In Man Disconnected, Zimbardo writes about the plight of the male in the modern world. A combination of excessive gaming, porn abuse, a lack of responsibilities, a lower quality education has all contributed to the phenomenon of the man-child, who can’t change a tire, but has multiple shampoos and styles ready for his masculine beard.
In gaming, men are three times likelier than women to get addicted.
Porn addiction has gotten so bad, that a community of men online (the no-fap movement) devoting themselves to not watching porn, have reported drastic changes in the quality of their lives. These include less social anxiety, more confidence, eye contact, and comfort when interacting with women.
It is not that video games are intrinsically bad, Zimbardo assures us, but that in excess, particularly in social isolation, they can get in the way of developing a young person’s social skills. The intensity of games also makes real life boring in comparison, and leads to problems concentrating and bad performance in schools.
J.R.R. Tolkien used to define human beings’ total immersion in a secondary world. He said that the more ‘you think that you are, bodily inside [a] Secondary World [the more] the experience may be very similar to Dreaming … but … you are in a dream that some other mind is weaving, and the knowledge of that alarming fact may slip from your grasp.’2 Tolkien was recognizing the ability to get lost in tales and stories. When you consider how much easier it is to get caught up in a virtual world where the story is told through visual stimuli than a story that was previously only written in text or spoken in words, Tolkien’s revelation is alarming indeed.
Gary Wilson, of YourBrainOnPorn, compares chronic overconsumption of Internet porn to other behavioural addictions such as excessive gambling, video game addiction and food addiction. He points out that there are already more than ninety brain studies on Internet addiction, gaming addiction and online porn addiction – all of which reveal the kinds of brain changes seen in drug addiction.
Dopamine skyrockets with novelty, so Internet porn can veil creeping sexual performance problems for years before young men realize they have an underlying problem. With every new sexual scene or ‘partner’, there is another surge of dopamine. If your dopamine starts to decline – that is, your erection starts to dwindle – you just click on something else to boost it back up. And with Internet porn, there is always something new, exciting or shocking.
Gaming
In the popular children’s science-fiction novel Ender’s Game, by Orson Scott Card, Ender gets enrolled into Battle School, eventually reaching the
school’s top rank through his intelligence and cunning.62 Ender’s practice sessions, in which he commands spaceships in a 3-D battle simulator with his
fellow students, gradually escalate into battle after battle against an enemy alien race known as the Formics, also known as Buggers.
Ender is on the brink of exhaustion and is having horrible nightmares that haunt him during his waking hours. In his ‘final exam’, Ender’s crew is outnumbered nearly a thousand to one near a small planet. Ender decides to use a deadly weapon to destroy the planet itself, annihilating all the ships in orbit. He’s hoping his
ruthless actions will get him kicked out of the school. Instead, he learns that all the battles had taken place with real fleets and his actions effectively
ended the war with the aliens.
The questions foremost in our minds are: could Ender have killed the Buggers if he knew that it wasn’t a game? If being one step removed from action makes for more effective and less endangered soldiers, why wouldn’t the military be moving in this direction?
Not to mention how obsessed young people, especially young men, are with gaming. Noah Shachtman, contributing editor of Wired, said that the military understands it must embrace today’s digital-obsessed youth in order to recruit the kind of soldiers, airmen and Marines that will be needed in the next century.But will the youth of today understand the impact of their actions as they use indirect technology to execute their orders?
Symmetrical relationships are not sexy
The women’s movement created more well-rounded women, but put a wrench in the mechanics of relationships, because the journey was not taken together with men. Men’s problems have been largely ignored or downplayed, which one could hardly say is inspiration to ‘man up’. Both sexes need to be able to take an honest look at how the other experiences powerlessness and be willing to allow the other to explore all the dynamics of power.
Most top US male executives have spouses who stay at home; 88 per cent of them are married, compared with 70 per cent of top female executives, and 60 per cent of the men’s spouses don’t work full-time outside the home, compared with only 10 per cent of the women’s spouses. The men have an average of 2.2 children; the women, 1.7. 50 Some female executives have commented that ‘they need a wife’, yet are not keen on the possibility of their husband taking on the role of stay-at-home parent, chef, household manager and chauffeur for the children.
In her New York Times article, ‘Does A More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex?’, psychologist Lori Gottlieb offered an explanation as to why sharing responsibilities equally, though practical, does not currently translate into a better sex life. In one study, when men did certain ‘feminine’ chores around the house, such as folding laundry, cooking or vacuuming, they had less sex than when they did ‘masculine’ chores such as taking out the trash or working on the car. Having a more traditional division of chores also led to a higher rate of sexual satisfaction, at least for women.