I was mostly with you until this part. Feminism is trying to bring yin/yang balance back. Right now we live in an incredibly androcentric culture. You've even spoken to that. Yin traits such as introspection and intuition are not considered acceptable for men - and that's a huge issue, as you have noted. It is directly responsible for the epidemic of male loneliness and suicide. That demand for men to have no Yin (feminine) traits comes out of patriarchy and it's incredibly destructive to both males and to society.
The dysfunction you are describing doesn't come from a lack of masculine models (single mothers, etc.) but because of living in a culture that is so out of balance that healthy masculinity is hard to find and only the violent, porn-addicted, always comparing yourself to everyone around you (rather than doing your inner work) kind of masculinity is celebrated and lauded. Just look at movies as proof. This is what makes for so many fragile and weak men. They aren't well rounded, they aren't self-responsible, they make themselves feel better by making others feel bad (which is exactly what patriarchy teaches them to do - because it's a dominance hierarchy and not just a male/female dynamic).
When boys were asked what makes a man, they included dominating and controlling women, being tough and independent, and other rigid rules for proving oneself to be dominant in order to perform masculinity. This is incredibly harmful to boys/men as well as to the rest of our culture. This story explains it really well.
"So the notion that masculinity is fleeting and requires vigilant reinforcement isn’t new to me, but there’s some new research to back it up. Time Magazine has an article about a new paper, Precarious Manhood and Its Links to Action and Aggression, in which the researchers looked at the ways that men deal with the fleeting nature of manhood. Men have to constantly prove and re-prove their status, as they showed in three experiments."
Here’s my assessment of how we have ended up with the sort of society that we have:
“We’ve built an entire culture around comparing ourselves to other people.Who has a better car or more expensive shoes? Who has a vacation home or a boat? Who has most ruthlessly climbed to the top of the pyramid of power? There is no arriving in this scenario. No amount of money is ever enough. No accolades are sufficient. Someone is always coming for your position, so you’d better keep striving. You can never rest, never trust, never have any real friends, and if anyone challenges you, you’d better put them down!”
