The new American man is freer in his gender: free to carry a diaper bag, yes, but also free to get a fancy barbershop haircut or talk about his feelings. Buddy comedies outpace romantic comedies, and the on-screen "bromances," inevitably reach a point of almost homoerotic tenderness between fart jokes (James Franco told GQ that he wanted his character to have "some sort of human connection" after reading the script for the new meta-sausage fest, This is the End. His solution? Make him "a little obsessed" with Seth's character). That's another thing: Younger people in general hold blasé attitudes towards gay marriage, eroding the homophobia at the heart of generations of male machismo. Stony Brook University just announced plans for the Center for Men and Masculinities, which will study the emerging discipline, and lead to a master's degree in masculinity studies.

So what about that crisis? There's still evidence here in the States that some men are clinging to the worst aspects of masculinity--and we, as a culture, aren't exactly enforcing a new code of what makes a man. Look no further than the media coverage of Steubenville and the emphasis of the loss of the rapists' "promising futures," the Steubenville School Board's extension of a coaching contract to the man who helped his players cover up their crime, and the victim-blaming most recently modeled by no less than Serena Williams in Rolling Stone to see that we're still besieged by contradictory, and often toxic, ideas about manhood. Peruse your standard-issue men's magazine for confirmation, or check out a parade of Super Bowl commercials for a bossy dictate claiming to "get" us while defining us to ourselves: what we can drink, how we relate, what we can care about, even how we feel.

"Like the film Fight Club," Abbott said in her speech," the first rule of being a man in modern Britain is that you're not allowed to talk about it." The same is true here: Being a man is a deeply entrenched series of social norms that we're only just beginning to question, and often by accident. The main problem isn't pushback from blowhards who don't want anything to change (though that's a problem, too).

The problem, if you're a man, is how you answer this question: do you have a gender? If you said anything but yes, then that's what I mean.

Masculinity is not as a magical state defined by advertisers and secondary sex characteristics but, like femininity, a complex amalgamation of socialization, biology, style, and stereotype. Men aren't in crisis, we're in opportunity, but only if we can each look in the mirror and decide what kind of man we are.

I should know. I've had my own model-scale masculinity crisis. Well, two: the first was the slow-burn way I realized I wasn't a girl; but the second unfolded for me on an intimate scale as the larger, society-wide crisis came to its collective fever-pitch. I've been a man, for all intents and purposes, for two years; one of the very few of us that can say I became a man just as a whole lot of people started asking what makes a man in the first place.