This is getting old.

Laura Sessions Stepp, writing for WashPo, warns us that men don’t know how to be men anymore…..because of feminism. It turns out, if women don’t feel like shit all the time and actually have lives and goals of their own, men just get so confused;

“The young man who desires a particular young woman has always had to work for her affection, but years ago he knew what he was supposed to do: Ask her out, pick her up and take her home, times 10.

Today, as likely as not, there is no date. She will drive herself, meet up with him and either offer to pay for herself or insist on paying. She may bolt later, or they may land in bed the same night, but chances are he won’t have a clue why either happened.”

It sure is hard to be a man these days. What with all the competition with women at work and the having to actually work to understand them as if they are actual people, I am surprised that we are not having some kind of manhood crisis….oh wait;

“While women are preparing to run corporations, what are guys doing? Playing the new Nintendo Wii?

“In trying to empower the girls,” Sandborn says, “we implicitly sent a message that the guys were not as good. Women succeeded in creating positive new roles for themselves. What we haven’t come up with is what a positive image of a man would be.”

I am getting really tired of reading the same article over and over again. Are men really that fragile that they can’t deal when women start to achieve some measure of equality and must be coddled and told what the positive role for them is? Feminism does not mean women=good, men=bad. That kind of binary thinking gets us nowhere and it demonstrates tremendous insecurity on the part of men if they think that “yes, women are human beings of equal status to you” means they are somehow not good. I just think that most men are much better than that. And people think that feminists are the ones who hate men.

I guess Stepp gets one thing sort of right. After all the hand wringing she says this; “Maybe …it’s not swish or swagger; it’s both. Though I am not sure she means it the same way I do.

Via Feministing