And I too appreciate your politeness, but the very first sentence of the story is this:
"I suppose it’s possible to be anti-male and be the parent of a boy child, but in truth, very few women are truly anti-male, whether they have boys or not."
As I went on to say, most of what comes across as misandry is emotional fatigue with pervasive negative life experiences at the hands of some men. Although there are some women who do genuinely hate men and look at them as subhuman, my perception is that is a small, radical fringe minority. Even the women I know who are entirely fed up with patriarchy and the bad experiences they've had with it, as angry as they are, still do not hate men. They simply long for a better, more equal system where they can expect to be treated as equals.
If some women think men lack empathy, it's most likely because their overwhelming experience has been that they have received very little of it from many men. And, in a dominance based hierarchy, empathy isn't the coin of the realm, so in some ways that's to be expected, although it is profoundly disappointing to be continually told that you are overreacting, trying to get attention, etc., when trying to discuss things like how often you've been groped by strangers or treated like a second-class citizen. Position in the hierarchy is gotten and maintained through coercion, fear, and threat of violence which often looks like garden variety bullying of the sort that Donald Trump is so well known for. This social system forces binary roles on us all, and in order to be "masculine" you can't be seen as being too "feminine."
Women do uphold the social system too and it wouldn't still be here if they didn't, but it's still a different vantage point in the hierarchy.
Traits that are considered masculine like control, competitiveness, and stoicism are more desirable for everyone than traits that are considered feminine like empathy, nurturance, and cooperation.
Little boys must be tough and action-oriented; little girls must be pretty and docile.
Boys and men must never embody anything remotely feminine because anything feminine is deemed as less-than.
“The core cultural ideas about what is good, desirable, preferable or normal are associated with how we think about men and masculinity.”
In a pyramid-shaped hierarchy, you must constantly dominate or risk being dominated. If you don’t win, you lose.
The rules are enforced through creating fear, the threat of pain, coercion and the ostracization of those who will not comply.
“Patriarchy is generally not an explicit ongoing effort by men to dominate women. It is a long-standing system that we are born into and participate in, mostly unconsciously.”
