Man Disconnected: How technology has sabotaged what it means to be male

299 Pages·2015·3.68 MB·English

by  Philip Zimbardo

Contents
Cover
About the Book
About the Authors
Also by Philip Zimbardo and Nikita D. Coulombe
Title Page
Dedication
Preface: Note to Readers
Introduction: Just Drifting
Part I: Symptoms
1. Disenchantment with Education
2. Men Opting Out of the Workforce
3. Excessive Maleness: Social Intensity Syndrome (SIS)
4. Excessive Gaming: Mastering the Universe from Your Bedroom
5. Becoming Obese
6. Excessive Porn Use: Orgasms on Demand
7. High on Life, or High on Anything: Over-reliance on Medications and Illegal
Drugs
Part II: Causes
8. Rudderless Families, Absent Dads
9. Failing Schools
10. Environmental Changes
11. Technology Enchantment and Arousal Addiction
12. Sour Grapes: Entitlement vs Reality
13. The Rise of Women?
14. Patriarchy Myths
15. Economic Downturn
Part III: Solutions
16. What the Government Can Do
17. What Schools Can Do
18. What Parents Can Do
19. What Men Can Do
20. What Women Can Do
21. What the Media Can Do
Conclusion
Appendix I: TED Survey Results
Appendix II: Social Intensity Syndrome – Scale and Factors
Notes
Recommended Resources
Index
Acknowledgements
Copyright
About the Book
Young men are failing as never before – academically, socially and sexually. But
why is this so? What are the implications? And what needs to be done about it
before it’s too late?
Philip Zimbardo and co-writer Nikita Coulombe examine the modern meltdown
of manhood and how this is manifest in the lives of young men today. They
consider such factors as absent fathers, and legislation favouring women, which
contribute to many men lacking social skills and direction in their lives. Most
controversially, Zimbardo argues that readily available hardcore pornography
and exciting gaming realities provide digital alternatives that are less demanding
and far more appealing for many than sex, sports and social interaction in the
real world. Immersion in these alternative realms is playing havoc with these
boys’ cognitive development, their ability to concentrate and their social
development, allowing girls to excel in the real world where social skills are a
source of success.
By illuminating the symptoms and causes of these gloomy trends, Zimbardo and
Coulombe shed light on how we arrived at this state of affairs and, most
significantly, what the solutions might be.
About the Authors
PHILIP ZIMBARDO is professor emeritus of psychology at Stanford University and
has taught at Yale, New York University and Columbia. He has been president of
the American Psychological Association (2002), president of he Western
Psychological Association (twice) and chair of the Council of Scientific Society
Presidents (CSSP); he is currently chair of the Western Psychological
Foundation. He narrated the award-winning PBS series Discovering Psychology
and has received numerous awards and honours for his work, including the 2015
Kurt Lewin Award for Distinguished Research on Social Issues. His many
publications include The Lucifer Effect, The Time Paradox and the classic
textbooks Psychology and Life and Psychology: Core Concepts. His current
passion is the Heroic Imagination Project, exploring and encouraging the
psychology of everyday heroes. See zimbardo.com for information.
NIKITA D. COULOMBE graduated from the University of Colorado with a
Bachelor of Arts in fine art and psychology. After university, she worked with
Philip Zimbardo as his personal and executive assistant for several years,
collaborating with him on the early development of the Heroic Imagination
Project, and co-writing The Demise of Guys. She created the surveys and
conducted many of the interviews featured in this book. These conversations, in
part, inspired her to co-found the sex education blog, BetterSexEd.org. She is
passionate about understanding human nature. Visit her website
nikitacoulombe.com.

A P Z :
LSO BY HILIP IMBARDO
The Lucifer Effect: How Good People Turn Evil
The Time Paradox
The Time Cure
Shyness: What It Is, What to Do About It
Psychology: Core Concepts
Psychology and Life

To my grandchildren, Philip (Panda) and Victoria Leigh (Bunny)
– Philip Zimbardo
To my husband, Chris, and three brothers: thank you for your support
– Nikita D. Coulombe
Preface:
Note to Readers
Many trends are born and magnified in the tech-heavy San Francisco Bay area,
which is where we both lived when we started writing this book. There wasn’t
one event that inspired the book’s creation; rather it resembled a light rain that
slowly turned into a torrential downpour. While one of us had started clipping
articles out of the newspaper about boys’ poor academic performance and
noticing the dwindling number of male graduate students in his class, the other
had started to notice her male peers crowding around computers and video
games at parties, rather than having conversations. We began to wonder why
more young men didn’t care about getting their driving licences, or moving out
of their parents’ homes, and why they preferred to masturbate to porn than be
with a real woman. Down the rabbit hole we went.
Around the same time, I (Phil) was asked by the TED organization to give a
five-minute talk on a topic of my choosing. I wanted to discuss what we were
observing. At the end of my short but provocative TED Talk in 2011, I made
clear that my primary goal at the conference was to raise awareness and even
alarm people into action about an impending disaster. After the talk was greeted
with much enthusiasm, Nikita, already familiar with the issues as my assistant,
came on board and together we wrote a short TED eBook inspired by that talk in
2012 called The Demise of Guys: Why Boys Are Struggling and What We Can
Do About It. Demise was a polemic meant to stimulate controversy and
conversation around these topics and encourage others to do research on the
different dimensions of these challenges.
Man (Dis)connected is an elaboration of Demise that delves much deeper into
this important discussion about young men and the complex issues and
challenges they face. Man (Dis)connected has also been restructured by
symptoms, causes and solutions, making the issues easier for readers to
understand and navigate.
We felt it was important to approach the topics from multiple angles. This
book weaves together the perspectives of a young female, Nikita, who, as a
millennial, has grown up in the thick of changing technologies, and an older
male, Phil, who has an abundance of life experience, along with the views of
many young men and women, making it a unique collaboration. In order to
challenge our personal views, we developed a detailed online survey with a host
of questions that touched on different aspects of Demise. We created a survey
related to this topic and posted it alongside the TED Talk, asking questions such
as, ‘How would you change the school environment to engage young men?’ and
‘How can we empower men in safe, pro-social ways?’
Remarkably, in barely two months, 20,000 people took the short survey
referred to throughout this book. About three-quarters (76 per cent) of the
participants were men; more than half were between 18 and 34 years old. But
people of all ages and backgrounds and both sexes shared their thoughts and
feelings about these issues and their subplots. In addition, thousands of
respondents were sufficiently motivated to go further by adding personal
comments, from a sentence to a page long. We also conducted an additional
smaller survey with 67 high school students from across the UK to get a better
feel for their concerns (which we’ll refer to as our ‘student survey’ throughout to
distinguish it from the larger study). After reading all of the replies, we followed
up with some of the respondents for personal interviews, and their opinions and
experiences will be shared later on. You can find more highlights of the survey
in Appendix I of this book. Additional supportive statistics can be found in the
endnotes.
Our book is presented with the intention of finding solutions to the problems
we highlight, and also inspiring men, and those who love them, to find their
voice and create positive social change in their lives and the new world that
surrounds them.