The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It (8 page)

“Your nails are pretty,” he said as he examined her hands, “are they fake?” In the world of pickup artists, or PUAs, back-handed compliments like this are known as negs. PUAs purposefully use psychological tactics like negs to entice a girl into being attracted to them.

The girl we spoke with didn’t know about this strategy when he asked her the question. “Of course not!” She was flustered and caught off-guard. “This guy has no tact,” she thought to herself. But he had a formula. And the formula worked, sort of. They ended up making out at the end of the night, but the chemistry was fleeting. Perhaps she just had buyer’s remorse and his game needed work, but her attraction to him quickly waned when they moved beyond the script into the world of genuine human connection.

Many books like
The Mystery Method
and
The Game
have emerged lately, offering some very effective, sometimes offensive, and generally entertaining advice on how to pick up women. It is admirable that guys would go to such elaborate lengths just to get their foot in the door, but unfortunately, their solutions don’t address other key areas of a relationship, such as finding areas of mutual interest, transitioning from stranger to interested date or becoming a long-term mate. Maybe tackling these other areas is not the point, but at some point, when a guy does want a real relationship with a girl, it can be difficult to transition out of the “game” into creating the relationship. Their whole mindset has to change from approaching the girl or woman as a “target” of possible conquest to being with a “person” of potential value and interest.

The key is staying mindful. When you snuff out the spontaneity of connecting with someone from the opposite sex, the motivation transforms from meeting an interesting girl to bedding “10s.” It goes from building self-confidence to peacocking. It’s not even about connecting anymore; it’s about escalating the game in order to score. Other people involved become interchangeable objects for one’s pleasure as the game takes on a new identity more like fantasy football than fantasies about making love with a real-life, flesh-and-blood woman.

Since the joy of romantic connection doesn’t lie in prefabricated interaction, what do guys who use these methods really want? In the world of young men, the desire for happiness and fulfillment has somehow morphed into the need for stimulation, amusement and control.

Tucker Max, best-selling author of
I Hope They Serve Beer in Hell
and
Assholes Finish First
, posted a dating application online that received many responses. His multiple-choice form asked potential dates questions such as, “What will my friends say when they see you?” Below are some of the options responders could choose for that question: 

On one level, it’s a joke. But it makes you wonder why Max’s writing turned into a No. 1
New York Times
bestselling book while many people are embarrassed to buy condoms or don’t know how to have an honest conversation about sex.

We see sex everywhere, so why is it so hard to talk about? Is being crude — thus lowbrow and easily dismissible — the only way to make it acceptable? A lot of men in America have developed a madonna-whore complex in part because of this strange divergence. Described as love without sex and sex without love, these men want a wholesome woman as their mate and a whorish woman as their lover. When they come across a woman in the real world that is nice
and
sexual, they are confused and often push her away — they don’t want sex unless it’s impersonal. This creates hugely challenging intimacy problems for everyone involved.

Relationships used to be viewed as a precursor to setting up a family together, and people treated their potential partners as such. But today, with fewer reasons to become romantically committed, young men don’t need to look beyond women as sex objects.

I’ve fallen in love again, head over heels. Step aside, Crysis: Your sequel is just as bubbly and stunning as you once were in 2007. You were amazing, but this latest model with the new streamlined features is just downright beautiful.
— Chris Fong, games writer
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Like sex, games have been around forever. Like porn, video games entered mainstream popularity in the 1970s and 1980s. It was then that arcade games and the first gaming consoles were introduced. The availability of computers, the Internet, touch screens and motion control revolutionized the way people were able to play.

There are a lot of benefits to playing video games — mainly, they are a lot of fun, and there can be a lot of social bonding, problem solving, strategy and even exercise involved. Online games also provide the opportunity to become more computer literate, a skill that should not be underestimated in the future job market. A lot of online games also allow people to interact with other people around the world, providing an opportunity to learn about many other cultures. But these benefits extend only to a point, and a lot of people don’t take advantage of these positive features.

As we mentioned before, we’re mostly concerned about people who play video games excessively and in isolation. In a recent
AskMen
survey, when asked, “Who do you play video games with most often,” only 24 percent of respondents said they play with their friends in person, while 37 percent said they play either completely alone or with strangers online.
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The disadvantage of playing video games, especially a lot of exciting video games, is that it can make other people and real life seem boring and not worthwhile in comparison. Not surprisingly, compared with teenagers who don’t play video games, adolescent gamers spend about 30 percent less time reading and 34 percent less time doing homework.
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Video gaming is also associated with decreased school performance, and desensitization to violence, and can influence how one learns and socializes due to a lack of balance between time spent playing and engaging in other activities.
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Going back to
Boys Adrift
, Sax points out that video games actually can affect the brain in ways that compromise motivation. The nucleus accumbens operates in conjunction with another area of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC); the nucleus accumbens is responsible for directing drive and motivation, and the DLPFC provides context for that drive:

Few things unite people like a common enemy. In the past, a common enemy might have been a neighboring tribe or country, but a gamer’s enemy is social obligation: responsibilities, time management, dealing with real people and taking real risks.

Video games go wrong when people play alone for long periods of time on a regular basis. A couple of grown men loaned their perspectives in our survey:

Video games also go wrong when the person playing them is desensitized to reality and real-life interactions with others. Many would agree that violence in video games is synonymous with success.
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Children with more propensities to be aggressive are more attracted to violent video media, but violent media, in turn, can also make them more aggressive. This could be related to the fact that most video games reward players for violent acts, often permitting them to move to the next level in a game. Yet recent research suggests a link between violent video games and real-life aggression — given the opportunity, both adults and children were more aggressive after playing violent games. And people who identify themselves with violent perpetrators in video games are able to take aggressive action while playing that role, reinforcing aggressive behavior.
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More and more, violent video games are having practical applications. For example, realistic violent video games set in a warlike environment are being used to treat veterans who have post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD. Video game–like applications of digital technology are also an integral part of military operation. P.W. Singer, author of
Wired for War
, raises some considerations:

Singer alludes to important questions. How will identifying with a violent avatar, or removing oneself from direct violent action that’s actually happening in the real world, affect the way we view each other and affect our real-life behavior? Could video games desensitize players not only to others’ feelings but also to their own?

Rye Barcott, author of
It Happened on the Way to War,
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told us in an interview that “in the Marine battalion in Iraq in 2005, during heavy firefight periods, young Marines returning to barracks would rush to play violent video games all night, going back into battle the next day like ‘exhausted zombies,’ and that was a common pattern among many of them.”

“Video games are never going to replicate the real thing,” says Maj. Larry F. Dillard Jr., U.S. Army.
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But you never know.

In the popular children’s science fiction novel
Ender’s Game
, Ender gets enrolled into Battle School, eventually reaching the school’s top rank through his intelligence and cunning. Ender’s practice sessions, in which he commands spaceships in a 3-D battle simulator with his fellow students, gradually escalate into battle after battle against an enemy alien race known as the Formics, aka Buggers. Ender is on the brink of exhaustion and is having horrible nightmares that haunt him during his waking hours. In his “final exam,” Ender’s crew is outnumbered nearly a thousand to one near a small planet. Ender decides to use a deadly weapon to destroy the planet itself, annihilating all the ships in orbit. He’s hoping his ruthless actions will get him kicked out of the school. Instead, he learns that all the battles had taken place with real fleets and his actions effectively ended the war with the aliens.

The questions foremost in our minds are: Could Ender have killed the Buggers if he knew that it wasn’t a game? If being one step removed from action makes for more-effective and less-endangered soldiers, why wouldn’t the military be moving in this direction?

Not to mention how obsessed young people, especially guys, are with gaming. “Look, the military understands that if it can’t embrace today’s digital youth, they are never going to recruit the kind of soldiers and the kind of airmen and the kind of Marines that they need to have for the next century,” says Noah Shachtman, contributing editor of
Wired.
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But will the youth of today understand the impact of their actions as they use indirect technology to execute their orders? Soldiers using this technology today may have had first-hand experience in real combat situations, and they come to work wearing their uniforms as a constant reminder that the button they press in America has real-life consequences overseas. We are wary that kids who are growing up immersed in realistic digital entertainment will not have the same capacity to empathize with other people and may make less-humane decisions.