As the father of a beautiful young girl, I am in passionate agreement with John Derbyshire about the imperative of keeping daughters away from losers, bad boys, and other undesirables.

A key part of that process, I think, is persuading her that it is perfectly okay—beneficial, even—to spend significant amounts of time completely unattached. Too many young women will go to great lengths to always have somebody. They’ll hold onto a boyfriend they no longer care for until they’ve found a new one; take up a placeholder boyfriend, whom they never had a passion for in the first place, to avoid being alone for more than a few weeks; and so forth. This behavior not only increases the odds that they will slip into long-term involvement with an unsuitable man, but also keeps some of the good men at bay: the sort of men who, out of some combination of chivalry, caution, and shyness, would not dare pursue a woman who is already involved with someone else.

All agreement with Derb aside, however, there was something that didn’t quite sit right with me as I followed the ensuing discussion; and I think I’ve put my finger on what it is. Isn’t the sort of young woman who is most apt to label young men as “losers” and shun them—to delight in the taunt, even—also the most likely to hitch herself to some shallow-souled striver in the end? I don’t know how the folks in The Corner would feel, but I’m far too crunchy to stand seeing my daughter take the married name of Gradgrind-Snopes.

Also, while being a wise judge of men’s characters is an unalloyed good, being a harsh judge of men is a key trait of the contemporary, girl-power-intoxicated, egotistical shrew. And such females are real and plentiful and corrosive of marital harmony, just as much as the losers and abusers on the male side of the ledger. I’d venture that for every woman of Derb’s acquaintance who’s been driven to despair by a loser, there is a man of my acquaintance who’s been driven to despair by a shrew; and literature can provide us many more examples of each, who are no less real for being fictional.

Literature thus informs us that these sorts of problems are not new in our day; but it leaves the question, have they gotten worse? As a divorced person, I am naturally preoccupied with questions of the war between the sexes, the fraught and broken nature of too many of our inimate relationships, and suchlike; but at the same time, I am naturally distrustful of my own judgment as to the frequency and severity of these problems in the wider world. What, I wonder, does the reader think?