liquidlifehacker caught this review of a generation of males.
The changes in women’s lives — their roles, ambitions, opportunities — have been studied from every angle.
But men’s lives have changed too, in ways that are more confusing, more contradictory and often less welcome. Men did not ask to have their roles redefined.
Men have come to accept — even celebrate — their wives’ careers and paychecks while learning, step-by-step, how to bathe the baby and baste the turkey. But there is no Julia Child’s style primer on closeness, no chart with diagrams: Insert A into slot B, and there you go. Intimacy achieved. Let’s go have a cold one.
It would be funny if it weren’t so painful.
“It’s probably the real cause of half of all divorces,” according to Sam Margulies, a divorce mediator in Greensboro, North Carolina, and author of several books on the subject of marital breakups.
“Very few women could compare their lives to their mothers” and say, “We look pretty similar,” says Steven Nock, a professor of sociology at the University of Virginia who has studied what marriage means to men. “Women have so many dramatically different options in their lives. But where are men taking their cues about what it means to be a husband or a father? There is much less discussion in our society about that.”
The guidelines for being a good husband used to be simple: provide, protect, maybe trim the hedges now and then. Now wives still want all that in a mate — and more.
The Emperor’s New Woes at Psychology Today
Update:
More big changes ahead? Impending dude shortage?
During the past thirty years, the number of male births has decreased each year in the U.S. and Japan. What’s more, an increasing proportion of fetuses that die are male.