The question in the the title of this post is inspired by a NY Times article:
At Colleges, Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust .
The articles makes very clear that women presently outperform men in scholastics. They remain more motivated throughout their college career, register and succeed in more difficult subjects and garner more academic rewards. Though success in school does not yet quite show up in the corporate world--men still make more than women--it may just be a matter of time before their scholastic triumphs transfer to the workday world. Whatever, your opinion about gender based economic inequality, overwhelming evidence suggests that American women's desire to flourish outweighs that of men.
While this certainly bodes well for women, this reality troubles me in many ways as it should everyone. I know that successful women now complain about the difficulty of finding suitable men to date and marry; because they make more money and are better educated, their choices are limited to men below their social or economic status. One can easily extrapolate the circumstance to where we have a class of highly educated and motivated females running corporations ruling over less educated and motivated men. Yes, a bit of stretch, but certainly a possibility.
So my question to any of you still reading "The White Papers" is: Is it time to help men? Obviously, gender inequality still favors those with penises; our representative government is woefully short of female representatives; women still have more reason to fear men than the opposite. Nonetheless, an unequal society of any kind is worrisome for reasons already stated. Women still bear more responsibilty for child-rearing, but must they also find some way to motivate men to do more?
Personally, I am one of the unmotivated. My father, though he remained married to my mother until his death was a father in name only; he paid the bills (after many arguments) and that was it. My mother overcompensated for his absence and declared me, at a young age, as "The Man of the House". I have struggled with this ever since. I mention this because the end of the article refers to men who isolate themselves to their rooms, neither going to class or socializing until they flunk out. I know that pain. Men generally do not have the support systems women do. The quiet loner is still seen as a romantic hero instead of a flawed underdeveloped human.
It is time to address the emotional needs of males in a different way. But how?
