George Will Would Like To Bizarrely Criticize Your Lack Of Manliness

Cross says the large-scale entry of women into the workforce made many men feel marginalized, especially when men were simultaneously bombarded by new parenting theories, which cast fathers as their children’s pals, or worse: In 1945, Parents magazine said a father should “keep yourself huggable” but show a son the “respect” owed a “business associate.”

Okay, there are a lot of passages in here insinuating that every gain by women had to come at the expense of men, almost like this was a bad thing. Here’s something, though: if these men were such emotional children that they couldn’t handle seeing women “infringe” on “their” turf, or hearing more than one opinion about raising a child, then they were more immature than these “modern” men that apparently mark the downfall of society as we know it. Or is Will saying that these guys who felt “marginalized” were the immature men who started this whole downward spiral of immaturity? I am so confused.

Although Cross, an aging academic boomer, was a student leftist, he believes that 1960s radicalism became “a retreat into childish tantrums” symptomatic “of how permissive parents infantilized the boomer generation.” And the boomers’ children? Consider the television commercials for the restaurant chain called Dave & Buster’s, which seems to be, ironically, a Chuck E. Cheese’s for adults—a place for young adults, especially men, to drink beer and play electronic games and exemplify youth not as a stage of life but as a perpetual refuge from adulthood.

OK, so I think that solves the issue of who Will’s incriminating here (“everyone” being the answer, but especially hippies). However, this clarification is more than counteracted by utter befuddlement that he used a restaurant as anecdotal “evidence” that today’s men just won’t grow up.

At the 2006 Super Bowl, the Rolling Stones sang “Satisfaction,” a song older than the Super Bowl. At this year’s game, another long-of-tooth act, the Who, continued the commerce of catering to baby boomers’ limitless appetite for nostalgia.

For a guy criticizing nostalgia so much, Will sure seems nostalgic himself for a (possibly mythical) bygone era in which men were real men. For the record, yes, too much nostalgia gets annoying and is useless, but some isn’t so bad, is it? Also, plenty of non-Baby Boomers enjoy the Rolling Stones and The Who.

Last November, when Tiger Woods’s misadventures became public, his agent said: “Let’s please give the kid a break.” The kid was then 33. He is now 34 but, no doubt, still a kid. The puerile anthem of a current Pepsi commercial is drearily prophetic: “Forever young.”

I’m not sure Tiger Woods is an adequate proxy for men of today as a whole. Also, it’s oversimplifying to say that young guys are refusing to leave their childhood behind because they might enjoy going the Dave & Buster’s every now and again. Here’s something else that some people might view as no more than a silly vestigial connection to one’s youth: baseball. Will seems like he enjoys that well enough. And…that’s fine. It’s okay to keep doing some fun things even if you’re not a kid anymore. And also…times change. They just do. It’s inevitable. And despite whatever differences might exist between Cary Grant, Hugh Grant, or anyone else with the surname “Grant,” different, unlike Will’s portrayal of it here, doesn’t always mean “worse.”

This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.