What a Catalan Peter Pan is like
BarcelonaAmerican author Kay Hymowitz wrote the essay Manning up In 2011, Hymowitz describes a new stage of life, pre-adulthood, a period between adolescence and adulthood, which she links to prolonged education, difficulty accessing credit, postponing family formation, and the digital leisure culture. Hymowitz describes how this new phenomenon has had a more negative impact on men, since women have a clearer biological clock, which warns us when it's time for pre-adulthood to end. It should not be forgotten that access to a well-paid job or owning a home have become undertakings worthy of Frodo Saquet and the Fellowship of the Ring. Hymowitz then argues that, without a clear life plan, many young men easily become trapped in a "man-creature" culture: they enjoy the privileges of adulthood (sex, consumption, freedom of movement) but avoid the obligations (own finances, family, caregiving).
In Game theory, Arià Paco's new novel, winner of this year's Anagrama Prize, gives us the opportunity to delve into the inner world of Ernest, its protagonist, a fine example of the Catalan writer's "man-creature." Although the novel's promotional material presents it as a reflection on the vulnerability and contradictions between new masculinities and feminism, I found it to be a splendid portrait of the progressive infantilization of society.
More guilt, less empathy
Ernest moves within an alternative left-wing and feminist environment and reflects on the appropriateness of his sexual desire and fantasies, which he associates with an old masculine model of domination, in a generation that navigates new social codes. But the guilt Ernesto says he feels for displaying "too masculine" desire seems more performative than restorative. Recent research (Vescio et al., 2021) shows that when masculine identity feels threatened, guilt and anger increase, but empathy declines. This is what we observe in Ernesto, as guilt is the perfect alibi for appearing to be a deconstructed good boy but, in practice, behaving like a 21st-century Peter Pan.
According to game theory, the optimal move is the one that guarantees maximum benefit with the minimum possible loss, and that's what she puts into practice: she maximizes the sexual and emotional pleasure that polyamory provides, without paying the basic tokens of relational ethics such as clarity, time, or consideration. Furthermore, she represents the children of an upwardly mobile working class that has been able to offer its offspring the privilege of choosing a vocation without immediate financial pressure (understandably, careers linked to the humanities), which has led to prolonged dependency (according to the Emancipation Observatory, only 14.8% of young people under 3 do so). But feminist theses crumble in the face of this infantile egocentrism that never ends, since no one considers the well-being and freedom of the mothers of this generation of precariously privileged people, who still have to pay for their children's housing and beers.
The protagonist ofThe screams, the fantastic and surprising novel by Víctor RecortA writer from the same generation as Paco and winner of the 2024 Documenta Prize, he offers a key clue for all those Ernests who want to break away from the game: "A man is only a man if he's able to return at least the same number of goodnight kisses he received as a child." Nothing more to add.