(typewriter clanging) (typewriter dinging) - Hi, this is Jessa Crispin and this is "What Is Wrong With Men."

- I've been dying to ask you this question, what is wrong with my gender?

What's wrong with us?

(Jessa laughing) - You're having, I guess, like an existential crisis that seems to be gender wide, which is understandable because the roles of men, what our expectations for them are, what they are supposed to do, how they're supposed to contribute, all of that has changed.

But without a real conversation about how men might need to adjust their expectations and their goals to contribute to our new systems, there's a lot of confusion, anger, resentment, and I don't think we're handling it very well, (Jessa laughing) us or you guys.

- So along with being a really interesting dissection of this crisis, you have come to the conclusion that Michael Douglas's characters kind of serve as an example of this crisis.

- Yeah.

- And I wonder how you came to that conclusion.

- It kind of happened as an accident.

I was asked to write an essay about "Basic Instinct" when like a director's cut was being re-released or something like that.

And there was a lot of conversation around #MeToo, about sexual harassment, age gap relationships, power dynamics between men and women.

And that movie very beautifully deals with all of those issues and makes it an exciting thriller where, you know, a woman liberates herself by murdering all the men that she comes into contact with basically.

And so I just thought, "Let's see what else Michael Douglas was up to."

And "Wall Street" is an amazing portrayal of the switch that was happening in the financial sector at the time, "Fatal Attraction," the sort of changing roles between men and women in relationships and in marriage.

So just one after another, it kept working in a way that I was really not expecting.

- Jessa, this has been just an incredible conversation.

Thanks so much for coming.

- Thank you so much.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm Jeremy Finley.

Remember, keep reading.

(typewriter dinging) - [Jessa] I've gotten some of the nicest emails about this book from men who said that they feel seen.