Chudacoff makes no mention of suicide among bachelors, a neglect of familiar evidence about their subculture and its problems that must be deliberate. One of the most crucial facts Chudacoff plays down is that from the late 1920s through the 1960s most men abandoned bachelor life early in their twenties, with the result that the subculture he wishes to celebrate dwindled. The most likely explanation is that family life became possible for more men during that time, and more men chose it above the bachelor subculture. The Age of the Bachelor ends with the present time and a reemergence of bachelorhood. He suggests that this contemporary state of bachelor affairs is the natural fulfillment of the subculture of the turn of the century and, as well, that these formative expressions were originally suppressed and unacknowledged.
Nothing is further from the truth.
Bachelorhood was a phase for many men in the last century and the early years of this one. The more recent phase of bachelorhood, sustained by the libertinism of the American sexual revolution, sprang forth with the great wealth showered upon Americans after World War II and was, to an astonishing degree, the creation of two well published sex zealots, Alfred Kinsey and Hugh Hefner. To argue that the first was indeed a form of the second is a distortion of social and cultural history. Paul R. McHugh, M.D., is Henry Phipps Professor of Psychiatry and Director and Psychiatrist in Chief in the Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at the Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions, Baltimore, Maryland.