KaraLee Langford, Editor

Far too often we hear about the problems and difficulties women endure in today’s world. Truthfully, it is not popular opinion to endorse the male’s side and empathize with their struggles.

Women are pushed to the forefront of gender battles, body image issues, workforce pay discrepancies, and so much more.

We forget that, while the female gender role is under reconfiguration, the male gender role must adapt as well.

Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology said, “Over the latter part of the twentieth century and into the first decades of the twenty-first century, societal gender role attitudes have become more egalitarian among both men and women, paralleling broader social and economic changes.”

Gender roles between males and females have come a long way in the past decades, but are still in the process of evolving. Now, stereotypical roles, such as women being the homemakers

and guys being the breadwinner, tend to bleed into one another as more and more people are accepting different lifestyles. “A study of husbands found those with more traditional beliefs

who performed fewer chores and those with more egalitarian beliefs who performed more chores had higher marital satisfaction than those whose beliefs and roles conflicted” the Social Psychiatry and Psychiatric Epidemiology Association reported. “It is the powerful rethinking of how we raise girls and boys.

The gender equality revolution is coming on fast and coming on strong. It’s time for men to join the fight for gender equality.” Michael Kaufman said in his book, The Time Has Come, Why

Men Must Join the Gender Equality Revolution. Kaufman said the way society has formed what it means to be a man is self-destructive. “And for men? More and more of us are realizing we cannot stay silent. We know we must speak out and we must examine our own attitudes and behaviors. But we’re also realizing that it’s time to rethink and reshape what it means to be a man because of the destructive and self-destructive ways we’ve defined manhood.”

It is time for us to fight for equality on all fronts. To encourage men to address the things they don’t normally talk about.

“It may sound strange,” Kaufman said, “but it turns out that men pay a terrible price for the very ways we define manhood and construct men’s lives within societies where we have more power. It turns out that the gender equality revolution will mean that our lives as men will be changed for the better too.”

Kaufman realized the start of feminist movements is the beginning for all gender equality movements. “There are so many of us, so many men, who are now realizing these changes stand to make our own lives better too. There are so many men who realize the time has come.”

We are entering a century crucial to the development of genders. Not only are we fighting for the basic rights of minorities, but gender equality as a whole. “Male-dominated societies have created expectations and ideas for men that set boys and men up for failure. Male-dominated

societies have determined that men should not be emotionally aware or expressive-or at least, not too expressive- and, as a result, have made us and those around us completely vulnerable

to deeply rooted and often, deeply hidden emotions.” Kaufman said. “The time has come for men to join the gender equality revolution.”

Now is not the the time to take a step back and think ‘someone else will speak out.’ Now is the very time when your words mean the most. It is time to break the bad habits that isolate genders

into sections. It is time to break the paradox surrounding male culture. After all, we as a society are the ones creating the social construct of gender norms. We are essentially setting ourselves up for failure.

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