Single Black Male

It’s 1965 and you’re a 26-year-old white guy. You have a factory job, or maybe you work for an insurance broker. Either way, you’re married, probably have been for a few years now; you met your wife in high school, where she was in your sister’s class. You’ve already got one kid, with another on the way. For now, you’re renting an apartment in your parents’ two-family house, but you’re saving up for a three-bedroom ranch house in the next town. Yup, you’re an adult!

Now meet the twenty-first-century you, also 26. You’ve finished college and work in a cubicle in a large Chicago financial-services firm. You live in an apartment with a few single guy friends. In your spare time, you play basketball with your buddies, download the latest indie songs from iTunes, have some fun with the Xbox 360, take a leisurely shower, massage some product into your hair and face—and then it’s off to bars and parties, where you meet, and often bed, girls of widely varied hues and sizes. They come from everywhere: California, Tokyo, Alaska, Australia. Wife? Kids? House? Are you kidding?

Taken straight from an article entitled Child-Man in the Promised Land, this article goes on to explain the “problem” that is the new creation they call the “Single Young Male”, or SYM for short. It goes on to describe the new “man-child” creation that has shirked the responsibilities he father and father’s father held at his age and how he is enjoying a newfound freedom in rebellion of well established “social norms”.

While I can’t agree with the overly bleak outlook “apparently all SYMs are bums and may never learn to be men” … I do agree with this powerful and important shift in social norms.

Another quote I found interesting:

“All woman [want] is security,” she quotes an early Playboy article complaining. “And she is perfectly willing to crush man’s adventurous freedom-loving spirit to get it.”

Truer words have never been spoken! Well … just like how there was a well earned and well deserved women’s rights movement earning women many long denied and well deserved rights and justices, this new age has allowed us new rights and privileges that were deemed as unacceptable a few years ago.

There are certain components which are unhealthy, but overall an article like this helps to explain the male infatuation with Friends With Benefits and the hatred many women seem to have with the concept.

I am happy to proudly say I am a Single Young Male. I am in my mid twenties, make very good money, own and play my Xbox regularly, love to go out, love to drink, own property, have a motorcycle, and am enjoying my independence and freedom while rarely thinking of things like marriage and children. I do aspire to achieve these things in my lifetime, but I don’t see a need to have either one by 26. I guess I’m “living the life”. I think men of the past saw the need of a female to help him achieve things, but with the extreme demands of the new “corporate world”, I think many of us see a wife and kids as a burden or something holding back our personal success.

From my experiences, a lot of comments, and testimonies by friends … the mid 20’s seems to be an extremely interesting and turmoiled time for men and women. On one hand you have women still ready to settle down and have a permanent fixture of the opposite sex in their life, while we … the male … want to f*ck, drink, and play Xbox. The 30’s male seems to be more similar to the mid 20’s female … but maybe thats just me. Maybe in another 100 years it will all work out.