Men's Liberation

Excerpt:

As for my masculinity, it has never recovered from the defeat it was handed one night by my wife, the very person for whom I had been, I thought, patiently preparing it. We had had a conversation about chivalry. I thought I could save the idea by retaining the bits of it that seemed to offer the least advantage to men and jettisoning the rest. In everyday circumstances, I insisted, men and women must be understood as interchangeable equals—no more pay gaps, no more devaluing of women’s work as such—but in the world of lurid, bad-movie scenarios, it had to be my job, as the man, to die for her. If we were on a sinking ship, she’d get the last seat on the lifeboat. (She hates sailing.) If we were attacked by terrorists, I would get myself killed stalling them, so she could run away. (Terrorist attacks are not frequent in Ann Arbor.) She laughed this off, but later grew thoughtful. She asked me, very earnestly, why should she want to live with the grief and shame of having failed to save my life? Why should she be automatically drafted for those forms of suffering? If her love for me meant the same thing to her that my love for her did to me, then even my watered-down, break-glass-in-emergencies chivalry was still an insult to that love. It was still, as she put it, “hierarchical bullshit.” I cannot quite accept the emotional consequences of this, but I know she is right.