Boys will be boys, but is that really so bad?

Brian Till

Sunday, Sept. 14, 2008 | 2 a.m.

“I’m gonna see how long I can go before I have to get a job,” declared a recent fellow graduate. Another leaves for New Zealand in a week; two spent the summer working at the racetrack in Saratoga Springs, N.Y.; and three others moved in together a block from campus. So looks the current breakdown of my college crew, and so fits the sociological profile outlined by University of New York at Stony Brook professor Michael Kimmel in his recently published book, “Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men.”

For this generation of men, college might never end. Skipping over issues of hazing and Hegel for a moment, it’s important to recognize the way in which college has extended into young adulthood. BlackBerry Messenger, Gmail Chat and group mailing lists have made it increasingly difficult for graduates to break ties between undergrad and the real world. Many young men find themselves in nearly constant contact with their friends from school — the “guys,” the “bros” — keeping up to date on one another’s daily lives even when thousands of miles apart. Who hates his job, who’s getting fat, who’s dating a new girl — it’s all laid out for others’ daily consumption and entertainment.

And I’m not certain “Guyland” is such a catastrophe as Kimmel would have us believe.

But there’s a host of concerns fueling Kimmel’s work. To some extent, his book is alarmist in nature, benefiting greatly from parental concerns over frat culture and high-profile intoxication deaths in years past. While there are numerous places where hazing has charged out of control, the code of manhood in the 21st century doesn’t necessarily endorse that.

Excessive drinking does play a major role in college life, for both men and women, for those associated with Greek life, for athletic teams and for nearly everyone else. But just like the inebriation college kids somewhat recklessly pursue, there are variants and degrees to the codes young men subscribe to these days. Not simply black and white, sober or blackout — grays and nuance make up the ground on which most find themselves.

Kimmel describes a stunningly simple code in which taking advantage of women, torturing underclassmen and harming one’s own body and mind are the only keys to acceptance. Most codes just aren’t such. Carrying friends home from a bar is more admirable than finding a girl to go home with. Making sure an underclassman acting too wild is taken care of — so he doesn’t harm himself or someone else, or get everyone in trouble — is as valuable as having the night’s funniest journey.

The code enshrines that eventually finding a great girl to settle down with and be loyal to is as important as living every night to the fullest while in school. It holds that telling a girl when her friend has had too much is the right thing to do, and often pays dividends down the line.

Kimmel gets some things right, that’s for sure. Today’s white, middle-class young men find themselves in a very different place from their fathers’. Entitlement felt for decades has largely met a stiff demise in the realities of a tough economy. We’ve been outperformed by girls since elementary school, and now the most empowered generation of American women is poised to easily surpass us. There are more women earning advanced degrees than men, and women are quickly overtaking undergraduate programs such as business and physical sciences, as the Institute of Women’s Policy Research has documented.

The “Guy Code” Kimmel lays out, with tired truisms of decades passed — “Boys don’t cry,” “Bros before hos” — draws a faltering line between good and bad.

Indeed, the vast majority of the “good guys” who I graduated with in my high school class — the kids who finished atop the class, ate dinner with the family, went on family vacations or house-sat while you were away — went on to pursue significant drinking and debauchery in “Guyland.” Duke, Brown, Cornell and other top schools find themselves mentioned as often as less academically noted institutions in Kimmel’s study.

Before parents lose control given Kimmel’s dire forecast — that too many guys are headed nowhere fast — we might want to step back, recognize that bounding out from college is far more difficult than it once was, and appreciate the elements of the “Guy Code” that may actually help the young men to one day succeed in the competitive global landscape.

If this is the meltdown of the young American male, I’d truly be surprised.

Brian Till, one of the nation’s youngest syndicated columnists, writes for Creators Syndicate. He also is a research associate for the New America Foundation, a think tank in Washington.