I know we’re not supposed to use the R-word anymore. Its “off-label” use as a pejorative has made it offensive even though the verb form, “to retard” simply means to delay or hold back in terms of progress or development. The word has entered the euphemism treadmill where words that have become stigmatized are replaced by euphemisms, which then become stigmatized, and are replaced by more euphemisms. Cretin was replaced by mentally retarded, retarded was replaced by mentally handicapped, which was replaced by cognitive disability or developmental disability, or learning difficulties. Each new term is an attempt to get away from a word that has become weighted with derision and shame.

Shame, however, can occasionally be useful, and I believe that applying certain words in certain contexts would make an appropriate use of shame for positive change. Unfortunately, we are often afraid to use shame against people because the collective, literalist peanut gallery that is American discourse often chooses to ignore context, preferring instead to burn down the entirety of a “bad” word and replace it with those softer, sometimes comically obtuse, descriptive phrases generated by the euphemism treadmill. The trick is to use it precisely, consistently, and only in certain specific contexts. The shock of a “bad” word used correctly can strip away layers of delusions and denial.

Now, because context matters, let’s get down to it.

As you can guess from the title, I’m writing about patriarchy and its particular ability to delay or hold back people’s development. Specifically, I’m writing about white supremacist capitalist patriarchy and its impact on men. Any feminist, and any anti-racists will tell you the point of white supremacist capitalist patriarchy is to delay and hold back, if not to wholly prevent, the progress and development of people who are not white, not cis-gendered male, and not wealthy.

White supremacist capitalist patriarchy wants to retard women, but especially black and brown women. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy wants to retard poor people, but especially black and brown poor people. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy wants to retard LGBTQ people, but especially black and brown LGBTQ people. White supremacist capitalist patriarchy wants to retard disabled people, but especially black and brown disabled people. It wants to do that because white supremacist capitalist patriarchy needs an oppressive hierarchy that “retards” everyone in some fashion simply to survive — even some of the people it supposedly benefits.

If you are only upset about the use of the verb “to retard” in those sentences, you’re not paying attention to the contextual truth of those statements. The shame is on our patriarchal system and those who fight to uphold it, not its victims. Hindering, often aggressively, the progress and development of women, racial and ethnic minorities, LGBTQ people, and people with disabilities is an act of oppression. It is also a hallmark of fascist ideologies.

Now, in this essay, I’m not concerned with how the patriarchy oppresses people who are not white, male, or wealthy. The harms the patriarchy inflicts upon those segments of the population are quite well known to anyone who is paying attention and engaged in trying to mitigate those harms.

I’m concerned with how white supremacist capitalist patriarchy retards straight white men because, first, I’m a straight white man, and second, because my growth and development into a whole, fully integrated, human has been retarded by the ill-defined, yet still rigid and restrictive demands of “white manhood” that have been placed upon me inside this white supremacist capitalist patriarchal system. Patriarchy in America makes it easier for someone like me to get a loan, it alleviates the potential danger of being killed during a routine traffic stop, it even lessens the punishment I would receive for sexual assault; however, in return for those unholy “benefits,” white men are purposefully stunted, or retarded, in their emotional growth and development, which makes it difficult for them to participate in their own liberation from restrictive gender norms.

With the way we treat the word “retarded,” and the way our patriarchal society treats white men, it can be hard to see the truth of how the patriarchy actually cripples cis-het straight white men, makes them into monsters, and then sets them to defending their own monstrousness. The lack of empathy, the entitlement, the obedience to male authority figures, and the lack of accountability are all signs that the growth and development of boys and men has been severely “delayed or held back in terms of development” i.e., retarded.

Over time, patriarchy has moved away from a simple, primitive division of labor and a mechanism of inheritance to a rigid racial and genital-based caste system. That caste system promotes the idea that our various human traits are “naturally” divided up between men and women, between races and ethnicities, and that the divisions patriarchy has created are inherent and immutable, with the traits designated as belonging to white men being superior and more desirable.

Patriarchy seems now to be a deeply ingrained, rigid, and nearly subconscious re-enactment of the Hans Christian Andersen folktale “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” except us white male “emperors” are so delusionally trapped in our non-existent superiority that we struggle to wake up from the delusion no matter how often it’s pointed out that we’re not wearing any clothes. The social, emotional, and psychological cost of waking up feels too overwhelming for some men to survive. The weakest of us white men have decided it’s better to fight, viciously and violently, to keep that delusion of superiority in place rather than risk accountability.

One of the most shocking personal realizations I had as I approached middle age was centered on this notion of patriarchy’s retardation of men. Throughout my twenties and thirties, I would occasionally joke that I felt like I was born with a mild developmental or intellectual disability and everyone who knew me had agreed to never tell me. I was looking for an explanation of both my failures, which were many, and my so-called successes, which never seemed as significant to me as they did to those around me. It felt like my ambitions were being humored, and what I saw as my limited, half-assed successes were elevated beyond their scope because I “needed encouragement” to feel good about myself. In other words, I constantly felt I was being appeased and pandered to, as if people didn’t think I could face the truth of my mental and emotional limitations.

I would have continued making that joke and fumbling around with the embarrassment and shame that came with it, if it hadn’t been for certain aspects of my personality the patriarchy hadn’t beaten out of me as I grew up. I have always been a bit shy, quiet, and cautious, which means I’ve learned to listen to and observe people before interacting with them. I’m also curious about how things work and why things happen. Finally, because I listen and try to understand, I’m constantly wrestling with the “stereotype threat”[1] of being “that guy” — the entitled, oblivious, incompetent, violent, asshole that I’ve heard women complain about my entire life. In fact, my fear of that stereotype is so severe that at times my inaction and the practiced non-committal shrug I’ve developed, have been read by others as the exact stereotype of the arrogant, unemotional, insensitive man I fear.

In all honesty, if I didn’t suffer from aspects of the male stereotype, just as I feared, it wouldn’t have taken me forty-some years to figure out that my suspicions of being developmentally disabled were, really, my subconscious sensing of people’s ingrained deference to me as a straight white male in a system that caters to straight white men. In other words, I was indeed developmentally disabled, but it wasn’t because of low IQ, severe autism, or some condition along the lines of Down Syndrome or Fragile X syndrome. My development was retarded by our patriarchal social structure and how it trained me to be “a man,” or, more accurately, how NOT to be a girl. I was emotionally ignored and silently trained into a version of the stereotype I hated, even as I struggled against it, and I’m both pissed off about it and, seemingly, trapped within it.

Here’s how it went:

Being a shy, sensitive, and quiet boy, I had a habit of eavesdropping on the grown-ups in my life. Since patriarchy demanded — at least during my early childhood before the Reagan years — that men be away at jobs while women tended the children, most of my childhood was, obviously, spent around women and other children.

I grew up in Kansas through the 1970s and 1980s, and I didn’t know about feminism until I was a teenager; however, the language and ideas of second-wave feminism were hovering in the social air around me, and acted out, at times, in the TV shows I watched. The emphasis of feminism in that era was on critiquing institutions and cultural practices that were dominated by men, as well as a growing awareness and anger about domestic violence and rape, especially marital rape. Being a kid meant I was ignorant of the wider social context. What I encountered was quite different from what grown-ups were encountering. I wasn’t watching the news, so I wasn’t aware of the Equal Rights Amendment, or of feminists like Andrea Dworkin, Gloria Steinem, Betty Friedan, bell hooks, or Audre Lorde, nor was I aware of anti-feminist women like Phyllis Schlafly. Also, western Kansas wasn’t a hotbed of liberal or leftist ideas, which meant that, even though feminist talking points may have been topics the grown-ups discussed, the social fabric they upheld around me was still decidedly patriarchal. My mother was a stay-at-home mom until my younger sister entered kindergarten, and I was ten years old.

What I heard from the women and girls around me (school, day care, friend’s houses) sounded like this: all men are jerks; all they think about is sex; they can’t do anything for themselves; men can’t control their anger; men are stupid; men are insensitive, and so on. Basically, men were outright monsters. It was especially jarring because when my father and other men were around, and we were all in public, the women who’d been complaining bitterly to other wives about the men in their lives put on their happy, obedient wife faces. They appeared to love their husbands, defend them, encourage them, and follow their husband’s lead even though I’d overheard these same women, in private, saying how careless, cruel, or domestically incompetent those men were. Sure, their husbands dutifully supported their families with their paychecks, but at home, all men were secretly seen as dumb, and dangerous as stray dogs.

As a child, I didn’t know women had legitimate grievances against specific men and against our male dominated society in general, and I certainly didn’t know what passed between my own parents when I wasn’t around. I was not yet two years old when Roe v Wade was decided. I was three when the Equal Credit Opportunity Act was passed and my mother could get a credit card without her husband’s or father’s name on it. It wasn’t until I was seventeen, in 1988, that a woman could take out a business loan without a male relative’s signature. Marital rape was finally made illegal in 1993 when I was twenty-two. What I grew up in was a society that was still deeply mired in maintaining traditional gender roles and identities, and, at least outwardly, still trying to maintain a kind of Leave It to Beaver picture of domestic stability and happiness.

What I didn’t know then, and only learned in bits throughout my twenties, was the dynamic I’d witnessed — the public deference to, and private criticism of, men — was women’s psychological relief valve that helped them endure the indignities of misogyny in a white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. Undercutting misogynistic male dominance by denigrating their husband’s infantile domestic and emotional skills is the true form and expression of misandry. Misandry is not criticizing men for behaving badly, or calling out their abuses of, and crimes against, women. Calling women misandrist for pointing out that men commit crimes against women and being angry that those men often get away with those crimes, is standard misogyny. In a patriarchal system, there’s Schrödinger’s male responsibility: a man is responsible for controlling women, but not responsible for controlling himself around women. True misandry is a means of framing women’s anger over their subservience to inadequate men within patriarchy that allows men to dismiss the criticism and ignore it. That is why true misandry is confined to the domestic sphere, which is the only societal sphere where women are typically allowed authority or dominance, and is often framed within humor[2]. True misandry serves two purposes, to relieve women’s internal dissonance and stress over the injustice of their station in patriarchal systems, and, by being seen within patriarchy as light, silly, and true, to protect women from violent reprisals over their anger at having to obey someone who is cruel or incompetent. Women can, with relative safety, mock and denigrate their men for being bad at cooking, cleaning, grocery shopping, and childcare because those things are women’s work and men aren’t supposed to be good at them anyway[3].

Because I heard all of that without understanding what it actually meant, or why it was happening, I internalized the message that men were awful, and that I, when I grew up, was going to be awful, too, no matter what I did. The problem was I didn’t want to be awful. I didn’t want the girls and women in my life to talk about me with that kind of disdain (I also do not want to be praised as “exceptional” for doing the bare minimum). It hurt to hear those accusations; it loaded me up with shame and fear and doubt about my worth as a person even if I met all the requirements of being a “man,” which now seemed to include being disdained and feared by women.

I was being conditioned by the patriarchal boundaries of the day that any emotion I felt besides anger, was unimportant, or unacceptably feminine. If someone hurt my feelings, I needed to let it go and not worry about what the bully thought of me, or preferably, get revenge. If I were scared, I needed to find my balls and man-up, lash out at whatever scared me, beat what I feared into submission. If I were hurt, I needed to stop crying like a girl, walk it off, preferably alone so no one could see. If I needed to be consoled, I was told to simply get over it and stop crying because that’s just how life is, toughen up, be a man. If I had a crush on a girl, it was something to be mocked, teased — how dare I be so enamored — I should go and kiss her till she likes it (a classic Hollywood trope), not pine away and hope she notices me. Sure, my scratches and cuts were bandaged, broken bones set and mended, coats were provided when I was cold, water if I were thirsty, food when I was hungry, medicine when I was sick. But my emotional needs were ignored unless I lead with anger. I learned that no one would notice or care if I were struggling with something until I lashed out, loudly, angrily, violently. Only then, out of their fear and panic at my outburst, would the practical issue be addressed. Maybe there’d be a bit of emotional soothing that would take place, but only the soothing of my anger, not its underlying source emotions. Also, those moments of attention only lasted long enough to settle the discomfort I had caused everyone else by yelling, slamming doors, throwing things, or punching walls. Once their sense of equilibrium was returned, and they were certain I was done making a scene, I was left alone to cope with all the original emotions that lead to the outburst, plus, now, the additional guilt and shame at having lost control and having become the monster I was so afraid of becoming.

This, I think, is why it’s men who tend to have an avoidant attachment style the way I do. It’s also why pop psychology tends to demonize that attachment style. Avoidant people (mostly men) are seen as not knowing their own feelings, or are afraid of them, so they purposefully refuse to be present and open to their partner’s feelings and emotions. It’s why we have this common narrative in hetero relationships where a woman goes to her husband or boyfriend looking to co-regulate an emotional upheaval, and instead of “listening,” he starts to offer practical solutions and actions. Then, because the woman knows what needs to be done, and was only looking to process an emotion and gain support through bonding before enacting the practical solution, she gets angry at him for seeming to not care about her feelings and only focusing on the “obvious” solutions.

The problem is no one stops to think that he’s only doing what he was trained to do: focus on solutions, actions, and tasks and not worry about those silly, feminine emotions. As a boy or a man, if you’ve got a problem, you’re supposed to solve it, not sit around “feeling” things about it, unless the feeling is anger at having been inconvenienced. For boys and men, school, sports, jobs, and relationships are all framed as problems to be solved, things to be conquered and made to submit, not experiences to have or experiences to share and process and get sympathy or understanding from. As a man, your emotions are not important — unless they hurt someone else. If you, as a man, spend time, any time at all, “feeling your feelings” instead of solving the problem that caused them, you’re weak, you’re a “girl.” Before second and third wave feminism, men who successfully mastered this emotional amputation were rewarded by our patriarchal system with some level of power, prestige, and even admiration and respect. If he mastered the problem of breadwinner manhood, he was rewarded with money, perhaps even a family who would come to depend upon his income.

And it wasn’t only our fathers and coaches who perpetrated that idea, it was also our mothers and occasionally the women we’ve tried to have relationships with. One of the common complaints about adult men is that they expect women to do all of the man’s emotional labor in the same way women are asked to manage the emotions of children. And women are right to be frustrated about that. Even the men who try to open up to them about their emotions, who seek to bond through the co-regulation of their emotions, arrive at that juncture with the retarded skill set they had at whatever age they learned from their parents, coaches, and teachers that they were too old to be emotional and acting like a girl. Men’s immature emotional skills do, indeed, demand an extra level of patience, and that feels quite unfair. Therapy can help men develop and practice those skills in safe controlled environments, but it’s still no replacement for real-world experience with someone they are trying to love and who has their own set of traumas and needs.

As we’ve become aware of how patriarchy retards the growth and development of women, we really haven’t spent much time thinking about, nor been particularly successful at dismantling, the subconscious fear and disdain of the “feminine” that has been implanted in boys and men. In the patriarchal hierarchy, it makes sense for women to want to climb up, to gain the power granted to men by the accident of their birth, and to acquire those traits that have been elevated to prime status and kept away from them. But because the patriarchal hierarchy devalues the “feminine” so thoroughly, it’s simply not seen as positive for a man to embrace those “lesser, weaker, feminine traits.” No matter how much lip-service feminisms pay to becoming “whole humans,” it is still perceived as less than and weak for men to descend the hierarchical ladder. To a lot of men, there seems to be little to gain by doing so, especially if they are deeply invested in misogynistic beliefs, or, what’s probably more common, is this: a lot of men have simply been so well conditioned by the patriarchy that they are unable to be disobedient and fail to see the strength and courage (both valued masculine traits) it takes to defy the patriarchal system.

Unfortunately, upholding patriarchal beliefs and failing to examine their assumptions about gender roles is also true of a number of women.

In Rebecca Walker’s introduction to the anthology What Makes a Man, she writes,

I also hope that women readers will reflect deeply on their part in maintaining the male charade. If we want men to be different, we must eroticize that difference, and stop saying we want a man who can talk about his feelings, only to marry the strong, silent type who “just so happens” to be a good provider.

Maybe the younger generations, faced with the collapse of the American empire, are doing what Ms. Walker suggested[4], but among my generation, Ms. Walker’s sentiment was often seen as a demand for women to continue being emotional wet nurses for underdeveloped men. In my early thirties, when I brought up that passage during discussions of the problems of, and harms caused by, manhood and masculinity, I was told that I was still expecting women to do all the work to change men. No one seemed to notice that I was simply asking to be seen clearly, that what I needed emotionally, in that moment, was to be acknowledged for trying to change and needing a little encouragement to continue. I was asking to be allowed to fumble, to ask for help as a man who was trying to answer the call to talk about my emotions, and wondering if I would, indeed be desired if I did change (because I wasn’t being desired as I was or had been). Instead, I was shut down for, it seems, asking for more empathy than I deserved (which often felt like none). And I’m still not sure why.

I suspect one reason was that, among my generation, most of the women still subconsciously expected men to be the strong, silent, and good providers even as these women were consciously stating they wanted something different. They weren’t doing that out of malicious, manipulative intent, but because, never having seen an example of what they said they were looking for, they couldn’t accept the imperfect, awkward attempts made by men who were, themselves, struggling to unlearn their patriarchal conditioning, and learn, seemingly on their own and without practical in-the-moment coaching, how to access, express, and talk about their emotions, which they’d never been taught how to deal with except by repression, and so were purposefully left underdeveloped.

People can and do change with little or no reason and for little or no reward, but in matters of love and relationships, it seems that we only change if the need is desperate, or if we fear we might lose someone if we don’t change. We are all animals after all, and operant conditioning still works. Unfortunately, it works both ways. If a man fears that becoming “softer” will cause his partner to lose interest, he’s unlikely to change no matter what she says — especially if her actions seem to belie the words. If he fears losing his partner if he doesn’t change, then he’ll change, or at least try to. Because our parents retarded our emotional growth to begin with, our parents are unlikely to be successful at helping us, and even if we go to therapy and learn new concepts to apply, we need a willing partner to practice with beyond our therapist. Talk therapy is little more than an intellectual exercise if we make no attempt at the practical application of the concepts in real world situations. But if we don’t have a partner to practice with and instead try to practice with the women we meet and try to date, we can seem needy and immature, and women in those situations certainly have a right to protest against their unwilling recruitment into our emotional reeducation.

The very structure of patriarchal enforcement makes that transition difficult for both men and women, but especially for men. Stepping down from the top of patriarchy’s hierarchical ladder is still often seen as a failure, not an expansion of, or growth into, our full humanity. Men who choose to step down from the top of the patriarchal ladder alone often have to endure criticism and isolation, the survival of which often seems to demand the very same masculine structures they were trying to avoid refusing to fit themselves into the rigid mold provided. Toughness, isolated endurance, stoic self-reliance, and rugged individualism are framed as harmful, and yet, they appear to be required for a man setting out to throw off those very same masculine expectations. If they’re lucky, they might find a positive social group that supports them, but those men who don’t find support, for one reason or another, are left facing an isolation that can begin to seem unbearable to the point of suicide.

Since I mentioned suicide, let’s take a detour through the gender paradox of suicide. Women make more suicide attempts, but men are more successful at taking their own lives[5]. The method of suicide is a small contributor. Men tend to use more immediate means like firearms. Women tend to choose overdosing, which is less immediately lethal, and leaves open a window for rescue. In other words, women tend to engage in suicidal gestures, while men adopt the Nike slogan and “just do it.” One of the possible reasons for the paradox, I think, is that women have tighter, more closely knit social groups, and so even if they reach the point of attempting a suicide there’s still some hope that someone will be there to rescue them. Their suicidal gestures are, indeed, “desperate cries for help” because they allow for a window of time for them to be rescued.

Men, however, are conditioned toward isolation, toward hyper-self-reliance. They often don’t believe they are allowedto ask for help, or they believe if they do ask for help, they will be refused, turned away, or criticized for being too weak to overcome whatever is troubling them, thus implying their failure as men. That ingrained narrative that no one will ever come to rescue or help them undercuts the “cry for help” theory of suicide, at least for men. If men believe themselves to be on their own, especially when it comes to emotional matters, and they fear showing weakness, then suicide is not a cry for help[6]. Suicide is the ultimate act of avoiding those emotions they have been told are too shameful for them to admit having. In other words, there is no final cry for help from men because they have been trained to believe that such help is unavailable to them in the first place either because it’s “unmanly” to ask for help or that help will never be offered. If a man can’t carry a burden anymore, and he believes no will help him, or that help will only come with criticism, shame, and the loss of stature, then the only safe option for dealing with those painful, shameful emotions is self-destruction, or denial — and denial, carried on long enough, becomes self-destructive.

Why kill yourself when you can antagonize someone else enough that they’ll kill you?

Now, this next part requires a non-sequitur level of intuitive leap, so give it a moment and stick with me.

In fiction there is the Mary Sue trope, which is typically a young woman who is unrealistically capable. The less common male version is sometimes called Gary Stu, Marty Stu, or Gary Sue. Both versions of the trope follow the same pattern: a young character saves the day because he or she is inexplicably more competent than their years and lived experience would suggest. I bring this up because I suspect it is a window through which to see the dilemma faced by men attempting to unlearn patriarchal conditioning, and by women who, exhausted by men in general, might still have a level of latent, unresolved patriarchal conditioning that feminism hasn’t resolved.

To me, the stressors and forces keeping so many men crippled are deep, complex, contradictory, and emotionally volatile. All of which makes change feel nearly impossible. We have lived, and evolved, for so long under a patriarchal structure that we fail to see its influence and how it continues to restrict our actions, even among those trying to liberate themselves.

What that leads to is this: men feel they are expected to change, to acquire that half of their humanity we call “feminine” but weren’t trained to use, entirely on their own with an almost “Gary Sue” style of sudden, miraculous competence. We’re then shamed if we fail to do it “correctly,” and to the standards expected of women. That expectation is not directly stated. It is very often implied because patriarchy has historically overburdened women with managing the emotionally crippled men in their lives. Women are, justifiably, tired of, and emotionally traumatized by, being asked to engage in this maternal-like emotional labor for the men they know. Furthermore, the most productive avenue for getting help and unlearning old behavior and learning new mental and emotional habits is therapy, which is now largely a feminine coded space in our patriarchal society[7]. So, the first thing a man has to overcome on his own, in that Mary Sue-Gary Sue fashion, is a fear of the feminine coded space that is most able to constructively help him. If he can do that, he then has to practice having his first, vulnerable, emotional co-regulatory conversations with a partner who is both vastly more experienced and, inevitably, deeply exhausted and traumatized by her partner’s and other men’s, pervious emotional neglect, abuse, or weaponized incompetence.

We’ve managed to create a situation where men are so hyper-focused on practical, immediate action to solve a problem that when they do try to show up to co-regulate an emotion, it’s interpreted as “solve my problem for me” not “help me regulate and process this difficult emotion so I can do what I need to do.”

What often happens, at least in my experience, is that I’ll go to a partner seeking to co-regulate some difficult emotions, which could have been caused by issues at work, or an encounter with a friend who has upset me, or a personal frustration over my writing, and in the process of trying to co-regulate, something I say triggers a negative emotional reaction from my partner (I’m too loud, or I’m gesturing too much, or I’m too bitter, or I’m too angry). We then divert into co-regulating and resolving her emotions around what I said, but we never return to the issue I was originally struggling with because my problem and my emotions have now become a trigger for her.

That cycle has been so common in my life, that I usually do not talk to anyone about anything until I’ve self-regulated down to a coldly analytical explanation. Despite past partner’s claims to the contrary, I know how my emotional cycle works. Like a lot of men, the most easily accessible emotion is anger, so every emotional upheaval will first present itself as anger; however, I am also aware that beneath that anger is the true, more accurate emotion like sadness, regret, fear, hurt, neglect, desperation, or disappointment.

Over the years and repetitions of that cycle, I have been conditioned to believe that my emotions are too volatile for the women in my life to handle because they might trigger fears of violence or harm, or that I might be too much of a burden. So, because I don’t want to be unloading my emotional labor onto her, I attempt to regulate my emotions down to an intellectual exercise, devoid of anything that might be potentially volatile or upsetting to someone else. Unfortunately, this often feels over-intellectualized to the women in my life who are seeking emotional connection and intimacy, and not my clinical self-analysis. Because the patriarchy has retarded my emotional skills, and because of her history of having to endure emotional trauma from other men’s retarded emotional skills, I continue to fail to connect and, most importantly, we both continue to blame me almost exclusively for not being able to “Gary Sue” myself into full emotional competence.

This is the fundamental problem: it is incredibly easy to confuse co-regulating emotions in a romantic or platonic relationship with doing someone else’s emotional labor. One is an essential process of bonding, which builds trust and intimacy, and one is an act of burdensome over-responsibility for her, and an infantilization of him that reinforces resentment and isolation. Patriarchy keeps that confusion, and its resulting frustration and harm, in place because patriarchy has retarded the emotional development of a lot of men at the skill level available to them when they finally internalized the belief that no one would help them deal with their emotions. Patriarchy then puts up barriers and boundaries around the means by which men can begin to learn those skills they were denied as children.

In my own life, I continue to fail at this. I know I lack true intimacy in my life because I am unable to trust that someone won’t dismiss, diminish, neglect, or weaponize my need to be seen, understood, and cared about. Intellectually, I know that by allowing myself to be vulnerable I give someone the chance to show they understand and care. However, my experience has taught me the chances of a positive outcome to my vulnerability are too small to overcome the historical pattern that no one cares about what I’m feeling.

I have been in and out of therapy since I was sixteen, and finally in my late forties, found a therapist I could trust and who does more than say “uh-huh” to me. I’ve learned through DBT (and my established meditative practices), to better control my outbursts of anger, and I’ve also learned to sit with partners as they process their emotions with me, and to not take things they say personally. However, I am still constantly accused of never actually listening. I suspect the reason for that is that I do not reciprocate with vulnerability in-kind. Often the things I say in response to my partner’s emotional needs are neutral or over-intellectualized to the point of clichéd meaninglessness — not because I don’t care but because I’m afraid of being wrong, and of doing something incorrectly in a way that would trigger more emotions. There is a distinct feeling that empathy is something I’m supposed to provide, but it’s something I’m not allowed to receive. It makes intimacy feel as dangerous as walking into a minefield rather than an opportunity for comfort and support.

So, there is nothing about me, genetically, that can be clinically classified as intellectually or developmentally disabled. However, I do carry an X and a Y chromosome and live in a patriarchal caste system. A caste system that has, in fact, demanded both a certain retardation of my full humanity and obedience to the violence prone men who claim to be in charge. In exchange for obedience, I’m offered only a false sense of superiority and power, and an immoral lenience toward bad behavior. None of those things are things I want, and I’m tired of being “good” only in comparison to the worst men out there. Instead of accepting the retardation of my humanity and being obedient to half-human males, I have carved out my own definition and standards of “masculinity.” Those standards are largely informed by my reading of feminist philosophy and the unglamorous pro-feminist and mythopoetic wings[8] of the men’s “movement.”

It’s a challenge because the so-called instructions for “being a man” usually begin with the proscriptive and negative: do not be feminine, do not be a monster, do not show weakness, etc. The prescriptive examples I’ve encountered are never ones that appeal to me because they either remain mired in aggression, conformity, and ridiculousness (be aggressive, be physically strong, take charge, hit yourself with a hammer to reshape your bones) or they seem smarmy and obsequious to the point of immolation. It still seems that even when we try to change, our full humanity gets held at arm’s length not because we are afraid or ignorant of our emotions, but because of the consequences of not sharing them like women do. Being vulnerable takes courage, yes, but it also requires having faith that people will not take advantage of that vulnerability, faith that they won’t turn it into a weapon against us. My experience in the world has taught me such faith is misguided.

I do hope that people are right about this moment in history being patriarchy’s extinction burst. I hope that we are on the cusp of a new masculinity that is whole and integrated. I hope the new social organization will encourage women and men to be fully rounded human beings rather than underdeveloped half-humans. Unfortunately, I think it’s too late for me, and whatever good comes won’t be something I’ll live to see.

[1] A stereotype threat predicament occurs when someone feels they are at risk of conforming to stereotypes, usually negative stereotypes, about their social group.

[2] A common sit-com and commercial trope from my childhood was to inject “humor” into it via a domestically challenged husband who couldn’t manage tasks usually performed by his wife like laundry, childcare, cooking, etc.

[3] Misandry is the reason I will not date conservative women who are looking for a relationship based on traditional patriarchal gender roles. I grew up in that environment, and I will not return to having my bad behavior excused and my domestic skills falsely denigrated or mockingly praised as exceptional “for a man.” I will be a whole human, and I do not want a woman who wants to fit herself to a restricted gender role.

[4] We could take the wide political separation between young women and men as a sign of this, if we incorporate the extinction burst theory. Young men are clinging, often violently, to the old model of masculinity, while young women have embraced the eroticization of the new form. This is a good thing, but perhaps too late for me.

[5] The price of patriarchal power is steep; white men account for the largest number of suicides (Suicide Statistics (2025)). In a report from 2022 compiled by SAVE.org there were 49,476 suicides, and white men accounted for 33,873 of them.

[6] Think of white men as being trapped on the top floors of a skyscraper above a fire that is raging on the lower floors, but the tower is so tall firefighters can’t reach the top floor on their ladders (think 9/11 or the old disaster movie The Towering Inferno). No one is coming to rescue them, maybe a few can find a way down through the fire, if they can find the courage, but they’d lose everything (power, prestige, wealth) in the process. For others, they’d rather choose to die than live through the loss of their status.

[7] Women make of nearly 70% of mental health workers in the U.S., and most are white as well.

[8] Keep in mind, the mythopoetic wing of the so-called “men’s movement” is problematic. The Robert Bly segment drifts toward goofiness and obtuse self-justification, while the Sam Keen segment, leans more toward philosophy and psychology. Both employ aspects of poetry and myth, which make it easily fall victim to negative interpretations by its adherents. It was the mythopoetic wing, especially the Bly inspired groups that, in my opinion, lead to the pro-patriarchal biblical masculinity ideology started by The Promise Keepers.

I’ve always hated the words “fiduciary responsibility,” or its more appropriate version “fiduciary duty,” especially considering the context in which I have generally heard those words.

When I looked up the term’s exact definition, it actually sounded like a rather decent concept, at least compared to the one I’d generated from the social context in which I have always encountered it. But, of course, definition and application are two different things — just ask all the people who insist on using the word “literally” when they should use “figuratively” or “ironically” when they mean “coincidentally.”

Now a complex term like “fiduciary duty” leaves a lot of room for misinterpretation, as well as harmful reduction. According to Delaware Corporate Law, which is supposed to be the most influential jurisdiction in the U.S. due to over half of the Fortune 500 companies being headquartered there, fiduciary duty includes the duty of care, the duty of loyalty, and the duty of good faith. Those concepts are also complex in their full definition, although the gist of their meaning feels much easier to grasp — at least if you have a fairly benevolent, perhaps even altruistic, sense of morality and ethics that hews fairly close to the so-called Golden Rule: treat others the way you would wish to be treated.

In other words, and to put it as bluntly and crassly as possible, “Don’t shit in my yard and I won’t shit in yours.”

The problem, of course, with the term fiduciary duty and its subcomponents is that their practice occurs in the business world, which is notoriously immoral and corrupt despite the strictures of law, morality, and ethics. The bigger the company gets, and the more the executive’s wealth alienates and isolates them from the public they pretend to serve, the more likely that company’s executives will cause harm.

That is a rather bold statement to deem the entire business world as immoral, but like our understanding of words and their actual definition, there exists a spectrum of application and understanding. Some large businesses do operate according to a higher, benevolent, even altruistic standard (Bob’s Red Mill is currently one of the most commonly cited examples on social media, as is Costco and a few others), but most do not, and that is the source of my hatred for the way the term “fiduciary duty” is used, and the social climate that crippled interpretation has wrought.

In 1999, Ball State University did a study comparing the ethical standards of Masters of Business Administration students and convicted felons (click here for a link to the article I found). I’m sure there have been similar studies since, but, at that time, the researcher was attempting to show that former felons could become productive and valuable members of society if businesses would give them a chance and hire them after they’d served their sentences. The Ball State study basically said, hey, incarcerated people are actually MORE loyal to their employer than MBAs, and more willing to do what is asked of them in ethically dubious situations than MBA candidates. It also said that MBA candidates could benefit from hands-on education in ethics instead of learning from abstract books and lectures.

What it inadvertently pointed out, at least in my opinion, was that MBAs are legally sanctioned crooks and businesses often find themselves in morally and ethically dubious situations that require obedience to a boss’s direction — kind of like a crime family. It was funny to me that convicted felons were more likely to follow orders in ethically dubious situations, but MBA might need more “ethics” education because the article, and it seems, the study, didn’t bother to specify if the orders from on high in those dubious situations were themselves ethically sound or ethically dubious orders. That suggests that what is most desired in business isn’t truly ethical behavior but the spurious notion that obedience to the boss is what determines ethical behavior. This, to some, has always been evident. The Enron scandal in 2001 reinforced it, as did the Great Recession after the housing crash, which was caused by greed, sub-prime mortgages, credit default swaps, and other shady financial derivatives that were, at the time, seen as “ethical” and legal. Basically, if someone has the criminal urge to rob people blind or commit mass murder the best way to have those urges and their consequences publicly sanctioned is to go into an appropriate business, obtain a leadership position, and then make sure those crimes fall under the leader’s “fiduciary duty” to benefit the company’s profit margin.

Now, since Enron in 2001, business schools have followed the recommendations of that Ball State study, at least according to their curricula, and increased their emphasis on business ethics education. However, from my experience and observations of the world, whatever they’re teaching in those business ethics classes isn’t really doing any good. It leads me to believe that “business ethics” is actually an exercise in finding loopholes that will give what would be considered unethical and immoral behavior by an individual a sheen of legality when done by a corporation. In the business world, the definition of ethical behavior seems to be doing whatever a company can get away with to make a profit. If it is not illegal by definition of law, then any and all harms caused by the business are ethically sound because those decisions made a profit — and according to capitalist philosophy, the sole measure of worth and value, human or otherwise, is profit. Greed really has become “good” and anything that stands in greed’s way, including the lives of people, is bad.

The most prevalent and most ignored form of this unethical and immoral behavior turned “good business” has been the health insurance racket.

Before the ACA (sometimes called Obamacare and seen as two different things by those in thrall to Fox News), health insurance was only somewhat affordable to those employed by companies large enough to help cover the cost of monthly premiums. If someone didn’t have a job at a company with enough employees, the employer didn’t need, and probably couldn’t afford, to offer health insurance. The cost of health insurance was often prohibitive for an individual on the open market. So, the ACA basically expanded the pool of customers for insurance rackets by requiring everyone to obtain health insurance or face a tax penalty. Incentives and tax rebates were offered to off-set the high costs for those who weren’t offered insurance through their employer. And yet, for some, it’s still less expensive to pay the penalty than to buy insurance on the open market.

Now, the ACA was actually a Republican solution to the lack of universal coverage, which the Democrats and Obama coopted in the hope that the GOP would provide bipartisan support. Ironically, the Republicans who first floated the idea of requiring everyone to purchase health insurance by force of law (a financial boost to for-profit health insurance rackets like UHC) walked away from the legislation and refused to vote for it out of spite. Not only did the originators of the ACA walk away from their own plan, they claimed the “Democrat” version would lead to government “death panels” where some anonymous bureaucrat would blindly consign grandma to death simply to keep costs under control.

As we all know now, every Republican accusation is, in fact, a confession. Those death panels already existed, and they were being run by the health insurance racket for profit.

People back then were willing to believe the death panel fear when it was leveled at a government program but unwilling to acknowledge the very real fact that health insurance companies were doing exactly what they often accuse single payer of plotting to do.

That weird bout of cognitive dissonance also applies to the way both for-profit health insurance and single-payer universal coverage operates. The Republicans and their juvenile little siblings, the Libertarians, often argue that they don’t want to pay for someone else’s healthcare costs under a universal single payer system, but they refuse to acknowledge that paying their monthly premiums to for-profit health insurance companies is exactly the same thing, but with the added pressure of the meeting the CEO’s “fiduciary duty,” which, as it is commonly misunderstood and practiced, ejects the duty of care, and the duty of good faith in relation to their customers, and requires a 2–3% annual profit growth. For-profit health insurance rackets charge people monthly premiums, which then go into a giant pool of money out of which the health insurance racket is supposed to pay our doctors for the care they give us. But because they operate for profit, and they have to pay their employees something, the CEOs need to find ways to make money without offering an actual product or even a reliable service. The ACA gave the health insurance rackets a boost in the amount of premiums paid to them, but that wasn’t, and never has been, enough for the “greed is good” people who run the health insurance rackets.

The only way those for-profit rackets make any profit is by refusing to pay for patient’s care. I don’t think anyone would mind if the only things for-profit health insurance refused to pay for were voluntary cosmetic surgeries, like breast augmentation, rhinoplasty, or liposuction and other purely elective treatments. Unfortunately, what health insurance companies regularly refuse to pay for are expensive treatments like surgeries and medicines to save someone’s life, or improve people’s quality of life after injuries or because of disabilities. These refusals force people to accept their deaths, or endure life-long disabilities and pain, or face potential bankruptcy in an effort to get healthy or save their own lives. This makes every illness, every trip to the doctor, a terrifying event.

Employee sponsored, for-profit health insurance is, therefore, a form of terrorism designed to keep us obedient to the techno-feudal corporations that extract their wealth from our underpaid labor. If part of your fear of losing your job is losing your access to so-called “affordable” healthcare, you are being terrorized. Someone doesn’t need a gun or a bomb to terrorize someone else. They don’t even need to engage in physical violence at all. Those engaging in terrorism only need to make people fearful enough to change their behavior. Corporations want obedient workers, and obedient consumers of their goods, and it’s cheaper to scare people into obedience than to earn their loyalty by paying them well or selling them a quality product.

A single payer system would be more cost effective, and lead to healthier outcomes simply by being a service, like the post office, and not a for-profit business. Single payer, universal coverage operated and managed as a non-profit service instead of a for-profit business would mean the money we pay into the pool through our taxes would go to our healthcare needs instead of going into the pockets of millionaire and billionaire CEOs and shareholders. In fact, as many have pointed out, we could redirect a tiny fraction of the money spent on the defense budget, which the Pentagon can’t keep track of anyway (the Department of Defense hasn’t passed an audit in almost twenty years and can’t account for billions of dollars), and not only remain the largest funded military in the world, which is not something to be proud of, but pay for universal single-payer healthcare, fully fund a world-class, student loan free, education system from kindergarten to PhD, and still end homelessness. There doesn’t have to be an increase in taxes on the middle class at all. In fact, we’d see the money that is currently removed from our paychecks each month, which goes to pay those for-profit premiums, decrease, and then come directly back to us every time we stepped into a doctor’s office. What we also know is that if the billionaire class, those neo-feudal lords like Musk, Bezos, and Buffett, and their mega-corporations that demand our obedience, were to actually pay a fair tax rate comparable to or higher than what teachers pay, we could take a very real step toward that “Star Trek” future a lot of us idealistic nerds daydream about.

But profit matters more than people in the USA. That pesky fiduciary duty, especially in its poorly misunderstood and abused form, has us all wrapped up in chasing dollars instead of developing and cultivating our humanity. In pursuit of that fiduciary duty, where all that matters is creating “value for shareholders,” the American businessperson is actually encouraged to become a criminal.

Those MBAs love those ethically dubious areas that were mentioned in that Bowling Green study. They live in those areas, taking advantage of the ostensibly legal aspect of actions that would, if all down-stream effects were properly taken into account, clearly be seen as destructive and harmful (thus violating the duty of care). In fact, outsourcing the environmental and human harms caused by extraction capitalism is a wholly accepted and tolerated practice in American business. It’s cheaper to produce goods in China, India, and other countries because their occupational and environmental safety laws aren’t as strict as those in America, and the people who absorb the physical and environmental harm aren’t “white.” Racist colonialism makes it cheaper to run mining operations in so-called “developing” countries where the governments can be manipulated by predatory loan practices and forced to ignore the use of slave labor. That process also helps reinforce the racist notion that non-white people are more corruptible and more disposable, which is one of the biggest crimes ever perpetrated on the world.

Even in the U.S., if dumping certain waste chemicals into the environment is not explicitly illegal, and the potential dangers to people and the environment downstream aren’t immediately obvious, those business critters will dump that chemical instead of handling it properly, all in an effort to cut costs and increase profits. They may even argue that by dumping a “supposedly” dangerous chemical it helps them keep their prices down for the consumer. Claiming to keep prices low (at least figuratively) allows these business leaders (read “crooks”) to say they’re meeting both ends of the “duty of care” by “caring” about consumer’s pocketbooks. We, the “consumers,” are then told we are “saving big” by buying the company’s cheap but poisonous product. Unfortunately, we’re not saving anything. We’re just buying our own delayed deaths at a discounted price point.

Companies will ride that moral and ethical dubiousness until someone catches them and is able to hold them to account. They actually don’t mind lawsuits. They don’t even mind losing those lawsuits, especially if they’ve been able to extract enough profit and corner enough of the market share before they are caught. If the company is wealthy enough, penalties are simply the cost of doing business. They’ll just switch their dubious, ethically problematic cost-cutting behavior to some other part of the business — including layoffs — while raising prices to cover their compliance to the new regulations put in place by the weak consequences of their blind greed.

Now, however, it appears that things are starting to fall apart. Income and wealth inequality are starting to become major issues for people, even those middle- and lower-class people who once saw themselves as “temporarily embarrassed millionaires” waiting for their fortunes to arrive as reward for their diligent obedience and defense of the capitalist model and the neo-feudal lords they worship. Capitalism operates in such a way that, if you wanted, you could spend your life believing there was some grand, cogent, organized conspiracy against you, and you could believe capitalism is the key to your salvation if only the leaders would recognize your fealty to the dream. Entire political movements have been built around such theories (see Nazism, which is centered around the idea of fighting an international Jewish cabal, or Ayn Rand’s Objectivism, which argues that unless you’re sufficiently selfish enough, you’re just a parasite, a moocher, a leach out to thwart the ambition of the superior selfish person like Ms. Rand). Capitalism doesn’t need a real, cogent, directed plan by a cabal of men in a secret star chamber. The guiding principle of profit above all else is sufficient to produce interlocking, codependent rings of destruction and abuse of the environment from which raw materials are extracted, and the abuse of the people who must be coerced into converting that raw material into goods for those who claim to “own” the land and its materials.

The use of profit and money to measure the worth and value of everything from the food we eat and the healthcare we receive to the education we acquire for the jobs we cling to simply to live in this culture is putting people on edge. A handful of wealthy people now own and control nearly all of our food production and distribution, all of the major media outlets, and, of course, all of our health care providers and the means by which those providers are paid. No scrappy upstart can displace them, and they can do whatever they like. The mega food corporations poison our diets and our environment, then influence the research into the effects of their food to hide its poisonousness. Those tainted results then get fed to news sources as stories that tell us it’s OUR fault that we’re unhealthy or sick for eating what Kraft, Tyson, and others have put into the supermarkets and restaurants. Then, when we go to get treated for the diseases we’ve developed as a result, expecting the health insurance we’ve paid into through our paychecks to help us pay for our cure, we get denied the care our doctors order for us by an impersonal algorithm with a 90% error rate.

More people are now starting to see through this charade perpetrated on us by these criminal corporations and their millionaire CEOs and billionaire owners and shareholders. From the very seeds farmers plant to the life insurance payout to our families at our deaths, nearly every aspect of our lives is controlled by massive companies whose only goal is to maximize profits for a tiny set of shareholders and those shareholders only. The goods and services they provide cannot continue to marginally increase profits each year because there is simply not enough demand to generate that annual increase. People don’t have kids fast enough, and there’s not enough space in the world to both extract the materials and keep people required. The extraction of infinite profit from a finite source means that other levers must be pulled to achieve that annual growth. Those levers include decreasing the cost of producing something, increasing the price to buy the end product, eliminating competition, and decreasing durability (planned obsolescence) thus forcing the repurchase of so-called “durable” goods.

Decreasing costs also includes keeping worker wages low and laying off workers, exporting production to foreign countries where a company can ignore worker abuse and environmental destruction, switching to cheaper, potentially harmful materials, and buying up and controlling the supply chain. As a company begins to corner more of the market, and once they’ve reduced costs as much as possible, their only other option to meet that annual growth rate in this confined system is to increase the price of the product. When it comes to our food, we also see something called shrinkflation, which is where a company decreases the size of a product (cutting costs), while simultaneously charging more for that smaller product (inflation). We have endured this cycle for so long that now it’s impossible to live without being in massive debt, and even our debt itself is a means of profit for credit card companies.

And, of course, in the case of health insurance, profit is achieved by refusing to pay for the treatments prescribed and ordered by your doctor.

In things like health insurance, the only way a CEO can meet that “fiduciary duty” to make the company profitable, is to violate the duty of care, which, according to the definition, should include providing the customer with a good, non-harmful product or service at a reasonable price. We pay premiums with the expectation that when we get sick, the insurance company will cover a sizable amount of the cost — and we don’t make that assumption without reason: the health insurance companies tell us that is their mission. It is, in fact, ultimately what we and our employers pay them to do. However, the insurance companies can’t grow their annual profits at a 2–3% rate if they pay for every necessary doctor ordered treatment. That means they need to refuse to pay for the care your doctor is trying to provide, and they’ll come up with all sorts of reasons to do so — basically it boils down to insurance rackets claiming that they’re protecting us and themselves from fraud, which is an accusation masking a confession. They’ll also tell you that they’re not actually denying you anything: they’re simply refusing to pay for it. You, the patient, can certainly receive the treatment if you wish, but you’ll have to pay for it yourself.

If you can’t pay for it, well, that’s too bad. Maybe you shouldn’t have gotten sick, or maybe you shouldn’t have spent your money on coffee, toast, and eggs, or housing, or an iPhone, and so on. Remember, the company is just meeting its fiduciary duty, and you, well, since you obviously didn’t get the right education or get the right high paying job, invest in the stock market, etc., then you weren’t living up to your “fiduciary duty” to yourself and so you’ll just have to suffer the consequences of not being a greedy bastard. If being a teacher doesn’t pay you enough money to save your life, then why’d you become a teacher instead of a finance-bro?

What we refuse to see is that the entire system is set up to extract money from our very existence, all while slowly enshittifying the things we have to spend our limited amount of money on. Once monopolies and monopsonies set in (and they have already), the only way for them to make a profit is to squeeze workers and their pay at one end, and increase the price at the consumer’s end. Corporations then sit in the middle rolling gleefully in what they’ve stolen from us.

As a society we have been poisoned by the idea of profit, especially the idea of un-ending exponentially expanding profit. We fear cancer invading our physical bodies, but we have invited it to take up residence in our social and environmental bodies. Make no mistake, for-profit health insurance is a cancer. It can’t survive, and it can’t meet those annual profit growth goals without killing, or allowing to be killed by indifference, a growing percentage of its customers (that’s you and me). Just like cancer, health insurance rackets can’t survive without destroying the host (i.e., our society).

It is now required that people go bankrupt or die so health insurance CEOs can keep enough of the premiums they extract to meet their “fiduciary duty” to the company, AND (this is important) insulate themselves from having to suffer the same fate they assign to us, their customers. I doubt that health insurance CEOs are enrolled in the same plans you and I are enrolled in. Even if they were, I’m sure there’s a flag on their file that prevents the denial of any treatment for that CEO. Furthermore, the CEO’s compensation is such that, even if they were denied a treatment or procedure, paying for it out of pocket would not adversely affect their wealth. Hell, they’d just recoup that loss by denying to pay for yourchemotherapy.

Now, let’s dive a little deeper into our cancer metaphor here. Cancer does violence to the person who contracts it. When cancer develops in the body, it attacks healthy cells to rob them of nutrients. If the cancer is allowed to spread unchecked, it will, eventually, kill the host body. To stop cancer, we must do violence to the cancer, which requires some damage to the host body. Surgery and chemotherapy both wound and sicken the body with the hope that, in the process, the cancer will die before the host does. There is no other way to stop cancer but to do violence to it and, peripherally, the host. Spontaneous remissions will sometimes happen, but that is rare and can’t be relied upon as a treatment. Keep that in mind.

When it comes to the health insurance racket, the denial of coverage qualifies as structural violence, specifically the form called institutional violence. Norwegian sociologist Johan Galtung described structural violence as an “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs.” When we are sick, we needhealthcare, and by refusing to pay for that care, health insurance rackets are impairing our ability to meet that fundamental need. The strength and impact of that impairment is determined by our ability to absorb the cost of our treatment. If a person cannot afford the cost of saving their life and dies, that is murder by neglect. If a person must sell everything they own; house, car, and other assets to survive, that is robbery and theft (often the entities who end up buying a patient’s assets are, you guessed it, corporations, who then resell it at a profit). In both cases, the insurance racket’s implementation of fiduciary duty is at odds with the fundamental human needs of a sick person. Dismissing that violence as the cost “doing business,” thus placing shareholder’s profits over a people’s lives is morally and ethically bankrupt.

So much for those extra business ethics classes MBA have to take.

There is an episode of Star Trek Voyager called “Critical Care.” In that episode, the Doctor is kidnapped and forced to work in a hospital where people receive care according to their Treatment Coefficient (TC). A patient’s TC is based upon their supposed “value” to society. The lower a person’s TC, the less “valuable” they are, and therefore the less treatment they receive, even if they are terminally ill but can be easily treated and saved. A person with a high TC will receive preventative treatment, often in unlimited amounts, and by using the same drug that could save a low TC person’s life — even though that high TC person doesn’t have the terminal disease. The hospital is run by Administrator Chellick and the computer system he oversees is called the Allocator. The Allocator determines a person’s TC and assigns low TC people to the hospital’s Red level where the patient is left to die. The Allocator assigns high TC people to the Blue Level where all treatments are given. At first, the Doctor is assigned to work in the Red Level where he learns that people often have terminal diseases that can be easily cured if they were given a certain medication. The Doctor tries several non-violent means to get that medication for a particular patient named Tebbis, only to have all his efforts thwarted by Administrator Chellick. Not only are the Doctor’s efforts thwarted, but Chellick’s attempts to control the doctor begin to include threats of violence, such as decompiling the doctor’s program. Although the Doctor hopes the crew of Voyager will find and rescue him, he can’t be sure, and since his moral programming won’t allow him to sit idly by while people die needlessly, he decides to act more aggressively. Finally, when Tebbis dies of his treatable disease, the Doctor infects Administrator Chellick with a sample of Tebbis’s blood, giving Chellick the terminal disease. Ironically, the Allocator computer mistakes Chellick for Tebbis and denies him treatment even though Chellick’s TC would have been high enough for treatment. The only way Chellick can receive treatment is to change the Allocator’s program and allow all patients with the disease to be treated regardless of their TC.

Yes, the Doctor commits an act of violence. Now, we might view it differently than the killing of that United Healthcare CEO because Chellick is not killed but simply threatened with death, thus allowing him a chance to do the right thing. It keeps the storyline clean, and less problematic that way. The problem is that real life is not so tidy. United Healthcare and all the other for-profit health insurance rackets have been given thousands of opportunities to do the right thing, and I’m sure several health insurance CEOs have had cancer, or other potentially life-threatening diseases, but instead of doing the right thing for their customers, they choose to increase premiums, increase deductibles, and then refuse to pay for treatments that doctors have ordered for their patients. That is the very definition of the “avoidable impairment of fundamental human needs.”

For a long while, health insurance rackets have incentivized doctors who were not specialists in particular areas to review claims and find “reasons” for denying claims submitted by doctors in other specialties. Now, to save the money they would have spent on basically bribing doctors to reverse other doctor’s decisions, they’ve outsourced the denial process to a faulty computer algorithm — a literal “Allocator” just like in the Critical Care episode — that comes with a 90% error rate in favor of profit.

We, the people, have tried, for decades, to appeal these decisions peacefully using the insurance racket’s appeals process: a process that is designed to be a complicated drawn-out exercise. That delay is built into the process because the insurance rackets know that if they drag their feet, the desperate patient will either give up and go into bankruptcy trying to get the money needed to save their life, or they’ll simply die. Either way, all that money the insurance racket would have paid to treat the patient can now be called PROFIT. Profit made off of our suffering and pain.

At the same time that we the people have been peacefully trying to use the system’s mechanisms to reverse denials, we have also been asking our government to do something about the problem: get medical costs under control, expand Medicare and Medicaid, provide a public, single payer option — anything to help people get the treatments their doctors have ordered for them in a timely manner and without having to ration our meds, sell off all our possessions, beg for help on GoFundMe, or stoically accept our deaths from a disease that could be easily cured or managed.

None of the things we’ve asked for have happened. The death of Brian Thompson is simply a case of the chickens coming home to roost. Any argument that violence is not the answer to a problem voluntarily and willfully made intractable, which those with power refuse to solve when they have the ability to do so, is an attempt at gaslighting. We all know that, in certain situations, violence is often the most effective answer. It goes back to our playground days and that bully who seemed to always get away with hurting people because the bully committed their acts either out-of-sight of schoolteachers or playground monitors, or with some tacit approval. And, even today, if your child were being bullied in school, and the administrators and teachers appeared unwilling to do anything about it, and you didn’t have the means to remove your kid from school, you would tell your kid to fight back. Maybe they could find a way to do it without physical violence, but sometimes, violence is all that remains — especially when there is nothing left to lose. Hell, go read the American Declaration of Independence.

The same principle applies when dealing with fascists, Christian Nationalists, and Nazis. Those ideologies, at their very core, embrace violence, institutional or otherwise, as the sole means of achieving their goals. Capitalism, especially now, is also a bully ideology just like Nazism and Christian Nationalism — and if you know the history of fascism, you know that its other name is Corporatism. In bully ideologies there is always a scapegoat, an “other,” who is often only guilty of being different from the bully. That difference, whether it is religious, ethnic, sexual, physical, or even economic, is used to justify the bully’s violence against the scapegoat. A bully ideology’s violence often starts off as institutional: restrictive laws, denial of service, hyper-policing of behaviors and bodies. If left unchecked, it will, inevitably lead to physical violence; beatings, extra-judicial murders (i.e., lynchings), and genocide.

Right now, in our society, CEOs and their corporations are seen as more valuable than the thousands of workers they use to run their companies, and infinitely more valuable than the “customers” from whom the companies extract their extreme wealth. The aftermath of that UHC CEO’s death has now made that fact glaringly, publicly clear for both sides. This is why the corporate media is running so many pieces trying to convince us that we the people should NOT be “celebrating” Mr. Thompson’s death and demanding that we show empathy for this one man. It is a crass, servile attempt to force us all back into the silent tolerance of our own suffering at the hands of these corporate entities. The problem is our empathy and compassion have already been used up on the friends and family members who have suffered and died because they could not afford medicine or surgery even after they’d gone bankrupt and begged for money on GoFundMe.

The corporate media that wants us to feel bad for not feeling bad, refuses to see our empathy fatigue. We are worn out. Our empathy muscle is exhausted from constantly extending our concern for our friends and family who have needlessly suffered constant pain, or gone bankrupt or died because they could not afford to pay for their medications or surgeries. Very few of us would ever do what Luigi Mangione is alleged to have done, but that doesn’t mean we haven’t day-dreamed of doing something like it. It is a very common, perhaps ingrained, human response to seek retribution upon those who have harmed us, but we rarely act upon it so dramatically. After all, we have so much to lose if we do: our jobs, our good standing, our (assumed) future potential. For someone to seek retribution so dramatically, they must feel that all that they could lose has already been lost. By asking us to have empathy for a representative of an institution that makes its profit solely through institutional violence (by impeding our ability to receive the medical care we need when we are sick or dying) corporations and their sycophants, are demanding that we deny and refuse our own humanity for the sake of someone else’s profit.

Capitalists, corporatists, oligarchs, or whatever you want to call them, expect us, the people, to accept as our lot in life the of being the natural resource they exploit for their benefit. What that means is that we are expendable. We — you and me — are what business leaders and probusiness politicians call consumables. We are supposed to be happy to be used up and discarded like toilet paper for the sake of the Gross Domestic Product and the cancerous ideology of exponential annual profit growth.

Those pieces in the NY Times, or The Atlantic, or the Washington Post that try to tell us that we are the ones de-civilizing America because we’ve turned Luigi Mangione into a folk hero are ignoring the stark, raw truth we all know: We didn’t de-civilize America. The corporate world did the de-civilizing when they decided that “fiduciary duty” only needed to mean making extreme profit for a select, elite few at the expense of other people’s lives, well-being, and freedom.

We the people have actually been trying to hold civilization together. It’s why we donate money to those GoFundMe campaigns to save someone’s life, why we stay in horrible jobs to provide some fleeting, perhaps even illusory, measure of security to our families and loved ones, and why we’ve all become so angry at a collection of billionaires, their millionaire cronies, and those elected officials who seem unwilling to act on our behalf against a rising tide of mass shootings, police brutality, endless wars, rising prices, homelessness, and the simple neglect of our basic human need to live a healthy life, free of the pervasive fear that we’ll lose those lives we’re trying to build for ourselves simply so some billionaire can pretend to be Captain Kirk in his personal, dick-shaped rocket.

It’s long past time to sharpen the pitchforks.

That headline is false, but not by much.

I have lurked around conversations online where the topic of male reading habits (or lack thereof) has come up, and some of the assertions are apocryphal, but do, in some ways, feel true. In my normal life outside of my day job, nearly all of my guy friends read fiction. That is because the few guy friends I have are creatives of some variety, whether writers, musicians, artists, or filmmakers. However, at my day-job, the men I associate with at work generally don’t read fiction. If they do, it’s highly ghettoized into a specific genre like science fiction, or spy thrillers. The books they prefer to read are something non-fiction that feels practical, or “fact based.” I put “fact based” in quotes because often the men I work with are riding the cusp of toxicity, if not fully on the train. Their “non-fiction” is usually related to their job, or their faith (which is really fiction, but let’s not go there), or some historical or political hobby horse they’re obsessed with. For the more politically rightward leaning men most of what they read is pretty fact-free despite its non-fiction label.

The possibly apocryphal things I hear online are:

1) Women are the main audience for fiction.

2) Women make up the majority of editors and agents — at least the ones taking to online spaces like Threads, Manuscript Wishlist, and others.

3) Men don’t read books by women.

4) Publishers are not interested in novels by and about young straight men because they think young straight men don’t read anyway, so who cares if they can’t make the leap to read women.

5) Men are struggling with feelings of isolation and loneliness, and they’re failing to develop empathy and critical thinking skills; therefore, young men are falling victim to the toxic online man-o-sphere or becoming devout religious fundamentalists in an attempt to find purpose and meaning.

Number five seems unrelated, but I assure you, it’s not. All of them are, of course, a bit disturbing

So, in case you haven’t read my bio and don’t already know who I am, let me offer up a little resume to satisfy certain elements of the reading audience who will want to know what “authority” I bring to these opinions aside from being a white man on the internet.

Yes, I am a straight white man. I have a degree in English creative writing, and an MFA in Writing and Poetics. My only published novel (so far) is The Evolution of Shadows. I read novels by men, women, and non-binary people. I read novels by straight, gay, and trans writers, as well as books by Black, Asian, Native, and European writers (I’m particularly fond of writers from outside the United States). In other words, I am an extreme exception to the so-called “rule” that straight men don’t read fiction, don’t read women, and don’t read marginalized writers. Not only that, but I know a thing or two about the publishing industry because I read books by editors and agents about the business and my novel was published by a small press. I’ve worked for Barnes & Noble as well as an indie bookstore Watermark Books & Cafe, and I DIY published a hand-made not-for-profit literary journal called The Project for a New Mythology. Also, for five years I was an adjunct instructor teaching composition at a community college with a lot of reading assignments to compliment the writing. My current day job, which keeps me fed, clothed, and housed, is spent working mostly with men who run the gamut from college educated engineers and business professionals to high school educated chemical plant operators.

Since my existence is an exception to the generally accepted notion that men don’t read fiction, some would take that to mean that I am, like all the other men who do read fiction, an oddity. I, however, see the men who don’t read as the oddities. How strange is it to be a member of the human species and not read stories? We are a species that is, quite literally, a storytelling and story consuming animal. So, let’s start there.

As a species, humanity is defined by its stories. In one form or another, narratives do the heavy lifting of creating our societies and communicating our values and beliefs to the other members of our society. Our brains spend the early years of our lives rapidly learning the language we are born into for one reason only: to receive and understand all those narratives society uses to integrate us and guide us. There are narratives about what to believe, how to behave, who to trust, and who deserves our suspicion. There is no aspect of our early development that isn’t given to us, or understood by us, in the form of a narrative. We receive stories from our parents and the adults around us, and as we learn the language of our parents and begin to differentiate our personalities, we learn to construct our own narratives about who we are, what we want and need, and about what has happened to us.

I was talking about this facet of humanity with a young professor of mathematics a few years ago. He was skeptical of my claim that story was humanity’s first science and that we use narratives to explain and understand everything about ourselves. He started to argue that mathematics, especially physics, could explain everything that stories could, and more. Without hesitating I said, except mathematics. He thought about it for a moment and conceded. The mathematical symbols that make up even the simplest looking equation, such as E=MC2, or the rudimentary 2+2=4, can’t be understood unless we have been told what those symbols mean and how they interact and relate to one another within the context those symbols are being read. That’s a narrative. The letters e, m, and c are letters in the English alphabet, which we use to represent sounds that make up the words we speak and write. The written numbers 2 and 4 are from Arabic (although we still use Roman (Latin) numerals for some things), but until we learn to associate them with values are meaningless. Mathematicians around the world only started to standardize mathematical notations within the last 400 years or so. The two parallel horizontal lines that we call the “equal sign” was first used in 1557. That means the equal sign is only 467 years old — it’s only seven years older than Shakespeare. All of the symbols used in math and physics are unique to human languages on Earth. So, although mathematics and physics are the secret languages of the universe, as far as the human species goes, we first need to learn the languages we’re born into, including our writing and notational systems, before we can express our understanding of the hidden physics of the universe through the symbolic shorthand of human mathematical notation.

To drive that final point home, you are reading this essay and, for the most part following what I’m saying because we both read and speak English. That means you can follow the narrative I’m laying out with all these symbols that correspond to sounds that, in turn, when juxtaposed in certain orders, correspond to words we know the meanings of. Those words are then placed in a specific order to express a thought that, I hope, you understand. Now, who aside from mathematicians and physicist can “read” and make sense of the equation below?

That’s the Einstein field equation. The first set of symbols in the string is called the Einstein tensor, which represents an entire equation on its own. That “G” by itself represents the Newtonian constant of gravitation, which is expressed in yet another equation made up of other symbols (see Einstein field equations on Wikipedia). Those symbols and their meanings create layers of mathematical equations that can, in turn, represent deeper foundational equations. Many of the symbols in these equations are pulling double and sometimes triple duty as Latin letters in an alphabet that corresponds to sounds in English, which is a member of the Germanic language family that split from Proto-Indo-European about the same time as Latin did. English then became a language that loves to follow other languages down dark alleys and mug them for their useful words. English has borrowed so many words from French (a descendent of the Latin language family, not the Germanic) that people often mistakenly believe English and French are more closely related than they actually are. The last common ancestor shared by English and French was Proto-Indo-European. So, just like that mathematical equation above where it expresses an idea that contains layer upon layer of supporting foundational equations that, on their own, are expressed in similar computation strings, the stories we tell ourselves also carry layer upon layer of meaning that might be incomprehensible to the uninitiated.

One of my favorite Star Trek TNG episodes, Darmok, addresses this idea of familiar unfamiliarity directly. Although the show’s conceit of a universal translator converts the Tamarian language into English words (and English words into Tamarian words), Captain Picard and Captain Dathon cannot understand each other. Even at the end of the episode, the Tamarians and humans still don’t fully understand each other. That’s because the Tamarian language to the humans, and “Federation Standard” to the Tamarians, is like that Einstein field equation. The sounds can “make sense” but the meaning behind them, the subtext, is incomprehensible to someone who wasn’t raised learning the ideas and thought processes needed to understand the sounds and syntax of the language.

I know that was a long detour from my original argument here, but I wanted to make sure the point is understood. The human mind is a world building piece of biotechnology. Nothing on earth can be comprehended and then communicated to someone else without a shared understanding of language and the narratives those languages build. Now, the human mind has its flaws, which should be quickly obvious to anyone who is familiar with the host of cognitive biases we can fall victim to. Cognitive biases are examples of how we often create bogus narratives based on varying degrees of information and knowledge, which are then clouded by fear, doubt, and suspicion.

Because we are a storytelling species that transfers knowledge through narratives, that means we are predisposed to find meaning in all those narratives we encounter. And all of those narratives can, just like all those equations with more equations hidden beneath them, have meanings buried behind other meanings. Of course, being aware of our minds in the way that we are means that, even when we are buried under mountains of cognitive biases, we can also conceive of meaninglessness. That is where we start getting into trouble. If we are predisposed to find meaning in stories, and if we can then conceive of stories that are meaningless, then we run the risk of reading meaning into meaninglessness and vice versa — especially if we are unprepared for, or unable to identify, meaninglessness.

Meaning and meaninglessness, especially in the context of gender and reading choice, is where we need to start reframing our thoughts about men and what they choose to read, if they choose to read at all.

Although philosophers, linguists, folklorists, theologians, and many others working in the Humanities have researched and written about the importance of human narrative, especially fiction, as load bearing structures for human meaning, most importantly, as a place where we can “game-out” or practice our responses to trouble and conflict (see this TED talk by Jonathan Gottschall about his book The Storytelling Animal) our society still tends to think of fictional stories as pure entertainment and almost meaningless. We believe this despite insisting on the meaning of our religious stories, and, at least among certain groups of people (namely men who feel threatened by Feminism), believing in the social narrative of Patriarchy, which includes this sub-narrative that men don’t read fiction.

Patriarchy is the first of a handful of factors that contributes this idea that men don’t read fiction. Fiction has long been seen, perhaps even from the beginning, as “women’s” entertainment, even when publishers (mostly men) would only publish fiction written by men, and occasionally by women writing under a man’s name. In Patriarchy, especially the flavor of Patriarchy that has evolved in America in the last fifty to sixty years, it is immensely important for a man to never appear, in any way, “feminine.” One of the most feminine things a man can do in this Patriarchal context is express or cultivate empathy and appear interested in other people’s stories, unless those stories can be turned to the man’s advantage. In this milieu, if a man is going to read, he should read “factual” books, how-to books, books about money, wars, conquests, and the powerful men — just the men — who started all those wars and conquered all those people, all for the purpose of emulating those men and becoming successful and powerful. Men don’t read for the sake of simple human communion.

Although scientists, both men and women, have done research that shows reading fiction improves our empathy, our interpersonal skills, and our problem-solving skills, men, fearing femininity by association, have told themselves and other men that they don’t need to improve those aspects of their humanity, and even if they did, they can get the same results by reading science and other “fact-based” writing. They’ve told themselves this even though the research also says those cognitive and emotional benefits can’t be achieved at the same level and thoroughness by reading non-fiction. The social narrative we tell men is those interpersonal skills, especially those that require empathy, compassion, vulnerability, openness, and gentleness, are feminine traits and therefore less valuable than the human traits we call “masculine.”

Patriarchy’s tendency to separate every human trait into male or female camps and then assign a higher social value to the things designated “male” is one of the weirdest, most restrictive narratives we tell ourselves. It is so pervasive, in fact, that our very language seems to force us into that hierarchical binary. Even Feminism sometimes can’t extract itself from it. I can’t remember how many times I’ve gotten into debates with Feminists, both men and women, over my assertion that if we really want more men to change, we have to stop telling them to “get in touch with their feminine side.” Instead, we should tell them Patriarchy has robbed them of their full humanity in exchange for a paltry illusion of power, superiority, and authority. Getting people to see that, especially when the language itself, and the society we built using it, reinforces such a binary view, is incredibly hard.

Patriarchy’s comorbidity is Capitalism and its impact on our education system. The Industrial Revolutions (first from 1760-ish to 1840-ish, then from 1870-ish to 1914) required a trained workforce that would show up on time, take orders, and be able to read and comprehend written instructions. However, that workforce could not be so well educated that they could see how they were being exploited. This was when Capitalism and Patriarchy joined forces. I think we are mistaken to assume that Patriarchy was always as toxic, and rigid, as it is now for all women everywhere. I think that before the first two Industrial Revolutions the kind of toxic patriarchy that ALL women now experience was limited, for the most part, to upper class women, and to lower-class women that caught the attention of upper class men.

For toxic Patriarchy to exist, women have to be reduced to a purely ornamental and reproductive possession that requires the man, through wealth, to provide all material things to the family without the woman’s support. A poor family that insists on the kind of strict gender separation the wealthy employ, would fail. Poor men and women had to work side-by-side to maintain a household or farmstead. They couldn’t buy slaves or hire servants. Once the breast feeding was done, poor mothers and poor fathers were interchangeable when it came to most household chores. It was only the larger society, embodied in patriarchal institutions like the church, that restricted what women could do. It was the rich who gave us women whose greatest qualities were reduced to their beauty and fertility alone.

Industrialization drew the poor out of rural areas and into cities where they were forced to labor in factories owned by the rich, and part of what came with that was the transfer from the rich to the poor of this idea that a woman’s only acceptable “work” was in the home. In essence, the poor adopted the wealthy’s idea that women were not fit for anything but elevating a man’s stature. This transfer happened in the factory schools that arose at the behest of wealthy factory owners who needed a moderately educated workforce. It had already been happening on a smaller scale among the city poor who worked in the homes and businesses of the wealthy. In order for the factory owners to have a reliable and stable workforce, the men had to believe it was their role, their duty, to obtain a wife and support her sequestered existence in the home.

The modern European novel came into being about the same time. Novels were popular first among the wealthy because they were more likely to be literate and to also have the available leisure time to read novels. Reading became popular with the lower classes as literacy became more widespread, but because poor men were working to support a household according to an unreasonable standard that was set by the wealthy, they didn’t have time for “pleasure” reading, which novels quickly became associated with. If they read, they read for practical knowledge acquisition that would help them be more useful to the wealthy men they worked for.

To further squelch the desire or interest in reading novels, the idea began to evolve that such reading was a “feminine” activity to begin with. If men pursued an interest in literature, it was to in a profession such as a writer, a professor, a political leader, or to join the upper management levels of those industries where they worked for the wealthy owners. In other words, reading for men was a means of securing an income and prestige.

Now, the final apocryphal nail in this coffin of an idea that men don’t read fiction is also tied to the public education system that has evolved over the years, and as reached its heights now as even the most elite universities have been reduced to little more than job training for Wall Street and K Street.

The thing about storytelling and story consuming animals, is that our relationship to those stories is as personal and unique as our relationships to other people. My sister and I have very different relationships to our parents even though we were both raised in the same house. My friends and I know a lot of the same people, but my friend’s relationships to those people is different from mine to the same people. However, the teaching of literature in primary and secondary schools is hierarchical and crippled by education’s insistence on uniformity of both input and output. Students who excel in the educational system by dutifully taking in and spitting out the required information are funneled into more challenging classes to keep them occupied and to keep them from rebelling. Students who don’t excel in the system, but whose lack of excellence isn’t related to intellectual or developmental disabilities, still need to be able to function in our social order, i.e., run the machines, take orders, and read and follow instructions. So, their education is focused on learning the appropriate responses to instruction and learning their subservient place in the system. That means they have to have their sense of and faith in their native intelligence beaten down.

Since we spread and share our knowledge of society through narrative, the docile workers the wealthy need have to believe they’re not smart enough to “get” all the things they might read. That is achieved in English classes when teachers try to steer students to one single interpretation of fictional works. That doesn’t happen in AP classes, but it’s quite common in English classes for those kids who struggle in academic settings but aren’t developmentally disabled. Children inherently want to trust authority, so when a teacher assigns a story to be read and discussed, and then ignores or downplays the reactions of students whose ideas differ from the standard interpretation laid out in the teacher’s guide, those kids have a few conclusions available to them. The most common is that literature, especially fiction, is “not for them.” Some, like I did, get defiant and insist on our own interpretations of the stories we read. Most, especially the boys, just give up reading things that don’t directly spell out the conclusions for them the way non-fiction does.

So, let’s go back to the apocryphal things I hear online, which are:

1) Women are the main audience for fiction.

2) Women make up the majority of editors and agents — at least the ones taking to online spaces like Threads, Manuscript Wishlist, and others.

3) Men don’t read books by women.

4) Publishers are not interested in novels by and about young straight men because they think young straight men don’t read anyway, so who cares if they can’t make the leap to read women.

5) Men are struggling with feelings of isolation and loneliness, and they’re failing to develop empathy and critical thinking skills; therefore, young men are falling victim to the toxic online man-o-sphere or becoming devout religious fundamentalists.

Women have become the main audience for fiction because we’ve allowed fiction to be cast as a feminine past time that men should avoid out of fear they’ll be seen as too unmanly instead casting fiction as a fundamental HUMAN expression and past time. Then, as women have entered the public workforce in greater numbers since the end of World War II and the rise of the Third Industrial Revolution (the Information Age), women have tended to find their easiest points of entry to that workforce in fields that are related to traits Patriarchy degrades (this is what’s sometimes called the feminization of an industry). Women are also finding greater opportunities in those industries men have started to abandon due to the lack of a college degree, or because, even with a college degree, the pay is too low, like publishing — especially the publishing of fiction. Patriarchy has made it hard for men to pursue an interest if that interest might cast doubt on the man’s bona fides as a man, or that make it impossible for him to live up to the Patriarchal expectation that he be the “primary breadwinner” in a heterosexual relationship. Sadly, a lot of women, even those who claim to be Feminists, sometimes fall victim to Patriarchy’s economic hierarchy, and marry men who are “good providers” so they can pursue their artificially feminized low-paying interests.

Those first three points, when combined, lead us to point 4; that fiction publishers, whose low pay and baseline education requirement is a bachelor’s degree, are dominated by women who are acquiring and publishing books that are “only” of interest to women.

Women, especially educated, independent women, are tired of reading books by those ambitious, egotistic, and often sexist men who became practitioners of a “feminine” art form with a patriarchal chip on their shoulder (i.e., think of all those men writers of late who’ve been called out for sexually harassing women writers). In other words, the recent trend some have pointed out that novels by young men are harder to get published than twenty years ago is precisely because we’ve embraced these twin ideas that men don’t read fiction, and the ones who write it are inherently, or at least secretly, sexists (see all the internet meme jokes about how badly men write women). So, why would a publisher bother with novels that are seen as having been written for men by men when the market for those books is so — artificially — small?

Now, before you try to answer that, ask yourself what women encounter when they go online. The internet is full of men writing for men — and it is as toxic as nuclear waste. First, men have been cordoned off from the full spectrum of human emotions by Patriarchy. They’ve then passed through an education system designed to turn them into automaton-like workers by focusing on productivity and economic value and which, incidentally, works to further separate them from the “frivolous,” “feminine” focused fiction that would expand their empathy and interpersonal skills. Finally, they have been betrayed by Capitalism, which has made it impossible for them to do what Capitalism says they should do to be a well-regarded man, i.e., support a family on their own like their wealthy, or at least much better paid, bosses.

In other words, men have been put into an ever smaller box while, at the same time, Feminism has been expanding women’s possibilities. Logically, it would seem that all men need to do is expand their own possibilities, but they can’t because Patriarchy has pulled a great double whammy on them. Patriarchy implies that because men are at the top of the hierarchy and all possibilities are already open to them (except those things that are defined as feminine and therefore less valuable) there’s nothing to be gained by learning less-valued “feminine” aspects of humanity’s emotional arsenal that fiction builds and reinforces. It’s like that apocryphal Henry Ford quote: “You can have a Model T in any color as long as it’s black.” Men can be anything and do anything they want, as long as no one thinks what they’re doing is a girl’s job or something a girl would do.

Stories are a human birthright, a part of our very essence of being human. If we continue to accept this notion that men don’t read fiction because they’re men, and if we refuse to see how we train them to view fiction as a degraded and less valuable women’s space, we are doing half of humanity a disservice. We’re exacerbating the toxicity coming from the mano-sphere where so many men these days are trying to construct a meaningful life out of only half of the human traits that should be available to them. We often say that representation matters, and that is very true. The problem is we assume that because “men” were overrepresented in the past that those representations were full and accurate. They weren’t. We need to correct that not only by expanding who is represented in our stories, but by seeking out and elevating accurate, full, compassionate representations of the kind of men we want to see in the future. The toxic mano-sphere exists because positive male representation, in all its current transitional complexity and difficulty, is hard to find and poorly promoted. We can’t expect men to change, much less to start reading fiction by women and marginalized people, if we first don’t show them fiction by men who have begun the transformational process away from rigid, Patriarchal expectations.

There is no reason men can’t read fiction as voraciously as women, except for the fact that we are training them not to read it.

In the spring of 1999, those loans were suspended when I entered graduate school at Naropa University. No interest was calculated during that time. In May 2001, I finished my Masters degree and entered repayment again on my loans in November 2001.

According to the Dept. of Education’s records, I borrowed $31,700 to pay for my Masters degree. Add that to my undergrad total, and I’d borrowed a grand total of $51,097.

In November of 2001, I consolidated my undergrad and grad school loans with my servicer, Sallie Mae (later Navient). My total balance, which included the first slug of interest, was $52,202.

From November 2001 to July 2013 I made regular payments, but used several months of economic hardship forbearances to put my loan payments on hold. During those twelve years, I spent nine months unemployed, plus I had to pay for medical bills out-of-pocket because my employers did not offer health insurance and the ACA wasn’t passed until 2010. My highest annual salary during those years was $25K.

By 2009, at the age of 38, I finally had a job that paid well enough (nearly $40K), and offered decent health insurance, so that I didn’t need to put my loans in forbearance again to get through an economic upheaval.

In 2013, I consolidated my loans with the Dept. of Education in order to get them out of Navient’s (formerly Sallie Mae) control and to take advantage of the lower interest rate the Dept. of Ed was offering (6%, which was a few points lower than Navient’s rate, which I don’t remember).

In July 2013, my consolidated loan balance was $81,108. $30,000 more than what I’d originally borrowed.

Since 2013, I’ve been in repayment and have never defaulted, and never used any of the voluntary economic hardship forbearance time available. During the first year of the pandemic in 2020, I continued to make my $500 a month payment despite the national emergency forbearance, but since 2021 I’ve been taking advantage of the national emergency forbearance.

So, all total, I’ve been in repayment for my undergrad loans for 26 of the last 28 years, and I’ve been in repayment for my grad school loans for 22 years.

Remember, I’ve NEVER DEFAULTED. According to my payment progress bar on the Dept. of Ed website, I’ve paid a total of $43,265 — or roughly over half of the total I consolidated in 2013. Remember, I borrowed a grand total of $51,097 for my two degrees. I’ve paid back $43,265, but because of interest, I still owe $68,495.

I’m $7,832 away from paying back what I originally borrowed. If I hadn’t been unemployed for 9 months in 2004, I could have paid about $4,500 more, reducing the difference to about $3,332. That $3K amounts to about 7 months of payments, which accounts for some of the other forbearance time I took between 2005 and 2013. If I’d been on an IDR plan since 2001, I’d have had my loans “forgiven” two years ago.

So, because I’ve passed 240 payments (twenty years) OR 300 payments (25 years if you count my time in repayment since 1995), I’m eligible for the IDR adjustment that the Dept. of Ed is using to cancel student loans for about 800,000 Americans, and reduce the remaining amount owed for thousands more.

This, of course, is pissing off a number of people who are ranting that this effort to cancel student loan debt isn’t fair to people who didn’t go to college. Their argument often involves some variation on the idea that “tax payers” shouldn’t be forced to pay for supposedly “reckless” education choices and poor financial decisions by those who went to college and didn’t get degrees for job that pay high salaries.

The truth is, that sentiment has always baffled me and the best way to explain it is a list:

1) We bail out the reckless financial decisions of banks all the time.

2) The majority of jobs that require bachelors degrees or masters degrees are not high paying jobs. The annual salary for a school counselor can be as low as $43K, or $20 an hour.

3) PPP loans were cancelled, often without anything ever being repaid. The government just wrote it off. That means the people who worked for PPP loan recipients (some with college degrees and student debt, but never got paid via those loans), paid off their boss’s loan.

4) I’m a tax payer, too. Going to college and taking out student loans didn’t excuse me from paying taxes just like everyone else, and often higher taxes than a lot of people who didn’t go to college.

5) Everyone’s taxes are pooled together and that money goes to pay for lots of government and social things we never take advantage of, nor approve of, like reckless military spending, propping up War-Mart’s substandard wages, bailing out Wall Street banks, or paying the salaries of useless state senators like Jerry Moran and that idiot Dr. Roger Marshall, or my House Rep, the repugnant jackass Ron Estes.

6) All the taxes I’ve paid in my adult life on my piddly annual income could surely cover the $7,832 that will be “forgiven” (say cancelled), by this IDR adjustment. Just move some numbers around in your mind. Take a little from that bloated military budget, or imagine that $7,832 will be recouped when Diane Feinstein or Mitch McConnell dies and we don’t have to pay their retirement salary.

7) Writing off debt doesn’t mean someone else has to start paying it, it means the government simply won’t collect it. It simply stops existing.

8) And yeah, medical debt should be cancelled, too.

9) And debt that you acquire in order to meet any requirements your employer place upon you should be forgiven as well. No one should go into debt to secure reliable transportation to a job, or acquire suitable clothing to wear at a job, in other words, no one will notice the cancellation of my $7 grand if we all get a $10K a year raise.

Here’s some other fun facts related to income, income taxes, and student loans:

K-State football coach Chris Klieman was paid a $3.7 million base salary in 2022, which translates to $1,778 an hour, or $14,000 a day. I’m basically getting half a day (4 hours) of Klieman’s pay “forgiven” by the IDR plan adjustment. Klieman gets paid $71,154 a WEEK, which is $1,000 more than my annual salary.

Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, who’s gotten bailed out by our tax money at least twice since 2008, is paid an annual salary $34.5 million, which translates to an hourly wage of $16,586. I’m being “forgiven” what Jamie Dimon gets paid to take a half-hour shit while he’s in his executive bathroom. In one day, Jamie Dimon is paid $132,692, which translates to about two months less than my total salary over 2 years — and I’m sure I spend way, way more time in the office than he does.

So, $7,832 is hardly anything to get worked up about for those paying taxes on their annual salary that amounts to one-third ($44K) or one-fourth ($33K) of what Dimon makes pretending to work remotely on a Monday from his mansion.

Recently, I’ve been trying to find a small publisher for my latest novel, The Poisoned Moon, which is about two men who meet a near perfect doppelgänger for a women they each once loved, but who recently died. The reason I’m looking for a small press is that most small presses don’t require a list of comparable titles the way nearly every agent I’ve looked at does. At first, comp titles didn’t seem like much of a problem, but when I began to do my research (reading submission guidelines, checking in on literary Twitter, and following agent’s social media feeds and wishlists), I started to run into problems. The titles I thought of as comparable to my novel were not acceptable comp titles to the agents. One book was too famous of a “bestseller” and had been made into a movie, and was too old, the second book was too obscure and too old, and the third book might be acceptable depending on the agent because the book was published in 2019 and might be too old for some agents but not others.

What has made it all the more frustrating is that the tips I’ve read on how to find comps are, quite frankly, unhelpful. Everything seems focused on those writers who are writing to satisfy a neatly defined and specific sub-genre market like Romance, Thriller, Mystery, or what I’m going to start calling “popular” Literary fiction (i.e. formulaic character driven stories by people with MFAs) and aren’t doing the things I find most compelling about good literature: taking a risk and trying to be original. Instead, it feels like this focus on finding comp titles is forcing writers to, essentially, ‘typecast” themselves into a reproducible style.

Now comp titles weren’t always a thing the way they are now. Fifteen to twenty years ago, when I was trying to land my first novel, comp titles weren’t required. They were a suggestion you could opt to use if you thought it would help increase your book’s appeal but certainly not something you had to worry about if you didn’t provide. Now it’s become yet another thing a writer needs to research in order to “premarket” their book. Agents, editors, and the big publishers are now so squeezed and streamlined in their effort to compete with Amazon that it feels like they won’t bother taking on a book unless they know beforehand what the SEO keywords should be for that book to appear in the search algorithms. And they rarely seem interested in any fiction that doesn’t hew to a standard story structure (think Freytag’s Pyramid i.e. a basic five act structure). In fact it sometimes feels like the Big Five are demanding the kind of rigid story structure that Hollywood has been demanding in their screenplays since the 1980s.

Consequently, I end up being rather bored by most contemporary fiction I pick up in the bookstore, just like I don’t watch a lot of contemporary cinema in the theaters anymore. I tend to gravitate toward independent movies, books from small presses, and the classics because they feel less rigid and predictable.

That desire to find things that interest me on many varied levels like content, structure, and form means my influences are varied; Jack Kerouac (both his prose and poetry), Ernest Hemingway (prose), John Berger (prose, poetry, and art criticism), Michael Ondaatje (both prose and poetry), Bobbie Louise Hawkins (prose and poetry), James Tate (poetry), and various non-literary people like musicians, film directors and film editors, psychologists, sociologists, and visual artists. There are also individual works (literary, scientific, cinematic, musical, visual) that I draw on to influence my work. So, when I say my work isn’t that similar to the majority of work out there, I’m not saying that it’s entirely unique or wildly original. What I’m saying is that the majority of work out there coming from the big publishing houses is filtered through a small cadre of agents and therefore it’s getting considerably more aesthetically homogenized than its been in the past because it’s being filtered through a narrower chokepoint than it ever has been through before, and I don’t seem to fit through that chokepoint. In fact, a larger and larger portion of writers no longer fit through that chokepoint anymore, which makes me think the books that would be good comps for my book are also not getting published.

When every book getting published by the Big 5 has to go through the same small number of agents who are comparing those books to three previously published books that did well, but not too well — and that were represented by that same small cadre of agents — that means all those books will begin to feel like a new remix of the same old book. Agents, after all, are just readers like the rest of us and are just as prone to preferring something familiar over something new as the rest of us.

That might be a bit of an overgeneralization. I know that. But this whole trend of demanding comp titles is, I think, detrimental to good literature.

Now, generalizations suck, so, I’m going to use my own current manuscript and situation to illustrate my point. And just to be fair, here’s a warning of a sort: some of you will miss the fundamental insecurity and self-doubt and instead read a lot of this as self-importance and arrogance — i.e. you’ll interpret this as if I were saying “I wrote a book unlike anything else ever” when, in fact, I know exactly what other books my book is like, the problem is my comps are unacceptable comps to agents, and I am having a hard time finding newer books in the same vein because, I believe, Amazon and the Big Five have created a homogenized literary aesthetic that prizes repeatable mass appeal over artistic risk and efforts at originality.

I generally start a project with an image that I can’t let go of; for instance, a man biting a woman’s shoulder (my first published novel), or someone discovering a suicide (my unpublished novel, The Palace of Winds). Then that image gets paired with other ideas that have been floating around in my subconscious for a while — the war in Bosnia, or my grandfather’s life as a road kid during the Great Depression. For The Poisoned Moon, I had this image of a man seeing a woman who is a doppelgänger for his deceased wife. That got merged with my desire to write a story about an ex-girlfriend who died of brain cancer. So, I sat down and started writing what I call “explorations,” which is just me trying out characters, tones, images, scenarios, etc. to work my way toward or away from that original image I started with. Inevitably, I reach a dead end. So, when I struggle to get a story rolling, I put it aside and do other things. I also begin to skim my personal library and sniff around bookstores and libraries looking for books that are doing something different with the hope of unlocking something for me.

By the time I reached my dead end with The Poisoned Moon, I knew I wanted to tell a story that would be “the saddest story ever told,” and that I wanted a certain narrative tone and mood that employed distance and subversion to create tension and engagement. So, I started looking around for other novels that might help me imagine a way to access the vague concepts rattling around in my head.

I’d read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being before, and remembered how Kundera’s narrator had acknowledged that a fiction was being constructed to illustrate something about love and regret. This was a start, but it didn’t get me unstuck. Some time later, I was reading one of the books in the Graywolf Press series “The Art of” called The Art of Intimacy: The Space Between by Stacey D’Erasmo. In that book she wrote at length about William Maxwell’s novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, making use of the subjunctive mood. D’Erasmo’s description and analysis intrigued me, so I went out and got the book. It floored me — and it gave me the second key to unlock my own story. In Maxwell’s novel, the narrator is an old man who says he is telling this story as a “roundabout, futile way of making amends” for failing to be a friend to someone from his youth. That was exactly what I’d had in mind for my story about my ex-girlfriend who’d died of brain cancer. What’s also fascinating about the narrator’s story is that he also acknowledges a great portion of what he has to tell the reader is imagined — a fiction.

Those two books, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984) and So Long, See You Tomorrow (1980), are well over thirty-five years old. I was too young to have read them when they came out, let alone to have been interested in reading them at 9 or 13 years old. I read one because it’s famous and was made into a movie that I liked. I found the other by reading the non-fiction work of a writer I’ve never read who was writing about intimacy in fiction. This is important to keep in mind because one of the things I’ve seen some agents throw at writers who balk at finding comp titles is an accusation that the writer isn’t reading widely enough. Maybe, in some cases, this is true. Leveling that accusation at me — or any serious writer who might struggle with or resist comp titles (does Michael Ondaatje need to provide comp titles to his agent or editor?) — is presumptive and rude. I read widely, in and outside the fiction genre, and all of it feeds into my fiction. Should I comp my book to Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death? Sheldon Solomon’s The Worm at the Core? Judy Grahn’s philosophical work around metaformic theory? An obscure poem of Taylor Mali’s called Topless Photograph of Juliette, Taken by Chase Biggs? No, I can’t, at least according to the rules the agents want me to follow, because they’re all too old.

To me, there is no expiration date on what is worth reading, or what can or should inspire and influence my work. Readers are constantly rediscovering “old” books, why do our comp titles have to be restricted to front list books from the last two orthree years? As a writer with a 40 hour a week day job who lives alone and must do all of my own unpaid regenerative labor, I have to make some hard choices on how to spend my limited reading time— and I choose quality over currency and quantity.

Now, I’ll admit, I’m intensely self-conscious about how much I’ve read and how much I’m reading now. I also feel like I got a late start, and that my access was limited by an education system that failed me. So, I probably spend a little more time going back and picking up the books I “should” have read when I was younger instead of reading as much of this year’s new releases as I can. Some of them are pretty fucking worthless anyway. I’ve come to that conclusion because I spend a lot of time in bookstores looking for things to read (and my to-be-read bookcase at home is already over-full). Sadly, in the last twenty years or so, I’ve tended to buy fewer and fewer “front list” titles. The front list titles I do buy are usually ones by writers I know, or are recommended to me by writers and booksellers I know. And even then, I sometimes balk. I’ve always loved wandering bookshelves, and I love odd, random, exciting discoveries. Usually it’s at my favorite local indie bookstore, Watermark Books, but I also engage in bookstore tourism whenever I travel. It’s fun not only to see the small-but-mighty and very charming indie bookstores in other towns, but to also browse their unique selections (the inventory at indie bookstores is wildly divergent as opposed to the inventory at every Barnes & Noble).

It was at the Bookbar (now sadly closed) in Denver, Colorado, where I found the final key to my own project. While browsing their shelves in May of 2019 I found Lindsey Drager’s 2019 novel The Archive of Alternate Endings (My local indie store hadn’t stocked it unit I raved to them about it). Archive did something rare that almost no book I randomly pick off the shelves does anymore: surprise me. The story pairs the Hansel and Gretel folktale with the reappearance of Halley’s comet, telling multiple stories of those who disseminated or came in contact with relics of the Hansel and Gretel tale during those periods when the comet was passing Earth. It’s a gorgeous book that juxtaposes a stellar phenomenon with very earth-bound and moving human struggles.

With that as my final key, I was set loose into my story. I knew how I was going to create the tone, voice, and mood I wanted. I knew where to position my narrator in relation to the story, and what that narrator wanted out of telling the story. I wanted a story that would, at first, appear to be focalized through multiple points, including an almost god-like position that would clue the reader in on certain artifacts and their context that would then imbue the story of the two main characters with additional depth. Slowly, through the course of the story, that god-like narrator would let slip certain clues about his bias and then, at the end, reveal himself as one of the two men wrestling with the appearance of this doppelgänger and his relation to manhood, masculinity, regret, forgiveness, and redemption.

It took me almost a year to finished the first draft, which was right about the time the pandemic kicked off. During the heart of the pandemic, while isolated in my tiny apartment with two cats, I revised and rewrote and tinkered the novel into its final shape. The advice to find comps was in my head because I’m not ignorant of the damn industry I work in, so I started looking and immediately lost hope. By the time I had a completed draft I was comfortable with (sometime in 2022), my one current comp title — The Archive of Alternate Endings — was already too old to use as a comp for most agents.

So, what are those guidelines for find comp titles, anyway?

A guest post on agent Jane Friedman’s blog by Star Wuerdemann collects various guidelines from agents on how to find comp titles, and it’s like reading a confusing research paper assignment from high school. One agent says using TV and movies is okay, but another says that once a book has been made into a movie it’s off-limits. One says you have to find the “perfect” comp, and that no comp is better than a poor comp (but they all demand comps, so what do you do if you feel that all your closest comps are still poor comps? Not offer any comps and hope they don’t reject you out of hand for not following their guidelines to provide comps?). One says to focus on the last few years, going back up to ten years if needed, but another puts the cap at three years, and still another puts it a two years. Some say to take a look at what books would sit on the shelves next to yours, and what writers you might end up on a panel with at a convention or seminar. In one form or another they all say to look for comps with a similar plot, tone, theme, character, character journey, category, genre, POV, or influences, and finally to make sure your comps are “popular” but not “ubiquitous.”

So, let’s take a look at the aspects of my novel, The Poisoned Moon, that could be used to find comp titles — at least as far as I see it — and follow the advice in Ms. Wuerdemann’s post. My list is as general as I can make it, and uses terms and phrases that might appear in a Library of Congress category or topic search, as well as more variable terms.

1) doppelgängers

2) man-woman relationships

3) masculinity

4) men’s interpersonal relationships

5) art

6) archeology

7) myth

8) space exploration

9) cave exploration

10) strippers

11) jealousy

12) Wichita, KS — Fiction

13) solar system — moon

14) multiple points of view

15) meta fiction

16) Fiction — General

17) the eternal return

18) goddess art

19) metaformic theory

20) stalkers

21) episodic structure

22) interconnected vignettes

23) religion

24) sex

25) Subjunctive mood

26) male friendships — fiction

Now, alphabetically, any book I publish, being “literary fiction,” will sit on a shelf near Emily St. John Mandel (interesting side note: we both had our debut novels published by Unbridled Books in 2009), and David Malouf. I admire both of these writers, but Malouf isn’t that well known in the states, and I’ve not read much of his work. He’s in his eighties and his most recent novel was published fourteen years ago. Emily is fantastic, but aside from an occasionally episodic style to our structures, and some similar themes in our early work, we’ve diverged dramatically in the last few years since Station Eleven (2014) was published that any comp would be out of date and imperfect (not to mention I can’t use Station Eleven because I see it as both ubiquitous and it was made into a mini-series for HBO). I could end up being on a panel with Aleksandar Hemon because my first novel has the Bosnian War as a backdrop, but we don’t otherwise have much in common and wouldn’t be on a common panel for our later books. I did my MFA at Naropa University, so, I could be on a panel with Laird Hunt, but the books he’s currently writing don’t really have similarities to what I’m writing. His older books do, but they’re all beyond the two to three year threshold most agents are looking for. Any other literary writer I might end up on a panel with is either too obscure at the moment (Duncan B. Barlow, Junior Burke, Troy James Weaver) for any comp to mean anything to an agent knocking on doors to the Big 5 with my book in their hands.

I recently talked to a couple of booksellers I’m acquainted with about my novel, and asked if they knew any titles that might be similar. Despite their in-depth knowledge of upcoming titles and access to advanced reader copies (ARCs), the only title they came up with that seemed similar to them was House of Leaves by Mark Z. Danielewski, which is twenty-three years old. A valiant effort but way off the mark. A more recent suggestion they gave was How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, but like Station Eleven it might be too science fiction-y to be a good comp for my book (and there’s a talking pig).

Of my twenty-four broad categories, some are so broad as to be irrelevant except as qualifiers to the rest of the list (multiple POV, literary fiction), and some lead in undesirable directions. Most books that employ a doppelgänger as a theme or construct are science fiction or horror. Stalkers and strippers lead to suspense, thrillers, and crime novels. “Questioning masculinity” leads to “toxic masculinity” and lands me again in crime and thriller novels, women’s fiction (stories about women liberating themselves from awful men), or YA dystopian sci-fi, or a lot of non-fiction ranging from men’s rights screeds to early 90s mens movement philosophy. Novels dealing with strippers and sex lead to porn or Romance.

So, I tried story elements. My novel hints at a few tropes, but actively subverts those tropes, so I don’t really consider using them as avenues of research, but let’s give it a shot. One echo is “Fridging” where a character dies or is injured to move the plot forward; however, the dead wife in this story is presented as a focalizing thread in the narrative rather than simply being dead. Also, it’s not her death that spurs the emotional journey of the two men, it’s the arrival of the doppelgänger. Now, the doppelgänger makes use of the “hooker with a heart of gold” and “manic pixie dream girl” tropes, but subverts them by essentially running them in parallel through the two male focalizing characters and exposing the tropes as masculine romantic delusions, and by giving the doppelgänger her own agency, then setting all of that against the specter of a toxic male stalker.

Using those tropes leads me to things that either aren’t good comparisons for my novel (romantic comedies), are outside of my genre (the damn sci-fi/fantasy prevalence of doppelgängers), or, again, too old .

In other words, what I think my novel is about on a thematic, structural, symbolic level, doesn’t get me a list of two to three year old literary novels that feel better than random matches. I have to be broader, more shallow. I have to throw out any structural comparisons because in all my searches, I’ve only found a couple of books that kind of do what I’m doing structurally and one is Lindsey Drager’s book and the other is Ondaatje’s forty-plus year old books Coming through Slaughter and The Collected Works of Billy the Kid. And although it doesn’t occur in the verb structures in the narrative, my novel relies on the feeling of a subjunctive mood created by the arrival of this doppelgänger — a great “What if” type of story — and the only book I’ve found like that is Maxwell’s. Also, at its heart is the story of two straight men wrestling with what it means to be a good man in a society that seeks to isolate men from each other and their own feelings of grief and loss, and that pushes them unconsciously toward various forms of toxicity, and benevolent sexism — and I can’t find any literary fiction that’s doing that.

The majority of books I find that deal with masculinity and alternate expressions of masculinity are either simply being critical of masculinity or are books by gay writers about gay characters. I could use one of those as a comp, but the audiences are wildly different. I doubt gay men would be terribly interested in my book and, sadly, most straight men, if they do read, shy away from literary fiction and lean toward sci-fi, fantasy, mystery, detective, or thriller fiction: genres that are typically reinforcing classic masculine and gender structures, but even if they did entail non-toxic expressions of masculinity, or the questioning of masculinity, their genre disqualifies them as comps for my book because the audiences are segregated in the minds of marketers.

So, I find myself in a bit of a dilemma. If I trust my own understanding of my novel, its comp titles are all out of date and therefore not comp titles at all. When I start digging and searching, I end up in places that don’t really seem to fit, therefore they are not “perfect” comps. I’m sure someone, somewhere, might read my book and say, “oh, this is like book X,” but how long and how widely should I search for that mysterious title before I start sending out my novel? This is why I’m focusing on small presses, and why, in general, I’m so concerned about health and viability of the literary landscape.

Do we really want to live in a literary world where you can read anything you want but only as long as it’s a remix of the latest James Patterson or J.K. Rowling novel? I know I don’t.

I don’t recall why I didn’t watch Our Idiot Brother when it was released in 2011. Maybe I was afraid it would be what I’ve come to call humiliation comedy where all the gags put the main character in the most humiliating and embarrassing public situations imaginable so that empathy itself becomes ironic. So, it wasn’t until the Covid pandemic when, probably out of boredom while sheltering alone with my two cats, that I finally watched it. I was surprised. The movie reminded me just how jaded and cynical we can be, and, honestly, how detached we are from our own humanity, especially men, and how toxic we’ve become.

The term-of-the-moment, “toxic masculinity,” wasn’t common in 2011. It only started being thrown about in earnest years after Our Idiot Brother was released. The movie had its theatrical run three years before both the Isla Vista massacre brought Incels out of the internet shadows, and the Gamergate harassment campaign showed us how toxic gamer culture is. It was released five years before both Brock Turner got infamous for raping an unconscious woman behind a dumpster, and Trump was elected president while gleefully bragging about grabbing women by the pussy. The movie was six years old in 2017 when Harvey Weinstein, whose eponymous company had released the film, was finally exposed publicly as a serial sexual predator. Since then we have, as a society, become hyper-focused on the horribly toxic ways that men treat women, as well as all the ways men display various hyper-entitled, anti-social, violent, and destructive behavior in general.

Considering that backdrop, Paul Rudd’s portrayal of Ned does, in fact, seem rather like an idiot. His trust and faith in people’s better angels certainly feels dumb compared to our current social order where to be open and honest around anyone feels like an invitation to be exploited. But I’d argue that Ned’s philosophy of life, even though it might seem “idiotic” to us in our toxic culture, is probably the outlook on life that might actually fix some of our ills.

I won’t go through a long synopsis of the movie, nor am I going to worry about spoilers. Seriously, if a movie can be spoiled by knowing how it goes before you see it, then, well, there’s nothing to that movie except the thing being kept a secret, and that’s a pretty thin movie that deserves to be spoiled. Besides the most significant part of the movie begins near the middle where one sub-plot takes over and gives us the clearest view of Ned’s character and the fact that he’s not an idiot.

While living with his sister Liz, Ned is recruited by his ambitious sister, Miranda, to drive her to an interview for a Vanity Fair article she’s writing. There he meets the subject of Miranda’s interview — Lady Arabella. Ned and Lady Arabella hit it off, and she invites Ned and Miranda to a benefit for a women’s shelter. At the benefit, Arabella gives Miranda the cold shoulder and spends the night talking with Ned. Ned tells her about his arrest for selling weed to a uniformed cop, and that he knows it was stupid. He then explains that, “I live my life a certain way and that is I like to think that if you put your trust out there; I mean if you really give people the benefit of the doubt, see their best intentions, that they’re gonna want to live up to it. It doesn’t always work out, clearly, but more often than not I think that if you do, people will rise to the occasion. I really believe that.” When Arabella tells him his philosophy is sweet, Ned says “Oh you think I’m an idiot like everyone else.” I realized then that Ned has consciously chosen to live his life as a guileless, empathetic, and compassionate man, and the moments when he appears to be an idiot are all when someone fails to “rise to the occasion” of Ned’s trust and faith in their best intentions.

An important moment showing Ned’s non-toxic masculinity comes at the end of the evening with Arabella. After hearing about Ned’s arrest and his life philosophy, Arabella opens up to him about an incident involving “the fucking Chilean” and a stabbing. We don’t get to hear the story, of course, but as Ned and Arabella enter an elevator to leave the benefit, she says “You must think I’m a total psycho.”

“I think you’re fucking awesome, I do. Hey, you wanna go out with me sometime?”

“Oh, no, not really. Thanks for asking.”

The first time I saw that, I knew that, if I were a woman, I would have immediately tensed up, waiting for the moment when Ned would start trying to negotiate, or get angry. In the real world, a toxic, entitled, aggressive man might feel entitled to more of Arabella’s time for having already spent so much time and energy being a “nice guy.” But Ned isn’t toxic. He smiles, nods, shrugs . . and the scene ends. He’s accepted his rejection with grace, and that is the end of it.

Later at Miranda’s apartment, he starts to tell Miranda’s friend Jeremy about Lady Arabella, praising her as cool, pretty, smart, funny, and strong. This is not a man who feels he’s been wronged or slighted by a woman’s polite rejection. He may be sad about being rejected, but he doesn’t let that color his positive, glowing impression of Arabella. He still thinks she’s great. There’s no sour-grapes grumbling, no attempt to diminish the good qualities that he liked about her to assuage his bruised ego. Unfortunately, he mentions the stabbing, which causes Miranda to manipulate Ned into telling her about it by making him feel she will withdraw the three hundred dollars she gave him so he could rent the goat barn on his ex-girlfriend’s farm his dog, Willie Nelson, is being held hostage.

After writing up her story about Arabella, the Chilean, and the stabbing, Miranda has to bring Ned into the Vanity Fair office to sign paperwork vouching for the truth of the story he was manipulated into sharing. Ned balks at the checklist of facts he’s shown, saying the conversation was private. Miranda, desperate to get her story approved and certain she can manipulate her “idiot” brother again, tries to corral him into saying they were a reporting team and that Arabella didn’t tell him it was “off the record.” Ned, however, refuses to back down even when a lawyer is brought in. Ned’s refusal to confirm the facts in the checklist kills the story and, of course, protects Arabella’s privacy. For a more toxic man, like Arabella’s ex-boyfriend who sold their sex-tape to pay his legal fees in a theft case, this would have be an opportunity to punish Arabella for turning him down. But again, Ned isn’t toxic, and he’s not an idiot. He’s a good man and so, Lady Arabella is protected from another scandal.

Throughout the movie each person who thinks Ned is an idiot, like Miranda, ends up taking advantage of him for their own gain or protection. The cop who busts him manipulates Ned’s empathy and compassion to entrap him. His brother-in-law lies to him about cheating on his sister, Liz. Miranda, of course, manipulates Ned into telling her private things he learned about Arabella for a hit-piece article. His sister Natalie ignores his advice to tell her girlfriend, Cindy, about her pregnancy, which leads to a breakup when Cindy finds out during an attempt to rescue Willie Nelson. All of these people ignore or take advantage of Ned and manipulate him because they are all caught up in a society that seems to require them to be ruthless, guarded, suspicious, hard-bitten, untrusting, and cynical. However, because Ned is none of those things, because he is, quite literally, a “non-toxic male,” everyone assumes he must be an idiot.

Ned, of course, blames himself for all the trouble his sister’s are experiencing. He’s so down that he violates his parole by smoking a joint and then telling his parole officer. This is the only time Ned acts like an actual idiot, treating his parole officer like a therapist. Knowing he’ll be returned to jail, he tries to have one last, pleasant dinner with his family, but his sisters decide to take their anger out on him by ruining a game of charades. When he calls them out on this, it’s the only time in the movie where Ned gets truly angry and it stuns his sisters. However, before any reconciliation can happen, his parole officer shows up to take him to jail.

When Ned refuses to be bailed out by his sisters, they go to rescue Willie Nelson from Ned’s ex-girlfriend knowing this will get him to accept bail. During the confrontation, Miranda, the sister who failed Ned’s trust and faith the most, says “Nobody loves that dog the way Ned loves that dog. Nobody love anything as unconditionally as Ned loves . . .” and she stops there, open mouthed and shocked because she’s just realized that Ned didn’t kill her article only to protect Arabella. By refusing to vouch for the story she’d turned in, Ned had also protected Miranda from becoming the worst version of herself. A version she might not have been able to live with.

Ned’s purity of spirit, especially within the protected confines of a fiction, is probably unattainable in real life. If any of us handed a stack of money to a stranger on the subway to hold while we cleaned up spilled coffee, we’d probably lose that money. However, the truth of Ned in Our Idiot Brother, especially in relation to our concepts of masculinity, is something I think we need to start embracing as men. Generosity, kindness, open-heartedness, loyalty, honesty, these are traits that we, as men, often say we value. However, most of us are more like the cop who busted Ned, or his brother-in-law who was cheating and lying about it. We’ll chew up and use people to get ahead. We’ll hide our mistakes and our vulnerability thinking that to tell the truth, to be uncertain, means people will stop loving us. And, worst of all, we’ll look at those people who believe in our better angels, in our potential to rise to the occasion and be the kind of people they believe we can be, and we’ll call them idiots when the truth is that we are the idiots for not rising to the level of other people’s faith in us.

Well, the mass shootings are back, so I guess we’re returning to normal in America.

Over the years, our rationalizations about how and why these things happen have changed. I’ve heard people blame job losses, bullying, misogyny, racism, psychosis, revenge, and simple attention seeking as motivations for various mass shooters. The current favorite is some formulation of all of those rolled into the idea of “toxic masculinity” and white male terrorism. And, considering the majority of mass shooters are white males, I suspect those two threads are about as accurate as we’re going to get until the research starts to roll in. For nearly twenty years the Dickey Amendment essentially prevented the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health from researching the causes of gun violence by denying them funding. That defacto ban was finally lifted in 2020 during the pandemic.

I suspect that CDC and NIH research will confirm a lot of what we already take to be common knowledge: that angry, isolated, entitled, and maladjusted white men with easy access to guns, and poor access to mental health counseling, are the prime perpetrators of gun violence — especially mass shootings. The basic solution these reports will probably provide is to restrict access to guns and increase access to mental health services. Both of which are good things, and I support them, but they won’t be the full solution.

It’s likely the research will go much deeper, but our media’s short-attention-span-to-everything-but-horror takeaway will be that the problem is simply men and guns: end of story. And, what’s worse, it’ll likely only increase resistance among certain social groups, namely all the pro-gun, chauvinistic and authoritarian men — and their women supporters — whose macho, blustery, rhetoric about their rights and freedoms and guns often ends up fueling the ideological underpinnings of the mass shooters, as well as preventing any legislation to curb the mass shooter’s access to weapons of war from passing.

Because it will be too unsettling to win much public attention, what I suspect will get buried is the deeper, broader, and more nuanced reasons for these mass shootings. Reasons I believe are rooted in a very basic human desire to feel that our lives have purpose and will endure beyond our physical existence.

I’m fairly certain the white male primed to become a mass shooter feels his life has been robbed of purpose by our changing society, especially by the elevation, acknowledgement, and tolerance of women, LGBTQ people, and BIPOC communities. These violent outbursts are an attempt to reassert a perceived old order that these men think is necessary to give them the meaning and purpose they feel is missing from their lives. Or at least assert the supposed supremacy of white males.

The dynamic I see is best understood through Terror Management Theory. Professor Sheldon Solomon and his colleagues have been researching Terror Management Theory for the last forty years or so. Their research was inspired by Ernest Becker’s 1974 book The Denial of Death. Essentially, Solomon’s research, which is described in his own book The Worm at The Core argues that because we humans are aware of the inevitable death of our bodies, we engage in a number of psychological efforts to ease and lessen that fear and bolster our sense of self-esteem (i.e. our sense that we are valued, important members of our chosen social order).

If you’d rather get a quick hit of Terror Management Theory, watch the documentary Flight from Death: The Quest for Immortality.

Becker called these efforts to build our self esteem and repress the fear of death “immortality projects,” and Solomon points out that they come in two flavors: literal and symbolic. The most common, of course, is religion; however, any belief system — and several at once — can be employed to reduce our fear of death to a manageable level. Religion is a pursuit of literal immortality that insists on believing the soul will live on after one’s physical death — as long as a person says the magic words and believes in their chosen god devoutly. Cryogenics is also a literal pursuit of immortality by its attempt to preserve the body in the hopes of reviving it once science has advanced.

Having offspring is a nice hybrid of literal and symbolic immortality.

Then there are the purely symbolic forms of immortality, such as the grandiose desires for fame and recognition by leaving our mark on the world, or the more low-key desire to be well remembered by friends and family after our death. The most rudimentary of the symbolic immortalities is maintaining one’s membership-in-good-standing in an enduring national or ethnic identity.

People tend to employ bits of both literal and symbolic immortalities, cobbling together their self-esteem from many different things that can include their achievements, spiritual beliefs, wealth and status symbols, as well as their national and ethnic identity. We will basically use anything that gives us a sense of being part of a continuum that is more enduring than the physical lifespan of our bodies and which allows us to feel that our short, doomed lives have meaning and purpose.

The problem with all of these efforts is that when our belief systems are challenged or threatened, or if we are reminded of our deaths, we deploy a number of defenses to reassert our beliefs, bolster our self-esteem, and push those death thoughts into the cognitive background.

In one study, Solomon and his team had judges fill out questionnaires before entering court to deliver sentencing in minor cases (usually solicitation of prostitution). The judges whose questionnaires reminded them of their eventual death tended to hand down harsher sentences than the judges whose questionnaires had not reminded them of their eventual death.

In another study, Solomon used the “hot sauce attack” principle on students who believed they were helping research personality and food preferences but were really being observed for how they would react to a person of different political opinions once their own death anxiety was elevated. The subjects were first given personal surveys to determine their backgrounds, including their political positions. Some surveys included sections asking for their thoughts and feelings about death. The subjects were then asked to write an essay about themselves and their food preferences that would be given to another test subject. The subjects were then given the biography of a fellow test subject. After reading about the second test subject, they were asked to portion out hot sauce for the other person who would have to eat the entire serving. The second test subject was a fabrication, of course, but what Solomon and his team found was that the subjects who were given personal surveys that increased their thoughts of death by challenging their beliefs tended to portion out more hot sauce to the fabricated second subject especially when the fabricated subject had a different nationality, political beliefs, or ethnic background. In other words, the test subjects lashed out at a person who represented a threat to the belief system that defined and bolstered the test subject’s self-esteem.

That dynamic, the urge to do violence to those who threaten our “strongly held beliefs,” shouldn’t, and probably doesn’t, surprise us. As a species we have perpetrated incredible evils against other people in the name of purging a perceived “evil” from the world. This, I believe, is what’s going on with these white male mass shooters: they are trying to fight back against a percieved “evil” they feel comes from things like Feminism, immigration, non-Christian ideologies, and sexual libertinism.

These mass shooters have constructed their belief systems, the mechanisms for building and maintaining their self-esteem, around strong patriarchal beliefs and the various branching ideologies that feed into it: i.e. Christian Dominionism, authoritarianism, racism (especially White Supremecy), sexism, chauvinism, etc. They might not articulate it that way, but their manifestos reveal all the right clues. Mass shooters have targeted women for not giving them sex, or for inspiring “sinful” lust. They’ve targeted black people, Jews, Muslims, Hispanics and Latinos, and Asians for a myriad of reasons, but namely replacement fears. They’ve targeted bosses and coworkers when they’ve lost their jobs, denying them a meaningful livelihood. The reasons are varied but always come back to issues that suggest these white men feel that, in some way, they have been denied something they felt entitled to have.

Their violence is a means of reasserting the power they believe belongs to them, and of punishing these “lesser groups” for usurping their white male privilege.

I’m not suggesting we need to expand our empathy for these mass shooters; however, they are not the only white men who have constructed their sense of purpose and self-esteem around beliefs of white male superiority and the sense of entitlement that comes with it. What keeps these fellow believers in check and not shooting people in the street is that their self-esteem never fully bottoms out the way it does for mass shooters. These “benevolent” patriarchal men simply have a more soundly constructed belief system that keeps them from going on a shooting spree — if only just barely.

Sadly, their belief system also keeps them from acting on the general population’s calls to fix the core problems that lead to mass shootings. It’s these men we need to focus our attention on and change the social narrative around manhood and entitlement.

The white male politicians who obstruct gun control legislation, the pro-gun lobbying groups lead by the NRA, the cops who gently arrest these mass shooters, and all the people who buy into the “good guy with a gun is the only way to stop a bad guy with a gun” mythology actually benefit from the terror created by mass shooters. Let’s call it “toxic benevolent chauvinism:” a belief that only white men (and approved, obedient white women) with guns can protect society from all those “evil” people (some with guns).

The clearest, most direct example of how this works can be seen when we dig into those now common memes that appear in the wake of both mass shootings and the street executions of black people by police.

Since the Civil Rights era it has, thankfully, become socially unacceptable for groups of white civilians to carry out the kind of public lynchings that were common in the early part of the twentieth century. However, like all aspects of racism, when one form becomes publicly unacceptable, something new and more subtle takes its place. Our society has spent the last fifty years or so attempting to portray black people as inherently criminal in response to their small victories around segregationist laws and voting rights restrictions. This has moved the public lynching of black people out of the domain of white civilian mobs and into the jurisdiction of unofficially sanctioned law enforcement activities with the tacit approval of white civilians and politicians.

What makes a murder into a lynching is the message it sends to the target community. The street executions carried out by police send the same message to black people that the old public lynchings carried out by civilian mobs sent: know your place and stay there, or you, too will be killed in the street with impunity. Those mob lynchings never led to trials or convictions for those performing the lynching because those lynchings were often carried out with the approval — and sometimes participation — of law enforcement and the courts. We’ve now simply cut out the civilian middle men and, because of qualified immunity and the lack will among district attorneys to prosecute the cops whom they must then turn around and work with, has created a situation where cops now carry out the public lynchings of black people as part of their regular duties.

Imagine the social uproar among white people if Sandra Bland had been a blonde white girl from a middle class family instead of an “angry black woman.” Imagine the uproar if Elijah McClain, a sweet, good natured young man known among friends and family for playing his violin for stray kittens, had been a sweet good natured white boy. Everyone involved in their deaths would have received some kind of punishment. But because our society has attempted to criminalized black bodies, the cops responsible of leaving Ms. Bland to die alone in a jail cell for failing to signal a turn, or for physically abusing to death Mr. McClain, a five-foot six-inch, 140 pound asthmatic, for walking home while listening to music, all appear to still be on the job.

Of course, we rarely hear about the white people killed by police. We don’t hear about them because in the white community cops are seen as allies, as friends, as ourselves, and so when a cop kills a white person no one looks too deeply at the circumstances. If a cop kills a white person, white people are all too willing to believe the death was justified, or at least an unfortunate accident that wouldn’t have happened if the white victim hadn’t brought it on himself. After all, as white people, we mostly encounter cops only for minor traffic violations or accidents — and none of those encounters end in our deaths. The rest of the time we encounter police is when we are either victims of a crime, or when we’ve committed, or are suspected of committing, a crime. So, cops killing white people doesn’t terrorize white people in the same way cops killing black people terrorizes black people. Instead, it reinforces most white people’s beliefs that cops are gallant heroes out there protecting us from harm and putting bad guys in jail.

In the last few years, however, because of the efforts of groups like Black Lives Matter, more and more white people are becoming aware of the unjustifiable brutality our predominantly white police forces are inflicting upon the black communities they are supposed to protect and serve. We can see the cops and their supporters in the Blue Lives Matter groups circling the wagons, trying to justify and condone this notion that cops are gallant warriors protecting us. The most egregious examples of this defensiveness are the TV pundits who have offered up such veiled terroristic threats as Brian Kilmeade’s “Let’s just hope, in your life, you never need a police officer,” which he tossed off after the conviction of Derek Chauvin for murdering George Floyd, and the protests over the street execution of Ma’Khia Bryant, led to more calls for defunding the police.

People who lean on white male patriarchal authoritarianism to give their lives purpose, and to bolster their self-esteem, can’t engage in the same kind of terrorism to reassert obedience from other white people in the way they do with black people.

Aside from their whiteness, mass shooters and the majority of police officers also share their maleness. And that maleness is why cops are gentle with white male mass shooters. The mass shooter, by virtue of being perceived as a “lone wolf,” is the perfect foil. The mass shooter terrorizes the white population into being obedient and tolerant of police authoritarianism and violence: it’s the cost, we believe, of being “protected.” The mass shooter also terrorizes people into embracing the propaganda around guns and gun ownership, which increases the likelihood of more mass shootings by maintaining the free flow of military style weapons in the general population.

White American patriarchal beliefs are centered on race, sex, heteronormative gender ideals, wealth, power, and religion. Mass shooters tend to be lashing out at a society they feel has deprived them of, or threatened the primacy of, one or all of those beliefs. Ironically, horrifically, the terror that mass shooters inspire in the general population — as well as the institutionalized racism that criminalizes black bodies — is needed to bolster the self-esteem building aspects of the “toxic benevolent chauvinism’s” hero mythology that informs the rhetoric of both white nationalism and law enforcement.

If we want to end police brutality and mass shootings we have to find a way to refocus the means by which men build their sense of purpose and self-esteem. Social behaviors maintain themselves by being rewarded in some way, and society is a mutually agreed upon condition. It’ll stay the way it is as long as a majority of those in society agree to tolerate it. When you look at the people who support American patriarchal ideals, and the toxic benevolent chauvinism of the supposedly “superior” white male, it’s not only white men in that crowd. Right there with them is the specter of Phyllis Schlafly and her ideological daughters.

We must change the acceptable ways straight white men build their belief systems and self-esteem. And, yes, of course, it must start with straight white men doing the difficult personal work, but it’s not a job for only one gender to do. Women can’t and shouldn’t be expected to do it for men, but men can’t do it alone.

The idea that men can’t do it alone is incredibly important here. Patriarchy is deeply ingrained and insidious. The very structure of our language often frames our ideas about gender — especially masculinity — so rigidly that it seems to thwart every attempt at change. One of the most self-isolating traits of traditional American masculinity is the idea of the self-made and fully self-reliant man; the go-it-alone maverick. Asking for help, especially emotional help, is seen as weakness. Telling men to fix themselves, but to do it alone, makes defeating that particular destructive habit especially hard. To put it another way, we can’t continue to mock and criticize men, to cast them out for refusing to ask for help and then fail to offer them help when they do ask for it.

But that, too, is fraught. How do we tell the difference between the man struggling to overcome that unique brand of male learned helplessness that comes from patriarchal entitlement, and the man attempting to exploit the perception of helplessness to manipulate others, which can take any form from sexual and romantic coercion (if you love me it’ll fix me) to terroristic threats (fix me or I’ll kill you). Both of those types, if we’re not on-guard against them, will blind us to the men who have done as much as they can to free themselves but who might need that last bit of help to get over the finish line.

Ironically, the social mechanics required to affect the change we need are the same mechanics that maintain the status quo: rewards for specific behavior.

Our patriarchal society elevates white men who fit “the mold” (no matter how comical or frightening it has become) and discards those who don’t. The discarded ones, of course, sometimes become mass shooters. To fight patriarchy and its violent and destructive side effects, men and women must elevate and spotlight the men who have done the work to liberate themselves; however, unfortunately, that means we also run the risk of our “new men” being sucked back into the insidious temptations of entitlement that make patriarchy so hard to destroy. The best example of this arc might be Joss Whedon who was seen as a Feminist ally but was exposed in time as a “typical” Hollywood womanizer and philanderer.

We can’t pay lip-service to men’s change, demand that they change, and then ignore their efforts and successes while blasting them for their failures. Rebecca Walker wrote in the foreword to her book What Makes a Man,

“I also hope that women readers will reflect deeply on their part in maintaining the male charade. If we want men to be different we must eroticize that difference, and stop saying we want a man who can talk about his feelings, only to marry the strong, silent type who “just so happens” to be a good provider. As mothers we can’t freak out and run for the karate school brochures when our sons tell us they want dance lessons, and we can’t turn a blind eye to our boys’ struggle to hold on to themselves in the face of a million messages telling them to change.”

It’s going to be risky and littered with failures, and it won’t happen quickly. On the biological and social level, it seems that men are made by the process of subtraction. Subtract too much, or subtract the wrong things, and we get these monsters who believe their job is to enforce obedience through threats of violence, and monsters who vent their frustrations at the setbacks and obstacles, which all of us face, with murderous attacks on those they incorrectly believe to have wronged them.

We have to try adding things, but there’s a problem there, too. Like adding things to an unfamiliar recipe, if what we add isn’t wanted, or makes the end product unpalatable, our progress stops. The change we need is, sadly, generational and we don’t have a good outline or idea of what these new men should look like except that we are tired of the status quo.

When I was an undergrad at K-State in the early Nineties, it was already fashionable to blast Ernest Hemingway for being an overly macho, chauvinistic writer: the template for toxic masculinity. Although his literary style dominated my creative writing workshops, in the critical fields, Feminist critics were pushing him to the margins either with aggressive criticism or simply passing him over in favor of previously marginalized writers.

For my second survey course on American literature, I ended up taking the class from a professor whom, it was said, always took the week off when the Modernists and Hemingway were discussed. And, sure enough, when Hemingway came up, our professor was gone, and my advisor, Professor Tim Dayton, whose area of interest was American Modernism, stepped in to give the lecture.

For me, this may have gone by with little more than some eye-rolling if it hadn’t been for a few other things that were going on at the time. During the late 80s and early 90s, the idea of a “mens movement” was starting to resurface, and a therapist I was working with at the time directed me to a book called Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man (1991)by Sam Keen. By the time I took the survey course, I was deeply engaged with Keen’s approach to analyzing and understanding my expression of masculinity. I was also exploring the writing of Ernest Hemingway and Jack Kerouac outside of class. So, I was primed to stage a defense of Hemingway based on Sam Keen’s book.

The 90s Mens Movement I encountered had actually begun in the early 70s as “men’s liberation.” It was seen by its early proponents as a positive companion to Feminism. Its aims were to get men to start talking about the way Patriarchal expectations damaged and limited them, and then open them up to a gentler, more tolerant, less toxic way of being men. By the time I was in college, there were two styles, as I saw it. There was the Robert Bly style, which revolved around his book Iron John (1990), and which sometimes, rather comically (in my opinion), involved “wildman retreats” into the woods (various groups are still holding similar retreats today). One such retreat I read about involved a 50-foot wooden penis that the “wildmen” — an assortment of dentists, accountants, business analysts, programmers, etc., — danced around while naked in the woods. The other style was more philosophical and revolved around Sam Keen’s book. Sam was friends with Joseph Campbell and had interviewed Ernest Becker on his deathbed, and those connections, I think, lead to a more thoughtful, and meaningful analysis. When Keen wrote about men coming together to discuss their ideas around masculinity it was always in small intimate friend groups, and not in for-profit mass retreats in the woods with strangers wearing loincloths and face paint.

It was at that time that I first tinkered with the idea that Hemingway was, in fact, being critical of masculinity and not, as the Feminist literary critics argued, reinforcing and glorifying a toxic patriarchal system of violence, sexism, and racism.

In the years since, I’ve seen other writers wrestle with Hemingway: a writer they acknowledge as technically brilliant but at the same time one they recoil from because of his seemingly worshipful attention to violence and inattention to women. I’ve also spent a lot of time thinking and reading about masculinity to better understand what it means to be a man, and avoid perpetuating the toxicity in my own life and which has come to define American manhood in general.

One of the things I’ve notice recently is a similarity in my interpretation of Hemingway’s writing through the filter of Sam Keen, and my perception of the sad arc (and failure) of the Men’s Movement as it traversed the rest of the 1990s and into this century. I’ll start with a quick reading of Hemingway as a critic of toxic masculinity, rather than a champion.

For me, the story Fathers and Sons (first published in 1933) is key to understanding Hemingway as an early but severely imperfect critic of American masculinity. In the story, Nick Adams, often seen as the most direct fictional stand-in for Hemingway himself, is returning from a hunting trip with his young son. As Nick drives, and his son sleeps, Nick reminisces about his boyhood and his father. The pivotal memory is one where Nick receives a pair of hand-me-down underwear from his father. Nick tries to refuse them, but his father insists they’re clean and the boy is forced to wear them. Ashamed and disgusted by this, he takes them off and hides them under a rock. When this is discovered, Nick is beaten. Afterwards, he hides in an outhouse with a shotgun and fantasizes about killing his father.

Now, consider how intimate that article of clothing is compared to a shirt, or a pair of trousers. Shirts and pants are items we present to the world, a coded uniform that can be removed when needed, or treated ironically if it’s not acceptable to remove it. But underwear is hidden underneath the uniform. It’s foundational, and it’s also the article of clothing closest to the genitals — the most obvious symbol of maleness.

The hand-me-down underwear represents the unattractive hand-me-down masculinity of Nick’s father. Nick is expected to be his father’s son so deeply that he must wear the same underwear — be the same man, essentially. So, when Nick rejects the underwear, he’s not simply rejecting his father’s clothing, he’s rejecting an internal, foundational symbol of the man his father expects him to be.

At this point in the story, Nick’s son wakes up and asks about his grandfather and why Nick has never taken him to pray at his grandfather’s grave. Nick agrees it is time to take his son to his grandfather’s grave and this is where we see Nick’s (and Hemingway’s) inability to break away from the masculinity he received from his father. No son is raised in isolation from the rest of society. As a son moves through the world, he’ll encounter other ways of being a man. Some will be positive, some, sadly, will be unexamined and threadbare facsimiles of manhood. Still others will be toxic. Nick’s son, not yet twelve, must already be feeling pressure, albeit subconsciously, to decide what kind of man he will be, which is why he’s curious about his grandfather and desires this symbolic ritual of praying at his grave.

Compared to Nick’s interactions with his father, Nick’s interactions with his son are an improvement, but not by much. Where Nick’s father was curt, dismissive, and abusive, Nick appears to be patient and warm with his son, yet he gives in to his son’s request. Like all men, Nick is in a patriarchal catch-22. He wants to reject his father’s version of manhood, but as his son grows up and begins to search for a sense of himself as a man, Nick and his son are caught in the constricting and silent world of men that the dead father represents.

It’s only been in the half century since Hemingway’s death that we have seen men really struggle, publicly, to break away from the old models of masculinity and, at the same time, seen other men charge headlong into ever more toxic expressions of masculinity in a kind of desperate rear guard action against the supposedly “softening” of the American male.

This is where I see the similarities to the rise and fall of the so-called “Men’s Movement.”

At the same time that Robert Bly and Sam Keen were laying out their ideas for a version of manhood that would be something new, something more adaptable to our modern world, University of Colorado football coach Bill McCartney was founding The Promise Keepers.

In part, both the Mens Movement of Robert Bly and Sam Keen and The Promise Keepers were a response to the upheaval in the culture at that time. The Cold War was ending and there was this legitimate question about what we were going to do now that there wasn’t a big-bad enemy out there to fight. We didn’t seem to need the old model of manhood that focused on violent and combative competition.

On one side, we had the secular Mens Movement philosophers with their defused, self-focused, inward looking contemplation on the future of manhood. On the other side was The Promise Keepers with their sports stadium centered prayer-a-thons where men were told the answer was to embrace a “muscular,” biblical masculinity.

Of course, biblical masculinity is, at its core, the same old patriarchy with a touch of “Kumbaya, My Lord” sentimentality and an emphasis on benevolent sexism. As a patriarchal defense strategy, it allowed men to show some sensitivity and some nurturing by graciously allowing women to more fully participate in society, even while taking the position that men were still in charge and women should obey, be help-mates, and defer to their husbands or fathers. By reinforcing their “inherent” primacy, it made a tiny concession, allowing men small window in which to feel comfortable doing the one thing they’d heard was desired of them: crying. But it had to be done in a crowd of fifty-thousand while facing a stage peopled with preachers and sports figures telling them to take charge of their women.

Even back in the 90s, without much of an internet, we knew there was a core of irony, if not outright hypocrisy, to that aspect of the Promise Keepers and the philosophies that would later spin off from it (men’s rights groups and those creepy father-daughter purity rituals, especially). Here was Bill McCartney, founder and leader of the Promise Keepers, telling men that the cure to the problems of our society were for men to take charge of their families again while he himself couldn’t seem to manage his own daughter (he has two grandsons fathered by different CU football players he coached). However, despite that, Promise Keepers set the model for a kind of neo-patriarchy. A “kinder, gentler” patriarchy to borrow from George H. W. Bush’s early 90s slogan, and it opened the doors for other similar ideas to flourish. Everything from the Men’s Rights Movement to the self-described chauvinist Proud Boys.

In much the same way American racism alters the mechanism of its enforcement as marginalized communities gain new levels of access and acceptance, American patriarchy changes its mechanisms of enforcement as American manhood is forced to respond to the growing power and influence of women and gay men. Relentless media attention and marketing, not to mention the massive rallies in sports stadiums, quickly made The Promise Keepers the thing people thought of when someone mentioned the “Mens Movement.” It also opened the door for those ever more toxic interpretations.

The one commonality all these organizations and philosophies have, whether they are the current incarnation of Bly’s “wildmen,” or the authoritarian chauvinists calling themselves The Proud Boys, is that they believe men’s status in America (especially white men’s status) is tarnished in some way. The core difference is that one group wants to further dismantle the current status quo and create a new, non-toxic masculinity, and the other wants to return more fully to the old style, reinforce it, and build defenses against the encroaching “softness” that frightens them.

Because of that, change is excessively slow, almost in stasis. The progressive model can’t get past the regressive model, especially while the regressive model is still, ostensibly, in charge and willing to do violence.

Violence is the hallmark of toxic masculinity. It’s the cudgel, knife, and gun that maintains male-centered power, and keeps men silent about its pain. If men attempt to break out of the model, they will either be beaten into submission, cut off from their peer groups, or killed. We see this pattern most obviously with every gay or trans person who is beaten, kicked out of the family home, or killed, but we don’t often recognize it when it happens to non-conforming straight men because they are ostensibly “rewarded” for their silent acquiescence by having all that power and privilege, even if, in the end, their conformity engenders remorse, depression, alcoholism, and a self-destruction and cruelty that cripples their humanity.

That is the very dilemma that Hemingway’s fiction wrestled with and couldn’t resolve.

It’s easy to look at Hemingway’s work, see that toxicity, and leave it at that. His novels and stories are about men, usually engaged in violence or enduring violence of some kind. Same-old, Same-old, and Christ, we’re sick of it, especially after the latest mass shooting (I dare not mention a specific one because by the time anyone reads this, it won’t be the most recent). However, the so-called “flaws” of violence and sexism in Hemingway’s fiction are there because they are the very same flaws present in the culture of his day, and, sadly, they’re still present today.

For example, the argument that Hemingway’s women are not full people is not something we can exclusively attribute to Hemingway’s personal beliefs. Dehumanizing women is a central tenet of American patriarchy in general. Seeing women as less-than, and in need of benevolent male protection, ensures the human characteristics that have been designated as “feminine” are undesirable and even embarrassing in men, and so, to be “men” those traits must be shunned, rejected, feared, diminished, or marginalized.

To loosely paraphrase the great Toni Morrison from an essay titled “Disturbing Nurses and The Kindness of Sharks,” which appears in her book Playing in The Dark: Whiteness in the Literary Imagination, Hemingway wrote about being a white male, and that meant he couldn’t help but bring into those stories all the elements that define white maleness. Being dismissive of those texts for that alone ignores their complexity. Morrison was specifically writing about racism, but it also applies to gender and anything else we might identify as a component of toxic American masculinity.

Hemingway prided himself on the truth of his fiction, and he demanded that his fiction reflect reality. So, on one hand, it is fair to recognize and comment upon the toxic masculinity that is present in Hemingway’s work. It’s there in the fiction because it was, and is, present in the culture he was writing about and the era he was writing in. But we should also consider and talk about the way patriarchy appears to trap and paralyze the men in Hemingway’s fiction as well as men in the real world.

American manhood in Hemingway’s fiction — and in our society today — feels like a damned if you do, damned if you don’t situation. Hemingway, either consciously or subconsciously, recognized that. It is why nearly every hero in Hemingway’s major works, either dies or is punished in some way for trying to live up to, or for rejecting, those masculine ideals. Robert Jordan in For Whom The Bell Tolls, lives up to those masculine ideals, and dies at the end making a sacrifice of himself. Frederic Henry, at the end of A Farewell To Arms, deserts the army and escapes the war, choosing love over duty, but ends up alone when Catherine and their child die during birth. Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises appears to be living up to all masculine expectations, except his war wound has made it impossible for him to consummate his love for Lady Brett Ashley who, because of his emasculated condition, rejects him. Only the old man in The Old Man and The Sea, survives his masculinity test without any apparent diminishment to his perceived manhood, but he is old and expected to be lesser from the beginning.

Long ago in that survey class, I felt the need to defend Hemingway against those Feminist critics I felt were being dismissive of a struggle that all men endure, and that Hemingway illustrated in his fiction even if he couldn’t see a way out of it.

When someone is not the beneficiary of white male patriarchal structures, it’s easy, even logical, to fight against that power structure, and to desire a share of the privileges and advantages that come with being at the top. In that way, patriarchy respects the fight even if it doesn’t respect the fighter. However, patriarchy’s very nature makes stepping down from the pinnacle, giving up that power, and displaying those unacceptable — i.e. “feminine” — aspects of one’s humanity, an incredibly risky and fraught endeavor.

The violence, both verbal and physical, that certain men direct at women, gay men, and trans people is also directed at those straight men who fail to live up to all those mysterious unwritten standards and requirements of American manhood. For those fighting to gain a comparable version of the power and privilege afforded men, the reward is obvious: equality, access, and freedom (but at a cost of course). But what is the reward for stepping down or away from that power when the patriarchal system still refuses to value those human traits that are seen as unmanly?

The very things that Robert Bly, Sam Keen, and others like them tried to encourage men to do: be sensitive, nurturing, compassionate, and vulnerable are the very things that open up men to brutality from other men. Then, often, in the wake of that brutality, the brutalized men are derided for not having defended themselves like men, or for not being strong enough to endure it silently. This is the conundrum I see in all of Hemingway’s work: men trapped in a brutal system that has so over-valued their capacity for violence that the only reward they see for stepping away from that model of violence is more violence. Damned if you do, damned if you don’t. We want men to be gentler, softer, but we provide them no gentle or soft landing when they leap down from their pedestal.

Leap man, but don’t act like a girl while doing it.