Late Bloomers and Large Adult Sons: The Culture of Young Men after the Recession

When the college cheating scandal broke earlier this year, one of my friends pointed out a highly personal wrinkle in the story that now strikes me as making a much broader and more significant point. If you’re one of the children involved in the SAT fraud scheme, he asked, how would it feel to know your parents think you’re too stupid to get even a plausibly acceptable score? As in, a score that wasn’t good, but that was high enough to make a more conventional approach to rigging admissions decisions—like donating a large sum of money or leaning on one’s legacy status—feasible? How would it feel to know that your parents didn’t even trust you to try?

Where and how a person is driven by the demons that come with knowing that your parents look at you as deficient is a common theme in armchair analyses of many political figures from history—you can fill in your own examples. But even if those psychobiographers are wrong about their specific cases, it still seems to me that this dynamic is important to think about as a factor in history—perhaps not in intellectual history, but certainly in legal, political, and social history. After all who else but this kind of parents—the parents who want to ensure the success of the very children they believe are incompetent—is more likely to press hardest for particularly unfair mechanisms of inheritance; who is likelier to strike back the hardest against the pressure of egalitarianism? Is it not the very people who most believe that the fortunes and achievements of their lives will be scattered and squandered by their children if certain measures are not taken to protect those children from themselves?

But if we shift our perspective once more from the parents to the children—and especially to the sons—we might also find some peculiar features that help explain certain phenomena, particularly at present. The discourse of Boomers vs. Millennials is a vexed one in many different ways, but certainly one of the most common is precisely this dynamic where the younger generation senses (and resents) the distrust and condescension coming from their elders, the lack of faith that the younger generation can deal competently with the crisis and tumult of real life—politics, war, administration.

I specified “sons” just now because I think there are a few other factors at work that are especially—even uniquely—present among younger (primarily cishet) men which have turned this general dynamic of generational conflict in an often dark direction. In the remainder of this post (and perhaps spilling over into another), I want to try to trace the steps in that direction by fastening on a particular word that I think is key to understanding the array of factors in play and how they have interacted.

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It is significant, I think, that young men who struggled to find a career and a romantic partner, who crossed a certain boundary regarding the appropriate duration and amount of parental support to receive, that these young men were once—euphemistically, perhaps—referred to as late bloomers. Today, the word that comes to mind is failson.

Failson is, as far as I can tell, a post-recession neologism, and is not particularly common off the Internet. It seems to have originated in the ecosystem of forums and social media that today comprises sites like Reddit and 4Chan. While locating a precise origin point is probably impossible (or at least I am not skilled enough to do so), the earliest substantive use I’ve found comes from a subthread created in November 2012 at Something Awful. More specifically (for any of you who had some firsthand familiarity with the bizarrerie of SA), “failson” emerged out of the FYAD subthread, a community which is contextualized and explained in this article/oral history from Vice. The short version, however, is that FYAD (an acronym for Fuck You and Die) was a highly insular community of people who ended up crafting the collective voice—aggrieved, belligerent, “ironic,” “edgy,” impish, faux-ingenuous—of the troll armies with whom we are all too familiar today.

The precise date on which this subthread was created is important: November 20, 2012—two days before that year’s Thanksgiving. The introductory post acknowledged this holiday as the impetus for the thread’s creation:

Thanksgiving is coming up. It is a hard time of year for us Failsons. We are going to get paraded in front of our extended families as the boring losers that we are and humiliated. Hopefully they don’t just throw us in a corner and beat us with sticks! Theres [sic] wine and beer, so drink up! You won’t be expected to offer any food, that is just one of the many Failson advantages.

The way the word is used suggests that it was already in circulation, but not wholly familiar, as the thread’s creator felt the need to define it obliquely. “Welcome to the Failson hangout. This is the thread for Failsons. We are disappointments to our families, burdens on societies, and NOT jealous of our older sibling’s [sic] nice houses and luxury automobiles. We have our computers, and frankly, that is enough! Our taxes are easy to fill out, and if we save up our Christmas and Birthday money, we can buy our own television.”

The field of reference here is quite limited: to be a failson is to disappoint one’s parents and to be less successful than one’s older siblings. The immediate family—or at most, the extended family that might visit on Thanksgiving—are the only spectators as well as the only judges of whether one is a failure or not, and it therefore seems quite possible that one could be modestly successful objectively while still disappointing one’s parents.[1] There is only one general statement about failure, and it indicates at least some of where this concept might end up going. “If you want to sign up [to the thread],” the original poster wrote, “just prove you are a worthless piece of male crap and [that] your parents are ashamed of you. If you post here, thats [sic] proof enough.”

While subtlety was never a feature of Something Awful, the inclusion of “male” in “a worthless piece of male crap” underlined the maleness of “failson” with a bright red Sharpie. Along with financial underperformance, sexual and romantic defeat was the other major failure of the failson. Hand in hand with not having the material goods to show off to the family, the failson also had no romantic partner to bring home to meet the folks.[2] The failson might in all likelihood also be an incel—a word that was coined much earlier but that was being newly transformed into a hate-bound identity precisely at this time. (Elliott Rodger would commit his murders in Isla Vista in May 2014.)

Failson has continued to be used primarily as a(n “ironic”) self-description, but it has sometimes also been used as an epithet to be hurled at the offspring of public figures, particularly at the sons of Donald Trump. (It overlaps with the “Large Adult Son,” a term which the excellent Jia Tolentino unpacked here.)

In these two connections—to incels and to the Trump sons—we can observe some of the broader social dimensions and political stakes of the term. In one direction we find a fevered panic among young men that they are, in a sense, being left behind by women who are more skillful at negotiating the major institutions of adult life: the academy, the job market, the dating pool. Manifested in waves of rage about video games or the gender politics of the new Star Wars films, these young men believe that stereotypically masculine traits and skills are being progressively devalued, even denigrated, even as women seem to be succeeding in redefining and mastering some of those very traits—strength, courage, self-reliance, confidence.

In the other direction, we find an increasing awareness of the prevalence of nepotism and the insidious effects of great wealth, with frequent accusations of “oligarchy” aimed at the standing order. The hollowness of meritocracy is a common topic, and corruption of many kinds taken more or less for granted.

Where these two strands come together is in a particular and peculiar acknowledgment of unmerited entitlement that I think is typified by the failson. The failson recognizes that he hasn’t done anything to earn special opportunities that his parents might be able to secure for him, but he feels entitled to them all the same. He is angry and resentful if his parents do not assist him or if they are unable to do so—if they do not, in fact, have those connections which might make him un succès malgré lui. At some level he recognizes that there are valid reasons why women are not responding to his advances (if he’s making them), but he still feels entitled to a romantic and sexual partner.

The failson’s self-awareness that he is both unworthy and entitled—that he doesn’t deserve something but feels he should be given it anyway—is the mirror image of the parent who believes their child is completely incompetent but wants to endow them with vast privileges nonetheless. Neither can afford to give egalitarianism even an inch of space to work; both feel pressed in by the limitations of their precarious pretense of winning a meritocratic competition that they are actively subverting.

I think, however, that this combination of self-aware unworthiness and entitlement is somehow more prevalent, more characteristic of our culture at present than can be accounted for by failsons and cheating parents. In another post, I want to look at a kind of genre of recent fiction—what I’ll call the Betangsroman, the Bildungsroman of the beta male. I recently read a very good example of this genre and want to explore what it says about literary and intellectual culture today.