The Demise of Guys [631735]

The Demise of Guys
Why Boys Are Struggling and
What We Can Do About It
By
Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan

The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It.
Copyright © 2012 by Philip G. Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan.
All rights reserved.
Published by TED Conferences, LLC.
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First published May 2012.
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Table of Contents
A search for solutions
The demise of guys
Behind the headlines
TED survey: the tribe has spoken
What’s going on?
Bros before hos: Social intensity syndrome (SIS)
Get everything, do nothing
Changing families
Unstable role models, tarnished trust
Helicopter parents
Where’s Dad?
The media isn’t doing you any favors
The truth shall bite thee in the ass
Why buy the cow when you can have the milk free?
High costs of living driving down personal and social values
School’s out — now what?
Who’s failing whom?
High on life, or high on something
Back away from the doughnut
Just press Play: Porn and video games
Dynamics of porn
Chronic stimulation, chronic dissatisfaction
Dude, where’s my erection?
Sex education vs. porn
Dating and the objectification of women
Dynamics of video games
When video games go wrong
Preparing for cyberwar
When video games go right
Billy is in his room
The rise of gals
What we can do
Next steps: Join us
Notes
Recommended resources
About the authors
About TED

A search for solutions
This book is a discussion about young men and some of the important issues and challenges they face.
We’re presenting this work in the hope of finding solutions. Fair warning: Our discussions will be frank
and our language direct. Problems get dealt with and maybe solved only when they are talked about
openly and honestly. When you’re done reading, please visit our website (
demiseofguys.com
) to continue
the discussions we’ve begun. Or watch the original TEDTalk “The Demise of Guys?” on
ted.com
.

The demise of guys
Everyone knows a young man who is struggling. Maybe he’s undermotivated in school, has emotional
disturbances, doesn’t get along with others, has few real friends or no girl friends, or is in a gang. He may
even be in prison. Maybe he’s your son or relative. Maybe he’s you.
In record numbers, guys are flaming out academically, wiping out socially with girls and failing
sexually with women.
Asking what’s wrong with these young men or why they aren’t motivated the same way guys used to be
isn’t the right question. Young men are motivated, just not the way other people want them to be. Society
wants guys to be upstanding, proactive citizens who take responsibility for themselves, who work with
others to improve their communities and nation as a whole. The irony is that society is not giving the
support, means or places for these young men to even be motivated or interested in aspiring to these
things. In fact, society — from politics to the media to the classroom to our very own families — is a
major contributor to this demise because they are inhibiting guys’ intellectual, creative and social abilities
right from the start.
Consequently, many guys lack purposeful direction and basic social skills. They’re living off, and often
with, their parents well into their 20s and even 30s, expanding their childhood into an age once reserved
for starting a family and making a career.
Many young men who do manage to find a mate feel entitled to do nothing to add substance to that
relationship beyond just showing up. New emasculating terms such as “man-child” and “moodle” (man-
poodle) have emerged to describe men who haven’t matured emotionally or are otherwise incapable of
taking care of themselves.
Hollywood has caught on, too, to this awkward bunch of dudes, who appear to be tragically hopeless.
Recent films such as
Knocked Up, Failure to Launch
, the
Jackass
series and
Hall Pass
present men as
expendable commodities, living only for mindless fun and intricate but never-realized plans to get laid.
Their female co-stars, meanwhile, are often attractive, focused and mature, with success-oriented agendas
guiding their lives.
The sense of being entitled to have things without having to work hard for them — attributed to one’s
male nature — runs counter to the Protestant work ethic, as well as to the Vince Lombardi victory creed
(“Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.”) These guys aren’t interested in maintaining long-term
romantic relationships, marriage, fatherhood and being the head of their own family. Many have come to
prefer the company of men over women, and they live to escape the so-called real world and readily slip
into alternative worlds for stimulation. More and more they’re living in other worlds that exclude girls —
or any direct social interaction, for that matter.
Over the past decade, this pattern has escalated into adulthood where grown men remain like little
boys, having difficulty relating to women as equals, friends, partners, intimates or even as cherished
wives.
We believe this demise can be traced to the rise of technology enchantment. From the earliest ages,
guys are seduced into excessive and mostly isolated viewing and involvement with texting, tweeting,
blogging, online chatting, emailing, and watching sports on TV or laptops. Most of all, though, they’re
burying themselves in video games and in getting off on all-pervasive online pornography.
In this book, we focus primarily on guys investing too much time and energy in the last two factors:

playing video games and watching freely available Internet porn. Video game production companies are
in fierce competition to make games that are ever more enticing, more provocative and, now, in 3-D. The
same is true for pornography. Pornography is the fastest-growing global business, with production
companies churning out daily doses of porn flicks in seemingly endless variety. The high-definition 3-D
porn wave may also be coming (pun intended). The combination of excessive video game playing and
pornography viewing is becoming addictive for a lot of guys. The next phase we imagine is transferring
the player’s viewpoint onto the body of the protagonist to mesh realities and make digital environments
totally egocentric.
There are also other factors contributing to the demise of guys: widespread fatherlessness and changing
family dynamics, media influences, environmentally generated physiological changes that decrease
testosterone and increase estrogen, the problematic economy and also the dramatic rise of gals.

Behind the headlines
This is the first time in U.S. history that our sons are having less education than their fathers.
— Warren Farrell, author of
Why Men Are the Way They Are
and
The Myth of Male Power
1
Failing at school
Are academics now more of a girl thing than a guy thing? It seems so. Girls outperform boys now at every
level, from elementary school through graduate school. By eighth grade, for instance, only 20 percent of
boys are proficient in writing and 24 percent proficient in reading.
2
Young men’s SAT scores, meanwhile,
in 2011 were the worst they’ve been in 40 years.
3
According to the National Center for Education
Statistics (NCES), boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of both high school and college.
4
In Canada, five boys drop out of school for every three girls who do.
5
Nationally, boys account for 70
percent of all the D’s and F’s given out at school.
6
It is predicted that women will earn 60 percent of
bachelor’s, 63 percent of master’s and 54 percent of doctorate degrees by 2016.
7
Two-thirds of students
in special education remedial programs are guys. These effects are much greater for males from minority
backgrounds. The NCES also reported that boys are four to five times more likely than girls to be labeled
as having attention-deficit (hyperactivity) disorder (ADHD),
8
and therefore are more likely to be
prescribed stimulants, such as Ritalin, even in elementary school.
Video games: Mastering the universe — from your bedroom
Here’s an astonishing fact: People spend a collective 3 billion hours a week playing video games.
A
week
. Additionally, more than 174 million Americans are gamers. Jane McGonigal, director of game
research and development at the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif., estimates that the average
young person will spend 10,000 hours gaming by age 21.
9
To put this figure in context, it takes the average college student half that time — 4,800 hours — to earn
a bachelor’s degree. (This calculation is based on the average university requirement of 120 credit hours,
with each credit hour involving 2.5 hours of homework and class time. Take an average of 15 hours of
actual class time and 22.5 hours of homework outside of class each week — 37.5 hours — multiplied by
16 weeks per semester, multiplied by eight semesters, and you’ve got 4,800 hours. See also the table
“Time Bandit.”)
Some gamers are women, there is no doubt; and video game companies are very aware of this
(FarmVille, anyone?). Still, girls don’t play nearly to the extent that guys do — only five hours per week
to guys’ 13.
10
The video game business is expected to be a $68 billion industry by the end of 2012.
11
Compare this with the size of the entire U.S. publishing industry, which in 2010 had net sales revenue of
$27.9 billion.
12
Porn: The marketplace of virtual pleasures
The porn business is one of the fastest-growing industries in America and is now a nearly $100 billion
industry worldwide. America is the top producer of pornographic Web pages, with 244.6 million, or 89
percent, of all porn Web pages worldwide.
13
Just type “porn” into Google and you’ll get 1.38 billion

results, with the entire first page of hits offering free instant streaming videos.
Back in 2005, approximately 13,500 full-length commercially available pornographic films were
released. Compare that with the 600 or so films released in Hollywood annually.
14
Today there are many
companies and outlets generating porn clips directly online in quantities not possible to accurately
calculate.
Who views all this stuff? You guessed it. One in three boys is now considered a “heavy” porn user,
with the average boy watching nearly two hours of porn every week, according to University of Alberta
(Canada) researcher Sonya Thompson.
15
And that’s the average; just imagine what the outliers are doing!
Add to the mix older guys watching adult videos online, at work, at home or in hotels across the country
and around the world.
One consequence of teenage boys watching many hours of Internet pornography every week, says
Penny Marshall, British columnist for the U.K.’s Mail Online, is they are beginning to treat their
girlfriends like sex objects; according to a 16-year-old girl in Britain, “Boys just want us to do all the
stuff that they see porn stars do.”
16
As a result, says Cindy Gallop, a dynamic TED speaker and author of
the TED Book
Make Love Not Porn: Technology’s Hardcore Impact on Human Behavior
, young men
don’t know the difference between making love and doing porn.
Arousal addiction: Give me the same but different
The addictiveness of video games and porn is a real concern for many reasons. As with all addictions, the
activity becomes all-consuming and preferable to anything else in life — as every compulsive gambler,
alcoholic or druggie will tell you. Video games and porn, however, are different from drink or drugs. We
can think of them as “arousal addictions.” A major source of the continual arousal, whether it is in the
cortex or the testes, is the novelty, the variety or the surprise factor of the content. Sameness is soon
habituated; differentness is attention sustaining. And the video game and porn industries are supplying a
virtually endless variety of variety.
This new kind of addictive arousal traps users into an expanded present hedonistic time zone. Past and
future are distant and remote, as the present moment expands to dominate everything. And that present is
totally dynamic, with images changing constantly. Boys’ brains are being digitally rewired in a totally
new way to demand change, novelty, excitement and constant stimulation. And their brains are being
catered to by porn on demand and by video games at a flick of the switch or a click of the mouse. That
means they are becoming totally out of sync in traditional school classes, which are analog, static and
interactively passive. Academics are based on applying past lessons to future problems, on planning, on
delaying gratifications, on work coming before play, on long-term goal setting.
Do you sense misfits in a mismatch here? They’re also totally out of sync in romantic relationships,
which tend to build gradually and subtly and which require interaction, sharing, developing trust and
suppression of lust at least until “the time is right.”
The new shyness
Phil pioneered research on shyness among adolescents and adults back in the 1970s and ’80s. He also
founded the first clinic devoted to the treatment of shyness at Stanford University and then later in the
local community (
shyness.com
).
17
In those days, about 40 percent of a large population of Americans
described themselves as “dispositionally shy” — that is, shyness was a major current trait that they
possessed. An equal percentage reported that they had been shy in the past but had overcome its negative

impact. And 15 percent said that their shyness was situationally induced, such as on blind dates, having to
perform in public, being forced on relatives and so forth. So only 5 percent or so were true-blue never-
ever shy. However, since then the percentage of those reporting being shy has steadily increased up to 60
percent. That rise has been correlated with increased use of technology, which minimizes direct, face-to-
face social interaction. It also reduces social practice time and learning the many rules of constructive
social dialoguing.
A central causal influence triggering shyness was found to be a deep fear of social rejection. Thus, shy
people behave awkwardly or inappropriately with superiors, experts, in novel situations and in one-on-
one opposite-sex interactions. But with guided practice, even the most shy men and women can be trained
to be “socially fit” in the shyness clinic.
Aside from the steady increase in shyness, what is different today is that shyness among young men is
less about a fear of rejection and more about fundamental social awkwardness — not knowing what to do,
when, where or how. At least guys used to know how to dance. Now they don’t even know where to look
for common ground, and they wander about the social landscape like tourists in a foreign land unable to
ask for directions. They don’t know the language of face contact, the nonverbal and verbal set of rules that
enable you to comfortably talk with and listen to somebody else and get them to respond back in kind.
This lack of social interaction skills surfaces most especially with desirable girls and women. The
absence of such critical social skills, essential to navigating intimate social situations, encourages a
strategy of retreat, going fail-safe. Girls equal likely failure; safe equals the retreat into online and fantasy
worlds that, with regular practice, become ever more familiar, predictable and, in the case of video
gaming, more controllable. A twisted sort of shyness has evolved as the digital self becomes less and less
like the real-life operator. The ego is the playmaker; the character is the observer, as the external world
shrinks to the size of Billy’s bedroom.

TED survey: The tribe has spoken
In researching this book, we wanted our personal views to be challenged or validated by others interested
in the topic. One way to do this was by developing a detailed online survey with a host of questions that
touched on different aspects of our main theme. We created a survey of eight questions related to this topic
and posted it alongside Phil’s “The Demise of Guys?” talk on the
TED.com
website. Remarkably, in
barely two months, 20,000 people took the short survey. About three-quarters (76 percent) of the
participants were guys; more than half were between 18 and 34 years old. But people of all ages and
backgrounds and both sexes told us what they thought and felt about this issue and its subplots. In addition,
thousands of respondents were sufficiently motivated to go further by adding personal comments, from a
sentence to a page long. After reading all of them, we followed up with some of the respondents for
personal interviews, and we’ll present a few of their comments later. Here are some of the highlights of
the survey.

Survey highlights:
64 percent of boys age 12 and younger chose “Pressure to perform combined with fear of failing
causes young men to not bother trying in the first place.”
62 percent of guys age 13 through 17 chose “Digital entertainment (i.e., video games,
pornography).”
66 percent of guys age 18 through 25, and
63 percent of guys age 26 through 34, chose “No clear direction/Lack of goal setting.”

Survey highlights:
64 percent of boys age 12 and younger chose “Ensure there are both male and female counselors.”
73 percent of guys age 13 through 17 chose “Offer more advanced learning programs for students
who show interest or ability.”
75 percent of guys age 18 through 34 chose “Teach more practical subjects and skills.”

Survey highlights:
The following groups all chose “Young men in the U.S. will not be as innovative or capable as their peers
in other First World countries”:
65 percent of guys age 13 through 17.
66 percent of guys age 18 through 25.
75 percent of guys age 26 through 34.
74 percent of all respondents age 35 and older.

Survey highlights:
The following groups all chose “Give young men a creative space where they can express themselves”:
89 percent of boys age 12 and younger.
72 percent of guys age 13 through 17.
74 percent of guys age 18 through 25.
68 percent of guys age 26 through 34.

Survey highlights:
78 percent of boys age 12 and younger chose “Provide a sense of mastery and control.”
84 percent of guys age 13 through 17 chose “They’re fun and easily accessible.”
85 percent of guys age 18 through 25, and
84 percent of guys age 26 through 34, chose “Provide instant gratification.”

Survey highlights:
67 percent of boys age 12 and younger, and
69 percent of guys age 26 through 34, chose “Increase in problem-solving skills.”
63 percent of guys age 13 through 17 chose “Games can be social and provide an environment for
male bonding.”
67 percent of guys age 18 through 25, and
69 percent of guys age 26 through 34, chose “Increase in problem-solving skills.”

Survey highlights:
58 percent of guys age 13 through 17, and
60 percent of guys age 18 through 25, chose “Stress reliever/Positive psychological effects.”
51 percent of guys age 26 through 34 chose “Fulfills sexual needs.”
51 percent of all participants age 35 and older chose “None of the these/Other.”

Survey highlights:

76 percent of women age 18 through 25, and
78 percent of women age 26 through 34, chose “Emotional immaturity or unavailability.”
57 percent of guys age 13 through 17,
59 percent of guys age 18 through 25, and
58 percent of guys age 26 through 34 chose “Lack of interest in pursuing or maintaining a romantic
relationship/Social isolation.”

What’s going on?
Whatever landscape a child is exposed to early on, that will be the sort of gauze through which he or
she will see all the world afterwards.
— Wallace Stegner, historian and novelist

Boys haven’t changed a whole lot in recent years, but the environments in which they socialize, go to
school, woo girls and mature have. If we take a closer look at their worlds we can better understand what
the data that we just reviewed means. In this section we’ll briefly examine the main situational and
systemic factors that influence young guys’ thoughts and behaviors, including cultural changes, medication
and illegal drug use, social needs, and what’s happening in schools, within families and among peers.

Bros before hos: Social intensity syndrome
In the film
My Fair Lady
(based on George Bernard Shaw’s play
Pygmalion
), lead actor Rex Harrison
has just achieved his successful transformation of a poor flower shop girl into a stunningly beautiful
sophisticated lady, played by Audrey Hepburn. When she becomes distressed that he fails to show her any
affection or even recognition for all she has done to so dramatically modify her entire being, and perhaps
would like a bit of romance as well, he rudely dismisses her. Harrison then sings a song of lament to his
buddy, Pickering. Its title is
Why can’t a woman be more like a man?
18
:
Why can’t a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historic’ly fair;
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Well, why can’t a woman be like that?
In doing so, he reveals what we believe is actually a common set of attitudes and values held by most
men: a deep preference for male company and bonding over association or even mating with women.
This phenomenon is one that Phil has labeled the social intensity syndrome (SIS). The key dimensions
of this new view of essential maleness are outlined as follows:
Men, more than women, are attracted to social settings that involve the ubiquitous presence of a
group of other men, over an extended time period.
That attraction is greater the more intense the nature of the relationship, the more exclusive it is of
tolerating “outsiders” or those who have not qualified for that group membership, and the more
embedded each man is perceived to be within that group.
Examples of such social groups are the military — especially during boot camp and deployment —
gangs, contact team sports, fraternities, prisons, some cults and neighborhood bars and pubs.
Men experience a positive arousal — such as cortisol, adrenergic system activation or testosterone
increase — when they feel they are part of such all-male social groups.
Men gradually adapt to that level of social intensity contact as an optimally desired personal and
social state.
Over time, that degree of social intensity becomes a “set point” of desirable functioning, operating at
a nonconscious level of awareness.
Men experience a sense of social isolation and then boredom immediately following their separation
from such socially intense male group settings — when having to function in mixed-gender groups or
family settings.
Men may experience withdrawal symptoms when removed from such socially intense group settings;
symptoms are greater the longer and more intense the prior duration of their group participation has
been.
Social intensity syndrome is the descriptive term for this complex of values, attitudes and behaviors
organized around personal attraction to and subconscious desire to maintain association with these

male-dominated social groupings.
And this phenomenon peaks on Super Bowl Sunday, when many guys would rather be in a bar with
strangers, watching a totally overdressed Tom Brady, the New England Patriots’ star quarterback, than
with a totally naked Jennifer Lopez in their bedroom.
This hidden desire to be part of the “guy thing” is double-edged, though. It must not become too
intimate and personal for fear of seeming gay. So that enforces a rule of superficiality and of nontouching
other guys, except for high-fives, chest bumping and shots in the arm.
It is possible to generate some interesting predictions of possible behavioral consequences for men
with high SIS levels. They will do some or all of the following:
Respond to the negative effect of disengagement from such groups by engaging in arousing activities,
such as high-risk ventures, daring deeds, arguments and fights, drinking to excess, gambling,
speeding and similar actions.
Feel less comfortable having women as friends.
Spend more time in symbolic male groups, such as watching sports in a sports bar or even engaging
in fantasy football or baseball competitions.
Report high levels of boredom after separating from the socially intense grouping.
Recall greater positive and fewer negative aspects of one’s time in those male-bonding groups.
Deal with the arousal deficit by seeking redeployment if in the military.
Deal with the arousal deficit by hanging around settings where there are likely to be other men who
also belong to such high-intensity groupings, such as soldiers hanging around VA hospital lobbies or
sports fans becoming team “fanatics.”
Be more likely to engage in spouse abuse, especially when drinking, and more likely to become
divorced or separate from mates with whom they had a positive relationship prior to deployment or
team membership.
Be more likely to develop generally negative attitudes toward women as “the other” who do not
understand them, and prefer pornography and sex with prostitutes or erotic massage parlor
“therapists” to consensual sexual relationships with equal-status female mates.
Paradoxically, then, males can get such generalized arousal merely from being in the presence of other
men in group settings but must avoid showing or even experiencing feelings of intimacy in those
associations for fear of being perceived as homosexual or, worse, giving into homosexual impulses. Then
when they are presented with the prospect of intimacy with a woman, the opposite response occurs: They
may fail to get aroused.
Social intensity syndrome is prevalent worldwide. In Japan, young men are increasingly apathetic to
sex. Even married couples have less sex. “Over a third of men ages 16 to 19 had no interest in sex, double
the figure from 2008, and over 40 percent of those married have been sexless for at least the past
month,”
19
reported the
Japan Times
in a recent article covering research done by Kunio Kitamura of the
Clinic of the Japan Family Planning Association. The phenomenon is so common, these men have been
given a name: “soshokukei danshi,” or “herbivorous men,” in contrast to carnivorous men, who still
perform sex.
One particularly poignant response to our TED survey came from a young male student at Bard College

in New York:
I must admit that I haven’t had one real physical relationship in my entire life. I’m a complete
extrovert who has a core group of [male] friends along with a whole bunch of other friends
[including some women] but has always been rather unsure when it comes to women. I feel like I
can’t really interact with them, and end up treating them like men, which makes them my friend
but not someone who is a romantic interest. … I would definitely rather hang out with my
friends and enjoy the company of a small group of guy friends where we hang out and relax.

Get everything, do nothing
A highly educated female colleague alerted us to another new phenomenon. It is the sense of total
entitlement that some middle-aged guys feel within their relationships with marriage or live-in partners.
Guys don’t want to work either at jobs that will bring in money or even at household chores that will keep
their abode tidy. They are content to just hang around doing their thing but perform nothing that
traditionally resembles “work.” They feel it is their right to absent themselves from having to make money
or do drudgery around the pad. In a sense, they are like old-fashioned gigolos, attractive men who were
taken care of by older women in return for being charming dates/mates/sexual adventurers. That
description does not fit this new breed of guys who want it all in return for no giveback. Consider a
couple of the vignettes she shared with us:
A physical therapist I know married a guy who basically quit his job once they got married. She
did all the work and all the housework. She would come home after a long day at work,
schlepping her heavy equipment through the rain, and he would not even come out to help her
carry anything. When she got in, he would ask her what was for dinner, and she would have to
go back out to the store and come home and cook. He sat on his ass all day and did nothing.
Nice guy, handsome, but did not work or want to work. She divorced him after four years of
marriage.

Another academic I know gets together with this guy who quits his job to go back to graduate
school. He incurs a $100,000 debt and is not able to get a steady job. She supports him although
he is not willing to get married nor willing to help with any house chores.
Why do women stick it out with such guys? Even their mothers might call them losers. The depressing
alternative for these well-educated women is no guy at all, so they stick with their bad decision until it
gets so unbearable that they decide to dump the dude.
Aside from not understanding that all relationships involve a negotiation of rights and obligations, what
this entitlement suggests to us is the abandonment of a sense of having to work for anything. These men are
acting as if one gets what one wants just by being at the head of the line when the doors open or the party
starts.
A young British man told us this in his survey comments:
It is my belief that entitlement can help shape men. What they are entitled to is responsibility.
The achievement is fulfillment of responsibility that will let the world trust them to shape the
future. Yes, men can be strong if they care about others. Responsibilities — such as to being
gentle and a gentleman, manners to others to show courtesy, to take on duties to reassure others,
being selfless — will help a young man find himself. … The key to being a man lies in
responsibility. The responsibility to care about oneself and not ruin or abuse oneself, to care
about others and not ruin or abuse them.
We could not agree more. But it seems to us that this new sense of male entitlement is different from what

it may have been in the past. It is more generalized, spreading to more settings and activities that tend to
undermine any meaningful social or romantic relationships. These men seem to be emulating successful
media celebrities who appear to have it all, but they see and admire only the desirable outcomes and
products. What is missing from the analysis is any appreciation of what goes into any kind of success: a
lot of hard work, trial and tribulation, practice, failures that are part and parcel of the process of trying to
attain a goal. The good things in life usually take a commitment to success, to delaying gratification, to
putting work before play and to understanding the importance and vitality of the Social Contract — giving
to others with the assumption of reciprocal giving back.

Changing families
Throughout history the vast majority of humans lived in multigenerational, often multifamily, groups with
an approximate ratio of four adults to every one child. Essentially there would have been two parents yet
many other caregivers in the picture: siblings, grandparents, aunts, cousins. Today, however, with
classroom ratios at about one teacher per 30 students, with only one or two parents living at home and
with great distances between extended family members, children have far fewer quality relationships with
adults. Today the average household size is three or fewer.
20
Furthermore, these ever-shrinking family
units spend less time together, especially quality time like sharing a sit-down meal. Maia Szalavitz and
Bruce D. Perry, authors of
Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential — and Endangered
, suggest this
lack of relational richness is having a negative effect on our culture’s capacity to care for others.
As infants we depend on our primary caregivers — first mom and then dad — to feed us when we’re
hungry and protect us when we’re threatened. In other words, our parents regulate our stress until we are
able to self-regulate, and how they respond to stress affects the way our stress response develops. Our
earliest interactions with mom will serve as a kind of template for how we react to future human contact.
But lately there has been a problem; mothers are under constant stress. And if a mother is under stress, if
she’s not being nurtured, it’s far less likely she’s going to be able to provide consistent nurturing for her
baby or youngster.
Furthermore, stress is regulated by social systems; the brain regions involved in social relationships
are the same ones that control stress response. They develop together, and therefore development
problems in the stress response can interfere with the development of social and emotional functioning
and vice versa.
21
With 40 percent of children born to single mothers today
22
(more than 50 percent for children born to
women under 30
23
), who is nurturing the mothers who raise these children? How will these children deal
with stress when they have their own children? Moreover, as human lifespan increases, there is an ever
larger number of older relatives in elderly care facilities. Who is responsible for visiting them regularly
and dealing with their survival issues, even their basic legal and accounting problems? Their daughters
— the same overstressed moms — must deal with this new stress of caring for beloved parents who are
feeble, suffering memory losses and are able to give back little affection to their grown girls.
One place where families used to talk, exchanging experiences, ideas, values and more, was around the
dinner table. That is now an ancient tradition, honored more in the breach than in practice.
USA Today
newspaper did a survey 25 years ago on the “time crunch” that Americans increasingly felt. One alarming
statistic uncovered was that only 60 percent — three in five — families said life was more hectic than
five years ago and they were not able to do things like have regular sit-down family dinners.
24
“Today
less than 3 in 5 teens report having dinner with their parents. According to the National Center on
Addiction and Substance Abuse, compared with teens that have 5 to 7 family dinners a week, teens who
have infrequent family dinners (fewer than 3 times a week) are almost four times more likely to use
tobacco, twice as likely to use alcohol, two and a half times likelier to use marijuana, and nearly four
times likelier to predict personal drug use in the future.”
25

Unstable role models, tarnished trust
Divorce isn’t easy for anyone. But it’s not so much the divorce itself that affects young people’s
perceptions of relationships as it is how the parents handle the situation. Many children lose faith in
relationships because they watch their parents become emotionally unstable and react irrationally,
sometimes violently.
This is the pattern many kids observe right now: Man and woman meet, fall in love and get married,
make babies. Enter stress. Babies take over lives. Distance grows between man and woman;
communication was never great to begin with but is now much worse. Enter stress-relieving but
relationship-destroying behaviors, such as physical abuse, drug and alcohol use, and emotional and
physical infidelities. Everyone is unhappy. Divorce follows. One or both parents now are struggling and
are emotionally, mentally and/or financially broken.
Since we are brought up to think that conventional marriage is for everyone and that marriages last
forever, the breakup is devastating to the entire family. As a kid you think, Is this what I have to look
forward to? Then as an adult you think, Why bother? What's the point? The entire burden will fall on me
in the end anyway.
It doesn’t have to be that way if the divorce is amicable and both parties communicate to their children
their respect for the other parent and love for them, but that’s usually not what happens. Young people in
America don’t grow up seeing great role models for trust and reliability, especially in intimate
relationships. Monogamous relationships are now thought of in terms of what you lose rather than what
you gain; they’re seen as a restriction on independence and freedom, and commitment is seen as
sacrificing your own goals and passions for something that will most likely fail in 10 or 20 years, if not
sooner. Young people are expected to still want these things yet are never taught how to talk about or
handle the challenges that come with these commitments.
And if we can’t trust those closest to us, whom can we trust? If mom and dad can’t even keep it
together, who can? Learning how to trust others starts with our primary relationships, so when our
primary role models are unreliable and don’t deliver on their promises or aren’t there for one another, no
doubt we will find it harder to trust others.
Something else worth noting is the overall decline of trust in the United States. The percentage of
Americans who believe “most people can be trusted” plummeted from 58 percent in 1960 to 32 percent in
2008, meaning the majority of Americans now view other Americans as untrustworthy.
26
One source of
this downsizing of trust is the media’s highlighting instances of corruption, deception and deceit by
politicians, celebrities and other public figures. Obviously, more than mere social implications stem from
this lack of trust; countries in which citizens don’t trust each other don’t do as well economically.
“Countries with a higher proportion of trustworthy people are more prosperous. … In these countries,
more economic transactions occur and more wealth is created, alleviating poverty. So poor countries are,
by and large, low-trust countries,” says Paul Zak, professor of economics at Claremont Graduate
University, in his TEDTalk, “Trust, Morality — and Oxytocin.”
27

Helicopter parents
Boys are not the only ones reluctant to grow up. Many parents are also reluctant to let go, to allow their
sons to develop self-reliance and create solutions to their own problems. Lori Gottlieb, a clinical
psychologist in New York, wrote in the
Atlantic
magazine about the role parents play in shaping their
child’s sense of happiness: “Could it be that by protecting our kids from unhappiness as children, we’re
depriving them of happiness as adults?” The rise of so-called helicopter parents supports this idea. The
University of Vermont has even hired “parent bouncers” to help these parents keep their distance.
28
Helicopter parents hover over and around their children in school settings to be sure they are doing the
right thing. Although their intentions may start out as good, their surveillance tactics not only undercut
their kids’ independence, it prevents them from soaring on their own.
This problem is seen in the extreme in modern China in the form of “sitting mothers.” Moms
accompany their prized only child to college, especially the male, who must become the pride of the
family and its legacy. They take apartments near the school and keep a keen eye on all the goings and
comings of Junior. In some cases, when moms cannot live close by and dads have business to attend to, a
“sitting grandmother” will do the job instead.
Failing is an inevitable and much underrated part of life, but many parents aren’t letting their sons learn
that it’s OK to fail. This costs them later in life. One male college student from our survey offered this
suggestion: “Let men fail when they are young. That way it doesn't seem like the end of the world if they
do when they are older. I think a mistake my parents made when I was young is they always rescued me
from the brink of failure. My biggest problem moving on to college is I never learned to learn from my
failures. I see men around me fail over and over because they seem incapable of deriving any lessons
from it.”

Where’s Dad?
A woman simply is, but a man must become. Masculinity is risky and elusive. It is achieved by a revolt
from woman, and it is confirmed only by other men.
— Camille Paglia, social critic

If we do not initiate the boys, they will burn the village down.
— African proverb

As mentioned earlier, 40 percent of children in the United States are born to single mothers, and about a
third of boys are raised in father-absent homes.
29
Forty-four percent of Millennials and 43 percent of Gen
Xers think that marriage is archaic,
30
which begs the question: What will commitment look like in the 21
st
century? And how will those attitudes affect future generations and how those children are raised?
America leads the industrialized world in fatherlessness.
31
And among those who have fathers, the
average school-age boy in the United States spends just half an hour per week in one-to-one conversation
with his father, according to David Walsh, founder of Mind Positive Parenting. “That compares with 44
hours a week in front of a television, video game screen, Internet screen,” he says. “I think that we are
neglecting our boys tremendously. The result of that is our boys aren’t spending time with mentors, with
elders, who can really show them the path, show them the way of how it is that we’re supposed to behave
as healthy men.”
32
The effect of fatherlessness and the lack of rites of passage are underestimated. Boys suffer when
there’s no father in the home or no positive male role models in their lives; they start to look for a male
identity somewhere else. Some guys find it in a gang, other guys find it in drugs, alcohol, playing video
games and objectifying women. Another side effect of fatherlessness is increased incidence of attention
and mood disturbances. A 2010 study of more than a million Swedish children age 6 to 19 found that kids
raised by single parents were 54 percent more likely to be on ADHD medication.
33
The National Center
for Health Statistics reports that children of unwed or divorced parents who live with only their mother
are 375 percent more likely to need professional treatment for emotional or behavioral problems.
34
Craig McClain, co-founder of the Boys to Men Mentoring Network, offers an unfortunate view of why
men do not really want to engage teenage boys: “Men are afraid of teenage boys, deathly afraid, and they
don’t want anything to do with them. I saw it in a lot of my talks to men’s groups, saying, ‘Hey, how many
of you guys want to go up on a weekend with 30 teenage boys with me? Raise your hand.’ And one of
them will raise their hand, and I’ll say, ‘That’s the problem.’ Men are afraid of teenage boys because all
they remember about their [own] teenage years is pain and sorrow and sadness and being alone, and when
they see teenage boys in that place, that’s where they go, so they back off.”
35
What are young guys to do? The 2007 documentary film
Journeyman
followed two Minnesota
teenagers — Mike and Joe — as they went through the Boys to Men mentoring and rites of passage
program. Initially both young men were very distrusting of the world. Neither one had a father figure in
his life. Mike and Joe were both individually matched with a male mentor. Both of the male mentors also
had absent fathers and struggled with feelings of shame and guilt about who they were in their youth.
Dennis Gilbert, one of the mentors, was unsure of his abilities as a mentor:

At first I was like, “I don’t know if I want to be a mentor.” I had some issues then that I didn’t
know I had with adolescent boys, particularly in groups. I had this fear thing. A lot of times,
we’d just sit in the car and we’d stare, and [I’d get] almost no response back from [him]. After
about six months I thought, “Am I doing this right? I’m not noticing
anything. We’re not feeling
like good friends, I’m just somebody who picks him up because he’s bored sometimes.” So I
called Charlie. I said, “I think I’m failing at this mentor thing. He doesn’t like me, we don’t talk
about anything. … Maybe there’s somebody out there better to be a mentor here.” And Charlie
said, “Dennis, you’re doing … exactly what you need to be doing.” He was right. It passed. …
In another three months he started opening up.

One of the most crucial things for these young men transitioning into manhood was simply having an adult
male around who enjoyed their presence and could guide them so that they could be loved for who they
were but also held accountable for what they did.
After two years, Mike went from getting straight F’s to straight A’s, and he did his first staffing on a
Boys to Men weekend. He said the experience was transformational; he said he could see himself having
a future now, whereas he couldn’t before. Joe now had a child of his own and was looking forward to
raising his family. The boys’ mentors also found that they went on an emotional journey of their own to
face unresolved issues from their youth that came to light through their interactions with the boys.
With involved dads or positive male role models, kids are more open, receptive and trusting of new
people; one group of elementary school children surveyed who were living with their fathers scored
better on 21 of 27 social competence measures.
36
And perhaps as a result, they also have more
playmates.
37
They’re also more likely to do better and go further in school. Elementary school children
raised with their fathers also do better on eight out of nine academic measures, and a father’s impact
remains significant through high school.
38
There’s no question boys need men in their lives. A mother’s role is extremely important, too, but
“there’s not one thing a single mother can do to help her … sons in adolescence to calm down and to be
moral,” says Michael Gurian, author of
The Minds of Boys
. “Boys need a father. And why? Because that’s
how nature’s set up. Because it’s human nature. There’s maternal nurturance and there’s paternal
nurturance, and they’re wired differently. Males nurture in a somewhat different way than females do, and
children — girls and boys — need both maternal and paternal nurturance.”
39
Guys also need to learn that it’s OK to want to be in their son’s life. Warren Farrell suggests that a
more balanced perspective about what is possible for young men will benefit everyone, not just young
men:
Prior to the women’s movement, girls learned to row the family boat only from the right side
(raise children); boys, only from the left (raise money). The women’s movement helped girls
become women who could row from both sides; but without a parallel force for boys, boys
became men who had still learned to row only from the left — to only raise money. The problem?
If our daughters try to exercise their newfound ability to row from the left, and our sons also
row only from the left, the boat goes in circles. A family boat that goes only in circles is more
likely to be sunk by the rocks of recessions. In the past, a man was a family’s breadwinner and he
might be with one company for life. In the future, advanced technologies make economic change
the only constant, increasing the need for a family boat with flexibility — with our sons
eventually able to raise children as comfortably as our daughters now raise money
.
40

Only a few decades ago, boys had not only dads but also uncles, granddads, older cousins, male family
friends and next-door neighbors who provided an extended, tribal family system that was often an
informal source of social support. Facebook, Twitter, gaming forums and a host of other Internet social
media sites now try to replace those functions — but they cannot do so. Guys need more than “contacts.”
They need confidants. They need people who will be there when they are down in the dumps, who can
sense their need because they interact with the boys and guys enough to recognize changes in their moods
without them having to ask for help. It is hard and awkward to ask anyone for help; that is why guys need
compassionate friends and family who are likely to notice they need help and who come to their aid. It is
also important to have others recognizing when guys do good stuff, achieve goals — to offer praise and
build up their sense of pride.

The media isn’t doing you any favors
What does it mean to be a man? And where do guys get their information about what it means to be a
manly? Many men we surveyed said they felt most like a man when they were honest about who they
were, confidently made decisions and actively pursued their dreams. Men are naturally risk takers and
explorers, they like to master things. Knowing that they’re needed motivates them, and they want respect
from their peers, specifically from other guys.
But that respect needs to come from doing pro-social things that make life better in some way, not from
outdrinking their buddies or doing some stupid shit better than them. Popular films and television shows,
unfortunately, present few alternatives to this latter image of guys.
Programs on TV could use more men with triple-digit IQs. Why the overwhelming majority of men’s
characters are testosterone-driven meatheads, FBI agents, obsessed chefs, vampires, womanizers or
overweight men with really hot wives is perhaps not such a mystery. A recent University of Maryland
study concluded that unhappy people watch significantly more TV.
41
That makes sense — TV is passive,
provides an escape and is an easy way to tune out. Drama is an amazing distraction. When you can watch
tanned guidos duke it out like two betta fish in a small aquarium, you feel less inadequate about your own
life. Disharmony seems to be appealing, too. As Leo Tolstoy wrote in
Anna Karenina
, “Happy families
are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” Watch one show about happy people and
you’ve seen them all?
The problem is, without better role models in real life, guys become confused about what acceptable
male behavior is. Violence and sex, two overrepresented topics in media and underrepresented topics in
conversation, become especially unclear. “It’s very confusing to little boys … all around them they see
violence on the news, on television, on video games — and at the same time, they’re getting the message
that the fantasies that boys seem to have always had are bad. … I think the danger is giving the boys who
are having those thoughts the idea that it says something bad about them as people,” says Jane Katch,
kindergarten teacher and author of
Far Away from the Tigers
.
42
Farrell elaborated on this point by saying many young boys unconsciously learn that sex is dirtier and
worse than killing, because parents will allow their kids to watch a Western in which people kill each
other but will turn off the TV or change the channel when there’s nudity or sex. At age 13 or 14, the
message comes across to boys that they want sex more than girls do — or that the girls who initiate sex
are untrustworthy — so they feel they must take on the role of initiator. Naturally, there is a huge fear of
rejection. Sex on TV and porn reduce that fear of rejection. If a guy doesn’t perceive himself among the
best performers, he believes the girl he is most attracted to will reject him. Watching television and porn
requires no commitment and has a zero rate of rejection; it provides instant gratification that can alleviate
the fear to some degree. As a side effect, however, it also reduces the motivation to get the skills needed
to attract the girl, creating further distance between a man and his ultimate goal.
43
One young man from our survey noted:
In a postfeminism generation, gender roles are unclear. Men in their late 20s to early 30s today
were raised to be sensitive and caring, and to hide any aggressive impulses, but find this gets
them nowhere. Women in their 20s to early 30s talk about feminine empowerment but are still
only sexually attracted to overt displays of strength and aggression. Sensitivity, politeness and

asking what a woman wants are extreme turnoffs because they are perceived as weakness. Not
only is being a new kind of man a turnoff, it also keeps me from making the first move because I
learned to worry about forcing myself onto the object of my desire, to not be crass or slimy, to
not use pickup lines, etc. But there are no clearly defined rules for what I should be doing, just a
set of things that I shouldn’t do — all the things that would elicit results. … I’ll just go play
video games, thanks.”

The truth shall bite thee in the ass
A hungry fox saw some fine bunches of grapes hanging from a vine that was trained along a high
trellis and did his best to reach them by jumping as high as he could into the air. But it was all in vain,
for they were just out of reach. So he gave up trying and walked away with an air of dignity and
unconcern, remarking, “I thought those grapes were ripe, but I see now they are quite sour.”
— Aesop, “The Fox and the Grapes”

In stressful situations, many of us adjust our understanding of what’s going on to preserve our sense of
self. The core message of “The Fox and the Grapes” tale is not in the fox’s failure to get the grapes but in
his reaction to that failure. He maintains his pride by a wee bit of self-deception. “And therein lies the
appeal,” says D.L. Ashliman, professor emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh. “Each individual reader
can respond to the fox’s self-deception according to his or her own expectations and needs. We can
criticize the fox for his dishonesty and inconsistency, or we can congratulate him for his pragmatism and
positive self-image.”
44
The fox’s response preserved the integrity of his self-image. Stanford University social psychologist
Claude Steele was the first to describe the theory of self-affirmation, in 1988. Psychologists David
Sherman and Geoffrey Cohen described it in their own research nearly two decades later:
[The theory] asserts that the overall goal of the self-system is to protect an image of its self-
integrity, of its moral and adaptive adequacy. When this image of self-integrity is threatened,
people respond in such a way as to restore self-worth. … One way that this is accomplished is
through defensive responses that directly reduce the threat. But another way is through the
affirmation of alternative sources of self-integrity. Such “self
affirmations,” by fulfilling the
need to protect self-integrity in the face of threat, can enable people to deal with threatening
events and information without resorting to defensive biases.
45
Guys’ attitudes are similar to the fox’s. The ego reigns king in American society today, and our
delusional self-perceptions have dissociated us from mundane reality. Most people confuse comfort with
happiness, preferring familiarity to truth. Our politically correct culture has become stifling for any form
of critical analysis. Although stigmatizing people with labels can be damaging, it also allows people to
externalize their problems and avoid taking personal responsibility to improve themselves. The
avoidance of reality has pervaded our language and even the way we understand what’s happening around
us, as the late comedian George Carlin pointed out:
Americans have trouble facing the truth. So they invent a kind of soft language to protect
themselves from it. … Sometime during my life, toilet paper became bathroom tissue. … The
dump became a landfill. … Partly cloudy became partly sunny. … Room service became guest
room dining. Constipation became occasional irregularity. … The CIA doesn’t kill anybody
anymore. They neutralize people. Or they depopulate the area. The government doesn’t lie. It
engages in misinformation.
46

Our culture is presenting a confusing and unfulfilling reality full of distorted ideals and truths. Guys are
told they can be anything they want to be, but it doesn’t feel that way. With modern pressures to constantly
perform flawlessly in all areas of life — school, career, socially, sexually — it’s no wonder guys seek
validation and refuge in other environments like porn and video games or even gangs, or are relieved
when their anxiety or depression is diagnosed and given a label that other dudes also share, like attention-
deficit disorder (ADD).
Poet and philosopher Robert Bly and psychoanalyst Marion Woodman call this confrontation with
reality “the Great Disappointment.” Leonard Sax, an American psychologist and family physician, says
our culture does a terrible job of preparing kids for the moment when they realize they’re not going to be
the next big thing:
The spiritual condition of the child before the onset of puberty [is] characterized by the feeling
that “something marvelous is going to happen.” Then sometime after the onset of puberty,
navigating through adolescence, the teenager is hit with the awareness that something
marvelous is not going to happen. That’s the moment of The Great Disappointment. In our
culture, that moment is often postponed until young adulthood, when the 20-something finally
realizes that she isn’t ever going to compete in the Olympics or be the next American Idol or a
movie star. Adolescence should be the time when kids learn about their own limits. In a world
that contains more than six billion people, 99.999 percent of us are going to have to get used to
the idea that we are not anybody special. Becoming a mature adult means reconciling yourself
to the fact that you’re not going to be a movie star, you’re not going to be on the cover of
People
magazine, you’re not going to be famous. Our culture today does a terrible job of preparing kids
for this moment and helping them to make the transition to full adulthood. … When boys
encounter The Great Disappointment, many of them find solace in the world of video games. If
you’re a boy or young man and you invest 20 hours or more each week playing
Call of Duty, you
can indeed become master of that universe. And for many boys, that is satisfaction enough.
47

Why buy the cow when you can have the milk free?
In general, as long as guys have easy sexual access to attractive women, they feel no need to exert more
energy, time or money to get female attention. This is particularly evident on college campuses. The
American Council on Education recently reported that campus ratios are now about 57 percent women to
43 percent guys.
48
Not incidentally, the number of romantic relationships has drastically decreased and
casual sex has greatly increased, with women exhibiting sexual patterns similar to those of young men —
of being hunters, not just gatherers.
The Guttentag-Secord theory was first presented by Marcia Guttentag and Paul F. Secord in their 1983
book,
Too Many Women?: The Sex Ratio Question
. They suggested that members of the sex in smaller
supply are less reliant on their partners because many potential relationships are available to them, thus
they have more “dyadic power” — the upper hand — over members of the surplus sex. When confronted
with an abundance of women, men become promiscuous and unwilling to commit to a monogamous
relationship. In societies with too many women, or too few “marriageable” men, fewer people marry, and
the ones who do will do so later in life. Since men take advantage of a variety of available partners,
women’s traditional roles are devalued, and because these women can’t rely on their partners to stick
around, more of them turn to furthering their education or career to support themselves.
49
One female college student from our survey reflected this concern:
I think one of the biggest challenges will be the effect this will have on family dynamics. Today’s
well-educated, empowered, successful women don’t want lame, slacker husbands, and most men
don’t want to feel inferior to their wives. Will this push us into becoming more of an individual,
rather than a family-based, society?

“Men are as good as their women require them to be,” said one 27-year-old guy we interviewed. This
statement made us wonder about how easy access to sex affects men’s motivation to achieve other life
goals. Could there be a spillover from easy sexual access to assuming other goals can also be achieved
with only minimal effort and planning? It could be argued that our goals are fueled by evolution and that
the majority of our efforts are just part of one big elaborate mating ritual. But in the past, the prize — a
sexual partner (and propagating one’s genetics) — would have been the reward for hard work, or at least
some wise planning. Today the reward is essentially free and available
before
any hard work has been
done, so what’s left? It’s like downing dessert before dinner.
A young woman Sax interviewed in his book,
Girls on the Edge: the Four Factors Driving the New
Crisis for Girls
, said, “Guys today just don’t know how to satisfy a woman. The guys just want ‘wham,
bam, thank-you ma’am.’ They don’t care about building a relationship.” Sax pointed out that because boys
and girls are becoming sexually active at an earlier age than in their parent’s generation, boys are more
egocentric and less mature, and that there’s been a cultural shift from dating towards “hooking up,” with
boys feeling less of an obligation to care about the girls.
The growing influence of porn culture plays some role here as well. Most young men today will
tell you that they visit porn sites. Some of them will even enthusiastically describe to you the
features of their favorite sites. Given the choice between masturbating over online pornography

and going out on a date with a real girl — that is to say, a girl who doesn’t look like a porn star
and isn’t wearing lingerie — more and more young men tell me that they prefer online porn.
“Girls online are way better looking,” one young man said to me, with no apology or
embarrassment.
50

High costs of living driving down personal and social values
Students who acquire large debts putting themselves through school are unlikely to think about
changing society. When you trap people in a system of debt, they can’t afford the time to think.
— Noam Chomsky, linguist and social-political critic

The cost of a gallon of gas, school tuition and a house are now out of proportion for young people in
comparison to the Baby Boomer generation that has parented this generation. Because it’s more expensive
to live in America now than before the economic slump, many Americans are taking on large amounts of
additional debt to make ends meet. Equity strategist Peter Boockvar says, “The absolute cost of living is
now back at a record high, [but America] has 7 million less jobs.”
51
Americans generally feel they have
more opportunity to get ahead than their parents but are more exposed to economic risk as well, whites
being much more uncertain than minorities.
52
In 1970, a new house in the U.S. cost $17,000, and the median household income was $8,730. The
average yearly tuition of public university was $480; private was $1,980. In 1990, the average cost of a
new house increased to $79,100, and the median household income was $29,943. The average yearly
tuition of public university was $5,243.
53
In 2010, the average cost of a new house was $221,800 and the
median household income was $49,445. The average cost of public university was $15,014 (2009-10
academic year).
54
Now it costs more to send kids to private elementary school than it used to cost to go to
Harvard, Yale or Stanford University.

Has the cost of living caused men to see the idea of family not as the reward of one’s hard work but,
rather, as a burden and the cause of having to work hard? To many young men, the future looks bleak, and
they wonder how they will ever be able to afford a house, children and retirement. The higher prices of
schooling across the board no doubt have had an effect on how men are planning their lives. In addition,
in this recession three men have lost their jobs for every woman who has lost hers.
55

SOURCE: U
NKNOWN

Man’s Math

This amusing equation is all over the Web. Sadly, many young men draw the same conclusion.

Many students who go into serious debt for low-value degrees grasp the realities of employment only
upon graduation — that there isn’t a real job awaiting them and their diploma isn’t an assured route for
success. A whole generation of young people, who were told they could be anything they put their minds
to, are being thrown into a junkyard of mass unemployment, settling for less than their ideal job just to
make it. Without the real possibility of ever becoming the family breadwinner, young men are having to
deal with feelings of anticipated failure. If they can’t be the alpha guy, what new roles are available for
them?

School’s out — now what?
Today, all fingers are pointing toward STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) careers
as guaranteed jobs. The College Board recently stated some sobering statistics:
The World Economic Forum ranks the United States 48th in the quality of its mathematics and
science education. Data from the National Science Foundation (NSF) indicates that only 11
percent of U.S. students earn science and engineering bachelor degrees, while students in China
and the European Union are earning science and engineering degrees at nearly twice that pace.
NSF data also indicates that the U.S. ranks 20th out of 24 industrialized countries in the
percentage of 24-year-olds who had earned a first degree in the natural sciences or
engineering.
56

The same idea was emphasized in a recent Casey Daily Research report:
In the 21
st
century, intellectual capital is what will matter in the job market and will help a
country grow its economy. Investments in biosciences, computers and electronics, engineering,
and other growing high-tech industries have been the major differentiator in recent decades.
More careers than ever now require technical skills so in order to be competitive in those fields,
a nation must invest in STEM studies. Economic growth has slowed and unemployment rates
have spiked, making employers much pickier about qualifications to hire. There is now an
overabundance of liberal arts majors.
A study from Georgetown University lists the five college majors with the highest unemployment rates
(crossed against popularity): clinical psychology, 19.5 percent; miscellaneous fine arts, 16.2 percent; U.S.
history, 15.1 percent; library science, 15 percent; and (tied for No. 5) military technologies and
educational psychology, 10.9 percent each. Unemployment rates for STEM subjects hovered around 0 to 3
percent: astrophysics/astronomy, around 0 percent; geological and geophysics engineering, 0 percent;
physical science, 2.5 percent; geosciences, 3.2 percent; and math/computer science, 3.5 percent.
STEM jobs also pay more. The list of the 20 highest midcareer median salaries, by college degree,
features no careers from the liberal arts. Liberal arts degrees provide few prospects for graduates. Yet the
bubble continues to inflate. In the 2009–2010 school year, around 690,000 non-U.S. citizens were
enrolled at American colleges, the highest level in the world and up 26 percent from a decade ago. Non-
U.S. students constitute 2.5 percent of bachelor’s degree students, 10 percent of graduate students, and 33
percent of doctoral candidates, with 18 percent of non-U.S. students enrolled in engineering programs —
nearly triple the level of U.S. students.
57
Anyone from our survey who selected “Young men in America will not be as innovative or capable as
their peers in other First World countries” may have rightly noticed these trends that are a neon sign of the
times not to be ignored except at one’s future peril.

Who’s failing whom?
Young men are not failing at school; the school system is failing them. The United States spends more
money per pupil than the majority of other developed countries, but it achieves less gain per buck. And
now that many schools receive funding based on test results, teachers teach for those outcomes, not for
curiosity or critical thinking, nor for learning nonspecific principals or values. Such training to focus on
fact memorization lowers the intellectual level of the teachers themselves, not just their bored students.
“The quality of teachers has been declining for decades, and no one wants to talk about it. … We need
to find a more powerful means to attract the most promising candidates to the teaching profession,” said
Harold O. Levy, chancellor of the New York City Public Schools, in 2000.
58
There are a lot of amazing
teachers out there, but in general, the current batch of teachers are less intelligent than earlier peers,
buried in the bottom third of the SAT class.
59

60
IQ is definitely not the sole predictor of good teaching,
but the difference between having a strong or weak teacher lasts a lifetime. Kids who have a good teacher
in the fourth grade are less likely to become teenage parents, are more likely to go to college and will, on
average, earn $50,000 more over a lifetime.
61
But because there are few tangible incentives to being a dedicated teacher (poor wages, less status),
over time many educators get discouraged and don’t invest the effort to make their classes engaging or
relevant to current events. Thus many kids end up just dumbed down by rote memorizing to achieve
teacher approval and school-targeted results. Much education is not problem focused or solution oriented,
or relevant to real-world challenges, as we believe it should be.
What else is wrong with school dynamics? Too much boring homework; absent parents who are not
interested in their kids’ progress or academic problems, only their results; elimination of gym class and
structured playtime (no time or place to release pent up energy, socialize at recess or develop
imagination); and the ever-tempting option to text and surf the Internet in class, which swamps directed
attention at the lesson of the day.
Thirty years ago elementary schools offered recess twice a day. Many schools now have recess only
once a day, and some schools are eliminating play or free time altogether. So all that restless energy that
young boys have now has nowhere to be released — except in the classroom.
Kindergarten now resembles what used to be a first-grade class. Since boys’ brains develop differently
from girls’, they aren’t receptive to the intense reading exercises now given to kindergarteners. If a boy is
forced to learn before his brain his ready, he is unintentionally conditioned to dislike the task, and early
negative experiences create resistance and resentment for learning in particular and school in general.
Since 1980, there has been a 71 percent increase in the number of boys who say they don’t like school,
according to a University of Michigan study.
62
That dislike is both cause and effect of poor academic
performance. We see this in the evidence that the United States ranked No. 25 on international
comparative tests. In Finland, which ranked No. 1, children don’t start formal schooling until they’re 7
years old,
63
but they are learning much at home from their families.
Since B’s have become the new C’s — it is now unacceptable to be “average” — has the pressure
from having to perform turned boys off from trying in the first place? Many guys from our survey said yes.
In particular, 64 percent of boys age 12 and younger agreed that “pressure to perform combined with fear
of failing causes young men to not bother trying in the first place.”
SAT scores are often seen as a valid predictor of college success.
64
But guys’ SAT scores are the

worst they’ve been in 40 years. With more and more-diverse test takers than ever before, a decline in
scores is somewhat expected. But these scores affected boys of all races and SES (socioeconomic status)
levels. So why the regression? Despite the Obama administration describing as fatally flawed the Bush
administration’s plan of No Child Left Behind (NCLB), it’s still the law of the land, and its test-driven
accountability measures are falling short, even if we did not disagree with the premise of teaching to the
testing.
“Unfortunately, [NCLB] testing did not translate into improved learning. A Rand Corp. study released
last week found that schools did pay more attention to underserved groups, but teaching focused on test
prep rather than learning. Schools reduced time for teaching subjects that weren’t tested but are important
for training citizens, like social studies,” a
San Francisco Chronicle
editorial reported in January.
65
The Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) article “What’s the Problem with School?”
66
sums up the
situation well:
“The average boy is less mature socially and verbally yet more physically active than the average
girl when he starts school.” Since boys are more active than girls, they have more difficulty sitting
still for long periods of time. (As a side note, much of the active time kids used to have during
school has all but vanished. Children spend about half as much time outdoors today as they did in the
1980s, and some schools have eliminated recess altogether. In recent years, 40,000 American
schools have eliminated recess, with only 12 percent of states requiring elementary schools to offer
any free time and only 13.7 percent of elementary school students having gym classes at least three
times a week.
67
)
Children are now being taught to read in kindergarten, and boys, being less verbally skilled than
girls, are not developmentally ready to be receptive to reading exercises.
“The elementary classroom is four-fifths language based, and girls are, on average, stronger than
boys in language.” Thus boys feel like they are not good at literacy, and that perceived deficit
becomes a part of their new negative self-identity.
Boys tend to learn best with hands-on learning activities, and schools don’t offer enough
opportunities to manipulate actual things. Furthermore, diaries and first-person narratives, writing
styles preferred by girls, are often favored over comic books and science fiction, themes favored by
boys.
Fewer than one in nine schoolteachers is a man.
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Most teachers in elementary schools are women,
which leaves fewer male models for learning as a masculine pursuit. (We would add that this is even
more true in high school classes.)
Once students are in college, they face other kinds of challenges. Clifford Nass, distinguished
communications professor at Stanford University, sees consequences of the ubiquitous digital life:
You walk around the world and you see people multitasking. They’re playing games and they’re
reading email and they’re on Facebook, etc. … On a college campus, most kids are doing two
things at once, maybe three things at once. … Virtually all multitaskers think they are brilliant
at multitasking. And one of the big discoveries is, You know what? You’re really lousy at it! It
turns out multitaskers are terrible at every aspect of multitasking. They get distracted
constantly. Their memory is very disorganized. Recent work we’ve done suggests they’re worse
at analytical reasoning. We worry that it may be creating people who are unable to think well

and clearly.
69

And that is true of some of the best college students in America — the 1,500 select few who are accepted
to Stanford from among the 30,000 applicants annually. If they can’t multitask, but believe they can, what
chance is there that less-talented students can do so effectively?

High on life, or high on something
In 2006, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) professor John Gabrieli and his research team
found that medication for ADHD improves the performance of normal kids by the same degree that it
improves the performance of kids with ADHD.
70
So when someone responds well to the medication —
better behavior, focus and grades — it doesn’t necessarily mean they have ADHD, yet many parents and
doctors are using these improvements to confirm the disorder.
What’s the harm if the medications help the kid do better in class? While kids generally do perform
better and become more manageable, being on these medications for even just a year can lead to changes
in personality. Friendly, outgoing, adventurous boys become lazy and irritable.
Professor William Carlezon and colleagues at Harvard University Medical School recently reported
that giving stimulant medications — such as those used to treat boys with ADHD — to juvenile laboratory
animals resulted in those animals displaying loss of drive when they grew up. These animals looked
normal but were lazy. They didn’t want to work hard, not even to escape a bad situation. The researchers
suggested that similar effects could be seen in children. Children might look fine during and after taking
these medications, but as adults they won’t have much motivation or drive.
Sax writes in
Boys Adrift
that stimulant medications appear to harm the brain by damaging an area
called the nucleus accumbens, where motivation is turned into action. If a boy’s nucleus accumbens is
damaged, he may still be hungry or sexually aroused, but will not do anything about it. Independent groups
of researchers at Universities in the United States and Europe have found that even when young laboratory
animals were exposed to even low dosages of these medications for short periods of time, permanent
damage to the nucleus accumbens can happen:
One particularly disturbing study — conducted jointly by researchers at Tufts, UCLA, and
Brown University — documented a nearly linear correlation between the nucleus accumbens
and individual motivation. The smaller the nucleus accumbens, the more likely that person was
to be apathetic, lacking in drive. These investigators emphasized that apathy was quite
independent of depression. A young man can be completely unmotivated — and still be perfectly
happy and content.
71

He just won’t do much or want to do much, but be a smiling couch potato. This is especially relevant to
guys since nearly 85 percent of all stimulant medications are prescribed to American boys.
72
One of the side effects of taking stimulants is nervousness and anxiety. What’s a great way to reduce
these side effects? Smoke pot.
Many young men, both those taking and not taking medication, smoke marijuana. And marijuana is not
the same drug it used to be. The average potency of weed has risen steadily for the last three decades. The
average THC content (the psychoactive constituent of marijuana) in 1983 was less than 4 percent, but in
2008 the THC content was more than 10 percent, and it is expected to rise to 15 percent or 16 percent in
the next 10 years. In October 2011, the Dutch government announced that high-potency weed (with a THC
content of 15 percent and higher) would now be classified in the hard drugs category along with cocaine
and ecstasy.
73
One reason for the reclassification may be that high-potency weed significantly impairs
executive function and motor control,
74
processes that are involved in planning, memory, attention,

problem solving, verbal reasoning and resisting temptation. From one generation to the next, marijuana
has become an entirely different drug that can potentially do more harm than good.
75
One male freshman college student told us a story that is becoming more and more common:
In the first grade, I was diagnosed with ADHD. I began taking Ritalin soon after. That diagnosis
has complemented the trajectory of my social and academic life up to this very day. My teachers
and parents always told me I was smart, but I had a hard time believing them, as I always found
myself in trouble or with a tutor. Middle school was particularly turbulent for me, as I moved to
an elite private school in the seventh grade. My grades were abysmal, and from the start, up
until I transferred after the end of my freshman year of high school there, there was not a
semester where I was not on some form of probation,
be it academic or social. Furthermore,
trouble, in school and out, has never failed to find me.
He added that he smoked a fair amount of marijuana, which was a common practice across campus.

Back away from the doughnut
Roughly 71 percent of adult males in America are overweight.
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When men gain weight — the bad kind,
as opposed to bulking up muscles — a metabolic change happens that drops the hormone levels in the
body. Researchers from the University of Buffalo recently determined that obese men have lower levels
of testosterone, and when that male hormone drops, one of the biggest victims is bedroom performance.
The study shows that 40 percent of obese men have abnormally low levels of testosterone.
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Obesity can
also trigger Type 2 diabetes, one effect of which is restricted blood flow to veins, especially the small
ones in the penis and testicles. That surge of blood is essential for male erections. An interesting
corollary of the combination of obesity and testosterone decline in males is the rise in their bodies of the
female hormone estrogen, which can lead to erectile dysfunction and infertility.
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Over the last few decades, physical activity among youth has decreased while screen time has
increased. Sedentary behavior fills time that children could be spending in physical activities or even
sleeping, contributing to excessive snacking and eating meals in front of the television or computer screen.
“Young teen boys
in particular
who spend their nights playing video games or texting their friends instead
of sleeping are putting themselves at greater risk for gaining unhealthy amounts of weight and becoming
obese,” reported April Fulton in a recent National Public Radio article.
79
Childhood habits tend to stick
with people for the rest of their lives. Thus kids who watch television and play video games instead of
being active are setting themselves up for a sedentary future, reported a recent Harvard University
Medical School Special Health Report.
80
Not surprisingly, several studies have found a positive
association between screen time and prevalence of overweight in children.
81
There may also be a strong correlation between family trauma — like divorce — and being
overweight. In a survey of almost 300 morbidly obese patients, researchers found a very high occurrence
of severe family dysfunction, particularly sexual abuse. About 50 percent (both male and female) reported
they were sexually assaulted or abused as children, a rate 300 percent higher than the general male
population. Pretty much all those surveyed reported experiencing some lasting form of childhood trauma.
Weight gain often immediately follows a distressing life event. Examples of this on a large scale include
divorce, and divorce rates increased considerably in America before obesity began to soar.
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Young boys
often have more difficulty adapting to a parent’s divorce than young girls — especially if the father leaves
the home, putting them at higher risk.

Just press Play: Porn and video games
Technology challenges us to assert our human values, which means that, first of all, we have to
figure
out what they are. That’s not so easy. Technology isn’t good or bad, it’s powerful and it's complicated.
Take advantage of what it can do. Learn what it can do. But also ask, “What is it doing to us?” We’re
going to slowly, slowly find our balance, but I think it’s going to take time.
— Professor Sherry Turkle, MIT Initiative on Technology and Self
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To a young man, the thrill-packed worlds of online porn and video games are far more exciting than real
life. And these sources of stimulation are now totally pervasive. Internet, videos and television are
available 24 hours a day on a variety of devices (computers, laptops, phones, TVs, iPads, and so on.).
Part of the problem is that we are telling boys their inner worlds are unacceptable and scary, therefore
they have no other outlet for their impulses. This is all contributing to an overall decrease in motivation to
contribute or partake in real-world events and social relationships.
Pornography is a dopamine-producing machine. Dopamine is a neurotransmitter associated with
activation of the brain’s reward system. Its presence helps initiate feelings of enjoyment and pleasure.
Rewarding experiences such as eating, taking drugs and having sex release dopamine into two main brain
regions, the nucleus accumbens and the frontal cortex. However, once a person develops an addiction, the
dopamine pathways become pathological. Neutral stimuli and events that are associated with the
addictive substance or its process, such as gambling casinos or drug-taking sequences, can become
conditioned to generate further arousal and add to the body’s chemical addiction. When excessive porn
viewing becomes addictive, the brain lights up as if it were on heroin.
Many people who watched Phil’s TEDTalk commented that porn and video games should not be
lumped together. Video gamers are not necessarily porn users, and vice versa. In many ways, porn and
video games are different, but they share many characteristics. Both video games and porn are
entertaining and have interesting and useful applications, but they can also be a huge waste of time and
potentially psychologically and socially damaging to some guys. We are concerned about young men who
are
excessively
using one or both porn and video games
in

social isolation
. We consider four hours or
more a day of playing video games alone to be excessive. There has been no established guideline about
what constitutes an excessive amount of porn; the effects of porn are more abstract and difficult to define.
Both video and online porn are relatively recent forms of digital entertainment that have been added to
the social environment. The industries are increasingly merging and becoming particularly seductive to
gamers, as Andrew Doan, author of
Hooked on Games,
points out:
The combination of sex and pornography in a video game has the potential for explosive growth
and has already proven to become so. In Second Life, it’s reported that there are over 20 million
accounts with more than half of those being active gamers. … There are people making
significant amounts of real money by providing a virtual escort service, some are making six-
figure incomes. By day, a woman could become a mom, lawyer, or other professional. But by
night, she is the voice behind an avatar that charges twenty dollars an hour for a man to have a
virtual companion and virtual sex.
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Eroticism and motivation are both fueled by arousal. If there is lust, arousal veers in a sexual direction,
and if there is a need to triumph, arousal sends one down the path of goal setting and long-term success.
Real life is competing with digital alternatives for nearly every aspect of existence; since porn and video
games are readily accessible, burden free and fun. The choice for lots of young men is often the digital
alternative.
Though nearly every social need in reality now has a complement in the digital world, it is unclear
whether the digital alternatives satisfy those needs in the same way. In Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of
needs, physiological and safety needs must be met in physical reality. Is it possible, however, for the top
three needs in Maslow’s hierarchy — belongingness, love and esteem, and self-actualization — to be met
in digital reality? Could a person be just as, if not more, fulfilled in digital reality? The answer is yes and
no; some needs can be achieved in the digital world, but because these needs are met without risk of
consequence, and frequently in social isolation — as if in a dress rehearsal — a person may be able to
achieve their esteem needs yet completely bypass belongingness and love needs. Therein lies a major
problem: entitlement without the ability to relate to others. Furthermore, self-actualization could not be
reached without the fulfillment of the other needs, so a lack of intimacy and appreciation for others
creates a distorted sense of potential and actualization not based in shared reality.

It’s unclear how well kids can move between reality and digital worlds. Katie Salen, director of
design at the Quest to Learn school in New York, says, “People talk about this distinction between the
virtual world and the real world, and there’s concern that there is an inability on the part of young people
to separate the two. I actually think that that distinction is a very adult idea, an idea that has come from a
generation of people [for whom] virtual didn’t exist and it was something new that was then added to the
real world. But kids have that ability to move kind of seamlessly between the digital and the real.”
Jeremy Bailenson, director of the Virtual Human Interaction Lab at Stanford University, says, “The
distinctions between real and virtual world are becoming blurred, even interchangeable.” In the
documentary
Digital Nation
, Bailenson makes a realistic-looking avatar of host Douglas Rushkoff:

In one study, we made you 10 centimeters taller than you actually were and had you conduct a
negotiation with someone. Having 10 centimeters difference in height from your normal self
causes you to be three times more likely to beat someone in a negotiation in virtual reality. …
Regardless of our actual heights, you’ll then beat me face to face when we have a negotiation.
… A small exposure inside the virtual reality carried over to their behavior face to face. …
We’ve done studies with children [in which] they see themselves swimming around with whales
in a virtual reality; a week later, half of them will believe that they swam with whales.
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Dynamics of porn
Woody Allen once said, “Sex without love is an empty experience, but as empty experiences go, it’s one
of the best.” Or is it?
One high-school-age guy from our survey commented, “I think the on-demand pleasure, gratification,
control and stress release of pornography and video games reduces our patience, makes us hold ourselves
to unrealistic expectations and cripples us socially.”
Pornography is the explicit portrayal of sexual subject matter meant to stimulate sexual arousal and
satisfaction. Unlike art or erotica, porn has little artistic merit and is focused on the physical act of sex
rather than feelings and emotions. Depictions of sex have been around since prehistoric times, but the
concept of pornography was not widely understood until the latter half of the 19th century. The large-scale
excavations of Pompeii in the 1860s kicked off discussions on what exactly qualified as obscene,
resulting in many of the erotic objects discovered being carted away to private museums.
The production of pornographic films quickly followed the invention of the motion picture in 1895.
Quickly after that, sexually explicit materials were deemed obscene and made illegal, which continued
through the 1960s. Today, access to pornographic material is limited to people over 18, though enforcing
“community standards” is tricky, especially online. Most people would agree that hard-core pornography
should not be available to children, but access to it — voluntary and involuntary — is difficult to
regulate.
In 1970, the total retail value of hard-core pornography in the United States was estimated to be $10
million. The porn industry revenues in 2006 were estimated at $13.3 billion.
86
Despite what appear to be
large profits, industry executives say the business of porn is suffering these days due to the weak
economy, piracy, and free or inexpensive porn available online.
87
While huge profits used to be made
from hotel room adult entertainment and DVD sales, the market has shifted in favor of the affordability
and anonymity that the Internet provides; porn is now only a click away. Technology has also made it
easier to enter the industry; anyone who wants to have sex on camera can be a porn player — and if
they’re any good at enticing viewers, a porn star.
Can guys learn about sex from watching porn videos? Sure, somewhat. They can learn that sexual acts
can be quite varied and, thereby, a continual source of pleasure over one’s lifetime by consensual
experimentation with one’s partner. Beyond that, the take-away message from porn viewing is likely to be
ego deflating because of the assumption that what you see is what is the norm, the acceptable way to
perform, the appropriate way to relate to a sexual partner; worst of all, you see that size not only matters
but dominates.
Most Internet porn has no story line, no buildup to the sexual performance. There are no words, just
actions. There is no suggestion that in real life there are romantic precursors, negotiations, discussions,
tender moments, kissing, touching, complimenting and even just talking. Then there is the implicit
understanding that the women wants sex as much or more than the male in the video, and she might even
initiate unzipping him, take his pants off and start oral sex. That is not going to happen often in the real
world.
Imagine learning to play basketball by watching Orlando Magic’s Dwight Howard dunk over his
adversaries, or baseball by watching all-star hitter Albert Pujols smack three mammoth home runs in the
World Series. They are exceptional athletes with dominant bodies trained for years to be among the best

in their profession. So they might inspire, but you learn the game by diligent practice on Little League
fields or on playground courts with coaches and peers whose ability level, age and size are comparable
to yours. In porn, male actors have enormous penises. They are selected for their size and stamina, and
then likely take meds to enhance their arousal. What you don’t see are breaks in the action to change
camera angles during which they may get “fluffed” by an assistant, take meds or get secondary assistance
from vacuum pumps or penile injections. So, too, their seeming ability to perform nonstop for 20 minutes
may also include offscreen timeouts.
A certain negative effect of boys watching lots of porn is a growing feeling of penis envy, of not
measuring up, so to speak. That self-consciousness in a realm so important for male identity is surely a
source of disguised discontent. This can be seen in public locker rooms, where many young guys refuse to
disrobe, undressing in the showers and covering themselves when they come out. Consider that more men
under 30 are being prescribed Viagra than ever before to ensure adequate performance.
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Once such drugs
are perceived as necessary to sexual success, it becomes meds over matter in that realm. Ad campaigns
that started with old-timers years ago have shifted to ever-younger looking men who want to be ready for
action at the hint of sex.

Chronic stimulation, chronic dissatisfaction
Sex is an undercurrent of society, but we don’t look at it holistically. We promote love but deny lust,
banning it from mainstream media. Lust is hardly out of sight; rather, it’s in plain sight, on thousands of
online sites. The Internet is the great collective unconscious that provides insight into our needs, desires
and fantasies. And while porn may initially help people become more excited about sex, over time it
appears to have the opposite effect. A recent study from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention
(CDC) found that “regular porn users are more likely to report depression and poor physical health than
nonusers are. … The reason is that porn may start a cycle of isolation. … Porn may become a substitute
for healthy face-to-face interactions, social or sexual.”
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Porn is an attempt to make up for the underrepresentation of lust in our culture; it’s represented very,
very well online. According to the Web traffic-reporting site
Alexa.com
, 24 out of the top 500 most-
viewed general websites worldwide are dedicated to porn — that’s nearly 5 percent. To put this in
context, nearly 47 of the top 500 sites are different countries’ Google homepages; the most popular porn
sites, LiveJasmin and XVideos, had more traffic than 36 of them, including Google Canada, Mexico,
Australia and Germany (
Alexa.com
, July 8, 2011). LiveJasmin and XVideos are also visited more than
CNN, AOL, Myspace and even Netflix (Netflix alone has 26.3 million subscribers
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). However, unlike
many of the other popular sites, which have a general audience, the porn websites’ audience is primarily
males under 24 years old, most of whom are viewing from home.
All of the 24 most popular porn sites offer free content and also offer more-exclusive features, such as
higher-quality high-definition (HD) videos or live webcam viewing for a small fee. You can pretty much
find anything you want free of charge, and you can access these videos nearly anytime, anywhere in the
world that Internet exists. A buffet of arousal awaits. One of the major sites, PornHub, has 56 categories
listed conveniently in alphabetical order; the average category hosts 5,832 separate videos. The most-
viewed videos among these categories average 22.3 million views and are about 20 minutes long.
On assignment for this book, Nikita watched PornHub videos for three days straight to record in detail
what they were all about. In the most-viewed videos, she found it is an average of 33 percent of the way
through the video before there is vaginal or anal penetration. In only a quarter of the videos is there a
discernable female orgasm, whereas in 81 percent of the videos there is a discernable male orgasm — the
male orgasm typically is the highlight of the final scene.
Not once in any of the most-viewed videos is there a discussion of safer sex practices, or of physical
or emotional expectations or boundaries. Condoms are used in only one of the most-viewed videos —
one in which lesbians are using strap-ons. And many times a man will receive oral sex from a woman and
then penetrate her vagina — and then her anus and then move back to her mouth or vagina (known as
ATM, for ass to mouth), a practice which puts the woman at much higher risk for sexually transmitted
diseases (STDs) and bacterial infections such as urinary tract infections (UTIs). Very seldom is there a
close-up on the man’s face, yet there are many close-ups on the woman’s. A commonly used camera angle
focuses the lens directly on the genitals while the woman’s breasts and/or face are visible in the
background. Often the woman is positioned so her facial expressions can be filmed. The man often
ejaculates on the woman’s breasts or face, or in her mouth, rather than inside her (with the exception of
“creampie” videos). Porn videos usually end shortly after the man has ejaculated, suggesting male
ejaculation is the only pinnacle of sex. The old “fade to black” that ended movies has become “face to

black,” as porn ends with the woman’s face covered with cum.
These videos insinuate that sexual fantasies never involve conversation. There is very little emotional
intimacy, and verbal exchanges, if present, are awkwardly scripted. Surprisingly, for all the bad rap porn
gets, there are very few instances in which derogatory language about women (such as slut, cunt, bitch) is
directed at the woman — at least that is the case in the most-viewed videos. Such language occurs more
in gang-bang and rough-sex videos. There is also very little physical intimacy, because if partners were
actually close to each other, the camera would not be able to capture such graphic close-ups.
Our overall conclusion is that porn is not about sex or making love, it’s about “fucking” in a visually
appealing way for the male viewer. That’s not to say that women don’t enjoy watching people have sex;
many do, and there are a good number who watch porn. Simply put, most women just don’t enjoy shot
after shot of graphic close-ups of body parts bashing together without any context. Porn is not about
romance, sexual foreplay or gradual building up to ever-greater intimacy. It is about on-demand
performance of oral, initially, then vaginal or anal sex, then variations in positions or partner
arrangements. On a positive level, porn can be an outlet for exploring fantasy or substitute for a lack of
sexual partners in real life, but it could set off a progression into further seclusion. It could also cause
other, unwanted, undesirable changes.

Dude, where’s my erection?
The most powerful sex organ is the brain, and for men, that’s where an erection starts. So what happens to
your brain when you watch porn? Gary and Marnia Wilson, creators of the website Your Brain On Porn
(
yourbrainonporn.com
), compared Internet porn to excessive gambling, video game playing, and food
addiction — all of which can cause brain changes that mimic drug addiction. Conveniently, the same part
of your brain where arousal occurs is the same place where addiction takes place: the limbic system.
That’s where your reward circuitry is and where you experience the desire to eat, have sex, take risks and
fall in love, as well as pleasure and libido. It’s here that you get turned on — or off — or addicted to
something.
Gary Wilson explains that because dopamine is the primary neurotransmitter that turns on the reward
circuit, the more aroused you are sexually, the higher your dopamine level. The higher your dopamine, the
more you crave something. Dopamine is also the basis for the motivation to achieve your desires, and in
the context of sex, it’s central to sexual desire and erections. An erection won’t happen if there is not
enough dopamine to signal the reward circuitry. Dopamine skyrockets with novelty, so with every new
sexual partner or sex scene, you are getting another surge of dopamine. If your dopamine starts to decline
— that is, your erection starts to dwindle — you just click on something else to boost yourself back up.
And with Internet porn, there is always something new, exciting or ever-more shocking only a click away.
However, watch enough porn and your reward circuitry will essentially get burned out because it has
been overstimulated by your dopamine system and thus becomes less responsive. At this point you
become dependent on new porn, because you need more and more stimulation to become aroused and get
that penis saluting again. Eventually, the porn pathway in your brain becomes so strong that you are no
longer sensitive to normal or usual stimuli, such as sex with a real person.
“Internet porn is now a powerful memory that calls to you at a subconscious level — because it’s the
most reliable source of dopamine, erections and relief from your cravings. … This is what happens with
all addictions. The more you overstimulate the reward circuitry by jacking up your dopamine, … the less
it responds. Think of a flashlight with fading batteries. In simple terms, your reward circuitry isn’t
providing enough electricity to power your erections,” says Wilson. He notes that porn-induced erectile
dysfunction “is not psychological — it has a physiological cause. It’s a symptom of an addictive process
that has altered the brain.” These changes associated with continued heavy porn use can cause numerous
consequences:
91
Lack of spontaneous erections.
Lack of arousal by static porn or previously viewed porn. Often guys need to escalate to more
extreme material just to get aroused — a sign of addiction.
Decreased penile sensitivity — indicating the brain has become numbed to pleasure.
Delayed ejaculation or the inability to orgasm during sex with a real partner.
Copulatory impotence — the inability to maintain an erection with a real partner.
Erectile dysfunction drugs lose their effect — in other words, the problem is in the brain, not the
penis.
Eventual inability to get any erection, even viewing the extreme types of porn.

Sexual enhancement drugs like Viagra and Cialis won’t help these problems, because they only
dilate the blood vessels to sustain an erection, not create one. The brain needs to be aroused first;
without arousal, nothing can happen. And that’s what porn does over time — it kills the male’s
arousal response.

Sex education vs. porn
The high availability of Internet porn combined with a lack of sex education means many young guys
don’t know what they’re getting into. They’re going to have challenges later with women because they
don’t realize how it’s impacting or shaping their sexuality. For them, sex becomes an objectified
experience. I have talked with guys that have to fantasize about being with their partner when they’re
actually with their partner because they’re disconnected from the sensation of their own body
connecting with another body.
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— Celeste Hirschman, sex and relationship therapist and author

of
Cockfidence: The Extraordinary
Lover’s Guide to Being the Man You Want to Be and Driving Women Wild

Sex education is to porn as reality is to fantasy. There’s a lot of fantasy material freely available, but very
few informative resources out there for young people regarding sex. We don’t want to say porn is bad, but
when young guys are on a regular diet of it — watching it
before
they’ve actually started having sex —
one has to wonder how it affects their views on normal, or reality-based, sexual behavior.
A recent article stated young males were suffering from “sexual anorexia” after Internet porn use. A
large-scale survey of 28,000 young men in Italy found that many of them started an “excessive
consumption” of porn sites as early as age 14 and later on, in their mid-20s, became inured to “even the
most violent images.”
93
The problem worsens when guys’ sexuality develops independently from real-life
relationships. As they develop lower reactions to the porn sites, their libido drops, and then it becomes
impossible to get an erection. A lot of guys in our survey said that porn distorted their idea of a healthy
sexual relationship and that “the script” of porn was always playing in the back of their mind when they
were with a real girl.
Surely those views would be tempered by better sex education and conversations about what to expect
from real-life sexual relationships. Here’s how one high school guy from our survey responded:
I think that our society, one which allows the display of blood and gore and viscera on a
network television but gawks at the slightest implication of a nipple, likely due to lingering
protestant ideals, should become better acquainted [with] and less ashamed of its sexuality,
especially considering how much more common and useful it is than a desensitization to death
and disembowelment.
The average age at which kids first view porn is 11 years old.
94
Sexual education in American public
schools tends to begin around the same time, and it is taught mainly in two forms abstinence-only and
comprehensive. The abstinence-only approach promotes the abstinence from sex before marriage.
Comprehensive sex education promotes abstinence but also informs students of the benefits of
contraception and how to avoid STDs and sexually transmitted infections (STIs). Neither the
comprehensive nor the abstinence-only approach discusses porn. According to a 2010 report from the
CDC, almost all teens in America have received a formal sex education by age 18, but only about two-
thirds have been taught about birth control methods.
95
Currently, there is no cohesive national law
governing what is taught in sex education classes; some state laws allow curriculum decisions to be
determined by individual school districts.

Neither the comprehensive nor the abstinence-only approach is very effective in its stated objectives.
People are marrying later than they ever have; the average age is 28 for men and 26 for women.
96
Eighty-
eight percent of teens who pledge abstinence and 90 percent of Americans overall will have sex before
marriage, yet most are ill-equipped to navigate the physical and emotional landscape of sex.
97
“Kids who learn abstinence only have just as much sex — only they use condoms less often. Limiting
the availability of contraception doesn’t reduce sexual activity — it just increases unwanted pregnancy,”
says Marty Klein, author of
America’s War on Sex: The Attack on Law, Lust, and Liberty
. He writes,
“Abstinence programs don’t shape adolescents’ sexual
behavior
much, they … shape the
emotional
context
of their sexual behavior. So these young people … understand less about how sex actually works,
feel worse about themselves, and talk less about their sexual feelings or experiences with their parents.”
98
In 2009, 15- to- 24-year-olds made up about 25 percent of the sexually active population, yet they
acquired nearly half of all new STDs.
99
The same year, 410,000 15- to 19-year-old girls gave birth — a
higher teen birth rate than in almost every other developed country. “Each year,” says the CDC, “teen
childbearing alone costs the United States approximately $6 billion in lost tax revenue and nearly $3
billion in public expenditures.”
100
Yet the grand total for funding all abstinence education,
pregnancy/STD/HIV prevention and education programs, and family planning services annually is $874
million.
101
If it’s not already obvious, these numbers on their own clearly indicate that it is worth it to
make these programs more effective.
Students want better programs, too, but unfortunately they have little influence on what information
schools give them. With few public resources and no help from parents, the Internet has become the main
go-to resource for unanswered questions and curiosities. Porn, being as accessible as it is, is now serving
as both sexual educator and safe haven for emerging sexual needs.
Young people are going to learn about sex one way or another, and technology is here to stay, which
begs the question to parents: Would you like to educate your children about sex — or would you rather let
the industries, like porn and other popular media, which exploit your failure to do so, be their primary
source of education? “Don’t do it,” or “Be safe,” isn’t an education. Although condoms tend to break less
than vows of abstinence, kids need more grown-ups they can talk with and readily accessible resources
they can go to for issues and questions.

Dating and the objectification of women
“Your nails are pretty,” he said as he examined her hands, “are they fake?” In the world of pickup artists,
or PUAs, back-handed compliments like this are known as negs. PUAs purposefully use psychological
tactics like negs to entice a girl into being attracted to them.
The girl we spoke with didn’t know about this strategy when he asked her the question. “Of course
not!” She was flustered and caught off-guard. “This guy has no tact,” she thought to herself. But he had a
formula. And the formula worked, sort of. They ended up making out at the end of the night, but the
chemistry was fleeting. Perhaps she just had buyer’s remorse and his game needed work, but her
attraction to him quickly waned when they moved beyond the script into the world of genuine human
connection.
Many books like
The Mystery Method
and
The Game
have emerged lately, offering some very
effective, sometimes offensive, and generally entertaining advice on how to pick up women. It is
admirable that guys would go to such elaborate lengths just to get their foot in the door, but unfortunately,
their solutions don’t address other key areas of a relationship, such as finding areas of mutual interest,
transitioning from stranger to interested date or becoming a long-term mate. Maybe tackling these other
areas is not the point, but at some point, when a guy does want a real relationship with a girl, it can be
difficult to transition out of the “game” into creating the relationship. Their whole mindset has to change
from approaching the girl or woman as a “target” of possible conquest to being with a “person” of
potential value and interest.
The key is staying mindful. When you snuff out the spontaneity of connecting with someone from the
opposite sex, the motivation transforms from meeting an interesting girl to bedding “10s.” It goes from
building self-confidence to peacocking. It’s not even about connecting anymore; it’s about escalating the
game in order to score. Other people involved become interchangeable objects for one’s pleasure as the
game takes on a new identity more like fantasy football than fantasies about making love with a real-life,
flesh-and-blood woman.
Since the joy of romantic connection doesn’t lie in prefabricated interaction, what do guys who use
these methods really want? In the world of young men, the desire for happiness and fulfillment has
somehow morphed into the need for stimulation, amusement and control.
Tucker Max, best-selling author of
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
and
Assholes Finish First
, posted
a dating application online that received many responses. His multiple-choice form asked potential dates
questions such as, “What will my friends say when they see you?” Below are some of the options
responders could choose for that question:
“Another tall, hot blonde with no self-esteem — he’s getting laid tonight.”
“Tonight’s forecast calls for scattered clothes, with a significant chance of intense, passionate
humping.”
“My Lord — she smells like the fish market.”
“Well, she’s too ugly for him to date … $10 says he sleeps with her anyway.”
“I wouldn’t call her fat, but he’s gonna need the Jaws of Life to get out of this.”
“She’s just a cheap hooker. I wonder how much smack she cost him.”
“Should have been a blow job.”
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On one level, it’s a joke. But it makes you wonder why Max’s writing turned into a No. 1
New York Times
bestselling book while many people are embarrassed to buy condoms or don’t know how to have an
honest conversation about sex.
We see sex everywhere, so why is it so hard to talk about? Is being crude — thus lowbrow and easily
dismissible — the only way to make it acceptable? A lot of men in America have developed a madonna-
whore complex in part because of this strange divergence. Described as love without sex and sex without
love, these men want a wholesome woman as their mate and a whorish woman as their lover. When they
come across a woman in the real world that is nice
and
sexual, they are confused and often push her away
— they don’t want sex unless it’s impersonal. This creates hugely challenging intimacy problems for
everyone involved.
Relationships used to be viewed as a precursor to setting up a family together, and people treated their
potential partners as such. But today, with fewer reasons to become romantically committed, young men
don’t need to look beyond women as sex objects.

Dynamics of video games
I’ve fallen in love again, head over heels. Step aside, Crysis: Your sequel is just as bubbly and
stunning as you once were in 2007. You were amazing, but this latest model with the new streamlined
features is just downright beautiful.
— Chris Fong, games writer
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ISTOCKPHOTO

Like sex, games have been around forever. Like porn, video games entered mainstream popularity in the
1970s and 1980s. It was then that arcade games and the first gaming consoles were introduced. The
availability of computers, the Internet, touch screens and motion control revolutionized the way people
were able to play.
There are a lot of benefits to playing video games — mainly, they are a lot of fun, and there can be a lot
of social bonding, problem solving, strategy and even exercise involved. Online games also provide the
opportunity to become more computer literate, a skill that should not be underestimated in the future job
market. A lot of online games also allow people to interact with other people around the world, providing
an opportunity to learn about many other cultures. But these benefits extend only to a point, and a lot of
people don’t take advantage of these positive features.

As we mentioned before, we’re mostly concerned about people who play video games excessively and
in isolation. In a recent
AskMen
survey, when asked, “Who do you play video games with most often,”
only 24 percent of respondents said they play with their friends in person, while 37 percent said they play
either completely alone or with strangers online.
104
The disadvantage of playing video games, especially a lot of exciting video games, is that it can make
other people and real life seem boring and not worthwhile in comparison. Not surprisingly, compared
with teenagers who don’t play video games, adolescent gamers spend about 30 percent less time reading
and 34 percent less time doing homework.
105
Video gaming is also associated with decreased school
performance, and desensitization to violence, and can influence how one learns and socializes due to a
lack of balance between time spent playing and engaging in other activities.
106
Going back to
Boys Adrift
, Sax points out that video games actually can affect the brain in ways that
compromise motivation. The nucleus accumbens operates in conjunction with another area of the brain
called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC); the nucleus accumbens is responsible for directing
drive and motivation, and the DLPFC provides context for that drive:
A recent brain imaging study of boys between the ages of seven and fourteen years found that
playing video games puts this system seriously out of kilter. It seems to shut off blood flow to the
DLPFC. … Playing these games engorges the nucleus accumbens with blood, while diverting
blood away from the balancing area of the brain. The net result is that playing video games
gives boys the reward associated with achieving a great objective, but
without any connection to
the real world, without any sense of a need to contextualize the story.
107

When video games go wrong
Few things unite people like a common enemy. In the past, a common enemy might have been a
neighboring tribe or country, but a gamer’s enemy is social obligation: responsibilities, time management,
dealing with real people and taking real risks.
Video games go wrong when people play alone for long periods of time on a regular basis. A couple of
grown men loaned their perspectives in our survey:
I believe myself to be a member of the first generation of Internet gamers, and I used to be a
hard-core MMOG (massively multiplayer online game) addict spending 12 to 16 hours a day
playing games. So I will share some personal thoughts. It started with bulletin board systems
online, where you could play simple games and leave messages to other people, and gradually
progressed into online chat rooms and then interactive games with chat rooms and now into
online societies where you can literally spend all of your daylight hours inside and there will be
people there wanting to play and chat with you. This alternative to spending time with people in
the physical world around them offers easier access to gratification of social needs. The direct
consequence of this is a degeneration of one’s ability to socialize in person. Especially when it
comes to new people and women. We have nothing of interest to talk about. No one wants to hear
about our characters or things that happened during an online battle, or how we have designed
our online house. And so we
are left behind others who are not as interested in online gaming.
Another horrible side effect is poor physical health. Many gamers (when I say gamers, I am
referring to ones I know and have met) have underdeveloped upper-body muscles and poor
eating habits and health as a direct consequence of the time spent behind a computer. Once you
find yourself addicted to the Internet, it feels pointless to change your habits, because you get
no gratification for doing so. If you manage to break away from the computer screen, you will
not know what to do with the time you normally spend playing. There are no tools available
online that I have found to offer a path to freedom from this kind of addiction. I believe the best
solution is prevention, and the only way to do that is to inspire children.

I am a physician with a research background in neuroscience, who battled his own addictions
with video games. I was an addicted gamer who, at my peak, invested over 20,000 hours of
playing games over a period of nine years. My reckless compulsion to play games transformed
me into a monster that almost destroyed my family, marriage and career. Without attention to
this quickest-growing addiction, our society will suffer from the creation of Generation Vidiot,
millions of people devoid of innovation and skills to live in the physical world.

Video games also go wrong when the person playing them is desensitized to reality and real-life
interactions with others. Many would agree that violence in video games is synonymous with success.
108
Children with more propensities to be aggressive are more attracted to violent video media, but violent
media, in turn, can also make them more aggressive. This could be related to the fact that most video
games reward players for violent acts, often permitting them to move to the next level in a game. Yet
recent research suggests a link between violent video games and real-life aggression — given the

opportunity, both adults and children were more aggressive after playing violent games. And people who
identify themselves with violent perpetrators in video games are able to take aggressive action while
playing that role, reinforcing aggressive behavior.
109

Preparing for cyberwar
More and more, violent video games are having practical applications. For example, realistic violent
video games set in a warlike environment are being used to treat veterans who have post-traumatic stress
disorder, or PTSD. Video game–like applications of digital technology are also an integral part of
military operation. P.W. Singer, author of
Wired for War
, raises some considerations:
Technology is wrapped up in the story of war. You look at all the things that surround us,
everything from the Internet to jet engines; these are all things where the military has been a
driver for technology. And technology opens new frontiers, new directions we can go in, but it
also creates new dilemmas, new questions you need to answer. … Going to war meant that you
were going to a place where there was such a danger that you might never come home again,
you might never see your family again. Now compare that experience to that of a Predator drone
pilot. You’re sitting behind a computer screen, you’re shooting missiles at enemy targets, you’re
killing enemy combatants. And then at the end of the day, you get back in your car, and 20
minutes later, you’re at the dinner table talking to your kids about their homework.
110
Singer alludes to important questions. How will identifying with a violent avatar, or removing oneself
from direct violent action that’s actually happening in the real world, affect the way we view each other
and affect our real-life behavior? Could video games desensitize players not only to others’ feelings but
also to their own?
Rye Barcott, author of
It Happened on the Way to War,
111

told us in an interview that “in the Marine
battalion in Iraq in 2005, during heavy firefight periods, young Marines returning to barracks would rush
to play violent video games all night, going back into battle the next day like ‘exhausted zombies,’ and that
was a common pattern among many of them.”
“Video games are never going to replicate the real thing,” says Maj. Larry F. Dillard Jr., U.S. Army.
112
But you never know.
In the popular children’s science fiction novel
Ender’s Game
, Ender gets enrolled into Battle School,
eventually reaching the school’s top rank through his intelligence and cunning. Ender’s practice sessions,
in which he commands spaceships in a 3-D battle simulator with his fellow students, gradually escalate
into battle after battle against an enemy alien race known as the Formics, aka Buggers. Ender is on the
brink of exhaustion and is having horrible nightmares that haunt him during his waking hours. In his “final
exam,” Ender’s crew is outnumbered nearly a thousand to one near a small planet. Ender decides to use a
deadly weapon to destroy the planet itself, annihilating all the ships in orbit. He’s hoping his ruthless
actions will get him kicked out of the school. Instead, he learns that all the battles had taken place with
real fleets and his actions effectively ended the war with the aliens.
The questions foremost in our minds are: Could Ender have killed the Buggers if he knew that it wasn’t
a game? If being one step removed from action makes for more-effective and less-endangered soldiers,
why wouldn’t the military be moving in this direction?
Not to mention how obsessed young people, especially guys, are with gaming. “Look, the military
understands that if it can’t embrace today’s digital youth, they are never going to recruit the kind of
soldiers and the kind of airmen and the kind of Marines that they need to have for the next century,” says

Noah Shachtman, contributing editor of
Wired.
113
But will the youth of today understand the impact of
their actions as they use indirect technology to execute their orders? Soldiers using this technology today
may have had first-hand experience in real combat situations, and they come to work wearing their
uniforms as a constant reminder that the button they press in America has real-life consequences overseas.
We are wary that kids who are growing up immersed in realistic digital entertainment will not have the
same capacity to empathize with other people and may make less-humane decisions.

When video games go right
There’s a reason why video games are so popular — they make challenges fun and interesting. When
video games go right, they provide a stimulating environment for triumph and offer some social bonding.
Games like World of Warcraft and Second Life are very social, even if players are in the guise of an
avatar. Positive gaming may also take the form of a learning or training program and make real-world
impacts.
Jane McGonigal’s World Without Oil was a step in the right direction. With the mantra “Play it —
before you live it,” more than 1,500 players started visualizing and living their lives as if there were a
true oil crisis. The result, as described on the website, was an “eerily plausible collective imagining of
such an event, complete with practical courses of action to help prevent such an event from actually
happening. … More than mere ‘raising awareness.’ World Without Oil made the issues
real
, and this in
turn led to real engagement and real change in people’s lives.” Visit
worldwithoutoil.org
to learn more.
Foldit is another game that is making waves. Users solve puzzles for science by designing proteins. It
turns out that humans’ pattern-recognition and puzzle-solving abilities are more efficient than existing
computer programs at pattern-folding tasks, so the scientists behind
Foldit
are using players’ answers to
teach computers to fold proteins faster and predict protein structures. The combined effort of players
actually helped solve a problem related to HIV that had puzzled scientists for more than 10 years. Check
out
http://fold.it
for more information.
The Nintendo Wii gaming system is another great example of positive gaming. Wii has a broader
demographic than other gaming consoles and typically involves more exercise and socializing, too. The
whole family can play together, but the games are fun enough that teenage guys play by themselves or with
each other. Nikita has even seen 90-year-old grandmothers playing Wii Bowling in a senior home. It’s one
of those “kid-tested, parent-approved” kind of things that creates a win-win scenario. One-fifth of 16- to
24-year-olds said they’d give up their gym membership if they played Wii regularly, and parents believe
that social gaming platforms like the Wii are having a positive influence in their home in addition to
encouraging kids to do more exercise, reported a recent TNS Technology study.
114

Billy is in his room
The scene: Visiting relatives are welcomed by their cousins, whom they have not seen for some time.
After the hugs and kisses and gift giving, the teenage son of the host family disappears — and never
returns, even to say goodbye. The relatives ask, “Where’s Billy?” His mom answers with what has
become a familiar family refrain: “Billy is in his room.” That is the explanation for the failure to respect
minimal social graces, or what used to be accepted as minimal family obligations to come out from
seclusion to even say, “See ya, Cuz” and buzz back to his video dungeon. For anyone who values family
and its rituals, this is unacceptable behavior not only from Billy but even more so from mom and pop,
who should know better and not be covering up for their son’s lack of civility. In one sense, as such
scenes get replicated widely, such behavior becomes part of the negative fallout from excessive, isolated
video game playing and porn absorption.

The rise of gals
More and more women are finding that, although it may not necessarily be what they want, they don’t have
to have a man in their life to achieve many of their personal, social and romantic goals.
Since the Equal Pay Act passed in 1963, women’s earnings have grown by 44 percent, compared with
6 percent for men. A 2010 study of single, childless urban workers between the ages of 22 and 30 found
that women actually earned 8 percent more than men. Black women with college degrees outnumber black
men 2-to-1.
115
Your authors celebrate the recent rise in status, power and wide-ranging abilities of girls and women.
Slowly but surely the glass ceiling is opening cracks to enable talented women to move up to top
leadership positions in industry. There are virtually no professions today that are off-limits to women who
are willing to work to make it in them.
This is wonderful progress. We don’t want to promote competition between the sexes, though; rather,
we’d like to see gender wrapping itself around men and women as a tribal blanket of interconnectedness.
There can no longer be us vs. them; we must work toward our shared future together.

What we can do
If the trends we’ve discussed here continue, what will happen is unclear, but our culture loses something
important when we, as a population, are less able to think critically, delay gratification, or define and
achieve meaningful personal and social goals. Technology especially needs to be embraced, but how we
embrace it may make the difference between healthy and unhealthy human interaction.
So where do go from here? How do we improve the situation for guys without disadvantaging another
group of people, such as girls and women?

What schools can do
Nobody who’s been teaching for 25 years would say that our students aren’t different now than they
were then. They need to be stimulated in ways that they didn’t need to be stimulated before.
— Sherry Turkle, MIT professor
116

Take pressure off performance and cultivate a love of learning. Don’t just give kids topics to master, give
them ideals for which to strive. Don’t just talk at students, create an environment where they can get
inspired. Take back mindless homework and give back recess. Let kids play, give them creative outlets
where they can express themselves and test out different real-life roles. Offer classes that teach personal
finance, critical thinking and computer skills. Give gender-specific, not gender-blind, class options and
assignments — guys don’t want to read the same books girls do. (Visit National Association for Single
Sex Public Education [NASSPE],
nasspe.org
, for more information on single-sex schooling.)
These are not pie-in-the-sky fantasies; they are already in practice in many programs with
demonstrated effectiveness. The key is their national scalability. Montessori and Waldorf schools
similarly create exciting learning centers for students of all ages. Montessori schools, for example,
emphasize independence, freedom within limits and respect for a child’s natural psychological
development, as well as technological advancements in society. Visit the websites for Montessori
(
montessori.edu
) and Waldorf (
whywaldorfworks.org
) to learn more.
Some public schools, too, are making revolutionary changes in the way they teach. In the documentary
film
Race to Nowhere
, when an Oregon high school banned homework, kids started learning more and
doing better on tests. Other schools are starting to follow in its footsteps. Visit the film’s website
(
racetonowhere.com
) to learn more.
“We know from generations of work that devices are catalysts,” says Harvard professor Chris Dede.
117
“Many teachers are incorporating more technology into their lessons as a way to strengthen learning.
Some professors take advantage of online forums to discuss topics from class or assign their lessons as
homework (often in the form of a PowerPoint presentation) and use class time for clarity and discussion.
These strategies have proven to be more effective and engaging for students than traditional or formal
teaching methods.
If your school doesn’t have its own internal network set up for classes, use existing social networks
like Ning (
ning.com
), which that cater to educators.

What parents can do
If you don’t raise your kids, who will? The bulk of change needs to come from parents. So turn off the
chronic stimulation and turn on your son’s creativity. Look at alternatives to medication, find the right
program for the boy instead of trying to fit the boy into a program that’s not right for him. Consider
enrolling him in school one year later so he loves to learn rather than learns to hate school. Be a good role
model or find good male role models or mentors for your son. Teach him positive ways to feel like a man
but also ways to develop his unique character as a human being.
Teach your son about sex. You may feel awkward about it — too bad for you. Your son’s future health
depends on him developing balanced perspectives on sex now. Make yourself available for questions.
You might also think about adding some books about sex to your family library, or gifting your son a book
when you think the time is right.
The Good Vibrations Guide to Sex
, by Cathy Winks and Anne Semans, is
a comprehensive and informative selection we’d recommend.
If your son is in high school, chat with him about the job market. Obviously you want him to pursue his
dreams, but you also want him to be aware of what opportunities will be available once he graduates so
he doesn’t enter a weak job market with no prospects and/or a huge student loan. Many parents aren’t
helping their kids develop realistic expectations or prepare for what awaits them beyond college. The
world is changing; the general advice used to be to get a well-rounded liberal arts education in
preparation for graduate school, but that advice is no longer relevant. They have to be tech savvy, and
writing and communication skills are critical for success, too. Learning basic social interaction skills
means others will want to be around them. Ask if they have friends who are girls as well as guys, and
encourage both; open your home to them.
Fathers must make it a priority to be a part of their son’s life. It is never too late to do so. If you have
been a delinquent dad, working for success, traveling too much or being into your own thing, just press
Pause. Take time out from the old and familiar to tune into your son. Be willing to express regret for not
being there earlier, and share a commitment to rectify that lack, to work at being a more diligent dad, a
buddy but also a source of both incentives and boundaries. Ask him about how such a new relationship
can start out; seek advice, don’t just give it. Don’t end up like so many middle-agers who look back on
their life and feel empty despite their material success because they realize they have sacrificed too much
for it — friends, family, even fun and sleep. They did not take the time to be there for their wives,
daughters or sons, and now they feel guilty. But it’s possible to right the ship: All you need to do is reset
the course, alter the compass and get shipmates on board to work collaboratively on a new common
journey. Sons need that from dads even more than daughters do because they will not get it from as many
other sources as girls have available, such as friend networks and more-expressive moms.
It is essential that dads, and maybe uncles and grandpas, too, give top priority to mentoring the sons of
this generation. They will value it if done honestly and openly in a constructive manner. You have to get
past the awkwardness. Plan what you will say and maybe even practice it with your mate. Find a quiet,
safe space to invite the boy into to simple discuss what is going on his life and in yours. You should know
what his ambitions are — or are not. What is he concerned about, fears? What does he feel are his
strengths and areas that need finer tuning? Just make clear that he can talk to you anytime about anything,
especially stuff that usually goes unsaid, such as sex or regrets or his uncertain future.
One practical suggestion is to ask your kids to track how they spend their time for a week (hold the
porn for now). Here are key activities to include:
1
.
Sleeping

2
.
Time at school/work
3
.
Doing homework
4
.
Doing chores
5
.
Playing sports
6
.
Hanging out with friends
7
.
Being outdoors in natural environments
8
.
Watching TV
9
.
Texting, tweeting, emailing: sum of all electronic activities
10
.
Playing video games
Summarizing these behaviors is the place for starting a conversation about time management and creating
a balanced time orientation for best physical, mental and social success for them now as well as in their
future. Give them an incentive for doing so, such as serving their favorite dinner, during which you can
discuss the results. We expect both parents and kids will be surprised by what the data show: a huge
number of hours devoted to gaming and Internet/video use. You can highlight any of this time spent with
someone else in direct contact during the gaming or viewing to identify the extent of time in solitary
confinement.
What single straight chicks can do
Complaining about why there aren’t any decent men isn’t going to solve anything. In the dating realm,
don’t reward bad behavior, and don’t be his mother (unless you’re both into that sort of thing). Be honest
with yourself and straightforward with him about your needs, expectations and boundaries, and ask the
same of him. Any guy you want to have a relationship with will have thought about these things.
Recognize situations that are uncomfortable for guys because of their lack of experience, such as dancing.
Be willing to initiate and teach them how to enjoy such activities. When you see a movie together, take
time afterward to discuss what each of you liked, disliked, noticed; which characters you would have
recast; how you would alter the plot or the ending. Show guys that talking with women is interesting, fun
and enlightening. Find out what he is most proud about, how he feels about his mom and dad and siblings.
What is his ideal job? Tap into his regrets — what does he wish he could do over? Reinforce good
behavior; don’t give mixed signals. Be honest about who you want to date and don’t settle for less.
What guys can do
Turn off your digital identity and turn on yourself. Learn how to dance, rediscover nature, make a female
friend, monitor social interactions to be sure others are being listened to adequately and sufficiently, learn
to tell jokes and practice conversation openers. Practice the art of making others feel special by giving
justifiable compliments — one a day for the next week. Find people who possess traits you want to have
and study their lives, find living role models or mentors, and find something in the real world that
motivates you. The world wants you; in fact, the world needs you more than you know. Ask yourself what
kind of man you are, then ask yourself what kind of man you want to become. Map out the steps to become
that man:
Turn off the porn.
Clarify your relationship with porn so you can avoid its downsides. If you want

to get aroused by being with people, porn can be a part of your fantasy life, just not the whole thing.
If you find you are having trouble getting turned on by real people, you need to stop watching porn
for at least a small period of time. There’s really no way around it. The good news is, your brain can
heal.
The website Your Brain On Porn states that turning off the porn will, in effect, “reboot” the brain
— allowing your dopamine receptors to recover and restore your reward circuit’s sensitivity to
normal, and “rewire” the brain — will weaken the porn pathways from disuse and will strengthen
your executive control pathways. As your brain heals, you will become more easily aroused by real
people and have more sensitivity in your penis. Your dopamine levels will most likely bounce back,
too. Visit
yourbrainonporn.com/tools-for-change
for support and tools to help you make the change.
Beyond porn, having sex on your mind all the time or as a big part of your identity is actually a
good thing — a lot of very successful people have very high sex drives — but you need to learn how
to rechannel your sex energy out of lust and into the heart and mind, where it can serve your higher
values instead of just your primal instincts. When transforming sexual energy into thoughts and
actions of another nature, you have to use willpower to visualize and mindfully direct that energy.
One way to do this is to figure out what your arousal triggers are — for example, make a list of
the traits you find sexually attractive in another person — and then seek goals that share those traits.
Chances are the goals that will “turn you on” the most will share the same qualities that turn you on
the most in someone you’re sexually attracted to (such as being creative, risk taking, etc.). An
excellent resource for further reading on the topic is Napoleon Hill’s classic text
Think and Grow
Rich
, as well as personal development author Steve Pavlina’s blog post titled “Sex Energy”
(
stevepavlina.com/blog/2007/04/sex-energy/
).

Do something else.
Cut the amount of time you spend playing video games, especially if you’re
doing it alone. People most vulnerable to addiction are usually socially or personally
disadvantaged, so start playing games that involve interactions with others, preferably in person.
Consider transferring some hours spent gaming into accomplishing real-life passions. Below is a
chart comparing the average number of hours spent playing video games with the average time it
takes to complete other activities.

Play sports.
Few activities teach mental toughness and collaboration like team sports. There are
casual to very competitive sports teams — no matter what your level of competitiveness, there’s a
group of guys out there who want you on their team or to join their league. For adults who want to
join or start a group, see if there’s already one in your local area by looking up the sport on Google,
Meetup (
meetup.com
) and Sportsvite (
sportsvite.com
), or join a gym or club where you can meet
people who share your interests.
If sports aren’t your thing, activities with rhythmic qualities, like singing, dancing or playing a
musical instrument, are great alternatives. They also provide a powerful environment for social
bonding.

Discover your inner power.
In her book
The Artist’s Way
, writer and filmmaker Julia Cameron
recommends an exercise called the morning pages, an “apparently pointless” process of writing
three pages of whatever comes to mind. When writing in the morning pages, there’s no wrong way —
the only requirement is that you
do
it every day, and do your best not to censor yourself. The morning

pages will help you be less judgmental of yourself. It doesn’t matter if you don’t feel like writing or
don’t have anything to say, after a while you will come in contact with an unexpected inner power:
your true self. You will become more honest with yourself, discovering not only who you are but
also who you want to become. And with this knowledge you become motivated to go from where you
are to where you want to be. It doesn’t sound logical, but it works. And it’s not just for creative
types. Everyone benefits from doing the morning pages, including lawyers, politicians and
entrepreneurs. If you don’t “do” journals, try Penzu (
penzu.com
), a site that lets you store your
thoughts online.
118

Make friends with some females.
Become friends with a girl and make it clear that you just want to
be friends — nothing more, nothing less. A lot of women never totally relax in their friendships with
men because there is always the worry that someone will develop more feelings for the other and
then it will become awkward, dealing a potentially fatal blow to the friendship. But if you put those
fears to rest right from the get-go, it’s much easier to really get to know someone and establish trust.
You can even talk about how you’ll handle the situation if someone does develop a romantic interest.
You can say, “It might sound silly, but our friendship means a lot to me and I want to make sure we
stay friends. If one of us develops romantic feelings for the other, let’s talk about it right away to
clear the air.” By doing this, you set the standard for honest, open communication. And it’s much less
awkward to say that at the beginning of a relationship than risk losing a friend later down the road
due to miscommunication. Find women with whom you have one or two activities or interests in
common. If you don’t know where to find these women, try using online clubs and forums or Meetup
groups.

Get a mentor, be a mentor
.
Those who have never had a mentor often underestimate the value of
having one. Places where men and boys can gather together are more necessary than ever before.
Older guys should become mentors to younger guys in their family, school or workplace. As
mentioned earlier, dads have got to do it. Make mentoring part of who you are. Below are
recommended organizations that support this kind of environment:
National Mentoring Partnership,
mentoring.org
.
Boys to Men Mentoring Network,
boystomen.org
.
Mankind Project,
mankindproject.org
.
Boy Scouts of America,
scouting.org
.
What porn producers and distributors can do
If you run an online porn website, especially a free one, add an Education category to the 50-plus
categories that already exist, streaming videos that teach men how to be more skilled lovers. Or at least
involve more dialogue between actors.
Another idea is ads: The average porn video is almost 20 minutes long. If you ran a 15-second ad on
safer sex practices before every video, it would take up only about 1.25 percent of the entire video’s
length. If users want to skip ads, they would have to pay you a fee. At the very least, clearly post
resources that users can easily refer to if they suffer from porn addiction — much the same way casinos
offer resources for people who have gambling addictions.

What video game producers can do
Bridge the gap between imagination and realization so that while users can enjoy playing your games,
their time counts for something beyond themselves. You have the tools and ability to apply the game
mindset to real-world problems and create generations of true-life heroes.
In
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
, Jane
McGonigal discusses the power of crowdsourcing, making the observation that successful crowdsourcing
projects are structured like a good multiplayer game. One example she uses is the parliamentary expenses
scandal of 2009. Essentially, many members of British Parliament, or MPs, had been filing illegal
expense claims that added up to millions of pounds sterling, including frivolous charges like £32,000
(more than $50,000 at today’s rates) for personal gardening expenses and £1,645 (nearly $2,600) for a
“floating duck island.”
The government released the expense forms in an unsorted collection of more than a million
electronically scanned documents. The
Guardian
newspaper, which had been covering the scandal, knew
it didn’t have enough manpower to sort through the mess, so it hired Simon Willison, a software
developer, to design a website where anyone could examine the documents for incriminating details. With
his help, the
Guardian
launched a site called Investigate Your MP’s Expenses, the world’s first massive
multiplayer investigative journalism project. After just three days, more than 20,000 people had sifted
through 170,000 documents. Investigate Your MP’s expenses also had a remarkable 56 percent visitor
participation rate.
The investigation prompted the resignation of dozens of Parliament members, plus legal action,
including suspensions and prosecutions. Ultimately, it led to widespread political reform.
119
Though it may appear to be a suggestion not unlike Tom Sawyer persuading the neighborhood boys that
whitewashing a fence is fun, imagine the kind of force gamers would become if every gamer dedicated
just 1 percent of his gaming time — 30 million collective hours a week — to make a real-world impact
like Investigate Your MP’s Expenses. Considering Wikipedia represents roughly 100 million hours of
human thought, hypothetically 15.6 Wikipedia-size projects could be accomplished every year if each
gamer invested that 1 percent into a crowdsourcing project. Now that would be a force to be reckoned
with.

Next steps: Join us
At the end of Phil’s short but provocative four-minute TEDTalk, he made clear that his primary goal at the
conference was to raise awareness and even alarm people. His talk was not designed to calm with simple
solutions to this complex problem. We attempted in the relatively short space provided by the new TED
Books format both to extend that original analysis by revealing its seriousness as well as its breadth and
depth in society, and to suggest some solution starters. Our hope is that readers like you will join a forum
on our website at
demiseofguys.com
or on our Facebook page to add your views, experience and
solutions regarding the argument presented here.

Notes
1
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.
2
Salahu-Din, D., Persky, H., and J. Miller, J.,
The Nation’s Report Card: Writing 2007,
NCES 2008–468 (Washington, DC: National
Center for Education Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 2008), table A-9; and Lee, J., Grigg, W.,
and Donahue, P.,
The Nation’s Report Card: Reading 2007,
NCES 2007–496 (Washington, DC: National Center for Education
Statistics, Institute of Education Sciences, U.S. Department of Education, 2007), table A-17.
3
Strauss, V., “What the Decline in SAT Scores Really Means,”
The Answer Sheet
(blog),
Washington Post,
September 14, 2011,
accessed December 8, 2011,
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means/2011/09/14/gIQAdUzdSK_blog.html
; and Steinberg, K., “43% of 2011 College-Bound Seniors Met SAT College and Career
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.
4
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.
5
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6

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.
8
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Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World
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Press, 2011), inside cover, 4, 6.
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.
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22
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.
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.
26
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Born for Love,
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.
27
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, directed by Paul Stern.
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34
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38
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directed by Charlie Borden and Kevin Obsatz.
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45
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The Maiden King
, page 20, cite Joseph Chilton Pearce’s
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(New York: HarperCollins, 1992) as the source of this idea; see chapter 22 in Pearce’s book, especially page 190.
48
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Recommended resources
Books:
Born for Love: Why Empathy Is Essential — and Endangered,
by Maia Szalavitz and Bruce D. Perry.
William Morrow Paperbacks, 2011.
Boys Adrift: The Five Factors Driving the Growing Epidemic of Unmotivated Boys and
Underachieving Young Men,
by Leonard Sax. Basic Books, 2009.
boysadrift.com
The Myth of Male Power,
by Warren Farrell. Berkley Trade, 2001.
warrenfarrell.org
Reality Is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World,
by Jane
McGonigal. Penguin Press, 2011.
realityisbroken.org

Films:
Digital Nation: Life on the Virtual Frontier
, directed by Rachel Dretzin. PBS Films (Frontline), 2010.
pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/digitalnation/
Journeyman
, directed by Charlie Borden and Kevin Obsatz. MirrorMan Films, 2007.
mirrormanfilms.org/film.html
The Medicated Child
, directed by Marcela Gaviria. PBS Films (Frontline), 2008.
pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/medicatedchild/
Raising Cain: Boys in Focus
, directed by Paul Stern. PBS Films, 2006.
pbs.org/opb/raisingcain/

About the authors
Philip G. Zimbardo is internationally recognized as the “voice and face of contemporary psychology”
through his widely viewed PBS-TV series,
Discovering Psychology
, as well as his media appearances,
best-selling trade books, and his classic research, the Stanford Prison Experiment. Zimbardo has been
president of the American Psychological Association (2002), president of the Western Psychological
Association (twice) and chair of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP); he is currently chair
of the Western Psychological Foundation.
Zimbardo has been a Stanford University professor since 1968 (now emeritus), having taught
previously at Yale University, New York University, and Columbia University. He also continues to teach
at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif., and is a professor at Palo Alto University.
Zimbardo has received numerous awards and honors as an educator, researcher, writer and media
contributor, and for service to the profession of psychology. Among his more than 400 professional
publications, including 50 trade and textbooks, is the oldest current textbook in psychology,
Psychology
and Life, and Core Concepts in Psychology,
now in its seventh edition. His popular book on shyness in
adults

was the first of its kind, as was the shyness clinic that he started in the Palo Alto, Calif., community
and which continues as a treatment-research clinic.
His current passion is the Heroic Imagination Project, exploring and encouraging the psychology of
everyday heroes. His recent trade books include:
The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People
Turn Evil
(Random House, 2007, paperback, 2008),
The Time Paradox: Reconstructing the Past,
Enjoying the Present, Mastering the Future
(with John Boyd, Free Press, 2008) and
Time Heals: The
Dynamic New Treatment for PTSD
(with Richard and Rosemary Sword, Wiley, 2012).
The Demise of
Guys
is close to his heart, as he recently became a grandfather to a baby boy.
See
zimbardo.com
,
heroicimagination.org
,
prisonexp.org
,
lucifereffect.com
and
thetimeparadox.com
.

Nikita Duncan recently graduated from the University of Colorado with a Bachelor of Arts in fine art and
psychology. She combined these interests for her senior thesis, creating a provocative series of paintings,
Orgasms: Portraits of Sexual Energy,
which resulted in a book,
Orgasms: Art & Psyche
(with Veronica
Monet, Blurb, 2009). She met Phil Zimbardo in San Francisco while her paintings were on exhibit, and
she has been collaborating on projects with him ever since. She assisted him in the early development of
the Heroic Imagination Project, the nonprofit he founded in 2008. She is passionate about research,
writing, human sexuality and art. Check out her website at nikitaduncan.com.
The Demise of Guys
hits home for her because she has three brothers, all in their 20s, who were all
diagnosed with ADHD in their teens and experienced many of the issues presented here. One of her most
unusual research assignments for
Demise
was immersing herself in Internet porn for three days and nights.
She is grateful to have had the opportunity to conduct many of the interviews featured in this book.

About TED
TED is a nonprofit devoted to “Ideas Worth Spreading.” It started out, in 1984, as a conference bringing
together people from three worlds: Technology, Entertainment, Design. Since then its scope has become
ever broader. Along with two annual conferences — the TED Conference in Long Beach and Palm
Springs, Calif, each spring, and the TEDGlobal conference in Edinburgh, Scotland, each summer — TED
includes the award-winning TEDTalks video site, the Open Translation Project and Open TV Project, the
inspiring TED Fellows and TEDx programs, and the annual TED Prize.

The annual TED Conferences in Long Beach/Palm Springs and Edinburgh bring together the world’s most
fascinating thinkers and doers, who are challenged to give the talk of their lives (in 18 minutes).

On TED.com, we make the best talks and performances from TED and its partners available to the world
for free. More than 900 TEDTalks are now available online, with more being added each week. All of the
talks are subtitled in English, and many are subtitled in various other languages. These videos are
released under a Creative Commons license, so they can be freely shared and reposted.