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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.
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没多久之前，普通的美国男人在二十多岁的年纪就可以完成大多数成家立业的重要指标：取得高中学历、实现经济独立、结婚生子。今时今日，大多数二十多岁的男人却陷身于一种新奇的过渡状态，其中既有负责任的自立精神，也掺杂着荷尔蒙作用之下的青春期特征。这种“半成年”状态有许多可取之处，对那些受过大学教育的人来说尤其如此。不过，事到如今，我们必须正视一个业已为众多沮丧失意的年青女性所熟知的事实：这样的状态并不能带来最好的男性特质。
喜剧作家茱莉•克劳斯纳（Julie Klausner）曾于2010年出版过一本感人至深的有趣书籍：《你的乐队我没兴趣：我约会过的独立摇滚乐手、信托投资人、色情作者、罪犯、善于识别假货的时尚人士以及其他一些傻冒带给我的教训》（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）。她如是写道：我们已经烦透了跟“傻冒”腻在一起的日子。克劳斯纳所说的“傻冒”指的是这样一些男性，他们既不是男孩，也不是男人，而是一种介于两者之间的东西。一位女士在为克劳斯纳著作所写的书评中写道：傻冒们成天谈论《星球大战》（Star Wars），完全没意识到那部电影只适合年纪比他们小一半的人。傻冒们心目中的完美夜晚是跟自己乐队里的人一起玩游戏机，或者是跟大学时代的朋友一起去拉斯维加斯……他们更像是需要我们照料的小孩，却不像开车送我们回家的父辈。读这本书的时候，我不得不多次停下来思考：对啊，我以前不也跟这种人约会过吗？
对我们当中的大多数人来说，孳生半成年状态的文化生境已经不再是什么引人注目的东西。说到底，将近二十年以来，流行文化当中一直都挤满了各式各样的“半成人”。上世纪九十年代早期，好莱坞用《单身贵族》（Singles）、《四个毕业生》（Reality Bites）、《叠影狂花》（Single White Female）和《全职浪子》（Swingers）之类的电影为这股风气开了先河。不久之后，电视也赶来推波助澜，为我们提供了一系列可爱的半成人组合：莫妮卡（Monica）、乔伊（Joey）、瑞秋（Rachel）和罗斯（Ross）（《老友记》）；杰瑞（Jerry）、爱琳（Elaine）、乔治（George）和克拉默（Kramer）（《宋飞传》）；以及卡莉（Carrie）、米兰达（Miranda）（《欲望都市》），等等等等。
熟悉归熟悉，半成年状态终究还是反映了社会的一个重大进步。毫不夸张地说，如今的社会上存在着大批独立生活的单身男女，这些男女又拥有足以让自己免除下厨之劳的大笔可支配收入，这是人类历史上从未有过的全新局面。没错，西方历史上以前也有过年青人等到年近三十才结婚的时候；没错，办公室女郎和律师单身汉早就已经开始在各个城市里上班娱乐，这样的状况已经存在了超过一个世纪。不过，他们的人数和他们的收入来源始终都处于相对有限的状态。今天的半成人却和以往不同，已经在人口当中占到了一个很大的比例。
现今的半成年状态还有一个跟以往不同的地方，那就是它彻底颠覆了传统的性别等级。在半成人当中，居于主导地位的性别是女性。她们接受大学教育的比例比男性高（在25岁至34岁的美国人当中，34%的女性拥有学士学位，男性的这一比例则只有27%），学习成绩也比男性好。正如大多数教授所指出的那样，她们还比男性更自信、更有干劲。这些优势会伴随女性从20岁走到30岁，结果便是她们比男性更有机会继续深造，也更有机会得到升迁。更有甚者，在不少城市当中，她们的收入也超过了自己的兄弟和男友。
尽管如此，对这些女人来说，一个关键的问题却始终挥之不去：好男人都上哪儿去了呢？她们的男性同龄人往往是些长不大的老学生、笨头笨脑的怪物或者肮脏邋遢的懒鬼──这样的性别鸿沟在导演贾德•阿帕图（Judd Apatow）2007年的影片《好孕临门》（Knocked Up）当中得到了完美的呈现。影片的男主角是23岁的本•斯通（Ben Stone），由塞斯•罗根（Seth Rogen）饰演。有一次喝醉酒之后，本和凯萨琳•海格尔（Katherine Heigl）饰演的爱丽森•斯科特（Allison Scott）上了床，后者由此怀孕。本和一群穷酸邋遢的朋友一起住在洛杉矶的一个临时居所里，每天只知道打游戏和吸大麻，想办个色情网站也没成功。与他相反，爱丽森是一个正在蹿红的电视记者，住的是一套整洁的公寓，屋里的床单和毛巾看着也挺干净。决定留下肚里的孩子之后，她马上做好了所有的筹划，随后便付诸实施。本却只能跌跌撞撞地一路前行，努力变成一个有所担当的成年人。
一场宿醉使尚未成熟的Ben Stone（塞斯•罗根(Seth Rogen)饰演）成为了一个孩子的父亲，他决定一定要逐渐成长起来。
如此说来，这些半成人是从哪里来的呢？你兴许会以为，原因在于一些被人惯坏了的24岁青年拼命想延续学生时代喝酒泡妞的生活，方法是利用娘老子的慷慨。不过，真实的原因并不是这么简单。从上世纪八十年代开始，高学历带来的经济优势──也就是所谓的“大学红利”──急剧提高。1960至2000年之间，年青人上大学或者读研究生的比例翻了不止一番。在这个“知识经济”的时代，好工作属于那些有文凭的人。与此同时，拿文凭是一件很耗时间的事情。
另一个因素也让走向成年的道路变得更加漫长，那就是越来越像迷宫的劳动力市场。过去几十年当中，经济扩张和数码革命已经把高端劳动力市场变成了一个竞争惨烈的地方，竞争的目标都是些最刺激、最需要创意、最有派头的工作。那些诱人的工作往往都需要志向远大的年青男女翻来覆去地折腾许多年，在学校和实习场所之间辗转、在实习场所和工作地点之间辗转、在不同工作之间横向或纵向辗转，还可能在美国和其他国家的不同城市之间辗转。知识经济为受过良好教育的年青人提供了一个前所未有的机会，让他们可以按个人的喜好来考虑工作问题。他们要的不仅仅是工作，而是“事业”，要的是一个可以施展自身才干、表达心底激情的岗位，还希望通过事业来塑造自我身份。对于今天的半成人来说，“你是做什么的”几乎可以跟“你是什么人”划等号，成家的事情却很少会得到他们的重视。
半成人阶段跟青春期有几分相似，后者是二十世纪中期才有的一个概念，那时候，美国那些十多岁的少年被人从田野和工厂里赶进了一个新兴的机构──高中。在很长一段时间之内，穷人和新移民都没有什么青春期生活，因为他们的家庭承担不起劳动力和收入的损失，他们就只好跳过青春期、直接走上工作岗位。不过，美国渐渐地富了起来，由此就有了空间和时间上的余裕，可以打造教育程度更高的市民阶层和劳动力大军。很快，十几岁的少年就成了一个商业上和文化上的明星群体，还获得了一张专属于自己的心理分析报告。青春期心理权威之一埃里克•埃里克森（Erik Erikson）将这个时期形容为一次“暂停”，亦即童年和成年之间的一个过渡时期，以角色混淆、情感混乱和身份冲突为特征。
跟二十世纪的青春期少年一样，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澜，旨在把半成人状态提升到生活方式的高度。此外，跟青春期一样，半成人阶段也是一种存在阶级基础的社会现象，只属于那些相对富裕的人。在这个知识经济的时代，没有四年大学文凭的人是无法抢到众人艳羡的工作的。
不过，半成人也跟青春期少年有一个重大的区别，那就是他们会为自己写传记，而且是从头开始写。社会学家们用“人生剧本”这个术语来概括某个特定社会为人生大事及人生重要舞台排出的序列。这样的剧本因文化而异，基本的情节却深植于我们的生物天性之中。青春期这个概念的发明并没有改写美国式人生剧本当中的主要章节。有了青春期以后，成人这个概念依然是指那个肩负大部分经济和文化建设任务的群体。就女人而言，核心任务通常是日复一日地养育下一代；对男人来说，核心任务则是为妻儿提供保护和生活资料。按照这个剧本演下去，你就会变成一个成人，暂时担起维持社会秩序的责任，直到你步入暮年、继而撒手人寰为止。
可是，与青春期少年不同，半成人并不知道未来应该是什么模样。对他们来说，婚姻和父母之责都可以表现为许多形式，完全省略也不是问题。1970年，25岁到29岁的美国人当中只有16%从来没结过婚；到了今天，这个比例则是惊人却真实的55%。在美国，第一次结婚的平均年龄日益向着30岁靠近（欧洲的许多地方已经突破了这一大关）。不足为奇的是，为数众多的美国年青人都在经历一场“四分之一人生危机”，沮丧不已地担心着自己的未来。
在这个立业艰难的时代，各位半成人即便选择了成家，成家的时间也是史无前例地晚。丈夫、妻子和孩子都会对自由自在的生活形成拖累，而自由自在的生活又是早期职业发展和身份探索的必要条件。除此之外，半成人状态本身也对寻找配偶的原始活动构成了障碍。它推迟了稳定的自我意识形成的时间，大幅度提高了潜在配偶的数量，搞乱了求爱的常规，还助长了人们对婚姻意义的怀疑。许多数字都可以证明这一点，这里只举其中一组：1970年，25岁的人当中有将近十分之七处于已婚状态；2000年，同年龄的人当中只有三分之一实现了这个重要的人生目标。
最晚从十九世纪中期开始，美国男人就一直在奋力寻找一个可以接受的成人身份。我们总是听人说，一旦男人踏出家门、开始在办公室和工厂里上班，女人就被圈在了家里，忍受各种各样的痛苦。不过，真相似乎是，男人也不怎么喜欢这样的安排。他们对中产阶级生活当中的种种乏味规矩避之唯恐不及，后来又对郊区客厅里的种种陈腐活动敬谢不敏，于是就转向打猎钓鱼之类的业余爱好和探险活动。到了二十世纪中期，一些做了父亲的人先是拒绝花钱买电视这种新玩意儿，后来又改变了主意，原因是电视里有了拳击比赛和棒球比赛。《花花公子》（Playboy）杂志于二十世纪五十年代问世，似乎是对男性驯化过程的一份终极抗议；想一想这本杂志的名字，你就可以知道，男人是多么不愿意变成家养动物。
从拒绝家庭生活这方面来说，这里的“花花公子”就是今天那些半成人男性的先声。不过，跟喜欢爵士乐和艺术的“花花公子”不同，我们这个时代的叛逆男孩属于动物世界。二十世纪九十年代，粗俗下流、广受欢迎的“男孩”杂志《Maxim》从英国来到了美国。这本杂志的理念和格调十分幼稚、十足野性，跟它比起来，《花花公子》简直就像是加缪（Camus）的作品。
与《Maxim》的到来同时，年青男人纷纷转向“喜剧中心”（Comedy Central）、“卡通网路”（Cartoon Network）和Spike之类的有线电视频道。这些频道以男性为目标受众，由节目内容可知，受众的口味都还停留在青春期。他们爱看斯蒂夫•卡瑞尔（Steve Carell）、卢克•威尔逊（Luke Wilson）、欧文•威尔逊（Owen Wilson）、金•凯利（Jim Carrey）、亚当•桑德勒（Adam Sandler）、威尔•法雷尔（Will Farrell）和塞斯•罗根等“老男孩”出演的电影，为他们那些妙不可言的汽车碰撞、下流笑话、胸胯特写以及喝啤酒比赛之类的男童恶作剧而欢呼。在以前，美国人的活力和乐天精神总是会给外国人留下朝气蓬勃乃至天真幼稚的印象。不过，发展到这个地步就有点儿太过分了。
这样的幼稚和浅薄该作何解释呢？按我看，它体现了这样一个事实，那就是我们的文化没有为男性的社会角色提供一个明确的定义。几乎普遍适用于所有文明的一条规律是，女孩只需要生理成熟就可以变成女人，男孩却要经历一番考验才能变成男人。他们必须证明自己的勇气和体格，要不就得证明自己已经掌握了一些必要的技能，最终目的则是证明自己有能力承担提供保护和养家糊口的责任。然而，今时今日，女性正在我们的发达经济之中高歌猛进，丈夫和父亲就成了可有可无的东西，曾经为合格男人所必需的种种特质──坚韧、克制、勇敢、忠诚──也已经落后于时代，甚至还有点儿让人尴尬。
如今的半成人男性就像是一出戏里的一名演员，但却不知道台词，只知道什么东西不能说。他必须在竞争惨烈的市场上搏杀，但又不能表现得太专横，也不能表现得太自信。他应该体贴殷勤，同时又不能罗里罗嗦，应该精明强干，同时又不能骄傲自大。雪上加霜的是，身为一名单身汉，他身边的顾问和知己通常都是些野性未驯的家伙，跟他自己一模一样。
单身汉从来都不是文明大戏当中最负责任的演员；跟那些主动承揽丈夫和父亲角色的男人相比，他们依然是麻烦更多、成功更少的一群。所以呢，如果他们当中的一些人继续在充斥着《星球大战》海报和瘪啤酒罐的屋子里生活、继续把女人当成一次性的雌激素玩具，我们可以感到厌恶，但却不应该感到惊讶。
手头相对宽裕、没有家庭的负担、又有一大堆媒介致力于满足自己的所有欲望，年青的单身汉完全可以选择在猪窝里过活──他们也经常这么干。女人可以忍他们一段时间，之后却会感到恐惧和厌恶，接下来要么彻底放弃拥有丈夫和孩子的希望，要么就撇开这些让人头痛的男人、直接去问精子银行要DNA。可是，女人做出的这些理性选择只会成为男人沉迷于童稚阶段的藉口。他们干吗要长大呢？反正也没人需要他们。他们用不着采取任何行动。
为什么要长大？现在，二十多岁的男人有很多玩具和可以让他们分心的东西，从电视游戏和体育酒吧到“男孩”杂志《Maxim》。。。
他们完全可以再来一罐啤酒。
──改编自凯•希莫维茨（Kay S. Hymowitz）的《重振雄风：女人的崛起如何将男人变成了男孩》（Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys），此书已由Basic Books出版社出版，出版日期是3月1日。
