In “Studying U.S. Families: ‘Men Are Where Women Were 30 Years Ago’,” Stephanie Coontz makes some interesting points but, it seems to me, is missing some of the important forces acting on men. She says, for example, that

In some senses, men are where women were 30 years ago. Fifty years ago, women were told, this is your place, stay in it. But about 30 years ago, it was, yes, you can do other things [. . .] Men are at the point where they’re beginning to discover that there are things beyond the old notion of masculinity that are rewarding.

I think the basic issues are simpler:

* Most people have no pre-defined roles in gender or work; this is good in some ways but has costs in others and leads to a lot of confusion, especially given the predominant ideology in schools.

* At some point, probably around 1980 or so (1973 could work, though this wasn’t widely recognized at the time) we entered a period of greater societal, technological, and social volatility. It is hard to predict what the future will look like and what skills and roles will be valuable. My only guess about what will be perpetually valuable is read, writing, and math.

In addition, there is a large number of people (certainly a minority but a reasonably substantial minority) brought up in religious environments that they accept uncritically but that don’t map well onto the modern social world and onto modern hypocrisy. Someone like Dalrock is the consequence (not that I don’t endorse everything he writes or even a plurality of what he writes, but he does criticize many of the social-sexual currents in contemporary Christianity).

* All Joy and No Fun is an interesting book for many reasons, but one is its point about raising contemporary children: many if not most of us don’t know what we’re raising them to do, or be. This makes the task inherently difficult.

* When writers say things like:

It’s so hard to continue the revolution in family life in a situation where there’s so little support for family-friendly work policies, where there’s not good child care available, when there isn’t parental leave. Why don’t we have them?

They actually mean that they want stuff other people are going to have to work to pay for. Not surprisingly most of us want something for nothing. We also have a problem in that lots of old people vote, so their interests are well-represented among the allocation of the federal budget, but not a lot of children do. It’s easy to call for handouts and hard to pay for them.

* Feminism has had a marketing and perhaps a content problem for decades. Among my female students at the University of Arizona, virtually none wanted to be identified as feminists. People who do want to be identified should contemplate why. It may be that students get the motte and bailey issues of modern feminism (do read the whole thing).

* Things that are adaptive in short-term relationships may be maladaptive in long-term relationships and vice-versa, yet I too seldom see this point.

* Men notice the kinds of men who women tend to be attracted to, and a lot of the men women are actually attracted to don’t appear to be the kind who Coontz probably thinks they should be attracted to. In addition, a lot of early socialization about sex and dating is so bad that men (and probably women too) need to learn how to overcome it. Books like Mate and Self-Made Man are important in this respect.

* It should be obvious by now that what people say they want and what they actually do are often quite different.