I stumbled across the Acculturated web site a couple weeks ago and found their Symposium on Manliness to be an interesting read. They used a piece by Kay Hymowitz as a jumping off point:

Today, most men in their 20s hang out in a novel sort of limbo, a hybrid state of semi-hormonal adolescence and responsible self-reliance. This “pre-adulthood” has much to recommend it, especially for the college-educated. But it’s time to state what has become obvious to legions of frustrated young women: It doesn’t bring out the best in men….It’s no exaggeration to say that having large numbers of single young men and women living independently, while also having enough disposable income to avoid ever messing up their kitchens, is something entirely new in human experience. Yes, at other points in Western history young people have waited well into their 20s to marry, and yes, office girls and bachelor lawyers have been working and finding amusement in cities for more than a century. But their numbers and their money supply were always relatively small. Today’s pre-adults are a different matter. They are a major demographic event.
What also makes pre-adulthood something new is its radical reversal of the sexual hierarchy. Among pre-adults, women are the first sex. They graduate from college in greater numbers (among Americans ages 25 to 34, 34% of women now have a bachelor’s degree but just 27% of men), and they have higher GPAs. As most professors tell it, they also have more confidence and drive. These strengths carry women through their 20s, when they are more likely than men to be in grad school and making strides in the workplace. In a number of cities, they are even out-earning their brothers and boyfriends.
Still, for these women, one key question won’t go away: Where have the good men gone?

The character Ron Swanson (played by Nick Offerman) from Parks and Recreation is mentioned by R.J. Moeller. (Incidentally, Swanson is a character that has been embraced by libertarian/conservatives even though he is an obvious attempt to lampoon their beliefs. Two points: 1) Good humor always contains truth; 2) Surprise! We can laugh at ourselves.)

…there are manly things. We just don’t seem to prize them anymore, and this is, in part, because they are not easy to obtain and require hard work to maintain.
Why does someone like Nick Offerman, the actor who portrays the beloved (and hilarious) Ron Swanson…stand out in such an intriguing and ironic way? Because he’s a man. Being a man is now “intriguing and ironic.”
I happened to catch a recent episode of The Nerdist podcast and the three uber-nerds who host the show (all post-thirty, unmarried dudes) were chatting with actor Jason Schwartzman (who has made a living playing the effeminate, hapless loser in multiple films) about how they were all fascinated by Nick Offerman and “just how manly and commanding he is in person.”
Even these four dainty dopes sitting around in Ms. Pac-Man t-shirts recognized he had something they didn’t–and they wanted whatever that was. Of course they didn’t want it badly enough to put down their light sabres and head to the lumber yard or Scottish caber toss competition with Mr. Offerman, but the fact remains that when confronted with traditional manliness, they were attracted to it. Yet the safety of their nerd-nest, the delusional world where weeping outside an Apple store when the stranger who invented your iPod dies, won out because they knew there’d be no judging from the legions of other man-boys running around these days.

Mark Judge picks up on the nerd theme to argue that we are raising too many specialists and not enough Renaissance men (and women) these days:

I happened to catch a recent episode of The Nerdist podcast and the three uber-nerds who host the show (all post-thirty, unmarried dudes) were chatting with actor Jason Schwartzman (who has made a living playing the effeminate, hapless loser in multiple films) about how they were all fascinated by Nick Offerman and “just how manly and commanding he is in person.”
Even these four dainty dopes sitting around in Ms. Pac-Man t-shirts recognized he had something they didn’t–and they wanted whatever that was. Of course they didn’t want it badly enough to put down their light sabres and head to the lumber yard or Scottish caber toss competition with Mr. Offerman, but the fact remains that when confronted with traditional manliness, they were attracted to it. Yet the safety of their nerd-nest, the delusional world where weeping outside an Apple store when the stranger who invented your iPod dies, won out because they knew there’d be no judging from the legions of other man-boys running around these days.

Mark Judge picks up on the nerd them to argue that we are raising too many specialists and not enough Renaissance men (and women) these days:

I believe the problem with the “pre-adulthood” phenomenon is that young men are no longer raised to be renaissance men. In a world that is increasingly secular and illiterate, they are taught to find their niche, hit it hard, and not worry about anything else. Thus, you have Big Bang Theory nerds who cannot name a single contemporary jazz artist; sports junkies who don’t know who John Paul II was; Bible thumpers who don’t own a single Beatles record; politicians who have never read a novel. These days no one tries to take on anything different for the simple pleasure of trying to improve themselves. They don’t stretch themselves.
This is why it gets tiresome when conservative critics keep circling back to the same scapegoats: Adam Sandler, Hollywood, toilet humor. They act as if these things are bad in and of themselves, when the problem is that they are not balanced out with anything more noble. I mean, Chaucer made fart jokes in The Canterbury Tales. But there were some other ideas in there as well. Also–and this is crucial–there was once a time when men kept ribald humor to their circle of male peers. There was just certain stuff you didn’t talk about in front of women. With the sexual revolution, those zones of healthy segregation began to collapse.
These days the problem isn’t as much pre-adulthood males as it is uncultured people–including women. When I was in high school at Georgetown Prep, a Jesuit school that prided itself on producing men who could both lay down a block and conjugate Latin, we had a term for well-rounded women: “cool chicks.” Yeah, she’s a cool chick. A cool chick would go to a baseball game with you, maybe liked a cool band, and also had a favorite museum and novel. They were cool because they weren’t just one thing–the Lena Dunham hipster, the scholarship-obsessed athlete, the Ally Sheedy Breakfast Club basket case. Do cool chicks exist anymore? Is there a Dianne Keaton of this generation?

Anthony Dent looks at the problems faced by such uncultured lower-middle class men:

For non-college-educated men…[t]he fundamental problem is structural…it’s the dearth of manufacturing jobs…that causes unemployment and, ultimately, the delay of marriage and the creation of healthy communities [and] these men watch television. These are not “the odyssey years” of competitive pressures and healthy experimentation in pre-adulthood described by David Brooks. A better name might be the Buckwild Years, after the MTV show that profiles the lives of six college-aged boys and girls in the backcountry of West Virginia.
In the show, the boys are perfect stereotypes for the lower-middle-class men of Fishtown in Charles Murray’s Coming Apart. Two of the boys, Joey and Tyler, started a lawn-mowing business during the summer to make some money. They quit before they even finish the first lawn. The majority of their time is spent muddin’ or re-enacting countrified Jackass-esque stunts. When Joey was in a relationship with one of the girls, Shae, he wouldn’t acknowledge her as his girlfriend just like Tyler, who hooked up with several girls, yet declined to call any of them his girlfriend. When Shae asked Joey for some level of commitment, he demurred preferring their status as “friends with benefits.” It’s only until Shain’s parents—the only parental figures in the show—tell Joey to man up and ask her out on a date that he relents and takes her out to dinner. As the dog days of summer come to a close, Shae is headed back to school and asks Joey what he’s going to do. He deflects the question with “I’m gonna do something,” but it’s clear he has no idea, the precise “decay of industriousness” that Murray has observed.
Hymowitz is rightly pessimistic about college-educated layabouts, but at least they have opportunities. If Buckwild and Charles Murray are any guides, lower-middle-class men will have a harder time becoming men again because manliness, at its core, is aggression with a telos.

Ben Domenech uses the example of the Patriots own Rob Gronkowski to argue that women are only reaping what they’ve sown:

Where have all the good men gone? The answer is: they have been snatched up, held onto, eradicated from the marketplace, because they are so few in number. And there will be fewer still, barring a backlash of some kind.
Feminism, properly understood, is not about the granting of power but rather its negation. We no longer teach girls that they control the future, even if men think they control the present, and in so doing concede to men power they once only thought they had–the power to muck about, do nothing, and still find a woman with relative ease later in life after the fun stops.
I remember the first time a woman swore at me, in Manhattan, for holding a door for her according to my Southern instincts, an indictment of old-fashioned manners in a compressed Bronx vowel. It was a jarring moment, and I have never forgotten it. I haven’t stopped holding doors open, but I’ve noticed others have. Men are all overgrown boys, after all (myself most definitely included)–it’s experience in life, the lessons we take from our mistakes and our triumphs, that makes us men. And if no lessons are taken, well, then you end up as Gronk, who has never wanted for female attention.

The dark side of feminism was creating a relationship environment that put relatively little if any qualifications on any man before you take him to bed, and even less after. If young men are ever going to stop treating women like objects and instead like creatures of value, then women have to stop behaving like objects and stop confusing a wicked strut with life-affirming power. That ship has long since sailed.

Emily Esfahani Smith responded to Domenech, explaining that everyone really has to be nicer!

At least part of what lies at the heart of the degeneration of manly behavior and the general breakdown in how men and women treat each other is, I maintain, selfishness, ego, and what results when those two things exist excessively in one person: a decline in compassion and empathy, or the ability to put yourself in another person’s shoes….Being a good person is an act in two parts. It involves treating others well, as Ben tried to do here, but it also involves gracefully accepting the kindness of others. This woman failed to gracefully accept Ben’s kind act because she thought Ben was being sexist. Was Ben being sexist? I’m sure if you asked Ben–or any other man who holds doors open for women–why he did it, he will say that he was trying to be kind and gentlemanly.
But instead of taking that kindness on its own terms, this woman imposed her own beliefs and ideology onto Ben, as she probably has done with countless other men. In doing so, she makes these men feel like unenlightened sexist brutes. Why? Because she just has to make her political point. The social and moral cost of her ideological position is attacking men like Ben and their kindness. If that doesn’t constitute selfish behavior, I don’t know what does.
I think women like her underestimate how profoundly damaging and hurtful behavior like that is for men–and I think women have a moral responsibility, not to mention a social one, to consider that it’s not always appropriate to wave the feminist flag….That said, I think that men have a moral responsibility too. I recently wrote an article in defense of chivalry for The Atlantic, challenging both men and women to higher standards of behavior. With the exception of a small handful of shrill ideologues, women (including many feminists) responded positively to my piece, which was a little bit surprising. But many men–too many men–did not. These men thought that women today did not deserve to be treated in a gentlemanly manner; they thought that women need to choose between accepting feminism or living in a culture where gentlemanly behavior is valued and encouraged; if women chose feminism, they should expect to be treated poorly….I find these responses to be rather disturbing. The incentive to treat women–or anyone, for that matter–well is obvious. It’s the right thing to do. The moral systems from the major world religions, especially Christianity, are clear on this point. Even if you are not treated well by another person, you have a moral duty to be kind to them. Women, who for physical reasons tend to be more vulnerable than men, merit special treatment in special circumstances, regardless–by the way–of their views on feminism.
So who is to blame for the cultural breakdown? We all are.