Years ago I was a teenage boy. Mostly I did not enjoy it. High school was a drag, and I made passing grades by the skin of my teeth. Since I was ugly and devoted to a style of dress that accentuated my awkward build, girls weren’t a reality. The few friends I had were as charmless as I was. Weekends were about bad music, Mountain Dew and whatever comic books I could afford on a fixed income.
Years ago I was a teenage boy. Mostly I did not enjoy it. High school was a drag, and I made passing grades by the skin of my teeth. Since I was ugly and devoted to a style of dress that accentuated my awkward build, girls weren’t a reality. The few friends I had were as charmless as I was. Weekends were about bad music, Mountain Dew and whatever comic books I could afford on a fixed income.
Getting my hands on an issue of Penthouse Magazine would have been only a little easier than buying a stolen firearm. Details from the period are hazy, but muscle memory does all the work, and—even after all these years—I can still fluently execute devastating super moves in Street Fighter II, which proves that I found too much time for video games.
Since the days when Street Fighter II was cutting edge, game makers have stretched their tentacles into the brains of nearly all American teens, boys and girls alike. A 2008 Pew Research Center study found that 99 percent of teenage boys and 94 percent of girls reported playing video games.
Gaming is no longer just for the outcast fringe and adult magazines, thanks to high-speed Internet, need no longer be purchased on the high school black market.
Therein lies the problem, says Stanford Psychology Professor Emeritus Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo’s new book, The Demise of Guys: Why Boys are Struggling and What We Can Do About It, addresses what he and co-author Nikita Duncan call “an alarming trend”: teenage boys are floundering like never before.
“Boys are failing,” Zimbardo told Dr. Phil on an episode of his show that aired in May. “They are failing academically, socially, and—when they get to be men—failing sexually.”
Zimbardo calls into evidence findings of the National Center for Education Statistics that indicate boys are 30 percent more likely to drop out of high school than girls. Boys, he says, are getting lower grades, and their SAT scores are at a 40-year low.
Video games and porn are the culprits, Zimbardo told Dr. Phil. At an average of 13 hours per week, boys are spending more than twice the time girls do playing video games. Additionally, boys on average kill two hours a week watching porn. Their delicate teenage brains, Zimbardo says, are rewired by immediate and constant gratification fed to them by video games and Internet pornography, making reprobate junkies of our nation’s young men.
The people who should care, Zimbardo told a TED talk audience in March 2011, are “parents of boys and girls, educators, gamers, filmmakers and women who’d like a real man who they can talk to, who can dance, who can make love slowly and contribute to the evolutionary pressures that keep our species above banana slugs.”
Sounds serious. And it would be, if Zimbardo were correct.
It is hard to know what age Zimbardo harkens back to when he invokes the talking, dancing, slow-loving “real” men of yore. Was there a golden age in which teens were well-adjusted and the men they became were “real?” To shelve Zimbardo’s overdrawn theory we need only look back to a generation of men who grew up without video games and high-speed Internet.
My grandfather didn’t dance and, I’m told, went years without speaking a word to my grandmother. To get further away from her, when the weather in New York began to turn each spring, he left the house to unfold a narrow cot in the garage where he snored every night until it grew too cold to bear. There were no video games and pornography was analog: for him, it was Yankee games on the wireless radio.
Furthermore, Zimbardo’s distress call is nothing new. Since before Rebel Without a Cause in 1955, American grown-ups have lost sleep over their wayward teens and the imminent calamity facing the human race when they inherit the world. The degenerating influence was once rock and roll music. Later, it was long hair. Then came gateway drugs, television, pro wrestling, MTV, The Simpsons, texting. It’s always something.
Teens are disoriented. They were shy and sullen before the advent of the Xbox. The aforementioned Pew study showed that, for teens, gaming is often a social activity and that the amount of time spent gaming doesn’t directly correlate to civic involvement.
Teens were confused before pornhub.com. Re-read The Catcher in the Rye.
“What’s the solution?” Zimbardo asked his TED audience. “Not my job,” he said. “I’m here to alarm.” Indeed.
