Meet Tommy, The “Child-Man”

According to this puss-oozing carbuncle of a human being, I'm not an adult because I am over 25, unmarried, do not have a mortgage, like to play video games, and have yet to father any children.

I am going to treat this…article…that was published on Sunday by the Dallas Morning News like something from a 9/11 TRUTH!1!! site, and give a point by point rebuttal.

It's 1965, and you're a 26-year-old white guy [why I gotta be white?-ed]. You have a factory job, or maybe you work for an insurance broker. Either way, you're married, probably have been for a few years now; you met your wife in high school, where she was in your sister's class. You've already got one kid, with another on the way. For now, you're renting an apartment in your parents' two-family house, but you're saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house in the next town. Yup, you're an adult!

Now meet the 21st-century you, also 26[am I still white?-ed]. You've finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face – and then it's off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?

Ah, so apparently no men went to college until the year 2000, but hey. Nobody I know downloads "indie" songs from iTunes. We steal popular music from P2P sites, and if we want any "indie" music that is not available on P2P, it can usually be downloaded for free else where because if they (obscure indie musicians) had any talent, they would have already signed with a label. Also, nobody I know over the age of 19 spends any appreciable amount of time playing basketball or any other team sport. However, I do know a dude that puts some mousse in his hair sometimes.

Bars and parties are boring, even when I have the chance of "gettin' laid." Most of my friends feel this way. I almost never "bed" one of these women I meet, because of the health issues, and well frankly, spending a great deal of time chasing "ass" is a pointless endeavor. It’s more challenging, and much more fun, to resist a slobbering advance from a “liberated” woman throwing herself at you, leaving her self-conscious and crying in your dust, as you drive home to play Dawn of War online.

Not so long ago, the average mid-twentysomething had achieved most of adulthood's milestones – high school degree, financial independence, marriage and children. These days, he lingers – happily – in a new hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. Decades in unfolding, this limbo may not seem like news to many, but in fact it is to the early 21st century what adolescence was to the early 20th: a momentous sociological development of profound economic and cultural import.

How is or was an average 25-year-old high school graduate with a wife and two kids “financially independent?”

It's time to state what is now obvious to legions of frustrated young women: The limbo doesn't bring out the best in young men.

With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their 20s and early 30s are joining an international New Girl Order, hyper-achieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling and dining with friends. Single young males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3 and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it's receding.

So childless, hedonistic, irresponsible women in their 20’s and 30’s are “emergent adults.” Men are sex-crazed, fist-knocking children. I see.

Freud famously asked: "What do women want?" Notice that he didn't ask what men wanted – perhaps he thought he'd figured that one out. But that's a question that ad people, media execs and cultural entrepreneurs have pondered a lot in recent years. They're particularly interested in single young men, for two reasons: There are a lot more of them than before, and they tend to have some extra change.

Consider: In 1970, 69 percent of 25-year-old and 85 percent of 30-year-old white men were married; in 2000, only 33 percent and 58 percent were, respectively. And the percentage of young guys tying the knot is declining as you read this. Census Bureau data show that the median age of marriage among men rose from 26.8 in 2000 to 27.5 in 2006 – a dramatic demographic shift for such a short time period.

That adds up to tens of millions more young men blissfully free of mortgages, wives and child-care bills. Historically, marketers have found this group an "elusive audience" – the phrase is permanently affixed to "men between 18 and 34" in adspeak – largely immune to the pleasures of magazines and television, as well as to shopping expeditions for the products advertised there.

Yes, I am “blissfully free” of the costs of a marriage, mortgage, and children. This is because AT THE PRESENT TIME I DO NOT EARN THE MONEY TO PROVIDE A WIFE AND CHILDREN WITH A LIFE THAT I WOULD WANT FOR THEM.

I guess this makes me an irresponsible, beer-guzzling, skirt-chasing Neanderthal.

A signal cultural moment came in April 1997, when Maxim, a popular British "lad magazine," hit American shores. Maxim plastered covers and features with pouty-lipped, tousled-haired pinups in lacy underwear and, in case that didn't do the trick, block-lettered promises of sex! lust! naughty! And it worked.

What really set Maxim apart from other men's mags was its voice. It was the sound of guys hanging around the Animal House living room. Maxim asked the SYM what he wanted and learned that he didn't want to grow up. And now the Maxim child-man voice has gone mainstream. You're that 26-year-old who wants sophomoric fun and macho action? Now the culture has a groaning table of entertainment with your name on it.

***cough*** COSMO ***cough***

That sound you hear is women not laughing. Oh, some women get a kick out of child-men and their frat/fart jokes. But for many, the child-man is either an irritating mystery or a source of heartbreak. In contemporary female writing and conversation, the words "immature" and "men" seem united in perpetuity.

That other sound you hear is the silence of the male 1000-yard-stare, when men look in to the setting sun, and realize that putting up with a scented-candle swilling, rain-dancing, money-grubbing, manipulative, materialistic, pseudo-prostitute is not worth his emotional and financial independence.

I can't go on. This op-ed is so hopelessly ignorant that even my youngest neglected lust-child could write my rebuttal. Too bad her mother and I didn't get along. She was always cheating on me, and I would get scolded by her when I got mad because I didn't "understand how independent she was." I started seeing another woman, and she filed for divorce. But I digress.

I'm a "man-child," huh? Well, while I'm at work, this "man-child" holds the lives of thousands of people in his hands, and my decisions can mean the difference between somebody loosing everything and going to prison, or being vindicated and having their lives restored.

When a single mother calls me crying about how she is about to go to jail and her kids will go to foster care, asking me to do something for her, even after she has lied to me and the police... and I have to make the call to either unleash the hounds and send her up the river, or allow her to try to repent...

I ask you Ms Hymowitz: Do you still want to call me a "child" because I haven't "knocked-up" a girl or found the woman I want to marry yet? Fuck you. I have to come home every day and think about the people and their families who's lives I may have just ruined, and YOU, a sycohantic kook academic wants to pass judgment on ME, because I am responsible enough to control my sex-drive?!

Liberalism is a mental disorder.
-Michael Savage