I found these 2 long articles in the City Journal about the daily lives of contemporary young women and men (and female and male sexuality) rather striking: The New Girl Order (2007) and Child-Man in the Promised Land (2008)


Women
-The New Girl Order (Kay S. Hymowitz, Autumn 2007)
http://www.city-journal.org/html/17_4_new_girl_order.html
about Single Young Females (SYF), women aged between 18-34 without mortgage/husband/children.
Excerpt: "an international lifestyle is born. One of its defining characteristics is long hours of office work, often in quasi-creative fields like media, fashion, communications, and design—areas in which the number of careers has exploded in the global economy over the past few decades. The lifestyle also means whole new realms of leisure and consumption, often enjoyed with a group of close girlfriends: trendy cafés and bars serving sweetish coffee concoctions and cocktails; fancy boutiques, malls, and emporiums hawking cosmetics, handbags, shoes, and $100-plus buttock-hugging jeans; gyms for toning and male-watching; ski resorts and beach hotels; and, everywhere, the frustrating hunt for a boyfriend and, though it’s an ever more vexing subject, a husband." (...)
“Their favorite topic of conversation is, of course, relationships: men’s reluctance to commit, women’s independence, and when to have children.”

Men
-Child-Man in the Promised Land (Kay S. Hymowitz, Winter 2008)
http://www.city-journal.org/2008/18_1_single_young_men.html
about SYM/child-men, men aged between 18-34 without mortgage/wife/children.
Excerpt: "give young men a choice between serious drama on the one hand, and Victoria’s Secret models, battling cyborgs, exploding toilets, and the NFL on the other, and it’s the models, cyborgs, toilets, and football by a mile"