Lots of good thoughts here, many of which I agree with - but the social scientist in me feels the need to challenge a few of them.
First off, young men ARE concerned about feminism (in a negative way) that is very, very different than even 20 or 30 years ago - because feminism has made a lot of inroads in that time and the chasm between regular people and the elites has widened dramatically in that same time period. Rather than blaming late stage capitalism, a lot of guys blame women for the decrease in their opportunities and privileges. It's misguided and destructive.
50% of young men in the UK think "feminism has gone too far" even though they rank pretty far down on the gender equality scale. This sort of disconnect is problematic and not helping anyone.
Was it immigrants who issued those predatory loans that lost them their homes? Was it feminist women who outsourced their jobs and created deals that let billionaires pay no taxes? Did LGBT people embark on ruinous trade deals? Of course not. America’s angry white men are right to be angry, but they are delivering their mail to the wrong address. That mail is now a letter bomb, and it will take a nation to defuse it.
Kimmel, Michael. Angry White Men (p. xiv). PublicAffairs. Kindle Edition.
And no, relations between men and women have not always been fraught. That's a product of patriarchy - a social system that has only been around for the past 6-8k years. When you override 97% of history where vehement egalitarianism was the main survival strategy with a social system based in Might Makes Right stratification and hierarchy, you're going to see the sort of tension that comes from turning some people into chattel and/or social inferiors. It's kind of like blaming "tense" race relations on Black people rather than on a systemic dynamic of oppression and marginalization.
Men don't have any more "natural" sexual energy than women do. Up until about the 18th century, women were widely regarded as the much more carnal sex, and it's well documented that women get tired of monogamy long before men do. That being said, we live in a culture that shames, censures, and makes it otherwise not safe for women to be their full sexual selves. Correlation isn't causation and it's important to be mindful of that.
We're all swimming in the same ocean of culture, and we all need to keep challenging the harmful aspects of that. I think men need to lead the way on that, since masculine culture is so much a part of the equation related to violence and sexual predation. But, we all need to embrace and support that, and look for ways that we can each be our best human selves, expressing our gender identity in positive and healthy ways.
There's no reason that men who are doing that work shouldn't enjoy who they are and celebrate it.
