Man, Interrupted Read online

  Praise for Man, Interrupted

  “With this title, Zimbardo and Coulombe not only prove that men are struggling in the dark and falling through cracks on the floor, they also help us turn on the lights and show us how to start fixing the floor.”

  —Foreword

  “In this entertaining, sobering, and thought-provoking book, Dr. Zimbardo bravely and wisely calls attention to the spreading crisis afflicting many of America's young men.”

  —Roy Baumeister, author of Is There Anything Good About Men? and Willpower

  “Man, Interrupted is the most important book I've read in years, given that it is thoroughly researched, well organized, beautifully written, and outlines a problem that effects at least half the population of the country, if not everyone. Even more, it identifies the causes and suggests practical solutions. This book should be read by legislators, judges, politicians, parents, spouses and, well, men . . . all of them.”

  —Michael Shermer, publisher of Skeptic magazine; columnist at Scientific American; and author of The Moral Arc

  “. . . a compassionate look at the phenomenon of young men disappearing into the virtual worlds of video gaming and porn—to the detriment of everyone. Authors Zimbardo and Coulombe don't simply supply evidence of the risks and benefits of today's hyper-alluring technologies. They also tackle contributing factors, such as absent dads, failing schools, environmental toxins, economic realities, etc., and offer a range of suggestions for parents, media, governments, men, women, and schools.”

  —Gary Wilson, author of Your Brain on Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction

  This edition first published in 2016 by Conari Press, an imprint of

  Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC

  With offices at:

  65 Parker Street, Suite 7

  Newburyport, MA 01950

  www.redwheelweiser.com

  Copyright © 2016 by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita D. Coulombe

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from Red Wheel/Weiser, LLC. Reviewers may quote brief passages. Previously published in 2015 as Man (Dis)connected by Rider, an imprint of Ebury Publishing, ISBN: 9781846044847.

  ISBN: 978-1-57324-689-7

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Zimbardo, Philip G., author. | Coulombe, Nikita D., author.

  Title: Man, interrupted : why young men are struggling and what we can do about it / Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Coulombe.

  Other titles: Man (dis)connected

  Description: Newburyport, MA : Conari Press, 2016. | “Previously published in 2015 as Man (Dis)connected by Rider, an imprint of Ebury Publishing.”

  Identifiers: LCCN 2015048616 | ISBN 9781573246897 (paperback)

  Subjects: LCSH: Men. | Men—Social conditions—21st century. | Men—Identity. | Men—Psychology. | Technology—Social aspects. | BISAC: PSYCHOLOGY / Mental Health. | PSYCHOLOGY / Developmental / Adolescent.

  Classification: LCC HQ1090 .Z545 2016 | DDC 305.31—dc23

  LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015048616

  Cover design by Jim Warner

  Cover photograph © fStop images / Twins

  Interior by Jane Hagaman

  Typeset in Bembo and Benton Sans

  Printed in Canada

  MAR

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  www.redwheelweiser.com

  www.redwheelweiser.com/newsletter

  To my grandchildren,

  Philip (Panda) and Victoria Leigh (Bunny)

  —Philip Zimbardo

  To my husband, Chris, and three brothers: thank you for your support

  —Nikita D. Coulombe

  CONTENTS

  Preface

  Note to Readers

  Acknowledgments

  Introduction

  Just Drifting

  Part I: Symptoms

  1. Disenchantment with Education

  2. Men Opting Out of the Workforce

  3. Excessive Maleness

  Social Intensity Syndrome (SIS)

  4. Excessive Gaming

  Mastering the Universe from Your Bedroom

  5. Becoming Obese

  6. Excessive Porn Use

  Orgasms on Demand

  7. High on Life or High on Anything

  Over-Reliance on Medications and Illegal Drugs

  Part II: Causes

  8. Rudderless Families, Absent Dads

  9. Failing Schools

  10. Environmental Changes

  11. Technology Enchantment and Arousal Addiction

  12. Sour Grapes

  Entitlement versus Reality

  13. The Rise of Women?

  14. Patriarchy Myths

  15. Economic Downturn

  Part III Solutions

  16. What the Government Can Do

  17. What Schools Can Do

  18. What Parents Can Do

  19. What Men Can Do

  20. What Women Can Do

  21. What the Media Can Do

  Conclusion

  Appendix I

  TED Survey Results

  Appendix II

  Social Intensity Syndrome—Scale and Factors

  Notes

  Recommended Resources

  Index

  PREFACE

  Note to Readers

  Many trends are born and magnified in the tech-heavy San Francisco Bay area, which is where we both lived when we started writing this book. There wasn't one event that inspired the book's creation; rather it resembled a light rain that slowly turned into a torrential downpour. While one of us had started clipping articles out of the newspaper about boys' poor academic performance and noticing the dwindling number of male graduate students in his class, the other had started to notice her male peers crowding around computers and video games at parties, rather than having conversations. We began to wonder why more young men didn't care about getting their driving licenses, or moving out of their parents' homes, and why they preferred to masturbate to porn than be with a real woman. Down the rabbit hole we went.

  Around the same time, I (Phil) was asked by the TED organization to give a five-minute talk on a topic of my choosing. I wanted to discuss what we were observing. At the end of my short but provocative TED Talk in 2011, I made clear that my primary goal at the conference was to raise awareness and even alarm people into action about an impending disaster. After the talk was greeted with much enthusiasm, Nikita, already familiar with the issues as my assistant, came on board and together we wrote a short TED eBook inspired by that talk in 2012 called The Demise of Guys. Demise was a polemic meant to stimulate controversy and conversation around these topics and encourage others to do research on the different dimensions of these challenges.

  Man, Interrupted is an elaboration of Demise that delves much deeper into this important discussion about young men and the complex issues and challenges they face. Man, Interrupted has also been restructured by symptoms, causes, and solutions, making the issues easier for readers to understand and navigate.

  We felt it was important to approach the topics from multiple angles. This book weaves together the perspectives of a young female, Nikita, who, as a millennial, has grown up in the thick of changing technologies, and an older male, Phil, who has an abundance of life experience, along with the views of many young men and women, making it a unique collaboration. In order to challenge our personal views, we developed a detailed online survey with a host of questions that touched on different aspects of Demise. We created a survey related to this topic and posted it alongside t
he TED Talk, asking questions such as, “How would you change the school environment to engage young men?” and “How can we empower men in safe, pro-social ways?”

  Remarkably, in barely two months, 20,000 people took the short survey. About three-quarters (76 percent) of the participants were men; more than half were between eighteen and thirty-four years old. But people of all ages and backgrounds and both sexes shared their thoughts and feelings about these issues and their subplots. In addition, thousands of respondents were sufficiently motivated to go further by adding personal comments, from a sentence to a page long. After reading all of the replies, we followed up with some of the respondents for personal interviews, and their opinions and experiences will be shared later on. You can find more highlights of the survey in Appendix I of this book. We also encourage you to look at the additional supportive statistics that can be found in the endnotes.

  Furthering the conversation with new information and collective dialogue is our ultimate aim. Our book is presented with the intention of discussing mankind's continual adaptation to technology, finding solutions to the problems we highlight, and also inspiring young men, and those who love them, to find their voice and create positive social change in their lives and the new world that surrounds them.

  Acknowledgments

  With special thanks to TED Inc., Jeremy Bailenson, Roy Baumeister, Charlie Borden of MirrorMan Films, Bernardo Carducci, Geoffrey Cohen, Nick Cohen, Gabe Deem, Larry F. Dillard Jr., Andrew Doan, Warren Farrell, Robert M. Gates, Celeste Hirschman, Miranda Horvath, Ariel Levy, Jane McGonigal, Tucker Max, Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam, Namisha Parthasarathy, Steve Pavlina, Jeff Perera, Robert M. Putnam, Keeley Rankin, Katie Salen, Leonard Sax, P.W. Singer, Joel Stein, Sherry Turkle, Mark D. White, Gary and Marnia Wilson, Paul Zak, and everyone who participated in our surveys.

  The authors and publishers would also like to thank the following for permission to reprint copyrighted material: Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group, for quotations from Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and Underachieving Young Men. Copyright © 2009 by Leonard Sax; The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press for material from Triumphs of Experience: The Men of the Harvard Grant Study. Copyright © 2012 by George E. Vaillant; The Free Press, a Division of Simon & Schuster, Inc., for material from Female Chauvinist Pigs: Women and the Rise of Raunch Culture. Copyright © 2005 by Ariel Levy. All rights reserved; McFarland & Company, Inc. for material from Game Addiction: The Experience and the Effects. Copyright © 2009 by Neils Clark and P. Shavaun Scott, McFarland & Company, Box 611, Jefferson, NC 28640 (www.mcfarlandpub.com); the Penguin Random House Group, Inc. for material from A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the World's Largest Experiment Reveals about Human Desire. Copyright © 2012 Ogi Ogas and Sai Gaddam; the Penguin Random House Group Ltd for material from Duty: Memoirs of a Secretary at War. Copyright © 2014 Robert M. Gates; Simon & Schuster, Inc. for material from The War Against Boys. Copyright © by Christina Hoff Sommers; Short Books for material from Mind the Gap: The New Class Divide in Britain. Copyright © 2012 Ferdinand Mount; WGBH Educational Foundation for material from “Digital Nation.” Frontline. WGBH-TV Boston, February 2, 2010. Copyright © 2010–2015 WGBH Educational Foundation.

  INTRODUCTION

  Just Drifting

  Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?

  —Mark Twain, nineteenth-century American novelist

  It's a new world out there for everybody, but amid the shifting economic, social, and technological climates, young men are getting left behind. Unlike the women's movement, there has been no cohesive men's movement to give a much-needed update to men's roles in society. Instead there are a record number of young men who are flaming out academically, wiping out socially with girls, and failing sexually with women. You don't have to look too far to see what we're talking about; everyone knows a young man who is struggling. Maybe he's under-motivated in school, has emotional disturbances, doesn't get along with others, has few real friends or no female friends, or is in a gang. He may even be in prison. Maybe he's your son or relative. Maybe he's you.

  Asking what's wrong with them or why they aren't motivated the same way young men used to be isn't the right question. Young men are motivated, just not the way other people want them to be. Western societies want men 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, guidance, means, or places for these young men even to be motivated or interested in aspiring to these goals. In fact, society—from politics to the media to the classroom to our very own families—is a major contributor to this demise because it is inhibiting young men's intellectual, creative, and social abilities right from the start. And the irony is only compounded by the fact that men play such a powerful part in society, which means they are effectively denying their younger counterparts the opportunity to thrive.

  Whenever we want to understand and explain complex human behavior, it is essential to resort to a three-part analysis: first, what the individual brings into the behavioral context—his or her dispositional traits; next, what the situation brings out of the person who is behaving in a particular social or physical setting; and finally, how the underlying system of power creates, maintains, or modifies those situations. That sort of analysis, which was featured in my (Phil's) book The Lucifer Effect, helped to explain the abusive behavior of guards in the Stanford Prison Experiment, and also the brutalizing behavior of US guards in Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

  In applying that reasoning to understanding why today's young men are failing academically, socially, and sexually, we first highlight aspects of their dispositions, such as shyness, impulsiveness, and a lack of conscientiousness. Next, we take into account situational factors, such as widespread fatherlessness, the availability of exciting video games, and free access to online pornography. Finally, systemic factors enter in to add another layer of complexity, including the political and economic consequences of legislation that recognizes women's needs but not men's, environmentally generated physiological changes that decrease testosterone and increase estrogen, media influences, the resulting lack of jobs from the recent economic downturn, and the widespread failure of school systems in many nations to create stimulating environments that challenge the curiosity of boys.

  This three-pronged attack has resulted in many young men lacking purposeful direction and basic social skills. Today, many live off, and often with, their parents well into their twenties and even thirties, expanding their adolescence into an age once reserved for making a career and starting a family.1 Many would rather live at home under the security blanket of their parents than head out on their own into a world of uncertainty.

  It is true that since the economic downturn, across the globe, young people have fewer opportunities for employment to demonstrate their abilities and professional attributes. The diminished opportunities are a problem for men and women, but young women under thirty years old are surpassing their male counterparts academically and financially for the first time. Young men are also more likely than young women to be living at home with their parents.2 Relating it to gender role expectations, since young women are better able to take care of themselves financially than guys their age, they are less likely to find a male partner of similar status, which consequently creates new challenges for young men. Society has a hegemonic view of masculinity, and for men, there are no socially acceptable alternatives to being a warrior or a breadwinner. All the possible new roles threaten the traditional concept of masculinity, and any male who embraces them gets less respect from his male peers and fewer social and romantic opportunities with the opposite sex.

  A couple of the most common examples are the ways in which stay-at-home dads are seen as losers, and “nice guys” don't get dates. One father, commenting in a New York Times article about the stigma of paterni
ty leave, said he would almost prefer to tell future employers that he had been in prison than admit he had taken time off to be a stay-at-home dad.3 Across the blogosphere countless posts are written by women claiming there is a lack of nice and respectful men to date, while there are about as many posts written by “nice and respectful” men asking for dating advice because women have told them they come across as too nice, passive, or desperate. This gridlock of men's roles makes it difficult for young men to want to change, and for young men and young women to relate to each other as equals.

  Because of the new difficulties facing young men in this changing, uncertain world, many are choosing to isolate themselves in a more rewarding place, a place where they have control over outcomes, where there is no fear of rejection and they are praised for their abilities.

  While removing oneself from the demands of society may be a conscious decision for adult men, as in the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement, it is often an unconscious decision for young men, who find safety and sovereignty in video games and porn. They become increasingly adept and skilled at gaming, refining their skills, allowing them to achieve high status and respect within the game.

  This is not something you see women doing, because they typically don't find those kinds of competitions meaningful, nor do they receive respect for developing their gaming skills. (We will address the increasing number of female gamers and porn users later on.) Additionally, men may become more easily hooked on games. When Russian researcher Mikhail Budnikov broke down the propensity to become addicted to computer games into low, medium, and high levels of risk, he found that women slightly outnumbered men in medium-level risk while men were more than three times likelier than women (26 percent versus 8 percent, respectively) to have a high level of risk.4