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"Man up" and overcome all the challenges that face him through masculine vigor and endurance, all with an uncomplaining stoic demeanor, or die trying? Recognize that he is the "disposable sex" who has to earn his personhood through deeds and through suffering?
And what happens when the rewards for all that effort are, rationally, not worth the effort and expense?
More to the point, after a guy goes through the painful efforts of making himself better, can he expect to achieve a loving marriage, have a kid or two with a loyal wife, and see these kids to adulthood in an intact home?
The stats on that are bleak, as of now.
If not, then what, truly, is the point? Why does he do what he does if not to preserve his status and pass on his genes?
The answer the "Traditionalist" view, which I've outlined above, gives to these questions is perhaps best exemplified in comments by Fox News talking head Tomi Lahren, as covered in this Shoe0nHead video, particularly the bit she said on Piers Morgan's show, on the topic of what women owe men in return for their efforts (at about 15:17 in the linked video):
It is your born duty as a male to work, suffer, and sacrifice for women, children, and society with absolutely no expectation of reward for it, simply because it's part of being a man, and if you don't do it, you're not a man.
In asserting this duty, Western traditions will tend to emphasize it being the will of God, or some such; East Asian ones will tend to put a bit more emphasis on owing it to the spirits of your ancestors. But in the end, they all reject the liberal/libertarian "pure individual," atomized and unbound by any obligation or duty not freely chosen. Instead, you are born in a particular place, a particular time, to a particular family, in a particular class, a particular nation, and, yes, with a particular sex. This unchosen role into which you are born comes with equally-unchosen duties and obligations to which one is bound. (Like the "filial piety" owed to your parents — even if you didn't choose them, and didn't choose to be born — recognized by pretty much every culture save the Modern West. Note, after all, that the first of the Ten Commandments involving one's duties to fellow human beings, as opposed to the earlier commandments covering one's duties to God and the sacred, is "honor thy father and thy mother.")
Where the Traditionalist view fails now is answering what equally-unchosen duties and obligations apply to women, what mechanism is attempting to enforce their application to women, and what society's duties and obligations towards men are. The answers to those three questions seem to be a hat trick of "nothing," which makes the Traditionalist view less than compelling.
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Which is why feminism is, despite the pretense of its practitioners, the ultimate successor to traditionalism.
In an environment of equality- where both sexes can hold the male role thanks to progressively increasing mechanization (it's been going on since the steam engine, but ramped up hard in the early 20th century thanks to a revolution in lightweight portable mechanical power generation)- men are as a consequence owed the inherent dignity of
womenhuman beings.We have a name for people like this: up until about the mid-1960s, they were called "liberals". That whole "rights and dignity of man" thing is pointing at precisely this moral hazard.
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