Of boys, men, and know-it-alls

Nick Troester writes: "Not sure I'm on board with the Mindy Kaling-written contention that spending one's 20s in grad school (if male) makes one a boy and not a man."

As this combined two of my interests - like every woman of my demographics, whatever they are, I'm signed up for the Mindy Kaling fan club, and, well, grad school - I had to see what Kaling had to say. And I don't think what Kaling means - although Nick may have meant this tongue-in-cheek - is that men who plan on going into academia and are thus in doctoral programs for much of their 20s are "boys." I mean, it almost sounds as if the yoga hotties were discussing James Franco, in which case whether we're calling him a boy, a man, or a dining room table, I'm not sure what the problem is.

But the "boy" thing rings true. And it's a stage most young men grow out of, but because the shift occurs for some at 19, others at 40, there's no telling initially what some 25-year-old man will be like in that regard. I suppose what it comes down to, even if Kaling insists that this isn't what it's about, is that some men are prepared to get married in the not-so-distant future, others not. This becomes an issue for women around 30, as Kaling would not be the first to tell the audience reading Glamour, a magazine I still think of as the one that indirectly sent Estelle Costanza to the hospital.

I remember in college that there were some guys who thought the way to a woman's heart was through borrowing a friend-of-a-friend's car and paying for two at an upscale French restaurant, others whose preferred attempt at seduction was overanalyzing everything to do with a possible relationship, with what relationships mean, in some under-furnished and messy dorm-like apartment. The latter seemed preferable to many of us at 19 - eschewing convention! building something amazing that defies the bounds of something so bourgeois as a "relationship"! - but at 30, especially if dude is also 30, I can't imagine this would have the same charm.

No doubt because the essay is in a women's mag, Kaling can't state the obvious, which is that the reason she was dating "boys" until recently - the reason women our age tend to go through a "boys" phase - is that women are, for those years, "girls" in just the same sense: not interested in settling down yet, not ready to commit to a man or much of anything. But society asks us to believe that girls/women all along, from the lead-up to junior prom on, want men who are prepared to commit, on account of all hetero-wired ladies being born wanting not guys but babies-and-rings. When in fact, there's maybe this five-minute window of time when women want commitment that men are not offering, but a far longer window during which women are expected to want Serious, but are actually just fine with three-month this-defies-labels relationships.

Oh, oh, and furthermore: there's the whole dynamic wherein the "boy" explains to the "woman" that he just wants to be free, play it by ear, whereas she's obviously looking for a "man." When she is not, in fact, looking for a "man," but is herself still a "girl." There are a lot of young men out there assuming, incorrectly, that the young women they're dating are on this forum

But one part of Kaling's essay really, really announced why it is that she gets to write for a living. She describes a guy she dated (a "man" not a "boy," but she's explaining why he was nevertheless not ideal) as "a comedy writer who was a smidgen more accomplished than I but who talked about everything with the tone of 'you’ve got a lot to learn, kid.'" As the kids say: this.

Women, listen to me: have we not all met, if not necessarily dated, this man? Have we not all dealt with men who are by all accounts less accomplished, who know less about the topic at hand, but who take that tone? This, I remember, is why it was so difficult to get women to write for the op-ed section of the college paper - there were simply too many male college students who began sentences with that all-knowing, "Well, you see, here's how it is...," and too few female ones doing the same. These 19-year-old boys/men/whatever had totally figured out the war in Iraq. Somehow this, and not the tired-if-described-in-a-clever-way-by-a-clever-writer man-child issue, seems the real question for young women today, at least those whose sexual orientation demands they deal romantically with men.