Hey there, welcome to That Dang Dad, my name is Phil, and tonight I’m going to return (for what I expect to be the final time) to the topic of men and men’s issues.
A couple years ago, I set out to do a deep dive for myself on whether The Left, broadly speaking, has “abandoned men” or “ignored men’s issues”. At the time, I disagreed with those two paradigms and instead offered the idea that the Left’s goal was not to minimize male pain but rather to link that pain to the pain of others in an attempt to build solidarity and community power. I even grabbed a dozen other male content creators and spent over an hour answering men’s questions and concerns from a variety of angles and expertise.
And while my Lefty audience was receptive to both those videos, the kinds of men I’d been trying to speak to were not (at least, not the ones who took to the time to comment). When I said “Your exploitation matters, so you should listen to people who have been fighting that exploitation for decades to learn how you can protect yourself,” a great deal of these men heard “Other people have it worse than you, so shut up and sit down.”
Now, was that a good faith reading of what I said? Of course not, that was men’s pride fucking with their listening. But, all the same, I found the experience pretty dispiriting and you’ll notice I haven’t returned to that topic much at all in the intervening two years.
I think what really got me was that I went overboard saying “I validate your experience, you deserve better” and so many of these men somehow heard “Your experience isn’t valid, you deserve what’s happening to you.” The number of commenters who told me that I said the exact opposite of what I actually said in the video was maddening. So I stopped making videos like that!
Since then, I’ve felt conflicted about stopping because male loneliness hasn’t gotten better, men are falling behind in school, in college enrollment, they are taking their own lives in high numbers, they are imprisoned at incredibly high rates, and just in general men are feeling more disposable and alienated than ever.
And yes, that does matter! I don’t want any man to feel alienation or abjection. I want men to have fulfilling educations and find engaging employment along with creative stimulation. The world of dignity and joy that I am fighting to build absolutely has a place for men, after all, I myself am a cis man.
And now, in the wake of Kamala Harris beefing the 2024 elections, many pundits are looking at a growing ideological gender gap between men and women and wondering what to do about men gravitating politically towards rapists like Trump and Tate. (My suspicion is that Harris’s abandonment of Palestine and her embrace of war criminals like Dick Cheney was probably a bigger issue, but whatever.)
I keep hearing “Men just need more good role models, where’s all the good male role models on the left?” and while there is actually no shortage of funny, smart, left-leaning men on Youtube and TikTok and wherever, I do feel this pressure to go be and do that, to be a non-threatening “normal” guy with traditional male experiences who owns a gun, who taught martial arts, who can “speak to the boys” out there. I used to be a conservative cop, surely I have some insight for the fellas.
But guys, if you’re still here, if you’re still listening, I have a problem. Genuinely, this is not like a rhetorical bit, I have a challenge that I cannot seem to solve when it comes to talking about men’s issues and I hope you’ll hear me out:
I cannot think of a single “men’s issue” that is unique to and only affects cisgender men. And listen, I want to be extremely clear: I am not saying “other people have it worse” and I am not saying “your issues aren’t real” and I am not saying “your experience of that oppression isn’t as bad as someone else’s.” I am not comparing or ranking identity groups here. What I am saying is simply that cisgender men are genuinely and materially oppressed by the same mechanisms that oppress others.
I’ll give you an example. For awhile, I thought I had a genuinely unique men’s issue I could bring up: circumcision. In the US where I live, a lot of boys are circumcised without consent and many of those cases have nothing to do with religion. There are many men out there who are traumatized because their body was carved up without any thought for their own autonomy. And you can bring up female genital mutilation, but culturally in the US that is not even in the same ballpark in terms of acceptance and ubiquity. Surely circumcision is a uniquely male issue right?
Except, that same medical violation of bodily autonomy happens all the time to people of all genders. That same disrespect for the bodies of young boys is what animates doctors refusing to give women hysterectomies, doctors refusing to give hormone treatment to trans people, nurses ignoring the pain of Black patients assuming “they can take it”, insurers denying people ADHD medications, and intersex children being forced into a rigid binary gender mode with surgery they never asked for.
If you experience pain and trauma from your circumcision, you have every right to! You *should* be mad that your genitals were operated on without your consent for someone else’s aesthetic preferences. You should absolutely be furious about that and brother I’ll be mad right there with you backing you up! So when I bring up hysterectomies or intersex kids, it’s not to tell you that their pain is more important. That would be like saying having a stuffy left nostril is worse than a stuffy right nostril; what matters is curing the headcold fuckin’ up the whole nose! Nobody is “more important’!
So fellas, tell me how to talk about this in a way that isn’t going to piss you off. Because what I thought I did was affirm your pain and connect you to allies who have similar pain so you all can fight against the systems that harmed your bodies. What I thought I did was recognize that “a cord of three strands is not quickly broken” and attempt to braid you together with people suffering like you into something stronger.
And, what I thought I did was outline the beginnings of a strategy for victory against the evil you’re rejecting. Because, at least based on my research and experience, you, me, any of us alone are not going to solve it. If this issue is something you’re passionate about and want to see movement on, you need a posse. You need allies. I want you to be successful in your fight for bodily autonomy and I know in my heart that success will be a group project.
Boys, is that fair? Maybe you don’t agree with my ideas or my solutions, but can you at least see that I’m not blowing you off? Do you at least see that I care? Do you at least believe me that I want you to have the dignity you deserve?
For me, liberatory politics is not a zero sum game and boys, I do not need you to lose for me and my friends to win. Because if you’re still oppressed and alienated, then I haven’t won! I haven’t won until ALL of us are free, and that includes you, brother. In the political order I dream about and fight for, you are thriving.
And there’s a part of me that just wants to hammer home this point with example after example. Are you a man who’s upset that dads get automatically treated worse in custody hearings and family courts? A lot of that stems from a patriarchal assumption that women are better nuturers than men. If we smash patriarchy, that goes away. Are you a man upset that boys are being left behind in schools and falling behind in college admissions? A lot of that stems from underfunded schools being run to crank out obedient workers rather than to enrich students for their own sake. Massive educational reform and free college could make a real difference. Are you a man upset that high suicide rates among men aren’t taken seriously? Me too, free medical and mental healthcare could have a huge impact (especially combined with some of these other solutions).
And are you a man who’s upset that it feels like men often get stuck with either exploitative, physically taxing manual labor or else get sent off to die as cannon fodder for Lockheed Martin’s quarterly earnings? Yeah buddy, that shit sucks and it’s wrong. Why do you think I want you to join a union? Why do you think I oppose America’s lust for war? If we worked together to grind capitalist machinery to a halt, we could protect and dignify workers who do what rich pricks falsely called unskilled labor. We could stop sending young men halfway around the world to die for oil or free college. You could have so much more of your life back.
But I still have this nagging feeling that this argument just won’t be persuasive to many men out there. And when I sit down to really think about why that is, I wonder if it’s because many men do not feel like what I am offering balances what they feel they have lost.
Think about what patriarchy offers to men: power, influence, prestige, domination. Patriarchy promises men that if they just uphold the laws of manliness, they deserve a doting wife, obedient children, generous pay, the admiration of peers, and priority over those who fail to live up to a masculine standard. In short, patriarchy promises you, the individual man, that if you follow all the rules, you personally get to be important.
As I reflect on that, I think about a comment I received from a brilliant, beautiful stranger awhile back. The legendary Jemolk8945 said it so perfectly, I’ll just quote him directly. “One thing I think a lot of my fellow men misunderstand about patriarchy -- it doesn't function to make men happy. It functions to make men powerful. And the specific kind of power it functions to give us is power over other people. To make us hold that power, it must make us unwilling or unable to give it away. And so, to that end, it isolates us from others, brainwashes us to think of everyone as a potential enemy, and vilifies admittance of the vulnerability that we, as mere humans, necessarily have. A patriarchal system functions by having miserable, perpetually angry men who wield their social power indiscriminately to hurt others and themselves, and breaks down with well-adjusted, happy men who do not feel the need to attempt to dominate their partners. Again, it is a system of maintaining social power, and nothing more. Your happiness is, to the patriarchal mindset, an afterthought at best.”
So here’s the deal, fellas. The world I am fighting to build is not going to restore your sense of individual power or importance. The world I am fighting to build is not going to turn back the clock to some mythical 50’s golden age where you just get issued a cute little wife in seamed stockings who hangs on your every word. The world I am fighting to build is not going to take away someone else’s self-worth to elevate your own.
The world I want to build, instead, will set you free. Free from having to jealously protect your manhood from scrutiny, free from having to fight it out to keep your place in a bloody hierarchy, free from abusive bosses, free from medical debt, free from stigma around mental healthcare, free from being made to feel like a drone who is only as valuable as the labor he can provide. You are so much more than that and you, yes, you the individual man watching this deserve so much better. You are worthy of a happy life.
But you and I cannot build that world alone. And even more important, you and I cannot build that world if we’re still obsessing over having individual power and prestige. We can’t build that world and gratify our egos at the same time. We only have the numbers, the skills, and the range to build this world if we do it together, with people who aren’t like us but who need the same things we do. You, individually will never have enough power to fix men’s issues, but together, in solidarity with your community, you have collective power, and collective power is so much harder to erode and ignore.
And look, I’m not going to sugar-coat it for you, the work is hard. Mighty problems require mighty effort to fix and building a better world is so much more about boring day-to-day logistics than it is some glorious battle. So much of the important work in liberation is care work, cooking and cleaning, childcare, checking in on people, standing up for people who can’t stand up for themselves. Liberation may brandish guns from time to time, but over the long term, it’s about meeting people’s needs without shame or stigma, and even without recognition. I’ve been thinking about this post from Talia Bhatt ever since I read it:
“Being progressive means committing to helping people who hate your guts and would not do the same for you. It's not about living out your fantasy of shooting the Czar in his palace.
You are not going to line people up against the wall. You will not have retribution. You will never be thanked.”
And yeah, I reconigze that this sales pitch doesn’t feel quite as persuasive as ones from the Trumps and the Tates of the world. But fellas, it’s time for a little tough love, and I need you to understand this:
If you think Andrew Tate has a solution to your misery, you’re a mark. In case you’re not familiar with that term, “mark” is carny-speak for someone who gets tricked into thinking they can win a carnival game. A mark is what con artists call their victims. The Trumps and Tates out there have identified you as a mark and they are going to bleed you dry and discard you. So if you take nothing else away from this video, let it be this: stop being a fucking mark.
And honestly? I just don’t know what else to say to the men and boys struggling out there. Because unlike the manosphere, I’m not gonna lie to you and tell you that I can turn you into a Gigachad. I’m not going to lie to you and tell you that there’s a secret cabal trying to keep you down and feminize you, as sexy as that sounds. And I’m certainly not going to lie to you so I can make you afraid of soy, Budweiser, or therapy.
The truth is as simple as it is boring: men, the systems keeping you down are the same one’s we’re fighting against and we gotta stick together if we want those systems to change. It will sometimes feel uncomfortable, it will sometimes feel scary, and it will frequently feel thankless, but it’s the only way. Chasing after domination is only making you miserable, isolated, and alienated. Come try something different with me.
So that’s my pitch. And unless something changes, I think that’s the last pitch I’m going to make to men broadly. Men’s problems are real, they cause real pain, and they deserve real solutions. We just don’t get any closer to those solutions pretending that men’s issues aren’t symptoms of a larger, deadlier disease threatening the whole body.
Anyway, what do you think? If you’re a man interested in men’s issues, do you feel like I adequately validated your hardships? Are you at least open to the possibility that your struggle is connected to the struggle of others? And if you’re a lefty organizer type, what do you think about this conversation? Have you had success illustrating this interconnectedness to interested newcomers? Tell us what you learned!
As always, I very much appreciate you spending some time with me tonight. Do all the various UI functions if you thought this was valuable and please send this to someone who you think would get something out of it.
Thanks again, hope to see you on the next one, have a good niiiight!