  Now that I have been working in the private sector 9:00-5:30 plus 1 to 1:30 hours commuting each way for a few weeks, I've been thinking more about the ways in which gender roles are oppressive of men. Although I like my job, it's pretty easy to see the reasons why not everyone would want to work full time. For example, you're being monitored and have a limited number of times you can go to see the doctor, since that must come out of your sick or vacation time, insurance considerations notwithstanding. You have to be in a particular place at a particular time for at least eight hours every day. Although I don't much like children, I can see scores of benefits that could come with staying home full time to care for your own. On top of the instrincic benefits of getting to spend time with your children and do everything you can to turn them into people who will be happy, successful, and virtuous (in alphabetical order), you have a certain amount of flexibility in your schedule and have time to read, especially once your children are in preschool.
I may be overstating the time benefits here, but I list them because they'd be things that would be really important to me, so I think of them first. Yet, as Warren Farrell pointed out long ago in urlLink The Myth of Male Power , while women can freely work full-time, part-time, or no-time as their preferences and circumstances permit, the only option for a man that our society regards as acceptable is to hold a full-time job.
There are househusbands these days, but they're still extremely rare. Montgomery County, MD, where I grew up, is a pretty liberal area, and Swarthmore College, which I attended, is very far left, yet I have never met a househusband or anyone who tells me that they know one. I'm not sure how widespread the pheonomenon is even among gay males , who are more accostumed to breaking with gender expectations (I'm barely active in the "gay community, so I don't know this kind of thing. ) It seems to me that this restriction of the options available to fully half of our society has got to count as a major injustice, despite the advantages men have in making it to the top of the career ladder. (I believe research presently indicates that men and women with the same education and experience are paid about equally. ) Yet the feminist movement has not, so far as I know, been vigorous about making this point. In one way this is understandable, since their concern is improving the lives of women. Nonetheless, the fact that there is a movement dedicated to ensuring that women have access to the same advantages and opportunities as men do, but not vice versa, seems to me to convey a pretty strong message. Looked at this way the women's movement comes to seem almost mysoginistic. At least during my lifetime, the public face of feminism has been demanding stronger anti-discrimination protections in the workplace, childcare for working mothers, and the like. Those are all fine things, but the message I have absorbed through my liberal upbringing is that for a woman, a career choice is the best choice. Is that what feminism has come to - telling women that the roles our society associates with women are unworthy and the roles our society associates with men are? (DISCLAIMER: I don't know much about feminism, so the above may be based on that misunderstanding. ) Of course, the state of gender roles now is far superior to what it was in the past, and there is still a lot to be done even by conventional feminist standards.
But that doesn't change the fact that gender roles for men are still tightly restrictive and men face other serious problems in our society. I haven't even touched on issues like what Farrell calls the "glass cellar" that keeps millions of poor men working dangerous jobs in poor conditions, from which women are largely absent, or the fact that our society considers men's lives to be much less valuable than women's.
When Uma Thurman can slice a hundred male samuari to bits onscreen in urlLink Kill Bill: Volume 1 , in good fun, but when was the last time you saw female extras slaughtered onscreen en masse ? Men are more likely to be the victim of violent crime - in 2000 (the only year for which I could quickly find urlLink statistics more than three times as many men were murdered as women. Yet nothing is said about this at all! 
