Of Fuckboys and Men-Children

Experience

Dear Friends,

I’m sharing the ‘Experience’ post of the week - these are somewhat impressionistic pieces on ‘lived life.’ At the partner site

Inner Life

,

Michael Mohr

(whose writing I always look forward to) discusses Cormac McCarthy.

Best,

Sam

OF FUCKBOYS AND MEN-CHILDREN

Here’s a conversation I have recently. I’m talking to someone in her 20s who’s upset about the men-children surrounding her. Everyone she meets, her own age, seems to be just wildly immature. There’s the sub-tenant who’s late on his rent because, instead of looking for a job, he’s been trying to patent a new type of crayon. There’s the friend who’s late for a meeting - and, in turn, makes her late for a flight - because he’s too broke for a cab and too proud to accept her payment for one. “They’re really everywhere,” she says. 

It’s a long, winding conversation, and, somewhere in it, I try to make the case for the men-children. The thing about men, I say, is that it’s really important for us to be at the center of our universe. That may be completely absurd to anyone looking at us from the outside, but, through an extremely intricate internal balancing act, we have to at all times make ourselves out to be the true center. When we’re kids, we assume that we’ll grow up to have all possible fame and power. As it gradually dawns on us that that’s not going to happen, we manage to recalibrate our narcissism - sometimes we create an obscure corner of the world (crayons, for instance) in which we are dominant; sometimes we become the pinnacle of one or another type of despair and have a perverse sort of megalomania about that (for instance, the sort of person who is too proudly poor either to pay for a cab or to accept money for one). Women seem not to have this malady as much, but, for men, it really is - as far as I can tell - a universal trait; the core of our characters. As F. Scott Fitzgerald puts it in Tender Is The Night: "A man is vulnerable only in his pride but delicate as Humpty-Dumpty once that is meddled with.”

The man-child as Jason Segel

I agree that, for anybody with an outside vantage-point, this quality of men is maddening - both narcissistic and megalomaniacal. And never more so than when men are in their early or mid-20s and in the man-child phase. Early-to-mid-20s seem to hit men very hard. Childhood and adolescence are full of cul-de-sacs in which it’s possible to imagine oneself as the center of the universe and - to some extent - to have that fantasy indulged by others. But, on entering into the working world, that fantasy crumbles. There’s a strict hierarchy and the narcissistic men-children, with their visions of grandeur and megalomania, find themselves fetching coffee or sending out résumés in the hopes of being sent to fetch coffee. This is unpleasant for everyone, but it seems to be more of an existential blow for men. In chronicling the sufferings of men in the modern workforce, Richard Reeves, for instance, cites a variety of studies and then eventually throws up his hands and proposes a largely spiritual explanation - that men are simply having trouble accepting the subordinate roles that come with being a good student or with the early stages of working one’s way up a ladder.

The man-child in an office setting

By mid-20s, many men seem to be in some sort of full-blown nervous breakdown, unable to accommodate themselves to actual society and creating random, bizarre fantasies of new domains in which they can excel. And, meanwhile, with their egos crumbling, they fight for social status in the only way readily available to them - by becoming ‘fuckboys,’ by trying to sleep with as many women as possible and, through a combination of greed and irresponsibility, ghosting them, failing to follow up on any commitments. This is the landscape that my interlocutor is encountering - a friend circle of perfectly-together women and then a morass of men-children and fuckboys - and, out of that dynamic, the women find themselves deciding that the only possible course for them is to date men who are significantly older. 

I’m very sympathetic to my interlocutor’s predicament, but, having been a man-child, I want to offer some defense. The thing about it is that the men-children often do have a vision. They are so determined to not fit in, not be subject to somebody else’s hierarchy, that they will go off in almost any random direction in order to be the center of their own world - and some of them, through sheer desperation, actually do achieve that. The stakes here are very high. Most men who attempt to patent a new crayon will fail, will have to ‘mature,’ catch up to the women, reenter the hierarchical workforce with their tail behind their legs. But every so often someone actually will patent a new crayon and will change crayon-making forever and the world will shift to make them the center of their peculiar domain. And, to some extent, the men-children do know this about themselves, know that they are taking a real gamble and are willing to be losers for some period of time (maybe indefinitely) in order to carry out the grandiose, insane ambition.

The man-child being berated by his brother

At the moment the crisis of the men-children is perceived to have reached epidemic proportions. The men-children are falling so far behind in school and in the workforce that forms of affirmative action are being very seriously considered for men in general (Reeves making several of these proposals in Of Boys and Men). I don’t necessarily disagree with any of that - males’ existential crisis is problematic enough that some societal shift seems to be needed - but I would just add that there is an inner logic to the men-children. During that phase of life, many men are simply constitutionally incapable of conforming, of subordinating themselves. They need to gamble and are willing to take on the risks of colossal failure. That may be narcissistic and megalomaniacal, but it’s not quite as immature as it seems - for many men, that is part of growing up.