I appreciate your explorations into this topic, especially as you are looking at it from various angles. I’ve had numerous online conversations with men, who defend aggression and hyper competition as a result of testosterone, or that it is a ‘natural’ masculine way of being.

I’m willing to consider the biological angle, but what I’ve observed of the men in my life, some aggressive, some passive and some healthy assertive, is most of what we deem masculine or feminine is culturally based. We learn these ways of being as a child, they are reinforced into adulthood and it takes a huge effort to change something that has been a part of your identity for decades.

We are rewarded for specific behaviors and punished for others. Men who were rewarded in their family and community for being ‘tough’, ‘alpha’ and ‘dominant’ and who were punished for any signs of emotionality, vulnerability, empathy - will tend to dig in, get angry and be dismissive when you ask them to explore these areas of lesser development. Their parents and their grandparents and their great grandparents plus the community they live in, the media they consume, the friends they hang out with, are entrenched in and have upheld these outdated ideals.

The public mask will have to drop and the thought of facing potential shame is too much, the thought of being kicked out of their ‘in group’ is not acceptable. The fear of being emasculated or not having a role they’ve always known is more than they can fathom. And for that, I feel compassion and yet, the perpetuation of these ingrained stereotypes is hurting everyone, especially the men who uphold them.

In the U.S. and other countries, women have been on a long path of redefining what is possible for our gender across a much broader spectrum of behaviors, career, family, relationships, sexuality, and appearance - since the late 1800s in the suffrage movement, accelerated in the 1960s with the sexual and economic revolution and continuing to this day. Feminism isn’t a perfect movement, but it has provided billions of women across our planet with way more options than our female ancestors.

Yet, during that same period, most men were not exploring a broader range of identity, many were actively resisting any attempt to change what masculinity had meant for generations. The stereotype of a financial provider, who is the decision-maker, who needs to lead, who needs to be paid attention to, who has to push his ideas on others, who needs a title, money and status to be respected, who needs to climb the ladder and compete to win, who needs to generate war and conflict in the name of ‘protection’ — keeps being passed down from one generation to the next. Continues to be perpetuated in our media.

Now that many women have done this work, to redefine themselves more individually, we are expecting men to have done the inner and collective work to shift out of these unhealthy dynamics too. But a lot of them haven’t or won’t. A man told me yesterday that if by doing his inner work, I meant emasculating him, no thank you.

Many men don’t value introspection, self-awareness, collaboration and kindness, because they either been taught not to, or because of the idea that it’s the realm of femininity, and those are second-class attributes, for the ‘weaker’ gender.

However, women are not weaker, if anything, we’ve had to be stronger to survive in a masculine dominant society that considers us to be less than, even though we are the majority of the population.

As people born into a female body, we’ve in some ways had more freedom of personal expression than men, and in other ways, a lot more oppression in terms of bodily safety, unequal representation and economic inequity.

I believe most of the tension is due to the fact that as a whole, the male gender has not been evolving as quickly as the female gender (not a judgment, just an observation).

And now that gender is being explored on a fluid spectrum, those who adhere to a ‘traditional’ way of being a man, have even less idea of where they fit in and how they will be respected. At one time, all they needed to dominate and minimize was women, but what do they do with someone who us trans or gender fluid? Oh yeh, dominate and minimize them too.

We’re talking nearly 120 years of unequal gender evolution, which is now coming to the forefront in many aspects of society.