Look at The Iliad, there's all this stuff about men loving children. The King of Sparta was the most brutal warrior of ancient Greece, and the only thing he liked to do was horse around with kids when he was back from slaughtering. One thing that feminism revealed is that being a distant patriarchal figure was not something men wanted to be. They want to be more involved in the lives of their children, and you can see that once they're allowed to have that connection, they crave it.

One thing you can say about Trump is that he is not a traditional patriarch. He has a wife who's not even in the White House. And you could say the same of Duterte in the Philippines and of Putin. They're parodies of masculinity. They're hyper-masculine, but they're also totally unsure of their masculinity, and they parade it around.

The problem with the way we discuss gender is that it tends to be "Let's sympathize with women" or "Let's sympathize with men."

The economy is changing everything. And men need to deal with that. Our response to it has been rage, stupidity and conscious avoidance of dealing with what the reality of being a man might be outside of empty concepts from ancient history.

The research points pretty clearly to the rise of companionate marriage, and I just think it's going to keep being popular, for the very simple reason that it's basically the only way to afford a family life in the 21st-century in advanced economies. It's one of the major reasons for the spike in income inequality. Surgeons used to marry their secretaries. Now they marry other surgeons.

Culture is always the echo of economic realities; that's what Marx teaches. Feminism is a clear example of that.

Whenever I read a book about a marriage, I always feel I'm being lied to.