The Right: Pajamaboy is a Silly Feckless Man-Child
The Left: You're Just Afraid He Could Kick Your Ass!!!

So, Rich Lowry wrote:

[I]t’s hard not to see Pajama Boy as an expression of the Obama vision, just like his forbear Julia, the Internet cartoon from the 2012 campaign. Pajama Boy is Julia’s little brother. She progressed through life without any significant family or community connections. He is the picture of perpetual adolescence. Neither is a symbol of self-reliant, responsible adulthood.

And so both are ideal consumers of government. Julia needed the help of Obama-supported programs at every juncture of her life, and Pajama Boy is going to get his health insurance through Obamacare...

The breakdown of marriage and its drift into the 30s mean there are more Julias and Pajama Boys than ever. The growth of government feeds off this trend, and at the margins, augments it. The vision of the Obama Democrats, distilled to its essence, is of a direct relationship between the state and the individual without the mediating institutions of family, church and community that are an inherent check on government power.

Tocqueville wrote long ago of the infantilizing tendency of such all-encompassing government. “It would be like the authority of a parent,” he wrote in a famous passage, “if, like that authority, its object was to prepare men for manhood; but it seeks, on the contrary, to keep them in perpetual childhood.” If you wanted to depict what Tocqueville was getting at in one meme, Pajama Boy wouldn’t be such a bad way to do it.

By the way: The piece I'm about to quote (well, quote by way of NRO's quote) is actually right in suggesting that Lowry "fears" Pajamaboy. We all do. Let's be honest about this: Yes, we are afraid that weak, feckless, Fashion-Cupcake-Indulging Pajamaboys will become more numerous, sapping the country of fire and spirt and industry, and demanding more and more state-provided comforts.

Just like parents fear that their children might not want to ever leave the nest.

But the way the New Republic puts this is just silly. It's like #slatepitch, a deliberately stupid article published to get rubbernecking "Oh my God what a bus collision" traffic.

Lowry goes on to connect what he characterizes as an immature version of masculinity with a liberal’s overreliance on a paternalistic government. “Pajama Boy’s mom probably still tucks him in at night, and when she isn’t there for him, Obamacare will be,” he writes. Millennials and Democrats just love their mommies too much! But while this is a ritual mockery that’s ostensibly about Obamacare, what it really reveals is a long-boiling, deep-seated fear on the right of the moment when a more beta-appearing man becomes the mainstream notion of masculinity.

There’s plenty of evidence that moment is upon us. Hanna Rosin’s 2012 book, The End of Men, was the capstone of a growing tower of cultural works on the curious gender-role reversal [Repetitive citations omitted.]

In an economy that is increasingly influenced by women (in all but three of the 2,000 largest metropolitan areas in the country, in the aggregate, single childless women under 30 are out-earning their male counterparts), the men who seem to be reaping the clearest rewards are those who seem to comfortable with the adjustments of a world that’s 40 years into second-wave feminism (and one in which, for that matter, gay culture is no longer fringe culture). The chest-thumping alpha males of yore now take their social cues from men who have worked out a more subtle way to assert themselves in the world. Metrosexuals aren’t a new, urban category any more; people who might have been referred to that way ten years ago are now just called dudes....

But if Pajama Boy is nothing out of the ordinary—which I’d argue he isn’t—then that means conservatives are losing several culture-war battles, and thus a great deal of valuable electoral ammunition.

Conceded, Pajamaboy isn't out of the ordinary. And that's a problem.

Because Pajamaboy is soft, and this is a hard world. This isn't about getting along with women. (Women don't particularly like Pajamaboys.) It's about simply having fewer and fewer actual Men.

And only someone who's anti-Man could claim that nothing will be lost as Men disappear, to be replaced by Pajamaboys and related otaku.

Japan's dying population emails to say "How you doin'?"

posted by Ace at 03:51 PM

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