My Kirk view in my own way, since my path was not a fun one to travel is this.

In a Patriarchal construct, as the man. In a relationship with the woman, flip the script. This has to be 100% consented and 100% communicated with 100% honesty.

It is akin to saying, here between you and me and the friends we meet along the way ... I give you my privilege, but you will have to be accountable and responsible so we can right the scales.

When you personally feel safe and secure personally, and can walk tall professionally. We share both the lead and follower to the best of each person's abilities.

We defend each other and our circle of friends 100%, we also try to recruit and build our tribe with like minded folks getting stronger as we go along.

There is a lot to learn from both sides of the gender house, in all forms. It will be uncomfortable, but if you can't trust your partner to do this trip together, then the partner may not be the one.

I have a belief based on scant articles and from observations is this:

Private property existed because it was found in communal societies the yields did not grow because of the loss of competition to a non-toxic version of group think. We do things this way because we have always done it this way. Examples of this came out later with cattle where shared lands were used to graze between multiple farmers. What happened was everyone overgrazed, and well production fell off. Private property came out with fences, and then one could observe higher yields because the smarter of the farmer families did better, and the weaker dropped out raising the efficiency of the food supply.

This had an unintended side effect, which lead to property rights and wealth and the rest you know as the hierarchy and dominance because you know, who doesn't respect a family that produces more then they consume, and when they feed the masses.

Well repeat this over and over and we get the warped sense we have now, but with the twist that no one really knows how to farm, but all of the systems are still in place totally warped beyond belief.

As for the Gillette commerical, I talked to this in groups and frankly people did not get it. They were wrapped into their own personal traumas and sexist beliefs (women included) that they missed out on the fact I had therapy and talked to this at the cost of thousands of dollars.

My reasoning was this. Gillette did not do this for the betterment of masculinity. They did it to make more money by using men's fear of inadequacy in the same way they used it in the 19th century to force women to shave their legs. What did they do? They inferred women were "unclean" if they were hairy.

This is utterly disgusting. Folks could look for the good in their advertisements, but the damage they did from starting the conversation to make money killed any goodness it evolved.

Same with using a psychologist talking point of the toxic culture of masculinity which was meant for men in therapy with trained therapists who would explain the "culture" aka man box. To someone uneducated.

Instead lets take a phrase which infers all masculinity is toxic because it purposely doesn't take the time to define it, and let it out there with boys and men with barely a 5th grade understanding of it.

I have written this before, so I repeat only for those that have not read my view on this (Elle has seen me talk to this).

I agree we need better systems to deal with the fact that the old ways don't work. There are some good things that come from it, (good stoicism) but we need to work this in a way that can be communicated effectively to men in a non-threatening way.

Right now we get a solid F across the board. If we take school shootings as an example. Well those wonderful souls that believe in gun control, miss the point and should not be part of the solution. Why? They miss the real issue which is how we raise our children and specifically the boys. This is the root cause to ignore it and put it on an object instead of the process of raising children, means one doesn't have the skills or ability to drive the solution.

In our society we need more balanced gender distribution in all things, and yes that means education and some of the medical professions. If there is a gender imbalance we need to figure out the who, what and why.

In the end it will come down to money and resources, and ensuring a balance in the societal ecosystem, where we need to not look at social systems of capitalism and socialism, but of one of co-ops which blend the best of both worlds.

We also need a little mystery too. Differences are awesome (non-toxic ones). They add zing to a hard life, but they should be the ice cream to the cake of real life .... added features and not the main course.