Smarty Pants From The American Scholar

American men are having a hard time right now. They're behind in school, staying single, earning less, drinking more, and dying younger. They’re also taking out their anger on women online, in the home, and in mass shootings, and taking dubious advice from social media influencers pushing ice baths and raw meat diets. They'd be better off looking to the films of Michael Douglas, argues Jessa Crispin in her new book, What Is Wrong With Men: Patriarchy, the Crisis of Masculinity, and How (Of Course) Michael Douglas Films Explain Everything. Throughout the ’80s and ’90s, Douglas’s characters were a mirror for our times, reflecting seismic economic and cultural shifts: “He was our president, our Wall Street overlord, our mass shooter, our failed husband, our midlife crisis, our cop, and our canary in the patriarchal coal mine.” Not that these characters offer a how-to guide today (just as they didn’t a few decades ago). Rather, as Crispin writes, Douglas “embodied the torments and confusions of the modern man, le