Men's Group

I may fail because I'm not entirely sure what is driving them, so my answers may lack relevancy to your interests. Just putting that up front to prevent as much disappointment as there might be.

Equality for men? Equality for women? Those two phrases don't even make sense except in the Orwellian sense. Equality is... equality. If women are equal to men, then by corollary men must be equal to women. It either is the condition of both or the condition of neither. So making a distinction between wanting equality for men or for women has no meaning. When achieved for one it is achieved for the other.

This was the once stated goal of feminism. By realizing the freedom of women, you do, by corollary, realize the freedom of men from the very same role system which may benefit them in some sense, but offer no alternatives, and be damned the outliers who don't want those roles.

My problem with the word these days is that equality is so far afield of what is being suggested that the original meaning of the word is lost. This is the feminist I am, the once and future feminist, certainly not what passes for it now. I'm sure there are those who would denounce me as some MRA type for daring stand against dogmatic radical anti-choice sex-averse feminism that seems to dominate the modern definition.

Just FYI, ultimately humanism is what we strive for. You can't have extreme advocacy in perpetuity and ever get to equilibrium. The best you get is a highly underdamped system that spends nanoseconds at the equilibrium point before it swings wildly in the other direction. A society perpetually hobbled by gender backlash of one form or another. Humanism may point to everything, but then again, everything originates with the individual. Ultimately, it is freedom for the individual to make the choices in life free of expectation of gender, race, creed or other largely superficial construct and have the equal opportunity to realize an outcome (not a guarantee to a specific one) which is what defines the word humanism in my mind.

So. I've effectively evaded your two questions up front... until now.

That I will answer in the following manner. You may consider it evasive, but it is the only answer I could come up with.

You can never guarantee outcomes. You can only guarantee opportunities. Right now, at least from the standpoint of education, we are experimenting (stupidly) with the former. You can't experiment with the former without introducing disequity in the latter.

The laundry list of educational problems with boys and men is a direct result of this artificial manipulation of outcomes, where the answer most useful to students of all types is establishing equality of opportunity. Sure, you may find that outcomes are not equal. But there are a PILE of reasons for that, including the reinforcement of traditional roles by forces outside of the educational system, disinterest or differing interest, socioeconomic class, parental expectations, and on and on which have precisely DICK to do with gender and are centered around individual situations and tastes. Of course, right now, that sort of thing is the last thing our educational system wants to deal with, the messiness of an individual. All they seem to be equipped with is the educational equivalent of sledgehammers when the problem requires a lighter, more deft touch than that.

There are also the other outcomes you mentioned. If more women took hazardous jobs, they'd die on the job just like men do. As I understand it, the pay (used to overcome the negative of the aforementioned hazard) is very good. If a woman wants to trade a long life for better pay and the possibility of an early death, then there is no problem. If they don't, does that mean that this statistic is any more meaningful? So women aren't choosing high hazard work. Are you suggesting that merely having the opportunity is not enough?

And the whole men incarcerated thing is more amorphous than a gender difference considering that the preponderance of people in jail in general these days are non-violent drug offenders who, with any kind of decent and sensible drug policy, wouldn't be there in the first place. This would radically change the landscape of who is or isn't in prison. If there was appreciable difference after that, perhaps we'd have an issue. Let's correct the prison-industrial complex thing first, then we can come back to it.

The draft I'm with you on. When I say equality of opportunity, going along with that is an equality of responsibility. There is nothing keeping women legitimately from combat. Many women have complained about how they are still not granted equality on the battlefield. Equality means equality in the not-so-good things too, does it not?

To address your final point, I too see one party who uses a lot of their energies proactively attacking. But I don't think it is potential counterparts they are attacking. To be a counterpart means that they should be of common goal. Since when are advocacy and equality common goals? I have never been under the misapprehension that modern feminism is interested in the slightest in equality. They see equality feminists like me as precisely anathema to their goals of advocacy.

Hope this helps.