David Brooks should get back in the kitchen

God, how I loathe David Brooks. Unlike most misogynists (who are all too happy to let you know how little they think of you) Brooks’ sexism is sugar-coated, making it particularly insulting. Whether it’s writing about how rape exists simply because chivalry doesn’t , or telling women that the “power is in the kitchen,” Brooks has a knack for denigrating women while swearing up and down he has our best interests at heart.
Brooks’ latest, however, is a bit more transparent than usual. In The Odyssey Years, Brooks gripes about young people today and what he sees as prolonged adolescence:

During this decade, 20-somethings go to school and take breaks from school. They live with friends and they live at home. They fall in and out of love. They try one career and then try another.
Their parents grow increasingly anxious. These parents understand that there’s bound to be a transition phase between student life and adult life. But when they look at their own grown children, they see the transition stretching five years, seven and beyond. The parents don’t even detect a clear sense of direction in their children’s lives. They look at them and see the things that are being delayed.

Okay, sure. This sounds a lot like what feminists have been talking about for a while, except more specifically, concerning the new masculinity being boyhood.
Brooks rattles off a list of what he clearly sees as failures of this generation: Young people are much less likely to be financially secure, married and having kids by 30 today than they were in 1960; dating and courting are now “hooking up”; “Marriage gives way to cohabitation”; and the kicker….

Social life is fluid. There’s been a shift in the balance of power between the genders. Thirty-six percent of female workers in their 20s now have a college degree, compared with 23 percent of male workers. Male wages have stagnated over the past decades, while female wages have risen.

Without getting into Brooks’ willful ignorance of the wage gap, I must ask–how exactly is women’s success a generation’s failure? Brooks, ever the gentleman, explains:

This has fundamentally scrambled the courtship rituals and decreased the pressure to get married. Educated women can get many of the things they want (income, status, identity) without marriage, while they find it harder (or, if they’re working-class, next to impossible) to find a suitably accomplished mate.

Wah!!! Women don’t need men anymore!
You know, in a stroke of genius I thought of the perfect video clip to capture “shorter David Brooks,” but I can’t find it anywhere: William H. Macy in Pleasantville wandering around his empty home (his wife has left) shouting repeatedly, “Where is my dinner?!” (For a fairly disturbing amateur recreation of this scene, click here.)
Seriously though, if Brooks is so concerned about a generation of slackers and perpetual adolescents you would think that he would be lauding women’s accomplishments–not blaming them.
This post is dedicated to Christopher, who underestimates my running abilities.