*I think you and many of the other internet critics of the Child-Man piece, among many worthwhile arguments (especially about the rose-coloured lens she puts on marriages of past eras), fall somewhat into a trap you accuse her of being stuck in. You (and Adventures in Guyland, for example) think she buys the pop-culture satirical fantasy world of Maxim, etc a little to literally and projects those cartoonish intentional distortions onto the people who indulge them as fantasy. But I don’t read her piece quite like that. I think she’s taking a lot of real-world statistically legitimate information about the state of men and exploring the culture surrounding them. She uses the exaggerrated and obvious signifiers of the culture at large (as we all do) to sketch out a general attitude that she thinks is a key contributor to the trends. Any composite so built is obviously going to represent very few actual real people, who are almost universally more nuanced in their perspectives. But women who read Cosmo have for years fought the impression that it represents their true character — that changes not at all that it does shine a light on certain things they value in some ways and presents an exaggerated but still interesting glimpse of their more purient interests and fantasies. One needs to read Frat Pack movies and Maxim with a large grain of salt, but they are still somewhat revealing of the “downward mobility” that many men dream of (NOTE: I got that phrase from Dave M. himself in a private communication).

*That said, I also think that those of us who, say, went to Ivy league schools and work in media (or who, like me, just work in media) can underestimate the degree to which many, many men do interpret this stuff literally as some kind of ideal. If you’re unlucky enough to spend much time in the boom-shaka nightclubs on Richmond Street in Toronto or go out to a Girls Gone Wild taping, for example, you see that its partly our classist assumptions that lead us to assume we’re all in on the joke.

*You put your finger on my biggest problem with Hymowitz’s piece exactly, though, and originally I planned to make it a big feature of my response until I, uh, forgot to. (did someone say something about bongs?)That is: how the hell do the Daily Show, The Simpson’s, South Park and Chapelle wind up in the same cultural discount bin as Maxim and Tucker Max? She confuses the critics of the culture with its proponents, which represents a fairly large analytical failure.

It’s a truism that women hold the balance of power in relationships until they start thinking about children, ie. until they need a man; if marriage rates are declining among twentysomethings it’s because modern women are more interested in establishing their careers in their 20s than they are in starting families. What men do in the meantime, and beyond, is a worthy subject of discussion; I objected to the piece in the first place because Hymowitz lumping together things as disparate as Dave Chappelle’s savvy racial commentary and Judd Apatow’s movies (which portray their protagonist’s immaturity as a problem to be overcome, not celebrated) with Maxim and videogames is lazy and distorted, the imagined cultural diet of a grotesque strawman that doesn’t much resemble the twenty-something men I know.

We should all be revolted by the man who embraces “the Maxim lifestyleâ€? but I really don’t think there are that many of them — the majority of Maxim readers, I suspect, keep those urges under the mattress where they belong. That’s why the tone is so jokey: ‘we don’t mean it, we know it’s wrong, this is just us letting off steam.’

The Playboy-era man and the Maxim-era man are essentially the same guy, but the Maxim man isn’t pretending to be getting something from his smutty magazine other than smut, nor is he as dumb as the rare, possibly-entirely-made-up stereotypical reader of said smutty magazine.