Kimmel Guyland Analysis

Kimmel wrote this book as ethnography of the American male, aged 16 to 26. His focus was to observe and describe the phenomenon of “Guyland” where young adult males hang out in a space between childhood and adulthood. He describes this space, both a stage and life and a social location, in which guys live in sort of time out from life where they continue immature, boyish acts, but with more adult themes and consequences. He focuses on many aspects of “Guyland”, from the rampant partying and drinking, continuous assertions of masculinity, and predatory sex practices, to the intense focus on sports, media, and anything else that allows them to avoid emotions or responsibility. Some of the behaviors exhibited are harmless, like the focus on fantasy …show more content…
He does an excellent job of summarizing fraternity, athletic, and bar culture for this age group, highlighting a number of issues both for and with this group, but then extrapolates this to be representative of almost all males in this age group. His primary sources for information were all either current or former members of fraternities and athletic teams, with only a few outliers. A majority of these were also Ivy League students from Cornell, Dartmouth, and similar colleges. This narrows his sample group to a specific sub-culture within the sub-culture. Each college is different, and while some campuses have fraternity participation as high as 78%, others have as little as 25% according to U.S. NEWS. Taking fraternities as the be-all-end-all of college aged males very much skews the data toward a single side. Along with this aspect of the skew, Kimmel never took into account the fact that there are still large numbers of men who never went to college at all. In all, Kimmel has excellent data to describe a subset of the male population, but it is rather difficult to take that data as a representation of the entire