Just Guys: Understand and Escaping "Guyland"

Fuller Youth Institute
Brad Griffin and Kara Powell
August 31, 2009

What’s the deal with guys?

Recent research warns of the chronic underachieving, emotionally drifting, and irresponsible “Guyland” of male adolescence...

Excuses and Fears

Much of our culture’s collective anxiety about adolescent guys is caught up in various excuses and fears. Excuses like “boys will be boys” or “it’s a guy thing” have become cultural blankets to cover all sorts of irresponsible and destructive behaviors from young boyhood through adulthood.

Meanwhile we’re overwhelmed by the fears that arise from the behaviors that prompt these excuses in the first place: boys are emotionally closed off, spend too much time playing video games and hanging out online, are too sex-obsessed, lack motivation, and often drift into adulthood with little direction.

More than a few of these fears are valid, but we struggle to find reliable lenses through which to interpret what’s going on with guys. We should say up front that not every boy is the same (thank goodness!) and not every boy lives by the excuses and fears we describe below. But these research trends are worth taking time to understand and respond to, for the sake of the guys—and the girls—in our ministries.

Guyland: The Secret Underworld

According to sociologist and gender studies expert Michael Kimmel, young men ages 16-26 live in a secret world of Guyland that resembles an uncertain holding tank.2 His interviews with over 400 guys led Kimmel to conclude:

Guyland is the world in which young men live. It is both a stage of life, a liminal undefined time span between adolescence and adulthood that can often stretch for a decade or more, and a place, or rather, a bunch of places where guys gather to be guys with each other, unhassled by the demands of parents, girlfriends, jobs, kids, and the other nuisances of adult life.3

Similar to the research of our Fuller Seminary colleague Chap Clark,4 most of the guys in Kimmel’s study believe that they are completely on their own to chart a path through Guyland. By the time they hit high school, they can’t trust their parents or other adults—and most feel like they can’t trust each other either. This is in large part because of the “Guy Code,” learned in boyhood and expanded in adolescence.

The number one rule in the Guy Code is, you guessed it, “Boys don’t cry.” Kimmel observes, “Masculinity is largely a ‘homosocial’ experience: performed for, and judged by, other men.”5 And it’s driven by homophobia—defined in Guyland code as the fear that others might think you’re gay. “That’s so gay” is one of the most common put-down guys use in high school, and it can refer to anything—something you say, wear, or do. So guys spend a lot of their energy attempting to prove (primarily to other guys) that they aren’t gay, that they are masculine enough to warrant independence in the “real man’s” territory. In other words, while many maintain that our version of masculinity is simply hardwired by biology, few account for the way the masculine code is “coerced and policed relentlessly by other guys.”6

To read more of the article: http://fulleryouthinstitute.org/2009/08/just-guys

References
2. Michael Kimmel, Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men (San Francisco: Harper, 2008).
3. Michael Kimmel, Guyland, 4.
4. See Chap Clark, Hurt: Inside the World of Today’s Teenagers (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2004).
5. Michael Kimmel, Guyland, 47.
6. Michael Kimmel, Guyland, 51.