The Demise of Guys Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It By Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It. Copyright © 2012 by Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan. All rights reserved. Published by TED Conferences, LLC. No part of this publication may be used or reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and review and certain noncommercial uses permitted by copyright law. For permission requests, contact the publisher at: TED Conferences, LLC 250 Hudson Street New York, NY 10013 TED.com Published simultaneously in the United States and wherever access to Amazon and the iBookstore is available. First edition. First published May 2012. ISBN: 978-1-937382-12-4. TED is a registered trademark, and the TED colophon is a trademark of TED Conferences, LLC. Table of Contents A search for solutions The demise of guys Behind the headlines TED survey: the tribe has spoken What’s going on? Bros before hos: Social intensity syndrome (SIS) Get everything, do nothing Changing families Unstable role models, tarnished trust Helicopter parents Where’s Dad? The media isn’t doing you any favors The truth shall bite thee in the ass Why buy the cow when you can have the milk free? High costs of living driving down personal and social values School’s out — now what? Who’s failing whom? High on life, or high on something Back away from the doughnut Just press Play: Porn and video games Dynamics of porn Chronic stimulation, chronic dissatisfaction Dude, where’s my erection? Sex education vs. porn Dating and the objectification of women Dynamics of video games When video games go wrong Preparing for cyberwar When video games go right Billy is in his room The rise of gals What we can do Next steps: Join us Notes Recommended resources About the authors About TED A search for solutions This book is a discussion about young men and some of the important issues and challenges they face. We’re presenting this work in the hope of finding solutions. Fair warning: Our discussions will be frank and our language direct. Problems get dealt with and maybe solved only when they are talked about openly and honestly. When you’re done reading, please visit our website (demiseofguys.com) to continue the discussions we’ve begun. Or watch the original TEDTalk “The Demise of Guys?” on ted.com. The demise of guys Everyone knows a young man who is struggling. Maybe he’s undermotivated in school, has emotional disturbances, doesn’t get along with others, has few real friends or no girl friends, or is in a gang. He may even be in prison. Maybe he’s your son or relative. Maybe he’s you. In record numbers, guys are flaming out academically, wiping out socially with girls and failing sexually with women. Asking what’s wrong with these young men or why they aren’t motivated the same way guys used to be isn’t the right question. Young men are motivated, just not the way other people want them to be. Society wants guys to be upstanding, proactive citizens who take responsibility for themselves, who work with others to improve their communities and nation as a whole. The irony is that society is not giving the support, means or places for these young men to even be motivated or interested in aspiring to these things. In fact, society — from politics to the media to the classroom to our very own families — is a major contributor to this demise because they are inhibiting guys’ intellectual, creative and social abilities right from the start. Consequently, many guys lack purposeful direction and basic social skills. They’re living off, and often with, their parents well into their 20s and even 30s, expanding their childhood into an age once reserved for starting a family and making a career. Many young men who do manage to find a mate feel entitled to do nothing to add substance to that relationship beyond just showing up. New emasculating terms such as “man-child” and “moodle” (man-poodle) have emerged to describe men who haven’t matured emotionally or are otherwise incapable of taking care of themselves. Hollywood has caught on, too, to this awkward bunch of dudes, who appear to be tragically hopeless. Recent films such as Knocked Up, Failure to Launch, the Jackass series and Hall Pass present men as expendable commodities, living only for mindless fun and intricate but never-realized plans to get laid. Their female co-stars, meanwhile, are often attractive, focused and mature, with success-oriented agendas guiding their lives. The sense of being entitled to have things without having to work hard for them — attributed to one’s male nature — runs counter to the Protestant work ethic, as well as to the Vince Lombardi victory creed (“Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”) These guys aren’t interested in maintaining long-term romantic relationships, marriage, fatherhood and being the head of their own family. Many have come to prefer the company of men over women, and they live to escape the so-called real world and readily slip into alternative worlds for stimulation. More and more they’re living in other worlds that exclude girls — or any direct social interaction, for that matter. Over the past decade, this pattern has escalated into adulthood where grown men remain like little boys, having difficulty relating to women as equals, friends, partners, intimates or even as cherished wives. We believe this demise can be traced to the rise of technology enchantment. From the earliest ages, guys are seduced into excessive and mostly isolated viewing and involvement with texting, tweeting, blogging, online chatting, emailing, and watching sports on TV or laptops. Most of all, though, they’re burying themselves in video games and in getting off on all-pervasive online pornography. In this book, we focus primarily on guys investing too much time and energy in the last two factors: playing video games and watching freely available Internet porn. Video game production companies are in fierce competition to make games that are ever more enticing, more provocative and, now, in 3-D. The same is true for pornography. Pornography is the fastest-growing global business, with production companies churning out daily doses of porn flicks in seemingly endless variety. The high-definition 3- D porn wave may also be coming (pun intended). The combination of excessive video game playing and pornography viewing is becoming addictive for a lot of guys. The next phase we imagine is transferring the player’s viewpoint onto the body of the protagonist to mesh realities and make digital environments totally egocentric. There are also other factors contributing to the demise of guys: widespread fatherlessness and changing family dynamics, media influences, environmentally generated physiological changes that decrease testosterone and increase estrogen, the problematic economy and also the dramatic rise of gals. Behind the headlines This is the first time in U.S. history that our sons are having less education than their fathers. — Warren Farrell, author of Why Men Are the Way They Are and The Myth of Male Power1 Failing at school Are academics now more of a girl thing than a guy thing? It seems so. Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school through graduate school. By eighth grade, for instance, only 20 percent of boys are proficient in writing and 24 percent proficient in reading.2 Young men’s SAT scores, meanwhile, in 2011 were the worst they’ve been in 40 years.3 According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of both high school and college.4 In Canada, five boys drop out of school for every three girls who do.5 Nationally, boys account for 70 percent of all the D’s and F’s given out at school.6 It is predicted that women will earn 60 percent of bachelor’s, 63 percent of master’s and 54 percent of doctorate degrees by 2016.7 Two-thirds of students in special education remedial programs are guys. These effects are much greater for males from minority backgrounds. The NCES also reported that boys are four to five times more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder (ADHD),8 and therefore are more likely to be prescribed stimulants, such as Ritalin, even in elementary school. Video games: Mastering the universe — from your bedroom Here’s an astonishing fact: People spend a collective 3 billion hours a week playing video games. A week. Additionally, more than 174 million Americans are gamers. Jane McGonigal, director of game research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., estimates that the average young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming by age 21.9 To put this figure in context, it takes the average college student half that time — 4,800 hours — to earn a bachelor’s degree. (This calculation is based on the average university requirement of 120 credit hours, with each credit hour involving 2.5 hours of homework and class time. Take an average of 15 hours of actual class time and 22.5 hours of homework outside of class each week — 37.5 hours — multiplied by 16 weeks per semester, multiplied by eight semesters, and you’ve got 4,800 hours. See also the table “Time Bandit.”) Some gamers are women, there is no doubt; and video game companies are very aware of this (FarmVille, anyone?). Still, girls don’t play nearly to the extent that guys do — only five hours per week to guys’ 13.10 The video game business is expected to be a $68 billion industry by the end of 2012.11 Compare this with the size of the entire U.S. publishing industry, which in 2010 had net sales revenue of $27.9 billion.12 Porn: The marketplace of virtual pleasures The porn business is one of the fastest-growing industries in America and is now a nearly $100 billion industry worldwide. America is the top producer of pornographic Web pages, with 244.6 million, or 89 percent, of all porn Web pages worldwide.13 Just type “porn” into Google and you’ll get 1.38 billion results, with the entire first page of hits offering free instant streaming videos. Back in 2005, approximately 13,500 full-length commercially available pornographic films were released. Compare that with the 600 or so films released in Hollywood annually.14 Today there are many companies and outlets generating porn clips directly online in quantities not possible to accurately calculate. Who views all this stuff? You guessed it. One in three boys is now considered a “heavy” porn user, with the average boy watching nearly two hours of porn every week, according to University of Alberta (Canada) researcher Sonya Thompson.15 And that’s the average; just imagine what the outliers are doing! Add to the mix older guys watching adult videos online, at work, at home or in hotels across the country and around the world. One consequence of teenage boys watching many hours of Internet pornography every week, says Penny Marshall, British columnist for the U.K.’s Mail Online, is they are beginning to treat their girlfriends like sex objects; according to a 16-year-old girl in Britain, “Boys just want us to do all the stuff that they see porn stars do.”16 As a result, says Cindy Gallop, a dynamic TED speaker and author of the TED Book Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior, young men don’t know the