We're in Trump times - we're in the time this misogynist hate clown is the leader of the free world, and when Putin has made abusing your wife legal, and transgender bathrooms have just been disallowed in school. There are all these political setbacks. And there's no question that those setbacks are very real and need to be treated as civil-rights issues.

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.

Men who define themselves as breadwinners are going to have to leave the traditional iconography of masculinity behind if they want to be breadwinners.

Marriage is not one point of view: it's a constant back and forth over different perspectives - a healthy marriage, anyway.

Men talk about masculinity through sports and clothes. They don't talk about gender, they talk about LeBron James and whether it's okay to wear lipstick and eyeliner. They're not getting to the question at hand, which is, "What does it mean to be a man when the traditional values of masculinity are eroding incredibly rapidly?'

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.

Toronto may be the only city where novels are integral to high art, the alternative scene and mainstream culture all at the same time.