What's good for women is what's good for men.

Meme alert!

1. In today's NYT, an opinion column by Stephanie Coontz: "How Can We Help Men? By Helping Women."

Social and economic policies constructed around the male breadwinner model have always disadvantaged women. But today they are dragging down millions of men as well. Paradoxically, putting gender equity issues at the center of social planning would now be in the interests of most men....

Putting women’s traditional needs at the center of social planning is not reverse sexism. It’s the best way to reverse the increasing economic vulnerability of men and women alike.

2. On "Meet the Press" today, David Gregory interviewing Maria Shriver about the current state of the war on poverty, which began in the Lyndon Johnson administration, with Shriver's father in charge. (At one point Shriver says: "Daddy ran the war on poverty.") Anyway, Shriver's done some new report, which Gregory calls "so interesting." There's much discussion of the centrality of the concerns of women, Gregory declares the "role of men" to be "interesting." Shriver says:

Men are totally a part of this conversation in terms of how they raise their daughters, in terms of how they support their wives and their partners. And what's good for women, at the center of the economy, is also good for men. Men need flexible hours. Men need sick days, because they're going to be caring for parents, as well. Men need all of the things that these women need. These are smart family policies that we're talking about in this report.

A bit later, Shriver again pairs the idea that women are "the center of the economy" with the assertion that what's good for women is good for men:

I think women are at the center of our country. They're at the center, as I said, in electing our political leaders. They're at the center of the economy. They're in the center of the family. And when women do well, men do well, and the nation does well. And when women do well, they don't just support other women doing well, but we support our sons and our daughters.

"If the ascent of women has been much exaggerated, so has the descent of men."

Asserts Stephanie Coontz:

Men’s irresponsibility and bad behavior is now a stock theme in popular culture. But there has always been a subset of men who engage in crude, coercive and exploitative behavior. What’s different today is that it’s harder for men to get away with such behavior in long-term relationships. Women no longer feel compelled to put up with it and the legal system no longer condones it. The result is that many guys who would have been obnoxious husbands, behaving badly behind closed doors, are now obnoxious singles, trumpeting their bad behavior on YouTube.

In the old days — which social conservatives would like to continue — women locked men into marriage and did what they could to tame them and tie them to a socially and economically useful way of life for the benefit of all of us. (This is why the phrase "marriage is between a man and a woman" is so deeply meaningful and important.)