To refuse to fight for love that is both free and responsible is in a sense to reject the possibility of love itself. - Ellen Willis

The idea that lack of paternal guidance can explain today's masculinity crisis doesn't make sense. I suspect rather that underneath the sons' charge that their fathers did not teach them how to be men lies another, unadmitted complaint — that their fathers taught them only too well how to be men, and they are choking on the lesson. These men, as boys, faced the age-old tradeoff: If you undergo the painful process of renouncing the "feminine" aspects of your humanity and follow your father into manhood (and what choice do you have, really?) you will share in the spoils of the superior half of the race. Now, as men, they find that the spoils are far more meager than expected. No wonder they feel betrayed.

A genuinely democratic society requires a secular ethos: one that does not equate morality with religion, stigmatize atheists, defer to religious interests and aims over others or make religious belief an informal qualification for public office. Of course, secularism in the latter sense is not mandated by the First Amendment. It's a matter of sensibility, not law.

it is the longing for happiness that is potentially radical, while the morality of sacrifice is an age-old weapon of rulers. I don't mean to suggest that social revolution can be painless-only that there is no reason to go through the pain if not, finally, to affirm our right to pleasure. In the meantime we have to live our lives, which means living with the contradictions of a system built on the premise that one must continually choose-insofar as one has a choice-to be either an oppressor or a victim. So long as that system exists, our pleasures will be guilty, our suffering self-righteous, our glimpses of freedom ambiguous and elusive.