The result is that men feel devastatingly diminished. They feel bashed. They feel unappreciated. But the Virginia Woolf Effect has a twin. Men were similarly encouraged to overvalue and romanticize women.
Women now profess to find that sort of idealization stultifying and ultimately imprisoning.
Perhaps American men and women should face the fact that they are hopelessly at odds. Or anyway that they are a little sick of one another for the moment. Time to give gender a rest. Time to stop staring at life through the single monomaniacal lens of gender politics. Put on the other lenses.