In the 1980s (when women just got to have their own bank accounts and credit cards, and we just invented no-fault divorce) there was still a lot of prejudice that women were too driven by emotions. My dad (a boomer) still believes this to this day.

The thing is, in the 1970s, we switched to two-income houses rather than the one-income houses of the 1950s. (Shit was evil then too, but that's a different rant) and so women were required to do all this adulting that they allegedly couldn't do. In the 1990s, women were regarded, at least by Gen-X and younger to be able to adult, and of which taking responsibility, being able to lead and / or follow without being a dick, and respecting others. If there was anything different, it was that men were expected to have higher incomes and be able to put more into rent, utilities, dating etc.

(I was dirt poor, but a solid friend so we went out less and ate in more. The VCR / DVD played the same role as Netflix in the Netflix-&-Chill paradigm.)

The way I put it came from the 1983 techno-thriller, Wargames, cut and pasted from a different thread, the man code was this:

🔸️ DON’T launch the LGM-30 Minuteman nuclear-tipped ICBM. Evar. Even if the President of the United States orders you to. (He’s bluffing.)

For most people it was allegory, but for some people, it's a literal thing (also, I know of USAF missileers who admitted they would not launch even under orders, and they've been kept in the same post even during the cold war, so go figure.) Incidentally, women were assigned to missile posts, in 1977 in the USAF, so it seems that the US government trusted women with the decision to launch a nuclear weapon well before US culture got the memo.

Nowadays, we see masculinity as it's expressed by politicians and pundits reminds me of Joffrey Baratheon insisting I am the king which I was specifically reminded of when Trump was strangling his own Secret Serviceman screaming I am the fucking president!

Any man who must say "I am the king" is no true king. -- Tywin Lannister

I wouldn't trust any of these bros not to abuse their lovers and kin, let alone with an LGM-30 Minuteman nuclear-tipped ICBM. But it seems seventy-seven million Americans trust that capacity to Trump.

My teachers were fierce about our capacity as fourth-graders to take responsibility seriously. Also to pronounce nuclear as NOO-klee-ur, so I had to cringe all the way through the George W. Bush era. It's worse in the Trump era, watching my elders acting like overgrown toddlers.

Because in a traditional patriarchal society, good and honorable traits are expected of men while women are expected to be inferior to men.

However as we've realized that women are equal to men and should get equal rights, many men have become whiny bitches who yearn for the so called good old days. Said men don't seem to realize however that "back when men were men" refers to standards they themselves don't fulfill. They just want the gender inequality back and that's it.

I suppose it doesn't have to be exclusively masculine. I'll take what I could get if it could coerce some of these "must be manly" folks to actually aspire to good attributes versus what they seem to think masculinity means right now...