Patrick Wyman

My son just shushed me because I was talking while he watched the Pearl Harbor bombing in “WWII in HD Colour.” Brought a tear to my eye, he really takes after his old man.

Dog Named Murph Lives Up To Name

Dog Named Murph Lives Up To Name

Social media, especially Instagram

I think a lot of it is forming politics based on consuming tons of short-form video, which you can probably lump most Fox content into. They're not reading news or watching longform investigative journalism. The conspiracy dad mostly gets his Trump news in the form of memes and GIFs.

It's a mistake to view them as low information - they're not, they can be quite knowledgable about some aspects of politics (tariffs, shifts in the tax code, regulations) and completely ignorant of others.

E.g. an immigrant woman from Eritrea who had no idea about the "shithole countries" remark, a suburban mom who had never heard what he said about the Charlottesville rioters, a non-political conspiracy dad who has never thought in terms of dog-whistles

I'm not interested in having an "I'm not surprised" conversation about this. It's an observation based on five years of interactions with people who are outwardly pretty chill and unobjectionable.

One of the most baffling aspects of interacting regularly with "normal" suburban people who voted for Donald Trump is that they genuinely seem to be unaware of his explicit racism, and if challenged, either refuse to believe it or fall back into exactly what Mulvaney does here.

A Fish Falls From the Sky and Sparks a Brush Fire in British Columbia

For a medieval monastic chronicler, a headline to die for

I don't think that was what I said, but if it came off that way, I can understand the frustration and appreciate the feedback.

Just want to clarify that. These are observations of the cultural zeitgeist around masculinity as I see it. I don't have solutions off the top of my head, but I know the solution isn't "libs/leftists need to be nicer to poor downtrodden men."

These are structural issues with the cultural construction of masculinity, the media environment that feeds those ideas, and the people pushing the ideas. The root problem isn't internet randos saying anti-men stuff, nor is it any left pperson's job to police the outer limits of gender discourse.

I did a bunch of posting about masculinity discourse yesterday and got some really good feedback that made me think hard about it. It makes total sense to me why the topic seems unimportant or overblown to a lot of folks; I'm not saying men and boys are poor dear creatures who just need empathy.

That’s an odd thing to infer from what I’ve actually said. Have a good day!

Some people - and my guess is that you're one of them - can sit with uncomfortable thoughts and ideas, turn them over, and work through the initial reaction. A lot of people don't have that ability, and for them, an objective description of reality feels like an attack.

A lot of well-meaning, thoughtful people on the left have never really encountered "all men are trash" discourse on social media, or skipped past it. My algorithm isn't geared toward it, but I've seen it enough to know that it really exists, there's a female audience for it, and men and boys see it.

Most healthy adult men have intentionally cultivated father-figures beyond their dads, IMO, and having women as mentors is an essential mirror to that process

I can tell you that I've met a lot of people who really feel they're being spoken to in those terms, yes. Whether it's objective reality or not, that's their perception of the popularly mediated feminist ideas they encounter, in my experience

Yeah, no disagreement

Honestly, I don't know enough about the media habits of boys and younger men to be able to reach them sans parental influence

I was lucky enough to make a great friend early in my PhD who was gay and took it upon himself (bless him) to help me understand gender dynamics and relationships a heck of a lot better. No idea where I'd be if that never happened.

Effectively nonexistent, according to the metrics at my disposal - males 25-44 are the demographic I hit most consistently with my various projects.

Imagine if you were an 18-year-old man, feeling like you're failing to hit the markers of manhood, your dad never showed you an emotion other than anger, your only exposure to sex is through porn, and you've spent your life in all-male spaces. That's not a recipe for self-reflection.

Not that I'm a paragon of masculinity but I'm 40 and have spent years thinking really hard about being a dad and a man, I've done tons of therapy and have graduate training in gender studies/history, and I'm still learning new ways that I've been conditioned to be shitty. It goes deep.

Exactly. Even the most accomplished (according to the standards they set) patriarchs I've met are fucking miserable and raise miserable sons

Can young men do better? Absolutely, and it's going to be on them to find a way of existing in a world that's hopefully less patriarchal (which is also bad for men!). But they're also prisoners of cultural conditioning, and we need to find ways to make it easier to break out of those ideas.

We've spent a lot of time unpacking how culture shapes girls over the past few decades and fighting against negative messages about bodies, sexuality, social roles, all of it. That's awesome. Boys are also shaped by culture. Being a young male idiot isn't entirely a process of self-fashioning.

We're talking about children here. They're impressionable. They're being bombarded by media and messaging they don't understand and haven't really chosen. The boys really are in trouble - I'm seeing it firsthand - and the answer isn't to tell them that they're inherently broken and evil.

You're not going to reach incels or boys who have decided to load up on white nationalism, but there are plenty who simply don't know what healthy relationships look like, would love to be a good boyfriend/husband, and are desperate for someone to tell them how to be a man.

They're Gen-Xers who imbibed 80s action movies and Tom Clancy nationalism, it's a mess