Where have all the good men gone? Ask women, too

If you believe, as I do, that people respond to models, incentives, and the marketplace, this is not very surprising. The dark side of feminism was creating a relationship environment that put relatively little if any qualifications on any man before you take him to bed, and even less after. If young men are ever going to stop treating women like objects and instead like creatures of value, then women have to stop behaving like objects and stop confusing a wicked strut with life-affirming power. That ship has long since sailed.

Lena Dunham’s genius is in recognizing this truth, though she’s hardly the first. I think of Dunham as her generation’s Rachel Wetzsteon, a tragic figure and a brilliant poet, who anticipated much about the movement of the sexes toward this modern collapse.