"If the ascent of women has been much exaggerated, so has the descent of men."

Asserts Stephanie Coontz:

Men’s irresponsibility and bad behavior is now a stock theme in popular culture. But there has always been a subset of men who engage in crude, coercive and exploitative behavior. What’s different today is that it’s harder for men to get away with such behavior in long-term relationships. Women no longer feel compelled to put up with it and the legal system no longer condones it. The result is that many guys who would have been obnoxious husbands, behaving badly behind closed doors, are now obnoxious singles, trumpeting their bad behavior on YouTube.

In the old days — which social conservatives would like to continue — women locked men into marriage and did what they could to tame them and tie them to a socially and economically useful way of life for the benefit of all of us. (This is why the phrase "marriage is between a man and a woman" is so deeply meaningful and important.)

I'm extracting the Coontz bits that interest me, so here's another (shorn of its connection to that other one, which you can click on the link to read):

One thing standing in the way of further progress for many men is the same obstacle that held women back for so long: overinvestment in their gender identity instead of their individual personhood....

Just as the feminine mystique discouraged women in the 1950s and 1960s from improving their education or job prospects, on the assumption that a man would always provide for them, the masculine mystique encourages men to neglect their own self-improvement on the assumption that sooner or later their “manliness” will be rewarded....

Now men need to liberate themselves from the pressure to prove their masculinity.

If you wouldn't be so much of a man, you wouldn't suffer so much from The Decline of Man. Women are on the upswing, but you can join us, be with us, but you're going to have to shed that manliness and become... An Individual... like Us the Women... who have ascended.