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So "Into The Manosphere" is a netflix documentary, that im sure many here have heard of.
Here is a video on it that I watched, by a psychiatrist. Although I enjoyed it enough, there is a common sentiment that deserves to critiqued, one that was echoed in the video, that i will simplify with a youtube comment (note: this comment is in response to another comment, the context of which i will be representing by {} brackets):
I think this gender abolitionist framing is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Men & Women are judged and valued by society differently. Men are valued based on their ability to climb up social hierarchy to obtain status. Women's value is more reflected by their attractiveness, and reproductive capabilities. Masculinity (attempts) to provide useful guidelines and structure to achieve this end. Women simply do not exist in the same space, so their variation of being a role model wouldn't be a good representation of the male position. It would be a kin to a white man trying to be a role model for black boys - the critical social context is not there.
Women don't grow up thinking about how to be woman, because much of what defines femininity is there by default. You are simply born a sexy girl - you simply gestate a fetus - and then give birth to it. There is little to no skill barrier required in comparison.
EDIT: Ok, the above statement was hasty initially. There are some aspects that are require skill in some capacity. Not all women are born pretty butterfly's, you need make up, nails, hair, ect, and this requires skill in its own right. But none the less, i wouldn't say this is equivalent to the skills sets required for Masculinity.
The problem with "being yourself" as so often espoused by liberal types is that, it provides 0 road map to achieving the traits that women (and people in general) value in men. & this is the same general issue I take with the manosphere opponents - Many of these individuals believe completely asinine and reality denying ideas like "Looks don't matter" or "You just need to be a good person to be attractive". The manosphere, for all its misogyny and toxicity, is at least calling out the reality of the situation: If you are poor, fat, and socially inept - as a man, you will be harshly judged and looked down on within our society. This is - arguably - one of the main appeals of the manosphere to begin with. If one really wants to see the manosphere go away - we need to start looking at these realities of life straight to the face. Only then can one begin to provide meaningfully positive alternatives.
The problem with the gender abolitionist framing is that when push comes to shove virtually no one actually believes it. There are a lot of culturally contingent ideas about femininity and masculinity and associated gender roles and there's some heated disagreement over how much the behavioral differences between men and women are rooted in biology(/natural order) vs indoctrination, but the number of people who think we should actually get rid of gender distinctions is close to zero. What is passed off as gender abolitionism tends to merely be a rebellion against perceived male supremacism and heteronormativity. As far as I can tell, the vast majority of women like being women. When they chafe against the strictures of womanhood, they're not (generally) saying "I wish I could be a man," they are saying "I wish I didn't have to put up with all this bullshit."
All of which is to say, I don't think hostility to the development of any sort of masculinist/male-specific movement descents from a serious belief in gender abolitionism. Rather, there are two main motives:
a) a zero-sum view of gender relations, under which any sort of men's movement is a problem because men's gain is women's loss and vice versa.
b) the (usually correct) fear that any men's movement or space will rapidly become anti-woman.
However, you can't just come out and say "men shouldn't be allowed to advocate for their interests because they'll inevitably become a threat to women." That sort of gives the game away. Instead the issue is dressed up in gender abolitionist rhetoric wherein men's interest in masculinity is held to be illegitimate/mistaken in and of itself (as illustrated in the quoted excerpt). However, this doesn't get great traction with men because it's transparently one-sided (and also bullshit). You can't make a big deal about the importance of representation for women and then turn around and say it's not important for men.
(There is also the separate reality that modern liberalism is very hands off on the question of what it means to live well, which makes it averse to highly prescriptive social norms. This includes strongly defined gender roles.)
I can't speak from firsthand experience due to not being a woman, but from what I can observe and have been told, this is very much not true. Girls have their behavior policed from a young age, and while the framing (and content) may be different across social contexts, the basic idea of needing to learn feminine ('ladylike') behavior and skills is omnipresent. Even in the purely physical domain, feminine beauty is, while helped along to a great degree by genetics, heavily artificial. Often in ways men are hilariously blind to (e.g. many men are comically bad at noticing when women are wearing makeup)
A point I realized in discussions with my wife (early millenial), her mom (boomer) and her sister (gen X) is that there are two fundamentally opposed kinds of male supremacism: First, the idea that biological men are just better, and second, that male social norms are just better. The first is extremely unpopular and is fought very openly and very hard, the second is ... complicated.
Especially among liberal Gen X and older women, there is a common story of noticing that you're being valued for your school and later career accomplishments, and having to become tough and competitive to make it in, often explicitly called, "the world of men". Meanwhile, the worst that can possibly happen to you, that will make your parents bow their head in shame and your classmates laugh about you, is to become pregnant early. Even later, while your parents might switch to start egging you to have kids, your environment will subtly or not-so-subtly never really stops primarily considering your status through the lens of achievements. Anyone can have kids, after all, so it's much more prestigious to become a high-powered lawyer, a professor, or something else.
All of this is a very straightforward application of norms that formerly only applied to men, now also to women. Formerly female norms, centering on communal decision-making, friendliness and inclusivity, as well as achievements, mostly revolving around motherhood and the household, were de-emphasized in the former case and discarded wholesale in the later. Interestingly, acknowledging this will regularly get you dismissed as a male supremacist, on the logic that of course the virtues/achievements I call "male" here are actually just general virtues/achievements, and implying that women might be less good or even just merely care less about them is akin to claiming that women are lesser.
This lead to an dynamic in which Gen X men who are very stereotypically male, who are dismissive of femininity, nevertheless consider themselves pro-feminist in the sense of thinking that women can and should behave the same as successful men. Several of my (former) profs are like that.
Of course people generally don't really change fundamentally, so this just got bottled up for as long as it was necessary. With women increasingly being a majority in many fields, they can now simply enforce new norms, even if it takes some time to (re-)normalize them. And it's unsurprising that these new norms happen to reflect feminine virtues. And the Gen X men are the ones being blasted the hardest, who additionally feel completely blindsided since it's a fundamentally different kind of feminism than the one they were told is the right kind. Millenial men might also be split on whether they like this development, but they seem much less surprised.
My wife notices this a lot, contrasting what she is told by her mother what she "needs to do" to be successful in the workplace, and how much her mom was kept back and discriminated against (in addition to being an east german in a west german company, who didn't get her advanced degree accepted to boot!), often in fairly overt ways ... and many of those don't really apply anymore, except for the part where you get screwed over hard for having kids and actually wanting to care for them. As long as you're childless and conform to male norms, you are, if anything, getting beneficial treatment.
The woke revolution seems to a substantial degree to be women just re-asserting that their values matter, too. But unfortunately these values can be wildly disadvantageous in the workplace; For example, you can't do without substantial competitiveness that women find deeply unpleasant. So at the end we arrive at a weird androgynous ideal, where men are forced to engage in female norms they dislike, while women are forced to engage in male norms they dislike. The "great feminization theory" is in this way correct about the recent changes, but fails to see the ways in which women also have accepted a, for lack of a better word, internalized masculinization a longer time ago that now sits so deep that calling it into question feels to many like a personal attack on their self-worth.
Dunno how we can fix this. Just talking about the issue usually gets you called names, and average differences are dismissed with single counterexamples. It's understable that women don't want to be forced all the way back into the kitchen, but at the same time, many of them clearly aren't very happy in highly competitive workplaces that don't suit their values. And the men likewise don't want to work in an adult Montessori kindergarten, either.
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