There has definitely been an overcorrected counter-reaction in popular culture since the 1970s and 1980s where you all the sudden see lots of sitcoms and films depicting men as incompetent, weak, etc. and the women as more competent and well adjusted. The Simpsons comes to mind as a classic example. This is a reaction against the fact that up until the 1970s virtually all women in popular culture were depicted as borderline children, with rare exceptions.
Still: I can with no difficulty list many strong male leads in media from this era onward. They're not hard to find. My wife and I just got done binging The Expanse, which had many including the main character (as well as many strong female characters). Action and comic book films are loaded with down-right ridiculously over-powered male leads.
Are modern HR departments too strait-laced? Yeah, they probably are, and this too is probably an over-correction. It's a reaction to the days when sexual harassment of women in the workplace was just standard expected behavior, and in many cases a woman was expected to "put out" for her superiors to rise in certain professions. It probably is possible for HR to chill out a little without us going back there.
Is there a need for more positive depictions of men in popular culture and better male role models? Why yes, that's what I'm arguing. I don't think there are enough, and I think the "manosphere" mostly pushes misogynistic trash and a desperate caricature of masculinity that comes of -- to me at least -- as weak and pathetic. It comes off that way to most women too. A guy saying he's an "alpha male" is identifying himself as fragile and emotionally stunted.
> This even extends to what essentially amounts to pharmacological abuse of boys - when 8 year old boys full of energy can't sit still and pay attention to a boring middle-aged women dispassionately lecturing about boring grammar, the boy is ruled cognitively defective (ADHD) and prescribed powerful amphetamines, nearly as a default course of action!
This is a hill I will die on, because I've seen it first hand: ADD/ADHD is absolutely 100% real.
Is it sometimes mis-diagnosed or over-diagnosed? Sure. But I have seen -- in my immediate friend and family circles -- many cases of people of all ages for whom ADD treatment was absolutely transformative. Like going from "possibly developmentally disabled, unable to learn to read" to straight A student. I've seen some adult examples too.
It's like this: about 60% of the population wear or could benefit from glasses, contacts, or some other kind of vision correction. That's more than half. Why? Because if it doesn't stop you from reproducing, it stays in the gene pool. Having perfect vision was not a requirement for survival, so evolution did not hyper-optimize for it.
Why wouldn't the same thing be true for things like the brain and central nervous system? It would be surprising if half the population weren't walking around with brains that, if mildly tweaked, could function much better.
Do eyeglasses emasculate men? Is it more masculine to be unable to read small text, or unable to make things out from a distance?
BTW -- plenty of girls have ADD/ADHD. It is not gender-specific. I would be willing to believe that it might be over-diagnosed in men, but it's probably under-diagnosed in women. A woman who can't focus and is either a manic-pixie-dream-girl or too passive carries less of a social stigma than these things do for a man.
We have bent over backwards as a society to accomodate women where society was previously was much more genuinely unfair to women than it is right now. Women are heavily preferred over men in hiring, resumes otherwise identical. Try submitting your own resume to several dozen companies, half with your real name, half with a name that conveys the opposite gender. Almost nobody ever actually does this and thus nobody ever seems to recognize it's true, it's just shouted down as "misogynistic" while completely ignoring the point that men genuinely are disadvantaged and women are genuinely privileged in many (but not all) aspects of society today.
There are dozens of homeless shelter beds available to women and children only for every 1 bed available to homeless adult men. Young women have access to more gender-specific scholarships than men do, even though women now outnumber men in both university admissions, university graduations, and job placement. Unmarried women under 30 in major metro areas have already been out-earning their male peers for a decade now.
Yes there is still an economic penalty for motherhood, and yes all of the advances we've made in women having equal rights are fantastic and wonderful examples of progress in the right direction, and yes, there is still more work to be done to advance the interests of women's rights and equality.
I think we can and should be trying to advance the rights and equality and well-being of both men and women. It doesn't need to be a either-or or a win/lose. Win/win solutions are possible.
That said, until the left is ready to stop verbally assaulting anyone who questions whether loading up young boys with amphetamines is a good idea as "misogynistic", I'm not sure where the strong, positive, kind, respectful male role models are supposed to be coming from.
I'm not advocating for reducing the support we offer to women, I'm advocating for increasing the support (not necessarily financial, even just emotional support and interpersonal kindness goes a long way) for boys and men.
Women tend to be pretty skilled at setting up healthy support networks for themselves, men seem to struggle with this much more. Many men are socially isolated, touch deprived (haven't even been hugged in months or years), and have been subject to physical, emotional, or even SA. But any time these issues are brought up, the immediate reaction is judgement and condemnation - there's an automatic assumption that those men must have done something wrong, and that is just how people respond to their actions, but that's just as much an example of uninformed victim-blaming as people criticizing the clothing choices of women who've been SA'd.
We have to be willing to recognize that not all boys and men are inherently evil, stop mentally accusing them of being inherently evil before taking the time to understand their lived experiences, and treat them with the same respect and decency we expect women to be treated with.
And no, I don't mean to excuse, justify, or defend actual toxic masculinity traits like bullying, SA, being socially domineering, etc. Those are still serious social ills that must be addressed by our society, including with criminal charges when appropriate.
It would just be nice if those men didn't get sentences that were twice as long on average as women do for committing the exact same crime. For some reason, this is morally reprensible when it's being done to ethnic minorities, but everyone seems to think it's perfectly fine when it happens to men.