The psychologist famous for the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment, claims in his book Man (Dis)connected: How Technology Has Sabotaged What It Means To Be Male, that men are suffering from masculinity crisis as a result of excessive use of video games and pornography.
Phillip Zimbardo, psychologist and professor emeritus at Stanford University, discourages the addictive watching of online pornography and playing too much video games as it could change men's brain structure, which is the major focus on his latest book.
The book, published and written with his co-author Nikita D Coulombe, forms a presentation about why young boys don't man up as former generations of males allegedly did. They point out that, while females are gradually making success in the real world, male teenagers are resorting into cyberspace, looking for the validation and security in a virtual environment online as the boys cannot achieve it anywhere else.
School works are becoming boring subjects for young boys and with no father figures around to encourage them, they also find it hard to practice real relationships with other individuals. They are being trained to avoid unsatisfying future in terms of jobs, financial matters and other mature responsibilities. Zimbardo mentioned that this flow of events is making the young boys hide in their rooms and prone to different kinds of addiction like video games, pornography and even drugs.
The statistics on the video game consumption are overwhelming. In 2012 Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 raked $500 million in sales in its first 24 hours. In 2013, the worldwide income of the gaming business, that includes mobile games on tablets and smartphones, was an amazing $66 billion, a $3 billion growth from 2012.
Zimbardo figures that online pornography has been more engaging to boys than girls, in part because it reduces narratives and goes to direct action, dodging the awkward questions part in courting. The gradual outcome would be a new form of social shyness for male teenagers.
Furthermore, Zimbardo states that majority of African-American male teenagers have been raised in a single-mother arrangement for generations. About a third of the male population has been brought up in an absent-father US households. In the UK, the number of single mothers raising children is tripled compared to the record back in 1971.
A proposed solution is for parents to be aware of their boys' hours spent alone in their rooms and that the school should exert more effort in providing male teenagers with positive outlets and activities.
Photo: Derek Bridges | Flickr
