Behind that familiar face, the crisis of men and boys

Article here. Excerpt:

'By coincidence, on the same day this week’s shootings occurred, President Obama signed an executive order creating the White House Council on Women and Girls to ensure they are “treated fairly all matters of public policy.” There are still many reasons why special care should be taken to ensure that women aren’t discriminated against in the workplace, that domestic violence is treated as a serious problem and that girls get the same educational opportunies as boys.

'But this is not our only gender-specific problem. Sometime this year, for the first time in history, the number of American women drawing a paycheck will exceed that of men. This doesn’t mean that women suddenly are doing a lot better. It means that men are being disproportionally affected by the economic downturn and are doing a lot worse.

Whether the current economy bothered McClendon at all is uncertain; he seems to have quit a couple of jobs by choice. Like most of his brethren, however, there’s a familiar dead-end quality to the outlines of his story.

Even more so in hard times than the boom years, we urgently need to understand the psyches behind these easy-to-forget faces. We need to figure out how young men like these can gain a sense of self-worth, the lack of which becomes so abundantly obvious only after it has taken its toll. Maybe we need a White House Council on Men and Boys.'