The Art of Manliness - Episode #14： Men to Boys and the Making of Modern Immaturity

00:00:00.000 This episode of the Art of Manly's podcast is brought to you by Huckberry. Huckberry is my

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00:00:32.000 code art15 to save 15% off your first purchase. Brett McKay here and welcome to another episode

00:00:53.020 of the Art of Manliness podcast. Now, a reoccurring theme on the Art of Manliness is that men today

00:00:58.740 are failing to grow up. Many are putting off responsibility like careers, marriage, and

00:01:03.420 fatherhood well into adulthood and are dressing and behaving like they're still in high school.

00:01:08.060 But what's behind this arrested development in men? Well, our guest today has written a book about

00:01:12.960 this very topic. His name is Dr. Gary Cross and he's the author of the book Men to Boys,

00:01:17.440 The Making of Modern Immaturity. Dr. Cross is a professor of modern history at Penn State

00:01:22.040 University where he teaches courses on the historical effects of consumerism, technology,

00:01:26.320 and leisure on society. Dr. Cross, welcome to the show. Thank you. Well, thank you for taking time

00:01:32.060 to speak with us today. Dr. Cross, what inspired you to write this book, Men to Boys? Well, observing a

00:01:40.520 lot of men who were still boys, I suppose, one of the things that really struck me was that

00:01:48.040 in case I had run into colleagues and certain students, grad students and others who were

00:01:53.940 often extremely smart and hardworking. But when they came home at night, they played video games

00:02:02.180 the whole evening. And I ran into, in my teaching, I'd run into two young women who would take a course

00:02:09.420 I offered on the history of family who said they never really had ever gone out on a date.

00:02:17.320 And it struck me, you know, what's going on here? There's something really strange. I mean,

00:02:20.780 these were not, you know, unattractive women. You know, back in my day, I'm now 63, that they

00:02:29.220 certainly would have had lots of encounters with chaps, you know, interested in them. And it struck me as

00:02:38.480 that there was just a really interesting shift, it seemed to me, in the way really men dealt with

00:02:46.080 their time free from work, in particular. And I had written on changes in the way people had

00:02:54.600 raised their children, and particularly the sort of introduction of the idea of the pool in young

00:03:02.640 people in childhood, back in the 1930s. And it struck me as, well, maybe a historian can maybe

00:03:08.880 make a little sense of what's going on by turning from the present and moving back through the past,

00:03:16.800 maybe 60 or 70 years, particularly the last 50 years, to see really what's happened.

00:03:22.560 Hmm. And that's going on to my next question. One of the most interesting arguments you make in your

00:03:27.280 book is that the immaturity of men isn't a new problem. A lot of people say, oh, this is a new

00:03:31.820 problem that we're facing. But you actually argue that this is something that started almost over a

00:03:35.800 century ago. Can you explain to our listeners a bit about the history of male immaturity?

00:03:40.240 Right. Well, you know, there's a lot about being mature that is, and always has been,

00:03:47.680 relatively unattractive. I mean, it means having to give up some pleasures, make some sacrifices,

00:03:54.920 start thinking about somebody other than oneself. And, and sometimes that's also a burden. And,

00:04:02.200 you know, even when you think of somebody like Mark Twain, you know, back in the 19th century,

00:04:07.400 and he's writing about Tom Sawyer and, and Huckleberry Finn. And, you know, these,

00:04:14.360 these are stories that appeal as much to adults as to, as to kids, you know, adults that really

00:04:21.000 felt that maybe, um, they had lost something by giving up their youth. And the same thing with,

00:04:27.240 this would be kind of surprising people that, uh, the people who watched the play originally,

00:04:33.000 Peter Pan were adults. There was, um, you know, this is called Peter Pan complex where,

00:04:38.640 you know, Peter Pan never grows up. This was a very, very attractive thing to,

00:04:44.360 to, to English and American men who, uh, and women too, who found themselves in, in often long,

00:04:51.960 boring jobs, working in offices and feeling, uh, you know, sort of unfulfilled by this sort of,

00:04:59.960 the forced, uh, maturity that they, uh, were, were put in. So it has been around a lot. And,

00:05:06.360 and for a long time, it's just that it was a kind of a, this kind of quest for childhood

00:05:13.960 or retaining it was a kind of a secret pleasure in a way that, uh, was certainly true with, say,

00:05:20.440 early Playboy magazines. Um, Playboy comes out in 1953. Hefner does very well with it. Um, and one of

00:05:29.720 the, the original buyers of that were suburban men with families and driving around and station

00:05:37.800 wagons, what, you know, they got their little dose of, of fantasy of being a bachelor and going

00:05:43.880 about town, uh, by reading their Playboys. So, um, there's a, there, it's been around a long time

00:05:49.640 in that way. And so a male arrested development has been with us for a while, but is there any

00:05:53.640 differences between the generations and how it's manifested or the severity of it? You know, say,

00:05:57.880 hey, you know, Hugh Hefner was a greatest generation guy. Um, there's a difference between

00:06:02.680 him and say the baby boomers and the generation XY. Right. Well, a lot of what I, the, the book

00:06:09.800 is about the changes over those three generations. I'm in the boomer generation. I'm actually in the

00:06:16.360 senior class of the boomer generation. And I look back on the, at least the ideal of, of the greatest

00:06:23.560 generation. And of course, uh, these were guys that were in World War II or Korea and often had, uh,

00:06:33.080 had families at a very young age, you know, uh, men would marry on average at 20 or 21, as late as 1970.

00:06:42.440 So, um, it has, there's been a lot of change really, particularly, um, particularly since the late

00:06:48.920 60s and early 70s, my generation, we kind of broke away from that, that sense of, uh, early

00:06:56.120 responsibility and often, you know, big way rejecting it. And maybe some of your listeners

00:07:02.200 remember, uh, the movie, The Graduate or some of these others that depict this kind of unwillingness

00:07:09.240 to adhere to the suburban lifestyle and to settle down and, and all of that. Um, and what's happened

00:07:17.400 even more recently, of course, is this is a trend that's accelerated greatly. Now, men marry at, uh,

00:07:23.960 on average at about 28, almost 27 to 28. So they spent a lot more time away from, uh, from responsibility

00:07:34.920 and family and raising children and even having steady careers than, than men did a generation

00:07:41.800 earlier, even my generation, although we were kind of a transition. And of course, there are

00:07:47.000 huge changes in the popular culture, which kind of embraces, uh, a kind of an ideal of, uh,

00:07:54.520 a manhood, which is, is not based on providing that and taking care of others or refinement,

00:08:03.800 but rather, uh, uh, but rather remaining, I suppose, permanently cool teenage boys around video games,

00:08:12.040 around, uh, uh, uh, personal, uh, pleasures and the like. And you see this, uh, in all sorts of

00:08:20.280 things of the, one of the things that really amazed me is I, I started looking at some contemporary news

00:08:26.840 magazines like Maxim and the whole group that are like that and comparing them to the way the

00:08:33.320 playboys were back in the fifties and sixties. And it's an astonishing really how different they're

00:08:38.920 appealing to the same audience, but it's just a very different set of attitudes. And, uh, I mean,

00:08:44.760 maybe, maybe the old playboys were a bit pretentious, you know, I mean, it would interview,

00:08:50.840 you know, Hemingway and, you know, that kind of thing, great authors from the past, but then we

00:08:56.360 would talk about fine lines and good stereo equipment and all the rest of it. Uh, whereas

00:09:02.600 the modern men's magazines are, are much more sort of focused on kind of immediate pleasures and

00:09:11.000 in a way kind of rejecting the idea of, of developing, um, skills, developing, uh, uh, refined

00:09:19.000 taste, uh, certainly of course, uh, responsible relationships with others.

00:09:24.040 And so looking at today, you know, what are the biggest factors driving male immaturity now?

00:09:31.480 Well, I sort of suggested that one is that for a variety of reasons, and I'm not, you know,

00:09:37.640 criticizing this necessarily, but for a variety of reasons, men are taking much longer to enter into

00:09:47.000 mature roles and relationships. And the, you know, I'm talking about marriage,

00:09:53.640 having children, having regular careers. Some of this has to do with the fact that it just takes

00:09:59.400 a lot longer to get established, uh, now, as opposed to say in the fifties and sixties,

00:10:05.720 you know, if you lived in Detroit, you maybe finished high school, you could get a job at GM

00:10:10.760 at 18 and afford to buy a car and put a down payment on a house by the time you were 20,

00:10:17.480 you know, and you could have two or three kids and, uh, and, and, you know, be a leader in the,

00:10:24.120 in the Boy Scouts or whatever in your mid twenties and, you know, move on in life that way. And of course,

00:10:30.920 that's much less the case now is, you know, it takes longer to go to school, but it's, it's sometimes

00:10:36.360 you're into your thirties before you really have the kind of job that maybe your father or grandfather

00:10:41.960 had when he was in his early twenties. So there's that. The other side is though, that the whole

00:10:48.600 culture, and I know it sounds vague, but it's in the, in television, the movies and the magazines,

00:10:55.640 and of course, in advertising has, uh, has shifted enormously in, in the past 30 years toward,

00:11:04.680 toward really abandoning sort of older ideas about how valuable and important it was to grow

00:11:11.800 up. And so we have, uh, we have movies that kind of feature these sort of ageless action characters

00:11:20.040 who, who are not about, about developing relationships, but about, uh, but about, uh,

00:11:26.360 very quick and thrilling kinds of fights and struggles and whatnot. So the, the, um, the culture has

00:11:35.480 abandoned the idea of, of maturity as well. And you see it in things like two and a half men,

00:11:41.720 versus not just father knows best, but well, in the old Westerns, I used to watch when I was a kid,

00:11:47.640 one of the thrills of writing this book was to look at some of the old Westerns from the 1950s.

00:11:52.840 And you see them really differently from my age, as opposed to when I first watched them as a,

00:11:57.960 you know, an eight or 10 year old, um, you know, and a lot of those, those stories were really about,

00:12:03.320 um, the struggles to, to, to make the right decision and to be, and to do something that

00:12:09.880 was self-sacrificing or even heroic rather than, uh, a self-indulgent and, um, selfish.

00:12:16.760 So it will cut, uh, cuts across a lot of things.

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00:13:10.760 AOMHUCK. That's A-O-M-H-U-C-K. And if it's your first time purchasing, use code ART15 at checkout to save

00:13:16.800 15% off on your first purchase. And now back to the show. And do you think the current economic

00:13:22.720 crisis we're having, do you think the current economic crisis we're having will have an effect,

00:13:27.520 you know, either positive or negative on male immaturity? Well, I mean, I think certainly in the,

00:13:32.640 in the, in the short run for a lot of guys, it, it does extend, uh, shall we call it the team

00:13:41.760 years and clean values? Because, you know, you can afford at say 25 and you're earning,

00:13:48.560 you have a job, say working at Best Buy or, you know, whatever, a fast food place, uh, I know it's

00:13:54.880 different, but, uh, you could maybe afford to buy, uh, you know, a 46 inch screen television set. And,

00:14:02.400 you know, maybe the, the, the latest, uh, video game equipment, but can't say afford to buy a house or

00:14:10.640 support a family. Uh, so, so in a way, the, uh, the economic difficulties kind of reinforce these

00:14:19.440 trends, I think, toward, uh, immaturity. But on the other side, the fact that people are going to

00:14:26.800 have to learn to how to pool the resources and, um, uh, and maybe hunker down and, and give up some of,

00:14:35.920 of, of the pleasures of one's youth, uh, this may have just the opposite effect. I mean,

00:14:42.080 the, the thing about all the observations I make in the book about the immaturity of,

00:14:48.000 say, 36 year old guys who, who haven't given up their video games. Well, that may not be the point

00:14:54.880 of view of a 20 year old guy, you know, who may look at the 36 year old guy and say, I don't want to

00:15:01.520 change. And so what happens is generations kind of often kind of change their behavior based upon

00:15:09.520 what they see in the, the older generation. And that may, might be happening now for all I know.

00:15:14.560 Yeah. Kind of reaction to the, the baby boomers were kind of a rejection of the, the gray generation,

00:15:20.400 the ideals of them. And maybe you're seeing, uh, maybe a possibly a rejection of the baby boomers

00:15:25.600 ideals of, you know, fancy free and well, that, or even the Gen X, uh, behaviors, you know,

00:15:31.920 cause the Gen X people are, you know, uh, a lot of them are in their mid thirties or forties.

00:15:37.440 And I mean, the Gen X, uh, you know, the baby boom, uh, ends about 1964. So anybody born between

00:15:45.680 say 64 and maybe 80 would be, you know, and how old does that put them there? They're, they're,

00:15:51.840 they're up there now. And, and, you know, we're seeing a generation of young, uh, who are children,

00:15:57.520 not a baby boomers in some cases, but of Gen Xers. So, you know, you, these, the generation thing

00:16:05.200 flows fairly, uh, fairly quickly. Now here's a, here's a question, Dr. Cross. And why does it seem

00:16:10.880 that only men are getting roasted for the Purell behavior? I mean, are women immune from the

00:16:16.400 immaturity or are they having the same problem too? Well, I mean, I don't write about women,

00:16:21.200 you know, partly because I don't know. I mean, if I were to write about women, people might just,

00:16:26.240 you know, think I, I had a personal problem or something. And, and I don't, I don't really know

00:16:32.400 the situation here as well as on the men's side. It just seems like men ought to write about men when

00:16:38.000 it comes to questions of immaturity. But yeah, obviously there are a lot of women, you know,

00:16:43.440 women who collect Barbie dolls, you know, who in, in a way that men might collect action figures.

00:16:50.320 I mean, I've had grad students who are 30, over 30 years old, who decorate their little cubicles

00:16:56.480 with Star Wars figures. Well, you know, the women don't do that so, so obviously that they do do it

00:17:03.680 in various places. And there may be nothing wrong with it, except for the fact that, you know,

00:17:08.240 maybe your taste might change from the time you're 35. The other thing, of course, is that, that, uh,

00:17:14.240 a fair number of women, of course, have a little bit different issue because, uh, in a way, once they

00:17:21.200 have children, they're, at least some of them are kind of obliged to kind of give up their childhoods,

00:17:27.520 you know, although some of them, I think, you know, live their childhoods through their children,

00:17:33.040 you know, so there's, it's complicated in that way. So, but it's definitely not an all-male thing.

00:17:38.640 I mean, the simple fact is that the culture not only sort of glorifies youth and particularly

00:17:44.240 the cool years of teenhood, but, but doesn't, but doesn't particularly honor, um, maturity in the

00:17:52.160 sense of either being older or the sense of, of having made accomplishments or honor those who,

00:18:00.320 who make sacrifices for the sake of, uh, of the next generation or for other people who in their,

00:18:09.040 their worlds who may need them. Uh, you know, we tend to, we tend to honor the, the person who,

00:18:16.240 you know, knows how to dress well, knows how to spend well on himself, who, um, has a, uh, you know,

00:18:23.760 has a very strong sense of personal self and who enjoys life and is in no, uh, no rush, uh, to get old.

00:18:33.680 I mean, look at somebody like Hugh Hefner. I mean, the guy is about 84 or something. And I mean,

00:18:41.120 you know, some of your listeners have probably have seen the girls next door. It's pretty hard

00:18:46.480 to take that seriously. But a lot of people say, wow, I had a boy, you know, here's an 84 year old

00:18:52.640 who can do that. Well, and at least in your fantasy life, maybe I could do it too. Well, you know,

00:18:57.520 maybe, maybe you can, but why should you? I mean, you know, that's the point, but the whole culture says,

00:19:03.440 you should, you know? Yeah. So Dr. Crosby, we know the problem exists,

00:19:07.680 but after studying the history of masculinity and all that you've done in your book,

00:19:11.520 do you have any suggestions or have you come with anything that we can do to solve this?

00:19:16.240 Well, I mean, I think at some level it's, it's really a matter of, of personal decision. I mean,

00:19:24.000 it's sort of how, how you kind of conduct yourself and realize, I mean, there's several things. One is

00:19:31.920 that even if the culture doesn't honor maturity in the way maybe it used to, and even if it takes a

00:19:42.000 long time to get to a position of maturity for the reasons that I've described, it doesn't mean you

00:19:49.520 can't find new ways of, of, of being a grownup. It doesn't mean you have to wear a fedora, you know,

00:19:57.440 like the, the fellow who used to, to coach the Dallas Cowboys, and I can't remember his name, but,

00:20:03.040 you know, yeah, Tom Landry. I mean, he was famous. He always wore the fedora and the, the tie and

00:20:09.040 whatnot, but we don't have to do that anymore. We don't need those kinds of symbols and we don't

00:20:13.440 need to be, you know, bossy and, and, uh, you know, push our, our spouses or our children around,

00:20:19.600 you know, but, but we can, we can develop, uh, ways of, of connecting with the younger generation,

00:20:27.120 being nurturing, and some of this can be done in the simplest kinds of forms, just getting involved

00:20:32.720 with, with, um, youth groups or, um, uh, you know, taking an interest in your nephews and nieces,

00:20:41.280 you know, those sorts of things, uh, and recognizing that, you know, that at a certain point you're,

00:20:47.200 you're, you're not 18 and 20, and there's, there's some, some nice things about not being 18 and 20.

00:20:54.160 You have a, you have a different perspective on life. Learn to be appreciative of, uh, uh, of the

00:21:01.200 next phase of life. Uh, don't necessarily, don't try to resist it. It's not to say, you know, you

00:21:06.720 should become, you know, some boring old fogey at 30 years old. Nobody wants that. But, uh, but, but learn

00:21:13.440 that, uh, that being older sometimes, uh, provides you with, with a kind of a new outlook and, uh, a fresh

00:21:21.280 way of being. And then, you know, and then also, and I, I think in your, uh, on your site, you

00:21:27.760 mentioned these things, develop, uh, develop refinements, uh, hobbies, interests that are

00:21:34.560 about much more than, than the sort of the latest thing. Uh, you know, the, the, the next, the next

00:21:40.880 shoot them up first person shooter video game, or, or, um, the latest, uh, in, in popular music,

00:21:48.160 or dress or whatever. I mean, part of being grown up is to, is to build up as, uh, uh,

00:21:54.320 not just to, uh, uh, to wait for the novelty, uh, parade to come by. So, uh, there's a lot

00:22:01.680 of things to be done. And I mean, I'm hopeful that, that, uh, that even though it's hard,

00:22:06.240 I think to be a grown up and, and in some ways we have to redefine what it means to be a grown

00:22:12.160 up. And that's been very hard for us to do. There are, there are ways of doing it. And I'm

00:22:16.720 pretty confident that a lot of guys will do it. Well, Dr. Cross, thank you for your time. It's

00:22:20.800 been very interesting talking to you. Have a good day. Our guest today was Dr. Gary Cross. Dr.

00:22:26.880 Cross is the author of the book, Men to Boys, The Making of Modern Immaturity. And you can pick up

00:22:32.400 Dr. Cross's book at amazon.com or any other major bookstore. Well, that wraps up another edition of

00:22:41.520 the Art of Manliness podcast. For more manly tips and advice, make sure to check out the Art of

00:22:46.160 Manliness website at artofmanliness.com. And until next week, stay manly.

The Art of Manliness - July 31, 2025

Episode #14： Men to Boys and the Making of Modern Immaturity

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