So, did you know men can’t write well anymore? It’s true! Previous generations had Hemingway and Mailer, and we’ve got the navel-gazing nancyboys known as Keith Gessen and Benjamin Kunkel. At least, that’s Choire Sicha’s premise in the Observer, which we were sort of following until we hit this:

“What is peculiar to our time is a habit of disparagement, persisted in with a kind of obsessiveness that seems like rigor. We go to the shopping mall,” wrote Marilyn Robinson in The New York Times in 1985. (That was written so long ago that it does not appear on the Internet, and therefore there are no Google results at all for the essay’s excellent phrase “a dark night of the prole.”)

“In Amerika,” Andrea Dworkin wrote two years later, “there is the nearly universal conviction—or so it appears—that sex (fucking) is good and that liking it is right. …”

But these two facts have collided, with terrible results, since the delicious mid-’80s. The American desire for fucking has become, locally, the Brooklyn-based or -bound desire for a book deal and a brownstone. [NYO]

From the shopping mall, to Andrea Dworkin’s In Amerika, to replacing sex with book deals and brownstones. If someone could explain these logical leaps to us, we’d appreciate it.

Side note: The one thing this piece does well is sarcastic elitism! With lots of pointless exclamation points! Props for mentioning Deep Springs (the all-male college), without explaining what it is, or that Ben Kunkel went there, because surely we already knew that. And this: “Also, let the record reflect that while he did attend Harvard, he did so on a scholarship!”