Call it "preadulthood": the period between late adolescence and one's late 30s, when there are far more questions than answers. Jobs and relationships may only be fleeting. Life, particularly for those passing through higher education or in the midst of it, will appear to brim with choice and freedom – but eventually feel weighted with angst, exhaustion, and the realisation that any halfway livable existence should be altogether more settled. I should know: it's not that long since I left.
Another thought: could women be better at navigating this phase than men? Bring in a few modern archetypes, and see why this might hold true. While no end of cultural noise is devoted to twenty- and thirtysomething career women, making haste in case motherhood brings things to a halt, how is it that the most common image of their male contemporaries tends to be silliness, ineptitude and too much booze?
Higher female attainment at school is traditionally put down to girls maturing more quickly than boys, with the gap closing by university. Not so: in higher education there have long been concerns about a growing gender difference reflected in participation rates and finals results (men are more likely to get 2:2s and thirds). At the last count, 11% of young women graduates had failed to find a job, and 17% of men. The chief executive of the Association of Graduate Recruiters credits women with being "more mature and focused"; by contrast, to quote a US writer, might it be that millions of young men have yet to be more than "giant frat boys, maladroit geeks, or unwashed slackers"?
Those words, along with the term "preadulthood", come from a new book called Manning Up, subtitled "How the rise of women has turned men into boys", by the conservative polemicist Kay S Hymowitz. US publishing seems to produce these breathlessly written, often maddening texts by the score. But this one picks apart something that has been bugging me for years: a suspicion that my generation blazed a trail for a newly puerile kind of masculinity that has been locked into millions of lives.
I hit my 20s as preadulthood's basics were being identified, and so-called laddism was at its peak. I recognise Hymowitz's picture of the Anglo-American culture it spawned: "child-man" icons such as Adam Sandler and Owen Wilson, and male-fronted TV shows – Top Gear, obviously – that "wink at contemporary man's shallowness and puerility, as if the dudes know full well just how ridiculous they are".
Reading her book, I even started to wonder if the failure of modern male politicians to exude the authority of their predecessors might be down to the malaise she describes: witness the noticeable decline in the tone of PMQs once David Cameron got involved – usually put down to his Etonian "Flashman" tendencies, though perhaps just as traceable to a male generation for whom crass mockery is much more ingrained than elegant repartee.
That said, I'm not sure about her implication that inside every man is a semi-feral ubermensch who needs an outlet; better, surely, to encourage an updated version of the New Man wiped out in the backlash against the right-on 1980s. Though she cites evidence that female graduates are out-earning male contemporaries in some US cities (but not, it has to be said, in the UK), her picture of an insurgent postfeminist sisterhood bumps up against the gender pay gap, and the inability of most industrial economies to know what to do about motherhood. But there is something in her conviction that, among the vociferous middle class at least, one result of the embrace of female empowerment has been a dangerous downgrading of men, particularly when it comes to the importance of fatherhood.
From that, a lot follows. If you're writing dads out of the script via blithe claims that their role is overrated and the celebration of reproductive independence (for the rich, at least), don't be surprised if educated male thirtysomethings remain stubbornly dissolute and commitment-phobic, and at the more difficult edges of society you sow chaos. It's also right to wonder about the pernicious effects of TV, movies and more, and what our public-service broadcaster is doing funding the rise and rise of Clarkson and co; right too, perhaps, to fear the consequences of "child-men" not just on our screens, but in power.
This is something Hymowitz doesn't consider: gender inequalities staying much the same, and made more toxic by the arrival of a new male elite emerging from extended adolescence even less qualified to lord it around than its predecessors. In fact, on current evidence, might we be there already?
