Thanks for your thoughtful comment. I do think it's vital to making any progress as a culture to identify and illuminate the ways that the social system of patriarchy harms men too, and is also in many instances upheld by women. That helps to take it from an Us/Them dynamic to one where we can hopefully improve the culture for us all. I write about these sorts of things often, and I wish more people would do the same. But, here's what I've noticed from the responses that I mostly get to my work:
A great number of men don't want greater equality, they don't want a flatter hierarchy, they don't want to do the work of recognizing their privilege. They think patriarchy is "natural" and really just fine. Many of them seem to want all the advantages of an androcentric system without any of the disadvantages of it - and for women to somehow "fix" that for them even though women are still very clearly dealing with their own issues around safety, discrimination, and opportunity - things that despite many improvements are still very real. It's a (mostly subconscious) continuation of looking at women as helpmates and sidekicks to demand that they make society more comfortable and enjoyable for men again, at their own expense, and without taking any notice of their own needs. That's where a lot of the anger comes in - not just the overt pushback to equality, such as the rise of the manosphere, but the level of whining and entitlement that just radiates off of so many men - particularly younger men. We're still hurting, and not treated equally in such a vast number of ways, and most men don't want to recognize that - they want everyone, including women to focus on their needs. It's pretty galling and also antithetical to progress for anyone.
Yes, to a certain extent, we all have to work together on this, but more men need to be taking the lead in improving the culture, rather than asking women to make themselves smaller and more agreeable so that men can feel better. As I've noted to a few other people, Darwin pointed out that survival of the fittest doesn't mean survival of the strongest, or the toughest - it means that the ones who are the most adaptable survive. For more than 60 years, women have been hard at work changing the understanding of what it means to be a woman in this culture. They have faced and continue to face huge backlash and hazing for doing it, but they continue on anyhow. Men need to start doing this for themselves - to broaden and open up "masculinity" so that a wide variety of iterations are normalized and accepted. And, I see very, very few men who have any interest in doing that, so if you are engaging in this sort of work, I applaud you and wish you all the best.
In order for men to feel "empowered" to do this work, they have to get their egos in check, their sense of entitlement in check, their insecurity and reflexive slavishness to dominance hierarchy metrics under control and to look to the future and how doing that vulnerable and difficult work will actually improve their lives and the entire culture. Most men don't want to go there. It's going to take other men to lead the way A) because women have their own problems and B) because most men don't listen to women anyhow, they primarily listen to other men.
Long story short, men need to lead the way in creating a better culture for us all. Until more of them get serious about doing that, things aren't going to move much.
