The demise of guys - Philip Zimbardo

But today I want us to reflect on the demise of guys. Guys are flaming out academically. They're wiping out socially with girls and sexually with women.

Other than that, is not much of a problem. So what's the data? The data on dropping out is amazing: boys are more than 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of school in Canada. Five boys drop out for every three girls. Girls outperform boys now at every level, from elementary school to graduate school. There's a ten percent differential between getting bas and all graduate programs, with guys BR falling behind girls.

Two-thirds of all students in special ed remedial programs are guys. And as you all know, the boys are 5 times more likely than girls to be labeled as having attention deficit disorder, and therefore we drug them with Ritalin. What's the evidence? A billion white of wiping out.

First, it's a new fear of intimacy. Intimacy means physical and emotional connection with somebody else, especially with somebody of the opposite sex, who gives off ambiguous contradictory phosphorescent signals. Every year, there's research done on self-reported shyness among college students, and we're seeing a steady increase among males.

This is two kinds: it's a social awkwardness. The old shyness was a fear of rejection; now it's social awkwardness, like you're a stranger in a foreign land. They don't know what to say, they don't know what to do, especially one-on-one with the opposite sex. They don't know the language of face contact, the nonverbal and verbal set of rules that enable you to comfortably talk to somebody else, listen to somebody else.

There's something I've developed here called social intensity syndrome, which tries to account for why guys really prefer male bonding over female mating. It turns out from earliest childhood, boys and then men prefer the company of guys, physical company. And it's actually a cortical arousal we're looking at because guys have been with guys in teams, in clubs, in gangs, and fraternities, especially in the military, and then in pubs.

This peaks at Super Bowl Sunday, when guys would rather be in a bar with strangers watching a totally overdressed Aaron Rodgers of the Green Bay Packers rather than Jennifer Lopez totally naked in the bedroom. The problem is they now prefer a synchronistic internet world to the spontaneous interaction and social relationships.

What are the causes? Well, it's an unintended consequence. I think it's excessive internet use in general, excessive video gaming, excessive new access to pornography. The problem is these are arousal addictions. Drug addiction simply wants more arousal; addiction, you want different drugs, you want more of the same difference.

So you need the novelty of the arousal; you need to be sustained. And the problem is the industry is supplying it. Jane McGonigal told us last year that by the time a boy is 21, he's played ten thousand video games, most of that in isolation. As you remember, Cindy Gallup said boys don't know the difference between making love and doing porn.

The average boy now watches 50 porn video clips a week, and then some guy is watching 100. Obviously, the porn industry is the fastest growing industry in America: 15 billion annually. For every 400 movies made in Hollywood, there are 11,000 now made in pornographic videos.

So the effects very quickly is it's a new kind of arousal. Boys' brains are being digitally rewired in a totally new way for change, novelty, excitement, and constant arousal. That means they're totally out of sync in traditional classes, which are analog, static, and interactive passive.

They're also totally out of sync in romantic relationships, which build gradually and subtly. So what's the solution? It's not my job. I'm here to reflect; it's your job to come.

But who should care? The only people who should care about this are parents of boys and girls, educators, gamers, filmmakers, and women who would like a real man who they can talk to, who can dance, who can make love slowly, and contribute to the evolutionary pressures to keep our species above banana slugs. No offense to banana slug owners. Thank you.