Whither Men and Women?

When did college students stop thinking and referring to themselves as “men” and “women”? My friends speak of meeting “boys” or, perhaps more slangily, “guys.” But our peers of the opposite sex almost never earn the basic social and biological honor of being called “men.” When did this linguistic shift happen? And why are we OK with it?

I’m not sure if it’s because I’m an English major, a conservative, or just a contrarian that I have a sincere problem with the way members of my generation refer to one another. For several years now, the U.S. legal system has recognized my age cohort as full-fledged adults. So why do we insist upon demeaning ourselves through our own way of speaking? If my friends are calling 21-year-old males “boys,” then surely those “boys” are reciprocating the favor, giving us the same label of girlishness we’ve held since elementary school.

There’s a lot of sociology out there on the so-called “Boomerang Generation,” mostly dealing with the fact that so many young people have delayed the major decisions that come with adulthood and opted to move back in with Mom and Dad. A critical mass of young adults are on-hold or regressing when it comes to responsibly embracing adulthood. Sure, conservatives can provide a number of explanations for this bleak phenomenon: the dismal job market, the student loan bubble, the decline of personal responsibility, helicopter-parenting styles, etc. All are legitimate concerns and contributing factors for our social-stalling.  But I wonder to what extent our own “guys” and “girls” discourse is holding us back.

Ashley Fetters offers a long-winded theory in the Atlantic that college students nickname their sexual partners (e.g. “Library girl” or “Hot Gym Boy”) as a sociolinguistic way of impersonalizing their late-night hookups and preventing any potential relationship from getting too serious. James Taranto at the Wall Street Journal takes Fetters to task for her feminist double-standard. Fetters insists that it’s insulting when men nickname women, but it’s acceptable for women to nickname their romantic partners because it “minimizes the despair” if the relationship doesn’t work out. Taranto is correct to criticize Fetters; both sexes are guilty of a dishonorable linguistic game. Moreover, notice that the example of nicknames Fetters offers never include the words “man” or “woman.” Presumably these would be too complimentary and, hence, defeat the supposed goal of reducing one’s peers to unemotional and nameless hookups.

Because this infantalization-through-language is happening in an academic space, I’ll do something a little radical. I’ll go ahead and quote from a thinker that many crusty old academics and young student radicals admire: Mikhail Bakhtin. For those of you who haven’t had the experience of sitting in a liberal arts seminar as someone slurping coffee out of a mason jar shouts about poststructuralism, Bakhtin is a Marxist literary critic who argued that all human discourse is completely laden with ideology. Bakhtin calls language “ideologically saturated.” Language is a “world view, even as a concrete opinion, insuring a maximum of mutual understanding in all spheres of life.”

I’m by no means a huge fan of Bakhtin, but I do think that my generation’s refusal to use the language of adulthood is, at least in part, due to a broader confusion and self-indulgence. Call it the ideology of irresponsibility. I’m appealing to Bakhtin as a way of waking-up both the Left and Right. For the most part, Bakhtin undermines individualism by arguing that truth is socially-constructed and can never be spoken by “a signal mouth.” Normally that would really bug me. But maybe, when applied to this case of millennial guys and gals whose speech is preventing them from growing up, Bakhtin is on to something.

It’s time for a bunch of twenty-something-year-old mouths to acknowledge each other as men and women.