Great post, Tom. Generational misogyny is a relay race, with men handing off the same batons. Stories, laws, aesthetics, “traditions” all while pretending to be surprised when women keep getting bruised by them. Hemingway is an example of how a male writer can be both formally brilliant and structurally incurious about women at the same time. His female characters are often vividly sketched yet weirdly under-souled, defined by how reliably they orbit male damage rather than by interiority of their own. You can always tell what the writer thinks of women when he starts with her appearance. Hemingway's best-realized woman character was Lady Bret Archer, and she was a vapid and pathetic party girl seemingly grafted from Fitzgerald's Daisy: an icon to be worshipped, but with the writer's scorn baked in.
I think of Alison Bechdel's test, a comic that became a diagnostic tool. Two named women who talk to each other about something other than a man. It's an excellent Geiger counter for background levels of male-centered storytelling that we’ve normalized, and it's alarming how in 2026 how few of the movies and books pass it.
The awkward truth is that an enormous swath of the canon from Hemingway to prestige TV fails even this low bar, which shows the narrative pipeline that still assumes men as protagonists and women as atmosphere.
Stieg Larsson’s original Swedish title is not The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but Män som hatar kvinnor—Men Who Hate Women. American publishers softened that into something quirky and marketable, sliding the emphasis from a culture of male violence to the body art of the one woman trying to survive it. They changed Salander from a woman to a girl, and while the character is deep and nuanced, Larsson uses the POV of the men around her to show how she's perceived. They always start with how she looks. The retitling is a confession that even when a man finally names the thing straight on, the market flinches and re-centers the male gaze in an attempt to sell misogyny as edgy entertainment rather than an indictment.
The Equal Rights Amendment was written in 1923, passed by Congress in 1972, and then left three states short of ratification when the deadline expired in 1982. A century after it was drafted, women can be President or Speaker but still lack explicit constitutional protection against sex discrimination. Women are paid less in virtually every job outside of the porn industry. Women have always written, painted, organized, and governed; the archive is full of them if you bother to look. What we call “greatness” is often just the residue of which men got to decide whose work mattered, whose books got preserved, whose signatures made laws.
The contemporary tradwife aesthetic is a reactionary fantasy layered over misogyny. Instagram softness blurring over the entrenched legal and economic order where male authority and female dependence remain structurally rewarded.
It dresses hierarchy up as choice, as if multigenerational female disposability is a lifestyle brand. Erika Kirk is a prime example, but in Trump's orbit women are wholly interchangeable just as they are on Fox News.
Men built the systems that treat women as supporting characters and raised daughters and sons inside those systems. The hard-coded misogyny feels like weather instead of design.
Calling this out is the first step in refusing to carry the baton any farther.
Thank you for using your voice to decry oppression and violence. It’s not easy to call out a powerful group that you belong to, but the people that share the identity of an oppressor are the best ones suited to make a dent. Its why Christians, straight people and white people also need to stand up and speak out in defense of our fellow human beings. ❤️
Thank you Tom J. When the Me Too movement happened at first I thought I had not remembered anything happening to me. But it did. Lots of times. Being touched, being patronized, being demeaned, being an object, being judged, being disliked for using my brain, being ridiculed because I was a reader, being told what I heard was not what I heard right then out of man’s mouth, having to be careful, being scared, not being free to dress or walk or talk or be alone outside and on and on and on. I like men and I have loved a couple. But jeez guys why ya gots to hurt us? We are your mothers and sisters and cousins and friends and coworkers and your service workers, your doctors and nurses and scientists and mathematicians and world leaders. Try to remember our humanity. We try to remember you supposedly have some humanity as well. Start showing it ya big babies.
That list you wrote, touched, patronized, demeaned, told you didn't hear what you just heard, scared, careful, not free to walk alone, that's not a list of incidents. That's a description of an entire way of moving through the world that most men never have to learn because they never have to. I'm sorry it took Me Too for you to even let yourself count it all. I'm sorry there was so much to count.
"Try to remember our humanity. We try to remember you supposedly have some humanity as well." That's going to stay with me a while. You said in two sentences what I took two thousand words to circle around.
Thank you for trusting this space enough to say all of that out loud.
Wow. I am blushing and for me that is not a thing. Did I already reply? I use a phone and IPad and the feed and notifications is different one from the other device. Weird.
I could relate all that after you wrote The Permission and I read it. I sat back and breathed. And then I wrote. It flowed out of my head into the “ page “.
Your confessional gave me permission.
You are of a house of women nuclear wise but you did that well because of what you knew about the danger your sister was in when you were a child. 10 years old.
I learned this comparatively late in life, for a girl. I grew up in a inner-ring Chicago town with a mixed neighborhood of white- and blu- collar workers, men of all kinds. Not once ever did I experience a sense of danger from any of them, my playmates' fathers and my own. Not once did I feel we girls were inferior to boys or that boys got excuses for their deeds. My first taste of male dominance was high school in a more middle-class town when the popular boys, athletes, got lunch table preference to be together, but that was it. In class girls were respected for academic achievement and parity in all things except girls basketball that had stupid rules. So I was deluded. I thought women were equal. My parents said that, acted that way between themselves. Thought that was how the world worked.
Then came feminism, the Sexual Revolution, and instead of becoming a way for men and women to move forward more equitably, it became a cudgel used to demand sex. It demanded work and more even contribution from women, sure, but that became entitlement even as women's pay didn't grow as fast as that of males. I do not remember the 60s in a kindly way at all. That equality I knew as a kid? The one everyone insists didn't exist? Well, it no longer did. Every assumption I made was wrong from then on.
Culturally I found the 60s revolting. Comedy became smarmy, anti-female, immature sniggering about sex and dirty words. What wasn't immature dirty jokes was angry and hostile. And I have no idea why. I'm still puzzling it all out. But I know I want a world of genuine respect among the sexes - all of them - and compassion for one another as human beings. How I grew up. I want it back. Thank you, Tom, for being the kind of man I knew.
What you're describing, that whiplash between a childhood that genuinely worked and a culture that turned around and used "equality" as a different kind of leash, doesn't get said enough. People want a clean story, things were bad and now they're better, or things were always bad and we're just naming it now. You lived something messier and more specific than either of those, and it deserves to be heard as its own true thing, not folded into someone else's narrative about the decade.
I don't know that I'm the kind of man you knew. I'm just trying, the way your father and your neighbors apparently managed to without anyone making a doctrine out of it. That you'd say so means more than you probably intended it to.
I hope you get some of that world back. I'd like to live in it too.
Yes, Tom, you ARE the kind of man I once knew and trusted. Personally I've found them individually in my own life, just shocked how absent so many are in public life.
Americans are indeed obsessed with linear thinking. When I was taking Lit in high school and read "Candide" I found Dr. Pangloss whose saying, "In every day in every way we are getting better and better" was sufficiently intriguing I never forgot it. As an historian taking the dreaded "historiography" course in college, we learned the many threads used by historians to show change. One of them is very Panglossian and always WRONG.
That things could have been more healthy in the past is also not unalloyed. What I remember was a white experience and leaves out the harsh reality of Black people in America. But the upshot of that is the discovery later through lived experience, that those very travails created Black men very much like my father and you. Regardless of class I worked and lived in communities of males I found I could trust, ones who lived by very much the same Code as you've described here. That's not the public fact of Black males, but it's the dominant one in real life.
My mother, the unhappy cottonwood that broke, still had some wisdom to impart. She said television and mass media of the 20th C. would skew our understandings of reality. She saw it as propaganda purveyed to dumb us down. She wasn't wrong. Most of the anti-woman, anti-Black, anti-immigrant ideas of who "the other" is are based on false stories, false images. We allow those to overshadow reality. Maybe this is a simplistic explanation. Maybe it's THE explanation. But we need strong voices about what decency and adulthood CAN look like in today's world. I see this set of conversations drawn from your observations as a solid way forward. It is a breath of hope and insight, a declaration of possibility that has lifted your readers up in a very dark time. It's a gift to us all. Thank you more than I can say.
Thank you Tom. I know the truth of this by the tears that immediately came on reading it. So much recognition. And we f***ing need more men to realise it. More men to say it. And more men to do something about it. In you. In your families. In your friend groups. In your communities. In your organisations. Everywhere. Just as many of us are trying to take responsibility as white people—for our own growth and change. We need men to do that with and for each other. Like their life depends on it. Because it does. All of our lives do. ♥️
Thank you for telling me about the tears. That's not a small thing to share with a stranger on the internet.
You're right that recognizing it in myself was the easy part tonight, the cheap part almost. The harder part is what you're asking for, men actually doing this work with each other, out loud, in the rooms where it usually goes unsaid. I don't have a clean answer for how that spreads. I just know it doesn't spread by one essay. It spreads by the next conversation, and the one after that, in actual rooms with actual men who'd rather change the subject.
I hear you. Trying to be one more voice that doesn't let the subject change.
Tbh, it’s getting over the cringe. Not just in one-on-one conversations. But in groups. In public. Collectively. In ways that require something of us. It’s loving other men. In public. And showing how much better that feels than staying bottled up and contracted. It’s living it. Not just talking about it. Being it. With others. It cannot be done individually. As little hermetically sealed units.
Speaking as someone who is trying to understand and embody the work for white people, the work for men follows the same pattern. See your patterns. The defensive architecture that you built to survive the stupid systems of dominance imposed by patriarchal colonial institutions needs to be seen, recognized for how it has harmed you and, also, caused you to harm others.
Because otherwise we’re just stuck in the repeating patterns. We are the system.
I always think that the real work is getting over our shame about love.
I’m glad there are men who speak clearly, as you do.
In this world, when “leaders” (and that is a gross misuse of the word in the example you spoke of) continue to sell the lie that being disgusting is powerful, it is other men who need to pick up the gauntlet and speak, take action, and say no more. Thank you for addressing this very thing.
May there one day soon be a world where baboons like the orange one who claims to be in charge, are too embarrassed by themselves to ever speak in public again.
The issue is much much deeper than algorithms. Mothers believe their male infants crawl further and earlier than their own female infants. But when measured objectively, there is no difference. A male toddler falls and is told to brush it off, to stop crying, to “be a big boy”. A female toddler falls and is scooped up, snuggled, cuddled and coddled. Once kids get into the social sorting mechanism otherwise called school, the real abuse begins. A boy that cries will be forever branded as a sissy, the low athletic boy will be ousted socially, the boy who likes to read will be labeled a nerd. While girls have their own mean girl social sorting mechanisms, the boys are vicious, physically cruel and the gang leaders often use girls as their teaching targets, taunting, chasing, belittling, and worse. This whole mechanism existed long before algorithms. The algorithms just do it faster and reach those who failed in the social sorting mechanism, letting them believe they too can become alphas.
Umm. Some Native American tribes would have the women in charge of torture because they were better at it. I wanted my son to meet the same milestones I did: crawling by six months, walking by nine (he did).
Clumsy girls are left to be picked last, right before the kids with bad hygiene if they are lucky. If the coach saves the embarrassment of choosing teams, the team “given” the clumsy kids treat them with ridicule, eye rolls and exaggerated sighs.
There is hair pulling and punches. You’re tripped in the hallway and have people yank your books out of your arms.
And if you cry. If you’re dumb enough to cry, they double down and do it more. If you complain, you’re taken into an isolated area and punched repeatedly.
Don’t pretend that girls are somehow coddled by their peers.
Appreciate you--your thoughtful,caring writing and sharing. Spot on about women and the permission pipeline men created--and support. I'm almost 83, in Minneapolis, walking the streets, facing ICE and more, staying strong. Two daughters--5 grands and 4 are young women. I want them to see me--father.grandfather--as a man with strength and caring, living values of respect,empathy and--yes--courage -on the streets, (and much more) 20 below or 90 above.
Brilliant piece. When I heard what Michelle Obama was called it made me sick to my stomach. This type of rhetoric happens far too often. We've all witnessed it in one form or another and many have been the victim. The current occupant of the White House legitimizes it and so do those that have voted for him and continue to support him. It's not okay. It's never been okay. Supporting this President despite his numerous failings in this regard makes one complicit. Thanks again Tom for engaging your readers. You make a difference.
"Sick to my stomach" is the right reaction, the only honest one really. It should turn your stomach. The day it stops doing that to people is the day it's fully won.
You're right that it's not abstract for most people, everyone's witnessed some version of it, plenty have lived it. That's part of why it gets shrugged off so easily by the people who haven't, it's background noise to them and a gut punch to everyone else.
Powerful. I know good men exist. My dad had his flaws, but was a good man. He had a lousy childhood and wanted to do his best to be a better man than his own father.
Sadly, because of some of his bad decisions, I spent much of my life giving myself away, and even my good marriage, in hindsight, listening to others’ stories, wasn’t as good as it should have been.
I know the word, and I know what it names. I left it out here on purpose. This piece works through specific people, one fighter, one microphone, one boy afraid for his sister, because I wanted the system visible in the particulars rather than asserted as a label. Patriarchy is real and it's the right word for what's underneath all of this. I just think a piece this personal earns the reader's gut before it earns the term. I appreciate you saying it plainly here, it's true even where I chose not to use it.
Thank you for this seering reflection. I believe the conversation about the "victimization" of young men is furthering the permission structure for such behavior.
Great article! Much of what gets called masculinity is really social permission. Boys are not born believing cruelty makes them powerful. They are taught, rewarded, corrected, and redirected until some of them mistake contempt for strength. I have a son in his thirties who is the antithesis of what the manosphere seems to worship. He is sweet, gentle, emotionally present, and kind. He also has a backbone of steel. That is the distinction too many people miss. Gentleness is not weakness. Softness is not an absence of conviction. A man can refuse cruelty and still be strong. In fact, in a culture that keeps trying to shame men out of tenderness, staying gentle may be one of the harder forms of courage.
Great post, Tom. Generational misogyny is a relay race, with men handing off the same batons. Stories, laws, aesthetics, “traditions” all while pretending to be surprised when women keep getting bruised by them. Hemingway is an example of how a male writer can be both formally brilliant and structurally incurious about women at the same time. His female characters are often vividly sketched yet weirdly under-souled, defined by how reliably they orbit male damage rather than by interiority of their own. You can always tell what the writer thinks of women when he starts with her appearance. Hemingway's best-realized woman character was Lady Bret Archer, and she was a vapid and pathetic party girl seemingly grafted from Fitzgerald's Daisy: an icon to be worshipped, but with the writer's scorn baked in.
I think of Alison Bechdel's test, a comic that became a diagnostic tool. Two named women who talk to each other about something other than a man. It's an excellent Geiger counter for background levels of male-centered storytelling that we’ve normalized, and it's alarming how in 2026 how few of the movies and books pass it.
The awkward truth is that an enormous swath of the canon from Hemingway to prestige TV fails even this low bar, which shows the narrative pipeline that still assumes men as protagonists and women as atmosphere.
Stieg Larsson’s original Swedish title is not The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo but Män som hatar kvinnor—Men Who Hate Women. American publishers softened that into something quirky and marketable, sliding the emphasis from a culture of male violence to the body art of the one woman trying to survive it. They changed Salander from a woman to a girl, and while the character is deep and nuanced, Larsson uses the POV of the men around her to show how she's perceived. They always start with how she looks. The retitling is a confession that even when a man finally names the thing straight on, the market flinches and re-centers the male gaze in an attempt to sell misogyny as edgy entertainment rather than an indictment.
The Equal Rights Amendment was written in 1923, passed by Congress in 1972, and then left three states short of ratification when the deadline expired in 1982. A century after it was drafted, women can be President or Speaker but still lack explicit constitutional protection against sex discrimination. Women are paid less in virtually every job outside of the porn industry. Women have always written, painted, organized, and governed; the archive is full of them if you bother to look. What we call “greatness” is often just the residue of which men got to decide whose work mattered, whose books got preserved, whose signatures made laws.
The contemporary tradwife aesthetic is a reactionary fantasy layered over misogyny. Instagram softness blurring over the entrenched legal and economic order where male authority and female dependence remain structurally rewarded.
It dresses hierarchy up as choice, as if multigenerational female disposability is a lifestyle brand. Erika Kirk is a prime example, but in Trump's orbit women are wholly interchangeable just as they are on Fox News.
Men built the systems that treat women as supporting characters and raised daughters and sons inside those systems. The hard-coded misogyny feels like weather instead of design.
Calling this out is the first step in refusing to carry the baton any farther.
Misogyny starts in early childhood with the phrase "BOYS WILL BE BOYS". Think about it.
The first of many excuses.
Thank you for this brilliant and beautifully written comment. It resonates in my bitter sad dark heart.
Thank you for reading!!
Thank you for using your voice to decry oppression and violence. It’s not easy to call out a powerful group that you belong to, but the people that share the identity of an oppressor are the best ones suited to make a dent. Its why Christians, straight people and white people also need to stand up and speak out in defense of our fellow human beings. ❤️
Thank you for this. You're right that it's not always comfortable, but comfort was never really the point. I appreciate you saying it the way you did.
Thank you Tom J. When the Me Too movement happened at first I thought I had not remembered anything happening to me. But it did. Lots of times. Being touched, being patronized, being demeaned, being an object, being judged, being disliked for using my brain, being ridiculed because I was a reader, being told what I heard was not what I heard right then out of man’s mouth, having to be careful, being scared, not being free to dress or walk or talk or be alone outside and on and on and on. I like men and I have loved a couple. But jeez guys why ya gots to hurt us? We are your mothers and sisters and cousins and friends and coworkers and your service workers, your doctors and nurses and scientists and mathematicians and world leaders. Try to remember our humanity. We try to remember you supposedly have some humanity as well. Start showing it ya big babies.
That list you wrote, touched, patronized, demeaned, told you didn't hear what you just heard, scared, careful, not free to walk alone, that's not a list of incidents. That's a description of an entire way of moving through the world that most men never have to learn because they never have to. I'm sorry it took Me Too for you to even let yourself count it all. I'm sorry there was so much to count.
"Try to remember our humanity. We try to remember you supposedly have some humanity as well." That's going to stay with me a while. You said in two sentences what I took two thousand words to circle around.
Thank you for trusting this space enough to say all of that out loud.
Thank you for writing the truth. I salute you sir! And my heart embraces you and my own brother who is also a kind and good man.
Wow. I am blushing and for me that is not a thing. Did I already reply? I use a phone and IPad and the feed and notifications is different one from the other device. Weird.
I could relate all that after you wrote The Permission and I read it. I sat back and breathed. And then I wrote. It flowed out of my head into the “ page “.
Your confessional gave me permission.
You are of a house of women nuclear wise but you did that well because of what you knew about the danger your sister was in when you were a child. 10 years old.
Cheers.
It’s not always misogyny, but it’s always patriarchy.
I learned this comparatively late in life, for a girl. I grew up in a inner-ring Chicago town with a mixed neighborhood of white- and blu- collar workers, men of all kinds. Not once ever did I experience a sense of danger from any of them, my playmates' fathers and my own. Not once did I feel we girls were inferior to boys or that boys got excuses for their deeds. My first taste of male dominance was high school in a more middle-class town when the popular boys, athletes, got lunch table preference to be together, but that was it. In class girls were respected for academic achievement and parity in all things except girls basketball that had stupid rules. So I was deluded. I thought women were equal. My parents said that, acted that way between themselves. Thought that was how the world worked.
Then came feminism, the Sexual Revolution, and instead of becoming a way for men and women to move forward more equitably, it became a cudgel used to demand sex. It demanded work and more even contribution from women, sure, but that became entitlement even as women's pay didn't grow as fast as that of males. I do not remember the 60s in a kindly way at all. That equality I knew as a kid? The one everyone insists didn't exist? Well, it no longer did. Every assumption I made was wrong from then on.
Culturally I found the 60s revolting. Comedy became smarmy, anti-female, immature sniggering about sex and dirty words. What wasn't immature dirty jokes was angry and hostile. And I have no idea why. I'm still puzzling it all out. But I know I want a world of genuine respect among the sexes - all of them - and compassion for one another as human beings. How I grew up. I want it back. Thank you, Tom, for being the kind of man I knew.
What you're describing, that whiplash between a childhood that genuinely worked and a culture that turned around and used "equality" as a different kind of leash, doesn't get said enough. People want a clean story, things were bad and now they're better, or things were always bad and we're just naming it now. You lived something messier and more specific than either of those, and it deserves to be heard as its own true thing, not folded into someone else's narrative about the decade.
I don't know that I'm the kind of man you knew. I'm just trying, the way your father and your neighbors apparently managed to without anyone making a doctrine out of it. That you'd say so means more than you probably intended it to.
I hope you get some of that world back. I'd like to live in it too.
Yes, Tom, you ARE the kind of man I once knew and trusted. Personally I've found them individually in my own life, just shocked how absent so many are in public life.
Americans are indeed obsessed with linear thinking. When I was taking Lit in high school and read "Candide" I found Dr. Pangloss whose saying, "In every day in every way we are getting better and better" was sufficiently intriguing I never forgot it. As an historian taking the dreaded "historiography" course in college, we learned the many threads used by historians to show change. One of them is very Panglossian and always WRONG.
That things could have been more healthy in the past is also not unalloyed. What I remember was a white experience and leaves out the harsh reality of Black people in America. But the upshot of that is the discovery later through lived experience, that those very travails created Black men very much like my father and you. Regardless of class I worked and lived in communities of males I found I could trust, ones who lived by very much the same Code as you've described here. That's not the public fact of Black males, but it's the dominant one in real life.
My mother, the unhappy cottonwood that broke, still had some wisdom to impart. She said television and mass media of the 20th C. would skew our understandings of reality. She saw it as propaganda purveyed to dumb us down. She wasn't wrong. Most of the anti-woman, anti-Black, anti-immigrant ideas of who "the other" is are based on false stories, false images. We allow those to overshadow reality. Maybe this is a simplistic explanation. Maybe it's THE explanation. But we need strong voices about what decency and adulthood CAN look like in today's world. I see this set of conversations drawn from your observations as a solid way forward. It is a breath of hope and insight, a declaration of possibility that has lifted your readers up in a very dark time. It's a gift to us all. Thank you more than I can say.
Misogyny sucks.
We actually wrote some fiction about understanding it
https://thistleandmoss.com/p/the-weight-we-carry-the-space-we-take
Thank you Tom. I know the truth of this by the tears that immediately came on reading it. So much recognition. And we f***ing need more men to realise it. More men to say it. And more men to do something about it. In you. In your families. In your friend groups. In your communities. In your organisations. Everywhere. Just as many of us are trying to take responsibility as white people—for our own growth and change. We need men to do that with and for each other. Like their life depends on it. Because it does. All of our lives do. ♥️
Thank you for telling me about the tears. That's not a small thing to share with a stranger on the internet.
You're right that recognizing it in myself was the easy part tonight, the cheap part almost. The harder part is what you're asking for, men actually doing this work with each other, out loud, in the rooms where it usually goes unsaid. I don't have a clean answer for how that spreads. I just know it doesn't spread by one essay. It spreads by the next conversation, and the one after that, in actual rooms with actual men who'd rather change the subject.
I hear you. Trying to be one more voice that doesn't let the subject change.
Tbh, it’s getting over the cringe. Not just in one-on-one conversations. But in groups. In public. Collectively. In ways that require something of us. It’s loving other men. In public. And showing how much better that feels than staying bottled up and contracted. It’s living it. Not just talking about it. Being it. With others. It cannot be done individually. As little hermetically sealed units.
Speaking as someone who is trying to understand and embody the work for white people, the work for men follows the same pattern. See your patterns. The defensive architecture that you built to survive the stupid systems of dominance imposed by patriarchal colonial institutions needs to be seen, recognized for how it has harmed you and, also, caused you to harm others.
Because otherwise we’re just stuck in the repeating patterns. We are the system.
I always think that the real work is getting over our shame about love.
I’m glad there are men who speak clearly, as you do.
In this world, when “leaders” (and that is a gross misuse of the word in the example you spoke of) continue to sell the lie that being disgusting is powerful, it is other men who need to pick up the gauntlet and speak, take action, and say no more. Thank you for addressing this very thing.
May there one day soon be a world where baboons like the orange one who claims to be in charge, are too embarrassed by themselves to ever speak in public again.
The issue is much much deeper than algorithms. Mothers believe their male infants crawl further and earlier than their own female infants. But when measured objectively, there is no difference. A male toddler falls and is told to brush it off, to stop crying, to “be a big boy”. A female toddler falls and is scooped up, snuggled, cuddled and coddled. Once kids get into the social sorting mechanism otherwise called school, the real abuse begins. A boy that cries will be forever branded as a sissy, the low athletic boy will be ousted socially, the boy who likes to read will be labeled a nerd. While girls have their own mean girl social sorting mechanisms, the boys are vicious, physically cruel and the gang leaders often use girls as their teaching targets, taunting, chasing, belittling, and worse. This whole mechanism existed long before algorithms. The algorithms just do it faster and reach those who failed in the social sorting mechanism, letting them believe they too can become alphas.
Umm. Some Native American tribes would have the women in charge of torture because they were better at it. I wanted my son to meet the same milestones I did: crawling by six months, walking by nine (he did).
Clumsy girls are left to be picked last, right before the kids with bad hygiene if they are lucky. If the coach saves the embarrassment of choosing teams, the team “given” the clumsy kids treat them with ridicule, eye rolls and exaggerated sighs.
There is hair pulling and punches. You’re tripped in the hallway and have people yank your books out of your arms.
And if you cry. If you’re dumb enough to cry, they double down and do it more. If you complain, you’re taken into an isolated area and punched repeatedly.
Don’t pretend that girls are somehow coddled by their peers.
I said “While girls have their own mean girl social sorting mechanism,…”. I don’t know what they are and I won’t try to pretend that I do.
Point taken. 😊
Girls can be astonishingly violent with each other. Maybe it was the kind of school I went to. 🤔
Appreciate you--your thoughtful,caring writing and sharing. Spot on about women and the permission pipeline men created--and support. I'm almost 83, in Minneapolis, walking the streets, facing ICE and more, staying strong. Two daughters--5 grands and 4 are young women. I want them to see me--father.grandfather--as a man with strength and caring, living values of respect,empathy and--yes--courage -on the streets, (and much more) 20 below or 90 above.
https://davidofallon.substack.com/p/weve-got-each-other?
Go get’em David!!
Brilliant piece. When I heard what Michelle Obama was called it made me sick to my stomach. This type of rhetoric happens far too often. We've all witnessed it in one form or another and many have been the victim. The current occupant of the White House legitimizes it and so do those that have voted for him and continue to support him. It's not okay. It's never been okay. Supporting this President despite his numerous failings in this regard makes one complicit. Thanks again Tom for engaging your readers. You make a difference.
"Sick to my stomach" is the right reaction, the only honest one really. It should turn your stomach. The day it stops doing that to people is the day it's fully won.
You're right that it's not abstract for most people, everyone's witnessed some version of it, plenty have lived it. That's part of why it gets shrugged off so easily by the people who haven't, it's background noise to them and a gut punch to everyone else.
Love you Tom
Powerful. I know good men exist. My dad had his flaws, but was a good man. He had a lousy childhood and wanted to do his best to be a better man than his own father.
Sadly, because of some of his bad decisions, I spent much of my life giving myself away, and even my good marriage, in hindsight, listening to others’ stories, wasn’t as good as it should have been.
Fathers are very important to daughters.
Please use the word patriarchy. Do not dilute the horrors of this conditioning. It will cost us many more lives of men and women.
I know the word, and I know what it names. I left it out here on purpose. This piece works through specific people, one fighter, one microphone, one boy afraid for his sister, because I wanted the system visible in the particulars rather than asserted as a label. Patriarchy is real and it's the right word for what's underneath all of this. I just think a piece this personal earns the reader's gut before it earns the term. I appreciate you saying it plainly here, it's true even where I chose not to use it.
Thank you for this seering reflection. I believe the conversation about the "victimization" of young men is furthering the permission structure for such behavior.
Great article! Much of what gets called masculinity is really social permission. Boys are not born believing cruelty makes them powerful. They are taught, rewarded, corrected, and redirected until some of them mistake contempt for strength. I have a son in his thirties who is the antithesis of what the manosphere seems to worship. He is sweet, gentle, emotionally present, and kind. He also has a backbone of steel. That is the distinction too many people miss. Gentleness is not weakness. Softness is not an absence of conviction. A man can refuse cruelty and still be strong. In fact, in a culture that keeps trying to shame men out of tenderness, staying gentle may be one of the harder forms of courage.