Will's general thesis is that boys in the modern era are growing up to be...boys. And both by choice and displacement, the leadership of the culture is being passed on to women.
Here's just a few of the factoids Will provides:
* "Although women are a majority of the workforce, perhaps as many as 80 percent of jobs lost [in the current recession] were held by men."
* "Women now receive almost 58 percent of bachelor's degrees. This is why many colleges admit men with qualifications inferior to those of women applicants—which is one reason men have higher dropout rates."
* "In law, medical, and doctoral programs, women are majorities or, if trends continue, will be."
* "Between 1980 and 2004, the percentage of men reaching age 40 without marrying increased from 6 to 16.5."
* "A recent study found that 55 percent of men 18 to 24 are living in their parents' homes, as are 13 percent of men 25 to 34, compared to 8 percent of women." (Thus the title of Will's article, "The Basement Boys.")
* "In 1959, there were 27 Westerns on prime-time television glamorizing male responsibility."
* "Gary Cross, a Penn State University historian, wonders, 'Where have all the men gone?' His book, Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity, argues that 'the culture of the boy-men today is less a life stage than a lifestyle.'
* "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."
* "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."
