It’s about both MEN & Women, THE War against the Individual & the fight against Planned Parenthood
Two of the comments from the above Rachel Maddow article.
I think you’re correct on the most extreme end, but I also think a lot of goodhearted men are like this guy: They’ve been conditioned with the expectation that they’ll be taken care of, and that expectation isn’t met.
I think a lot of this is wrapped up in the fact that not only did early feminists reject their assigned roles, they then raised their daughters as feminists. Yet boys are still overwhelmingly being raised essentially on the 1950s model of boyhood. On average, girls are raised more gender-neutrally than boys. The result is something like Rachel’s pulling-the-center-right model: as more girls join little league and more moms bring home the bacon, boys and men have to choose between androgyny or hyper-masculinity, and since androgyny is mislabeled as emasculation, many move to the extreme rather than the middle. I think this is something that’s been happening slowly for a very, very long time.
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You are right. Something is very wrong with our lack of male-identification. Part of this is self defeating though. Men are so gorram terrified of being called “gay” or somehow “female” that they shy away from anything and everything that they might otherwise identify w/. Men are facing a crisis of identity and it hasn’t been addressed. Men need to go through their own renaissance era so they can wake up and rejoin the rest of us. How we do that I don’t know. Those who push hardest against things like women’s rights also tend to screw men up in that those very same people won’t allow men to grow. Fears of gender roles punish men as much as women and I totally agree it has to stop. I have blogged about that before, although perhaps not as much as I should have. I do not pretend that these men aren’t also victims, but perhaps I let my outrage blind my fairness. I feel that our society currently favors men, but you are correct that there’s a catch-22 that comes w/ that. The point is men should learn to evaluate reality based on themselves just as women do. And both men and women should learn to come together as individuals to work in harmony. Men don’t need to idealize “masculinity” or “femininity” and neither do women. The idea that something is “man” and “woman” I believe is the problem. We need to realize we’re all people and we differ and we need to accept ourselves for who we are instead of always constantly trying to appease others. Many men likely move to the extreme, as you say, because they recognize that their reality doesn’t match w/ (as Tru-TV calls it) actuality. And that’s sad.