From an op-ed by Francey Russell, at The Morning News:

“Recently over beers, some female friends described a common and upsetting situation: The boys they liked (and who liked them) were more interested in cuddling than they were—almost to the complete exclusion of sex. As I listened to their stories, it became clear that, culturally speaking, we are facing a chicken-or-egg predicament. While the real world may be seeing a drastic influx in the numbers of sensitive, sexless boy-men, this upsetting rise is paralleled by increasing numbers of the same male type on film. It must be asked: Are movies the groinless loins from whence all these sad bastards have sprung?”

These female laments about the disappearance of “Real Men” from the cultural mileu always throw me off my mental game. I do not hesitate to point out that� the problem is not with the laments themselves, but with my feeble brain. The dissonence in my thinking comes from trying to reconcile the fact that no woman can speak for the tastes of all womankind with my knee-jerk acceptance of a woman’s right to make gross generalizations about my gender.

I guess what I’m saying is that I’m not entirely clear about what exactly the point is in the above-linked piece–my reading of it is hampered by my own preconceptions about gender and relationships. From my perspective, the writer is saying that women are attracted to guys whose personality traits make them bad relationship material; then praising their ability to get laid; and then saying that the current versions of these guys are now unwilling to fuck them. And all of this has something to do with a brand new fear of anger and rejection and sex. This is taken as read, and the question is whether or not movies are a reflection of this real-life problem, or if it’s the other way round.

While scientific studies can eventually home in on the causation question, seimotic meanderings are rarely able to answer it, and so usually come to nothing. Boiling the piece down to its essence is not possible, because it leads to grotesquely insenitive statements like this: Some men that women are powerfully attracted to are unwilling to have sex with them, which is frustrating.

This is a statement I don’t have the right to say, let alone publish. And my initial, reptile-brained reaction is even less acceptable: Life is ordered in such a way that you have almost no say in which individuals do or do not want to have sex with you. You can judge people’s actions as much as you like; you can invite a person into your bedroom and offer them the, “Fuck me, or go away,” ultimatum. You can complain about the results to your friends over beers, afterward. You can write an essay about your frustration with huge subsets of an entire gender. And, you have the right to do all of this without your position being straw-personed into a, “Why won’t the guys I like fuck me properly,” deal, because that would be dismissive, ad hominem, and miss the entire point of what you are saying.

I guess what I’m saying is that I don’t know if movies are to blame for this sort of thing.