Modern immaturity: why it's okay for twenty-eight-year-olds to play Halo 3.

• Author: Taussig, Doron
• Position: Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity - Book review

Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity

by Gary Cross

Columbia University Press, 328 pp.

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A lot of people seem to be worried about me these days. Well, not me specifically, but my generation, and my demographic: twenty- and thirtysomething middle-class men. In a January essay in City Journal, editor Kay Hymowitz dubbed us "child-men," and said that we're "not very promising husbands and fathers." The same month, in an op-ed in the Dallas Morning News, conservative columnist Rod Dreher wrote that we are "conscious only of [our] desires and the impulse to fulfill them." Then this past May, A. O. Scott of the New York Times theorized that in today's America, "a man is, at last, a triumphant boy, with access to money, sex and freedom but without the sad grown-up ballast of duty and compromise." My generation, these critics say, have failed to make, or even acknowledge, their passage into adulthood, choosing instead to live in a state of perpetual teendom. Women are wondering where all the men--and not just the good ones--have gone.

In the midst of this barrage, a professor of history at Pennsylvania State University named Gary Cross fires yet another missile: Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, a 328-page, heavily endnoted attempt to explain how, historically, today's young man came to be. Cross sees big trouble in a number of facts: that men are getting married later in life (the average age at which men first marry is now twenty-seven); that 55 percent of American men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-four still live at home with their parents; that more children are growing up without fathers in their homes; and that the culture of what he calls "boy-men" is an "unalloyed pursuit of sensual intensity." This is a pretty broad lament, but it's not delivered crankily--there's not much nostalgia for the social structures of the 1950s in Cross's writing--and so, for someone like me, it's a palatable way to see what everyone's so upset about.

Cross's history starts with the end of World War II, and a generation of men returning home to build both families and a country. Whatever else you want to say about these men, he says, they had a model: Judge Hardy, the father from the "Andy Hardy" movies. It was understood, Cross writes, that a man was to be firm, responsible, sober, and wise.

But things were not so simple in the real world, where, Cross explains, socioeconomic changes cast an obscuring shadow over the role of the father: in leaving the family farm or store for the factory or office, men had effectively ceded domain over the home to women. Rather than daily fathering, a man's household role became simply to provide. Some contemporary parenting experts recommended that fathers "pal" with their children during their time off; others insisted that men focus on discipline ("Wait until your father gets home!"). But nurturing, character...