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As someone who’s 45 and not married, who is a selling writer of short stories and continues to pursue publication of novels while I work with boys removed from abusive homes and/or who have drug and/or criminal backgrounds...

I liked the book, but after a while I started skimming. The author has good things to say, but while talking about how boy/men live in a world of computer games and college fratboy humor well into their thirties (she’s right on her descriptions of boys who don’t grow up), she has a really annoying habit of using examples from movies and celebrity culture as examples of how things should be. It’s like her problem isn’t with boy/men, but that they don’t watch the right TV shows.

Women are pretty much perfect and just frustrated with the men, according to the book, but her oversimplification of so many issues was frustrating. I see and work with the types of males who are the problem she talks about, but she keeps hitting on this narrow view of what a man HAS to conform to in order to have a ‘real’ life.

Well, no. There are options for all. Folks like me are outside the norm, and I am a decent citizen who isn’t playing video games and watching TV. I didn’t expect the book to talk about folks like me, but I was a little startled by her repetition of the illustration of these awesome, smart, grown-up women, and all these darned MEN who won’t do what she wants them to do.

The author should have been more comprehensive, or she should have made this an op-ed piece. In the end, I thought she missed a great opportunity to show how media, as a previous poster mentioned, has become all-consuming ni the lives of males AND females. All their references are pop culture, with so little connection to local community, physical labor, non-organized sporting, reading the classics AND reading for pleasure. We’re sexualizing kids, both girls AND boys, and telling them that gender is just a construct of the patriarchy, that all religions are the same, etc. etc.

There are so many things to incorporate in this kind of study, and she kept the focus on these boy-men playing their video games. That’s not the whole story by a mile.