OK, last thing before I go pop some aspirin and pour myself a glass of wine due to the way your convoluted diatribe has made my head hurt - It is not slandering men to talk about the way that mainstream masculine norms harm men, women, and the society as a whole. And yes, that's extremely fragile to be so overly identified with patriarchy that you can't even interface with how it harms you too - as well as everyone else.
If you are tired of masculinity being assailed then you need to start investing your time and energy into making it an actual force for good in the world - something that mainstream patriarchal masculinity is not at this current juncture. Stop whining and be a leader in helping change things for the good of all.
This is one of the primary reasons that masculinity in this culture needs to be reimagined — because a patriarchal dominance hierarchy model has insecurity built into the operating system. If you have to always be in competition with everyone around you, including the person you are romantically involved with, for some kind of imaginary status in an invented pecking order, how happy or confident can you ever be? There’s always going to be somebody “better” than you, or somebody trying to step on you to get ahead. How can you ever be close to anyone, not even the woman in your life, under those circumstances? The patriarchal dominance hierarchy isn’t good for anyone, except maybe for a few elites at the very top of the social pyramid.
Newsflash guys, women, and society at large are not going back to the 1950s, or even the 1990s, no matter how much complaining there is about that, and you are going to have to figure out how to adapt. I suggest you assist each other with that, rather than the expectation that some men seem to have that women make themselves smaller and less equal again so that guys can feel more comfortable. According to Darwin, those who are most evolutionarily fit are not the strongest or the toughest, they are the most adaptable.
Women have been reinventing themselves — in the face of continued discrimination and backlash — for more than 100 years. Nobody has given them much sympathy or assistance or empathy on a societal level, and so I think most women feel that men ought to carve out their own new place in the world themselves — even if it’s hard, even if it’s uncomfortable, even if there is some resistance to that — because, well, join the club…
As Katz and many others have pointed out, the things that women face as far as safety, as far as discrimination, and sexual violence go — those aren’t actually women’s issues — because they are problems that are overwhelmingly perpetrated by men acting on scripts of masculinity as it is constructed in our culture. And, those are the huge problems that they are in large part because the men who don’t do those things nonetheless still uphold or turn a blind eye in a system that allows for them. These are, in fact, men’s issues and men need to take the lead in shifting that.
“As recognition of the importance of men’s gender norms grew, there was and continues to be an evolution in global and public health approaches that recognize, leverage, and seek to change particularly harmful aspects of gender norms.” — Paul J. Fleming, et al.
Male-dominated societies are not only ones where men as a group have power over women. Some men also have power over other men; some groups of men are more highly valued.
So one reason why many men feel they don’t have power is that, in relation to at least some or even many other men and some women, they actually don’t have much social or economic power. Some men, because of the color of their skin or the country where they were born or their religion or sexual orientation or physical differences or economic class, face enormous discrimination and oppression. — Kaufman, Michael. The Time Has Come (pp. 55–56). Catapult. Kindle Edition.
But because masculinity in this culture is a relentless performance of norms and rules that have been laid out by others hundreds or even thousands of years ago, it’s restrictive, isolating, and keeps men constantly vying for a place in an artificial pecking order. Boys and men are rewarded for adhering to the expected Man Box metrics, and those who don’t comply are punished — bullied, teased, and even physically attacked in order to police them back into compliance — sometimes by women and girls.
He also points out that gender equality alone is not enough. We need to break away from the norms of a domination-oriented hierarchy where bullying and abuse of those viewed as lower than us in some imaginary pecking order are considered normal and acceptable.I’d say our goal can’t just be gender equality, but rather a vision of human liberation outside of the narrow constraints created by eight thousand years of life in patriarchal societies.— Kaufman, Michael. The Time Has Come (p. 207). Catapult. Kindle Edition.
If you fear that allowing men to be full human beings is erasing masculinity or trying to enforce some sort of uni-gender, you’ve bought into a small, and disempowering notion of what masculinity even is or means.
Why do you want to define yourself as “not” something rather than by what you are as an individual human being?
How tough and individualistic are you if you let other people (many of whom died several hundred years ago) decide for you what is an acceptable way to be a man?
This isn’t the way men have always been since the beginning of time. It’s not just “naturally” who men are. It’s a series of restrictive norms that guys have been policed into in this part of the world at this particular time in history and it’s harming men (and everyone else).
