Manning Up

Here's an interesting interview between Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review and Kay Hymowitz, author of an intriguing new book entitled, Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys.

An excerpt:

LOPEZ: Did you know all this before you sat down to write? Or were you truly surprised by some of your findings?

HYMOWITZ: I wrote an article called “Child-Man in the Promised Land” for City Journal in 2008. It described the new media — Maxim magazine, the Comedy Central and Spike networks, video games (men in their twenties and thirties are by far the biggest consumers of video games) — that arrived in the 1990s to entertain young single men. I saw that these new media were related to what I now call pre-adulthood — that the entertainment industry was recognizing a large consumer niche that hadn’t existed before. And I was pretty harsh about both the media and their audience.

Men were furious at me. But they were also — and this I wasn’t prepared for — furious at women more generally. It’s not our fault if we’re not behaving, they said — it’s the women. They’re entitled, they’re bitchy, they’re hypocritical. They want it both ways: They want to be equals, and they want us to pay for them. They want gender neutrality, and they want us to have the muscles of Stallone. I interviewed some of the men who had written to me, and I started spending a lot of time on dating websites (reading comments, I mean) and pondering the personal blogs of twenty-somethings. I was pretty taken aback by the toxic level of bitterness and confusion about the opposite sex among pre-adults.