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Book Review: "Guyland: The perilous world where boys become men" by Michael Kimmel Full Citation: Kimmel, Michael. 2008. Guyland: The perilous world where boys become men. NY: Harper Collins. ISBN 978-0-06-083135-6
Using a combination of interviews, anecdotes, and socio-historical insight, Michael Kimmel's Guyland offers a detailed analysis of the prevailing social construction and performance of hegemonic masculinity in mainstream North American youth culture. A large preponderance of young men, Kimmel argues, currently exist within the combined developmental stage and social space of "Guyland": a world characterized by its celebration of camaraderie, promiscuity, conformity, consumption, and irresponsibility. Kimmel traces these values through the various dimensions of young men's social environments and discusses the impact that Guyland has on their lives and the lives of those around them. Specifically, Kimmel argues that Guyland's conformist, misogynist, and escapist ethos constitutes an ineffectual process for developing boys into mature men. With a style and analysis directed to both academic and general readerships (and, in particular, the very "guys" it describes) Guyland offers an original and incisive critique of the gendered lives of predominantly white college-aged and college-bound males in North America, as well as a convincing articulation of potential avenues for instigating positive social change.
As his point of departure, Kimmel confronts the current prolongation of youth faced by today's young men. Since the 1960s, he explains, there has been a steady decline in the kinds of normative standards and traditions that had once defined an individual's transition from childhood to adulthood, and meaningfully distinguished between boys and men. With no clear definition of how one achieves and practices manhood or masculinity, young males resort to Guyland, "a kind of suspended animation between boyhood and manhood" that "lies between the dependency and lack of autonomy of boyhood and the sacrifice and responsibility of manhood" (p. 6). Thus, Kimmel uses the Guyland motif to denote both an indefinite transitional stage of life, and a social space in which "guys" are able to exist free of obligation and responsibility to those around them (girlfriends, parents, children, jobs, etc.).
For most guys, Guyland represents the last refuge in which they...