You've made some good points and asked some good questions. I do wonder though about the assertion that #MeToo has gone too far. HTF can that remotely be the case when sexual harassment at work is still rampant and often has a blind eye turned to it if the perpetrator is powerful enough? In a lot of Western countries, female surgeons get groped and harassed WHILE assisting in medical procedures. Woman grad students still get pressured to "be nice" to their advisors and most of the women who leave STEM fields do it because of harassment.
If men claim they don't know how to act for fear of getting into trouble, it indicates that bad behavior was so normalized in the past and they never knew how to treat women with proper respect in the first place. Sorry, not the fault nor the problem of the demographic who has been on the receiving end of that all their lives. The work of the #MeToo movement is not remotely done.
Unfortunately, this sort of thing is not confined to surgeons, or even to the field of medicine. Women in all sorts of scientific and academic disciplines are often subject to the same kinds of harassment and demands for sexual favors — something that damages morale, but that also often drives women out of these fields. A much smaller number of men are also harassed or assaulted.
“The report concludes that the cumulative result of sexual harassment in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine is significant damage to research integrity and a costly loss of talent in these fields,” concludes another relevant study. (National Academies)
"Today, this kind of quid pro quo may be less common, but sexual harassment at universities persists. The spate of lawsuits, investigations, and recent resignations at the University of California, Berkeley, University of Chicago, and UCLA, accompanied by older cases leaked to the press and an increase in women going public about their experiences, have made that clear.
Graduate students and postdocs are particularly vulnerable, because their futures depend so completely on good recommendations from professors. And STEM (science, technology, engineering, and math) students are more dependent than others. Their career progress hinges on invitations to work on professors’ grants or — if students have their own projects — access to big data sets or expensive lab equipment controlled by overwhelmingly male senior faculty." (The Atlantic)
But back to the main topic, I think that any couples that are more worried about “keeping up with the Joneses” than about actually parenting are abdicating their roles to the detriment of the children. Women who spend vast amounts of time showcasing on social media how “perfectly trad” they are undoubtedly fall into this category. Actual hands on parenting is exhausting, gritty, messy, and time consuming. There’s little time for making videos of yourself baking pies in a pretty dress and full face of makeup.
