In 1971 and again in 1999, progressive changes were made in America. In the best tradition of unintended consequences, these changes hastened the decline of the American male.
If reproduction were an industry, Mitt Romney would write off American men as a necessary casualty of creative destruction. Dry your tears, he’d say; they’re an obsolete product so it’s best they go away. The ones we need, we’ll import. Men are obsolete because, for one thing, they do jobs that no longer need doing. Noted Rosin, “Men dominate just two of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most over the next decade: janitor and computer engineer. Women have everything else—nursing, home health assistance, child care, food preparation.”
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Maybe that’s because guys get no instruction and are served no examples. David Brooks’s central observation was that schools throughout the Western world are tuning boys out: “The education system has become culturally cohesive, rewarding and encouraging a certain sort of person: one who is nurturing, collaborative, disciplined, neat, studious, industrious and ambitious. People who don’t fit this cultural ideal respond by disengaging and rebelling.
David Brooks began his column with Shakespeare’s Henry V—Prince Hal. “He was rambunctious when young and courageous when older. But suppose Henry went to an American school?” Henry would get himself in constant trouble, Brooks supposed; notes would be sent home, parents summoned, meds suggested, and eventually suspensions meted out. “In kindergarten, he’d wonder why he just couldn’t be good. By junior high, he’d lose interest in trying.”
In my article I acknowledged a cigarette that had done it right—Marlboro. A recent UCLA study had called Marlboro the “generic cigarette” among white adolescents 13 and 14 years old. In Minneapolis, 85 percent of teens who smoked smoked Marlboro. What do you see in a Marlboro ad? the UCLA researcher, William McCarthy, asked me. You see a cowboy on a horse alone in the middle of nowhere. “Teenagers have a need to show they’re independent,” McCarthy said. “The Marlboro image is archetypically independent.”
