Ignoring boys' emotional needs fuels public health risks

1) If men were simply trying to protect women from unpleasantness, there would be no need to ban women from additive things like education, property ownership, spiritual leadership, medical autonomy, etc.

2) Women have been performing difficult, uncomfortable work (think agriculture and factories) alongside men this whole time; the occupations women were prevented to hold tended to be the cushier ones in law, fine art, medicine, engineering, finance, etc.

3. Based on demographic voting patterns, the effects of democracy that you seem to dislike are more significantly attributed to men.

4. When men “don’t include” women in a realm in the ways you’ve described, the best case scenario is that women have no legal recourse when they’re denied entry to it (like when women were turned away from college entrance or bank account ownership). In worse scenarios, the consequence could be imprisonment.

5. To act as an autonomous, self-directed, free person is nigh impossible without access to education, property ownership, self-governance, and personal financial resources. Try to imagine how many life decisions would be unavailable to you without these basic rights.

To broaden your worldview, I would recommend picking a topic that interests you historically and digging into the history of women’s relationship to it. You might be surprised by some of the nonsensical ways in which women have been prevented from participating in the most fulfilling realms of human experience.

People here are explaining why fathers are being emotionally unavailable to their sons.

It's not a mistake, and it's not neglect. The fathers aren't idiots or abusers.

It's to train the son to be able to function in a world that doesn't care and will never care about his feelings, his pain, his safety, or his life. A world where all acceptance and love is conditional on being useful to someone else.

The fathers understand that showing weakness or needing emotional help as a male simply makes people distrust, reject, abuse, and abandon you. We've all had this experience over and over. They care about their sons, so they try to teach them the easy way, before the world teachers them the hard way.

It's "the talk" for boys.

A big silence in terms of women’s equality is found in the most drastic case in fields like the military, where even though women have been allowed and encouraged via advertisement, is still overwhelmingly male worldwide. It’s obvious that women’s bodies are not the same as men’s bodies in general… so why would we aim for full equality (aka identicalness) given these basic facts that men are not like women?

Also see pay and work: the more time a woman spends at her job is less time with her kids, which directly impacts society in many unfortunate ways, especially since men are still often the breadwinners, and even sociobiologically, the role of motherhood cannot equal fatherhood. So is work pay more about capitalism & lowering wages or more about a nebulous sense of empowerment?

In terms of assault and harassment: there is also the general culture on both genders of situations that encourage this. For example, things like clubbing, heavy drinking, proximity with strangers, hookup culture, a culture focused on individualism and bringing attention to oneself in terms of clothing, behavior, etc… all of these are factors.

Perhaps to obtain the outcomes people wish to see, “equality” is not the answer.

I disagree.

> The fathers aren't idiots or abusers.

Well, a lot of fathers (and mothers, and non-parents) are idiots or abusers. There are no qualifications for the job other than having functional sexual organs.

> It's to train the son to be able to function in a world that doesn't care and will never care about his feelings, his pain, his safety, or his life. A world where all acceptance and love is conditional on being useful to someone else.

The question is, to what extent are we just "preparing" boys for that world, and to what extent are we creating and perpetuating that world by brainwashing boys into this mentality?

> The fathers understand that showing weakness or needing emotional help as a male simply makes people distrust, reject, abuse, and abandon you. We've all had this experience over and over.

Speak for yourself, not for me.

> They care about their sons, so they try to teach them the easy way

It's not the easy way, though. Boys do have emotional needs, and neglecting those needs takes a hard, enduring toll on them. It's like throwing the kid into the deep end of the pool and forcing them to sink or swim.

> It's "the talk" for boys.

Except there's very little talking. Talking about it would be emotional availability.

Again, "Fathers are also more likely to sing to and soothe their toddler daughters at night when they cry." That's not "the talk". You don't sit down and have a hard talk about the future with a toddler, who hasn't even learned how to speak yet.