Guyland

The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men

Michael Kimmel

• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9780062885739
• eBook ISBN: 9780062886507
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

One of the most eminent scholars and writers on men and masculinity and the author of the critically acclaimed Manhood in America turns his attention to the culture of guys, aged 16 to 26: their attitudes, their relationships, their rules, and their rituals.

“Kimmel is our seasoned guide into a world that, unless we are guys, we barely know exists. As he walks with us through dark territories, he points out the significant and reflects on its meaning.”—Mary Pipher, Ph.D., author of Reviving Ophelia

The passage from adolescence to adulthood was once clear. Today, growing up has become more complex and confusing, as young men drift casually through college and beyond—hanging out, partying, playing with tech toys, watching sports. But beneath the appearance of a simple extended boyhood, a more dangerous social world has developed, far away from the traditional signposts and cultural signals that once helped boys navigate their way to manhood—a territory Michael Kimmel has identified as "Guyland."

In mapping the troubling social world where men are now made, Kimmel offers a view into the minds and times of America's sons, brothers, and boyfriends, and he works toward redefining what it means to be a man today—and tomorrow. Only by understanding this world and this life stage can we enable young men to chart their own paths, stay true to themselves, and emerge safely from Guyland as responsible and fully formed male adults.

 

 

 

 

1

Welcome to Guyland

The ignominy of boyhood; the distress

Of boyhood changing into man;

The unfinished man and his pain.

—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS

“A Dialogue of Self and Soul” (1933)

In the early morning hours of January 18, 2015, two international students from Sweden were taking a bike ride across the Stanford University campus. As they passed a dumpster near the Kappa Alpha fraternity house, they heard some muffled noises, and when they went to investigate, they found Brock Turner, a nineteen-year-old Stanford freshman and a varsity swimmer, sexually assaulting an unconscious twenty-two-year-old female student. When Turner ran, the Swedish students gave chase and caught up with him, restraining him until the police arrived.

Turner was arrested and charged with rape, attempted rape, and felony sexual assault. He pleaded guilty on all counts and was convicted in a criminal trial on all three counts of sexual assault. Before passing sentence, the elderly judge in the case, Aaron Persky, weighed the evidence, including a moving victim statement from “Emily Doe”—a statement that went viral after the trial and led Glamour magazine to name Emily Doe the “Woman of the Year” in 2016.

Turner’s defense was that the sexual encounter was consensual and that as they were going back to his dorm room, she slipped and fell, so they decided to have sex right there. His account was supported by a childhood friend who declared Turner to be blameless: “There is absolutely no way Brock went out that night with rape on his mind,” she wrote, before launching into an explanation of how political correctness has gone too far:

I don’t think it’s fair to base the fate of the next ten + years of his life on the decision of a girl who doesn’t remember anything but the amount she drank to press charges against him. I am not blaming her directly for this, because that isn’t right. But where do we draw the line and stop worrying about being politically correct every second of the day and see that rape on campuses isn’t always because people are rapists.

She later wrote, “These are idiot boys and girls having too much to drink and not being aware of their surroundings and having clouded judgment.”

Turner’s father argued that a prison sentence for his son would be a “steep price to pay for 20 minutes of action out of his 20 plus years of life.” A sexual assault had become “action.”

Although Turner could have been sentenced to up to fourteen years, Judge Persky sentenced him to only six months in prison, three years of probation, and registration as a sex offender. The judge said that a longer sentence would have had “a severe impact” on Turner, ignoring whatever “impact” the assault might have had on Emily Doe. Turner was released from prison after three months.

On Friday, February 3, 2017, Tim Piazza, a sweet-faced nineteen-year-old sophomore at Penn State University, was found unconscious on a sofa at the Beta Theta Pi fraternity house on campus. He’d been participating in hazing rituals all night and had fallen down a flight of stairs. Four of the brothers had moved him to the sofa, where they slapped and punched his unconscious body, and threw shoes at him trying to rouse him. When one brother tried to intervene, he was roughed up and pushed out of the room. (He was later vilified by other fraternity members around the campus for being a snitch.) The others waited for twelve hours before calling 911, until, as one of them said, he “looked fucking dead.” He had suffered multiple traumatic brain injuries, a lacerated spleen, and had an abdomen full of blood. He died while undergoing surgery the next day.

Had it not been for the videotape gathered from the house’s security cameras, this would have been chalked up to one more hazing death on America’s university campus—an occurrence that seems to happen with alarming frequency. In the Penn State case, however, based on hours of videotaped evidence, the local grand jury released a sixty-five-page report recommending more than one thousand criminal charges against eighteen former members of the fraternity and against the house itself. The grand jury concluded its statement with a stinging rebuke:

The Penn State Greek community nurtured an environment so permissive of excessive drinking and hazing that it emboldened its members to repeatedly act with reckless disregard to human life. . . . Timothy Piazza died as a direct result of the extremely reckless conduct of members of the Beta Fraternity who operated within the permissive atmosphere fostered by the Pennsylvania State University Interfraternity Council.

And these were the guys who were supposed to be Tim Piazza’s “brothers.”

After stalling for years when faced with reports of serious hazing and injury—just as the university had failed to act in the case of Jerry Sandusky, now serving a 30–60 year sentence for sexually abusing more than forty boys and young men for more than fifteen years while an assistant coach in Penn State’s storied football program—the university finally took some action. They banned Beta Theta Pi for life and wrested control of the fraternities from the Intrafraternity Council (IFC), the governing body for Greek life on campus composed of other fraternity members. Self-policing clearly hadn’t worked.

As journalist Caitlin Flanagan put it in an exhaustive article on the case, this “young person was killed because of something his friends did to him; his own university quickly backs away from any responsibility for his death; his parents become pariahs to the other members’ parents as they seek justice for their lost son.”

And these parents are not alone. In 2017 there were four other reported hazing deaths on American college campus, including Matthew Gruver, an eighteen-year-old Phi Delta Phi pledge at Louisiana State, who died in September after being forced to drink twelve “pulls” of 190-proof alcohol; Andrew Coffey, a twenty-year-old member of Pi Kappa Phi at Florida State who died in November at a fraternity party; and Matthew Ellis, a twenty-year-old Phi Kappa Psi pledge at Texas State who died at an off-campus pledge event in November. Every year, there are typically three or four young men who die while being hazed.

Expressions of public outrage have found their way into the corridors of collegiate administrations. Campuses have begun to sponsor state-of-the-art research to understand the extent and severity of sexual assault on their campuses. Early in 2018, Columbia began to release the results of its Sexual Health Initiative to Foster Transformation (a clunky name designed to yield its acronym, SHIFT) study, which mapped the “sexual ecology” of the campus, discovering not only how often and how many assaults take place, but also where. Over one-fifth (22 percent) of all Columbia students had experienced a sexual assault—with over one-quarter of women (28 percent) and nearly four-tenths of gender-nonconforming students (38 percent), and over 10 percent (12.5 percent) of men reporting having been assaulted since they entered college. Off-campus, the rates of rape are nearly as high for women (19.3 percent) but significantly lower for men (1.7 percent).

Tulane followed suit a few weeks later and found that just under 40 percent of its students had experienced assault and a full 25 percent had been raped. (Rates were even higher for LGBQ women [over half] and GBQ men [44.3 percent], and nearly 13 percent of heterosexual men had been assaulted.)

Tulane and Columbia are not particularly risky; the schools may actually just be more refreshingly honest. Reported rates of sexual assault on college campuses seem staggeringly high. Estimates suggest that between one in five and one in four college women and about 6–8 percent of college men are sexually assaulted during their college careers.

Colleges and universities have also begun to reconsider the often dangerous equation of alcohol, sexuality, and Greek life. Late in 2017, the Interfraternity Council at the University of Michigan suspended all Greek activities in the wake of allegations of sexual misconduct, hazing, and drug use. Soon after, Ohio State suspended most of its fraternities in the wake of investigations of misconduct. There are “a lot of schools [that are] shutting down Greek life altogether at one time,” said Hank Nuwer, a journalism professor at Franklin College in Indiana who has been researching hazing deaths since the 1970s.

What is happening on our nation’s college and university campuses? I can imagine some students reading these pages and wondering if it’s really this pervasive. And I can imagine some parents wondering if they should consider saving the thousands of dollars they will spend to send their child to a place where they would be in such constant danger.

My task in this book is not to scare parents or unsettle students, nor is it to make either group defensive. It’s to try to map this world. “Something is happening here,” as Bob Dylan so famously sang to a generic “Mr. Jones,” but we do know what it is. We often don’t want to admit it, because it might unsettle some of the complacent myths we have about higher education or millennials or Gen Z.

And often, “we,” meaning parents, would like to blame “them,” meaning young people, for this state of affairs: they’re too attached to screens—they enjoy video games more than Renaissance poetry, gangsta hip-hop more than iambic pentameter, hooking up drunkenly more than forging relationships, slouching toward their high school bedrooms after college more than setting out on a path to adult responsibility and careers.

I don’t think that’s fair. Sorry, but this is as much our fault as theirs (and here I count myself as the parent of a college student). I think we let ourselves off the hook too easily. We—meaning parents, teachers, university administrators, and our community at large—have created the swimming pool in which young people swim, and tread water, and flail about, and even occasionally drown.

Something most definitely is going on here, and everyone—students, parents, teachers, administrators, politicians and policy makers, and the community at large—will be needed to address it. But first we have to map the crisis, understand it, get inside it.

Let’s go back to those first two stories in this chapter. Yes, Brock Turner committed rape, and he was sentenced for it. But notice these other dynamics before you simply put all the blame on him. Notice how his friends, male and female, coalesced around him, serving as witnesses for his good character. Notice how his father disparaged the young woman, called his son’s assault a few minutes of “action,” and defended his son. And notice how the judge handed down the lightest of sentences—and even had the temerity to apologize for demanding that Turner serve any time at all!

And notice how the fraternity brothers at Penn State behaved so callously when one of their new “brothers” was clearly in serious distress. Notice how their first concern was their reputation, their potential culpability. Notice how they intervened—not to help their dying brother, but against one of the brothers who was actually trying to come to Tim’s aid. Notice how they all agreed on an official story so they—and their fraternity itself—would not be seen as guilty. And notice how Tim Piazza’s bereft parents were ostracized by the parents of the other brothers, how the parents were angrier at the grieving parents than at their sons who had committed murder.

These are the dynamics I want to discuss in this book—not how one or two “bad apples” can pollute a perfectly good barrel, but how the barrel itself is of such shoddy construction that it has to be held together by a conspiracy of silence and support, concentric circles that shield perpetrators and target victims, that deny problems and efface the experience of those who are hurt. It’s as if, in the effort to protect the perpetrators, we think it’s “reasonable” to attack their victims.

We are doing these young men no favors by encircling them in a culture of silence and a culture of support. Not one bit. Circling the wagons—demanding silence from one’s peers, support from those grown-ups who are charged with their care, and indifference from the larger community—actually infantilizes young men, denying them the opportunity to be adult men, taking responsibility for their actions, making amends, and moving on.

So I will be judgmental in this book: but make no mistake, I am not being judgmental towards those young men who participate in such grievous activities—at least not of them alone. The dynamics of male peer culture in what I call Guyland implicate us all. Everyone will have a role to play if we are going to help support young men become the men they say they want to be.

What Is Guyland?

My task in this book is to describe and analyze something that is relatively new in our society. I’ve called it “Guyland” because I want to highlight the gendered aspects of a larger cultural phenomenon. I want especially to understand that new stage of development between adolescence and adulthood that we see in advanced industrial societies; to examine its origins, describe its dynamics, and suggest some ways we can all work toward supporting young women and men as they navigate a world entirely unlike the world of their grandparents, and perhaps even that of their parents.

What I call Guyland is a stage of development that all young people are going through—and will continue to go through. It is also a “place”—a set of institutional arrangements in our high schools and colleges, and in our military and workplaces. In this place titular gender equality, mandated by law, can be undermined and thwarted by cultural forces, institutional arrangements, economic factors, and persistent gender inequality.

Most important, Guyland is a culture, a set of values and assumptions that provides the foundation of our society. It’s rooted in the ways that we understand what it means to be a man or a woman, and the ways we’ve prescribed the appropriate relations between women and men.

For four years, I traveled around the country interviewing young men—and a fair number of young women as well. I’ve talked with nearly four hundred of them on college campuses, in neighborhood bars and designer coffee shops, in Internet chat rooms, at sports events. Most of them have been middle-class and college-educated, from good homes in reasonably affluent suburbs. Most were white, but I talked with lots of Latino, African American, and Asian American guys, too. Again, most were middle-class, but I also made sure to talk with high school grads who never went to college, who worked in steel mills and auto body shops, served in the military and opened small businesses. Most were straight, but I spoke with quite a few gay and bisexual guys as well. In another era, college-educated guys were poised to take the reins of leadership in business, medicine, and law as the nation’s future entrepreneurs. A few years later they would be engaged to be married, settling down with a family and preparing for a future as community civil leaders and soccer dads.

But no longer. Today they feel anxious and uncertain, despite sometimes posturing with a sort of louche insouciance. They drift aimlessly from one dead-end job to another, spend more time online playing video games and gambling than they do on dates (and probably spend more money, too), “hooking up” occasionally with a friend “with benefits,” going out with friends to drink too much and save too little. They live at home, or in group apartments in major cities, with several other guys from their dorm or fraternity. They watch a lot of sports and play video games, hardly entertaining the existential questions involving what to do with their lives. Or they may have grandiose visions for their futures but not a clue how to get from here to there.

They’re like Jeff, twenty-four years old, tall and fit, with shaggy brown hair and an easy smile. After graduating from Brown with an honors degree in history and anthropology, he moved back home to the Boston suburbs and started looking for a job. After several months he finally found one, working as a sales representative for...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Contents
• The After Hours Crowd
• Introduction
• 1: Welcome to Guyland
• 2: “What’s the Rush?”: Guyland as a New Stage of Development
• 3: “Bros Before Hos”: The Guy Code
• 4: High School: Boot Camp for Guyland
• 5: The Rites of Almost-Men: Binge Drinking, Fraternity Hazing, and the Elephant Walk
• 6: Sports Crazy
• 7: Boys and Their Toys: Guyland’s Media
• 8: Babes in Boyland: Pornography
• 9: Hooking Up: Sex in Guyland
• 10: Predatory Sex and Party Rape
• 11: Girls in Guyland: Eyes on the Guys
• 12: “Just Guys”
• Acknowledgments
• Endnotes
• Index
• About the Author
• Praise
• Also by Michael Kimmel
• Copyright
• About the Publisher