Herd Immaturity

What do you think is the most societally destructive euphemism? I think it's "emotional immaturity." We all know that the euphemism “emotional immaturity” is actually not about either emotions or maturity but rather about privilege and perspective.

Emotional immaturity has for so long been used as a euphemism that we no longer even question what it’s supposed to signify. It’s an expansive phrase, opening up and metastasizing in scope and size to cover more and more territory of meaning so as to cover more and more of men’s collective ass. So today, despite all apparent development of humanity as a species, alas our men are somehow still less emotionally mature than women than ever before.

Fancy that. How does that happen?

Tucked into the folds of this fat, sloppy euphemism are so many bodies. The victims of men’s prolonged emotional development we feel are better forgotten, left in the dust of the past so that boys can keep on being boys. Why mar the narrative of the hero’s journey by addressing the damage that he caused along the way?

And the worst part is that there’s no floor to it. Because it’s so ambiguously specified, there are always brand new mysteries that can be explained away by it. Its expansive power comes from its failure to be specific.

But what if “emotional immaturity” isn’t a euphemism for gendered behavior but a euphemism for the takenforgrantedness of inequality in gender relations itself? What if it’s not about how men behave at all but rather about the social latitude that gender inequality affords them relative to women?

How many times have you been told that men are just less mature than women as though that comparison actually explains anything other than how unequal these two genders really are in our society? That one gender doesn’t even have to grow up on the same developmental timetable as the other ones?

Even in the highest echelon of sociological reasoning, I have been offered this folk wisdom for causation as though just evoking this universal truism ended the conversation instead of begging altogether new questions. In a philosophical arena where supposedly every theoretical claim made about mankind must be rigorously scrutinized and empirically substantiated, this one, this one specific idea escapes examination is and always held to be self-evident.

A big duh. Everyone knows that. Come on.

I’m telling you, as a feminist and a sociologist, approaching how to make sense of this gendered immaturity hypothesis has been maddening for me. It’s because it’s what French Sociologist Pierre Bourdieu referred to as doxa: beliefs, ideas and ideologies so axiomatic in one’s society that they are virtually beyond discussion.

The reason emotional immaturity is gender doxa and not “just how it is” is because there is in fact no evidence whatsoever of its actual material existence. Part of the reason for that is because as a euphemism, it doesn’t actually have a precise definition and thus there is no shared sense of how to measure and assess the phenomenon. It’s nebulous, changing, shape-shifting, like that slime that kids like to make from Elmer’s glue and food coloring, spreading and oozing into every available crevice without much conscious thought or direction. It just goes where there isn’t resistance and settles in to watch another three self-soothing episodes of The Office before falling asleep in a puddle of middle-aged mediocrity.

Despite thinking about this for an awfully long time, I honestly don’t know which specific behaviors “emotional immaturity” broadly signifies if not generalized thoughtlessness and the unchecked disregard for the feelings and boundaries of others. Which, honestly, really aren’t so much about maturity at all so much as it is about a deficit of social consciousness, a lack of basic awareness that the universe and all its inhabitants do not exist to orbit and service us. This isn’t adult-level consciousness. This is something toddlers are expected to learn in the course of healthy infant development.

If there is some retardation at this toddler-level stage of development, then let’s not call it emotional immaturity anymore but rather the regression to a very toddler mean.

Ah, right, but it’s more than that. Because it’s also about power. It’s about the social latitude that power and oppression provide.

But there’s also a second layer to this that I despise which is that only men can enjoy the latitude that this myth of emotional immaturity affords. Men and women do not exist as separate but equal categories but are in fact always mutually and unequally referential. Men are men because they are not like women. Women in this unequally balanced equation serve as the living repositories of whatever castoff characteristics society requires to reproduce itself but that men don’t want to be. Hence, women love cleaning and cooking while listening to dad jokes and men love watching reruns of The Office and delight in novelty craft beers that make his incipient drinking problem seem just a little bit classier than his dad’s. All of this is natural. Very natural. Basically genetics. Why ask questions.

So if the doxic argument is that men are just naturally more immature than women, it’s implied that women are just naturally more mature than men. Women’s intuitive capacities, our supernatural ability to tend the emotional landscape and quell tempests, are assumed indicative of our sex organs, never a complex skillset that we are pressed by unequal gendered circumstances to develop and sharpen over the course of our lives.

My life is overflowing with books written by feminist scholars who make a pretty solid case that what people think of as women’s intuition isn’t actually a natural expression of feminity at all but rather their socially conditioned response to inequity. Girls grow up having been constantly informed by everyone all the time that the ruling logic of our society is not one governed by the interests and wellbeing of young girls. We are warned every day of our young lives that adult men are harbingers of suffering, that any one of them (no matter what they look like or who's father or uncle they may be) poses a threat to us. In fact, we soon learn that putting an end to such nonstop violence isn’t even one of the ruling society’s primary concerns. We internalize the doxic belief that our fate as girls is just to learn to live with this. That’s just how it is. That’s how the world works. It’s never anybody’s fault for why we keep getting hurt by men in patterned and predictable ways.

In fact, it’s precisely because society affords so much latitude to adult men that the freedom of girls is so restricted. As far as my own generation is concerned, we were raised to anticipate gendered disrespect, abuse and violence from boys. We were raised to fear adult men for much of the same behavior, just worsened by the added inequities of money, status, and power. What we euphemistically call ‘women’s intuition’ is embodied self-regulation. We are told men are capable of doing practically anything to us should we find ourselves the source of their toddler-like displeasure and so we must discipline and brace ourselves accordingly.

But we’ll call the ambient awareness of that truth ‘women’s intuition’ and pretend that the benign sexism implied isn’t plainly insulting.

Though emotional maturity is for young girls no better defined than emotional immaturity is for adult men, it’s neither a euphemism about their gendered behavior either; it’s still really about the unequal arrangement between genders itself.

It’s code for the double standard. Women have to grow up faster because men reject maturity and are told that’s ok, even natural.

What is expected of girls and women changes from decade to decade but what stays the same is the gendered expectation of self-sacrifice and ready accommodation to this batshit inequality. Technologies change society but what has remained relatively constant is that nothing about the given arrangement between men and women has to fundamentally change, only women.

This gendered double standard has never had to make rational sense because it’s never been about reason. Patriarchy has always been men making up all the rules as they go along anyway. Nothing in our lived history has ever even made the pretense of being about what women want. Nothing about our supposed sexual liberation meant that anything about them or heterosexuality itself had to change, just us.

Women continually adapting themselves to the same inequity forever.

That’s why I have to describe this emotional immaturity hypothesis as goo-like, of being slimelike in quality. It’s the only metaphor I can think of that works. It’s not like men are doing this on purpose. It’s not like they all got together and colluded on this being how society should function. It’s less the product of willful intention than what happens when so many men independently default at the same time to what is for them the path of least resistance.

And the doxa of emotional immaturity has afforded straight men considerable latitude in their relationship with women. While it’s not especially righteous, being recognized as an emotionally immature man carries almost no social stigma among men that I can see. In fact, many men seem to really enjoy and celebrate the emotional immaturity of their friends, even going out of their way to encourage it. You might even be forgiven for thinking that being demonstratively immature in the company of other men was what being a man is all about.

And this pretense of herd immaturity has created a very slow-moving demographic crisis that everyone can see pouring out like cold blackstrap molasses. Women my age aren’t marrying. The divorce boom of millennials who did marry is coming. But we’re still being told that the event horizon of gender equality will soon be upon us. As though hearing that makes all the everyday violence of what we put up with all somehow less grotesque, reminiscent of how David Attenborough’s voiceover narration can make animal savagery seem almost civilized.

The way I see it, the real damage of letting boys take the scenic route to social accountability is that it leaves girls shouldering nearly all of it. And now women must liberate themselves not only from patriarchy but also society from this lazy new oppression, which is men’s moral collapse into herd immaturity. It’s like digging your way out of one prison only to find yourself in still another prison, qualitatively different from the last one but in ways that are nevertheless equally stupid and frustrating.

But what is to be done about it? Who can speak about what women are afraid to make known about our shared condition? How are men going to respond to it except defensively and predictably with asymmetrical violence?

Is feminism always going to be this struggle for women to name a problem that men would prefer to go on without a name?

How’s this been going for us so far?