Sometimes it’s difficult to tell how mainstream a phenomenon Kimmel is describing. In one chapter he recounts the case of George Sodini, a 48-year-old who went to his gym and shot dead five women (and then himself) because, as he wrote in an online diary, “I dress good, am clean shaven, bathe, touch of cologne — yet 30 million women rejected me.” Sodini, Kimmel writes, has “legions of fans” on men’s rights websites, people who call him a “hero” for standing up to all the “freeloading” women out there. But are these fringe lunatics or, as Kimmel labels them, an army of “everyday Sodinis” who beat and batter women with abandon? After all, rates of nonfatal violent victimization of women have dropped significantly since the 1990s, according to a 2011 White House report on women and girls. Visible rage may be increasing, but most men may feel impotent to act on it, or may be adjusting in more ways than we realize.

In one fascinating chapter Kimmel explores the changing nature of school violence. Once the scourge of urban black institutions, this phenomenon has taken on new form in suburban and rural neighborhoods. The school shooter is now pretty much always male and usually white (Seung-Hui Cho, the Virginia Tech shooter, being an exception, although Kimmel asserts that he had much in common with the Columbine killers and others). Kimmel makes a convincing case that this shift has to do with a sense of aggrieved entitlement, showing how these boys spent a lot of time fending off insults to their masculinity from the “jockocracy” that ruled their schools. But Kimmel also strains a little too hard for a tidy sociological explanation, arguing mightily (and pointlessly) against the idea that these attackers were singularly deranged or psychotic. Like the suicide bombers he compares them to, one can be both uniquely psychologically vulnerable, a total outlier, and yet tuned in to a broader cultural trend.

Kimmel’s balance of critical distance and empathy works best in his chapter on the fathers’ rights movement, a subset of the men’s rights movement. Members of this group are generally men coming out of bitter divorce proceedings who believe the courts cheated them out of the chance to be close to their children. They exhibit some of the wrath and obsessive qualities of other angry white men, routinely refer to their ex-wives in the nastiest ways and tend to overstate their involvement in family life. (As one child reported to a custody evaluator, his dad didn’t spend a lot of time with him “because he’s always busy working on his fathers’ organization.”) That said, their grievances are based on a legitimate insight. Often, Kimmel writes, family court judges act as if “they’re adjudicating Don and Betty Draper’s divorce,” back in the 1960s. They fail to recognize that fathers these days do a lot more child care than they used to, that mothers should not always be the default caretakers, and that fathers often want to remain an active presence in their child’s lives, as something beyond a steady paycheck — ​an­other sign that many men are in fact getting used to a new world order.

Outside a more elite audience, Kimmel’s diagnosis of aggrieved entitlement will be, I imagine, a tough sell. The men he’s writing about have gone through several recessions and 40 years of economic shifts. They live in a world where, as one man tells him, you’ll never find a job as a plumber but you might find one as a Walmart hostess. Beyond that, families around them are falling apart. Among men like them, without a college degree, divorce rates are high and fewer people get married; for women with only a high school degree, for example, nearly 60 percent of births occur outside marriage, rendering fatherhood a relic of the past. These men may have once run with the wind at their backs, but the air has been dead still for a long time.