It would be easy enough to hold up some of the callow ranting that the piece inspired as proof positive of the child-man’s existence. But the truth is that my correspondents’ objections gave me pause. Their argument, in effect, was that the SYM is putting off traditional markers of adulthood—one wife, two kids, three bathrooms—not because he’s immature but because he’s angry. He’s angry because he thinks that young women are dishonest, self-involved, slutty, manipulative, shallow, controlling, and gold-digging. He’s angry because he thinks that the culture disses all things male. He’s angry because he thinks that marriage these days is a raw deal for men…

Darwinian mores, or anti-mores, also explain the brutal status jockeying that pervades the contemporary dating scene and that makes the high school cafeteria look like a feminist utopia. Check out DarwinDating.com, a matchmaking website “created exclusively for beautiful, desirable people.” Members rank your picture on a scale of one to five and vote on whether to let you join their honored ranks or throw you into the slush pile of “saggy,” “hairy,” “sweaty,” “nerdy” rejects. My 28-year-old daughter tells me of a friend, a Yale alum and Stanford business school graduate, who asked her, apropos of nothing, “If you ranked women from one to ten, one being Ugly Betty and ten being Elizabeth Hurley, what number could I get?” Jillian Straus describes a 34-year-old sales manager from Dallas who says that his current girlfriend meets just six out of his ten requirements for the perfect girlfriend. When they go out together, he’s constantly looking for an “upgrade.”