I've seen this asserted dozens of times before, and even though I agree with the observation, the way I see it phrased invariably drives me nuts. Out of all the traditionally "masculine" traits that are in decline, the ones most worth saving are ruggedness and personal responsibility, yet the subtext of your assertion is a portrayal of men as helpless victims. Social change is not a conspiracy. There's nothing "careful" or "systematic" about masculinity being devalued. If men don't like it, and we shouldn't, then the way to reverse the trend is simply for us to stand up for ourselves and refuse to take part.
I know it's not a conspiracy, and I know there's no orchestrating hand. I was phrasing it the same way as the 'Invisible Hand' theory of economics. There sure as hell is no Invisible Hand, but we call it that because that's what it sometimes looks like.
Of course there is an orchestrating hand. This is what teachers are taught to teach in teaching colleges. This is why men who want to become teachers (here in the UK at least) are forced through the humiliating process of proving that they are not paedophiles.
Perhaps the political theorists behind it haven't thought it through, but emasculating men is policy.
You get extremely similar viewpoints for any single fathers, especially if they have a / more than one girl.
There's next to zero support for single fathers in any area, including monetary support, job support, emotional support, family support, you name it, it's not there. In many cases I've quite literally heard people & support-providers say that most single fathers drove their mother away and are raping their kids, some even saying that all single fathers should put their kids into foster care because "men can't raise kids" or "kids need a mom".
Perhaps the political theorists behind it haven't thought it through, but emasculating men is policy.
The first part of this sentence contradicts the second. Emasculating men is not policy. Emasculating men is an unintended side-effect of policy. The creators of that policy, in turn, were shaped by their own education, and so-forth in a cycle of positive feedback. Even if you want to find some ruling class to single out and assign blame to, which I don't think is a worthwhile exercise, then the number of bad actors is too large and their individual crimes too slight for an "orchestrating hand" to be anywhere close to an appropriate metaphor.
If there were a policy where vehicles were not allowed to be within X miles of the coast (to prevent pollution / damage to the flora), wouldn't it also be a policy against living that close to the coast? Sure, some people would still do it... just as some men are still teachers in the UK.
Emasculating men is deliberate. The second-order effects (e.g. kids without a strong male role model having behavioural problems) were perhaps unexpected.
I'd phrase it by more carefully separating the "is" from the "ought". "Modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women" gets the "is" part pretty close, though I'd say it as "modern, postindustrial society is less well-suited to men than what preceded it", because the former misleadingly implies a men-against-women zero-sum game. The "ought" part is what I said in my previous comment: men ought to recognize that the trend exists, and when they hear masculine virtue demonized, ought to stand up for it by word and by example.
