Why do men in television commercials so often appear effeminate, incompetent or stupid? This excellent article in The Globe and Mail states the obvious. Advertisers believe portraying men as feckless is an effective strategy. It flatters women consumers who control the purse strings for most domestic purchases. One advertising executive, however, disagrees. The practice is counter-productive and offends women, who prefer to think they have some good judgment and don’t choose the male clods depicted in commercials.

Paul Nathanson, a researcher who studies misandry at McGill University, asks, “Can’t you talk to women without insulting men?”

My hunch is advertisers are not going to start portraying men as strong and admirable any time soon. The traditional family spends less frivolously.  It also probably watches less TV. I never watch television commercials and don’t understand why anyone does.

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In the previous post on electronic games, I wrote:

Electronic entertainment is one of the few realms in which boys can still be boys. I agree with Ron on this point. And, it’s a very important consideration.

But, it shouldn’t be that way. Virtual games, at least the obsessive and exclusive playing of them, are not a good replacement for other types of aggressive play that involve physical movement and real social interaction. The boy who plays games and only plays games is in an artificial world where he is not forced to respond to real people. In sports or idle rough-housing, there is a check on the isolating aspects of male aggression. There are real people interacting with each other and a boy is forced to react to them. That’s not the same as responding to someone in an electronic game.

In truly aggressive play, the boy’s energy is used and satisfied. He is ready to turn to things that involve a different sort of mental effort and patience. A boy can be sated  by aggressive physical play. Games are addictive and a boy never realizes he has had enough until it is too late to play outside or shoot hoops. He gets easily lost in them. That explains the irritability of boys who sit for long hours at the screen and their declining performance in school.

I think games in excess are much more destructive for younger boys than for older ones. They are used by parents as a form of babysitting. Many parents rely on them almost out of necessity because of the destruction of real community in which kids can congregate outside for pick-up games and boys can  engage in mischief.

My husband strongly believes that electronic games do not relieve male agression, but cause it to build. They are no more a complete outlet for healthy masculinity than watching football games on TV. He maintains that the idea that games serve a healthy function is equivalent to saying that pornography is a useful aid to male sexuality. The virtual experience replaces and perverts the thing itself.

I would like to add that I blame the over-use of electronic entertainment on women. They use electronic games as an easy form of childcare so they can go off and do their own thing. The departure of women from the home has caused the decline in normal outdoor play.

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Ron Purewal replies to my post, Boys and Electronic Games. Ron makes a number of important points. His most interesting argument is that electronic games represent “one of the few places left in our society where boys can still unabashedly be boys”

Mr. Purewal writes:

In that post, you wrote: “Can the outward passivity that is so characteristic of the addicted gamer ever fulfill female romantic longings? Can the addicted gamer acquire the patience and temperament required by marriage and family without a painful and permanent rejection of his habit?”

There will always be a tradeoff between “the patience and temperament required by marriage and family” and “fulfill[ing] female romantic longings”, because most of the qualities of the former are detrimental to the latter, and certainly vice versa. The former can be summed up, roughly, as “stability”, while the latter can be summed up (again, very roughly) as “excitement and danger”.  although there are a handful of personal qualities that can be positive in both contexts – such as confidence – most “female romantic longings” involve impetuous, risky, aggressive, devil-may-care characters who are ill suited for any sort of stability.

Ironically, men who are easily bored, thrill-seeking, and annoyed by the inefficiencies of social interaction are much, much more likely to pique a woman’s romantic interest.  Much more likely. In short, there’s a reason why romance novels stop at the wedding day.

Second, the problem faced by the addicted gamer in adjusting to marriage is negligible compared to the problem faced by the average American woman, who for her entire life has been coddled and convinced that she can do no wrong and should have no shame, in adjusting to the same situation.  Totally negligible.

Third, under older (and, I might add, more feasible) gender roles, the man wasn’t expected to provide social chitchat and discussion of “gray areas”; he was the man of the house.  if he were the extroverted type, then that was of course a bonus, but a woman had girlfriends for a reason. In other words, the “problems” you’re citing would not even have been problems even a few decades ago, because marriage was not seen as a relationship in which the man is responsible for pushing every single one of a woman’s attention-getting (and -keeping) buttons.

The gamer’s temperament is certainly not unlike that of famous scientists and other innovators that have lived in various eras.  until the last few decades, such men have had no trouble finding and keeping wives, because they weren’t unfortunate enough to live in a culture that tells their wives to walk – and incentivizes them financially to do so – if they feel the slightest bit “unfulfilled” or “bored” in their marriage.

In any case, I see the explosion of “gamers” as a result of the hydraulic pressure of male restlessness and natural male qualities. We live in a culture that has done its best to expunge male-friendly aspects such as competition and horseplay from all parts of childhood.  most kids’ sports are now of the “everyone gets the same size trophy” variety, any sort of natural acting-out is punished out of all proportion, and boys are generally punished whenever they fail to act like good girls (even though they aren’t girls).

Our culture also teaches (upper- and upper-middle-class white and Asian) that it’s not ok to fight, to be aggressive, or, in some cases, even to be confident.  these qualities are hydraulic – if they don’t vent in one place, then they’ll vent somewhere else.  hence, the video-game addiction. Electronic games are one of the few places left in our society where boys can still unabashedly be boys. 

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  The fields and gardens, the empty lots and woods, even the highway median strips - all  resound with insect music here at this time of year, as if thousands of soloists, chamber groups, quartets and jazz ensembles were hidden in the bush.  Whatever evolutionary purposes it serves, there is nothing utilitarian about our pleasure in this music. Even you, dear reader, are mortal and this sweet evanescent sound is for you. The crickets and katydids produce their songs by rubbing their wings together, a method known as "stridulation." A file on the bottom of one wing is rubbed against a scraper on top of the other wing. Thin membranes on the wings vibrate rapidly to produce the noise we hear. If not for the wings, the sounds would not resonate anymore than the sound of a finger scraped against a comb. The cicadas have a pair of special sound-producing organs called "tymbals," located at the base of the abdomen. Here is a wonderful website,  Songs of Insects, that describes the process. "Inside each tymbal are stiff but flexible ribs supporting a stout membrane. Muscles attached to the ribs pull the tymbal inward, causing it to pop. The tymbal pops again when the tension is released. Rapid contractions and relaxations of the tymbal muscles create the loud, buzzing songs of the cicadas, which are amplified further by a hollow area in the abdomen." .

  The institution of marriage is undergoing it's most profound crisis today. But, it has been subjected to lesser controversies throughout history. Robert Dale Owen issued the following statement on the occasion of his 1832 wedding to Mary Jane Robinson, to protest the state of law by which women lost property and other legal rights upon marriage. Of the unjust rights which in virtue of this ceremony an iniquitous law gives me over the person and property of another, I cannot legally, but I can morally, divest myself. And I hereby distinctly and emphatically declare that I consider myself, and earnestly desire to be considered by others, as utterly divested, now and during the rest of my life, of any such rights, the barbarous relics of a feudal, despotic system.    

Ron writes:

I enjoy your blog, but I’m a bit surprised that comments are disabled. This surprise is multiplied when the post consists of a series of questions, whether rhetorical or not (as does your most recent post concerning gamers). Have you been getting spammed? Any other reason why comments are closed?

Laura writes:

  B. is a boy I know who is approaching adulthood. He has spent most of his free time for the past eight years playing electronic games. He is a good person, well-behaved, decent and intelligent. But, he is easily bored. He does not engage in lengthy conversation and seems impatient with the inefficiency of social interaction. He does not like gray areas. Reading bores him and it even makes him angry. He is an addict and wants to get back to his games. Here is my question: How will he ever find a wife? And, even if he finds a wife, how will he sustain her interest in him? Few girls share his addiction. Electronic games generally bore them to death. Most women like conversation and they like to discuss gray areas. Can the outward passivity that is so characteristic of the addicted gamer ever fulfill female romantic longings? Can the addicted gamer acquire the patience and temperament required by marriage and family without a painful and permanent rejection of his habit?

In a follow-up to my post The Parental Serf, I wrote:

“The enormous sums spent on higher education don’t represent adoration of youth so much as adoration of institutions and a superstitious belief in their magical properties. I don’t mind selling out to the future. I do mind selling out to colleges which offer little of value that cannot be obtained for much less.

James M. writes:

Surely, the “magic spell” can only be sustained within a healthy job market? Recent college graduates know or will come to know what little they received for their parents money, and many are having trouble finding employment. Tens of thousands of dollars were spent on each so that they could be taught by unintelligible immigrant TAs while playing in a richly populated hook-up hunting ground. If the economy continues its downward slide, how will a matured reflection upon these memories affect decisions made regarding the schooling of these graduates’ own children?

As a supplement to this issue, we have the mass-dismantling of vocational technology programs in high schools across America. Tradesmen are retiring much faster than they are being replaced. Everyone is getting funneled into college, and the attitude is that kids who don’t go to college are failures; they got “left behind”. Working with your hands is for lower class people who “weren’t suited” for higher education. There are hordes of College Engineering students who can’t actually make anything. White-collar husbands can’t fix a leaky faucet, change their wife’s brake pads, or make a birdhouse.

So, if there is a depression in our future, I hope that positive side-effect will be a disenchantment with unnecessary higher education and a re-invigoration of the trades.

Laura writes:

I also hope for a re-invigoration of genuine learning. I did fairly well in college but I barely learned a thing. Virtually every scrap of higher learning I possess was obtained on my own.

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  Is the atmosphere of fear and anxiety that pervades high schools throughout America, fear that without admission to the right college an individual's life is doomed, one of the most effective crowd control devices ever invented? Such is the claim of John Taylor Gatto in his new book Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling. I entirely agree with him on this point. The belief that learning depends on a college education, and that worldly success depends on it is, a myth. Many jobs today depend on the credentials acquired at colleges and universities, but the learning, especially in an age of advanced commuications, can be acquired for less. Less money, less time, less hassle and less damage to the ability to think. Gatto was once an award-winning teacher in Manhattan. He now believes schools deliberately inculcate stupidity and passivity. They do bring one good to society: they are a successful jobs program.  He tried to discover the reasons for our profound over-schooling and concluded, "Only a darkness at work, reachable not by common experience but through historical, sociological, psychological, theological, political and philosophical research, could reveal the causes, it seemed to me."

  Wellfleet, on Cape Cod, was the favorite beach town of America's intellectuals in the 50s ad 60s. Writers, artists, scientists, law professors, historians, psychoanalysts - many of the most prominent names took up residence in summer cottages on the dunes and held their evening cocktail parties overlooking the magnificent Atlantic. Devastating wit and incomparable learning were concentrated in one of the coast's most pristine settings. But, the ship of American culture was showing serious cracks. If you looked closely, it was already listing to one side. Alfred Kazin, the New York literary critic, spent his summers in Wellfleet. He wrote a moving essay about both the beauty and decadence of the place. He said of his wife of the time, who was consumed with her work as a novelist and with her love of highbrow parties, "I came to think of R. not as a wife but as a brilliant, wayward daughter, so dogged that I would never be able to help." Kazin's essay "Wellfleet and the Beach of the Intellectuals" is not available online, but here is its melancholy closing: End of summer. End of a marriage. How strange it was at the "violet" hour of the day, when the light was fading and the couples in odd corners were getting cozier by the minute - how strange it was to look out on the outermost Cape with nothing else in sight but a last fishing vessel. Somewere in that thrilling, frightening emptiness was Portugal, even Galicia in northwest Spain. How strange…

In a previous entry, Jeffrey W. laments the end of courtship and describes romance today as a form of “egalitarian play.” In response, I said:

The Victorians created what Linda Lichter called a “religion of love,” with its own sacred practices and totems, down to the ribbon-wrapped bundles of letters from a suitor that a young woman would keep in her drawer. This is not to say they worshipped love, but they knew that it was largely built from human artifice and that without this it was unsatisfying. With all our sexual libertinism, we are far more prudish than the Victorians. They truly knew how to be in love and to woo each other. Their famous “cult of domesticity” was not a cult, it was civilization in its highest form.

Ellie Hunter writes:

I tried to teach my children about this, and my daughter decided she did not want to date. One day a young man came to see my husband about some business and my husband literally snatched him. “You would be a good man for my daughter,” he told him.  The young man thought it was unusual but he was enchanted. He had been in the dating scene and could never figure out what the next step was. Here, in a family courtship, he would be guided to the final results and get where he was going.  We played parlour games, went on outings, trips, and all sorts of activities as we shared the courtship. Mostly, my husband and I did the work and set things up so that they could enjoy time together.
 
Ten years later, our younger son had a bad experience with a girl who acted like she liked him. She was plastered all over him at a Christmas party we had, and needless to say he was happy about it. But, when he proposed, she said she just wanted to be friends.  Later, he went to see her and she gave him the cold shoulder. If  she had known about courtship, and if her parents had been involved, perhaps she would not have played this game.  When people did that, they were “marked” and they learned a lesson.  Today we allow it to go on.  When someone saw my son with this girl they warned me that she was that “type” and that there was no way she was serious about marriage.  At least there are a few people who speak out and who have some sense of propriety in the matter.
 
This is an example of two ways of doing things. One is through the parents, which is mocked and ridiculed today, but it is lasting and happy. You know, the moderns spread the lie that parents and family were oppressive and that girls needed their freedom to choose. But in a courtship, a parent is more likely to get an end result. In dating, the choices are just so confusing and it rarely ends in marriage.

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