Manning Up: How the rise of women has turned men into boys by Kay Hymowitz presumes that the meme of adult male as perpetual child, the lad generation, the male incarnate as any juvenile Adam Sandler character, which she describes as the “preadult”, is the result of the socioeconomic rise of women in modern culture.

The jacket design is the best thing about the book. It’s a great graphic, and it is what will sell the book, but after that, like Neil Young said in his intro to “Don’t let it bring you down” the book “sort of starts off slow and then fizzles out all together.” It is the literary equivalent of news channel infotainment, nothing more than a sensational premise supported by opinion and convoluted presumptions designed only to generate controversy, and more importantly, sales.

I’m going to take specific exception to the title, because it presumes the one thing that is possibly the most toxic concept in any relationship and that is that someone else, or some set of circumstances that are beyond your control, are responsible for how you behave and think.

No one can make you mad, belittle you or denigrate you: we do that on our own. I have a wise friend who’s said time and again, “It doesn’t matter what I’m called, it matters what I answer to.” And in our relationships, in our lives, we are responsible for the choices we make and the consequences they bring.

It may be that as the title suggests that men are living lives of extended “preadult”-hood, or as Ms. Hymowitz tries to caveat with a “some men” in an interview with Dr. Helen Smith, (at approx 4:20) but if men are, in fact, choosing computer games over relationships, if men are choosing to be Chester Riley rather than Ward Cleaver, then understand this one thing: it is a choice. The rise of women, the conflict of who gets the check, the distinction of alpha or beta or even theta male has nothing to do with it. It is a choice. To say that men make this choice, if in fact they are making it, because of women’s relative success is simplistic at best and it does disservice to both sexes.

While the book is copiously footnoted, most of the references are anecdotal and tautological, and many of the core premises of her argument go unsubstantiated: three spring to mind easily.

On page 3 she states that “preadults are a different matter: they are a major demographic event.”

Notwithstanding that she has self-admittedly created the new concept of “preadult” without bothering to define “adult”, demographics are by definition documented numbers. A city is 23% black, 54% high school graduates, 10% LGBT: these numbers come from the census, from statistical analysis, from any number of sources public and private but they are at their core demonstrable and factual: to state that “preadults” are a “demographic event”, major or otherwise, is meaningless and pure sophistry without citation to authority.

And on page 15 she states “By the 2000s, young men were tuning in to such cable channels as Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network, and Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences.” It might be a commonsensical claim, notwithstanding that the Cartoon Network is the home of “The Powerpuff Girls” yet I have no doubt that Ms. Hymowitz could have contacted someone at Nielson or Tivo to document the exact demographic of these channels, but she doesn’t, and like the dog that didn’t bark in Doyle’s Silver Blaze the fact that she doesn’t is telling: like the Sandleresque slackers she derides, she gives at best a “preadult” effort at documenting her claims.

Writing of the latter part of the nineteenth century she further opines “Still, with the limited number of respectable women hanging around in billiard halls and, in any case, fairly strict rules against sex unless you put a ring on a finger, the vast majority of men - 90 percent – would soon enough become husbands” pg 129

I’d like a little authority for the presumption that social rules against premarital sex were any more effective in 1890 than they were in 1960 or 2010, and some explanation of why charities supported “lying in” hospitals where generally poor and unmarried women, seduced, no doubt by the functional equivalent of “preadult” man-boys of their time, could both safely birth their unexpected child and find moral salvation if the youth of the time were deferring sexual activity until marriage.

The truth is we are sexual creatures and the hormones that propel that drive are at their most rampant in our fertile years. Young men and women fuck around. Always have, always will, and sadly my only authority for that is my personal experience, yet even that limited authority is more than Ms. Hymowitz can muster for her claim that somehow social prescriptions against premarital sex once forced men into marriage and the absence of those social prescriptions allows today’s man-boy to live in an extended adolescence.

I will grant you if there is a phenomenon of “preadult”-hood among some men and further assuming arguendo that it has evolved over the last thirty years that there is a correlation between “preadult”-hood and the advances women have made in their economic and educational participation in society, but there is also the same correlation to be made with the decline in interest rates in the same period. Correlation is not causation.

But one of the major problems with Ms. Hymowitz’s theory is that she posits this behavior is some how new, as if Henry Fieldings Tom Jones wasn’t the eighteenth century iteration of a paradigm that has been around for all time.

As I understand one of her arguments, women’s lib, the pill, and greater education has allowed beautiful intelligent girls to “play the field” and to put off their child rearing years so that they can pursue alpha males to the detriment of poor beta males, who then slide inexorably into the perpetual childhood that is “preadult”.

This is passed off as new and interesting despite the fact that we all were in junior high school at one time or another and learned there that beautiful intelligent girls play the field and seek out alpha males. As Charlie Sheen, the paragon of extended adolescence would say, “duh… winning.”

Distilled to its core, the sum and substance of Ms. Hymowitz’s monograph is simply that some people make bad choices and choose immaturity over growth, self-gratification over introspection and behave childishly even after their personal chronology suggests they are “adults”, and she takes almost 190 pages to put lipstick on that particular pig.

The hope is that somehow, as a species, we evolve past junior high school. It seems iffy, but it could happen. Ms. Hymowitz doesn’t address how her “preadults”can grow to be more than a cruel society has forced them to be, but I can.

It requires some work, and the assiduous application of the principles in How To Save Your Marriage, but we can all, men, women, “preadults”, adolescents, senior citizens and baby boomers alike, let go of the bad behaviors that destroy our relationships and our lives.