When a man is forced into early retirement, he is often being "given up for a younger man.” Being forced into early’ retirement can be to a man what being "given up for a young woman" is for a woman. When that is compounded by forced unemployment, feeling to men like rape feels to a woman, it becomes easy to understand why men who are retired or fired are soon expired.
Why do many men get more upset by retirement than women do from the empry nest i. e. when their children leave home? When females retire from children, they can try — a career; when a man retires from a career, his children are gone. Often they only’ grudgingly return (& la "Cat s in the Cradle"). We empathize with the new woman who has grown up and "forgotten to have children,"26 but not with the man who has always (due to the responsibility of providing the family’s financial womb), in essence, “forgotten to have children." But no men’s movement explains a man’s feelings of powerlessness for being his child’s wallet while feeling deprived of his child’s love.