Men Will Always Be Boys!

Not so long ago, the average man in his twenties had collected most of adulthood's milestones: a diploma, a paycheck that covered his own rent, a marriage, often children. By 2011, the pattern had visibly shifted. Millions of young men were living in what commentators called a new life stage -- not adolescence, not quite adulthood, a hybrid of hormonal youth and responsible self-reliance that stretched well into the thirties.

Nobody gave the phenomenon its most provocative framing that year better than author Kay Hymowitz. In Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys, she argued that the combination of women's economic ascent and an entertainment industry devoted to every male pleasure -- video games, porn, sports on endless loop -- had removed young men's reasons to grow up. The thesis landed like a grenade in the culture pages, not least because it told frustrated young women that their dating complaints had a structural explanation.

Comedian Julie Klausner supplied the memoir version the same era. Her 2010 book I Don't Care About Your Band catalogued a dating landscape full of "guys" -- males who were neither boys nor men but something in between, whose perfect evening was a PlayStation session with bandmates or a Vegas trip with college friends, who discussed Star Wars with the gravity of scripture. Women reading it kept having the same reaction: wait, did I date this exact guy?

The demographics underneath the polemic were real. Marriage ages were climbing, education was lengthening, and the old script -- school, job, wedding, mortgage by 25 -- had stopped describing most people's lives. But the moral framing was always the contested part. The same economy that supposedly let men drift was also the one loading them with student debt and pricing them out of housing; milestones were delayed for women too, and many young men were working hard in an economy that offered less than it had their fathers. Blaming women's rise for men's stagnation mistook a correlation for a cause.

Fifteen years on, the "pre-adulthood" stage Hymowitz named has only become more institutionalized -- the basement apartment is now the group chat, the PlayStation is now the infinite scroll. The debate she started, though, still asks a fair question underneath the provocation: when the old milestones stop arriving on schedule, what does growing up actually mean?