Home > Buenos Diaz > Weeping for the manchildren

Weeping for the manchildren

By Gloria Diaz

Check out Gloria's Blog — Edge of Gloria!

Fort Wayne Reader

2012-01-05

If you are an older woman with an adult daughter, and wondering why she isn’t married, you might want to keep reading. “What the hell is wrong?” you ask. “She’s attractive, articulate, intelligent, and a little bit ambitious. Why hasn’t she landed a husband yet? I want some grandchildren, dammit!”

The problem is she’s attractive, articulate, intelligent and ambitious, but not shaped like a video game controller. If she were, you’d have grandchildren by now.

Okay, maybe that’s a little bit mean, but a friend and I were discussing how men seemed to be a little, well, childish. This conversation happened about two or three years ago, and a few months later, Women’s Health (yes, I know it’s not Ms. magazine) did an article about how men were more like boys these days. So it wasn’t just our imaginations. But it is kind of a letdown.

Sure, men will read this and blame Disney. “You all want a Prince Charming to take care of you.” Okay, maybe some women do, but what happened to growing up? It’s a little depressing to be surrounded at work by adult men who sound more like teenage boys. The video game talk goes on, and on, and on. I keep expecting to hear some of the guys say, “I’m afraid of girls.” And I hate to bring up stereotypes, but I’ve yet to meet an avid
videogaming male who seems interesting and physically fit. They seem to come out of a mold: seriously overweight, goatee, mustache, and rather uninteresting to talk to. They’re pretty laid back, for the most part, but I guess if I spent my waking hours thinking about videogames, and treated everyone and everything like a vague distraction, I suppose I’d be more relaxed too.

I used to be way into videogames once, but that was back when I was a teenager, and I had time to waste. My parents ran the house, kept the cars mobile, paid the bills and kept me fed. I slogged through school and blew up asteroids and space ships in my spare time. It’s not like I had a job or anything. Gradually though, videogames lost their hold. I became more interested in the world, and creating stuff and going places. Despite the attempts of well-meaning friends, I have no interest in Angry Birds. I must have three videogame systems that I haven’t played in months, if not years. (For the record, two of them were given to me, the third was one of those Atari 2600 multi-game consoles I bought because I knew I wouldn’t need an instruction manual to play them.) And I can’t remember the last time I played it. Maybe Thanksgiving, 2010.

I can’t entirely blame videogames for the demise of manly men, or even just average guys, but it seems that for every manchild out there, a gaming console is not far behind. I guess it’s a somewhat healthy escape, better than heroin or pot, but after 15 to 20 minutes of playing video games, I start to get antsy. I look around at my cluttered house and feel guilty that I’m doing something that isn’t very productive and eventually turn off the game. I think about all the stuff I want to do, and here I am playing video games. So I stop and try to do something productive, like clean the bathroom.
And I can’t wait for the day when all these twenty-something, and thirty-something guys look around and realize they are in their forties, still haven’t made it through school, living in their parents’ basements and still don’t have girlfriends and wonder what they did wrong. Men aren’t very perceptive, and when they get dumped, they don’t know what went wrong. When “Loveline” was still broadcast locally, Adam Carolla would chuckle when hapless guys called in and said their girlfriends broke up with them, but they don’t know why. The women could probably give you a good list of what went wrong, but guys just don’t get it.

But then again, if your prospects aren’t any better than some manchild who talks more enthusiastically about killing a Kworb from the Twelfth Realm on level MegaAwesome from the game Mortal Stupidity III than your silky hair or beautiful eyes, do you really need him? Zap that dweeb!