Studies are merely collections of anecdotes, which are then crunched into numbers (i.e., percentages) to make them look “scientific.”
Why do people take them seriously?
The concept is so widely-accepted, it’s often blamed for men behaving badly, from Anthony Weiner, to Arnold Schwarzenegger, to Bill Clinton … and beyond.
And from “The Seven Year Itch” to “American Beauty” to “Moonstruck,” it’s one of Hollywood’s go-to themes.
But as it turns out, our assumptions are wrong. Surprisingly, Lachman’s research shows that for most men it’s more fiction than fact. Very few men – perhaps only 10 to 12 percent – have anything approaching a crisis.
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Perhaps, but art — let alone the evidence of our senses — is more accurate than science.
Can anyone doubt the obvious: that as men age, they mourn their decreased virility, and struggle with their mortality? Poems hundreds of years old depict this mourning, and struggle?
As the article notes, movies from the sublime Seconds (1966) to (the superficially ludicrous yet surprisingly satisfying and well made) The Manster (1959) take it up as a theme.
Fewer studies, please. More Shakespeare. More trust in our personal observations.
PS: I caught The Manster a few nights back thanks to TCM. While a few overlong chases (to get it to a proper commercial running time) cause drag, I was shocked at how not-awful it was. Some genuinely creative moments, an “exotic” post-war Japanese setting. And yes, unlike a lot of 1950s monster movies, it was about middle aged characters, not adolescent ones. Not even a token teenager to be found, to re-grab the kids’ attention half-way through (as happens in Tarantula (I think))
