The Boys Who Refused to Become Their Fathers

My stepfather disowned his son for coming home from college in John Lennon glasses. With a single sartorial signal, my stepbrother alluded to antiwar sentiment (“All We Are Saying Is Give Peace a Chance”), amplified his own late-Lennon long hair, evoked drug use and Eastern spiritualty, endorsed interracial marriage, and mirrored a gender-ambivalent sensuality that, to his father’s Southern Baptist sensibility, was a non-stop ticket to hell. His dad needed no translation: he jumped straight to “get out of my house.”

That’s just how charged the battle to define manhood was between the generations of my time.

Neither my stepfather nor my birth father (who was so pissed off when I challenged him about Vietnam that he bounced me around the house yelling about my lack of patriotism) actually fought in World War II. Just a little too young. So, instead, they both suffered the experience of the Silent Generation Men: feeling they were never measuring up to the War Generation, who had stood up to the ultimate test of manhood and saved the world.

My dad went to Yale Medical School after only three years of college and eventually became a star in medical research. Right up to the end, though, he would recall studying medicine with the War Generation men who returned from battle to the generosity of the GI Bill. “Those guys were so serious,” he would say, “They were not messing around. It put so much pressure on the rest of us.”

From there forward, it was like the two generations were telescoped into each other, living side-by-side in their first homes, buying their consumer durables with money from the same Organization Man jobs, and having their 3.7 children during the same years. In fact, it was their combined family formation and astronomical fertility rate that produced us, at the time (but no longer), the biggest generation in American history. The boomers' resistance to the warrior ethos—set off by a number of factors, but the most prominent was the Vietnam War— fundamentally changed America's view of what it means to be a man—starting a trend that continues to this day until, now, the youngest men have utterly rejected the macho mentality of previous generations.

The Silent Generation men were so keen to live up to the measures of manhood set by the G.I.s that they became rather volatile when those ideals were challenged by their sons. It often got ugly.

Is there anybody left out there who has actually seen Easy Rider? Peter Fonda, in his own long hair and wire-rimmed glasses, is travelling by motorcycle across the American South with his equally counterculture buddy, Dennis Hopper. Eventually, a couple of old boys in a diner are so offended by Hopper and Fonda’s very existence that they grab their guns, hop in their trucks, follow these two “long hairs” out on to the highway, and shoot them dead. I remember feeling the tension from the first frames on the screen—I knew in my bones the shotguns and pickups were coming.

The movie, released in 1969, became iconic for the way it dramatized the breach between generations of men. Easy Rider, with its long hair, drugs, motorcycles, and open-road spirit, captured that era’s young men rejecting the old warrior masculinity, as well as their refusal to buy into corporate conformity.  Their comparative openness with each other, their anti-authoritarianism, their palpable freedom—all that brought fear and hatred from  traditional America. To the older order, these young men were not just politically radical.  They were failed men, feminized men, unserious men, unpatriotic men, sexually threatening men, socially destabilizing men. And none of that was OK.

That same year, a young man who would later become my husband and the father of my children hopped on his Harley and rode from Tulane in New Orleans to Washington DC for the huge antiwar protests. He had a full beard and a moustache.  I’m amazed he got to DC in one piece and lived to tell the story.

My motorcycle-riding ex grew up to be a pretty buttoned-up kind of guy.  Liberal, to be sure.  Smart, thoughtful, all of that.  A nice guy.  But my children joke that he even showers in a suit.  There is a lesson here about the evolution of masculinity, across a lifetime and also down history.

If you look at data from the 1970s, you can see that the young men of that time are most distinctively different from the previous generation in their attitudes about gender.  Decades later, that effect has held and even magnified, but now they look “traditional” compared to the generations that followed. Still, one generation at a time, all these men have continued to widen the gap between what they see as the ideal man and the ancient warrior masculinity.  Are they, like the good old boys saw Fonda and Hopper, failed men?  Just a bunch of sissies?

Well, that’s what today’s advocates for a return to traditional masculinity want you to think.  (Still sitting in the diner. Still with the gun rack in the pickup.) But that is not at all what is happening. 

As I explained in the last post, the outcomes experienced by men who ascribe to the traditional ideal of masculinity are massively negative, as are the effects of their proclivities on their partners, children, friends, communities, and nations.  But public discourse never looks at the "obverse group"—those who do not endorse the old ideal—but instead just assume they are lost and losing. 

As it happens,  the obverse group, now big enough to be the majority, deserves our attention because, far from being an amorphous group of softies, they have a clear and coherent profile and they have much better outcomes on basically every measure of individual and social life we care about.

Today’s majority are defined most by their egalitarian values.  In this, they are the opposite image to Traditional Men, whose defining attribute in scientific studies is their need to be dominant over. . . well, basically everybody. 

These new Egalitarian Men are just as strong and brave as the old guys were, but they only think it is ok to resort to force when trying to protect others from harm—not to redress their own grievances or to force their beliefs on others.  In fact, their tolerance for others’ differences is another distinguishing mark.  They value communication and emotional expression in a way old-fashioned masculinity thoroughly rejects.  Unlike previous generations, they do not automatically disdain everything feminine.

The newer majority enact this egalitarianism at home by, yes, helping with housework, but even more, with their engagement with children.  As a result of their warm and attentive child-rearing approach, their kids do better in school and, later, in life. Among TM groups, it is considered a disgrace—too feminine—for fathers to help with childcare.  And their kids fail more often as a result.

The Egalitarian Men have more stable and satisfying relationships with women.  Lower divorce rates.  Less domestic violence.  And—I swear there is data for this—these new men have better sex and more of it. 

This newer breed of men are better providers, though they also nearly always live in dual income households.  They are smarter with their money, don’t get fired as often, save more, get promoted more often.  Consequently, they are wealthier than Traditional Men.

Egalitarian Men have more friends and more community involvement than TM men.  They even go to church more often.  These are the kind of men who wouldn’t be caught dead in the groups where old-style guys congregate:  biker clubs, hate groups, drug rings, terrorist cells. Their incidence of criminality is vanishingly small, as compared to the warrior wannabes.

The men of the new way are happier.  Substance abuse, which is a outcome typical of traditionally masculine men, occurs much less often among these forward-facing men.  They suffer mental health difficulties, exhibit aggressive behavior, and commit suicide less often than do the men stuck in the past.

Globally, the big picture show the effects of this shift in ideals about men.  Though the Vietnam experience is unique to the US, the rest of the postwar generational rift is not.  (Remember:  the Beatles were British and an international phenomenon, as was all the youth culture stuff, including the radical politics.) Gender equality has been a moral cornerstone for each generation since, pretty much everywhere.

In the countries where gender roles have been most successfully realigned, human well-being across the board—health, education, livelihoods—is measurably better. And there is less conflict, less violence of any kind in those places. The governments are more stable.  Democracy is stronger. 

Just as traditional masculinity promises nothing but autocracy and strife at the aggregate level, the Egalitarian Man's way of doing gender promises the opposite:  hope.

These guys are not losers, but heroes. Instead of standing by while public discourse insults them, we should express support and admiration for their creativity and courage.  By redefining masculinity positively, they are helping bring about a change that will help the whole world.

Imagine that.