The other day, my 6-year-old asked, “Why is there a book called I Hate Men?” He pointed to said book, by the French writer Pauline Harmange, which I had just recently bought at a bookseller’s passionate recommendation, which went something like this: “Give this to every man you love.” Now, here was a boy I loved asking about this bomb-throwing title. We were running late to camp, I was exhausted from my eighth straight day of solo parenting while Christopher traveled for work and family, the longest stretch I’ve ever had to do, and this monumental question was something I hadn’t at all expected and really felt I must get right. “Ooh, great question,” I said. “I’ll tell you all about it in the car.” There are so many book titles in our house that will one day require explanation. It’s something I’ve been worrying about, given how much of a reader my kid has become, but mostly as it relates to sex. I considered culling the bookshelf of titles like Sluts and I Love Dick but then where was the line, exactly? What about Hard Core, The Erotic Mind, Boys & Sex, and Powers of Desire? What about my own memoir, the one screaming “Want Me” on the spine? And what would it mean—what message would it send—to purge our home library of smart, thoughtful, and politically vital writing on gender and sexuality? I gave up, feeling overwhelmed by this conundrum of age appropriateness and political values. Anyway, I had been anticipating a sex talk, not a men talk. In the car, I bumbled my way through an explanation of this book that I had yet to actually read, this book that felt very relevant to the current discourse around celibacy and divorce and, good lord, J.D. Vance. All I could go on was the book jacket and the bookseller’s recommendation. “The author of this book isn’t saying that she hates all men,” I said, while simultaneously heeding his repeated interruptions to please put on Chappell Roan, his new favorite. “She’s saying that she hates sexism. She hates the bad things that many men have done to women throughout history.” “Which bad men, like Donald Trump and the cybertruck guy?” The kids, they’re always listening. Just the other day, he had heard me grumbling about a cybertruck on the road and the hateful man who made them. “Well, yeah, kind of,” I said. “Anyway, the woman writing the book is really saying that she’s very troubled by a lot of the things in our culture that either men do or are expected to do.” “I have a question,” he said. “Are you saying that men are told to do bad things?" “In a way! Lots of times men face pressure, starting when they’re young. ‘Boys can’t do this. Only girls can do that. Boys don’t cry, boys have to be tough, boys have to like guns.’ A lot of boys get shut off from their own feelings because their parents or friends or TV shows are telling them you’re not supposed to feel feelings.” I was really winging it. I considered getting into the ways that masculinity is positioned as antithetical to all things feminine, and how that sows hatred, internally and externally. I thought about mentioning a recent quote I’d read in Carvell Wallace’s fantastic memoir: “To be a man, a certain percentage of your feeling toward women must be disapproval. You must view them as too emotional, too loud, not rational enough, unpredictable, disorganized, silly, curved, loose, untrustworthy, wrong, too much, or too little.” Instead, I decided to keep it simple. “As a result, many boys and men don’t end up building meaningful relationships, they don’t talk about their emotions, and that can lead to bad choices,” I said. “I think that’s how Donald Trump and the cybertruck guy got bad,” he said. I refrained from—once again, for the millionth time—troubling the idea of “bad people” as opposed to “bad choices.” In part because we had arrived at camp at that point and I was late to a meeting, but also because Trump and Elon Musk… challenge my spiritual clarity. I drove home reviewing the transcript of our conversation. I think it went pretty well, especially as tough conversations in these times go. Over the previous days and weeks, my kid has heard snippets on the radio, learned things on the playground, and gathered some keywords from adult conversation that have led to questions relating to attempts to overthrow democracy, ban gay marriage, bully trans kids, and criminalize abortion (“There are people who want to force people to be pregnant and have babies,” I said). That’s not to mention my having to explain the concept of war, which led him to question the existence of Santa, because if this magical being did exist, why wasn’t he preventing kids from being killed in Gaza? (My kid for president.) Of course, a “men talk” is essential to understanding all of these abuses and atrocities. It is essential to all those sex books on my bookshelf, too. And, like any good “sex talk,” it is not just one talk but a series of ongoing conversations. Ideally, with Chappell Roan playing in the background. Friends! I need your help. I can’t do this weekly newsletter without paid subscribers. 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četvrtak, 18. srpnja 2024.
What made the bad men bad?
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