If there’s one thing that William Bennett, the U.S. secretary of education during the late ‘80s, director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy under the elder President Bush reign and well-known conservative pundit, detests than the concept of changing gender roles. It is the thought of you, assuming you have a Y chromosome, spending your hard-earned free time playing “Call of Duty” that gets his goat.
No, he’d rather have you living the life of a ‘50s sitcom dad, enforcing good old-fashioned patriarchal dominance, McCarthy-style.
Early last week, Bennett published a CNN editorial lamenting the failure of the modern male to reach his “perfect” standards of manliness, which center on the founding values of “work, marriage and religion.”
“Man's response has been pathetic,” he writes, referencing the increasing presence of working females, “Today, 18-to- 34-year-old men spend more time playing video games a day than 12-to- 17-year-old boys.”
Bennett treats the notion of women in the workforce with repugnant hostility throughout the article. He depicts them as an ever-encroaching horde, power-hungry and relentless, as they continue to consume all those positions of authority and power that our white Christian God clearly meant for strong male figures.
“Women now surpass men in college degrees by almost three to two. Women's earnings grew 44 percent in real dollars from 1970 to 2007, compared with 6 percent growth for men,” he writes with an all-too-apparent theme of revulsion.
Bennett tackles the problems currently plaguing modern man with a clearly out-of-touch perspective, impaired from a high seat of long-held privilege and old age.
“We may need to say to a number of our twenty-something men, ‘Get off the video games five hours a day, get yourself together, get a challenging job and get married.’ It's time for men to man up,” he carelessly spews at the end of his editorial.
Of course Mr. Bennett! It’s not a floundering, overly-sensitive economy or a mangled job market beaten to a pulp by the irresponsible, money-hungry power plays by suited men in power, not unlike yourself, that preventing twenty-something college graduates from getting jobs. It’s their Xbox 360s!
Are you drowning in all that student loan debt? Well, as long as you don’t buy “Battlefield 3,” then things should just work themselves out.
Bennett also fails to make any mention of the fact that female gamers make up over 42 percent of the total gaming population in the U.S., according to a June 2011 report by the Entertainment Software Association.
But who cares if they play video games, right? At least it keeps them away from boardrooms.
OK, in fairness, yes, our generation is by no means perfect. We have our lazy, purposefully unemployed individuals, but these are traits not limited to a specific gender, or time period for that matter.
Bennett views his era with classical “back-in-my-day” hubris. People during the era of “work, marriage, and religion” were no less confused, depressed, or generally lost than people today, even if they didn’t Tweet about it.
Look, Mr. Bennett, as a male twenty-something myself, I can safely say we’re trying. We’re trying to get jobs, be good fathers and generally positive members of society. Remember, it’s a process and doesn’t happen overnight.
It’s just that, well, sometimes it’s easier to stay at home and deal with fictional characters then go to work, and listen to out-of-touch conservatives drone on and on.
Reach the columnist at dsydiong@asu.edu
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