My gender seems to be in trouble at the moment, witness the current pileup of articles and commentary.

The headline on the current Atlantic magazine screams: "The End of Men: How Women are Taking Control — of Everything."

Notice the dash, the emphasis on everything.

Meanwhile, Global and Mail columnist Margaret Wente tells us men are going belly up in their competition with the fairer sex.

More females than males are attending university. The ranks of middle managers are being filled by women (watch the glass ceiling shatter, eventually).

Boys are adrift, as one book title puts it. "Failure to launch" has become a cultural cliché.

In two areas, mind you, men still reign supreme: engineering and janitorial work.

And war. Yes, let's not forget that.

That's why Sebastian Junger's new book, War, is adding some spice to a meaty argument.

What is it good for?

The bestselling author of The Perfect Storm, Junger's newest book is an account of his being embedded with a platoon of American soldiers in a remote valley in Afghanistan, one of the most fought over places in the country.

Author and director Sebastian Junger, left, and co-director Tim Hetherington are shown at the Restrepo outpost in the Korengal Valley, Afghanistan, during the filming of their documentary Restrepo. (Outpost Films, Tim Hetherington/Associated Press)

From the experience, he also produced the documentary Restrepo, which just won an award at the Sundance film festival.

His busy publicity tour is taking place at the same time as males are taking a drubbing in the media.

War is a stark account of a squad of combat soldiers in their late teens and twenties who were camped out in the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan.

They had no electricity, no running water, no TV and no amusements, including no alcohol or female company.

Generally, they were bored out of their minds, except for those thrilling moments when they found themselves in a firefight, for which they were superbly trained.

Lying about among the tarantulas in the awful heat, they would often joke with each other and cry out for the Taliban to start a firefight.

And sometimes the Taliban would oblige.

Politically incorrect

In many ways, War is a very politically incorrect book.

Sure, there are plenty of war movies and video games that glamorize combat. But a great deal of the reporting you hear nowadays is about how war is such a dreadful experience, turning manly combat veterans into psychiatric casualties with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.

Just watch the stunning PBS documentary The Wounded Platoon. War is no rite of passage you'd willingly send your son to.

Junger doesn't whitewash the violence and admits to a little PTSD himself. But the war he portrays is a distinctly male activity that is also, as he puts it, "insanely exciting."

"War is supposed to feel bad because undeniably bad things happen, but for a 19 year old at the working end of a .50 calibre during a firefight, war is life multiplied by some number that no one has ever heard of."

Still, that is not something that "the public wants to hear about," he recognizes.

War tourism

You can accuse Junger of war tourism if you want. He was a competitive athlete in college who went on to become a war correspondent in Africa and then the former Yugoslavia and Afghanistan. He knows terrible things occur in battle.

But for the young men in his book, all volunteers, who worked hard to get into an elite combat unit, war was what they wanted to participate in.

They even missed the action when they were on leave, we are told.

In today's modern culture where, Junger argues, there are no rites of passage anymore, going to war provides a simple, stable set of meanings.

It gives the participants a purpose and a job, provided they can conquer the fear of being killed.

War brings males together in a bond of "love," Junger says. You can get moralistic about it. But, in his view, no other activity in organized human life does it quite so well.

Tribal bond

Now, Junger isn't the first person to tell us that our highly organized, bureaucratic society lacks significant rituals for the coming of age. Pierre Trudeau suggested that, too, which is no doubt one of the reasons he travelled around the world so much in his youth.

In combat, Junger tells us, something quite extraordinary happens. You might literally sacrifice yourself for your comrade, even if you hated him.

Die for somebody you actively disliked? That's what these young troopers told Junger, who accompanied them on their combat patrols and claims to have begun to understand the sentiment.

In these situations, if you slow down, you slow everybody and put the entire unit in jeopardy. In a life and death situation, everyone is bound to each other.

In his book, Junger muses about evolutionary psychology and how our hunter-gatherer ancestors went about in small bands, which the modern military emulates with its squads of nine, its platoons of 30 and its companies of 150.

But why sacrifice yourself for a stranger when you don't pass on your genes? Junger speculates that this is a holdover from that earlier time, when your hunting partner was related to you by family and tribal bonds (much like the Taliban).

Still, you can't create this intense bonding in everyday society. That's the tragedy.

William James, the great American psychologist, once talked about how humanity needed a "moral equivalence to war." We're still waiting.

No real sacrifice

So, in the end, it's not simply the violence that these men are largely addicted to. It's the sense of belonging.

These soldiers believe their simple, structured life, lived with comradely intensity, is easier than the confusions and uncertainties of civilian life.

You can see small versions of this sentiment in street cafes right now — the bands of men cheering wildly for their tribe, their World Cup team.

But this is sport, play. No real sacrifice for anyone.

Hence the basis for all these articles and books asking the question "are men obsolete?" And for all the commentary that tells us that women function so much better in modern society, with their co-operative ways, bureaucracies and book clubs.

In the end, to confess, your evolutionary dodo isn't quite sure himself what to make of the question. Are we men obsolete?

I will have to take it up with a female supervisor, one of the many so deftly staffing the ranks of the public broadcaster.