There are some people today who simply don't understand men's troubles in adapting to our new environment. 

In certain quarters, there is much head-shaking at our apparently dinosaur-like inability to "cope with change."  Why, these people want to know, should this be so hard for us?

I could probably make a reasonably persuasive case for our difficulties on the basis of evolutionary biology.  It seems apparent that in confronting rivals or aggressors, we men didn't originally smile or project false charm to them.  Our natural, instinctive response is to glare and glower, warning and/or challenging. In our evolutionary past, we probably learned to do this to keep others away from whatever we had that was of value—a patch of territory, a carcass, a female, whatever.

By way of contrast, most mammalian females don’t behave in quite so directly confrontational a manner, probably because they’re more likely to have to accept rivals in closer day-to-day proximity—to be required to share a territory, or a carcass, or a male, if the environment favors harem-style arrangements. 

Thus, I could argue that it made evolutionary sense for women to be able to fight more subtly, and at closer range.  I could then further contend that because of the associations we make with this pattern, for us men to smile and pretend to be nice to an enemy or rival not only goes against all of our natural dominance-establishing behavior, it also makes us feel feminized.

In the end, though, it doesn’t matter whether there’s a Darwinian or evolutionary basis for our contemporary male discomfiture.  What ultimately matters most is just the fact that this difficulty exists. 

It certainly can be more than a little mind-bending for us men to have our traditional male power and dominance quotients based on where we are on the economic ladder, when success in the business environment so often demands a style of behavior we have traditionally regarded as feminine.

It would undoubtedly do us good to talk more about this state of affairs.  But even if we generally recognized what's happening, we still might not feel able to say much about it.  We'd probably be partly afraid that by doing so, we'd sound like whiney losers.  Partly we also just tend to be reluctant to discuss anything that makes us feel belittled.  (No matter what the potential advantages of speaking out, dwelling on victimhood just seems to go against the male grain.)