Philip Slater On Masculinity (Huffington Post)

Part of the problem is childrearing. For six thousand years parents have tended to raise their boys as if they were destined to be soldiers--that is, to be stoic, rigid, and aggressive, so they would not easily intimidated by their opponents in hand-to-hand combat. War today involves very little hand-to-hand combat, yet men are still being brought up as if they were being prepared to fight in Caesar's army.

Since men for thousands of years have been brought up to be belligerent, unfeeling, and insensitive, it has fallen to women to take care of those human needs irrelevant to combat. Women have had to become skilled at negotiation and compromise, at recognizing and anticipating the rights and needs of others, at mediating ("Your father really loves you, dear, he just doesn't know how to say it").

As a result, today's women have a head start in the new woven world we live in. Since young girls aren't trained to be compulsively competitive the way men are, it's a lot easier for women to join forces to achieve common goals. Women in all fields of activity are getting together to pool resources and improve skills. They have writing groups, artists' groups, executive support groups, entrepreneur support groups, professional support groups, academic support groups--whatever women set out to do, they tend to do in a cooperative setting.

Women have expanded their lives by asserting that anything a woman decides to do is thereby automatically feminine. Men need to come to a similar conclusion about masculinity. Otherwise they'll be stuck with Dumb, Dumber, and Still Dumber. If they're limited to doing only what women don't do they're in danger of becoming the drudges, the grunts, the expendable bodies in a world where communication is everything.