Joel Stein, a columnist for Time magazine, is the author of "Man Made: A Stupid Quest for Masculinity."

Your dad was manlier than you. His dad was manlier than him. And so on, for all of history back to the Stone Age.

I’m thrilled with technology, the Enlightenment and feminism. But with all those improvements we lost a little self-reliance, some ability to protect – some manliness. And no matter how many hoodied nerds become masters of the virtual universe, without manliness we’re going to die as a species. Because being a nerd will never get you any action.

Sure, you could be progressive and buy your son a doll. But he'll thank you if you're more old school and teach him to hunt.

When a pipe broke at Pete’s party on “Mad Men,” and Don Draper ripped off his shirt like Superman and fixed the sink in his undershirt, no guy watching that show got lucky that night, since every one of us is a metrosexual liberal who immediately calls the plumber. It was the meanest thing any broadcast has done to its own audience since Orson Welles’s “War of the Worlds.”

I got messed up by my feminist mom in the 1970s, who taught me that gender was a social construct. I can’t believe that social experiment went on as long as it did, since it’s clear by month six of having a child that William does not want a doll. Ladies do go first. We are not free to be you and me. We are born different. As soon as my son was old enough to crawl, he pulled a jar of mustard from the pantry and pushed it around the floor making car noises. We bought him a closetful of stuffed animals, but he sleeps with a Matchbox car clutched to his face. He'll sleep with a doll when they make one with an internal combustion engine.

We can’t solve this man-crisis by sitting on a couch watching “Ice Road Truckers.” We’ve got to start fixing our own toilets, exercising outside at 6 a.m. and hunting the meat that we cowardly eat from far crueler factory farms. Otherwise, the tribe down the street might raid us and pillage our apartment.