The only catch was that his “extremely highly recommended” was prefaced by “For those souls brave enough ...” That’s because the movie Harris was raving about is Sin City, directed by Robert Rodriguez, one of Time magazine’s “25 Most Influential Hispanics in America.” (In an incomprehensible oversight, I didn’t make the list.)

Sin City is based on the “graphic novel” of the same name by Frank Miller. What’s a “graphic novel”? Basically, it’s a longer -- at least 100 or so pages -- comic book that aspires to escape the ghetto personified by the Comic Book Guy on “The Simpsons.” For some, this aspiration takes the form of more ambitious subject matter and themes. For others, the additional pages seem to suffice.

Sin City is in the latter camp. The movie can be characterized in a single word: puerile. While Harris was right about the movie’s technical brilliance, the story, or what passes for one, is little more than a 13-to-15 year-old boy’s darkest fantasies come to life -- or at least to the movies -- especially in its depiction of women. Some scenes are so juvenile in this regard that you half expect subtitles that read “pause and gratify yourself here.”

After hitting “open” on my DVD player’s remote, I felt I needed the movie equivalent of granitee, the ice served between courses to cleanse the palate. So I watched Silverado, director Lawrence Kasdan’s (The Empire Strikes Back) attempt to resuscitate the Hollywood western. The pairing wasn’t as absurd as it sounds: in both movies, the eponymous settings were places where corruption and vice were the norm and doing the right thing required an heroic resolve. Similarly, the heroes were men with, at best, checkered pasts.

The similarities end there. Silverado, like the westerns it paid homage to, was a story for adults. Not in the debased and unintentionally ironic sense that “adult,” along with “mature,” has come to be used: material that appeals to our prurient interests. I mean that the story’s sensibilities assume that responsibility and the well-being of other people are more important than self-gratification. In other words, the characters, and the audience watching them, operate within a morally- serious universe.

If the puerile sensibilities on display in Sin City were unique or even uncommon, it wouldn’t be worth noting. But they’re not. They are increasingly the norm, especially in media directed at young men. Whether in commercials, on television or in the movies, the average young male being depicted is essentially a 13-to-15 year old in an adult male’s body. (I’d call him an “idiot” but that wouldn’t be fair to Dostoevski’s Prince Lev who, however strange he may seem, is nonetheless the most intelligent and morally serious person in “The Idiot.”)

The best-known example of this depiction is the media creation that Douglas Rushkoff of New York University has dubbed the “mook.” The “mook” is a “crude, loud, obnoxious, in-your-face character” who is “frozen in permanent adolescence.” If “mookness” were a religion its trinity would consist of Tom Green, Johnny Knoxville and Jimmy Kimmel. On their shows, things like “poo diving” -- no explanation required -- and the “Wheel of Destiny,” which included prizes that guys are supposed to really want like a “wheelbarrow of porn” or a year’s supply of beer, were treated as the essence of “guyness.”

While the trio’s antics were, admittedly, on the extreme end of the spectrum, a kind of “mook lite” ethos permeates nearly every bit of media directed at young males which, given their importance to advertisers, means most of the media we encounter. It almost goes without saying that every male in a beer commercial is a moron and a shiftless, lazy one at that. He can barely force himself to get off the coach to go to the bathroom or answer the door. (This “mook lite” archetype was best captured in the “Friends” episode where Chandler and Joey literally refused to get out of their chairs after discovering that the cable company had accidentally unscrambled the porn channel.)

Television, especially sit-coms, is almost as bad. At best, men are ineffectual dolts married to improbably -- given what the guys look like -- attractive women. More often, they are unreflective creatures largely governed by animal instincts. Sure, they sometimes end up doing the right thing but that’s a function of the sentimentality that pervades television; it’s not in keeping with the character as he’s actually written.

Nor can you expect any relief from the radio. The two most- popular formats with young men, “shock jocks” and sports-talk radio, are “mook-friendly” formats. If you didn’t know otherwise, you would conclude that it’s impossible to discuss the Yankees or the Raiders without mentioning strip clubs, how drunk the host got the night before or both. Throw in the almost- constant adds for online poker games and sports-betting websites and you’ve got a mook trifecta: sex, alcohol and gambling. And, thanks to media consolidation and the aforementioned prized status of young males among advertisers, and you can expect more of the same.

Once again, none of this would matter if we were all somehow impervious to the effects of media but anyone who thinks that is kidding himself. What we see and hear shapes how we think. Not in a direct way, although some especially impressionable guys have hurt themselves imitating what they see on television. The effects are more subtle but just as real.

Case in point: Tom Brady of the New England Patriots. In a interview/pictorial in the September, 2005 issue of GQ, the three-time Super Bowl champion goes out of his way to prove that he is “no different” from every other American guy. As proof of this dubious proposition -- more about which below - - he admits that he searches the Internet for porn.

Think about how ridiculous this entire story is, starting with the obvious fact that Brady is definitely different from other American guys: he’s a two-time Super Bowl MVP; he’s rich and good-looking; and his girlfriend isn’t only beautiful enough to be a movie star, she is a movie star, Bridget Moynahan. I don’t know which is sadder: that despite living a life any guy I know would love to live, if only for a week, Brady feels the need to surf for porn; or that he feels admitting such a need is necessary to establish his guy credentials? Actually, I do know: it’s the latter. All you need to know about our impoverished notions of what it means to be a male in 21st century American culture is this: in less than two decades, viewing porn has gone from being shameful to being socially acceptable and, finally, becoming part of what it means to be a guy.

I could go on with the examples: parsing “Spike: Television for Men” alone would require thousands of words. As I said, this puerile ethos is everywhere and it’s not going away anytime soon. Thus, any escape from the planet of the mooks will be via personal acts of resistance. Fortunately, there’s a pretty straightforward thing you can do: get married. The younger -- within reason -- the better. It’s not an accident that the juvenile turn in male behavior has coincided with a rise in the average age for first marriages. As being a husband and a father diminishes in our understanding of what it means to be a man, something has to take its place and, as we can see, it’s not very pretty.

Both evolutionary psychologists and social conservatives say that marriage “civilizes” men; it channels male energy, aggression and drives in a constructive fashion. In the absence of this outlet, these traits express themselves in violence and conflict. History and social science bear this out to a large degree: the most dangerous thing a society can have is a large population of young, unmarried males.

But marriage does more than “civilize” men, it helps them to grow up, especially in an age when, thankfully, most of us don’t have to hunt for our next meal or be on the lookout for a smilodon. Marriage is the principal way by which men learn to embrace responsibility and regard for other people’s well-being.

And it’s learning this lesson, not the “price of their toys,” much less having the stuff on the “Wheel of Destiny,” that separates men from boys. It’s a lesson you won’t learn from advertisers and media conglomerates for whom 13-to-15 year olds with credit cards are their ideal customers. But it's a lesson we need to learn if we're to become the kind of men that real women, as opposed to those in comic books, need and deserve.

(Editor's note: To avoid the possibility of misunderstanding, we'll say this plainly. We are NOT recommending this movie. We think it's one of the worst movies ever made. To find out why, just read this. )