I circled back to this after missing the reference to Reeves earlier. I haven't read his book, but I think your conclusion captures why it is important and why it's so difficult, if you aren't simply holding to an arcane notion of gender, to have a nuanced conversation about masculinity as anything but the perfect foil of feminism. Take the slogans on toddler T-shirts for example. My daughters wore shirts that proudly said, "The Future Is Female." My son was given a hand-me-down that said, "Boys Will Be **Boys** [strikethrough] Good Humans." There's a certain binary reasoning that seems vengeance-driven, as you say. I've been slowly working on a memoir about fatherhood, and some of this is at the fore. It was an education to discover that the standard for being a good father was substantially higher than just being better than my own father. I'm still not sure I understand where the bar is, socially speaking. Certain questions and conundrums related to parenting are much more difficult to pose as a father than as a mother, and I'm not sure that's healthy.
I circled back to this after missing the reference to Reeves earlier. I haven't read his book, but I think your conclusion captures why it is important and why it's so difficult, if you aren't simply holding to an arcane notion of gender, to have a nuanced conversation about masculinity as anything but the perfect foil of feminism. Take the slogans on toddler T-shirts for example. My daughters wore shirts that proudly said, "The Future Is Female." My son was given a hand-me-down that said, "Boys Will Be **Boys** [strikethrough] Good Humans." There's a certain binary reasoning that seems vengeance-driven, as you say. I've been slowly working on a memoir about fatherhood, and some of this is at the fore. It was an education to discover that the standard for being a good father was substantially higher than just being better than my own father. I'm still not sure I understand where the bar is, socially speaking. Certain questions and conundrums related to parenting are much more difficult to pose as a father than as a mother, and I'm not sure that's healthy.