Books

Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be Guys.

EDUARDO VERDUGO/The Associated Press

The Guyland inhabitant typically has a college background, but is in no hurry to grow up.

That's the clearest take-away from Michael Kimmel's Guyland, but as the author amply demonstrates, it's far easier said than done.

First, some loose definitions. Guys, for Mr. Kimmel (Manhood in America), are found among the 22 million American males ranging from 16 or so up to the mid-20s. They're almost always white and usually from a fairly affluent upbringing. The Guy typically has a college background, and indeed, much of Guyland takes place on college campuses. The Guy is in no hurry to shed youthful egotism and hedonism and take up the mantle of adulthood.

All of which sounds fairly innocent, but Guyland is an ugly, frightening place. The Guy mentality is rooted in resentment, drenched in booze and dedicated to pervasive, sometimes violent denigration of women and gays.

Mr. Kimmel explains the psychosocial dynamics of Guyland this way: Women and minorities have made dramatic inroads into what were exclusively white-male bastions just three decades ago. Bright, ambitious girls and women are everywhere. And yet, for reasons the author never quite makes clear, many Guys grow up with a 1950s sense of male entitlement. It's as if Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton never happened, or shouldn't have.

With so much of the real world in enemy hands, young and not-so-young men have created their own "homosocial" counterworld: Guyland. It's a perpetual carnival of pornography, violent video games, hypermacho music and blustering talk-radio hosts who stoke resentment by constantly reminding Guys of the lost paradise that should have been theirs.

Why should all this matter to the non-Guy majority? For one thing, Guys dominate and shape popular culture. If you've wondered why so many of today's television shows and movies read like a long, booze-fueled orgy punctuated by "body-fluid humor" and worse, it's because Guys form "the front end of the single most desirable consumer market," Mr. Kimmel writes.

And there's another reason to be alarmed about the cultural hegemony of Guyland: its effect on women and girls.

"Girls contend daily with Guyland," Mr. Kimmel writes, in "the constant stream of pornographic humor in college dorms or libraries" and "the constant pressure to shape their bodies into idealized hyper-Barbies."

As for what to do about Guyland, Mr. Kimmel is better at describing than prescribing. He wants fathers to stop winking at their sons' predatory sexual behavior. He'd like college administrators to locate their spines. He urges local police and district attorneys to treat violent hazing and date rape as the crimes they are.

Ultimately, Guys must summon the courage to stop being Guys and start being men.

Chris Tucker (www.ctucker.wordpress.com) is a Dallas-based writer and literary consultant.

The Perilous World

Where Boys Become Men

Michael Kimmel

(HarperCollins, $25.95)

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