Of course other causes are indicated — like “widespread fatherlessness and changing family dynamics, media influences, environmentally generated physiological changes that decrease testosterone and increase estrogen, the problematic economy and also the dramatic rise of gals.” But technology gets the brunt of it: Zimbardo and Duncan lament how, “from the earliest ages, guys are seduced into excessive and mostly isolated viewing and involvement with texting, tweeting, blogging, online chatting, emailing, and watching sports on TV or laptops” (with no mention of how girls experience the same).

Backing up a bit: The evidence the authors use to demonstrate that this phenomenon exists in the first place is startlingly thin — that is especially so, given that one of the authors is a respected psychologist, former president of the American Psychological Association and professor emeritus at Stanford. The proof ranges from the anecdotal (“everyone knows a young man who is struggling”) to the statistical, but even the latter rarely satisfies. Data on hours spent watching porn or playing video games may be inherently alarming — as are many stats about our modern lives, like our TV-watching, cellphone-using, calorie-consuming habits — but the data alone don’t reveal much more than the degree to which our world has changed. The most compelling evidence of “the demise of guys” is familiar to anyone who has read any of the warnings over the past several years about a “boy crisis,” and that relates to education. Take, for example:

By eighth grade, for instance, only 20 percent of boys are proficient in writing and 24 percent proficient in reading. Young men’s SAT scores, meanwhile, in 2011 were the worst they’ve been in 40 years … Boys are 30 percent more likely than girls to drop out of both high school and college … Nationally, boys account for 70 percent of all the D’s and F’s given out at school. It is predicted that women will earn 60 percent of bachelor’s, 63 percent of master’s and 54 percent of doctorate degrees by 2016.

These statistics are deeply concerning, but they were put into better perspective seven years ago in a Washington Post op-ed: “The alarming statistics on which the notion of a crisis is based are rarely broken out by race or class,” authors Caryl Rivers and Rosalind Chait Barnett wrote. “When they are, the whole picture changes. It becomes clear that if there is a crisis, it’s among inner-city and rural boys.” Still a critical concern, but a more specific one; the details in this debate are crucial. (The same authors recently debunked the media myth that women are, or are swiftly becoming, “the richer sex.”)

In the case of this book, even solid evidence that boys and young men are falling behind in education doesn’t speak directly to Zimbardo and Duncan’s argument that males are failing romantically and sexually, which they support with anecdotal and self-selecting survey evidence.

Rather than strongly demonstrating that young men are in fact “totally out of sync in romantic relationships,” as they claim, the authors turn instead to the inarguable fact that some guys watch a lot of porn and play a lot of video games — as though it were self-evident proof that the modern human male is amorously inept. Yes, many intuit such a connection — porn and video games are go-to scapegoats — but that doesn’t demonstrate that there is one. They talk of the possibility of a video game player becoming “desensitized to reality and real-life interactions with others,” but the authors don’t provide evidence of this happening — aside from extreme anecdotes like that of a video-game-playing mass murderer. They uncritically rely on controversial and frequently disputed arguments that porn can be “addictive.” At the same time, in a chapter charmingly titled, “Why buy the cow when you can have the milk free?,” the authors worry that the gender imbalance on college campuses has made it easy for guys to get girls to have non-committal sex with them. Well, which is it — are men failing, or too successful, with women?

So many of the problems the book identifies are not gender specific. The authors lament the way porn can establish unrealistic standards and breed insecurity: “[T]he take-away message from porn viewing is likely to be ego deflating because of the assumption that what you see is what is the norm, the acceptable way to perform, the appropriate way to relate to a sexual partner; worst of all, you see that size not only matters but dominates.” The parallel for women is plain as day, but they don’t bother to acknowledge it. Nor does the book recognize peer-reviewed research finding positive changes in the ways young men are embracing a more inclusive notion of masculinity — one that eschews homophobia and includes women, as Mark McCormack, author of “The Declining Significance of Homophobia,” argues in a Psychology Today post titled, “The Demise of a Particular Type of Guy.”

There are legitimate and significant social changes afoot that deserve careful, critical and nuanced analysis. Unfortunately, this book doesn’t do it. Looks like we’ll have to wait for “The End of Men.”

But we’re talking about a man who blackmailed a scared au pair into having sex with him – rape, to my mind – and, when he showed up at Beth’s home with her husband after she rejected him, seemed to be trying for a repeat. In Pete’s turn this week as Joan Harris’s pimp, stacking the deck to make her choice all but inevitable, he is trying to restore a sexual order where women have very little decision at all. No wonder the selling point of the Jaguar is whether you can truly own something beautiful — this episode is all about men trying to own women.

This is entirely in character for Pete – and also for the morally weak men of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, prostitution-client and client-bedder Don Draper included. But I’m disturbed by the suggestion in many reactions – including in Salon’s excellent recap – that we should be disappointed in Joan as a character. Nelle Engoron argues that “seeing Joan allow her body to be used in this fashion is worse because of what it suggests about her character. We’re not long past the time when all women who gained a position of any power were accused of sleeping their way into it. To literalize that degrading accusation in Joan renders her less than we’ve always thought her to be.”

But in striking a deal that involves an ownership stake in the company that seems to matter more to her than her own family, Joan doubly takes possession of the means of production. It’s not “empowering,” and it’s a partly coerced decision – she’s not even given accurate or full information about the partners’ response, who were in turn misled about her position, and she believes they think she’s a whore anyway — but it’s a rational choice that will give her much more autonomy than anything else available to her.

As Amanda Marcotte put it in the comments of her excellent video recap, “this episode really exposes how people see sex work, especially the perplexing … belief that selling is worse than buying … or pimping. Which is pure, unadulterated misogyny.” It’s true that Joan has plenty to offer the firm beyond her gorgeous breasts, but after 13 years and one brilliant but unappreciated turn as a script reader, the men at the firm still see her as either the seductress or the tough mom figure. (Peggy managed to de-sexualize her image, but she has become professionally invisible at the company.) Meanwhile, after an on-again, off-again relationship with Roger that definitely was on the prostitution spectrum regardless of her feelings for him, Joan has clearly come to believe that she can’t rely on him either emotionally or financially.

Most relevant of all is the fact that finally taking the respectable route of marriage – itself traditionally transactional — has failed Joan. It has not protected her in any sense – not from sexual or emotional harm, or from her “honor” being besmirched, or from financial instability. The men at SCDP seem to feel like they vaguely need to put up a fight not because Joan is a human being who should be in charge of her own bodily autonomy, but because of a chivalric urge that either puts women on a pedestal or concedes them as the property of another man, as Don Draper tries to do by saying Joan is married. Of course, not only does he know full well that her marriage is over, he’s been an active perpetrator of the undermining of marriage as an institution of either protection or respect.

Yes, Don is trying to change with his marriage to Megan, in which he not only has been faithful (so far as we know) but also no longer holds all the cards. In this week’s episode, Michael Ginsberg’s awed declaration that Megan Draper comes and goes as she pleases echoes Pete’s bitterness about women calling the shots. For a brief minute there, Megan seemed to be pulling off a rare balance for the office – a conventionally beautiful and sexually confident woman whose ideas are actually taken seriously. But she only got there by marrying well, and while she may be wielding a lot of power in the relationship now, she still essentially serves at Don’s pleasure. Joan, on the other hand, owns something that will last as long as the firm does.

I get that Carolla is just cracking wise, from inside the bubble of his own lame version of post-rockabilly guy-shtick — he is interviewed inside a garage, with what looks like an orange Camaro behind him in the middle distance — and that if you brought up the fact that those old-time “chick jobs” paid 40 to 80 percent less than “guy jobs,” he’d get all irritated with you for being a drag. He’s still an idiot, though, even if he’s an idiot in quotation marks. That’s kind of the problem with “Mansome,” which tries to tackle the enormous subject of contemporary male vanity as an assemblage of whimsical anecdotes, which are often entertaining in themselves but studiously avoid any semblance of intelligent analysis or historical understanding.

It’s pointless to come down too hard on a film like “Mansome,” because like all Spurlock’s work (including “Super Size Me” and “Where in the World Is Osama bin Laden?”) it’s driven by a good-hearted frat-boy humor that seems fundamentally sincere. It’s more first-person journal and travelogue than it is cultural archaeology, and as such it’s basically OK. Spurlock gets to interview some of his celebrity pals about their attitudes toward masculinity and grooming: Paul Rudd is slightly ill at ease, Judd Apatow is charming, and Zach Galifianiakis steals the show, of course. (When asked to rate his looks on a scale of 1 to 10, Galifianakis responds confidently that some people find him “a strong 2.”)

Spurlock documents his own decision to shave off his trademark porn-star ‘stache, thereby reducing his 5-year-old son to torrents of tears. (It was definitely a mistake, Morgan.) He meets various kooky characters who have some tangential relationship to his theme, including a California suburbanite named Jack Passion who describes himself as a professional “beardsman,” meaning he travels the world exhibiting his Hagar-the-Horrible facial thatch in competitions. (Anthrax rhythm guitarist Scott Ian responds: “Beard and mustache competitions, for want of a better word, are kind of gay.” I laughed, and I know that’s wrong.) Then there’s the elegantly coiffed and tailored Manhattan clothing buyer who describes himself as the “dictionary definition of a metrosexual,” perhaps making up for his teen years as a Sikh immigrant outcast in middle America. And the entrepreneur who has introduced a lotion-y product called Fresh Balls: The Solution for Men. (Yes, it is what you think it is.)

In fairness, Spurlock is at least half aware that all the jokes and episodes of “Mansome” never add up to anything, except perhaps the conclusion that neither male narcissism nor male grooming is anything new, but that they have been coded in different ways at different times. Masculinity is no less a troubled construction than is femininity, and it’s just as easily whipped about by the tides of commerce and fashion. The aristocratic dandies of the 18th century make Spurlock’s New York Sikh metrosexual look like a shoeless Dust Bowl farmhand, and every Important Man of the 19th century, regardless of background or affiliation — King Leopold II! Karl Marx! The pioneering Ambrose Burnside! — had his own tonsorial signature that required extensive maintenance.

Now, I’m not denying that there’s something specific and contemporary about the version of male narcissism wrought by consumer capitalism, with its tendency to turn things once seen as immutable, such as gender or sexual identity, into fluid and exchangeable commodities with no fixed meaning. (Speaking of Karl Marx, it was he who wrote that, under capitalism, “all fixed, fast frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away … All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned.”) It was to address that question on a pop-sociological level that the term “metrosexual,” first introduced to America a decade ago in this Salon article by Mark Simpson, was originally invented. (Simpson’s coinage was instantly stolen by marketers, of course, and turned into a pretty-boy Frankenstein monster who was, in turn, burned by the resentful villagers.)

Some of that big-picture stuff comes up almost by accident in “Mansome,” but Spurlock doesn’t even pretend to pay attention. He’s just a guy! He’s confused like the rest of us! He makes his little boy cry and watches pro wrestler Shawn Daivari (a Minnesota native who plays the anti-American “heel” called Sheik Abdul Bashir) shave his back all the way down to his butt crack. He sticks for far too long with an embarrassing framing device in which Jason Bateman and Will Arnett go to a spa and engage in uneasy homoerotic banter. He chops up the movie into irrelevant chapters about beards, mustaches, hair and so on, as if those things were unrelated. When he goes to get his own hair cut, it’s at some pseudo-old-fashioned place in downtown Manhattan where the wood fixtures are way too polished and the barbers are conspicuously overdressed. It’s kind of endearing and kind of asinine.

“Mansome” is now playing in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Dallas, Detroit, Houston, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, New York, Philadelphia, Portland, Ore., San Francisco, Seattle and Austin, Texas, with more cities to follow.

All this is standard operating procedure in 21st-century Hollywood, where the industry is dominated by post-boomer males reared on the comic books, TV shows and blockbuster movies of the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, and the audience is understood in almost Pavlovian terms as a slavering horde of permanent adolescents. Audience familiarity and “pre-awareness” are greatly prized, so nearly all these guy-oriented movies derive from superhero comics or video games or other decades-old pop franchises. (It is, of course, possible to go too far into the pop-culture past. Let’s observe a moment of silence, once again, for “John Carter.”) We can certainly argue about which of these movies create an interesting twist on existing formula and which are cynical crap, but I don’t think we can argue that it makes much difference to the bottom line. “The Avengers” will make a kazillion dollars, and so did “Transformers: Dark of the Moon.” The differences between the two are mostly a matter of fine-grained detail; they’ve both got cartoonish male bonding, a lot of stuff blowing up, and hot-chick eye candy.

If you’re female and you’re interested in any or all of the above pictures, by the way, I apologize for making it sound as if you don’t exist. But in marketing terms, you don’t. There’s no end of paradox in Hollywood’s patronizing attitude toward female viewers, especially given the long-held marketing truism that in a date-night situation, the woman’s vote typically holds more sway than the man’s. (It’s a standard sitcom joke, right? She persuades him to go see “The Notebook,” and he has to pretend he didn’t cry at the end.) But broadly speaking, women are supposed to be satisfied with the mid-budget, low-prestige romantic comedies made on the Hollywood margins, many of which are so phoned-in and formulaic — hello, Garry Marshall! — they make Michael Bay look like Fassbinder. (Actually, Michael Bay is kind of like Fassbinder. But let’s not get distracted.)

Of course, the Hollywood suits have no objection to making enormous piles of money off female moviegoers, whom they rediscover every few years. (See also: “Ghost,” “Pretty Woman” and the careers of Meg Ryan and Hugh Grant.) But even enormously profitable franchises like “Sex and the City” and “The Twilight Saga” exist in a sort of pink-hued ghetto, and are widely understood both inside and outside the industry as being silly and second-rate. As opposed to the movies about muscular guys in colored costumes who fight evildoers from outer space, which attract the biggest budgets, the biggest stars and the highest possible production values. When feminist critics argued, for example, that “Sex and the City 2″ received far more scathing treatment from male reviewers than did guy-oriented movies that were every bit as wretched, I at first resisted. I now think they were correct: Critics make allowances for dumb, macho action movies, because they conform to unconscious norms and expectations, in a way they don’t for silly, superficial “vagina movies.” I have long contended that if you construct a Venn diagram showing the best of the (universally derided) “Twilight” movies and the worst of the (universally praised) “Harry Potter” movies, there’s way more overlap than fans of the latter would easily admit.

All of this reflects deeply ingrained social and cultural ideas about gender, which are present in people of both sexes. Maybe men’s preference for violent action yarns and women’s preference for sappy love stories — and our tendency to understand one as more “serious” than the other — are hard-wired in some biological way, although that falls a long way short of scientific truth. But despite the torrent of male-centric franchise flicks we’ll see this summer, and next summer, and for all the summers into the foreseeable future, the tide in the Hollywood gender wars has begun to shift, slightly but perceptibly. As I said earlier, “The Avengers” will be No. 1 this coming weekend. But the top-grossing film for the preceding six weeks was a female-oriented picture: Four weeks of “The Hunger Games,” followed by two weeks at the top for surprise hit “Think Like a Man,” whose principal audience was not just women but African-American women, who make up about 6 percent of the United States population. (Clearly a lot of other people went to see it too.)

Those six weeks aren’t statistically meaningful by themselves. But when added to the big numbers rolled up last year by “The Help” and “Bridesmaids,” and the $1.7 billion taken in so far by “The Twilight Saga” around the world, they begin to suggest the contours of a new reality, one in which films aimed at girls and women are high-end blockbusters on an equal footing with guy-flicks. This year, “Hunger Games” will be somewhere near the top in global box-office returns, alongside “The Avengers” and Chris Nolan’s final Dark Knight film. While I don’t think “Hunger Games” is likely to be remembered as a cinematic breakthrough, it’s an important movie in other ways. Its canny blend of science fiction, action flick and love story nosed it out of the pink ghetto in various ways; it was presented by industry insiders as a high-stakes gamble and a worthy successor to the Harry Potter franchise, and male critics were mostly respectful, not reacting as if they were being flooded with icky estrogen. If the film’s audience was predominantly female, the film’s ethos — the cultural narrative surrounding it — was more butch.

Maybe it’s coincidental that two of the biggest female-oriented films we’ll see this summer — Pixar’s animated “Brave” and “Snow White and the Huntsman,” with Kristen Stewart and Chris Hemsworth — are genre-mixing action pictures with independent-minded heroines. But when it comes to the sluggish, reactionary and massively over-thought process of making Hollywood movies, I don’t believe in coincidence. Some of you with long cultural memories may be wondering whether this could mark the beginning of a long-arc trend that brings us back to big-budget Hollywood movies that aren’t so niche-marketed and gender-specific, that are meant to appeal to all ages and both sexes. One answer to that question is “Hey, Tim Burton and James Cameron and Peter Jackson,” and another answer is “only sort of.” In the meantime, it’s business as usual: “Battleship,” which is based on “the classic Hasbro naval combat game,” will open directly opposite “What to Expect When You’re Expecting,” which is based on a series of lecturey and divisive pregnancy advice books. I honestly can’t decide which one to see first.

There are a host of ironies here. Obama has earned the renewed support of reproductive-rights advocates by requiring health insurers to cover contraception, but the Center for Reproductive Rights is still taking him to court – with oral hearings being held this week before a New York federal court -– for overruling the FDA’s recommendation to lift the prescription requirement on emergency contraception for women under 17. That litigation has been winding its way through the system for over a decade, throughout the Bush-era politicization of the FDA, eventually resulting in a federal judge concluding that “the FDA repeatedly and unreasonably delayed issuing a decision on [the emergency contraception pill] Plan B for suspect reasons.” The FDA was ordered to explain why Plan B shouldn’t be available over the counter for girls 13 and up. When the Obama administration overruled the FDA’s recommendation to make it over the counter, U.S. District Judge Edward Korman suggested the Center for Reproductive Rights reopen its case.

“It seems to me that what we’re going through is a rerun of what happened before,” Korman remarked, referring to politics trumping the recommendations of medical professionals.

The Obama administration’s unspoken but unmistakable fear was of an election-cycle attack line that Michele Bachmann would use anyway: That teenage girls would be able to get Plan B from “the grocery store aisles next to bubble gum and next to M&Ms.” That was, in fact, an echo of the language President Obama himself used to invoke a highly unsupported bogeyman: that “a 10-year-old or 11-year-old going to a drugstore would be able to, alongside bubble gum or batteries, … buy a medication that potentially if not used properly can have an adverse effect.”

But there is another twist, so far mostly overlooked: Emergency contraception won’t be covered by insurance for everyone, since it’s available over-the-counter for those who can show I.D. proving that they’re 17 or older. They’ll still have to fork over around $50 a pop. But as long as girls 16 and younger need a prescription for the morning-after pill and they have insurance, it will be fully covered — effectively free. The same goes for women older than 17 who decide to jump through the hoops of getting a prescription, either for over-the-counter Plan B or the prescription-only generic and Ella versions.

As much as pro-choice advocates want to lift the barriers that make emergency contraception hard to get — because it’s more effective the faster you use it — one of those barriers, the prescription requirement, also mitigates another, the high cost. Said Adam Sonfield, a senior public policy associate at the Guttmacher Institute, of this catch-22, “It presents a tradeoff between cost and access.”

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Part of the reason people get confused about emergency contraception and abortion is because lots of people are confused about the basic biology of pregnancy: specifically, that it doesn’t necessarily happen instantaneously and that sperm can live in the body for several days, during which time a woman can ovulate and an egg can potentially be fertilized and implant. Regular use of hormonal contraception prevents ovulation and the chance for fertilization; emergency contraception essentially works the same way except that it’s taken after sex, by which point ovulation may have already happened. But according to recent studies, there is no evidence that taking emergency contraception after ovulation and fertilization will stop the egg from implanting.

But the misinformation and misunderstanding have created a contradictory public health picture when it comes to emergency contraception. In some ways, it’s become more accessible. In 2010, the U.S. approved a longer-acting French variant of Plan B, known as Ella, and there are scattered experiments in convenient delivery, from a birth-control vending machine at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania to a new bike messenger service in London, both of which caused minor news sensations. The annual “Back Up Your Birth Control” campaign has been promoting the line “EC=BC,” emphasizing that emergency contraception is birth control, not abortion — just in case that is a barrier for women who are considering taking it. And the Center for Reproductive Rights’ petition did manage to lower the age restriction from 18 to 17.

But there are more disturbing suggestions that misinformation is triumphing. A recent Boston Medical Center study found that many pharmacists were still often misinformed about the age requirement and were even more likely to wrongly refuse emergency contraception to 17-year-olds in low-income neighborhoods, where the rate of unintended pregnancy is higher. In Honduras, the Supreme Court upheld the criminalization of emergency contraception, which means women who use it could be jailed. Personhood initiatives, which oppose the morning-after pill, have so far failed in Colorado, Mississippi and Oklahoma, but they’ve introduced false doubts by providing even more opportunities for pundits and candidates to say “the morning-after abortion pill.”

It’s a problem that dates back decades: When, throughout the ’90s, the U.S. considered approving a French chemical abortion pill known as RU-486, it was widely called the “morning-after abortion pill,” including, often, in the New York Times. The distinction wasn’t pressed by the pro-choice community itself.  “At the time, the prevailing medical wisdom was that there is a continuum rather than a bright line between EC and mifepristone,” said Gloria Feldt, who was president of Planned Parenthood at the time, with the benefit providing more options for women who did not wish to be pregnant. “It was also assumed that a formulation of mifepristone would eventually be made for use as a true ‘morning-after’ pill.” The widespread belief, she recalled, was that a chemical abortion pill would “solve all the abortion debate problems and guarantee privacy.”

Another problem was that although doctors and non-professionals had been giving women high dosages of regular birth control pills for decades as a form of emergency contraception, the science of exactly how emergency contraception worked remained unclear. The medical definition of pregnancy remains “implantation of a fertilized egg,” but let’s say you believe, as the Catholic Church does, that fertilization itself creates a human life. Anti-choice advocates obsess over what would happen if a woman who took emergency contraception did happen to ovulate anyway and an egg potentially was fertilized, which is enough reason for some of them to call postcoital contraception “abortion.” They have claimed that hormonal contraception makes the lining of the endometrium inhospitable to a fertilized egg, constituting “murder.” Even the official packaging for Plan B, the single-step version of emergency contraception, suggests that “in addition” to blocking ovulation and fertilization, “it may inhibit implantation (by altering the endometrium).”

Except that we now know it doesn’t, even if you walk down the path of remote maybes, which requires you to believe that a zygote, which may not implant for unknowable reasons, has the same rights as a living woman who doesn’t want to be pregnant. As Princeton’s Kelly Cleland pointed out recently, “The science has evolved considerably in the last 13 years. Newer evidence, published since the Plan B label was approved, provides compelling evidence that levonorgestrel EC (LNG EC) works before ovulation, but not after.” The International Consortium for Emergency Contraception and the International Federation of Gynecology & Obstetrics also note that two new studies have shown conclusively that if a woman has ovulated and an egg has been fertilized, it’s too late for emergency contraception to work. They recommended that the language on the product labeling be changed.

Of course, scientific evidence has rarely had much place in this debate. In the meantime, even the most non-ideological news sources keep making the mistake alongside the ideologues. Last week, a furor erupted after the Associated Press reported that “Women seeking to take emergency contraception like the so-called ‘morning after’ pill would have to do so in the presence of a doctor under a bill before the Alabama legislature.” That is, until Erin Gloria Ryan from Jezebel read the actual bill and saw that it was, in fact, a law meant to limit chemical abortion, not emergency contraception. (A spokesperson for the AP said a correction was being prepared). “The confusion over this issue is probably one of the reasons emergency contraception hasn’t had as positive an impact as hoped when it comes to lowering the abortion rate,” wrote Amanda Marcotte at RH Reality Check. “If women think it is some kind of abortion-ish thing, they probably think taking it is a big deal, instead of thinking of it more like taking the pill, since it’s basically the same thing.”

But talk about moved goalposts. If ’90s-era advocates had hoped that the ability to end a pregnancy in the safety of your home with RU-486 — the actual abortion pill, not the morning-after one — would defuse the abortion debate, their more recent counterparts hoped to take it to the next technological level by providing “tele-med” abortions. They would involve doctors seeing a woman over webcam with a nurse practitioner physically present, helping women in remote areas with ever-dwindling options for safe abortions to access them. But four states have already passed requirements meant to undercut these options by forcing a doctor’s presence, and the bill the Associated Press misreported was aiming to add Alabama to the list. All in all, there have been fewer gamechangers, and more cases of one step forward, two steps back.