Because of fucking artificial masculine norms! Duh! But that's not set in stone - it's not even universal in the history of patriarchy or in current Western masculinity. It's made up bullshit that you don't have to keep continuing to uphold. The way to shift that is for guys like you to start to change it.
“But even beyond these two bedrocks of so-called “traditional” masculinity, the way that men have been expected to behave in the recent past is also pretty new.“
In the Middle Ages there was a trope of masculine weeping being a mark of religious devotion and knightly chivalry; by the sixteenth century it was well-established that a masculine man was supposed to have deep emotions and to show them — in some cases, through tears.”
“The Bible is full of crying men, and tears are plentiful among the Greek heroes such as Achilles in the Iliad. In mediaeval Europe the elite felt little obligation to conceal their emotions and that continued as late as the reign of Henry VIII, when we find his chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, repeatedly weeping in public without embarrassment after his fall from power.”
In the 17th and 18th centuries in England, masculine men were expected to be in touch with their “sensibilities” by sharing and expressing their most profound feelings. In fact, weeping men were often the heroes of popular novels. There’s no definite agreement about when greater stoicism began to be required for men, but some historians believe that the Industrial Revolution was perhaps responsible when it is hypothesized that factory managers wanted their workers focused on productivity."
Men demonstrably have quite often not seen it as their role to protect women and children - or we wouldn't live in a world where so many of them are harmed by men and where so many other men stand by and allow other men to do that. Duh! Look at the world around you and not the narratives that make you feel better. This stuff is completely self evident — if you aren’t in deep cognitive dissonance.
There's HUGE ample evidence of woman the hunter from all sorts of sources. Hers is only one. And of course, women were and are hunters because when you've got 20-50 in your band all trying to keep each other alive, you don't have the luxury of stupid artificial norms about who does what to accomplish that. Again, Duh! You don't need research to prove this - it's self evident. Once wars started, about 10k years ago, women were often soldiers or ad hoc fighters. Why on earth wouldn’t they also be hunters?
Could generations of anthropologists have gotten things so badly wrong? Yes, of course they could, as already demonstrated to you with the story about how badly androcentric ideas have demonstrably skewed all kinds of science over and over and over again. Louis Leaky hired three women to study primates (Dian Fosse, Jane Goodall, and Birutė Galdikas) because he wanted people who didn't come with the baggage of established patriarchal "everyone knows" ideas about primatology. They revolutionized the field — by demonstrating the flaws in what so many male primatologists had just assumed for decades.
Aren’t dominance hierarchies going "under ground" some sort of feminist (or Marxist) plot? 😸 And as already pointed out to you several times, of course women and girls also act according to dominance hierarchy metrics at times because that's the social system that we've all been acculturated into and patriarchy is NOT a synonym for men. Just exactly how many times does that have to be said? It IS patriarchy - because that's the definition of what patriarchy means - a Might Makes Right system, where bullying and domination are seen as appropriate and the way to demonstrate your superiority. Women and girls do it too, and when they do, it’s still patriarchy.
Male/female relationships have demonstrably been all about exploitation for the past 6K years. Again, where's your knowledge of history here? Women wouldn’t have been second class citizens until just 50 years ago if it weren’t the case. Again, Duh! That has nothing to do with Marxism - I mean WTF are you even on about? It’s the history of the Western world. Men owned women as chattel, and treated them with as much cruelty or brutality as they wished and the culture allowed for that and at times openly supported that as "appropriate." The term "rule of thumb" refers to the width of a stick that a man could beat his wife with without getting the authorities involved. Spousal abuse wasn't made illegal in the UK until 1976 - when all those "radical" feminists demanded it loudly and longly enough to finally get some progress. Why TF do you think they had to resort to being “radical”?
Would you stand by and allow a social system that said you had so few rights you could be owned and beaten like a slave — that you were a de facto second class citizen even after the laws changed? Be serious here . . . You would not, and so being upset with women who will not accept that or the continuing aftermath of that where women are still routinely harmed by men with few consequences is positively hypocritical and pathetic.
Men aren’t inherently“bad” (I’m married to a terrific man and the mother of another) but they have been socialized into a lot of harmful and bad norms that harm women, and children but that also harm men. Until we all begin to confront that (and you guys stop overly identifying with a social system that has nothing to do with you except as you choose to adhere to it or not) we’re never going to have less violence, less abuse, less authoritarianism.
Edit: and it’s not just feminists that say traditional masculinity is bad for men — it’s literally everyone who isn’t Jordan Peterson or Andrew Tate. It’s all but the most fundamentalist and retrograde research and every men’s health and wellness organization worth it’s salt as well as groups like the APA. Again, coming around to what is common sense is not being “infected by feminism” — it’s coming out from under the spectre of self-evidently artificial harmful demands on men cooked up by patriarchy that have zero to do with masculinity in any organic sense. Not rocket science; entirely obviously apparent; no Ph.D necessary. Helloooo!
