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.

One [paradox] is that pornography follows in that wake of women's liberation. The first instances of hard-core pornography were in late 18th-century in France, "the Golden Age of Women." The next wave in the 20th century comes from Sweden, one of the first countries where women voted. Then Germany, again, at the forefront of progress. Then America in the '80s, when women were closing the pay gap. And Japan, same thing.

As you get closer to equality, you get more pornography. True patriarchal societies like Saudi Arabia do not allow pornography because women are not allowed to turn their bodies into a commodity; women are chattel.

When you look at the biggest study of the American dream, the number-one correlate for upward mobility is having two parents in a home. It doesn't matter if they're male or female.

Actually the family is still the core social unit. Culturally, traditional masculinity was a removed father. That was a false conception of masculinity and the proper relationship between a man and his children.

We have never been more detached from one another, or lonelier. In a world consumed by ever more novel modes of socializing, we have less and less actual society. We live in an accelerating contradiction: The more connected we become, the lonelier we are.

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