It is possible that if we reach back far enough, that the men of the past might have been better suited than we might think. I just finished reading a book by Patrick Joyce called Remembering Peasants. His thesis is that the defining feature of the last few hundred years is the loss of what he calls peasant civilization. He claims that the world of peasants was distinct from the world of commodity agriculture and industrialization that replaced it. That peasants worked with each other and the land in a different way. Commodity/plantation agriculture treated land and people as resources for extraction. We are living with a version of masculinity that was born of the collective trauma of being turned into a resources for extraction.