no email/paywall: https://archive.is/g4qdV
With the unnecessary Trump tie-in aside, which implies men are to blame for "our messed-up dating culture," the author concludes the culprit is our culture's double-standard.
Over the past 60 years, as girls and women have fought their way into classrooms and boardrooms, society has expanded its idea of womanhood accordingly, yet our definition of manhood has failed to evolve alongside it.
This is a conclusion that I reached recently. Women have redefined what expectations men should have of women (well and good), but men haven't redefined what expectations women should have of men.
Throughout the piece the author waffles on the source of the double standard. They begin by implicating culture heritage through fairy tales, appearing to stare past the fact that fairy tales persist because they dramatize something deeply true:
Hundreds of years after the Brothers Grimm published their version of that classic rags-to-riches story, our cultural narratives still reflect the idea that a woman’s status can be elevated by marrying a more successful man — and a man’s diminished by pairing with a more successful woman.
Then acknowledges the context such fairy tales were crafted in:
Throughout much of Western literature, this alone qualified as a happy ending, given that a woman’s security and sometimes her survival were dependent on marrying a man who could materially support her.
Yet returns to claiming the male provider is mostly a social construct:
While so-called female gold diggers are an obsession of the manosphere, much of its content reinforces the male-breadwinner norm — tying money to manliness and women’s preference for providers to biology.
As far as I can tell, modernity hasn't just surprised our myths. Modernity has surprised what our biology expects. The male provider isn't a myth of culture or a coincidence of history. I don't think we can fix the double standard by changing women's expectations of men. I don't think men can, as easily as women have, change their expectations of themselves.