“IT'S CALLED GOSSIP AND OF COURSE IT'S AN OBSESSION OF MINE -ANDY WARHOL

For all this, “Guyland” bristles with excellent raw material. Kimmel has an ear for the telling quotation. Some are worth the price of admission all on their own:“When I tell moms about the gender asymmetry of the oral sex ‘epidemic,’ for example, or what the hooking-up culture actually is like,” Kimmel writes, “they seem shocked at how predatory it is, how the sex seems so disconnected from anything resembling even liking the other person. The fathers, though, get jealous.” One man — the 48-year-old father of a 19-year-old boy — asks him to clarify: These guys are getting it on with, “like, different girls all the time and . . . the girls are willing to do that?” And “she doesn’t even expect him to call her — let alone, like, be her steady boyfriend? Oh, what I wouldn’t give to be 20 years younger.”Kimmel closes his book with a heartfelt plea for parents to remain active in the lives of their “guys” and help them become mature, empathetic, ethical men. With fathers like that — good luck.

-New York Times
Sept 7 2008