And why not, while we await the return of Mad Men this hot summer (and its accompanying cultural romp), return to the vexing problem of manliness that is Don Draper? Right here on Sex Offender Week!

We all want to like Don Draper for reasons other than his glamour. We want to find reasons to like him other than that he's pretty and suave and charismatic-we want to make him, more or less, the Ideal Man, the "why aren't more people like this?" guy. We talk about him as a kind of zenith of masculinity, something everyone agrees men should be striving for. This seems weird to me. [...]

This season's winner of Tool Academy, a reality show on VH1 in which awful mostly-male people are tricked into going to couples' therapy in order to make them better mostly-boyfriends, was an aspiring professional wrestler named Jacob, or "J.T. Extreme." In the final episode, we were treated to an apparently sincere ceremony in which Jacob sacrificed, as a sign of his romantic contrition, his leopard-print leotard and banana hammock on a fire, causing an entire nation to mentally smell the worst smell anyone has ever smelled. (I imagined a toaster which has been turned on, smeared with Icy Hot, and stuffed with an large chunk of runny Camembert. What [...]