Trashing contempt for women with contempt for men.

I tried to read this WaPo column by Alexandria Petri called "Why Bustle.com doesn’t work for women." It's about how the male founder of a website for women has "ample contempt for the very market he was aiming at." I think Petri, aiming for the market he has contempt for, aims contempt at him. But she quickly dives into generic contempt for men, on the theory that men don't read "books," and by "books," Petri means novels, and somehow the general failure of men generally to read novels feeds back into the topic of why Bryan Goldberg's Bustle sucks.

Excerpt:

Reading is one of the few sure-fire ways to become better at being human. So it’s a problem when anyone doesn’t do it — and an especial problem recently, when boys are increasingly slipping behind, at least compared to their female counterparts.

As of 2009, boys lagged 39 points behind girls, according to the Programme for International Student Assessment. One of the suggested reasons that boys aren’t reading is that unlike girls, who are somehow fonts of empathy capable of leaping from one perspective to another at a single bound, reading books from male or female perspectives with equal vigor and ease, boys can only be summoned to respond to the stories of other boys.

Who suggested this reason? No one's name is stuck to that stereotype, it's just a "suggested reason." Boys can't read because "books" are those fictional stories told from a perspective that can only be understood if one possesses empathy and that's something boys lack or Goldberg lacks or who the hell knows? It's just a theory out there, not a theory Petri herself admits to embracing as she wanders about trying to aim at that man who takes aim at women.