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Yes, the comments were a bit... much. I still maintain a great deal of sympathy for the Hymowitz/Moore position, though. It seems like we give too much deference to cheap and low behavior. I don't pine for the days when men wore coats and ties to baseball games or anything quite as outwardly formal as that. But something seems to be missing, and it's something important.

What's the case for taking life seriously, Elizabeth? It might be simply that other people do, and some of those people have very bad intentions. Or it might also be that taking life seriously means taking care of yourself because others aren't necessarily going to take care of you. But I wouldn't recommend taking life too seriously.

While I was doing a bit of searching on another topic, I stumbled on a post by Rich Miniter taking strong exception to Hymowitz's piece. I think Cycle Geezer would find much to recommend in Miniter's response:

One thing that Hymowitz might want to consider is that women have changed, due to feminism. The male behavior she deplores is simply a response.

A few years ago, a woman I knew from college complained to me about men. After the usual Hymowitz-like rant, she cited a man in particular who she thought was perfect for her. At 38, he had just made partner at his law firm, their families knew each other for generations and so on. I pointed out to her that he pursued her repeatedly in college—and she had rejected him then. Instead, she dated older men with money.

Well, she said, I would take him now.

I am sure you would, I said. But he is now doing what your ex-boyfriends did and dating women in the their early 20s.
It isn’t fair, she said.

Actually, it is — it is just not good for society.

Brad, you are a shameless tease. Of course "300" was cool. How could anyone say otherwise? (And, no, that isn't a rhetorical question.)

I hereby elect Elizabeth to be our ruler. :-) Can I get you to talk my wife into letting me play more video games?

Ben,

I am sad to disappoint with the news that my own experience as a Marine NCO, as a (private school) teacher, and as a headmaster, do not offer much more than the simple truths that you have already mentioned (i.e. virtue, submission, Quintilian, etc.). The good news is that those are are right answers. The classics aren't dead, but they are becoming more obscure, nearly to the point that they now seem novel. That's where we see the stuff of the Western tradition. I'm tempted to say "the Old Western tradition, sadly.

The one thing I don't see listed in my quick perusing of the materials here, though I admit my glances have been brief this workday, is that of challenge. Real challenge. That's the crucible in which men are made. Challenge that affects one's whole being, rather than a portion limited by scale, or foreseen brevity. I'm reminded of the increasing need for the new wave of successful wilderness programs. With the diminishment of scouting and the wussifying of many playgrounds and sports, the gap that needs to be filled is more and more extreme.

Some may expect me to rail against the new culture of psychiatry. Nope. Not me. It's the overindulgence of amateur psychology that's a big problem. One of the simplest solutions? Let the kids (boys especially) roughhouse, no matter the risk of parents' objections and lawyers' menace. Let them play cops & robbers or soldier. The real body to body thing is much better training for our future men. [Okay, insert joke here about asking Billy if he likes gladiator movies.../Airplane!]

Gotta get back to work. No conclusion for you!

There is also Diana West's book, "The Death of the Grown-up: How America's Arrested Development Is Bringing Down Western Civilization." A transcript of an interview with her -- which discusses the problems an adolescent culture faces while trying to defend itself against radical Islam -- can be found here.

A different tack: I wonder how much of this is due to economic factors. The guy referenced in 1965 was most likely sole breadwinner for the family. We seque to a time when it took 2 people earning to maintain the same lifestyle. Are we now at the point where it takes 3 incomes (the parents and the adult offspring) to reach the same point? If so, how do you form a 2 person adult relationship when it takes 3 to make it function financially?

I hope people take the time to read those City Journal and Claremont Review essays. They're long, but rewarding. (But if you really don't have the patience or attention span, a shorter version of the Kay Hymowitz article is here. Albert Mohler offers a pretty good summary of Moore's essay here.)

The bottom line here is that men are made, not born. They're shaped by the culture in which they live. If the culture is coarse, informal, vulgar and childish, then you are more likely to get coarse, informal, vulgar and childish men.

I resemble the child-man in more ways than I would care to admit. Being married and having children has a way of mitigating if not quite erasing the resemblance. But it's still there.

I hadn't seen it earlier, but Rod Dreher has a thoughtful take on the child-man phenomenon:

Today's child-men have been formed by a culture that has lost – or, rather, thrown away – a relatively fixed standard of manhood. It used to be that virtue was the measure of a man. Was a man just? Was he brave (and not necessarily in terms of physical courage)? Was he honorable in his dealings with those weaker than he? Did he respect women? Did he believe in something higher than himself? Did he submit to the concepts of duty and respect?

It's not that all men, or even most, lived by this general code. It's that they recognized that they would be judged by it, and judged themselves by it.

That's mostly gone, replaced by a therapeutic model in which the autonomous self is its own judge, and personal satisfaction is the measure of a life well lived. For 40 years now, we have been living through a cultural and psychological revolution that has rendered young men (indeed, most people) incapable of recognizing and submitting to authority. As social critic Philip Rieff foresaw at the dawn of this revolution, the loosening of traditional constraints would make man free, but it would be a liberty fraught with anxiety, even psychological paralysis.

Which brings us to our latter-day child-men, the wayward sons of a generation that crawled on purple and never got over the experience. Quintillian and his successors through the ages knew that the process of becoming a man requires a juvenile male to subordinate his own desires to an objective code of conduct – which is to say, some sort of higher authority. In this sense, the self could only be understood and realized in relation to one's community and its values.

The only bone I would pick with Dreher is his emphasis on tradition and values. Tradition per se isn't good, and values are what you make them. What we need is an education that stresses traditional virtues.

Times change, economies change, social mores change. Human nature, however, does not change. We are not our father's sons. Alas. Our charge now is to do better by our sons and daughters with what tools we have. Turns out, we have a vast range of materials at our disposal.

Joel, I have to tell you... ever since I started reading and posting on RedBlueAmerica I've been tempted to use the Report As Objectionable button, but not exactly as intended. The picture of Carrot Top? Objectionable.

I blame you, Joel. And it's further proof you haven't grown up. Ergo, (and this is ironclad logic, so don't even TRY to question it) it's liberals who are responsible for the new plague of man-children. About this there can be no debate. The science is in. Case closed. To deny it would be like denying [insert something that would be offensive to a religious minority here,].