I think you meant well, and you certainly raised some important points, but I cannot get over the clear bias in this article and its click bait title. You start out talking about whether women want equality, imply they somehow overshot their mark, and are now reaping the benefits at the men’s expense. You then proceed to use a source which reveals something entirely inimical to your arguments.

What made me upset was the fact this read more or less like an MRA puff piece.

A Voice for Men launched a site purporting to track female murderers and rapists, as well as women who scheme against men. The site’s motto: “Fuck Their Shit Up.”

Warren Farrell is seen as the father of the men’s movement. The work you sited, The Myth of Male Power, is the bible of the “angry man” rights movement. In its pages, it compares rape to “buyer’s remorse and eating potato chips.” The book is used to justify discrimination against alleged female oppressors and is indirectly responsible for misogynistic groups like A Voice for Men. Warren Farrell created controversy by saying incest can be a positive experience in his interview with Penthouse magazine.

“… [M]illions of people who are now refraining from touching, holding, and GENITALLY CARESSING [my emphasis] their children, when that is really part of a caring, loving expression, are repressing the sexuality of a lot of children and themselves.” — http://www.florida-family-lawyers.com/trishwilson/farrell2.html

If you follow the link, you will find the full article and a photocopy of the original 1977 issue of Penthouse Magazine.

Well-known American feminist, ethicist and psychologist Carol Gilligan described the problem of how we raise girls and boys in an interview with Feminism.com:

“Patriarchy is used now as sort of a code word to mean men’s oppression of women — it’s not! It’s a system, a hierarchy where hieros means priest and where the priest (the hieros) is a father (pater). It’s an order of living where a father, or some fathers control access to truth, or salvation, or knowledge,” says Gilligan. “And it affects men as well as women.

“My research shows it affects men at a much earlier age — the pressure on little boys to internalise a patriarchal voice occurs around five. And the pressure — the shaming of boys — ‘you’re gay, you’re a girl, you’re a mama’s boy’ — it’s almost like a strategy of the patriarchy to characterise it as though men are the victors and women are the losers. It’s a system of oppression that cuts off everyone from parts of themselves. It makes a line between men and women, and between men and boys, between men and children, between some men and other men.”

In order to change the way that we treat one another, we must first become aware of who we are. There is a big problem with just labelling oneself as a something-ist, because once this happens the something-ism becomes part of one’s identity. As a result, any discussion of the values involved in the concept can be perceived as a personal affront, an attack on who that person is. Immediately there is a personal and collective expectation that, as a member of a group, you represent the values of that group.

Instead of continuing to exist as a person with millions of individual ideas, one’s identity becomes compartmentalised into set parts — feminist, capitalist, vegetarian — each of which have their own assumed beliefs and ideas. What this means is that it’s easy for a person to find themselves defending issues that they don’t personally agree with simply on a misguided principle. Everything else becomes the evil ‘other’ that should not even be considered.

Now you have both sides.

I laud your attempts at addressing issues men face. Indeed, they too get the shaft. I just cannot agree with everything you said. You identified the what but not the why or how. This article has very little with whether women in general want true equality. Going from the title and your sweeping conclusions, you completely silence the voices of women who do not match your stereotypes. There is far more variety among men and women you completely leave which would make this entire article almost irrelevant.

You would have had a better article if you focused solely on men’s silent pain, since that seems where your interest lies.

Most of men’s problems do not come from women but from other men, rich men, powerful men, men who write the books, men who dictate policy and culture.

The “patriarchy” then, doesn’t care about men either. As psychologist Roy Baumeister said, “What seems to have worked best for cultures is to play off the men against each other, competing for respect and other rewards that end up distributed very unequally.” Whereas women get rewarded for “being” men get rewarded for “doing” — “Men have to prove themselves by producing things the society values… That basic social insecurity of manhood is stressful for men… but that insecurity is useful and productive for the culture, the system.”

Some women follow along, because it suits their interests. Some just do because of some genetic fallacy they believed when it came to sex and gender, and some just do not know what the hell is going on. The same applies to men. Women follow in the footsteps of men, and it only compounds the problems already present within a sadomasochistic structure. Women point out these problems or leave. They are early to the game and see it is sadomasochistic and destructive, and some rightly call for men to change their conditions or abandon it completely. These conditions and conflicts are not innate within our biology. They exist only in our environment, which is very much man-made, setup long ago by powerful interests before the women’s rights movement.