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Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This 'pre-adulthood' has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it's time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn't bring out the best in men.
'We are sick of hooking up with guys,' writes the comedian Julie Klausner, author of a touchingly funny 2010 book, 'I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I've Dated.' What Ms. Klausner means by 'guys' is males who are not boys or men but something in between. 'Guys talk about 'Star Wars' like it's not a movie made for people half their age; a guy's idea of a perfect night is a hang around the PlayStation with his bandmates, or a trip to Vegas with his college friends.... They are more like the kids we babysat than the dads who drove us home.' One female reviewer of Ms. Kausner's book wrote, 'I had to stop several times while reading and think: Wait, did I date this same guy?'
For most of us, the cultural habitat of pre-adulthood no longer seems noteworthy. After all, popular culture has been crowded with pre-adults for almost two decades. Hollywood started the affair in the early 1990s with movies like 'Singles,' 'Reality Bites,' 'Single White Female' and 'Swingers.' Television soon deepened the relationship, giving us the agreeable company of Monica, Joey, Rachel and Ross; Jerry, Elaine, George and Kramer; Carrie, Miranda, et al.
But for all its familiarity, pre-adulthood represents a momentous sociological development. It's no exaggeration to say that having large numbers of single young men and women living independently, while also having enough disposable income to avoid ever messing up their kitchens, is something entirely new in human experience. Yes, at other points in Western history young people have waited well into their 20s to marry, and yes, office girls and bachelor lawyers have been working and finding amusement in cities for more than a century. But their numbers and their money supply were always relatively small. Today's pre-adults are a different matter. They are a major demographic event.
What also makes pre-adulthood something new is its radical reversal of the sexual hierarchy. Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to 34, 34% of women now have a bachelor's degree but just 27% of men), and they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. These strengths carry women through their 20s, when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and making strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their brothers and boyfriends.
Still, for these women, one key question won't go away: Where have the good men gone? Their male peers often come across as aging frat boys, maladroit geeks or grubby slackers″a gender gap neatly crystallized by the director Judd Apatow in his hit 2007 movie 'Knocked Up.' The story's hero is 23-year-old Ben Stone (Seth Rogen), who has a drunken fling with Allison Scott (Katherine Heigl) and gets her pregnant. Ben lives in a Los Angeles crash pad with a group of grubby friends who spend their days playing videogames, smoking pot and unsuccessfully planning to launch a porn website. Allison, by contrast, is on her way up as a television reporter and lives in a neatly kept apartment with what appear to be clean sheets and towels. Once she decides to have the baby, she figures out what needs to be done and does it. Ben can only stumble his way toward being a responsible grownup.
So where did these pre-adults come from? You might assume that their appearance is a result of spoiled 24-year-olds trying to prolong the campus drinking and hook-up scene while exploiting the largesse of mom and dad. But the causes run deeper than that. Beginning in the 1980s, the economic advantage of higher education″the 'college premium'″began to increase dramatically. Between 1960 and 2000, the percentage of younger adults enrolled in college or graduate school more than doubled. In the 'knowledge economy,' good jobs go to those with degrees. And degrees take years.
Another factor in the lengthening of the road to adulthood is our increasingly labyrinthine labor market. The past decades' economic expansion and the digital revolution have transformed the high-end labor market into a fierce competition for the most stimulating, creative and glamorous jobs. Fields that attract ambitious young men and women often require years of moving between school and internships, between internships and jobs, laterally and horizontally between jobs, and between cities in the U.S. and abroad. The knowledge economy gives the educated young an unprecedented opportunity to think about work in personal terms. They are looking not just for jobs but for 'careers,' work in which they can exercise their talents and express their deepest passions. They expect their careers to give shape to their identity. For today's pre-adults, 'what you do' is almost synonymous with 'who you are,' and starting a family is seldom part of the picture.
Pre-adulthood can be compared to adolescence, an idea invented in the mid-20th century as American teenagers were herded away from the fields and the workplace and into that new institution, the high school. For a long time, the poor and recent immigrants were not part of adolescent life; they went straight to work, since their families couldn't afford the lost labor and income. But the country had grown rich enough to carve out space and time to create a more highly educated citizenry and work force. Teenagers quickly became a marketing and cultural phenomenon. They also earned their own psychological profile. One of the most influential of the psychologists of adolescence was Erik Erikson, who described the stage as a 'moratorium,' a limbo between childhood and adulthood characterized by role confusion, emotional turmoil and identity conflict.
Like adolescents in the 20th century, today's pre-adults have been wait-listed for adulthood. Marketers and culture creators help to promote pre-adulthood as a lifestyle. And like adolescence, pre-adulthood is a class-based social phenomenon, reserved for the relatively well-to-do. Those who don't get a four-year college degree are not in a position to compete for the more satisfying jobs of the knowledge economy.
But pre-adults differ in one major respect from adolescents. They write their own biographies, and they do it from scratch. Sociologists use the term 'life script' to describe a particular society's ordering of life's large events and stages. Though such scripts vary across cultures, the archetypal plot is deeply rooted in our biological nature. The invention of adolescence did not change the large Roman numerals of the American script. Adults continued to be those who took over the primary tasks of the economy and culture. For women, the central task usually involved the day-to-day rearing of the next generation; for men, it involved protecting and providing for their wives and children. If you followed the script, you became an adult, a temporary custodian of the social order until your own old age and demise.
Unlike adolescents, however, pre-adults don't know what is supposed to come next. For them, marriage and parenthood come in many forms, or can be skipped altogether. In 1970, just 16% of Americans ages 25 to 29 had never been married; today that's true of an astonishing 55% of the age group. In the U.S., the mean age at first marriage has been climbing toward 30 (a point past which it has already gone in much of Europe). It is no wonder that so many young Americans suffer through a 'quarter-life crisis,' a period of depression and worry over their future.
Given the rigors of contemporary career-building, pre-adults who do marry and start families do so later than ever before in human history. Husbands, wives and children are a drag on the footloose life required for the early career track and identity search. Pre-adulthood has also confounded the primordial search for a mate. It has delayed a stable sense of identity, dramatically expanded the pool of possible spouses, mystified courtship routines and helped to throw into doubt the very meaning of marriage. In 1970, to cite just one of many numbers proving the point, nearly seven in 10 25-year-olds were married; by 2000, only one-third had reached that milestone.
American men have been struggling with finding an acceptable adult identity since at least the mid-19th century. We often hear about the miseries of women confined to the domestic sphere once men began to work in offices and factories away from home. But it seems that men didn't much like the arrangement either. They balked at the stuffy propriety of the bourgeois parlor, as they did later at the banal activities of the suburban living room. They turned to hobbies and adventures, like hunting and fishing. At midcentury, fathers who at first had refused to put down the money to buy those newfangled televisions changed their minds when the networks began broadcasting boxing matches and baseball games. The arrival of Playboy in the 1950s seemed like the ultimate protest against male domestication; think of the refusal implied by the magazine's title alone.
In his disregard for domestic life, the playboy was prologue for today's pre-adult male. Unlike the playboy with his jazz and art-filled pad, however, our boy rebel is a creature of the animal house. In the 1990s, Maxim, the rude, lewd and hugely popular 'lad' magazine arrived from England. Its philosophy and tone were so juvenile, so entirely undomesticated, that it made Playboy look like Camus.
At the same time, young men were tuning in to cable channels like Comedy Central, the Cartoon Network and Spike, whose shows reflected the adolescent male preferences of its targeted male audiences. They watched movies with overgrown boy actors like Steve Carell, Luke and Owen Wilson, Jim Carrey, Adam Sandler, Will Farrell and Seth Rogen, cheering their awesome car crashes, fart jokes, breast and crotch shots, beer pong competitions and other frat-boy pranks. Americans had always struck foreigners as youthful, even childlike, in their energy and optimism. But this was too much.
What explains this puerile shallowness? I see it as an expression of our cultural uncertainty about the social role of men. It's been an almost universal rule of civilization that girls became women simply by reaching physical maturity, but boys had to pass a test. They needed to demonstrate courage, physical prowess or mastery of the necessary skills. The goal was to prove their competence as protectors and providers. Today, however, with women moving ahead in our advanced economy, husbands and fathers are now optional, and the qualities of character men once needed to play their roles″fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity″are obsolete, even a little embarrassing.
Today's pre-adult male is like an actor in a drama in which he only knows what he shouldn't say. He has to compete in a fierce job market, but he can't act too bossy or self-confident. He should be sensitive but not paternalistic, smart but not cocky. To deepen his predicament, because he is single, his advisers and confidants are generally undomesticated guys just like him.
Single men have never been civilization's most responsible actors; they continue to be more troubled and less successful than men who deliberately choose to become husbands and fathers. So we can be disgusted if some of them continue to live in rooms decorated with 'Star Wars' posters and crushed beer cans and to treat women like disposable estrogen toys, but we shouldn't be surprised.
Relatively affluent, free of family responsibilities, and entertained by an array of media devoted to his every pleasure, the single young man can live in pig heaven″and often does. Women put up with him for a while, but then in fear and disgust either give up on any idea of a husband and kids or just go to a sperm bank and get the DNA without the troublesome man. But these rational choices on the part of women only serve to legitimize men's attachment to the sand box. Why should they grow up? No one needs them anyway. There's nothing they have to do.
They might as well just have another beer.
Adapted from 'Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys' by Kay S. Hymowitz, to be published by Basic Books on March 1. Copyright © by Kay S. Hymowitz. Printed by arrangement with Basic Books.
參考譯文：
沒多久之前，普通的美國(guó)男人在二十多歲的年紀(jì)就可以完成大多數(shù)成家立業(yè)的重要指標(biāo)：取得高中學(xué)歷、實(shí)現(xiàn)經(jīng)濟(jì)獨(dú)立、結(jié)婚生子。今時(shí)今日，大多數(shù)二十多歲的男人卻陷身于一種新奇的過渡狀態(tài)，其中既有負(fù)責(zé)任的自立精神，也摻雜著荷爾蒙作用之下的青春期特征。這種“半成年”狀態(tài)有許多可取之處，對(duì)那些受過大學(xué)教育的人來說尤其如此。不過，事到如今，我們必須正視一個(gè)業(yè)已為眾多沮喪失意的年青女性所熟知的事實(shí)：這樣的狀態(tài)并不能帶來最好的男性特質(zhì)。
喜劇作家茱莉•克勞斯納（Julie Klausner）曾于2010年出版過一本感人至深的有趣書籍：《你的樂隊(duì)我沒興趣：我約會(huì)過的獨(dú)立搖滾樂手、信托投資人、色情作者、罪犯、善于識(shí)別假貨的時(shí)尚人士以及其他一些傻冒帶給我的教訓(xùn)》（I Don't Care About Your Band: What I Learned from Indie Rockers, Trust Funders, Pornographers, Felons, Faux-Sensitive Hipsters and Other Guys I've Dated）。她如是寫道：我們已經(jīng)煩透了跟“傻冒”膩在一起的日子。克勞斯納所說的“傻冒”指的是這樣一些男性，他們既不是男孩，也不是男人，而是一種介于兩者之間的東西。一位女士在為克勞斯納著作所寫的書評(píng)中寫道：傻冒們成天談?wù)摗缎乔虼髴?zhàn)》（Star Wars），完全沒意識(shí)到那部電影只適合年紀(jì)比他們小一半的人。傻冒們心目中的完美夜晚是跟自己樂隊(duì)里的人一起玩游戲機(jī)，或者是跟大學(xué)時(shí)代的朋友一起去拉斯維加斯……他們更像是需要我們照料的小孩，卻不像開車送我們回家的父輩。讀這本書的時(shí)候，我不得不多次停下來思考：對(duì)啊，我以前不也跟這種人約會(huì)過嗎？
對(duì)我們當(dāng)中的大多數(shù)人來說，孳生半成年?duì)顟B(tài)的文化生境已經(jīng)不再是什么引人注目的東西。說到底，將近二十年以來，流行文化當(dāng)中一直都擠滿了各式各樣的“半成人”。上世紀(jì)九十年代早期，好萊塢用《單身貴族》（Singles）、《四個(gè)畢業(yè)生》（Reality Bites）、《疊影狂花》（Single White Female）和《全職浪子》（Swingers）之類的電影為這股風(fēng)氣開了先河。不久之后，電視也趕來推波助瀾，為我們提供了一系列可愛的半成人組合：莫妮卡（Monica）、喬伊（Joey）、瑞秋（Rachel）和羅斯（Ross）（《老友記》）；杰瑞（Jerry）、愛琳（Elaine）、喬治（George）和克拉默（Kramer）（《宋飛傳》）；以及卡莉（Carrie）、米蘭達(dá)（Miranda）（《欲望都市》），等等等等。
熟悉歸熟悉，半成年?duì)顟B(tài)終究還是反映了社會(huì)的一個(gè)重大進(jìn)步。毫不夸張地說，如今的社會(huì)上存在著大批獨(dú)立生活的單身男女，這些男女又擁有足以讓自己免除下廚之勞的大筆可支配收入，這是人類歷史上從未有過的全新局面。沒錯(cuò)，西方歷史上以前也有過年青人等到年近三十才結(jié)婚的時(shí)候；沒錯(cuò)，辦公室女郎和律師單身漢早就已經(jīng)開始在各個(gè)城市里上班娛樂，這樣的狀況已經(jīng)存在了超過一個(gè)世紀(jì)。不過，他們的人數(shù)和他們的收入來源始終都處于相對(duì)有限的狀態(tài)。今天的半成人卻和以往不同，已經(jīng)在人口當(dāng)中占到了一個(gè)很大的比例。
現(xiàn)今的半成年?duì)顟B(tài)還有一個(gè)跟以往不同的地方，那就是它徹底顛覆了傳統(tǒng)的性別等級(jí)。在半成人當(dāng)中，居于主導(dǎo)地位的性別是女性。她們接受大學(xué)教育的比例比男性高（在25歲至34歲的美國(guó)人當(dāng)中，34%的女性擁有學(xué)士學(xué)位，男性的這一比例則只有27%），學(xué)習(xí)成績(jī)也比男性好。正如大多數(shù)教授所指出的那樣，她們還比男性更自信、更有干勁。這些優(yōu)勢(shì)會(huì)伴隨女性從20歲走到30歲，結(jié)果便是她們比男性更有機(jī)會(huì)繼續(xù)深造，也更有機(jī)會(huì)得到升遷。更有甚者，在不少城市當(dāng)中，她們的收入也超過了自己的兄弟和男友。
盡管如此，對(duì)這些女人來說，一個(gè)關(guān)鍵的問題卻始終揮之不去：好男人都上哪兒去了呢？她們的男性同齡人往往是些長(zhǎng)不大的老學(xué)生、笨頭笨腦的怪物或者骯臟邋遢的懶鬼──這樣的性別鴻溝在導(dǎo)演賈德•阿帕圖（Judd Apatow）2007年的影片《好孕臨門》（Knocked Up）當(dāng)中得到了完美的呈現(xiàn)。影片的男主角是23歲的本•斯通（Ben Stone），由塞斯•羅根（Seth Rogen）飾演。有一次喝醉酒之后，本和凱薩琳•海格爾（Katherine Heigl）飾演的愛麗森•斯科特（Allison Scott）上了床，后者由此懷孕。本和一群窮酸邋遢的朋友一起住在洛杉磯的一個(gè)臨時(shí)居所里，每天只知道打游戲和吸大麻，想辦個(gè)色情網(wǎng)站也沒成功。與他相反，愛麗森是一個(gè)正在躥紅的電視記者，住的是一套整潔的公寓，屋里的床單和毛巾看著也挺干凈。決定留下肚里的孩子之后，她馬上做好了所有的籌劃，隨后便付諸實(shí)施。本卻只能跌跌撞撞地一路前行，努力變成一個(gè)有所擔(dān)當(dāng)?shù)某赡耆恕?br />
一場(chǎng)宿醉使尚未成熟的Ben Stone（塞斯•羅根(Seth Rogen)飾演）成為了一個(gè)孩子的父親，他決定一定要逐漸成長(zhǎng)起來。
如此說來，這些半成人是從哪里來的呢？你興許會(huì)以為，原因在于一些被人慣壞了的24歲青年拼命想延續(xù)學(xué)生時(shí)代喝酒泡妞的生活，方法是利用娘老子的慷慨。不過，真實(shí)的原因并不是這么簡(jiǎn)單。從上世紀(jì)八十年代開始，高學(xué)歷帶來的經(jīng)濟(jì)優(yōu)勢(shì)──也就是所謂的“大學(xué)紅利”──急劇提高。1960至2000年之間，年青人上大學(xué)或者讀研究生的比例翻了不止一番。在這個(gè)“知識(shí)經(jīng)濟(jì)”的時(shí)代，好工作屬于那些有文憑的人。與此同時(shí)，拿文憑是一件很耗時(shí)間的事情。
另一個(gè)因素也讓走向成年的道路變得更加漫長(zhǎng)，那就是越來越像迷宮的勞動(dòng)力市場(chǎng)。過去幾十年當(dāng)中，經(jīng)濟(jì)擴(kuò)張和數(shù)碼革命已經(jīng)把高端勞動(dòng)力市場(chǎng)變成了一個(gè)競(jìng)爭(zhēng)慘烈的地方，競(jìng)爭(zhēng)的目標(biāo)都是些最刺激、最需要?jiǎng)?chuàng)意、最有派頭的工作。那些誘人的工作往往都需要志向遠(yuǎn)大的年青男女翻來覆去地折騰許多年，在學(xué)校和實(shí)習(xí)場(chǎng)所之間輾轉(zhuǎn)、在實(shí)習(xí)場(chǎng)所和工作地點(diǎn)之間輾轉(zhuǎn)、在不同工作之間橫向或縱向輾轉(zhuǎn)，還可能在美國(guó)和其他國(guó)家的不同城市之間輾轉(zhuǎn)。知識(shí)經(jīng)濟(jì)為受過良好教育的年青人提供了一個(gè)前所未有的機(jī)會(huì)，讓他們可以按個(gè)人的喜好來考慮工作問題。他們要的不僅僅是工作，而是“事業(yè)”，要的是一個(gè)可以施展自身才干、表達(dá)心底激情的崗位，還希望通過事業(yè)來塑造自我身份。對(duì)于今天的半成人來說，“你是做什么的”幾乎可以跟“你是什么人”劃等號(hào)，成家的事情卻很少會(huì)得到他們的重視。
半成人階段跟青春期有幾分相似，后者是二十世紀(jì)中期才有的一個(gè)概念，那時(shí)候，美國(guó)那些十多歲的少年被人從田野和工廠里趕進(jìn)了一個(gè)新興的機(jī)構(gòu)──高中。在很長(zhǎng)一段時(shí)間之內(nèi)，窮人和新移民都沒有什么青春期生活，因?yàn)樗麄兊募彝コ袚?dān)不起勞動(dòng)力和收入的損失，他們就只好跳過青春期、直接走上工作崗位。不過，美國(guó)漸漸地富了起來，由此就有了空間和時(shí)間上的余裕，可以打造教育程度更高的市民階層和勞動(dòng)力大軍。很快，十幾歲的少年就成了一個(gè)商業(yè)上和文化上的明星群體，還獲得了一張專屬于自己的心理分析報(bào)告。青春期心理權(quán)威之一埃里克•埃里克森（Erik Erikson）將這個(gè)時(shí)期形容為一次“暫停”，亦即童年和成年之間的一個(gè)過渡時(shí)期，以角色混淆、情感混亂和身份沖突為特征。
跟二十世紀(jì)的青春期少年一樣，今天的半成人也在等待成年。各路商家和文化人都在推波助瀾，旨在把半成人狀態(tài)提升到生活方式的高度。此外，跟青春期一樣，半成人階段也是一種存在階級(jí)基礎(chǔ)的社會(huì)現(xiàn)象，只屬于那些相對(duì)富裕的人。在這個(gè)知識(shí)經(jīng)濟(jì)的時(shí)代，沒有四年大學(xué)文憑的人是無法搶到眾人艷羨的工作的。
不過，半成人也跟青春期少年有一個(gè)重大的區(qū)別，那就是他們會(huì)為自己寫傳記，而且是從頭開始寫。社會(huì)學(xué)家們用“人生劇本”這個(gè)術(shù)語來概括某個(gè)特定社會(huì)為人生大事及人生重要舞臺(tái)排出的序列。這樣的劇本因文化而異，基本的情節(jié)卻深植于我們的生物天性之中。青春期這個(gè)概念的發(fā)明并沒有改寫美國(guó)式人生劇本當(dāng)中的主要章節(jié)。有了青春期以后，成人這個(gè)概念依然是指那個(gè)肩負(fù)大部分經(jīng)濟(jì)和文化建設(shè)任務(wù)的群體。就女人而言，核心任務(wù)通常是日復(fù)一日地養(yǎng)育下一代；對(duì)男人來說，核心任務(wù)則是為妻兒提供保護(hù)和生活資料。按照這個(gè)劇本演下去，你就會(huì)變成一個(gè)成人，暫時(shí)擔(dān)起維持社會(huì)秩序的責(zé)任，直到你步入暮年、繼而撒手人寰為止。
可是，與青春期少年不同，半成人并不知道未來應(yīng)該是什么模樣。對(duì)他們來說，婚姻和父母之責(zé)都可以表現(xiàn)為許多形式，完全省略也不是問題。1970年，25歲到29歲的美國(guó)人當(dāng)中只有16%從來沒結(jié)過婚；到了今天，這個(gè)比例則是驚人卻真實(shí)的55%。在美國(guó)，第一次結(jié)婚的平均年齡日益向著30歲靠近（歐洲的許多地方已經(jīng)突破了這一大關(guān)）。不足為奇的是，為數(shù)眾多的美國(guó)年青人都在經(jīng)歷一場(chǎng)“四分之一人生危機(jī)”，沮喪不已地?fù)?dān)心著自己的未來。
在這個(gè)立業(yè)艱難的時(shí)代，各位半成人即便選擇了成家，成家的時(shí)間也是史無前例地晚。丈夫、妻子和孩子都會(huì)對(duì)自由自在的生活形成拖累，而自由自在的生活又是早期職業(yè)發(fā)展和身份探索的必要條件。除此之外，半成人狀態(tài)本身也對(duì)尋找配偶的原始活動(dòng)構(gòu)成了障礙。它推遲了穩(wěn)定的自我意識(shí)形成的時(shí)間，大幅度提高了潛在配偶的數(shù)量，搞亂了求愛的常規(guī)，還助長(zhǎng)了人們對(duì)婚姻意義的懷疑。許多數(shù)字都可以證明這一點(diǎn)，這里只舉其中一組：1970年，25歲的人當(dāng)中有將近十分之七處于已婚狀態(tài)；2000年，同年齡的人當(dāng)中只有三分之一實(shí)現(xiàn)了這個(gè)重要的人生目標(biāo)。
最晚從十九世紀(jì)中期開始，美國(guó)男人就一直在奮力尋找一個(gè)可以接受的成人身份。我們總是聽人說，一旦男人踏出家門、開始在辦公室和工廠里上班，女人就被圈在了家里，忍受各種各樣的痛苦。不過，真相似乎是，男人也不怎么喜歡這樣的安排。他們對(duì)中產(chǎn)階級(jí)生活當(dāng)中的種種乏味規(guī)矩避之唯恐不及，后來又對(duì)郊區(qū)客廳里的種種陳腐活動(dòng)敬謝不敏，于是就轉(zhuǎn)向打獵釣魚之類的業(yè)余愛好和探險(xiǎn)活動(dòng)。到了二十世紀(jì)中期，一些做了父親的人先是拒絕花錢買電視這種新玩意兒，后來又改變了主意，原因是電視里有了拳擊比賽和棒球比賽�！痘ɑü印罚≒layboy）雜志于二十世紀(jì)五十年代問世，似乎是對(duì)男性馴化過程的一份終極抗議；想一想這本雜志的名字，你就可以知道，男人是多么不愿意變成家養(yǎng)動(dòng)物。
從拒絕家庭生活這方面來說，這里的“花花公子”就是今天那些半成人男性的先聲。不過，跟喜歡爵士樂和藝術(shù)的“花花公子”不同，我們這個(gè)時(shí)代的叛逆男孩屬于動(dòng)物世界。二十世紀(jì)九十年代，粗俗下流、廣受歡迎的“男孩”雜志《Maxim》從英國(guó)來到了美國(guó)。這本雜志的理念和格調(diào)十分幼稚、十足野性，跟它比起來，《花花公子》簡(jiǎn)直就像是加繆（Camus）的作品。
與《Maxim》的到來同時(shí)，年青男人紛紛轉(zhuǎn)向“喜劇中心”（Comedy Central）、“卡通網(wǎng)路”（Cartoon Network）和Spike之類的有線電視頻道。這些頻道以男性為目標(biāo)受眾，由節(jié)目?jī)?nèi)容可知，受眾的口味都還停留在青春期。他們愛看斯蒂夫•卡瑞爾（Steve Carell）、盧克•威爾遜（Luke Wilson）、歐文•威爾遜（Owen Wilson）、金•凱利（Jim Carrey）、亞當(dāng)•桑德勒（Adam Sandler）、威爾•法雷爾（Will Farrell）和塞斯•羅根等“老男孩”出演的電影，為他們那些妙不可言的汽車碰撞、下流笑話、胸胯特寫以及喝啤酒比賽之類的男童惡作劇而歡呼。在以前，美國(guó)人的活力和樂天精神總是會(huì)給外國(guó)人留下朝氣蓬勃乃至天真幼稚的印象。不過，發(fā)展到這個(gè)地步就有點(diǎn)兒太過分了。
這樣的幼稚和淺薄該作何解釋呢？按我看，它體現(xiàn)了這樣一個(gè)事實(shí)，那就是我們的文化沒有為男性的社會(huì)角色提供一個(gè)明確的定義。幾乎普遍適用于所有文明的一條規(guī)律是，女孩只需要生理成熟就可以變成女人，男孩卻要經(jīng)歷一番考驗(yàn)才能變成男人。他們必須證明自己的勇氣和體格，要不就得證明自己已經(jīng)掌握了一些必要的技能，最終目的則是證明自己有能力承擔(dān)提供保護(hù)和養(yǎng)家糊口的責(zé)任。然而，今時(shí)今日，女性正在我們的發(fā)達(dá)經(jīng)濟(jì)之中高歌猛進(jìn)，丈夫和父親就成了可有可無的東西，曾經(jīng)為合格男人所必需的種種特質(zhì)──堅(jiān)韌、克制、勇敢、忠誠(chéng)──也已經(jīng)落后于時(shí)代，甚至還有點(diǎn)兒讓人尷尬。
如今的半成人男性就像是一出戲里的一名演員，但卻不知道臺(tái)詞，只知道什么東西不能說。他必須在競(jìng)爭(zhēng)慘烈的市場(chǎng)上搏殺，但又不能表現(xiàn)得太專橫，也不能表現(xiàn)得太自信。他應(yīng)該體貼殷勤，同時(shí)又不能羅里羅嗦，應(yīng)該精明強(qiáng)干，同時(shí)又不能驕傲自大。雪上加霜的是，身為一名單身漢，他身邊的顧問和知己通常都是些野性未馴的家伙，跟他自己一模一樣。
單身漢從來都不是文明大戲當(dāng)中最負(fù)責(zé)任的演員；跟那些主動(dòng)承攬丈夫和父親角色的男人相比，他們依然是麻煩更多、成功更少的一群。所以呢，如果他們當(dāng)中的一些人繼續(xù)在充斥著《星球大戰(zhàn)》海報(bào)和癟啤酒罐的屋子里生活、繼續(xù)把女人當(dāng)成一次性的雌激素玩具，我們可以感到厭惡，但卻不應(yīng)該感到驚訝。
手頭相對(duì)寬裕、沒有家庭的負(fù)擔(dān)、又有一大堆媒介致力于滿足自己的所有欲望，年青的單身漢完全可以選擇在豬窩里過活──他們也經(jīng)常這么干。女人可以忍他們一段時(shí)間，之后卻會(huì)感到恐懼和厭惡，接下來要么徹底放棄擁有丈夫和孩子的希望，要么就撇開這些讓人頭痛的男人、直接去問精子銀行要DNA�？墒牵俗龀龅倪@些理性選擇只會(huì)成為男人沉迷于童稚階段的藉口。他們干嗎要長(zhǎng)大呢？反正也沒人需要他們。他們用不著采取任何行動(dòng)。
為什么要長(zhǎng)大？現(xiàn)在，二十多歲的男人有很多玩具和可以讓他們分心的東西，從電視游戲和體育酒吧到“男孩”雜志《Maxim》。。。
他們完全可以再來一罐啤酒。
──改編自凱•希莫維茨（Kay S. Hymowitz）的《重振雄風(fēng)：女人的崛起如何將男人變成了男孩》（Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys），此書已由Basic Books出版社出版，出版日期是3月1日。
