Are you between the ages of 18 and 34? Are you male? Do you watch sports? Play video games? Go to clubs? Try to "pick up chicks"? If you said yes to more than two of the above, congratulations you are a SYM and will never become a true man. What's a SYM you ask, you'll have to ask Kate Hymowitz.
"With women, you could argue that adulthood is in fact emergent. Single women in their 20s and early 30s are joining an international New Girl Order, hyper-achieving in both school and an increasingly female-friendly workplace, while packing leisure hours with shopping, traveling and dining with friends. Single young males, or SYMs, by contrast, often seem to hang out in a playground of drinking, hooking up, playing Halo 3 and, in many cases, underachieving. With them, adulthood looks as though it's receding."
Alright so a SYM is a 18 to 34 year old male who is single. By gosh! I fit into that category! Why I even play video games (though not Halo 3)! My god, she even realized that I go out with my friends and try to meet girls! Oh sweet merciful father... Hymowitz has even found out about my secret leisure activity, underachieving. Sarcasm aside I really like how Hymowitz has only the women shopping, travelling and dining with friends, which guys apparently never do. Also, from what I know of girls at my college campus, I'm pretty sure they're drinking and "hooking up" as well (seeing as how guys hook up with girls at parties, I mean it's kind of hard to go looking for chicks without, you know, chicks). Even better though is that use of "underachieving" as if it were some kind of leisure activity that guys actively participate in. Hymowitz continues in spectactular fashion,
"Naturally, women wonder: How did this perverse creature [SYM] come to be? The most prevalent theory comes from feminist-influenced academics and cultural critics, who view dude media as symptoms of backlash, a masculinity crisis. Men feel threatened by female empowerment, these thinkers argue, and in their anxiety, they cling to outdated roles."
I've heard this theory used quite often on campus for a variety of things, such as why guys hold open doors for girls (Because our mothers drilled it into us from day one), and I've never quite understood it. Maybe it's because I have a strong mother and that I grew up with strong female characters in my television shows, comic books, regular books, etc... but I personally have never felt my masculinity questioned by empowered women. All of this so far is nothing compared to the last couple of paragraphs,
"And here's what may be the deepest existential problem with the child-man – a tendency to avoid not just marriage but any deep attachments. This is British writer Nick Hornby's central insight in his novel About a Boy. The book's anti-hero, Will, is an SYM whose life is as empty of passion as of responsibility. He has no self apart from pop-culture effluvia, a fact that the author symbolizes by having the jobless 36-year-old live off the residuals of a popular Christmas song written by his late father. Mr. Hornby shows how the media-saturated limbo of contemporary guyhood makes it easy to fill your days without actually doing anything.
Will's unemployment is part of a more general passionlessness. To pick up women, for instance, he pretends to have a son and joins a single-parent organization; the plight of the single mothers means nothing to him. For Will, women are simply fleshy devices that dispense sex, and sex is just another form of entertainment, a "fantastic carnal alternative to drink, drugs and a great night out, but nothing much more than that."
The superficiality, indolence and passionlessness evoked in Mr. Hornby's novels haven't triggered any kind of cultural transformation. The SYM doesn't read much, remember, and he certainly doesn't read anything prescribing personal transformation. The child-man may be into self-mockery; self-reflection is something else entirely.
That's too bad. Young men especially need a culture that can help them define worthy aspirations.
Adults don't emerge. They're made."
I would have condensed the quote, but I felt that each piece is necessary to understand how ridiculous the next one is. I especially how Hymowitz says the SYM's (Me) don't read. I mean, most of her demographic (the SYMS) are only comprised of college students or recent college graduates, and we all know that they don't read, right?
Honestly, I wouldn't have brought up this article at all if it weren't for one major thing. Hymowitz bases her most controversial argument (that SYMS not only avoid "marriage, but any deep attachments") is based off of About A Boy. A novel, that was later turned into a movie. As a college student, and an English major I find actual physical pain in her use of a novel as evidence of a real-world phenomena. Fiction ≠ Evidence. Since this, her only piece of evidence for her final argument is complete bunk, then the rest must be as well, and thus I just don't give a shit.
-Cory Ragsdale
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