I felt very much the same way when I was trying to figure out what was going on and what I believed. What I ultimately landed on is that feminism is really the only game in town when it comes to identifying what is actually happening. I found Bell Hooks’ The Will To Change immensely useful in sorting it out – it’s not men vs women, it’s the patriarchy vs all of us. One thing she wrote in that book that really resonated with me, and is basically what this post is about, is something along the lines of “the first act of violence that patriarchy demands of men is the destruction of their own emotional selves.”