ribbonfarm piece on "The Lonely Atoms", discusses young males who lack skills and don't even try to assimilate into the mainstream ... a 17 years-after-Driscoll survey but with cleaner language

The idea behind "Pussified Nation" was a fairly pedestrian one, decades old within evangelical and neo-Calvinist circles but sometimes other authors with other angles can arrive at an idea as though it is new, for them.  Rosin's The End of Men comes to mind but there are other, more recent examples.

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2017/08/08/the-crisis-of-the-lonely-atoms/
..
But making sense of the Lonely Atomic Age requires more than numbers and trends. It means getting comfortable with an account that does not pretend to be an explanation. Naming the problem demographic is part of how we make the problem legible. Ian Hacking calls this “dynamic nominalism” in his essay “Making People Up.” The philosopher sees “our classifications and our classes conspire to emerge hand in hand, each egging the other on.” This is not to question that there is such a type as “lower-skill American males who live with their parents or a close relative, don’t work, aren’t in school, and play lots of videogames.” These individuals exist. But the individual identity of a person of this class is never explored.

Instead they are treated as fungible crumbs of the demographic itself. Their individual fates don’t matter; the salient point is what their collective inaction might signify for the rest of us. [emphasis added] The category itself, the boxes checked to make someone a specimen, is something new, and it “conspires to emerge hand in hand” with the narrative of crisis.

Ha!  No, this isn't a new thing at all!  Maybe it's new to imagine young white 20-something males who don't bother to assimilate into the mainstream to begin with rather than struggling for a while and rejecting the mainstream as something vaguely new, but categorizing people as nothing more or less than demographic symbolism has been around for as long as there have been people. 

The category and the narrative arrived in the wake of a financial meltdown, and more generally, in a time of increasing technological disruption. This disruption matters in the story of the Lonely Atoms.
The category and the narrative arrived in the wake of a financial meltdown, and more generally, in a time of increasing technological disruption. This disruption matters in the story of the Lonely Atoms.
Technology reduces demand for unskilled labor by making such workers expendable or unnecessary. An industrial economy becomes an information-age economy, and labor-intensive businesses become capital-intensive businesses keen to increase production and slash costs. It’s not hard to see how younger lower-skilled workers wind up under the boot of technological advancement.
...

What this long-form piece reminded me of is how this kind of thought has been characteristic of evangelicals, social conservatives and particularly neo-Calvinist/new Calvinist sorts for decades.  Doug Wilson's whole shtick is in some sense dependent on this kind of analysis.  Mark Driscoll took a number of elements from that shtick, pumped them full of steroids and transformed that into what some would eventually read as "Pussified Nation".  The basic shtick is still, actually, pretty much the same with Driscoll even now.  He's couching it more in a desire to be a father figure and to address "father wounds" but the basic belief that young guys aren't doing enough to engage in the economic and social activities to prove they have reached and passed the goals that constitute the checklist of functional adulthood in post-war American life. 

The worry that guys were just staying home and looking at porn and watching video games has been going on in Christian subcultures for decades.  Not everyone is sure that the economy is as recovered from the Great Recession as has been said. Not everyone is sure that more and more people getting advanced degrees is really an indicator of upward social or economic mobility as has been taken for granted in the past.   There's a recent article on that topic but that constitutes a separate post.  Meanwhile, it's interesting how there are times when writers not in the Christian popular writing scenes touch on the kinds of crises that are ever-present to Christian writers in the Anglo-American context. 

Something that just came to mind is that while blogs such as Mere Orthodoxy stake out a position of opposition to gay marriage on the one hand and lament the loss of rites of passage into adulthood the paradox seems to be that the aim is to deny, basically, that gays should have access (though some, to say the least) seek to fulfill those socio-economic milestones of functional adulthood that have traditionally been the domain of straight people; on the other hand, for decades now, evangelicals and social conservatives have been lamenting how fewer and fewer straight people voluntarily seek out these checklist points of the transition into socially recognized adulthood in the United States.  The crisis for social conservatives seems to be that gays are actively pursuing what straights are pursuing less and less and handling more disastrously apart from the upper crust strata of white society ... maybe. 

But in a way ... couldn't we ask whether or not in both cases the metaphorical boner is the guiding light in both cases?  Sometimes it seems like it.  At one level the market doesn't care who's getting married as long as whoever is getting married goes on to buy real estate and participate in as well as contribute to the market.  In that sense socially conservative Christians may need to figure out whether they're really for freedom of the market or for what they regard as necessary standards of ethical purity.  For those on the liberal or left side (and I don't regard these as really being the same at all at several levels) the question of whether gay marriage is even a net benefit if deregulated globalist capitalism is possibly not the greatest thing ever may make any potential celebration of gay marriage profoundly subordinated to questions of whether the global ecosphere would, say, benefit from yet more Americans getting live the consumeristic lifestyle of Americans; a redistributive welfare state that is powered by fossil fuel economics can still crash and burn in the long run.