I’ve opined on this situation before, mostly when it comes to topic of the success of comic-book movies among so-called grownups:
The Democratic Party’s vision of the American future is a kind of permissive classroom, no doubt appealing to its base of spoiled children. It is not a place where real work will ever get done. Democrats tell their voters there is nothing they cannot have, and that if they complain and demand loud enough the stingy, bad parent (the Republicans, the rich, Old White People©) will be forced to give them treats. They are led to believe that anyone who does not give them what they want freely (free health care, free college, reparations, housing, jobs) is doing so out of malice.This jejune political rhetoric is mirrored on social media in the left’s call for people to be deplatformed. Censorship is the demand for teacher to restore order in the classroom and punish the disagreeable pupils. Unanimous agreement on all the big questions is a precondition for playing in the same nursery.
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Going beyond politics, the infantilization of America is unmistakable by the success of Disney. As a film company, they’re on a hot streak almost unparalleled in Hollywood history. Within any given year they drop new releases in Star Wars, Marvel superheroes, children’s cartoons, and live-action remakes of children’s cartoons. These movies do well with children and with adults. It sucks the satire out of another Onion headline, “Rising Disney World Ticket Costs Prompting Many Parents To Leave Children At Home.”
This trend is also evidenced by the numerous toys geared for adults. Electronic toys and video games for men are extremely popular. Equally ridiculous is the number of adult women who have an affinity for Disney princesses.
Millennials (born 1980–1994) and Gen-Zers (1995–2009) don’t seem to realize that video games, toys, and the like were things you were only supposed to be into until you were old enough to drive, date, get married, and be an adult. But millennials don’t drive, they don’t date, they don’t marry, and they don’t really grow up. So it’s no surprise they are stuck in a preadult world [].
Don’t even get me started on supposedly-adult men of voting age who are infatuated with My Little Pony (a.k.a. “Bronies”). Great Napoleon’s bleeding ulcers, it actually turns my stomach to read about these fucking losers.
At the risk of sounding all White Christian Male and stuff [irony alert], allow me to remind everyone of this excellent precept from Corinthians:
When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Except that men aren’t doing any of that. Instead, they’re clinging to the artifacts of their childhood, hoping that Mommy will be there to keep the Big Bad Wolf/Zombies away.
What will inevitably happen is calamity. As Charles Norman puts it: “The world is running out of grown-ups. It will probably take tragedies and a prolonged era of diminished affluence for people to grow up.”
Like I said: calamity.