Why has an emphasis on manhood receded in the modern day?

Throughout this series, we have indirectly been touching on these questions. Today we'll tackle them head on. (We explored this subject a few years ago, but I had only skimmed Manhood in the Making at that point, and it deserves a much more thorough and critical treatment. We've now laid down enough context to really dig into it!).

This post is long. Like chapter-of-a-book long. (It was originally even longer, but I decided to break it into two back-to-back posts!). I made it so thorough for those who are very interested in this subject, and for those who will critically question how I came to these conclusions. (If you're not so interested, skip ahead to the cliff notes version in the conclusion).

The length of this post, and that of all the articles in this series, does naturally give rise to an interesting question: is thinking this much about manliness even manly? In truth, I personally spend very little of my time thinking about "gender." I'm not all that interested in analyzing manliness, or dissecting sex differences, or thinking about feminism. Perhaps that is surprising coming from a man who runs a site called "The Art of Manliness," but I'm honestly a really simple, practical guy.