There isn't any 'New Man.' The New Man is the old man, only he whines more.         -- Roseanne Barr (New Yorker: Feb 26. 1996)

 The comic strip "Luann" recently featured a conversation between Luann and another character, Toni, who had just broken up with her boyfriend, Dirk, due to his hotheaded, aggressive behavior. Toni recalls the freewheeling adventures she shared with him but then adds, "The things that made him exciting were also the things that made him dangerous." The "punch line" comes when Luann muses, "Where are the exciting nice guys?" I suspect that question has become more common than we realize.
  Around the late 60's and early 70's, the emotional roles of the sexes appeared to begin a subtle yet noteable reversal of themselves. Many women, eager to affirm equality to their male counterparts, adopted a more tough-talking, aggressive, take-no-prisoners approach to their personalities and life pursuits; in other words, they seemed to become more like men.
  The men reacted to this by taking the other road. The birth of the sexual harassment frenzy, as well as the political correctness craze, saw more and more men being heavily indoctrinated in sensitivity and emotional connection. Nothing is wrong with these things in and of themselves. They are good tools for anyone to have. However, desperate to relate to the women, men did what men are often prone to do and overlearned these concepts to the point of self-emasculation. Several decades and a 50% divorce rate later, men and women everywhere are asking where it all went wrong.
  When the Gen-X'ers began to emerge in the late 80's to early 90's and start their own families and careers, they knew they did not want to live in the shadow of their parents' mistakes. But the upbringing has proven too ingrained, and they have failed thus far in making a significant dent in the divorce rate or any other measure of social dysfunction. But at least they were starting to grasp how inverted things had become.
 
To be continued...