Alvin and SNX, I agree with you both. I'm just surprised a woman had the guts to publish a book about it.
I plan on picking it up. Interested in seeing what she has to say. Even more interested in seeing what my wife thinks.
I've ranted about this before on the board. I'm genuinely concerned about the over-feminizing education my young son receives. I do my best, but I'm one voice in his young life dominated by female role models (his mother, his teacher, his daycare provider, his sister). I know they have his best interests in mind. And for millennia, all of us men were raised by villages of women while the men absconded in search of land, food and war. So his experience in general, is nothing new compared to what I received, or what my forefathers received. Yet I still worry that the intensity of the teaching is greater.
Are men are out of the house and away from families even more than my grandfather was? In my case, that's the case! I am barely home in time for bedtime, because of my work. My grandfather worked in his own repair shop for cars, so he was home for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Did his boys have an advantage over mine? When my grandfather was a young lad, he labored under the hand of my great grandfather on the family farm. Did he learn what it is to be a man in an easier fashion than my son will?
Women taught little boys much differently then, than they do now. Although I'm sure boys have frustrated their moms for eons, it's safe to say my grandmother probably tolerated her "boys being boys" far more than my wife does. My grandmother probably taught them with greater intensity than my wife will, that men should be brave, courageous, strong, stoic, bold, confident, and rife with perserverance. That's probably because in grandma's time, that's what a man had to be in order to survive.
But my wife didn't see men acting like that growing up. She was raised by the boomer generation, just like I was. These men weren't warriors, or explorers, or people who suffered undue hardship like the men at the turn of the 20th century. The boomer generation was gifted an entire economy, raised with unfettered opportunity, and in general had it easy. They had no great war; no great depression; no crushing pestilence; no giant uprising and search for a new land. Their greatest concern was running off to college and seeing how long it would take to put a pool in the family backyard. My wife's mother went to work; she made money, had her own life outside the home. Although I'm sure my mother in law loves my father in law, my wife grew up watching a woman who could have lived completely independent from any man. A lesson my wife learned well. She is fiercely independent and certainly doesn't feel she needs me to protect her or provide for her. That is her perception of how women should be, going forward; her perception is also that if a woman can do everything a man can do, then there isn't much room or tolerance for men being men. It's very difficult for her to reconcile what value men add, sometimes; about the only time she's glad I'm there is when a racoon dumps a trashcan and I have to go kill it. Or when there's a bump in the night and she's confronted with the fragility of the feminine body.
I have to constantly remind her why boys do what they do, what value they add, and why my son needs to learn things a certain way to understand his own worth. She loves him more than anything, but she can't help who she is no more than he or I can. I just think women have a much more challenging job helping to raise boys today than they ever have.
By way of comparison, I think it's far easier for men today to raise little girls. I can teach my daughter confidently how to succeed in business and manipulate markets; how to maximize earning potential; how to sink an arm bar; how to keep your hands near your face in a fight; how to throw a spiral; how to grill a steak; how to do differential equations; how to lift a weight; how to build a shed; how to loose an arrow from your compound bow...stuff that men have always done. Stuff that feminists today would say women should be able to easily master. And who better to teach a woman how to be more like a man, then a manly father who wants his daughter to be strong, tough, and able to make her way in what we've all been told to believe is a patriarchal society? The only problem for feminists...when they finish re-educating men into behaving more like women, will there be any real men left over to teach women how to be more like men? That's the rub of feminism...it's a self-limiting ethos.
And when all that's left are feminized men, will women truly be happy? Or will they lament for the days when "men were men"? And the rub for the feminized man is that he'll get married to one of these uber-women, but he won't be the one chosen to create her children. Feminism will unleash a rash of infidelity as frustrated women search out manly men to father their offspring. I guess that's the society we're about ready to unleash.
Good luck to the next generation of men when the next great war taps them on the shoulder. That'll be a rude awakening, for men and women alike.
