Men are worse off now than in the past. Therefore male privilege isn't real.

[Squinch]

7. Here's what I think is the problem: Women have had to re-define what it means to be a woman and

what the "proper" role for a woman might be, because the old roles were financially and emotionally untenable. So we did. We've completely re-defined which roles are considered appropriate for women.

The problem is that some men never bothered to do the work to redefine themselves and their roles in relation to the new definition of women's roles. They just decided not to.

Now, you see all this crap about how men are oppressed, all these polls that show that men are pissed when their wives make more than they do, this insistence by many men on shunning traditionally female roles even as women are inundating traditionally male roles (yes, we are talking about housework here, among other things).

Something you see here on DU all the timeis a group of men who wallow in bemoaning the fact that men are oppressed by the expectation that they be masculine in the traditional sense of the word, that they need to provide, that they need to be the problem solvers, that they be "real men."

I call bullshit. It is pretty obvious it isn't women who are requiring these things from men, it's other men. Which means it's pretty obvious that the solution is: so, cut that out. Just stop. Do the work. Come up with a definition of masculinity that works, because the one they are clinging to doesn't. Don't pander to the morons who can't change.

That's the source of all this whining. A few idiotic men just want things to go back to where they get to have power over women, so they act as if they actually do. Which makes them completely odious. And some others are afraid of being made fun of by the first group. All the men in these groups see women not as people, but as some construct that defines them, whether that be for better or worse. And they're working on a set of assumptions that will never be valid again.

Thank God, I think there is a group, growing daily, who have been able to step outside the traditional nonsense, and treat women as people, and at least consider redefining their role as men in relation to women.