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.

The easier sex gets, the less intimate every sexual act gets. In the Victorian period, a kiss was like a f - k. And now, you know, when actual sexual acts become so easy, their intimacy declines and their meaning declines.

You have two things happening: You have the cultural and economic reality of men falling apart and traditional masculinity falling apart.

Only idiots or snobs ever really thought less of 'genre books' of course. There are stupid books and there are smart books. There are well-written books and badly written books. There are fun books and boring books. All of these distinctions are vastly more important than the distinction between the literary and the non-literary.

To me, there's two definitions of feminism. One is that you believe that women are equal human beings; that's not really a philosophy, it's just obvious. And the other is that you're actually fighting for women: you're promoting women and working towards the betterment of women.

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.

Men are enforced into a kind of silence about their gender; they're supposed to not think of it as a performance. That's the definition of manliness - that it's not a performance; it's being yourself, authentic. Whereas women have understood gender as performance. Men have not yet made that quantum leap, or rather they're making it in many ways, they're not thinking about it.