Perhaps you've read her work: Caitlin Flanagan is a regular contributor to The New Yorker or The Atlantic, and her headlines are always intriguing--from the "nanny wars" which headlined at The Atlantic a couple of years ago, to a little piece about the creator of the Mary Poppins series not long ago in the New Yorker. And she has a book coming out soon.

And she always, without fail, infuriates me.

She is, as far as I can tell, a quite well off writer in a very traditional relationship (which she frequently hypes up) who believes that feminism is the bane of modern existence. No matter what the topic, (and it is indeed usually gender-oriented) she finds a way to get a little dig in on feminism.

Of course, her most frequent tactic is to set up FEMINISM as a straw man that elides multiple feminisms while vastly oversimplifying any individual feminist arguments, taking the kind of cheap potshots at an abstract ideological bogeyman that she says FEMINISM does with PATRIARCHY.

But whatever about her. She is the Ann Coulter of the Mommy movement, and I think I waste my breath tearing her down. She does, for what it's worth, always make me think, and her fallacious arguments often help me crystallize my own (hopefully more sound) arguments.

In the most recent Atlantic, she has an article (subscription required) on the "Teenage Oral Sex Epidemic," which would be most frustrating for its potshots against feminism, if weren't also occasionally racist and homophobic. But one sentence in particular sent me off on a tangent. In this particular segment, she was railing against feminism for encouraging girls to be sexually aggressive in a way that rivals boys, a message that she suggests leads to a debased and ultimately woman-decentered approach to sexuality.

She writes, "Society has let its girls down in every way. It has refused to assert--or even acknowledge--that female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure."

My beef with her essentialism of femininity aside, I actually am prompted to think about what she seems to suggest about male sexuality: that it is about gratification and pleasure at the expense of kindness and trust. And for many men, it is, simply because the discourse of sexuality frequently teaches them this.

How, then, can male sexuality be connected to kindness and trust as I believe and hope mine is?

I wonder sometimes if the emphasis on women's access to traditionally male power and authority (not, I recognize, a uniform feminist approach) does not ultimately valorize cultural values of maleness. Can we imagine a feminism that instead of, or in addition to opening up once-closed male spaces to female access, works hard to really open up traditionally female spaces and mindsets to male participation?

This is, I recognize, difficult cultural work, since (as I well know) accusations of effeminacy are incredibly potent weapons of gender discipline, especially (but not only) for heterosexual men. But to risk the "we've-come-a-long-way-baby" fallacy, maybe it's time for a shift away from doggedly enabling women's empowerment for a shift toward encouraging men to find less authoritative positions culturally and personally rewarding.

Stay-at-home dads are unfortunately more often a punch-line than a reality, sharing housework usually means "he helps," and I still get dumbfounded looks when I mention that Ann proposed to me, not the other way around. We've done well to teach women to be more assertive, more empowered; we haven't (with any success, at least) taught men that it's ok sometimes not to be.

The shift begins, perhaps, with sexuality, with teaching our male children (as I hope to one day teach my son) that sexuality is as much about kindness and trust as about gratification and pleasure, to use Flanagan's terms of the exchange.

It's a lesson that I hope I can help teach my daughter as well, but frankly, it the boy I'm worried about. In one sense, Flanagan is right. We have let our girls down, in large measure by letting down our boys as well.