Offbeat

This is way more complex to attribute blame to people of specific gender here.

Statistically speaking, at least in my country, women are now more likely to get a degree and move to a big city for work. In the big picture it isn’t because of some affirmative action (there’s some of that but it’s blown out of proportion) but simply because women are more likely to be socialised as diligent, agreeable and therefore more compatible with education and more employable in modern white collar jobs. Men are socialised to be somewhat unruly and aggressive (especially those from rural areas) so they stay behind to look after family farms and other businesses which often aren’t very profitable. This combined with little to no contact with women leads to them looking for something to blame for how their life turned out to be, usually ending with misogyny adjacent political ideology.

Current situation is similar to what suffragettes faced back in the day - they had to convince men but also swathes of women that they deserved equal rights. This toxic masculinity isn’t just harmful for women, it costs men a lot too - shorter lifespans, higher incarceration rates, higher suicide rates etc. We’d all be better off with some other masculinity model but it’s so ingrained into capitalism that both reinforce each other.

I wouldn’t absolve women of blame either. Same as every living person regardless of gender, they tend to look for a mate of similar social standing and are unlikely to compromise because there’s little reason to do so. This has strong classist undertones because that’s what it is. Men can compromise on it but for all the wrong reasons so I’m not saying that anything should be reversed here, rather we should rethink how all of this should work for the benefit of everyone. We emancipated women not because someone thought all humans or equal but because capitalism needed more workers and that’s probably where all of this went wrong.