Dana Goldstein of TAPPED fishes the one coherent line from a by-all-accounts totally wiggy op-ed from arch conservative-in-RINO-clothing pundit David Brooks.

[Contemporary western women] hit puberty around 13 and many don’t get married until they’re past 30. That’s two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn’t a transition anymore. It’s a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.

I think the reason he thinks it’s important to distinguish young women from young men between 13 and 30 is that whereas there have been other times when women have waited as long as their early 30s to marry (according to, for instance Stephanie Coontz) there hasn’t been a comparable tradition for women who are substantially economically and reproductively emancipated relative to their male cohorts.

Young men in those shoes, of course, have had rules for millennia.

Now comes the tricky part: many of the rules for men have been predicated on a patriarchal structures that treated women as economically and reproductively constrained, which in turn allowed them to be treated as transferrable property.

Consequently it probably wouldn’t be terribly productive to just extend traditional young-men-based rules to young women. On the other hand 1) being has how young women are now in a position to have some sort of actual say in the matter of how they conduct themselves, and 2) being as how their having a say substantially invalidates any traditions their young male cohorts might have been able to draw on it seems, again, 3) unnecessary for Brooks to distinguish young women as the ones who have to learn new rules as opposed to both young women and young men.

I would also say that only a conservative would consider it a problem that young women have a first-time opportunity to forge new rules for the fairly significant years of 13-30.