Tuesday, May 12, 2015

Boys in 2015

Absent fathers and feminized schools are driving boys into a disconnected online world of porn and video games, argues the academic psychologist Philip Zimbardo in an interview with Stuart Jeffries in The Guardian.
In the UK today, a young person is more likely to have a television in their bedroom than a father in their house by the end of their childhood. And even if fathers are around, their sons don’t engage with them much: boys spend 44 hours in front of a TV, smartphone or computer screen for every half hour in conversation with their fathers.

Why does any of this really matter, I ask the American psychologist Philip Zimbardo, who cites these figures in his new book Man (Dis)connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What It Means To Be Male. Why do boys need fathers?

Zimbardo, professor emeritus at Stanford University, replies that everybody needs a mother and father because they give different kinds of love. “Mothers give love unconditionally – because you came out of her body, a mother loves you. You bring home your report card and it’s all Cs? Mom will say, ‘It’s OK. Momma loves you anyway. Try harder.’

“Fathers give love provisionally. If you want your allowance, if you don’t want me to turn off your computer, then you’ve got to perform. That’s always been the deal with fathers and sons – you don’t get a pass just because you exist, just because you got my name on your birth certificate. You’re going to do it because you want your father to love you and admire you. That central source of extrinsic motivation is gone now for almost one out of every two kids.”

...Why are boys more likely to retreat into cyberspace than girls? “Boys have never been self-reflective. Boys are focused on doing and acting, girls are more focused on being and feeling. The new video-game world encourages doing and acting and not really thinking. Video games are not so attractive to girls.”

...Zimbardo reckons that online pornography is much more appealing to boys than girls, in part because it eliminates narratives. “With the old pornography there were typically stories. There was a movie, like Deep Throat, and in the course of some interesting theme people were having sex. Now it’s only about physical sexual contact.”

“It’s always been difficult for boys to talk to girls because you are never sure what they want or what their agenda is. And now without trying or practice it becomes more and more difficult. So it’s a reason to retreat into this virtual world.”

...“The one thing every boy or man fears from girls is being rejected. I don’t want you to kiss me, I don’t want sex, I don’t want you, I don’t want to date. That fear of rejection by women is eliminated in this virtual pornography world.”

“Pornography is being moved to the next level. You’ll put on 3D glasses and the woman or man will proposition you. And in some cases it’ll be interactive – you could say ‘Take off your clothes’. The idea of the film-maker of 3D virtual sex is to make it seem ever more real, just as video games are. Soon they’ll be able to put the face of the viewer on to the leading character. So you’ll be the man the woman wants to have sex with.”

...But there is a grisly paradox, Zimbardo argues. Boys’ retreat into a putatively safe virtual world involves, in fact, a new kind of rejection. “In online porn, the men are incredibly well-endowed – they are paid precisely because they have those attributes. In addition, some of the men take penile injections so they can perform for half an hour non-stop. When you’re a 10 or 15-year-old kid, you say to yourself, ‘I will never, ever look like that or perform like that’.”

As if to clinch the point, Zimbardo tells me about how he recently took part in a documentary about boys called The Mask You Live In. Directed by Jennifer Siebel Newsom, it’s a sequel to her film Miss Representation, about the false depictions of women in the media. In one scene, a US school teacher gives a group of boys each a circular piece of paper. On one side they write what their image is, and on the other what they are feeling. Then they scrunch up the paper and throw it to another kid. “What they said was all the same,” recalls Zimbardo. “On the outside it said: ‘Tough. Fearless. Kick your ass.’ And on the inside: ‘Lonely. Sad. Got no friends.’ Each boy was stunned that the others felt the same way. I think it’s what it’s like for boys now – they’re in a terrible state and I can’t imagine that it’s going to get better any time soon.”
Read more here.

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