During a book tour last fall, I had a chance to share a few drinks with roughly a dozen law-school students—half male, half female—at a top university in Virginia. And though I hate to say it, here goes: the young men were smarter and more driven than the young women, who came off like sorority lightweights auditioning for Legally Blonde IV. The men wanted to talk about the law and history. The women wanted to slam tequila and talk about cities that offer “good hook-up potential” during summer internships.

Sadly, to hear professors tell it, law schools are stuffed with “quota babes” like these, who are admitted to adjust the enrollment imbalances that persist in male-dominated fields such as law, engineering, mathematics, chemistry, physics, and computer science. A few years back, Lawrence H. Summers, then president of Harvard, drew fire for suggesting that women’s slow progress in these disciplines may have more to do with “issues of intrinsic aptitude” than the age-old barriers of sexism. The Virginia spectacle left me wondering if he was right, and whether, for their own good, we need to prevent unqualified women from suiting up for roles they can’t fulfill …
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Yeah, right. As I hope you’ve guessed, I’m only pretending to be a sexist idiot. I did meet some law students in Virginia last year, and they were all smart and impressive. But even if the women had been airheads, that wouldn’t be grounds for such sweeping generalizations by me. The enrollment statistics and the Summers quote are real, but everything else is a simulation.

Of? Of the attacks on young men that have become so popular in the media lately. These range in style from mainly-for-laughs (like Julie Klausner’s 2010 book, I Don’t Care About Your Band, a funny memoir ripping the various Star Wars geeks and self-obsessed indie rockers she’s dated), to cutely provocative (Dan Abrams’s new Man Down, which compiles research “proving” that “Women Are Better Cops, Drivers, Gamblers, Spies, World Leaders, Beer Tasters, Hedge Fund Managers and Just About Everything Else”), to very serious, like “The End of Men,” Hanna Rosin’s much-discussed article in The Atlantic from last summer, which examined whether a fundamental shift is underway that will lead to men being one down in a women-dominated future. “What if the modern, postindustrial economy is simply more congenial to women than to men?” she chillingly asked.