the scope…:<\/p>\n No, this is bitterness from guys who find the young women they might have hoped to hang out with entitled, dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling\u2014and did I mention gold-digging?…Women may want equality at the conference table and treadmill. But when it comes to sex and dating, they aren\u2019t so sure.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n …but I think she missed a much, much bigger point.\u00a0 Men, especially younger men, are <\/em>angry – and it’s not just about dating, mating and sex.<\/p>\n She gets ever <\/em>so close to the real point, too:<\/p>\n So, is this what Susan Faludi famously called the backlash? Is it immaturity, as my own book seems to suggest? Is it the Internet as an escape valve for decades of pent-up rebellion against political correctness? Or, is it just good, old-fashioned misogyny?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n (Hymowitz’ theory is it’s a little of all of the above, plus the “men aren’t used to competition” slur, plus a broad upset over dating\/mating gender roles, which have changed, partly, for women but not for men, in case you’d rather not read the whole thing).<\/p>\n Hymowitz missed the real story – or perhaps the real story was outside the scope of a book and article whose purpose seemed to be to reassure a generation of jaded younger women that they’re OK, it’s all those guys who have the problem.<\/p>\n There was another bit of news last week that is interesting to juxtapose with Hymowitz, though.<\/p>\n ———-<\/p>\n Earlier this week, a Texas non-profit announced it was going to start giving scholarships <\/a>for white guys.<\/p>\n The “Austin American-Statesmen” reports a Texas nonprofit group called the Former Majority Association for Equality is behind the scholarships.<\/p>\n Texas State University student Colby Bohannan says he launched the group after returning from the Iraq war to find there were college scholarships for women and minorities, but white males were left out.<\/p>\n Bohannan and his friends will start giving out 500-dollar scholarships this summer.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n