Mail: Why do today's soppy men act like toddlers who need to be mollycoddled?

1. You can never trust what a woman says she wants in a man.

2. Never try to become the man she says she wants.

What a man can do is decide what HE wants to be and be that. In the end, the women in his life will like him better and respect him more. But more important, he will respect himself and like himself more.

A lot of articles around these days about men in eternal adolescence, etc. All well and good. What is missing from the analysis? Not to sound legalistic here but both lawyers and shrinks are aware of things that go on between people in the form of contracts or transactions. Social protocols are the "interface" that individuals use to fill in the gaps that imperfect knowledge about one another and oneself create. Without these protocols, society would quickly collapse. They are as simple as handshaking in the western world and bowing in Japan. When you first meet, you shake hands (in the west) or bow (in Japan). Other places, people do different things. Of course along with it comes some opening lines like "It's nice to meet you," or words to that effect. If you don't follow these simple rules, depending on the context, it can indicate that you have something wrong with you (even in places where these are general expectations, there are of course exceptions due to circumstance). So even something that minor has great significance.

Now consider something much bigger: A business deal. This is so important, it needs a written agreement binding the parties to uphold expectations that are laid out with consequences drawn up or established in precedent for failure to come through. That is contract law. In transaction analysis, for the social side of things, breaking a major expectation can result in serious repercussions up to and including legal ones (eg: major faux pas is mistaking someone for someone else and then doing something to them that you have no right to do: kiss them, hit them, in some way violate their personhood-- this gets you a trip to jail, and exceeds the definition of 'faux pas' indeed).

One can consider the expectations around 'gender normative behavior' from our recent past as a combination of legal and transactional protocol. The transactional stuff though was, and often still is, enforced in "mommy courts" when there is a legal contract (ie, marriage) involved, and even when there isn't should a child be involved. But if there is no basis for legal issues to arise between a man and woman or more generally, men and women, there is only transactional expectation. Transactions have their own requirements that must be upheld on both sides: if I offer my hand, you are obliged to take it, and we shake when first meeting. What happened a few decades back was that a majority of women here in the west, led by feminists, abrogated their side of the transactional expectations around 'gender normative roles'. As with any such contractual arrangement (and a transaction can be thought of as a socially-oriented contract, just one not on paper), once one party has abrogated their end, the other party has no duty to maintain their side of the bargain.

What we are seeing today is that men, esp. younger ones, are seeing that being like Rob Petrie from the Dick Van Dyke show is not a good idea. First, Laura Petrie is more likely as not to take off at some point with the boy they had together. Second, Laura can get Rob into a lot of trouble with just an allegation of abuse should she decide it's a good way to get him to do what she wants, or get leverage on him in a child custody or divorce proceeding. Third, Laura has also decided she is not going to do the things that her mother used to do for her husband: cook, clean, keep house, etc., all while Rob goes out and earns the money and gives almost every penny to her to spend on the house and family's needs. Instead, she will expect Dick to spend lot of money on her and the kid and still not do much for Rob, but will still complain a lot about him and to him. Such a deal!

So why are there not more Rob Petries in the western world? Because there aren't many more Laura Petries. It really is that simple.

Relationships between men and women were one time based on reciprocal rights and responsibilities. Women have relieved themselves of any responsibility towards men. Laurie Petrie and women of her generation still behaved like ladies--now women don't.

What women want is to be relieved of their responsibilities (obligations) to men but still expect men to meet theirs. Life doesn't work that. A man can take on those responsibilities, but won't when he recognizes they're unilateral. He gets nothing in return.

Women have spent too many years biting the hand that feeds them. Now they can feed themselves.

There has actually been a great deal of discussion lately on the status of men. The inequities they're facing and the fact they are failing in many regards. The public discourse is shifting, ever so slowly, to the idea that women have been granted a great deal, and that maybe it's time to shift some focus onto men. I suspect feminists feel this is a threat, and thus, we are experiencing a concerted effort to lay the blame for men's failures, not on the feminists, who know full well it's a result of their attacks on men for half a century, but instead, blaming men. If men are blamed and held responsible for their own failures, feminists can claim it is simply up to them to fix themselves, and then can continue to proceed claiming women are discriminated against by the system, and advocating even more changes that favor women.

somewhere the feminist movement melded with the legal profession, for $$$.
the precepts of law (equality, fairness, truth, and so forth) don't work in femlaw.
so, they abandoned them wholesale in civil and eventually criminal court. want proof?

1. divorce: equality under the law would mean men and women are equal before the law.
that's a joke to any guy handed his arse by her judge. she got the gold mine and he got the shaft ain't just a song. it's very real. once it was (falsely) decided that women were automatically
the best parent, and thereby got automatic sole custody of the children, and all that comes with it, marriage and the family as we knew it was done.

2. sentencing: it is a well known fact that women only do a small fraction of what a man does for the same crime. things like false accusations by women get men serious jail time. yet, courts are only now starting to even look at any punishment at all. sex with children is another way women get over in court. there are a plethora of other ways men are screwed over in courts.

3. laws: most laws in this country are made to incarcerate men. the first thing a lawyer tells his female client is about her possible female loopholes. what did he do to cause you to break the law? he!!, they cut men's privates off and women laugh about it on t.v. talk shows. equality before the law, truth, fairness, justice? yeah, make me laugh some more.

I posted a second comment to the article, because my first got moderated. lets see if this one posts:

"After decades of normal, healthy masculine attributes (such as strength, curiosity, exuberance, competitiveness, etc) being attacked in our schools as "disruptive" and "dangerous", is it really a surprise that some boys listened (the soppy boys)? Given the insistence of breaking down the gender roles (for women only, men, as this article demonstrates, remain firmly shackled by theirs in our society) and the constant attacks on masculinity, is it a surprise that men have started breaking free themselves? But when men start doing it for themselves, we start hearing cries of irresponsibility (in what way? they aren't taking up the role of provider for some woman who will treat him like crap and divorce him and steal away his kids? that's irresponsible?), to shame them back into their traditional gender roles. It seems that women don't like the path many men have chosen after freedom from their roles, because those path's don't favor women. well too bad."