Masculinity, That Fragile Flower
JAN. 17 (APE)--The boom in business media is damaging male self-esteem, a
new study shows.
The study's findings were unveiled yesterday at a news conference in lower
Manhattan co-hosted by MALE, the Men's Association for Label Evaluation, an
organization devoted to challenging negative stereotypes of men, and the two
psychologists who performed the research. The psychologists, Dr. Eric Smith and
Dr. Adam Cohen of New York University, interviewed 500 American men between the
ages of 15 and 45 over a period of five years.
"It's a wake-up call," said Dr. Smith of the results. "We are losing our
brightest young men to a devastating disorder. They are squandering their
enormous potential for growth and personal happiness on a meaningless obsession
with dot-coms, bandwidth, relative net worth, and the fleeting indices of
success, such as stock overvaluation."
The study suggests that some men may be so affected by the proliferation of
business television and financial services magazines that they fall prey to
what Smith and Cohen call an obsessional disorder. Said Smith, "They binge and
purge, or rather, purge then binge. Because they feel worthless, they punish
themselves by coming in too early to the office and staying too late, whether
they need to or not. Then they waste time on endless day trading and deplete
their bank accounts on frivolous items--watches, suits, cell phones with Web
browsers, huge bouquets they'll send to girlfriends alienated by their long
hours and tedious business gossip, even though the girlfriends will just throw
the flowers in the garbage."
The periods in a man's life when he is most vulnerable to the condition,
according to Smith and Cohen, are "troughs"--moments of transition, such as
leaving high school and entering college, leaving college and entering the job
market, hitting 30, and so on. In a trough, a man may develop an emotional
attachment to "aspirational media," which traffic in celebratory stories and
photographs of highly powerful men and the symbols of their success, such as
the corporate titles they have acquired and shed, the venture capital they
haven't spent yet, and the wives they have married and divorced.
These publications and programs also contain how-tos about getting rich
quickly and yet investing wisely that may make readers feel confused and
inadequate, said Smith and Cohen. "For instance," said Cohen, holding up the
current issue of Fortune magazine turned to an article by columnist
Stanley Bing, "he humorously dismisses the typical New Year's resolutions, then
pledges to 'make a lot of money.' It's role models like him that are laying
waste to an entire generation of men who could have had richly nurturing
relationships with their spouses and friends and gone on to be perfectly happy
and productive professionals with children in progressive schools and summer
rentals in western Massachusetts."
Several noted psychiatrists confirmed that this disorder had become
increasingly evident among their male patients. "More and more young men in
their late teens and 20s are exhibiting signs of distress," said Dr. Winston
Thurston, a professor of neuropsychiatry at Yale University.
"These boys have gone from being bright young things on their way to a
college degree and a promising career to feeling broke, hopeless, and doomed to
professional failure because they haven't started and walked away from their
own companies yet," Thurston said. "It's as if they've been brainwashed by all
the admiring profiles of Bill Gates and Steve Case into thinking that their own
considerable achievements aren't big enough."
Thurston, a member of the editorial board that oversees the publication of
the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, or DSM, said the group was debating
whether to expand a previous category of addiction in order to cover the new
condition. "Let's face it," he said. "What we're talking about is men getting
hooked on the pornography of success."
Contacted by APE, Susan Faludi, author of Stiffed: The Betrayal of the
American Man , agreed with Thurston's definition of business media and said
it amounts to a plot against men.
