I want to begin with what this is not. A definition by negation. Two exes have accused me of doing this trick all the time. It feels relevant to mention only because, as with most things in a guy’s life, this is all about women. Writing anything about the woes of young men in contemporary fiction can feel like yammering about a lost cause. It can also prompt some pretty fatuous counters. Not even Joyce Carol Oates could be spared — when she shot out a tweet in 2022 about how a literary agent had told her he couldn’t even get editors to look at debuts by ambitious boys, the Twitterati collectively told her to get stuffed. So, here’s what this is not: I’m not saying that literary culture has degraded because women pack the book world to the brim; I’m not saying that Stephen King and James Patterson are immaterial nobodies, that their sales numbers matter not at all; I’m not saying that nonwhite folk have a cinch of a time getting their books on the shelves; and I’m not saying that female editors should now be freighted with the grim responsibility of victors and must dole out ginormous contracts to yearning and pitiful mediocrities just because they happen to be male. Everyone knows that some of the writers crying foul about the paucity of men getting published are mere aggrieved nimrods trapped in a deserved eternity of irrelevance. The phallus is no skeleton key for unlocking the mystery of their nothingness. They just suck.