What of the adolescent males? How does distributed parenting affect the developmental path of boys? We have seen in Section IV that the ox-bow scheme is no more propitious an environment for development for adolescent boys than for adolescent girls, especially for those from non-educogenic homes. But boys have no choice to escape at a tangent; for boys whose adolescent environment pushes them towards the negative there are no short cuts to adult status. Very much the reverse. Not only is social adulthood impossible to accelerate, for many men it remains permanently unattainable. In our society the door to social recognition of manhood still opens only to those in a recognized work status. Males who never succeed in escaping their dependence on others never convincingly establish their manhood socially – hence the extremes to which they go to establish it physically and symbolically (drinking, fighting, group acceptance in gangs/drug subcultures/pubs, domestic violence, sexual predation). The significant minority of males who fail to achieve the socially acknowledged identity of men continue ‘pubbing and palling’, being ‘one of the lads’, siring children and perhaps ‘playing at parenthood’, in an interminable extension of adolescence, imprisoned in a psychosocial vacuum which they are powerless to break and from which (an effectively self-inflicted) early death can be the only release:
41 I’ve done eight funerals in the last three weeks. Half of them are men who died from liver problems or cirrhosis – all drink related. That really shocked me. It’s a real pub culture for the men. That’s what they do.
