The good men haven't gone anywhere--they are having a great time :)

So, a few days ago I blogged about a WSJ article that was about the perception that young men increasingly don't "man up" ... Because my students had made similar remarks in class weeks ago, I had emailed that article to them and they are continuing to discuss it even a week later, and the educator in me is having a great time that students are passionately arguing. (Note to concerned taxpayers and partisans: the discussions on this topic have been happening in cyberspace, and we don't waste the contracted class time for it. So, there!) Hey students, are you reading this?

But, all we are doing--in class and in society--is just about beginning to wake up to a new reality. A reality in which women, who now have freedoms that even our grandmothers could not have imagined it in their wildest dreams (creepy to think of my grandma having wild dreams!) are beginning to mean it when they say "anything you do, I can do better"

If we keep thinking along these lines, then a question arises: why do young men seem to have the upper hand even whey are failing in life?

while young men's failures in life are not penalizing them in the bedroom, their sexual success may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life. Don't forget your Freud: Civilization is built on blocked, redirected, and channeled sexual impulse, because men will work for sex. Today's young men, however, seldom have to. As the authors of last year's book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality put it, "Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy." They're right. But then try getting men to do anything.

That is right: if men are slacking off, it is women's fault!

Yes, sex is clearly cheap for men. Women's "erotic capital," as Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics has dubbed it, can still be traded for attention, a job, perhaps a boyfriend, and certainly all the sex she wants, but it can't assure her love and lifelong commitment. Not in this market. It's no surprise that the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds who are married has shrunk by an average of 1 percent each year this past decade.

Leave it to academics and researchers and their highfalutin language to make even sex a boring topic :)