So I should probably stop beating this Kay Hymowitz horse to death, but her “successful women have made men TERRIBLE” really stuck in my craw. In her piece, she suggests it’s a big problem that “Not so long ago, the average American man in his 20s had achieved most of the milestones of adulthood: a high-school diploma, financial independence, marriage and children. Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance.”
Matt Yglesias has a really great response:
Since I’m still in my twenties for a few more months, I thought I’d actually look up the median age at first marriage for American males. The most recent year the data is reported for is 2007, when it was 27.7 which is indeed a few years older than it was “not so long ago” in 1960 when it was 22.8 years. But in 1920, it was 24.6 years. In 1890, it was 26.1, presumably because everyone was too busy watching Judd Apatow movies. Or maybe this number just bounces around over time and it’s always been the case that some people are sometimes frustrated with some members of the opposite sex.
World of Warcraft was invented in 1890, right?
Kay Steiger, who shares a first name with Hymowitz but little else, also has a piece worth reading, and rounds up a lot of the internet-talk about the original article.