I recently read a book - unfortunately, I don't think it's been translated to English - called "Argumenter for Mænd" (Arguments for men) by a Danish psychologist named Svend Aage Madsen. He's spent decades working for male advocacy, and imo he's one of the best right now at approaching the topic in a constructive, meaningful way.

The book itself is absolutely worth a read, where he reflects on his 50 years or so of advocacy in an attempt to forge a way forward. Specifically, he identifies four key areas of concern: Paternity, health, education and loneliness.

I won't go into these topics in detail (unless there's a great desire for it,) but there's an overarching message that's stuck with me.

Simone de Beauvoir, one of the most influential feminist writers of the 20th century, wrote her book "The Second Sex" about the idea that, to put it succinctly, that woman is a gender, while man is a default. The world is designed for men, and women are defined as being an "other" in that world.

I don't agree with that idea today - although I'm sure it was absolutely valid in the 1950s - but I do think we can learn a very important lesson from it.

It's a little high flying, but he proposes - and I agree - that men need a moment of separation. If you think of "gender studies" (ok, maybe not in this forum, but in general,) you're going to think of women. If someone says a problem is gendered, it is often code for being about women. There's women's health, and then there's health. See the problem?

That's what we need to change. We need a general, cultural understanding that men have challenges and problems that are unique and gendered, that we need to tackle, and that those require us to break our own, metaphorical glass ceiling.

The identity of being a man has to be something more and something different than simply not being a woman.

I want to be clear that I don't think this should be a return to old gender norms. Men working themselves to death and being absent fathers isn't actually good for us. It's how we got in this mess in the first place.

As men, we need to see ourselves as something more abstract than traditional forms of masculinity, but still something specific. The idea of a "real man" is flawed - but we need to challenge those ideals and create a wider definition of masculinity while still recognising that men die earlier, have structural barriers against being better fathers, and that one out of every five men say that they have nobody to turn to if they need to talk about something difficult. And, more importantly, we need to recognise that those things matter.

We don't need to oppose feminism. We need to learn from it, and take what we can use for our own advocacy. Equal does not mean identical.