When are males going to be liberated?

That makes it sound like we're waiting for the freaking marines or something.

Whenever we stop acting like.....................whenever we stop acting.

i must post another comment. it's about the underlying brand of social constructionism at work in your post. gender is not pixie dust. it did not evolve from nowhere, and it not simply theater. it is a complex interaction of social customs, endocrinology, history, genetics, and other variables.

if feminists are going to get anywhere further, we need to start educating ourselves about our bodies and stop chickening out from that line of discourse based on the blanket condemnation of "biological determinism." right now, evolutionary psychology is a field with much insight to offer about gender, IF we integrate it with our social constructionist outlook.

for example, there is quite a bit of evidence that our brains have not structurally evolved that much since the pleistocene, about 150,000 years ago, when we lived largely as hunter/gatherers. the introduction of language and imitation creates other vectors of change that many of us are accustomed to utilizing in talking about gender, but it doesn't go the whole way to explaining things, as we all know. can darwinism be leftist? feminist? YES.

our backbrains and hormonal systems may reflexively institute behavior impulses in line with gendered roles of the pleistocene. for example, in a nomadic hunter/gatherer society, you might expect women to be pregnant (or have died in pregnancy actually), be nursing, or being more protected from the possible harm of hunting -- not because they couldn't do it -- but because men are simply more reproductively expendable. it is not the firmest footing to imagine how our ancestors lived, and it's a little shaky to base any conjectures on existing hunter/gatherer peoples, but neither of these instabilities warrant throwing this line of thinking out completely.

so, what might this mean? well, one thing, a little boy would be protected in the safety net of the homebase and mother or other caregivers (which may have included men who were older or unable to hunt) and then wrenchingly undergo a transition to the hunter culture -- learning to control fear on the hunt, to suppress sensitivity in order to kill, to compete perhaps with other males in being a successful hunter, proving his fitness and ability to provide resources to a mate. this process -- which many of you will also connect with chodorow's argument from twenty years ago -- is an important backdrop of the kinds of intimidation paul brings up. "don't be a pussy!" = "don't remain the culture of your mother."

none of this is a rigid formula, and certainly female hunters, queer people, and male caregivers can be included -- but only to the degree that doesn't undermine the reproductive success of the group. and certainly some things have evolved since the pleistocene!

but still, it most often takes our forebrain, our rationality and consciousness, to look at the capacities of our bodies and souls and override the legacy of our systems. this is what feminism is. we are NOT in the pleistocene any longer and gendered expectations which made at least more sense in that structure no longer apply. contraception and safer sex practices mean that we can have sex for fun and connection and not reproduction. we can be queer. we can cross-dress. we don't have to kill and eat animals. we don't have to toughen men up in order to hunt, nor do women have to be oriented on the little ones. the modern world requires different sets of skills to survive and thrive in.