When I was a child, I loved Christmas. I loved the gifts, of course, but it was also a time for togetherness. Along with Thanksgiving, it was one of the two times a year that my family was obliged to act like a loving, healthy group. We would visit other relatives, too. I had cousins…
Month: December 2017
Three Ways Male Entitlement Erases Women
One. The other day I went to McDonald’s with my eight-year-old son. We don’t go very often, but he likes the Happy Meal toys, and he was putting up with Christmas shopping. While we were waiting in line, he went to check out the toy display: Train cars, tied to various popular children’s franchises. Hot…
Melting the Icebergs of the White Patriarchs
I’ve been thinking about icebergs again. I was thinking about them earlier in the year. At the time, Richard Spencer and other white nationalists were marching in Charlottesville. Moderate white people were rushing to distance themselves from the Nazis with tiki torches defending statues of General Robert E. Lee. The problem with that, as I…
A Eulogy for Porn
The first time I saw a pornographic magazine, I was about twelve years old. My older brother had gotten half a dozen issues of magazines like Hustler from a friend whose father had an extensive collection. The teen boys would look at the magazines in his bedroom, and I was invited to join in, in…
Write for the Good Men Project!
When I first found Good Men Project, I was excited. Here was a website dedicated to changing the traditional views of manhood and working towards social change. This was somewhere that I could offer my own voice on being a man in the 21st Century. But I hesitated to offer submissions because I thought my…