Neither a real man, nor an empowered woman

"we need to start being honest about what being a man has come to mean."

Readers of this blog will be familiar with how often I address this question, and my worry that we don't talk about this enough.  I don't understand why we shy away from this question.

First, let me admit to this: Like any male, I too took my gender privilege for granted, especially during my formative years in the old country, even as I empathized with the struggles that my sister had to go through, the experiences of my grandmothers, their "monthly" hassles,... And, I am sure I have behaved like a jerk on one too many occasions since.  This post, or any of my loud thinking here, is not because I believe I am on a high holy ground, but because I believe that I, and we, can do better by tackling that question of what it means to be a man in the contemporary world, and in the future.

The current (p)resident in the White House provides us with an urgent context to think about it.

Trump’s rise has made it terrifyingly clear that his toxic version is not at all peripheral to 21st-century modern masculinity. It is central. It is authoritarian. And it is lethal.
If we’re going to survive both President Trump and the kind of people he has emboldened, we need to attack masculinity directly.

I agree.

Like the author, I don't believe that tackling this masculinity means that women need to be like men.  That's bullshit and sexist.  It does not mean that men ought to be kinder and gentler like women, because that is also bullshit and sexist--as if only the "fairer" sex is capable of being kind and gentle, and that they are not "womanly" otherwise.

We need to stop talking about what it means to be a “real man” or an “empowered woman,” and begin talking, instead, about what it means to be a good person and a good citizen. Our nation’s future depends upon it.

Exactly.  Is that hard to understand?  But then how does one get this message across to 63 million people?