I stumbled across a new TV programme last week (accidentally of course!) with the intriguing title of ‘Please Marry My Boy.’ No, it wasn’t about tearful mothers pleading for their grotesquely overweight or horribly disfigured sons to be taken pity on. These ‘boys’ appeared to be normal healthy, good-looking professionals who according to the Channel marketing, were just ‘unlucky-in-love.’ It wasn’t exactly ‘I’m Pimping For My Son’ but I wondered if I was alone in thinking the idea behind this show was, shall we say, uncomfortable, if not plain creepy.

I watched with a strange ‘train-wreck’ sort of fascination as these ‘boys’ allowed their prospective ‘wives’ to be subjected to the cooking test, made to prepare the meal most like the ‘favourite’ the mother always cooked for her ‘boy’. At any moment I thought the door would be broken down by feminists with battering rams but alas none appeared. Were these ‘boys’ just looking for a mother substitute?

Was this just a cute idea for a bit more reality-based entertainment or are we seeing the tip of a social problem iceberg here? The recent literature on the topic would indicate that ‘men not growing up soon enough’ is indeed a matter to be taken seriously. In 2001 The Wall Street Journal (Link Here) identified the phenomenon of ‘pre-adulthood’ in a review of “Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men Into Boys” by Kay S. Hymowitz. Hers is no anti-feminist diatribe but an attempt to understand why women generally are outperforming men in the workforce and the home. Hymowitz identifies the surge of women into higher education and professional jobs as one possible cause.

She also blames popular culture for developing a ‘cultural uncertainty about the social role of men.’

Hymowitz nominates the 2007 film “Knocked Up” where the story’s hero is “23-year-old Ben Stone, who has a drunken fling with Allison Scott and gets her pregnant as an example. Ben lives in a Los Angeles crash pad with a group of grubby friends who spend their days playing videogames, smoking pot and unsuccessfully planning to launch a porn website.”

Certainly the rise of feminism may have caused some of that male uncertainty but there are other reasons too. In the last twenty to thirty years one–parent families (particularly of mothers) have been on the rise. According to the Australian Bureau of Statistics “One-parent families increased as a proportion of all families with children under 15 years for most of the twenty years since 1986.” In 2003–04, government pensions and allowances were the principal source of income for 61% of one-parent families. Many of these families will have sons who struggle to find an older male as a role model.

In Australia author and public speaker, Steve Biddulph has been writing for years on the topic of how to turn boys into men. His popularity (he’s reached 130,000 people in 30 years as a public speaker) is some indication of the need for such mentoring.

Whatever the demise of organised religion in Australia might say about our growing maturity, there have been downsides too. Young boys now have fewer opportunities to undergo rites of passage. The formal rites or ceremonies, offered by organised religions (amongst others), to indicate the psychological transition from being a boy to becoming a man, are few and far between. Schoolies week and binge drinking are poor substitutes and merely prolong the culture of selfish irresponsibility.

Meanwhile the promotion for ‘Please Marry My Boy’ continues to wax lyrical.

“The mums we meet in the series are fantastic. They approach the task of finding a match for their sons with military precision. They know their sons better than anyone, so they have very firm ideas about the perfect mate. Their sons had better watch out!”

If these boys can’t grow up soon, we had all better watch out too.

(c) John Bartlett