Sounds like the author is drinking too much of some rah rah women koolaid. I don't see the end of anything, I just see the pendulum swinging far in the opposite direction but it will come right back to the center. Girls are basically told they can do whatever the fuck they want at this point, there's still some socialization in terms of femininity (looks, behavior, what have you) but in terms of encouragement into fields a lot of the sexism my mother and her generation encountered in education has eroded. I think we're seeing what can happen when a gender is less held back in education and the workforce year after year.
At the same time however I don't think boys are totally free to do as they please and as a result seem kind of listless in comparison. Women have/had the feminist movement to challenge the traditionalist definitions of the word "woman" and it went from a very narrow patronizing role to at this point up to the individual. I think my own mom gets a little jealous of the freedoms I was endowed with but she managed to do fine herself despite the conservative parents who didn't approve and the "times" she was in.
Dad on the other hand, I don't think too much has changed from when he was a kid. Masculinity/man is still in a conservative box. Many fathers are starting to take it upon themselves to raise their boys in a more understanding open environment from what I've seen but there's never really been a movement to usurp the definition of man from the patriarchy. So it stays there, mostly unchallenged except by certain individuals but there is still push back in the the forms of homophobia and sexism. I find that many men want to do scores of things but still held back by rigid thinking. And they get defensive about it too when questioned. Why is something gay? What makes it for women? I just don't see my gender pre-occupied with this shit mostly.
When we see something unfair, like the current reproductive nonsense from the right, we have the foundations, feminism, to fall back on. We rally. We march on DC. As much as some people (and the article writer doing it no favors) want to vilify feminism as some negative portrayal of men, the movement has mostly just been about breaking down the myths about who women are and what we're capable of. Until men have a positive movement like this or enough men decide to challenge other men on their antiquated views, you'll keep seeing this trend I think. I don't think MRM is such a positive movement despite efforts to say the opposite. Then people will say well why doesn't feminism/women handle it, feminism does but I've always stressed that men who are already kind of sexist and homophobic have to hear how they are wrong from other men. There's really no other way around it. You want to press forward, you gotta challenge your fellow dudebros, maybe even teachers, other parents, the people around you and say look "don't fucking tell my son what you think a "real man" should grow up to be or what he should do with himself." If he's talented at something, let him flourish.
In the end I don't think there is a single answer but I don't see the honest point in how narrowly confined men are especially compared to their counterparts.
