It requires you to sit through an ad if you aren't a subscriber, but everything you need to know about how I wound up getting involved with a relationship book -- perhaps the second-to-last thing I would have envisioned myself doing, ahead of only writing Linda's Guide To Keeping Your Car Tidy -- is contained in the jaw-droppingly insulting Salon article found here:

http://www.salon.com/books/int/2005/09/20/kunkel/index.html

Go and read it, and then come back.

This is what passes for discourse. This is what passes for trying to figure it out. "For some time now I have been anxious to let loose on the sorry state of the young male population of this country -- or at least of New York City," says Rebecca Traister. Yes, the entire young male population is of one "sorry state." The literally millions of men of this kind, have gone to pot. Yes, I'm sure that's exactly what it is. No matter their background, no matter their history, they can all be successfully judged based on two factors: they are young, and they are men. And as a group, they simply are not good enough.

Is this a joke? At first, I thought it might be satire. She sits with this navel-gazing dork who is, based on this conversation, the precise brand of stultifyingly boring spiritual poet I despise the most, and she allows him to bloviate about the failings of men in general, and about how women are just so very superior to them. She is apparently entirely unaware that Kunkel is reading from a script that men have been playing out for a zillion years, telling her exactly what she wants to hear while actually reenforcing every revolting stereotype in which men are so innately inept at relationships that women are doomed to spend eternity teaching a remedial Emotional Intelligence class, doling out sex and attention in ways that are little more than behavior modification techniques.

Benjamin tells us, "As far as I can tell, it will take some ingenuity for a man to retain his freedom past a certain age." You'll notice that Kunkel uses brightly positive language -- "ingenuity" and "freedom" -- to describe concepts that he is, in theory, condemning. In theory, the "ingenuity" he is discussing is something he considers emotional cowardice, and the "freedom" he is discussing is something he finds akin to pathetic emptiness. Why, then, is he using words of admiration? Why is he choosing a vocabulary of good cheer and inspiration -- ingenuity, freedom -- to describe these men when he is about to agree with Traister -- shocker! -- when she posits that "generally young men are unworthy of their female counterparts"? Because Kunkel isn't really condemning this behavior. He's really romanticizing it. It's about suffering. It's about pain. It's about creeping modernism. Guys who treat you like crap aren't mean -- they're afflicted.

Traister, by the way, wants you to know that she thinks that truth is very "uncomfortable," this acknowledging that men are generally unworthy of women. If you have ever met this woman, however -- the "I hate to say it, but men suck" woman -- you know that she does not at all hate to say it. She loves to say it. She says it to everyone who will listen. Always with that same phony reluctance, but always with that same evident glee.

So what is Kunkel's answer for Traister? A sexual strike. At first, it sounds like he might be talking about selectivity, saying, "As a whole, you should go on some sort of a sexual strike against just such men." But the men she is talking about are "men of [her] generation." The very men they have been generalizing about. The very men who are so unworthy. That's the answer: don't sleep with them.

Even more revolting is the next bit, in which Kunkel says that individual women making this decision will not suffice. It has to be like the labor movement. All women, he says, have to get together and "go on sexual strike" against all men. In general.

Of course, Traister responds that this would punish women as well, since that would mean that women would be deprived of sex. But Kunkel has the solution to this, as well. "You need to make an old-fashioned masculine distinction between sex and love. Just find some guy and use him. The guys you want love from? Give them nothing."

Stop and read that again.

Only have sex with the ones you don't care about, he says. Use them. Drive a wedge between sex and feelings, and deny sex to men you actually like as a brickbat you can use to get them to... do what, exactly? Have more passion? Be more interesting? Traister's main complaint seems to be that men are boring. Is this going to make them more sparkling conversationalists? If the argument Kunkel is making is that women as a whole can be said to function emotionally in a way superior to the way men function, then why in the hell would you tell them to learn how to draw "an old-fashioned masculine distinction"?

Kunkel goes on to blame widespread male malaise on things like bureaucratization, making a preposterously strained argument that seems to amount to something like this: Modern-day life has limited meaning. Men have always had lives with oodles of meaning, so they really miss it and it makes them sad. Women have always had lives with substantially less meaning, so they appreciate just having a little bit more. In other words, being a bureaucrat looks really bad to a man who used to be able to be great, but it looks pretty good to a woman who used to just sweep the ashes out of the fireplace. He dresses it up, but that's the basic idea.

He then moves on to the patently silly idea that past generations mated and married based on a passionate sense of "destiny," which is not only not true, but basically the opposite of true. It's pretty hard to make the case that a "shopping mentality" is a new thing to romance when for zillions of years, you could do things like get a mail-order bride. The idea that you should marry based on romantic love isn't some ancient ideal that the consumer culture has corrupted -- it's a relatively recent notion that the consumer culture encourages. Constantly hunting for something better, something perfect... this is exactly what's wrong with the idea of destiny.

And then Benjamin pays tribute to perhaps the only "persuasive love story" he has ever found in fiction, which turns out to be about a man who has set up a utopian feminist commune.

ARE YOU KIDDING ME WITH THIS GUY?

Hasn't Traister ever hung around on campus at a place like Oberlin or Swarthmore? Is this really her FIRST goateed straight man who lurves to talk about feminism over Indian food? How the only good love story is one set on a UTOPIAN FEMINIST COMMUNE? I hate to say it, but if you can't recognize that for the line that it is, you deserve every loser you're going to continue dating, because that, my friends, is some bullshit.

And then Rebecca talks for a while about how women don't freak out when things don't work out, saying this: "So when things get tough, women don't enjoy it any more than men, but they are not surprised. Whereas men -- at least some of the ones I've known -- have been paralyzed by life's hardships." This coming from a woman whose conclusion, because she apparently hasn't outgrown dating Black Turtleneck Slacker Guy, is that young men as a group are unworthy of young women. Good fucking grief. Talk about "paralyzed by life's hardships." She's written off an entire gender. In men, we call that misogyny. Can you imagine -- seriously, can you imagine -- a man seriously writing in a publication like Salon that young women are basically unworthy of young men, and some understanding woman writer nodding her head all, "Yeah, you know, you should go on sexual strike against women until they act more like you want"?

I hate everything about that conversation. I am depressed and disheartened by both of their positions in it, and it comes off like a lot of mutual stroking -- oh, you're so right, oh, you're so good, oh, you're so wise, oh, I totally agree -- that never goes more than about a half-inch deep. From the opening stereotypes ("Boys only like sci-fi and dirty movies!")to the ostentatiously quasi-intellectual claptrap that follows, this conversation is everything that's wrong with the way men and women talk to each other.

What is to be gained from a woman sitting down with a man willing to agree that other men (himself not included) suck? Does it ever occur to her that if everyone she's dating is listless and boring, it might have something to do with her choices? If she's lamenting the existence of a subgroup of dull, inert windbags, I totally agree -- Kunkel being Exhibit A. Her description of the way her "date" with him was set up and the way he behaved made him sound like exactly the kind of person I dislike, but she found it charming. She thinks it's endearing how he says he wants Indian and sends her a list of restaurants in descending order of preference and cost. I would find that pushy, show-offy, and indicative of someone who will, just as he eventually does, be in a constant state of self-display throughout the discussion.

You know, it's really not my job as a woman to participate in demonstrations to make men better at relationships. It's not my experience that men need to be made better at relationships any more than women do. This is the same cop-out that lies at the heart of He's Just Not That Into You. Just as that book said, "Oh, sweetie, there was nothing you could have done; he never cared about you," this one says, "Oh, sweetie. Men suck. That's what it is. They're not nearly as good as women. It's just part of being a guy."

This benefits exactly one group of people: men who suck. The only people who are better off under this theory are men who want to continue to be obnoxious and self-involved. We know women aren't going to go on a general sexual strike, and so does Kunkel. What his theory accomplishes is that it tells women that if they choose not to go on a general sexual strike, they have only themselves to blame for the consequences. He places the onus on women to solve whatever ails men, and if they don't, then... well, you know. They're the better species. The least they could do is step up.

A lot of men annoy me. I've been known to catalog them at length. But a lot of women annoy me, too. The older you get, the more selective you are about the people you allow into your life, and the more attuned you become to the things that make them not right for you. But if you're smart, you also become more painfully aware of how precious people are who seem capable of understanding and caring about you, and the more preposterous it seems to fall back on some kind of boys-versus-girls idiocy to explain the simple truth that most people in the world are not right for you. Most people in the world will not get you in quite the right way, or won't make you laugh, or will irritate you. At 35, you know a lot more than you did at 20 about how many things there are that make people not right for you, and more of the ones that are right for you are already with somebody else. But that doesn't make any more of them suck than sucked when you were 20.

The world is annoying. People you like are hard to find. Lots of men are slackers. Lots of men are overly driven wankers. Lots of women are aimless morons. Lots of women are bitches. It's not a contest. What's to be gained from lowering the level of discourse like this?

Everybody's trying. Everybody's screwing up a lot, because relationships are complicated. But sitting down with some guy who's willing to tell you exactly what you want to hear about how bad all the men out ther really are, just so that you'll run and tell everyone how brilliant and insightful he is? That's not the way to learn a damn thing.