Low Culture's parody of the insufferably pedantic, unbearably long-winded, and awkwardly erudite interview with Ben Kunkel on Why Modern Males Suffer From Torpor And Flaccid Personalities is pitch-perfect. The article, meant to be a Q&A with profound self-help implications, is so strangely bad as to be most interesting as a fugitive from good editorial judgment. The interviewer, Rebecca Traister, is single, dissatisfied, and totally bewildered by the lack of literary-caliber lovers populating her nightlife. So she looks up a Hot Young Novelist who just published a book about a directionless dude to provide her with answers. Kunkel, the writer in question, takes the opportunity to sound like an academic journal trying, and failing, to publish an article that'd work for popular consumption. So we get "ennui", expenditures of "libidinal energy", and references to Hannah Arendt's theory of bureaucratization.
Meanwhile, back on some planet that makes sense to me, rehashing old concerns about Generation Slacker hardly merits an article, I've never noticed a giant imbalance in the number of apathy-afflicted men and women (and while some have, I'd suggest that may be because it's harder, as we get older, to really know members of the opposite sex, as attraction often intercepts friendship and we erect more barriers more quickly. I seem to have more dynamic male friends than female ones, but I think that's sample error rather than demographic reality), and this idea that men are now kept from being Great Men by the grinding down of society and loss of the frontier (which Kunkel didn't mention but probably should've) is quasi-nuts.
We've been hearing this for decades now -- if American males were really listing about, wishing they could go off and fight some wars, they'd be going off and fighting the current war. These arguments have been floating around forever and the answer, so far as I can tell, is that characters in books and movies and television shows are simply quite a bit sweeter than the non-scripted, non-imagined (unless you're a sophist) actors populating reality. I know lots of folks in politics -- none of them are as bright, brilliant, and quick as the operatives populating Jeb Bartlett's White House. And trying to explain that away only distracts from the very real work of adapting to it.
Gah!
