In many cases, though, what's at stake is more than just a few crumbs. We should also bear in mind that it's not real progress to simply replace one kind of bias with another: we should be striving for true fairness, along with a bit of empathy for everyone's needs.
Case in point: in our rush to make education more
girl-friendly,
we've inadvertently made it boy-hostile, with the result that boys are
now failing in droves. Many of our better colleges are
becoming 60% female, 40% male. This will have major effects
on people's lives.
Other changes have had less dramatic impact, but this doesn't mean they ought to be imply brushed aside. Cumulatively, they add up to a kind of cultural surround that simultaneously puts men in environments they don't do well in, and then faults them for being, in effect, defective women.
One small example: Men today are commonly told that if we want to succeed in relationships with women, we’ll have to do certain things in different ways than we may be accustomed to. Thus, if a woman tells us about a problem, we’re supposed to resist the male urge to “fix it,” and just provide sympathetic feedback--the way women do. Is anybody telling women that they should change the way they talk about their problems to men?
Another small example: When I finally got around to watching an episode of the much-talked-about TV show “Queer Eye for the Straight Guy,” I was struck by how readily the premise was accepted that there was something deficient about a heterosexual man if his wardrobe, interior decorating, and entertaining skills were less than spectacular. Nobody paid the slightest attention to the deficiencies of the guy’s wife—the person who, traditionally, you’d expect to be attending to these matters—except to sympathize with her frustration over her husband’s failings.
Why, exactly, should men be trying to copy women today?
Granted, there are many things that women tend to do better than men: multi-tasking, holding phones on their shoulders, and a host of others. But there are also things that men tend to do better.
Like opening jars...killing spiders...and leading.
