Pop culture creates overgrown kids in adult bodies who won’t grow up

By David McElroy · November 13, 2017

It was late at night when I got the emailed threat about five years ago. A suicidal friend sent me a dramatic picture — an obvious cry for help — with a knife poised against her wrist. She lives hundreds of miles away, so there was little that I could do to help, but I wondered where her husband was.

After I sent a reply trying to talk her into ending the threat — at least for that night — she sent back a sarcastic reply to my attempt to help her deal with this existential crisis.

“It’s not your job,” she wrote. “It’s the man-child’s who’s off playing computer games.”

I knew this was a continuing issue in her marriage. Her husband — about 30 years old — spent pretty much all of his non-work time playing computer games. As a result, they had fallen into living parallel lives. Although he knew she was depressed and suicidal, he chose to live in a fantasy world with gaming buddies instead of in the real world he had chosen for himself.

We’re living in a world where adults are allowed to remain irresponsible children. What’s worse, they’re led to believe this is normal.

I have no idea how accurate this is, but I noticed over the weekend that a 2011 study from a British company called Divorce Online claims 15 percent of recent divorces result from men paying more attention to computer gaming than to their wives. The first thing I thought of when I read that was the formerly suicidal woman who I used to know.

It’s not just men, but the crisis seems especially acute to me among men. Maybe it’s just because I’m particularly conscious about men’s failings in this regard. Either way, I’m certain it’s a crisis — for millions of individuals and for society as a whole.

We’re encouraging adults to remain children. It’s no longer treated as something to be ashamed of. It’s excused and treated like “just a phase” that someone will grow out of.

We talk about “man caves” and accept the idea that a man should go out partying with his friends and leave his wife and children home. Or sit in a basement alone playing video games for hours on end. Or do a dozen other things that say, “I brought a check home from work and that’s where my responsibility ends.”

We glorify immaturity. The heroes of our movies are often lovable but irresponsible men who won’t grow up. The villains and the butts of jokes in the movies are the “square” people who take responsibility for their families and lives. What kind of message does that culture send to young men? It tells them that they don’t have to grow up. And if they’re among those who can make a nice living and get married, that’s the only nod toward maturity that these men ever have to make — so they remain 40-year-old children.

When a man does it, the marriage is inevitably rocky and it forces a woman to build a separate, parallel life. After awhile, she might even come to prefer this dysfunctional pattern, because she doesn’t have to put up with a man who she doesn’t especially like anymore — a man who doesn’t especially like her, either — so she just makes bitter jokes about him and then makes her life all about her “girlfriends.” (And sometimes boyfriends, too.)

Guess what children learn as they grow up watching these patterns? They’re not as blind as you hope they are. They learn that this is what a family looks like. They learn that mom and dad don’t really need to love each other. Mom and dad don’t even have to like each other. They don’t even have to deal with one another. So what pattern do you think these children are going to unconsciously emulate in their own future?

As individuals and as a society, we have to grow up.

That doesn’t mean we have to become boring people like the “squares” in movies. Movies need conflict and they need a character to start out in a terrible place and then magically grow into something mature and loving by the end. It doesn’t work that way in real life.

Adults have to leave childhood behind and start acting like mature adults. We have to treat each other better and in more loving ways, not like selfish and angry 9-year-olds on a playground. Responsible people have to learn to quit trolling each other and trying to hurt each other online from behind the anonymity of a keyboard.

Most of all, adults need to become clear about their values.

Mature people need to realize that marriage and family are a responsibility. If they choose to take on those responsibilities, they owe it to their spouses and children to fill their roles in emotionally responsible ways. And that requires knowing what matters.

If you’re a nihilist — or if you’ve accepted that functional way of thinking — nothing really matters. You can troll people online. You can hurt people for “fun.” You can ignore the needs of people who you claim to love if that feels good to you. You can disappear and leave your family alone for a drunken weekend with your buddies if you want. You can do all those things — because if you value nothing, your actions don’t matter. Just do what feels good.

But if you believe life has meaning — and if you believe you have a responsibility to those you love — that changes everything about your behavior.

You put someone else first.

You treat your spouse and your family with loving care.

You give them your time and attention.

You turn away from immaturity. You turn away from the pop culture version of adulthood.

Let’s grow up — and let’s raise our expectations of those who we allow to be part of our lives. This epidemic of “the man-child” needs to end.

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Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

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