I'm glad I read Dana's blog post because, to be honest, I wasn't offended when I read Brooks' column this morning. My guess is I'll always be a good deal less sensitive to sexist remarks or feminist bashing than, say, Dana Goldstein because I'm a white male (granted, a white male who tends to read Brooks with a skeptical eye but a white male nonetheless).

I'll throw a bit or two of that unoffended white male perspective - which I think is valuable to have since it's probably the majority of Brooks' readers - on the table here. Dana and others see Brooks as attacking feminism, sexual liberation and getting married at a later age than is typical. (Just so you know where I'm coming from, my mom was the executive director of Women Organized Against Rape, didn't get married until she was 36, and gave me her last name instead of my dad's.) I agree that some of the phrases Brooks uses (e.g. “formless premarital life and the anxieties it produces,” "nobody knows the rules," etc.) seem nostalgic for the good ol' days before the Sexual Revolution led to a "cold-eye age of divorce and hookups." I am not particularly nostalgic for those days, but I think Brooks can be read in a more charitable manner which doesn't make him out as an unabashed sexist.

His op-ed seems more of a straight-up social commentary than an attack on female independence and reproductive rights as one commenter on TAPPED suggests in an argument I still can't quite follow. Indeed, much of what Brooks writes could hardly be interpreted as sexist rhetoric as much as a critique of “hookup culture.” For example, Brooks claims that “cellphones, Facebook and text messages” create “fluidity, drama and anxiety.” True or not, Brooks’ aim here seems to be noting a social phenomenon, not suggesting women shouldn’t be using online social networks and talking on the phone late at night. Speaking of which, it is very late at night. (Check out the post date on this comment.) I’ll check back in the morning and hopefully add the rest of what was floating around in my white male noggin.