Why Girls Hate Boys (And The Feeling Is Mutual)

When you’re single, it’s sometimes easy to assume that the reason you can’t get a date is that all boys are unhygienic cretins only interested in jacking off to internet porn between bouts of Killzone 3. But not all men are like that, I promise.

In fact, I know plenty of really nice guys who spend Friday nights playing Killzone 3 because they are convinced that all women are materialistic bitches more interested in the contents of a man’s wallet than his head. Where do they get these crazy ideas? The media.

To plug her book entitled “Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys,” Kay S. Hymowitz tries to convince us that guys just won’t grow up. She seems to blame them for the delay in marriage seen across the developed world. While women are advancing in their careers, men are just sitting at home watching Comedy Central.

• 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.

But it appears that men don’t like being called obsolete. In his essay attacking her essay, Ian Lang argues that women are hypocrites. We still want what we have always wanted, yet we are no longer providing what we used to:

• Women, for all of their successes and achievements in the last 40 years, still want a man who’s ambitious, driven and capable of taking charge of his life and his relationships, because that’s what women have looked for in a man since the dawn of time. Well, guess what? What we look for in a woman hasn’t changed a whole lot either. We want someone who can support us emotionally, be a mother to our children and can keep the cave tidy while we’re out hunting woolly mammoths. Spending my free time drinking and playing Wii isn’t going to make me president any sooner than being chained to a desk 80 hours a week is going to allot you the necessary time to help our kids learn how to read.

So it appears that we have an old-fashioned Mexican stand-off.

The women refuse to marry boys who contribute nothing to the real world, and the men refuse to marry girls who are more interested in their own careers than their families. Well, it was a nice run, but I guess the human race is ending with this generation.

But wait! Could it be that the journalists are merely trying to gin up their hits counts? Is it possible that this ridiculous stalemate had ended?

… or never existed in the first place?

Because when we come out of a long dry spell, we begin to notice all the really nice people around us. Some are girlfriends who have found non-odious boys to date, some are male friends who would be great boyfriends if they found the right girl, and some are really cute looking men we spy on the bus. Although all the people we date seem insane, it’s important to remember that most people in the world are just fine.

Maybe it was easier to get married back in the day when the only requirement for a man was a job and the only requirement for a woman was a frying pan, but we want so much more.

We want someone who can enjoy life with us, not live in an entirely different world. We want someone who will teach our kids all the things that make them such a wonderful person, and also help provide for our family. We want someone who loves us for who we are, not just what we do.

Throwing out the marriage handbook isn’t a disaster, it means we can write it for ourselves. How cool is that?

Contact the author here: mick@morningquickie.com