On a radio show one morning last year, a female professor at a well-known university tossed off the thought that if men are just going to hang out with their pals at the bar every night, women will take a pass on having kids with them. She didn't cite any studies, and she almost certainly didn't know any men who fit that description. But it didn't matter.

Casually disparaging the entire male gender is not only the last socially acceptable prejudice, it's a national pastime. Later I asked friends to name a few things men do well, and the answers ranged from "Leave the toilet seat up" to a flat-out "Nothing." Men have become a necessary evil—and maybe not all that necessary, once artificial sperm moves out of the lab and into a uterus. At the same time, women have become so disproportionately admired by both sexes that psychologists call this phenomenon the "women are wonderful" effect.

And Lord knows they are. But I was hoping one of my friends would pipe up to say that men and women aren't really all that different, and that both do plenty of things well. Feminists used to say something along those lines for the purpose of moving women into jobs traditionally held by men. So you would hardly expect them to argue now that men are a defective or inferior gender—unless they have completely forgotten how destructive it was when such things were said about women.

And yet that has somehow become the default assumption for society at large: When boys raise their hands in class, they draw more attention to themselves than girls do, so they need to be ignored. Boys are disruptive in school, so they need to be medicated (and they are: almost three times as often as girls). Boys drop out more and fail to attend college or grad school at the same rate as girls, so let's forget them and focus on helping the girls. Young men are more likely to be aggressive and violent, so instead of spending money to educate them, we should spend it to lock them up (especially if they are black, a group that's seen its incarceration rate rise to five times what it was 20 years ago). Above all, men are defective as fathers. So 38 percent of kids are now born to single moms, up from about 11 percent in 1970. And hardly anyone acts as if this is a catastrophe in the making, even though the numbers are much worse in low-income homes where kids (and moms) need dads most. When marriages end, custody of the kids still goes to the mother eight times out of 10. Because conventional wisdom says Dad is a bum. (And you know that's not true. Sign up for the MH Dads newsletter for parenting advice every dad needs.)

Over the past 25 years, the social sciences "have done a really good job of cataloging the things men do badly—men and depression, men and violence, men and drugs—and very little on the other side," says Matt Englar-Carlson, Ph.D., a professor of counseling at California State University at Fullerton. "Would this research describe me? Would it describe my friends? Are we doing a disservice if all we educate people about is this dark side of masculinity? Does it create a bias against men?" James O'Neil, Ph.D., a professor of family studies psychology at the University of Connecticut, says there is no question about it: "Sexism is as bad against men as it was against women." O'Neil started out in the 1970s struggling to get men to admit that they had problems. But these days, together with a handful of other mental-health providers, he's trying to show men that positive masculinity is not a contradiction in terms.

So let's go back to that question: Is there anything men do well? Or as Florida State University psychologist Roy F. Baumeister, Ph.D., phrased it in the title of his recent book, Is There Anything Good about Men? Baumeister says the answer may depend on what drives each gender in life. "Some differences in motivation are linked to the fact that women can become pregnant." And reproduction is a highly sensitive arena in which women have traditionally succeeded far more consistently than men.

Ask yourself a simple question: What percentage of your ancestors were men? Since everybody who ever lived had a mother and a father, you might reasonably think it's half. But recent DNA analysis indicates that we are in fact descended from about twice as many women as men. That's because for much of our evolutionary history, simply being a woman was almost a sure ticket to reproduction; perhaps 80 percent of all women who ever lived became mothers. But a man had to acquire power and status to attract a woman and father her children. A much smaller share of all men—perhaps 40 percent—managed to win the race, often becoming not just serial monogamists but serial polygamists. These Big Daddies turn up repeatedly in the family tree (meaning fewer total male ancestors). Meanwhile, the majority of men died childless, evolutionary dead ends.

So far this doesn't sound so good for men. But Baumeister calls it "the single most underappreciated fact about gender." The message to women was "Play it safe, be like everyone else, don't blow a sure thing." And to men? "Take chances, play hard, stand out: It's your only hope." (One risk you don't want to take: cancer. Use our Cancer Calculator to see how you might kick the bucket.)

That's why the first thing men do well is compete. In fact, we can hardly help competing. I row with a bunch of guys in their 50s and 60s, well past the age when this sort of thing is supposed to matter. I don't think we're competing for women—what biologists call an ultimate cause. But the proximate cause is that we just like to beat each other. If you put us in doubles and send us around the lake a few times, our "steady state" row invariably escalates into a race. Then we lean on our oars, catching our breath just enough to start talking trash. (I lose at rowing but pull ahead on comic insults.) The only reason this is a problem is that society now regards the almost automatic male urge to compete as silly, annoying, and often destructive. But here's another way to look at it: Male social skills are the basis for civilization.

Men don't just compete one-on-one. We band together to compete against other groups, and we have been doing so since our hairy ancestors first figured out that groups were a more effective way to hunt and to wage tribal warfare. For better or worse, that's where we learned our social skills. And it has supposedly turned us into social morons, unable to savor the deep emotional connections that resonate through the close relationships among women.

Male socializing can admittedly be fairly shallow: If women sometimes fake orgasms, men can fake entire relationships, and this can lead to, oh, misunderstandings. But our shallow social style is also functional, enabling us to move easily though a shifting array of alliances and not get bogged down too much by emotions. In a game of shirts and skins, or in a corporate takeover, switching sides can turn the guy you were just hating into your temporary best pal, and then you both focus together on the job at hand. (You can hate each other later.)

Men aren't worse than women at socializing, just different. It's a tradeoff, says Baumeister, with the social strengths of each balancing the weaknesses of the other for the benefit of all: "While women concentrated on the close relationships that enabled the species to survive, men created the bigger networks of shallow relationships less necessary for survival but which eventually enabled culture to flourish."

These networks turned out to be perfectly suited to building large social systems, says Dutch evolutionary psychologist Mark van Vugt, Ph.D.: Group competition generated a psychology in men "which allows them to connect with large groups of, effectively, strangers, and rely on them to build alliances. Once you have that, all sorts of things become possible"—tribes, small villages, nations, empires—"even businesses, which consist of large groups of strangers cooperating with one another," almost all founded and built up by men. You could call van Vugt's idea the "culture builder" hypothesis. Unfortunately—and this is how it always seems to go for men—he dubbed it the "male warrior hypothesis" instead. What else are we good at? Plenty of stuff.

Men excel at hierarchies.

Our male predecessors tended to favor the old command-and-control style of managing businesses—and the switch to a looser, more collaborative style is one of the happier improvements brought about by the arrival of women in management. But hierarchies still rule the workplace, and though it's not fashionable to say so, this is a good thing, even if they happen to be a male specialty. In a classic Stanford University study, groups of male college freshmen put in a room and given a problem to solve needed less than 15 minutes to sort themselves into hierarchies. That may be because boys start choosing up sides and figuring out who's in charge on the preschool playground, and they never really stop. Girls are just a little wobblier when it comes to hierarchies.

Sometimes, no doubt, men get carried away with the power struggles. I was once talking to executives at an auto manufacturer about the notion that a round table could make boardroom discussions more egalitarian. Then the head of sales set me straight: "The round table just makes it easier for everybody to see the kill." But most of the time, the male strategy of establishing who's in charge and where all the players fit in serves to set goals, get business done, and reduce needless aggression.

Men work more.

Modern society has demonstrated that women can learn to be almost as shallow and competitive as we are. But they work fewer hours, 30 percent fewer than men on average, typically so they can spend more of their time taking care of family and home. In a 2010 study of the would-be careerists who earned MBAs between 1990 and 2006 from the University of Chicago's Booth School of Business, virtually all the men—but only 62 percent of the women—were still employed full-time 10 or more years out. Likewise, after years of postcollege training, only 72 percent of women pediatricians work full-time. Taking care of their own children evidently comes to seem more important than taking care of other people's kids.

Men work longer hours because we're more motivated, Baumeister says. "Men are much more interested than women are in forming large groups and working in them and rising to the top in them." We have a richer history at it, and we're also driven to compete on the job by the deeply ingrained memory of our dismal reproductive odds. Just don't let those long hours get to you. Click here for 15 Ways to Bust Work Stress.

Men are smarter than women.

Okay, we're stupider too. In fact, men tend to show up more at the extremes not just for intelligence (geniuses versus dolts) but for a variety of other traits, including height, weight, body mass index, and measures of physical and psychological performance. "Whether we are talking about kindness versus cruelty, curiosity versus close-mindedness, wisdom versus immature pigheadedness, self-control versus self-indulgence, or humility versus narcissism," says Baumeister, "there are more men than women at both the good and the bad extremes."

Given this tendency, it probably shouldn't be so surprising that there are more men at the top of most organizations. And in some fields, the opposite extreme is true too: There are more men at the bottom. (Oddly, women never mention this when they complain that a "glass ceiling" of discrimination holds them down.) In fact, there's a trap door to the sub-sub-basement—and, gentlemen, for us, admission is free. For much of our history, men have quietly accepted that the dark and dirty work of the world—digging the coal, stoking the furnaces, hammering the steel, collecting the garbage—is our lot.

Men are expendable.

Feminism notwithstanding, everybody understands that it's still a world where women and children come first. And we're okay with that because when it comes to survival of the species (or the family), men are just not as precious. But that context can sometimes make the modern urge to focus on female victims—while stepping gingerly past heaped-up male corpses—a little unseemly. For instance, a recent New York State report on post-9/11 deaths among first responders at the World Trade Center solemnly noted that 13 percent of victims were women. You had to go to a table to find out that the other 87 percent were . . . oh, never mind.

In the 1990s, the feminists Gloria Steinem and Naomi Wolf showed a similar slant. Steinem wrote that 150,000 American women were dying each year from anorexia, to free themselves from "female bondage," and quoted Wolf, who wondered, "How would America react to the mass self-immolation by hunger of its favorite sons?" Steinem's numbers were from an eating disorders group; it was a good cause. But if you check with the National Center for Health Statistics, you'll find that the actual number of deaths per year from anorexia is more like 50. And as to how society would react if its sons were dying? We already know that. In 2010, 4,690 Americans died on the job and 92 percent of them were . . . not women. The death toll is even more skewed for policemen, firemen, soldiers, and even journalists. And men are okay with all of that. But if we are going to be expendable, our deepest wish is to go out in a worthy cause, and in the hope that someone will notice.

Men take risks just to be entertaining.

Wow, we really are stupid, aren't we? Let's go back to our penchant for extremes. From the fetal stage on, males respond more directly than females to environmental circumstances, both good and bad. In the animal world, this results in greater variability of traits like stags' antlers or peacocks' tails. It's evolution at work, sorting males into winners and losers, Big Daddies and Dead-Enders. Meanwhile, females cruise through on an even keel.

Going to extremes, in all kinds of sensible and nonsensical ways, is how males try to stand out, win attention, perhaps even persuade a woman that we might not be all that expendable after all. It's courtship behavior, writes psychologist Geoffrey F. Miller, Ph.D., in his book The Mating Mind. Human culture has been dominated by males "because human culture is mostly courtship effort, and all male mammals invest more energy in courtship. Male humans paint more pictures, record more jazz albums, write more books, commit more murders, and perform more strange feats to enter the Guinness Book of Records." We come up with more big ideas (93 percent of all Nobel Prize winners have been men, records indicate), we invent more stuff (we hold about 94 percent of all patents), and we tell more jokes (most of us do not yet have our Nobels, but a GSOH—good sense of humor—is one of the main assets women look for in personal ads).

There are, of course, things men can do to learn better. There are ways we can steer some of our more aggressive impulses toward healthier ends (fewer murders, more jazz albums). But let's start by talking about how society can help. It might seem obvious to say so, but characterizing masculinity as a failed brand of humanity just makes things worse. It hurts men because our self-worth comes largely from the idea that we play a useful and important part in the lives of the people around us. It's bad for women too because it leads men to live down to their low opinion. It's bad even for a woman who wants to bypass nasty masculinity in favor of a hassle-free anonymous sperm donor. Odds are better than even that she will give birth to a boy. And then the idea that males are doomed will suddenly seem unbelievably shortsighted.

We are not a doomed gender, just one that's a little raucous and disruptive. And society can work with that, first by treating the educational system as if the male half of the classroom also mattered. Schools want boys to learn the way girls do, sitting still in class and being nice to one another. "Too often the women's movement wants the boys to shut up," Kathy Stevens, M.P.A., told me; she was the executive director at the Gurian Institute in Colorado until her death earlier this year. It fails boys—contributing to the high male dropout rate and low college attendance—and it fails society too: "Each sex brings different skills to the table," Stevens said. But only if each receives the necessary education.

How about adult men? How do we adapt to a society that increasingly acts as if we are not worth the trouble? Psychologists argue that men need to continue moving away from narrow old notions of masculinity because those notions no longer work in a more egalitarian world. But talking about stress, fear, depression, anger, and other standard male emotional issues seems like a way of undermining one of the best things about being a man—our sense of confidence, our belief that even against overwhelming odds we can still triumph (or die trying).

But I like the paint-by-numbers system of reconnecting with our emotions, outlined by University of Akron psychologist Ronald Levant, Ed.D. Alexithymia, from the Greek meaning "without words for emotion," is the common male syndrome of numbness to our own inner lives, and Levant's treatment focuses on translating emotions into words: "Every emotion has a physiological component—for instance, the way the heart races when you feel fear. So notice how your body changes, write it down, and then ask who is doing what action and how does it affect you." The next step is simply to practice emotional self-awareness over and over, the way you would practice a golf swing or a tennis serve, so it becomes ingrained. The idea isn't to make the emotions go away. But recognizing them can help us savor good ones and handle troublesome ones intelligently.

Women can also help by understanding that we sometimes express emotions in ways they might not immediately recognize. Men are, for instance, entirely capable of experiencing the Big E, empathy, even though conventional wisdom says we are too analytical and goal oriented for that sort of thing. But here's a different take: For women, empathy typically elicits an emotional response. They lift their eyebrows, coo, "Oh, poor baby," and fold the unfortunate party in a warm hug. This can feel good, but treating it as the one true form of empathy is like telling women that they can experience only one kind of orgasm.

Men tend instead toward what Levant calls "action empathy." It's a tactical response more than an emotional one: We take note of what the unfortunate party is experiencing and focus on what's likely to happen next, what to do about it, and maybe even how we can help. It is yet another good thing about men. But sometimes you just need to say it out loud: "That stinks and I'm sorry." You might even try to hug her and coo, "Oh, poor baby." Unnatural? Maybe a little, but it's painless. (And there's nothing wrong with thinking tactically: It might just lead to sex.)

The bottom line is not just that men are good—and women are too—but that each sex needs to learn from the strengths of the other. Balky feminists used to brag that "a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle." But the reality is that men and women need each other like fish need a school.

Living well is about learning to swim together.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io