Letters

A crowd of readers -- both the listless and the angry -- respond to Rebecca Traister's "Attack of the Listless Lads."

Sep 20, 2005 | [Read the article here.]

Rebecca, for what it's worth I'd counsel patience. We privileged kids born after man walked on the moon grew up being told -- and believing -- that there was nothing we couldn't accomplish if we put our minds to it, that we should find our passion and pursue it. Because we were privileged, we managed to get all the way into our mid-20s believing that this was all it would take. Then, with an unpublished novel or several unfinished screenplays, or a stack of unsold paintings, or just a job that we could care less about, it occurred to us that this thing might be harder than we'd imagined. I don't want to say our parents lied to us -- they were only trying to help -- but they were flying high in the '80s, and they didn't have our expectations to begin with, and so it's understandable if it didn't occur to them that the road might be rockier for us. Now we're just regrouping. We may appear to be sitting on the couch listlessly eating potato chips, but the wheels are spinning full-speed inside. It may take us a few years to translate that into decisive action, but we will recover from the shock of reality, and we will find something to do with ourselves that will allow us to love ourselves again. And then, I think, we will be ready to love you.

-- J. Resnick

I am a 31-year-old single male living in Boston. I believe Rebecca Traister's problem with what she sees as today's male can be identified at the beginning of her article when she states that this "crisis" is "one that seems especially, but not exclusively, to afflict the young, urban and privileged." I wonder if Ms. Traister has ever dated a man who makes less than $50,000 a year.

I consider myself to be a passionate guy, with interests other than just to be able "to achieve libidinal expenditure relatively frequently," to quote Benjamin Kunkel. But, is this guy saying that we are not worthy of a woman because we do not make nearly as much as she does? Or are the unworthy ones those men that the article is focused on, the privileged? Because if it's the latter perhaps a sexual strike would benefit those of us who can't afford a vagina as expensive as Ms. Traister's.

-- Mark Umstot

Single people are full of complicated theories. Especially in New York City. Before I met my wife, I spouted all kinds of nonsense about women and men and my generation (I'm 30) and whether my failure to meet the right woman was extrinsic or intrinsic and so on and so forth. Then I met my wife in, of all places, a Manhattan bar. We both knew pretty quickly we were meant to be together; now we can't imagine life without each other.

The point is, all relationships fail until, if you're lucky, you hit the one that doesn't. Until that time comes, you pontificate and hypothesize and bloviate and revel in articles like this one.

But even in New York, happy couples are coming together all the time. And once they do, all the theory talk reveals itself as what it was: just so much comfort to get you through the tough nights. Best of luck to Ms. Traister.

-- Sam Bonderoff

The reason for male ambivalence is simple -- free Internet porn.

-- Bob Dobalina

And here we go with yet another "what's wrong with men that they don't want me" article. I had a hard time reading the piece as I was struggling not to jam a pen in my eye. For the love of God, woman, let it go. There's nothing wrong with men. Perhaps the problem is that you think these men have a problem, and don't mind telling them. Who'd want to sign up for that anyway?

-- Laurie McGuinness

I'd agree with many of the points raised in your "Listless Lads" piece, and add that men have too many easy distractions that might seem to them almost as good as a relationship with a woman, and far less work.

Why cultivate a charming, impassioned persona when you can wank over 20 different women's gaping crotches a day via the Internet? Why make the great efforts and embrace the sacrifices involved in forging a relationship with a woman when you can guiltlessly kill dozens of people and crash a wide selection of vehicles at will, all night and for free at your computer? Why engage a woman on an intimate level and risk revealing all you never had the chance to learn and wear with pride in the first place, when you know that the political correctness to which your educational institutions subjected you has taught you to suppress your instincts, restrain your opinions, and be a meek, compliant, spiritless dolt, or risk outcast status? Lots of men in the big cities are only being what they've been trained, at the behest of feminists and liberals, to be.

Don't forget, too, that from the standpoint of even smart, well-rounded bachelors, modern women are harder work than ever. Women always were an unfathomable puzzle. But now they're like men -- narcissistic, selfish, demanding, neurotic, image-obsessed, ego-driven, attention-needing, impatient -- AND an unfathomable puzzle, one with money, power, expectations and strong feelings of entitlement. That's a hell of a lot for a man to factor into everything he says and does and feels.

To me, a well-traveled North American recent ex-bachelor of 46, our culture's been over-designed, and weakened for it. In the older cultures, young men and women would paddle through the rapids of change and only get splashed, while over here the canoes have been overturned and the current has all the paddlers in its grasp. The irony or paradox is, most of the single, attractive, intelligent women I know -- and being in the beauty business, I know plenty -- would prefer the male of the pre-feminist, pre-p.c. era to the lifeless twits and insipid metrosexuals they have to make do with nowadays. Interesting too, how so many of the single, attractive, intelligent men I know avoid local women and instead pursue immigrant girls from more established cultures who are comfortable in their own less-complex skins and bring their own flourishes of exotica and mystery with them.

-- Paul Fenn

Next Page: "Get to know some older men"

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