The Washington Post has an article asking what is happening to the boys.
This phenomenon cuts across all demographics. You'll find it in families both rich and poor; black, white, Asian and Hispanic; urban, suburban and rural. According to the Census Bureau, fully one-third of young men ages 22 to 34 are still living at home with their parents — a roughly 100 percent increase in the past 20 years. No such change has occurred with regard to young women. Why?
My friend and colleague Judy Kleinfeld, a professor at the University of Alaska, has spent many years studying this growing phenomenon. She points out that many young women are living at home nowadays as well. But those young women usually have a definite plan. They're working toward a college degree, or they're saving money to open their own business. And when you come back three or four years later, you'll find that in most cases those young women have achieved their goal, or something like it. They've earned that degree. They've opened their business.
But not the boys. "The girls are driven; the boys have no direction," is the way Kleinfeld summarizes her findings. Kleinfeld is organizing a national Boys Project, with a board composed of leading researchers and writers such as Sandra Stotsky, Michael Thompson and Richard Whitmire, to figure out what's going wrong with boys. The project is only a few weeks old, it has called no news conferences and its Web site ( http://www.boysproject.net ) has just been launched.
I think that the problem can best be described as a lack of purpose, and I think that this lack of purpose is probably a result of the feminist movement. The feminist movement had some legitimate complaints about women being historically mistreated, but the solutions and rhetoric of the movement were too radical. (1) Women have taken on the traditional male role in society, and many do not need husbands for financial support at all. The traditional family structure offered a man the purpose of providing for and protecting his family. If women do not need provision or protection anymore, what is there left for males to do other than play video games? (2) The feminist movement launched an extremely hostile attack on men. The philosophical position of many feminists was very much like that of Marxists. Marxists argued that capitalism was the root cause of all of society's problems. Feminists argued that masculinity was the root cause of all of society's problems. After having launched a successful attack on masculinity, what we have now is the outgrowth of that, which is undriven males who just do not care about anything any more. (3) There could also be a rebellious element to this. Males may be tired of female empowerment, tired of being a social cancer, and tired of being put at a disadvantage in employment and college admissions. So the lack of motivation could be a conscious or unconscious expression of male frustration.
(Posted by Trask)
