“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.” — Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

I spoke to a friend about an idea I had for a book, one that centers a bunch of women, and she immediately warned me that she didn’t trust men to write women well. She mentioned that when women are written by men, it’s usually clumsy, short-sighted, sexist, or all of the above. Fair enough.

Admittedly, a lot of media centered around women doesn’t usually handle them with a careful touch. However, I like women. I have longed for them, been curious about them, and thought deeply about them. Or at least they make me very curious, and they tell me more about myself. So naturally, I want to write about them.

However, because I am a straight man, those thoughts are tangled with possible attraction, possible ideas of sexuality, and of course a sense of desire. This doesn’t mean that every woman I think or talk about or am interested in is someone I’m attracted to, but before I become curious about them, I do have to untangle that knot.

It’s a very self-aware practice that has come with experience, and one I didn’t have a good grasp on when I was younger. Because I was a shy, romantic, and utterly unaware teen, I thought that every woman I paid attention to was someone I was attracted to. So I get it. I get why women would be wary about guys writing about women.

It’s also fair to say that for any male writing about women, the reader has to grapple with a very basic question, is the writer genuinely curious about this character, or are they horny for them?

A lot of the time, the writer is horny for them, and then writes them in a way that tries to hide it, because why else are they suddenly describing their breasts, or their hips, or showing a very particular interest in sex? There are great lengths taken to show that a female character is supposed to be complex, that her story is much more than just a romantic interlude, and yet the writer still keeps coming back to her sexual features. I think I’d forgive it more if the writer were intentionally making these characters objects of desire, or if it was just straight-up smut, but it feels worse when you can tell the writer is reaching for something deeper.

This is the feeling I got reading Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami, a seminal text in the life of the celebrated Japanese author. And to be absolutely clear, a book I generally liked, and had a good time reading.

It’s about a young man in love with two women, one tied to a monumental event in both of their lives, the other tied to the present. A lot of the book is a meditation on life and death, depression, and the liminal space that the threshold between youth and the real world can create in the people you love. The novel not only has the two main young women who are the subjects of Toru’s (the main character’s) affection, but it’s surrounded by more women: older role models, friends’ girlfriends, mothers, and caretakers.

Again, I like this book. It’s very deep, very heavy, very much like how it feels when real life hits you with a ton of bricks.

However, the way Murakami writes his women is just… creepy.

There are many scenes in which the main character and a woman have sex for no apparent reason. There are many descriptions of the bodies of all the female characters. The most egregious part comes at the end, one I can’t spoil for you, but if you’ve read this book, I need to discuss how awful it made me feel. A decision that was truly unnecessary.

I do believe that nowadays, a lot of male writers are attempting their best not to make the same mistakes as the writers of yore when it comes to their female characters. Reading older books, you can also pick out the writers who were trying to make their female characters less sexualized. At the very least, we’ve come to a point where the male gaze in media is not an obscure concept, there is general awareness of it, and there is understandable scrutiny applied to a man writing about women.

But as any writer does, they write about the things around them, and of course that has to include women. The option to simply never write about women or the lives of women is one I’ve seen a lot of writers take, all power to them. But it’s an option I frankly reject. Not because I believe I fully understand the interior lives of women or their experiences (I’ve heard and read many books about women written by women, so I have some understanding, but never a lived experience). And to be fair to Murakami, his book is told through Toru’s point of view, not the women’s. However, the way the women are described in a book that is so deeply interested in the female psyche was frankly strange, and I don’t want to make those same mistakes in my own writing.

So how do you write women in a way that honors their lives and humanity, while also coming from your own unique point of view?

After I finished Norwegian Wood, I was lucky enough to pick up another classic, The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides.

“We knew, finally, that the girls were really women in disguise, that they understood love and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.” — Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides

The Virgin Suicides is a story about five young sisters, the Lisbons, all of whom kill themselves. The story is told through the memories of the town, and specifically through the fascination of the boys drawn not only to the events that led to their deaths, but to the girls themselves. Mysterious, aloof, hidden away, and alluring in the way sirens are alluring. But the difference between how Murakami thinks about the women in his story and how Eugenides thinks about the girls in his is vast.

Murakami paints his women in Norwegian Wood as mysterious, broken creatures. Spiritual goddesses. There are many scenes in which Toru’s interactions with the women in his life are portrayed like a hero’s encounter with a higher form in a dream. Half-nude, bathed in shimmering light, disrobing for his pleasure and offering him sage advice. They come to him as sensual ghosts, otherworldly beings. At the same time, he tries very hard to give these women human complexity. They hurt, they wonder, they live and die like people do. But Toru always looks at them like they are beyond him.

The Lisbons in The Virgin Suicides are also beyond the grasp of the male characters, but purposefully so. We are heavily reminded throughout that the Lisbons are young women. They love music, they care about fashion, they care about the boys in town, and they are only hidden away because of their parents and the way they try to protect them. Lux, as the de facto leader of the Lisbon girls and the character the book spends the most time with, could easily have been portrayed as the archetypal mysterious female. Powerful, unknowable. But I never felt Eugenides forgot that she was a teenager. One who made mistakes, one who was not a mature woman in disguise, but someone with teenager problems, teenage ideas, and a teenage attitude. Exploring who she is in a way that made the boys immediately attracted to her, and also scared of her at the same time.

Eugenides’ book is about young women, but it’s also about the fascination we project onto them. In part, it’s about the male gaze, it functions as an act of gazing upon women and a commentary on that gaze simultaneously.

It may be the best book I’ve read about women written through a male point of view. It gives voice to the ethereal space young men and boys create around the people they love, while also making those young women feel like peers with faults and challenges that anyone their age would recognize. And at the same time, those boys will never know the pain and suffering those young women have gone through. They (and in fact the whole town) can only imagine it through the coded actions the Lisbons portray, including their deaths.

I found The Virgin Suicides completely relatable. I was also a teenager once, fantasizing about the young women in my life, wondering what they did, how they moved through the world. I captured small glances their way and found their light too bright. But I also knew, even then, that they were my peers. They had braces. They swore. They smoked. They were just as embarrassed as I was when I asked them out. They were at the same time far away and very close.

Murakami’s writing is fantastic, no doubt. His prose and his ability to achieve true philosophical insight on the pain and pleasure of love in so few words is a genuine gift. But I couldn’t relate to Toru, nor to the way he thought about the women in his life.

The Virgin Suicides works not only through the authorship of a man, it also translates beautifully through the viewpoint of a woman, as we saw with Sofia Coppola’s equally stunning film adaptation.

As I’ve started to rebuild my reading and writing habits (by which I simply mean I’m doing more of both), I’ve also been working on and off for a few months on an idea for a book, and a lot of the characters are women. My friend’s warning has stayed with me, swirling around in my head, keeping me careful of the path I’m treading. Reading Murakami and Eugenides back to back has been a gift. I also know that the purest example is to keep reading women. It’s a start.

…I feel like I want to treat this Substack like I did with my old blog, but I know I shouldn’t. In my old blog, any thought or comment would go on there. Every nugget of wisdom, any stupid saying, and any songs I was listening to. Honestly, after I re read those notes years later, I was pretty stupid, and realized I needed to edit things down. However I did like not feeling constricted in what I was writing, and I was writing for the hell of it. It helped my practice even though it may have annoyed my audience. But internet space is free space, am I right? (I’m not right)

Think of these posts as little throwaways, not meant to be taken seriously, just a window into what I’m watching, reading, and listening to. I won’t do this all the time, maybe once every two weeks. But I’d genuinely love to hear from you if you’ve also watched, read, or listened to any of the same things.

That’s the whole point. Enjoy!

Watched:

Eraserhead (1977)

My wife had been nudging me for months to watch Eraserhead, David Lynch’s debut. Notoriously hard to sit through. Famously weird. I’ll be honest Lynch is a director I’ve never quite gotten. I understand his whole thing intellectually: it’s about feeling, about mood. Uncanny valley. Something always slightly off.

It’s not that I don’t like challenging movies, I actually prefer films that are subtle and complex, things meant to be discussed rather than just consumed. If a movie can do both, make you feel and make you think, I consider it great, sometimes a masterpiece. What I can’t get behind is abstractness for its own sake. I’m always asking why a director made a specific choice. Those small, deliberate decisions are where the heart of a film lives. Even if it’s difficult, I’ll wade through it as long as it’s worth it.

Eraserhead tested that patience.

Not because the themes are opaque, they’re actually pretty straightforward. Parenthood is terrifying. Living next to factories will grind your soul down. Even if your baby looks like a rat fetus, you still have to take care of it, or the universe will not forgive you and you will die. Easy peasy.

What I couldn’t grasp were the details around the edges: the little alien eggs, the mother trying to make out with him, the “man-made chickens,” the completely motionless grandma, the dirt pile by the bed. And then there’s the Lady in the Radiator, who Lynch apparently dreamed up and simply put in. Is she an angel of death? A harbinger of doom? Who knows. She shows up, has those strange bumps on her cheeks, stomps some larvae, sings a sad little song, and disappears.

I understand that Lynch invented a specific avant-garde filmmaking language — one we literally named after him — and that we’re not supposed to get it in any conventional sense. I get that he’s riffing on his own experiences, young fatherhood, the alienating grind of industrial Philadelphia, the general strangeness of being alive. That’s just what he does.

I listened to a few explanations after the fact to see what I’d missed, but I kept coming back to the same feeling: these flourishes aren’t necessary. The central theme is already coherent without them. They feel like weirdness for weirdness’s sake.

The consensus among “Serious Movie People” is that this is a capital-A Art masterpiece. I’m not sure I agree. I see a bold, ambitious modern art piece so stuffed with metaphor it can’t quite find its footing.

That said the baby is astonishing. Creepy and somehow cute, mechanical and lifelike, realistic and completely otherworldly. Whatever they built, it’s a genuine feat of practical engineering, and I completely understand why people are still obsessed with it.

Lynch has always said the film is open to interpretation, and sure, fine. I can’t deny it’s worth talking about at length, clearly, since here I am doing exactly that. Maybe that’s the whole point of great art. I just hesitate to call this great. I don’t know. Have you seen it? What’s your take?

Listened:

“Something Worth Waiting For” by Friko

Every year, as a personal taste-making exercise, I build a playlist of my favorite songs. Music has been a genuine passion of mine for as long as I can remember, longer, actually. There’s a photo of five-year-old me staring intensely at a stereo, and I have zero memory of it being taken. It predates me.

I bring this up because I’m a bit of a sicko about curating my own taste, and part of that means actively trying to outfox the algorithm. If it knows me too well, I feel like I’ve lost. There’s still a little snobby hipster buried in me somewhere.

One of my main methods is going back to the blog-list era: Stereogum, Gorilla Vs. Bear, even (sigh) Pitchfork. Those lists were my map for finding new music, and I still use them. Any list written by actual humans, Loud and Quiet, The Fader, Exclaim for my CanCon fix, I’ll take it in and try to figure out what’s worth my time. Substack has helped too, with a growing number of people writing seriously about music and putting their taste on the line.

Out of everything I’ve come across this year, Friko’s Something Worth Waiting For kept showing up on list after list. Apologies if you’ve already been there, it’s new to me, and I love it.

I love this album.

It’s earnest and sincere in the most dude way possible. It reaches for Bruce Springsteen levels of working-class rock filtered through a post-punk lens. It builds to anthems and then brings you down slowly. The opening track, “Guess,” hit me on a walk just as a light rain started to fall, one of the most accidentally perfect settings for a rip-roaring, full-throated cry of a song. The whole album balances angst against serenity, youthful abandon against tight, deliberate composition.

In a just world, we’d all be singing “Still Around.” Alas.

Internetting:

Ash Callaghan

I hear everyone’s concerns about logging off and not giving in to the endless scroll that is social media, especially video social media like YouTube. I hear all of it, I acknowledge all of it, and I’m here to tell you it simply doesn’t affect me. I have my social media under control. It might sound like hubris. It is hubris. But I’m just better than them. I can defeat them.

I subscribed to YouTube Premium to cut down on ads, which predictably made me want to watch more YouTube. But like my music taste-making, I’ve started being more intentional about what I actually watch. Lots of essay-style content, things about ideas and subjects I care about. I used to be skeptical of video essays, especially long ones. I’ve never been a Jenny Nicholson convert frankly they’re just too long. But a tight 30-to-40-minute piece on style or taste or ideas? That works. What I can’t stand is an essayist trying too hard: rapid cuts, quirky fonts, the same recycled soundbites used as punctuation. Lazy shorthand.

And then I found Ash Callaghan, who does essentially all of those things I claim to hate and somehow I can’t look away.

Maybe it’s the accent, the manner of speaking, the glasses. Whatever it is, I’m hooked. Her videos are entertaining, absurd, funny, and genuinely informative. She has a specific je ne sais quoi that is scarily alluring, like that one girl in school who’d be scribbling furiously in her notebook and then interrupt the class to ask, completely sincerely, “So what’s this whole school business about anyway?”

Her videos are something of a pastiche of every video essay trend, and yet she’s so singular that if anyone tried to copy her, they’d fail immediately. I can absolutely see her style not landing for everyone but it lands for me completely. And yet if I stumbled across anyone doing the same thing, I’d find it insufferable.

A true one-of-one.

Reading:

“The Employees” by Olga Ravn

On my reading journey I’ve been searching for books that stretch my philosophical mind — stories that might seem small on the surface but quietly expand how you think about the world. One of my favorite recent discoveries is On the Calculation of Volume, which follows a woman named Tara who gets stuck living the same day on repeat. A Groundhog Day scenario, but played neither for laughs nor for science. Tara is a bookseller, and she spends much of the series trying to find meaning in her predicament — her desperate attempts to simulate normalcy, and how the loop affects not just her but everyone around her. It’s a remarkable series.

I bring it up because The Employees sits in the same register: deliberately slow, deliberately quiet, deliberately pensive. Olga Ravn’s novel is set on a spaceship crewed by both humans and humanoids, and it begins when they encounter a set of undefined “objects” that provoke in them feelings of longing, love, hope, fear, and connection that weren’t there before. The book unfolds through a series of formal “statements” — transcripts of interviews conducted by an unknown figure, asking each crew member what it means to be human, what it means to feel these elevated emotions, and how different (or not) they actually are from one another.

Ravn is a poet, and you can tell. The prose is precise and beautiful in a way that real humans or humanoids probably wouldn’t speak — I had to get over that — but once I did, it worked. It didn’t rock my world the way Volume did on first read, but I’d still recommend it to anyone looking for something quieter and more surreal. The humanoids-versus-humans device is a well-worn trope, but Ravn finds something genuinely alive in it that I wasn’t prepared for.

I love finishing a book and thinking about it more than I did while reading it. The Employees does that, even when not everything lands.

Watching Currently:

The World Cup

I tried my best to be mad at the World Cup as a sporting event, and honestly I can’t do it. I love the World Cup.

I know, I know — outside the games themselves, this one has been a mess. About as chaotic as Qatar, but with more fanfare thanks to the North America angle, and maybe a touch of convenient xenophobia in how much more we seem to care now that it’s closer to home. Fine. Noted.

But the games? The games have been incredible.

Watching countries like Curaçao and Cape Verde hold their own, seeing towns and nations lean into globalization and community on a massive scale — it’s been genuinely moving. Scottish fans taking over baseball stadiums and turning them into something else entirely. Mexican fans telling Iranian players they’re like brothers. European tourists discovering brisket and Buc-ee’s for the first time. An older man tearing up as a crowd assembles a giant Algerian flag.

@iammrbeatStan Herd and Team Herd present… the BIGGEST ALGERIAN FLAG in Kansas! Lawrence, KS is Algeria’s FIFA World Cup base camp. Welcome to Lawrence! 1-2-3 viva l’Algérie! #earthworks #lawrencekansas #algeria 🇩🇿 #fifaworldcup #kansas Filmed by Shannon Beat. Drone footage by Shannon Beat (@beat.aerial). Edited by Matt Beat/ Beat Productions.

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The World Cup is for the people. For this one month, I see it everywhere — and without getting too sentimental about it, that’s really what it’s all about. All these people who struggle to see each other as fully human, and then this tournament just forces its way into their hearts anyway. It’s beautiful. I love it. I can’t be mad at it.

SPOILERS FOR THE MOVIE OBSESSION. JUST GO WATCH IT

A few months ago, I was playing games with a couple my wife and I both know. At some point the other husband and I started talking about how oblivious we were when we were younger, specifically to women who were clearly interested in us. The stories came out fast. He missed what was, by all accounts, an unambiguous invitation for sex. I missed an equally obvious invitation for a date. I remember one instance with crystal clarity: a woman gave me a hug and said “we should go out for coffee,” and I said, earnestly, without a trace of irony, “I just had coffee.” I wasn’t blowing her off. I genuinely wanted to go out with her. I was just that dense.

We laughed harder trading those stories than at anything else that night, a mix of embarrassment and genuine comedy. Our wives stared at us with bafflement, because for them, those same moments of reaching out had ended in confusion and quiet shame. Maybe they felt a little pity for us. Maybe for themselves, for marrying such oblivious men. But we assured them: this is a near-universal male experience.

Now, well past the craziness of the dating world, I’ve tried to understand why that happened, why I was so blind to the signals in front of me. The honest answer is that I was like Bear, the male lead of the horror film Obsession, locked in tunnel vision on a specific idea of a woman, and completely unable to see the real one standing in front of me. At the time I dressed it up as romanticism. Looking back, it was a lack of confidence disguised as idealism. My friends called it being too “nice,” a word I resented for years before I learned to understand what they actually meant.

Obsession is the first film I’ve seen that genuinely captures that mindset, and more importantly, the flaw at its core.

“You Never Had Me”

The most eye opening scene in the movie comes when the real Nikki’s voice breaks through from inside her possessed body. She’s asking Bear to kill her, to end her suffering and set her free. Bear, who has already endured chaos just by being with her, immediately defaults to his victimization loop, Oh, now that I finally have you, you want to die? Her answer:

“You never had me.”

Inde Navarette’s amazing performance as Nikki is subtle and excellent from the start because we’ve seen this play before. Even in the midst of the nightmare that Bear makes of Nikki he still sees a possible rejection and lies in self pity.

Nikki also knows Bear’s intentions towards him even before the “One Wish Willow” break, Bear’s little knowing glances, his nervous gestures that are easily perceived by Nikki as a weird crush that she’s scared of breaking. We know where it’s going even when Bear doesn’t and it’s funny because the audience sees this clearly as well. Just like his friend, and just like I’m sure many friends we’ve had in the past.

We know it as soon as Bear places enormous weight on a single grand speech believing that the perfect words will finally make Nikki fall for him. A speech that’s not bad to be honest, but one that his friend sees through immediately. He knows Bear, he knows Nikki, and I’m sure has had to deal with Bear’s bullshit more than once.

I’ve had that friend. Most men have. The one who says “stop being so nice” when what he really means is stop pitying yourself, you sad sack. He warns Bear, begs him not to do it, practically spells out the humiliation ahead.

Even though Bear can’t do it still, Nikki has smelled his intentions and I’m sure has smelled them for a while now and begins to do the labour a lot of women do for the “nice guy.” Gives him a direct out, she asks him plainly: “Do you like me?” And Bear still can’t say it.

That scene was painful to watch, because I’ve lived a version of it. The all-or-nothing thinking that made every potential relationship feel like something that had to be won or lost in a single moment. The fear of rejection dressed up as romantic devotion. It wasn’t romantic. It was cowardice.

Bear’s fear of himself , his all-or-nothing obsession with Nikki, is what summons his Monkey’s Paw nightmare. And even after the wish is made, even as Nikki visibly deteriorates, he keeps going. He knows something is wrong. He continues anyway, still nursing the fantasy, still performing the role of the wounded romantic even as the real Nikki suffers inside her own body, a prisoner in a trap he built.

He never had the real Nikki, yet he pretended he had a chance. Typical “nice guy” shit.

Not an Incel but Not Innocent Either

I push back when people call Bear an incel. An incel, as I understand it, isn’t just socially awkward or romantically unsuccessful , he’s actively resentful, misogynistic, nihilistic. Bear is none of those things. He’s something more recognizable and, in some ways, more insidious, someone we all know. Some of us were him.

The difference matters, but it doesn’t make Bear harmless. The film is precise about this. He dies, yes, but not before dragging his friend Sarah (who, in a cruel bit of dramatic irony, had been showing genuine interest in him all along) and his best friend down with him. He leaves the wreckage for Nikki to sort through. That’s the point. People like Bear don’t set out to cause harm, they cause it anyway, through selfishness they’ve mistaken for devotion.

He’s not radicalized, he’s not on a forum, he’s just some dude who has never developed the confidence to see what was actually in front of him. Mistaking obsession for love and connection. And, the funny thing is, most of us have either been him or watched a friend become him.

I was like Bear, and looking back at myself, I am deeply ashamed of that guy. There’s always a feeling of regret and wonder of what would be different if I was more confident, less desperate, and more curious about the women I liked, instead of pinning this on my own sense of self-esteem. I didn’t create damage like Bear, but I definitely hurt relationships because of it, ones that would’ve been great to have, either romantic or not. I hated that guy, even though I need to be empathetic to him as well.

Obsession is the most honest cinematic treatment of the “nice guy” I’ve seen, and like the best horror, it works as a warning. Not about monsters. About the damage male self-delusion can do when it goes unchecked.

When the Hockey Canada scandal broke out, the one where the male players coerced a young woman to have sex with them in a hotel room, the one that went to trial where the players were exonerated legally. When that scandal broke out it showed everyone in Canada how masculinity within hockey culture is performed. Through dominance, through protections, through nationalism, and through fame.

What was missed is that this type of masculinity, this Canadian Hockey version of masculinity, is performed through Capitalism. Through the exchange of identity through capital.

As a culture, as a nation, we should look at any story that describes how young men allegedly sexually assaulted a young women with a sense of disgust and worry. However these type of incidents happen often, so much so that if there was an incident in which a bunch of boys in a suburban school allegedly coerced a young woman to a hotel room to have sex with a group of them, it would maybe make news, but it wouldn’t cause the ripples that this specific scandal did, with these types of boys. White boys that play hockey that are now professional hockey players in Canada.

It caused rippled due how we as a nation view the culture of hockey. The masculine culture of the most popular, and therefore the most profitable sport in Canada. Hockey Canada not only has a lot of money, be it from the government but from sponsors, hockey in Canada also creates a lot of money. The NHL teams in Canada are some of the most profitable in the league, their stars power the winter Olympics throughout the world, and the sport is an engine for culture in Canada. I get a chance to talk to young boys in Canada a lot, and one of my favorite questions to ask them is how they envision themselves as they grow up. The majority of these boys will mention that they see themselves as a professional hockey player1. The history of why this happened in Canada is as long as the history of the nation state itself.

Canada in regards to hockey is entangled with the economy of the state, as well as it’s masculine identity.

For a boy, regardless of their sexual orientation, their relation to masculinity is one of the strongest identity relationship they have. How we, as a society, as a community, as caregivers to our youth, cultivate that through the things we venerate, ideas we lift up, as well as the ones we admonish, tells boys how to perform masculinity within their culture. As stated before we right now live in a western, semi-religious, white centered patriarchy.

Boys and men in Canada know that within Canadian culture, specific sports, especially hockey, is where they can cultivate and strengthen their identity as a man. For a lot of Canadian boys and men, hockey is masculinity.

However there is a caveat.

Hockey Masculine Culture as a Commodity

We all know the Hockey Canada incident as a scandal, a blight on the hockey community, and a black mark on Canada in general. Why then, if we live in a western, semi religious, white centered patriarchy was this act of violence not just swept under the rug? I mean, they tried! That was what was originally supposed to happen, until an investigation broke through, and the drips of what happened started leaking out to the general public.

This is where we have to give credit to the feminists and pro-feminists who have been speaking out about misogyny in hockey for a long time. Without them, we wouldn’t have the public outcry that we had during this event. This wasn’t an isolated incident, this stood side by side by other hockey related scandals, like Kyle Beach sexual assault, like hockey players killing themselves after being fighters, like the many stories about drug abuse, about homophobia, and the rise of the manosphere and Donald Trump infiltrating the hockey world.

Yet the public outcry wasn’t enough, Hockey Canada only agreed to an investigation due to funding being cut by private and public organizations.

Money was the thing that finally cut the cord.

In the end, the players were found not guilty of anything illegal, however the information that was released and the way some of those players conducted themselves, made it very clear how much of that misogynic culture existed within Hockey Canada, and hockey in general.

There are some players, coaches, people in the hockey community that want to change that, and I believe them. They see the hurt that they may give to others through this culture, they may even have daughters or children that may be at harm through the continued support of this culture. They see the dangers, they want to help. I don’t think they will like the solution to their worries though.

It would mean de-coupling the identity to money and capitalism within hockey.

For those coaches, those parents, this community to see wellness within the hockey community, it would have to mean that we as a community wouldn’t put so much importance in the so-called leadership of hockey players in Canada.

That would mean professional players wouldn’t play as big of an importance in our community. That would mean we would have to go to less hockey games, means we would have to care less about hockey.

For Hockey to change their culture of domination, would mean to completely disentangle the financial rewards it would mean to be a professional hockey player. It would mean that would care about them as much as we would care about say, a nurse, or a teacher for example.

As it stands, if this were to take place, this would be a monumental economic loss. It would mean players, owners, agents, property managers, media companies, sponsors, etc would be losing millions and millions of dollars.

Not only that, a lot of public money has been inserted in to the continued thriving of hockey masculine capitalistic culture. Many municipal, provincial, and federal tax dollars have been used to build, maintain, and keep hockey money in the community. Be it through helping them build arenas for billionaire owners to maintain and keep the money. Be it to finance organizations like Hockey Canada that keep a slush fund for possible depravities that their players may do. So this means that hand in hand, we as people in Canada have a hand in the economic success or failure of Hockey.

But because hockey in Canada is masculinity, then that means we lift these kids up as the paragon of masculinity, therefore they must benefit the most. They must be paid accordingly in this patriarchal structure.

How do you tell someone that is already invested in the continued success of hockey, that for it be less toxic, it must mean that we have to care about them less. That they would have to be paid less. That there wouldn’t be parades for them. There wouldn’t be statues. There wouldn’t be streets named after them.

It’s identity death. Men and boys in Canada would fight that tooth and nail.

This is why any time another scandal pops up in the hockey community there’s also people tied up in the identity of western, semi religious, white centered masculinity who feel the need to combat those news. Deny the survivors stories, claim that it’s boys will be boys, and say that the way men and boys in hockey treat each other is actually fine and good.

We in Canada, are all a part of this, unfortunately.

We as a society have pedestaled masculinity to a point where it’s tied up culturally to the economic future of the state. This is not a new phenomenon, it’s happened through a lot of different dominant ideologies, where it be monarchy, communism, fascism, socialism, religiosity, and now the dominant culture of the modern world: Capitalism.

Hockey in Canada is one minor example in how masculinity and capitalism are tied together in a dance that is hard to untangle. However, to combat Capitalism Masculinity is to not play the game.

We as a society cannot beat Capitalism Masculinity at it’s own game, in spite of what liberals may want you to think. We can’t spend our way to boys and men feeling well. We can’t pretend we will infiltrate corporations and change their ways from within.

In this example, the Canadian Hockey Masculinity, we must somehow release the power and hold that hockey has on the community. That means we must watch less, we must wear less hockey gear, we must also venerate our hockey players less. This, as a person who has an Oscar Klefbom #77 Oilers jersey and watches the Oilers during the playoffs, is hard to do.

I know how sports can be a powerful tool, either for political goodness and for political wrongness. I also know the power of community, and the one quality that hockey sometimes lacks the most is grassroots community. The power of the masses.

Sometimes I wish hockey culture was more grassroots like soccer culture is sometimes, I know that soccer in itself has many documented issues and problems of it’s own. Much more than hockey. However I look at smaller clubs in Europe and South America, and how the fans, the ultras, the hinchas, have a massive effect on how that club behaves. I look at a club like St Pauli who at their core have an identity of anti-fascism. Their history is that of fighting against the tide of oppression. They see themselves as rebels, and their community aligns themselves through that. It’s an identity that is deep, and even though they do have to make money to survive, they have beliefs and attitudes that can’t be shook.

The Edmonton Oilers, for example, my home town team, have a different identity. They employ the best player in the world at this moment2, an electric talent that has made the Oilers one of the most profitable teams in the NHL. However, they are constantly at war with how to create a culture that is admirable. They have hired Stan Bowman as a General Manager, who was part of the cover up of sexual abuse of Kyle Beach. They have also got in disputes with homeless shelters over land rights. They have also tried to employ controversial players like Evander Kane, Corey Perry, and Jake Virtanen. The Oilers are also owned by Daryl Katz who also has his own controversies. The Oilers are a franchise now that people look at with side eyes, and yet public money is connected to where the Oilers play hockey and now Edmonton is all implicated in how the Oilers operate.

The answer of course, is to let the Oilers die. Stop going to games, stop buying jersey, stop paying for packages for the playoffs, stop spending money on the Oilers. That’s a strategy I have employed, and yet they still continue.

The other strategy I employ is to look at the players as they are, flawed 20 year olds. No pedestals, no hero worship. No extra lights on them. Yet they still will be idolized in Edmonton, and throughout the country.

I’m not part of the team, I have no control over that, whether they win or lose is not what I do as a fan. The way to stop the idolizing is to stop the cult. I’m not part of the team.

This is a mantra I repeat myself every time I get caught up emotionally to hockey. Unfortunately to fight Capitalism Masculinity is to remove money around masculinity altogether. And that means removing ourselves emotionally to a sport we love.

We can do it together, yet we have to do the hard emotional work to separate our emotional ties with a culture that we may have lived with for many years.

I know I have to.

I wrote this piece for a writing challenge I was doing, I wasn’t even thinking about masculine discourse when I wrote it, or my father. It’s just the first story that came to mind. However I wonder through this what our responsibility to get out the true emotions of the fathers of your life. And how much my dad are close and yet it surprises me when he shows me raw emotion.

My father was wiping away his tears as he closed the store for the last time. I went to hold his arms and wipe his tears. It’s not the same, you don’t understand he says to me. And instead of inviting me into his emotions he furrows his brows and tells me we need to go meet my brother.

I’m used to my father’s emotional blockades. I saw him cry exactly two other times. Once when my grandfather died, a man he only greeted with a handshake. The other time being when his small soccer team from his small hometown won a trophy.

I can also tell you the times he didn’t cry. He didn’t cry when I got married, he didn’t cry when my brother graduated with honors, he didn’t cry when he had to downsize to an apartment, and most egregiously he didn’t cry when my mother, his wife, died.

She had a stroke. We stopped life saving measures, she was dying. We stood beside her body as the nurses unplugged machines around her. I distinctly remember a sharp cold, when her eyes started flickering. And my tears couldn’t stop. My eyes shooting out the memories of my childhood. Her leftover stew, singing The Backstreet Boys in her broken English. Rocking my baby boy, whispering a song only my son could hear.

My brother’s tears followed. My fathers’ did not. I was confused by it. I resent him for it.

But today, as he locked the door for the las time, he cried in small gasps, constantly wiping his eyes, ashamed of the wetness streaming to his cheeks. He brushes off my attempt of comfort and walks ahead.

My brother waiting at Don Franco’s sees my father and tries to give him a hug in celebration.

What is there to celebrate? He asks as he also pushes him away. My brother apologizes and tries to explain that his store is a success. That it created a great life for us, and in a plea to his own values of hard work, tells him that I know how much him and our mom put into that store.

Then why should we close it, he says to us as he wags his finger, in the beginning of a lecture. A gesture I know too well. My brother tries again to tell him that his business will be fine. The rent was too high in that building, and the landlord was ripping us off, just because a Chipotle opened in the block. My brother forgets his head when he says that it’s time for him to rest.

Offended, my father asks us both what we know about rest. More importantly what do we know about him? He just wanted to be left alone, and now he doesn’t have that. Of course, him being alone is exactly what we fear, and I am now getting annoyed at him, because my father is not a dumb man, and that we have been worried about him ever since mom died. I reminded him again, if he didn’t notice, that I made it a point to visit him at all times and bring him food, a drink, and then talk to him about retirement and he continued to ignore me.

Even worse, I told him that he never cared about people coming into that store anymore, and all he would do is lower his crossword puzzle and no one would buy anything. We talked many times about the store, and he knew we were not going to keep the store open.

I started to eat the pasta that my brother ordered beforehand and reminded him of the happy times we used to have, or he used to feel, even though he hated his feelings. Of how he would greet every person coming in with a smile. Of how he would get bread from baker Tom until he shuttered his doors. The sound of the words Baker Tom made my dad chuckle.

My father would spend an uncomfortable amount of time explaining the meticulous process in which those products were made to anyone who asked. As a kicker he would proudly take out a picture of my mother as a young woman from his wallet. Acting like she was a starlet from the 60’s he would say look that’s who designs them.

I told him all of this, and he just shook his head. I pressed on, told him that this is for the best, the landscape of the neighbourhood has changed. Parnacci’s Breads is now a 7-Eleven, the bodega is a bank. Surely, he was not a dumb person and saw that he was next. But he just kept repeating the words that it was all lost, gone.

Maybe I was being selfish, I was worried that he would die in that store. I didn’t consider that maybe that’s what he would want.

I worry I’m going to lose him again. I lost him once before. It was at mom’s funeral. He wanted little part of it; didn’t want to say anything to the hundreds of people who were there in sorrow. He resisted, and I insisted. His speech was a mess, short and bitter. Embarrassed, he lashed out at both of us and stopped talking to us for months afterwards. It was a slow process to get him back. That’s why I stopped at the store regularly. It was for him, but it was for me too.

I loved my mother, and I know he did too. The store became hers as much as his. He was happy to just exist beside her glow.

I admitted this to him that our life has not been the same since she died. Finally, this broke his silent brooding. In anger he says he lost a partner, his wife. I told him he was being selfish. We lost a mother too, and me and my brother were worried we were going to lose a father too.

My brother nodded. From the outside after mom died he seemed like he kept it together, but I know he didn’t get a chance for comfort. I never talked to him about it, I’m just assuming because that’s how I felt.

My father kept repeating that she is lost and started crying. Nearing her death my father stood by my mother. I remember staring at him, as he grabbed and caressed her hand, gently taking off her wedding ring. Symbolic closure, I thought at the time, I was wrong about that. It just delayed his suffering.

At his tears I didn’t feel relief, I felt anger. I reminded him that it’s the first time I have seen him show any tears about mom.

His defenses shattered, waving his hands, apologizing, pleading at his sons. I don’t think he was apologizing to us.

My dad pulls out his necklace under his shirt, her ring attached to it. He says I miss her everyday. If I lose the store, I lose her.

In a more parent-like manner I say that his stubbornness could’ve lost us. I know he meant to keep her memory alive, but we’re here still, and we’re still family. We need to do this together. We need to remember and move on. And I say this by grabbing his hands who is holding on to the ring.

My brother repeated the gesture as all our hands hold on to the ring. A gesture we as a family have never done.

The story goes that a man, usually a middle aged man, usually a middle aged white man, although not always, but always someone who has a business background will find some sort of void in their life. A panic, or a trauma, or an event.

That void, that need, will most likely be connected to their gender, because that gender is usually the only identity marker that they feel strongly. That man will stumble that manhood is broken in some way. Mostly that men try to push away emotions, that our mental health is valuable and that we also pushed that down, and that most likely that women and possibly queer people have been blamed for this, however this affects men (and himself) the most.

They are trying to fill that void inside of them. That man will try to find a group, a movement, and because that man, is a business man, that group, movement, gathering will be indirectly tied up to gaining capital through the pursuit of positive male mental health. If they can’t find it in a way that suits them, they will make it themselves, in their own Capitalism Masculinity vision.

The funny this is that a lot of these men run the positive masculinity movement. This is not the story of the manosphere. They are everywhere, and they are in charge of the messaging, the infrastructure, the way we talk about masculinity, and the use the systems available to get the money that they need.

The common thread here is that they are fans of capitalism and maybe call themselves capitalists. The irony is that a lot of these men are fans of the systems that have created that void in their life, and because their identity is so intertwined within capitalism, they are either blind to it, or purposely ignore it.

I know this is because I see these men all the time, I have talked to them, I have been involved with them, and I have argued with them. They refuse to acknowledge how capitalism affects their organization and the role it plays in how it creates the issues around men.

This manifests in men’s retreats that charge thousands of dollars to men for the privilege to be healed. 1

It shows up in business podcasts and say that therapy is actually not good for men, instead they will need life coaches, the business man’s therapist. 2

These men will also talk about male’s loneliness, male negative mental health, and pitch drugs, charge for courses, create a business, charge for the access to this therapeutical business, and will pursue the speaker circuit.

All the while never address the gigantic elephant in the room, which is that the pursuit of capital, the ownership or things, ideas, and people, is causing the void. The void that they are trying to escape.

This also manifests in the non profit space where for example, Movember is a gatekeeper for grants and groups throughout the world. Same with governments which will make action towards gender equity but will do it through the spread of capital. You see this also with every business guy who has ever wrote a book about being a man, which makes it known that creating a business is part of masculine growth. Organizations that are started by sociologists but then are surrounded by business people.

Play the system right they will say, we need the money they will say, how will we pay people? The modern non profit system is broken they will say, but then I ask, whose fault is that?

I start here with the modern positive healthy masculinity, not because they are causing the most harm, on the contrary they are working to help the most. They are far removed from the truly evil and awful manosphere who have no qualms extoling the virtues of capitalism (Get money, buy my crypto coin etc.). But I start here because if the positive healthy masculinity movement cannot shed the skin that is Capitalism Masculinity, then it’s fair to say that we cannot talk about men and boys without talking about capitalism.

Honestly not doing it would be a derelict of duty.

Men’s modern identity is uniquely shaped by capitalism. So much so, that it’s fair to say that modern masculinity is Capitalism Masculinity. And once men and boys examine, critique, fight back and ultimately shape how capitalism affects their identity as men, then we as men will always be battling a losing fight.

“I often use the phrase ‘imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy’ to describe the interlocking political systems that are the foundation of our nation’s politics” - bell hooks

Now I know I’m not the first to say this, or I would be the most qualified. In fact most of my knowledge around masculinity and masculinities are shaped by the many scholars and thinkers that came before me, people way more qualified to talk about this. People like bell hooks, Michael Kimmel, Ivan Jablonka, Raewyn Connell, CJ Pascoe. They have mentioned continuously how capitalistic identity shapes the way men look at each other and the world.

bell hooks especially had been up front and center in her critique over not only the systems that affect women, but the same systems that instill violence towards those men and boys as well. So this theory, if it even is a theory at all, is not something new.

But I feel like it needs to be repeated, because I haven’t heard it loud and clear from the people that should be saying it, neither from the discourse, the influencers, or the books. The people that say they care about men and boys. It should be front and center.

I believe this is because the overall media system that talks repeatedly about men and boys , which includes the toxic influencers, the manosphere, and positive masculinity influencers, runs on capitalism, and that if that system is reduced in some way, it’s effects would lessen.

But a lot of men, and this includes men who think of themselves as feminist or at least liberal, have a stake in their personal identity with the system that governs our world.

What is Capitalism Masculinity

“The bourgeois sees his wife as a mere instrument of production. He hears that the instruments of production are to be exploited in common, and, naturally, can come to no other conclusion than that the lot of being common to all will likewise fall to the women. He has not even a suspicion that the real point is to do away with the status of women as mere instruments of production.” - Karl Marx

I promise this won’t turn into the Communist Manifesto, and I know that immediately once we mention the name Karl Marx I’m going to lose some people. But it’s impossible to talk about the critique of capitalism and specifically of men, without directly referencing the chief critic.

Marx had a good idea about how he viewed marriage and because he saw a lot of things through capital exploitation, he viewed marriage as a form of exerting power and control over women through their labour. And he blamed men whose identity is tied to capitalism as it’s vessel. 3

How do we define Capitalism Masculinity?

It’s the identity confusion that the pursuit of power and control through the ownership of capital and property is considered masculine.

I call it confusion because it may be in concert or in contradiction to other types of identities that the person may inhabit, be it through being a father, being a husband, a lover, a soldier, a trade worker, a feminist, a liberal, or a conservative (among many others).

A lot of these identities can be defined as masculine or feminine in some way right now in the modern world. We know that this has not always been the case, the definition of how to be a man has changed and evolved over time and over place, but due to globalization and the spread of influence capitalism has seen throughout, until we can safely assume that a lot of men participate and identify with Capitalism Masculinity.

One of the major hallmarks of masculinity throughout history, is of domination. Historian Ivan Jablonka in “The History of Masculinity” makes the case that “the symbolic power of the masculine is used to justify social domination by men.” That the idea of patriarchy is not just men dominating women, but a machine which uses masculinity and masculine ideas and agents to exert it’s will towards others to the benefit of the majority of men and minority of women. “It’s culture is the masculinity of domination.”

At this moment the major dominator and the system that holds true power is the holding of capital and property. People who hold and hoard the most of capital dominate the most, and it dominates through masculine aggression, either through takeovers, lobbying, social communication, acquisitions, and even physical aggression through violence.

Capitalism Masculinity not only allows for capitalism to continue, but it also makes it fully the arena of the masculine. In doing so, it also makes it so if you don’t believe in the power or even acquiesce to the dominating power of capitalism, you will be seen as less of a man. And for men, that is not only identity death, but if you look at the rate of male suicide once the unemployment rate goes up, possibly literal death.

What to do with Capitalism Masculinity?

“A man conforms with a masculinity of non-domination when he implements mechanisms that prevent himself and others from imposing any constraints of sex or gender…what feminist policies have to overcome is not men, but the masculine. And men themselves can fight against the monsters that their gender has created.” — Ivan Jablonka

I’m realistic enough to know that in to escape capitalism fully not only takes a considerate amount of wealth, but it also takes privilege. It will also take a will of the many, and Capitalism Masculinity has done a great job of making it hard for men to organize without making it so men to think of themselves less than because they don’t see themselves as a capitalist, or just to make money. How do you live in this society without the pursuit of money and capital? Hard to do, and for many, impossible.

However, it doesn’t mean we don’t investigate it, analyze it, critique it, and do the part to identify it within ourselves. Throughout these next few posts I want to show examples of how Capitalism Masculinity has embedded itself through the discourse of masculinity or be it through the manosphere, or the positive masculinity discourse. How Capitalism Masculinity makes it hard to talk about men and boys without critiquing the very influence it has on us. It is important to address this head on.

Men through the masculinity of domination has created Capitalism Masculinity, and it’s our job to destroy it.

To be continued.

An emotion has emerged, a feeling that I can’t seem to shake. One that I used to shake off easily, like water from a duck.

It happened when I heard that Alberta was going to have a referendum about immigration. A big waste of money and an excuse to be racist in the expense of people who are just trying to get by. It popped open a big zit in my brain.

That zit started forming when I started thinking about my personal immigrant experience, and realized I don’t have anything to write about. The story was for a magazine submission and it’s a piece that I started, threw away, started again, threw away, and started again. Eventually I got rejected from the magazine and I understand why, I didn’t really believe in the piece at all. It was displaying emotions that I didn’t carry, about supposed sadness and struggle in connection to my immigration.

When someone asks me about my time learning English and adjusting to life in Canada, I can only say that it was tough, but in general it was fine. It took me a while to learn English but eventually I did. I got picked on at school because of my brown skin and the way I said the word beach. But realistically who hasn’t gotten picked on at school, some of my friends got it worse than me. My childhood affected the way I go around life now as much as anyone’s childhood has informed theirs.

I’m truly not special in the terms of the immigrant story. It’s unique only because it’s mine, but if you look at anyone’s immigrant story in Canada they are similar in pace and tone. When I started writing that piece for the magazine, I couldn’t pick out the grief or sadness or strife. Every word on that page sounded fake, like someone else’s sob story.

Grief is not something I’m accustomed. It’s not a feeling I have quick access to, and I doubt that a lot of men have either. I don’t know if it’s my gender construct (probably) but I had no specific instruction to push down grief, it just happened. My parents were never ones to say “stop crying” however they were not overly emotional. I just thought not crying was something I had to do. Again, a male story that’s as old as time, so I won’t bore you with the rest. But ever since I started to write that story and failed at it, I got angry about the immigration discourse that was around me.

• What was happening in the US was awful I told myself, I felt it myself.

• What happened in Venezuela, the meddling of Latin America again, I felt that too.

• What was going on in the UK and Australia and Europe with the many anti-immigration rhetoric that is not about policies but rather about racism.

• What so many people were saying, not only in the US or in the UK or in Canada, but even in places like Chile and others, that immigration is a problem. That immigrants are a problem.

Of course, I took that personal, much more than I would with any other political issue that was going on around me. More so I was angry and desperate at the world, all too familiar with a lot of people, but a feeling I pushed down for years. It bubbled up in unexpected ways, with my personal relationship with my wife, my job, and my family. I didn’t understand what was happening until I could pin point it.

However I didn’t have anyone to talk about it, except my therapist, a person I sought out because she is an immigrant herself and understands it as much as she can. I seek more people to talk to, I seek a community of people grieving as I was. Not angry, just sad.

I didn’t feel like taking my energy to an aggressive place, to protest, to throw rocks and molotov cocktails. Neither to make signs and posters that say “Immigrants make this country” a true statement but one that I find too cutesy and doesn’t fit with the sadness I feel. I just wanted to express my grief in a way that felt public, with people around me. To be hugged by this energy.

It was during this time I had a good discussion with Lizzie Dersken about religion as she has mentioned having a complicated relationship with God and Church but one she has felt peace with, or at least she sounded like she was at peace when I heard her say some words online. I can’t speak for her truly, but I was jealous that she had embraced radical acceptance with her relationship with God, and I’m still wrestling with those ideas.

At age 45 I have this expectation that all of my relationships have a sense of acceptance to them, but that’s far from the truth. My relationship with the church is complicated as I’m sure a lot of people’s are. But I was struck by how Lizzie spoke about spirituality in a way that aligns to her own ethics and values, and also (or what it seems, again I can’t speak for her) understands the damage the church has done to her own upbringing. I wanted that for myself.

I don’t have as much religious trauma as others do, I wasn’t abused, I wasn’t in a conversion camp, my culture wasn’t taken away, my liberties maintained. Honestly all of my trauma came second hand, seeing what our version of the church has fragmented my family. Because of this I hold all forms of religiosity (not just western religiosity) at arms length, and internally sneer when I feel some sort of spirituality is present in my daily life, even as ephemeral as tarot cards. However I feel an emptiness inside that feels like it should be filled by something spiritual. Nothing fits right though. I want to back away from it, but feel jealous of the people who have it.

Lizzie recommended Peter Rollins, a person who has popularized the idea of pyrotheology, which in his own words is “designed to help us embrace the difficulties of existence and face the challenges of being human. It involves a deep critique of any religious/ideological system that promises an escape from doubt and anxiety. Exposing the true tyranny that the pursuit of certainty and satisfaction creates (by feeding the very problems the pursuit promises to fix).”

I started going down a rabbit hole with Rollins, and his accent who reminded me of my friend’s accent, was warm enough for me to engage in his stories and his wisdom. One of his main tenants was around his view of communion, which he sees as a gathering for grief. A place to understand, hear, and be heard about what grief, strife, and doubt. I felt all of those things in relation to my thought about religion, and my feelings around immigration. Doubt.

By all accounts, I am ok. I have made a good life here. I am not a giant vessel of trauma, although I’m sure I carry some.

However, I feel doubt strongly.

Dan Harumi landed on my algorithm at a good time as doubt and grief wrestling in my head:

@danharumiKaraoke in America vs Japan

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In it, Dan talks about the difference of how Japanese and North Americans approach karaoke. He says that in Japan, it wouldn’t be weird or off putting if a man got up and sang a sad song earnestly. Letting his emotion out, feeling the words, and then sitting down, drink a beer, feel at ease. Whereas in North America, we’re comfortable singing these songs either to sing well, or to have fun. A man singing an earnest song would ruin the mood. The party constantly running away from sadness.

Dan doesn’t excuse Japanese culture either, he knows that they also have areas in which a void of emotion is common. But his point connects how North Americans express grief in public, as it’s done mostly online. Where there is an external performance that’s different from just getting on a stage and belting out a song. This is due to the medium, to the technological and sociological aspect of social media. The person crying online because they are desperate, frustrated, desperate will never be fully at ease.

I also think of my own gender, if a man were to go to a karaoke bar and sing Exit Music (For a Film), it better be for laughs.

If social media is one of the few places to express grief, especially as men, then we will end up as slaves to the machine. This is why I am skeptical to places like r/guycry where men share their struggles and grief, but it goes into the void of social media. Reading through that message board, it pains me to see all of the outward pain that these men are experiencing, but no where to be held.

One of the places that strives to be a container for male grief is through these men’s retreats that espouse mythopoetic beliefs, places like Sacred Sons or EVRYMEN. But this is also tied into what Rollins mentioned “by feeding the very problems the pursuit promises to fix.” In this case, capitalism and financial insecurity, due to the entry fee (which is in the thousands) for men to access these places of communion. It’s implicitly exclusive.

For myself, I am digging deep into my feelings of doubt and grief. Acknowledging my upbringing, and staying comfortable in my uncomfortableness. Tapping into that feeling of a man singing an emotional song, with voices and heart full. I have to pretend and believe that it’s not awkward, or off putting.

I have to know that it’s real. It exists. It’s living, and I need to grab it.

When young Martin Scorsese set out to make Taxi Driver, he only had one true movie out, the weird Boxcar Bertha. Mean Streets hadn’t been released yet, and neither had Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore. He wasn’t known as the Martin Scorsese we know today, the one who is able to dissect the American male psyche with as much panache as anyone else. A director who loves working with complicated male characters who live in a complex dichotomy, be it gangsters, business bros, priests, boxers, or deities. We didn’t know that Martin yet.

He made Taxi Driver explicitly as a feminist movie. He mentions to Rogert Ebert just before the movie was released:

“Ebert: “Taxi Driver,” where the hero can’t relate to women at all, is…

Scorsese: Feminist. Because it takes macho to its logical conclusion. The better man is the man who can kill you. This one shows that kind of thinking, shows the kinds of problems some men have, bouncing back and forth between the goddesses and whores.”

After watching Taxi Driver, admittedly only for the second time in my life, first time being when I was in my 20’s, it struck to me how not only present this movie is (yeah wow, what a take, Taxi Driver speaks so much to how men are now than before, we haven’t heard that one before), but also how it’s never been truly replicated in the same way again. And I have seen a lot of “true nature of male psyche” movies. I think what makes Taxi Driver different is the subtleness of Travis Bickle’s condition. One that can feel hidden, one that others can feel even safe around or even attracted around. But the movie never preaches, it just shows.

Also because I am a bit of a sicko, after I watched the movie, I logged it to Letterboxed (four and half stars, it’s great just not as good as like Goodfellas), I started to read other people’s reviews, of people who are just logging it now in 2026. It’s filled with either 5 stars or 1 stars, and the 1 stars are basically saying something to the effect of “I don’t care about men.”

Which is fine, whatever. Be it for me to judge other people’s movie tastes, but at the risk of just going through the comments and getting angry myself, this type of review completely loses the point of the movie. Yeah Bickle does misoginist shit, yeah dude is creepy, and yeah he should be behind bars. Yes that is the point of this movie. The point is that he should be and he’s not, he’s out there. And these types of men, lonely men, lonely men who have been constructed by gender expectations, are products of their time and place, and products of the systems that are in place that in many ways don’t care for them (as much as people believe they do). What do those men end up doing? They go out and hurt people by thinking they will protect. They go out and hurt women specifically through the thought of saving them. Betsy and Iris (even as young as she is) is not dumb enough to think Travis will save them.

I get that Taxi Driver (and Martin Scorsese in general) is part of the film bro aesthetic, and I know a lot of people find that to be annoying because it signals a specific type of guy. I struggle with this gendered thinking though, it reminds me a lot of how guys off handedly dismiss romantasy books or media like “Heated Rivalry” “Heartstopper” and the like. It’s this idea that you’re above it, when clearly you’re not. But I understand that these types of critiques and opinions are out there for guys to kind of dodge and weave.

However, I find Taxi Driver one of the best views of male psyche put to screen, and honestly one of the more feminist movies I have seen. One that everyone should watch and dissect and think about because Scorsese not only wants to lean in to what makes Travis tick, he’s also repelled by him. And knowing that he made this during a time of great disstress of what New York was, and what men were going through at the time, coming back from a brutal war in Vietnam, and having to contend to a life that didn’t want them.

I usually think of how individually men act and are created are by a specific formula. Gender Constructs + Time they live in + Systems that are in place to support or bring him down. Gender + Time + Systems. Men for the most part are moved by this or try to resist it, they accept it or they reject it. They are aware of it, or they work to push it down. The issue with Travis Bickle, the main character of Taxi Driver is that he is not aware of this, therefore he displays this fake confidence which turns into madness.

It’s funny to think of Taxi Driver as a feminist text though, because it does center men. But the amount of scary ass type of men in this movie is extraordinary, Scorsese is very aware of what makes men scary. And it’s doubly a feminist text because Travis’ confidence and power is only dictated by the women that he pursues or protects. Betsy or Iris. Through them he only sees himself. Either as a lover or protector.

However when I say everyone should watch this movie now, to dissect and understand, I would say that when I first watched this movie I didn’t get it. I found it boring, and meandering. And I think that’s why you see a lot of Letterboxed reviews saying that this is just men and blah, not interesting. I think it does take a bit of a mature understanding of the world before Taxi Driver sinks in.

For example, on first watch I didn’t get how Scorsese and Schrader are empathetic to Travis as well as showing the audience why a man like this exists, how much gender + time + systems makes a man like him.

For example it’s shown that Travis is a Vietnam vet. Taxi Driver was released in 1976, just after the Vietnam War ended, however it was filmed earlier than that. Remember a young Scorsese for which Mean Streets hadn’t come out yet, started to make a movie about the POV of a returning war vet in a war that the government wanted to have and for which many American soldiers died or came back permanently changed. We don’t know much about Travis’ back story but from subtle clues, we can guess. His back scar, the way he handles a knife in his boot, the cigarette he uses, his insomnia, and obviously his jacket. War has definitely done a number on his mental health, and no one is able to help him.

And because of this, because of the time, and energy, and the amount of toxicity that he has endured he is not a person who is aware of his world. You can easily call him kind of dumb. He only sees things as good people and scum, and has a specific racist point of view. He stares menacingly at the black people around him, quietly judging them, and then outwardly killing one. One of black taxi drivers even looks at him and says “ bye, killer” seeing through his veneer.

There’s many times in the movie in which he is asked his opinion on a topic and he says he doesn’t know. He is asked about politics, specific policies, and he doesn’t know. He’s asked about music when he gives Betsy a record, and she asks him if he’s heard it, and he says he doesn’t follow musical artists and he just liked the cover. He also takes Betsy to a porno theatre to watch a movie, because that’s the only movies he knows. He’s not culturally aware, nor does anyone that he trusts around him care enough to teach him. He’s just present in this world, judging it, and planning his revenge fantasy. Not unlike many of these dangerous men out there.

Effectively, we’re also shown that Travis is also knows something is wrong with him, but cannot say it. He continuously asks for drugs, and complains about his lack of sleep. There’s a great scene in the movie in which he asks another cab driver, Wiz, for advice about how he feels. The only words he could say is that things has got him down. It’s a plea for support, telling Wiz that he’s got “some bad ideas in his head.” And Wiz could only tell him to “be a job” and “everyone is fucked.”

Wiz is right, but it’s said in a way that makes no sense. But he misses Travis’ serious plea for help.

Travis is not a singularity, he’s not a lone crazy person. He is a product of the society around him. The gender constructs he’s in, the people he’s surrounded himself with, the loneliness he faces, the drugs he’s in, the city he works in, the heat, the life, and his lack of knowledge. It’s as Scorsese says, “macho to the logical conclusion.”

Travis is also a danger to everyone, but mostly a danger to women, even though he wants to protect them. Martin Scorsese says that the most important scene is the one where Betsy rejects him, and in a movie of a lot of uncomfortable scenes, it’s maybe the hardest to watch.

“The whole movie is based, visually, on one shot where the guy is being turned down on the telephone by the girl, and the camera actually pans away from him. It’s too painful to see that rejection.”

And the thing is that women know this. Iris even in her own way knows this, laughs at Travis when she says he will take her away. Betsy knows this when she stops calling her and all he could do is send her flowers and then yells at her. As much as I dislike the whole “men v/s bear” meme, Taxi Driver is the nuance that the meme is trying to convey. That these guys are out there, they are hidden, and waiting to “save them” in their own messed up view of the world.

It’s sobering, it’s in your face, and it’s vulnerable. Fifty years in and it still hits.

I just want to start with saying something that should be completely obvious by now, especially this year, especially this month of this year. Capitalism absolutely has screwed the 99% of people in ways that are subtle and not. So what I will have to say has more to do about how the unique identity of the western modern man has made them an easy target for the ways Capitalism hurt people. That men like to deal with the issues that they may face, be it depression, relationship issues, lack of external supports, friendships, anxiety etc by listening to other men who will pitch them a solution that will involve them paying something which will increase their ails. And these grifters people, other men, will use masculinity to pressure men to use capitalism to help their woes. Western Male Identity is so tied up with Capitalism such in a way that it’s the little kid meme of putting the boot on it’s own head.

Let’s take the example of Quittr, the app that was supposed to help people (specifically men) with their porn addiction. According to Dazed, here’s how they described Quittr:

“To help people quit porn, the app has an array of what it calls “expert-backed porn addiction therapy tools”. One of these is a panic button that tells you, “You’re better than this. Look at yourself”, when you feel the urge. There’s also a block for trigger sites, an AI support chatbot to guide you through urges, a dashboard to monitor your porn-free streaks and porn addiction support groups, for “strength and accountability.”

On it’s face this seems…fine, I guess. I don’t really have a big opinion about pornography in general, I’m not anti-porn, however I do acknowledge that the type of porn that is popular for a lot of men have made them have a fucked up view of how they see the world. Especially women, and especially themselves. Be it how they have sex, or how they view their own bodies.

On the other side I do think the banning of porn in general would also be bad, eroticism is an important idea and a complex theme that people should have access to, especially men. Because men have for the most part a very skewed view of what is erotic and what to do with that. A lot of men see something erotic and just see it as a power play. More on this later.

But young men especially as they’re learning about themselves and who they are a sexual person, are lost. However porn is about as easy to find as a hamburger (and cheaper too) and young men are also aware (or have been told) that there’s something wrong with them, and will think of porn as a problem. This can be cultural, as in people around them see porn as a problem (think religion), or interpersonal (think relationships). However, when they think of porn as a problem instead of finding the solution through some vulnerbale intersection of their own ideas of sexuality and sensuality, understanding their own connection to eroticism and sexuality, they will look to other men. Online usually. And because we live in an era where a lot of help, especially help directed at men, is monetized, the solution becomes a blunt hammer approach. Enter the r/NoFap community.

NoFap as a concept is the abstinence only approach of porn. The idea is simple, you just stop masturbating to porn cold turkey, and there is a whole community around it that will help you by providing tools, words of encouragement and external supports. These communities have been around since the early 2010’s, and have really entered the manosphere during times of Mens Right Activists, Gamergate and just before Donald Trump. On it’s surface it seems like an innocous place where men are supporting each other through the dubious approach of quitting porn. But inside, you will find a lot of crosspollination of misogynistic ideas and themes, since a lot of the users also frequented other manosphere communities.

Quittr is basically the monetization of NoFap. It’s 4.99 a month to help you with NoFap. Capitalism to help you deal with your ails.

Quittr was invented by some 20 year old men a few years ago, who on the site said that their approach for the app is backed by neuroscience, but it’s clearly not. This whole page on their app website? Bullshit, and they admit it. From the Dazed article:

“When I asked what specific research or studies they were drawing these supposedly addiction-healing techniques from, he said they’re still working on some of the “legitimising stuff“. “It’s run by 20-year-olds who did this for fun before it started ramping up,” he says. “We got excited and kept expanding, but there were a lot of things we did wrong.”

There has been some studies on this by the way, and the research states that the abstinence model clearly does not work. They don’t jack off less. However what does happen is they become more conservative and more anti-science. From the research article “Abstinence from Masturbation and Hypersexuality:”

“While there were associations with hypersexuality, no significant correlation with behavioral markers such as maximum number of orgasms was found. Higher abstinence motivation was related to a higher perceived impact of masturbation, conservatism, and religiosity and to lower trust in science. We argue that research on abstinence from masturbation can enrich the understanding of whether and how average frequencies of healthy behavior are pathologized.”

Therefore for the people that this worked (meaning that they didn’t jack off at all) was due more to the idea that they thought porn and masturbating was already unhealthy and wrong. A weird thought to be honest, why do these people think this way? Well, let’s continue.

It’s clear that this group, NoFap and Quittr, is just making it all up based on their idea of what a good man should be. These ideas either come from religionsity or through online influencing, in which the NoFap idea has been popular. Apps like Quittr have also been popular in the manosphere. For example, this influencer @popcornwithtom is a fan of Quittr, or at least got paid to say he was a fan of Quittr, whose page looks like this:

It’s a curiosity that men who for the most part love, watch, pay for, and proliferate pornography have turn their back on it through the NoFap model. It’s weird. Especially when you know people like Andrew Tate and others use pornography as a way to get income and popularity.

But if you think about it a bit more, it makes a lot of sense. For these men giving in to pornography means giving into the power of women. It means that the more porn you watch the more you as a man are relinquishing your control to a woman. Going cold turkey for these men may mean you’re only giving that power to people who you love, your wife, girlfriend, God, or for a lot of these men, themselves. Again on it’s surface seems ok to think this, but think about the idea that they’re very resistant of someone else (ie. women) taking their God given hierarchical power, and you get the main thrust of the manosphere. There’s a reason why manosphere podcasts and influencers bring in porn stars and adult entertainers and “thirst trappers” just to show men how dumb they are by following them, and also making fun of those entertainers, calling them “whores” and such. NoFap was never a movement for men to better themselves, it’s to gain power over women which is signaled by porn.

You can see the issues of NoFap and Quittr as an iceberg. On top of the iceberg, the thing you see upfront is how bad an app like Quittr is. Quittr is run by 20 year olds who don’t know what they’re doing, and lately their app had been shown that it has a vulnerability feature that leaked user data, which included how many times someone had masturbated (oops!).

On the bottom of the iceberg, the things we can’t see, are misogynistic views of women due to how these men view porn, literally and figuratively. They may believe that porn has taken their power away and now they have to wrestle it back. Their discourse is not to talk about how a lot of pornography is deeply sexist and harmful, but to claim back their own masculinity.

Again, NoFap is a blunt hammer to a problem that needs complexity and precision. If someone had a genuine porn addiction, I would never recommend the NoFap community, because they may stop porn but they’ll easily turn into a RedPiller whose going to spend their money on other things, like Quittr, an app that not only will not help but will steal your data.

Furthermore, the blunt hammer approach is being fed and funded by men who will pay for an app that doesn’t work, for a model that won’t help them, which then will lead to less enjoyment and less well being. They will then come back to online influencer men who will tell them to listen to another idea that doesn’t work, then buy a course/book/talk that won’t help them, which will lead to more pain, more shame, and more finger pointing at women/feminism/other people. The “don’t tread on me” snake that just keeps treading on himself. This is all self-inflicting.

It’s a cycle that continues and continues and men, even well meaning men, just cannot help themselves. I see this even within the positive masculinity space in which is selling men on an idea that requires money for them to pursue. Quittr though is a perfect encapsulation of the ills of modern man trying to be solved by capitalism. It will never work.

Guy knows he is depressed. Podcast Man told him so. Guy subscribes to Podcast Man’s Patreon, 20 dollars a month, so he could get five episodes a week of Podcast Man and his Podcast Friends. Podcast Man is a doctor, in what, he doesn’t know, but he knows it’s in Harvard. He listens to so much Podcast Man that he knows Podcast Man better than he knows his own mother, who begs him to call her, but she doesn’t have any advice to get rid of depression because mom is depressed too.

Podcast Man knows how to solve depression. Eat well, organic, raw, no gluten. Exercise all the time, do 1000 pushups a week. Guy buys his supplements, but all they do is make him pee more. The doctor says he should stop, but what does the doctor know, his degree is only from the local University.

But Guy is still depressed. Podcast Man keeps telling people that society is making people depressed and that men are going through a crisis. Guy knows how this feels, he is depressed and in a crisis. Guy tells AI Chat about this, and she also agrees with him, and tells him he’s insightful because he knows this. He feels happy but does another 50 pushups to punish himself, stay humble.

Guy looks at the website of therapists and picks the best looking one. He goes to his intake and Ms Therapist is too pretty and distracting for him, it doesn’t work. Instead he finds someone who looks like Podcast Man, Mr. Therapist. Before his appointment, he makes sure to listen to the DSM V audiobook front to back, two times speed as he’s doing his 100 pushups a day. He does the same with Freud (my mother does suck, yes), Jung (archetype of a lion obviously), and The Body Keeps the Score (boring, my body is a temple). Guy goes to his appointment and Mr. Therapist studies him while Guy details that he is depressed and in a crisis. Guy asks if he knows Podcast Man, and Mr. Therapist says of course, he’s everywhere. Guy is pleased that Mr. Therapist would understand that the world is out to get men like him, and that Podcast Man is smart and he keeps taking his supplements, yet he still feels he needs to pee all the time. He needs leadership advice and Mr. Therapist should understands because he’s a leader of men too, right? Mr. Therapist looks overwhelmed and says that he doesn’t agree with Podcast Man all the time. He asks Guy what he does he do to help himself. Guy is proud to tell him he’s doing 75 Hard for the start of year, three exercises a day, eat healthy no gluten, read only non-fiction, and takes progress pics every week. Mr. Therapist takes out his camera and takes a picture of Guy, he says “This is your first progress pic.” Guy is pleased. When he goes home he does another 50 pushups, stay humble.

Guy says he likes seeing Mr. Therapist and plans to go to see Mr. Therapist three times a week until Guy hears Mr. Therapist say something stupid. He said that I’m trying to win at therapy and by doing that I’m losing. Mr. Therapist takes his picture again, he says “This is you after 3 months, do you notice anything?” Guy doesn’t. Mr. Therapist says, “I know.” Guy reads, Guy eats well, Guy exercises well, yet Guy is still the same. Come back in a week, Mr. Therapist says, but before you do write down all of your feelings. Write down when Guy has them, how he has them, and why.

Guy does this for a couple of days even though Mr Therapist pissed him off, but he looks like Podcast Man, so he goes along with his stupidity. So he writes down “sweaty - 100 push-ups” “busy - investments” “mad - listened to Podcast Man Podcast (weird?)” “sad - looked at Instagram” “sweaty - 100 crunches” “sad - mom called.” Mr. Therapist was impressed at Guy, he said that I worked hard to feel my feelings. Guy said that the exercise was stupid, he loves listening to Podcast Man and he says I need to be “stoic.” Mr. Therapist reminds him he put down mad when listening to him. “Why are you mad, Guy?” Mr Therapist asks. Depressed, and in a crisis, Podcast Man told me, all his friends said the same thing. I know it, I feel it. Guy then hears Mr. Therapist say that Podcast Man is making me feel depressed. That I should stop listening to Podcast Man and his Podcast Friends and write down all his feelings and come back to him.

“What do you feel when you listen to Podcast Man? You said it yourself. Mad.” Guy stared at Mr. Therapist as he continued. “When was the last time you cried?” Guy never cries, he reminds Mr. Therapist, it’s not stoic. Mr. Therapist nods at Guy and tells him it’s ok to cry, and Guy does. He cries hard. Cries so much it takes him 10 minutes to stop. Mr. Therapist is proud of him and he said he will fix him. Mr. Therapist gives him his card, it also says “life coach.”

Guy then books Mr. Therapists Men’s Wilderness Retreat, stops listening to Podcast Man, and now cries in the wood. When he comes home, he books another retreat to cry in the woods. His mom calls, worried about him. Guy tells him, don’t worry. I’m winning therapy. Guy then does 50 pushups and cries while doing it.

As a full-blooded Canadian hockey fan whose musical taste was forged in the indie rock of the late 90s and early 2000s, I couldn’t escape Heated Rivalry. It was everywhere. It dominated my social feeds and sat firmly at number one on the charts the second I opened my streaming app. Even my friends, the ones who usually only post about advanced stats, were posting memes about it. So, like Michael Scott desperate to be part of an inside joke, I finally got to be a part of one.

I already had a vague idea that “hockey romance” was a juggernaut in the BookTok community. Much like the Romantasy phenomenon, athlete-based erotica has become a massive staple on Wattpad and in fanfic circles. I also remember the fallout from a couple of years ago involving Alexander Wennberg of the Seattle Kraken; his wife eventually had to ask people to stop sexually harassing him because of the “hockey booktok” obsession. It was an unfortunate mess, partly fueled by the Kraken’s own social media team, and I worried it would alienate women and gender-diverse fans, the very people hockey desperately needs to diversify its fanbase.

Now, regarding the show and the book: I’m just not a fan.

It’s not because of the amount of gay sex (of which there is plenty) or because it centers on a queer story. At the risk of sounding like “the lady doth protest too much,” some of my favorite romance movies are queer romances, Brokeback Mountain, Y Tu Mamá También, Call Me By Your Name, or Portrait of a Lady on Fire (a true five-star masterpiece). I’m not a prude about romance, and I’m certainly not a prude about sex. If a romance is well-executed, I don’t care who is in the relationship.

The problem is that Heated Rivalry felt schmaltzy and over-tropey. The acting was stilted, the pacing was off, and I never truly bought why these two guys loved each other. But here’s the thing: despite the quality, I loved that it brought mainstream awareness to 2000s-era Canadian indie rock and, more importantly, to the existence of gay hockey players.

You see, I have a love-hate relationship with hockey. Growing up in a hockey town with a deep history, you can’t escape the sport. But it’s not that I’m trying to get away; when hockey is good, it’s damn good. It’s one of the fastest sports in the world, and the playoffs offer the most heart-wrenching drama in professional sports. There have been countless times I’ve watched a game with my stomach in my throat, telling my wife to stay positive so she doesn’t “jinx” the boys. At its best, the NHL provides a truly elevated feeling. That’s when I love the sport.

But to be a hockey fan in 2026, especially a progressive one, means you have to swallow the “ugly” side, too. For a sport that struggles to keep pace with the popularity of the MLS, it has a lot of baggage. We still deal with rampant sexism, racism directed at non-white players and fans (I know I have faced my fair share of it), and a constant stream of sexual harassment stories. Just last year, the public was rocked when several Hockey Canada players were found not guilty in a highly publicized sexual assault case. Then, there’s the homophobia.

Now Heated Rivalry is forcing the NHL to confront its own homophobia in the funniest way possible, and for that, I’m a huge fan.

This confrontation was long overdue. This is a sport that claims “hockey is for everyone” while doing everything in its power to tell queer people, “Actually, nah.” We’ve seen it from bold-faced MAGA supporters like Matthew Tkachuk and Wayne Gretzky (a traitor in my Canadian eyes), to players like Eric Staal who refused to wear Pride jerseys because of their “beliefs”—whatever those are. And let’s not forget the cowardice of Commissioner Gary Bettman, who scrapped players wearing Pride jerseys altogether to appease those people.

It also matters that Heated Rivalry is a Canadian show, produced by the same team that brought us Letterkenny. In Canada, hockey players of all ages are held in high esteem, especially in small towns. Think of the “asshole high school quarterback” trope in America, but give him an Ontario accent, a backward hat, and a very specific vocabulary. That is the “Hockey Boy” archetype. Whether it’s fair or not, that stereotype exists, and plenty of former players turned adults still act like being a “Hockey Boy” is the pinnacle of masculinity.

Now, in an Olympic year, especially one where American politicians are making noise about threatening Canadian sovereignty, a big Olympic gold would be therapeutic for the country. We are, as a nation, depending on these “Hockey Boys.” I can only imagine the ego boost they’re feeling.

But in 2026, with the “fate of the country” in their hands, these players are being forced to answer questions about a show famous for gay hockey sex. It’s beautiful. It’s a direct challenge to their dominant masculinity and their hegemony. It’s forcing them to be allies.

The show has brought in fans the NHL never thought it would see, mostly non-male, non-straight fans who watch the real-life highlights and wonder why the rivals don’t just kiss. It’s making the pros contend with the fact that there are likely gay players in their locker rooms right now. It’s forcing them to ask: If my teammate were gay, what would I do? I can’t imagine the conversations happening in locker rooms because of this show, but they are clearly conversations that needed to happen.

I hope the lasting legacy of Heated Rivalry (regardless of my thoughts on the acting) is that an NHL player finally feels safe enough to come out and be celebrated for it. If that happens, the show’s legacy will be legendary, perhaps the most important piece of Canadian media we’ve ever produced.

Then, hopefully, the second season will get better writers.

Political issues at this moment are pissing me off.

There’s a constant wave of bad news, hard news, and issues that sometimes make me feel powerless. Or at least makes me feel like we need action. That this can’t go on any further. For example, the other day our right wing contrarian ever MAGA loving provincial government had a town hall so they could manufacture consent on their asinine agendas. There was a clip going around where a young man started asking a question that the panel didn’t like and his mic was immediately cut off, then the host of the panel said this teenager should’ve been spanked.

This clip, this government, this place we’re in, makes me incredibly upset on a daily basis and this is just an inkling of it. And I just keep wondering when are people going to change, and I fully well know that I am wondering this while I type in a coffee shop on my paid day off from work, celebrating my birthday, feeling grateful to be alive and to age. It’s in this space that I’m thinking about “Performing the Revolution” a new podcast documentary that explores how grassroots theatre has carried movements for justice across India, Palestine, and the United States. And my conversation with Remoy Philip, one of the many people who helped create this podcast with his friends from the New York City based theatre collective, Radical Evolution.

I started thinking of change, and when we as a collective usually think of change, the image that often comes to mind is of massive crowds, raised fists, or charismatic leaders delivering thunderous speeches. But the ripples of change don’t always look like that. Sometimes they’re in the rehearsal room of a neighborhood theatre, in the back of a truck on farmland, or in a crowded street where a small group of performers tells jokes, sings songs, and stages skits to expose injustice. Or to stand beside people wanting to make meaningful change in their daily life.

When I was finished talking to Remoy I realized that “Performing the Revolution” and change at large is a story not about grand declarations of world change, but about the everyday, about small acts of solidarity that ripple outward into something enduring. And it’s a reminder that in a chaotic world like ours, acting small, humbly, and with people is what we need.

So let me detail what “Performing the Revolution” is about through my conversation with Remoy.

How did this start?

Remoy, who is also co-host of the podcast MASK-ULINITY, is one of my podcasting bros from the whole gender media space. I always find him and Samantha Nzessi-Kifle’s takes on what is going on with the world so god damn smart. I’m lucky to know him.

Remoy also is a veteran in the storytelling space through audio, he’s worked with many popular podcasting companies and told me that this specific podcast series began almost by accident. It was meant to be a simple archival project of a 3 week collaboration between two theatre companies that turned into something much larger.

REMOY: They [Theatre collective Radical Evolution] were gonna bring this company from India [Janam] and the history behind this company, how they had fought for like the poor and working class of Delhi. And, you know, they had faced some violence along the way, but yet they continue on. So I kept hearing these stories and then they were like, yeah, we’re actually gonna do this thing and bring them over here to like, kind of work with them and learn from them. Maybe it’ll teach us some new ways to make theater. Right. I was like, cool guys. I mean whatever. I don’t know what the fuck you want from me.

What started as an invitation to hold a microphone in a rehearsal room quickly unfolded into a powerful documentary project. The Indian group in question was Jan Natya Manch, or JANAM, a radical street theatre collective whose origins lie in the turmoil of India during the 1970s, when censorship and repression forced them to rethink what theatre could be.

REMOY: This theater company from India has, their work is around labor organizing. So they work with unions in India to help, mobilize and organize workers for better rights. So they put on these like really biting satires, hilarious ones that make this situation, the hierarchies that these factories or at these places where people exploited, showing them that this is insane. We need to fight for better rights.

JANAM did this by abandoning traditional stages and stepping directly into the areas where workers were, into the streets to perform as strikes were happening. In the face of the police. In the face of the power and the powerless.

At the center of this story is a woman whose life embodies both tragedy and resilience: Mala.

We Have to Finish The Story

Mala left an impression on Remoy. He told me this story in the 80’s in New Delhi about how Mala specifically balances this idea of art and surviving:

REMOY: I think all of Delhi shutdown, it was like one point something million people don’t go to work for like a week. And like that’s crazy. There’s becomes a confluence in events where a few days after that or week they have a performance, and a horrible thing happens, there’s a violent attack that happens because of some issues that are happening with that performance and Safdar gets beaten and dies.

Safdar Hashmi, was one of JANAM’s founders. In 1989, while performing a play that exposed exploitation, he was attacked and killed (a story you will hear fully during the podcast).

REMOY: Well, a couple days later they’re like, fuck this. We’re gonna finish the play. Not only do they finish the play, they keep going. And so fast forward, again, back into the present, I keep hearing people tell this story and these stories. Everybody else is telling it. [Mala’s] just chilling. Like she’s just cracking jokes, she’s not really telling this story and I’m not really paying attention, but I’m noticing that.

There’s one moment during that two to three [week] period, [Radical Evolution hosted a] little party to introduce the India group to their friends and networks in New York. There’s some kids running around. One of the kids is having a night tantrum. Just, it’s just kind of end of the day tantrums. It happens. And all of a sudden, like this little girl runs by Mala and Mala just kind of scoops her up mid tantrum and puts her on her thigh and just starts rubbing her back.

Maybe she whispered something, but I don’t think she did. She just kind of like held her in this like very gorgeous maternal embrace and the kid just kind of just immediately stopped crying and like hugged her leg and just kind of like softened immediately. And it was like the most angelic moment I’ve ever seen.

Then there was a realization

REMOY: I have all this information and it’s like the final day of that three week [collaboration], I’m gonna go meet everybody in Manhattan. And I’m sitting there this morning and suddenly the math in my head makes complete sense. Mala, I couldn’t remember her last name.

I was like, I don’t know her last name. I had to Google it. And I was like, Mala Hashmi? Mala was Safdar’s wife or his widow. So basically what I just realized was is not only did her husband get murdered, like right in front of her. She had to then memorialize him and then say, fuck this. We’re gonna keep doing this thing because the people deserve more. Continue, and the power will not silence us or the people. I am not exaggerating, like once that math made sense, I started bawling, bawling and sobbing.

Violence could easily have ended JANAM’s story then and there, but Mala insisted that they return to the same place to finish the play. That act of courage not only honored Safdar’s life but also sent a message: no amount of repression would silence their voices. Decades later, Mala is still helping organize, still making sure JANAM meets regularly, still pushing new generations to pick up where others left off.

Mala’s philosophy is strikingly direct and disarmingly modest.

REMOY: Somebody asked [Mala] something to the effect of like, how do you want to change the world? Or why do you do what you do to change the world? And she’s like, in typical Mala fashion, she’s like, change the world. What the fuck? What the fuck are you talking about? I’m not here to change the world. I’m here to work with the working class and learn side by side with them

Mala insists that lasting change emerges from standing shoulder to shoulder, learning, teaching, and organizing together. This is a lesson I think about dearly every time I see some awful news pass upon my feed. When I heard this from Remoy through the context of the stories of that podcast, I knew that just being around people who were just trying to make some sort of change, of any kind, that’s the hope. That’s the spirit of the whole thing.

Mala is a true revolutionary in my eyes, because she also does two amazing things.

One, she refuses to center herself. As Remoy recalls, “She was just like, let them tell the stories. I want them to tell the stories. This is the time when others can tell those stories. If I need to interject, I will. But if it’s too personal, I’ll keep it to myself.”

From what I took from Remoy’s stories about Mala is not that Mala is super humble, it’s that she knows that this is the right thing to do. But if she centered herself, she becomes the movement, and that if the movement were to survive it needs to survive past her.

And, two, like any amazing revolutionary, she knows that being mysterious is its own magic.

Feminism in the Revolution

This show is also an example of a type of feminist storytelling, even though it’s not explicit in saying that. This is also something that I admire, I knew it was feminist without it announcing that it was. Remoy and I talked about the performance of masculinity in the podcast itself, and through the violence it discusses. I called it a “masculine violence.”

REMOY: It’s easy to like see these stories and like kind of the centering of violence and like the centering of this particular masculinity, but also hopefully, and unfortunately they don’t become the most prominent parts because it’s not the way that we could find the ways to tell these stories in the most effective ways. But even with the gentle one, with with how Mala carried this thing forward or in [the podcast’s second episode] the Freedom Theater, the woman who was the actual center of this that got it started way before it was this woman named Arna Mer-Khamis.

Violence here is more than physical; it is a performance of masculinity itself, an attempt to assert dominance and crush vulnerability. Yet Remoy insists (and I agree) that against this stands another kind of performance, one that reimagines masculinity as care, solidarity, and tenderness.

REMOY: There’s like within South Asian communities, like men will touch each other, hold each other, love on one another very physically, and though they never talk about this, I could see Sudu and Safdar [central characters in episode one] just being arm in arm half the time, totally touching each other. And I could totally see that physically intimate and cordial with one in a way that’s so beautiful. It was beautiful.

In this way, theatre becomes a stage for rehearsing new forms of masculinity, where intimacy and affection replace violence and suppression.

Through this it also reminds me that even though violence exists, it doesn’t mean feminism doesn’t. Masculinity in itself is not anti-feminist, it’s always about the performance of masculinity, and how we see ourselves.

Act Locally, Change Globally

Yet, none of them, JANAM or the Freedom Theatre which is highlighted in episode 2, claimed to be changing the world. Their power lies in being local, specific, and most importantly, a community.

REMOY: You don’t really have to make change. You can just show up and maybe learn something,. And that kind of takes away the fear, the weight. What is political organizing? Ah, no, you just show up, man.

This idea that all one needs to do is “show up” resonates with me highly. When the world feels heavy, and change feels impossible, and sometimes I get mad at activism because it feels overwhelming, or impossible, or just ineffective. Or I just want to happen faster. I just have to remember this: “Just show up.”

It’s a western narrative of the ‘great man’ or even ‘great person’ that it takes one super person to be the change, and if we can’t be that super person then change becomes impossible. These groups are just showing up to make plays, they are showing up for each other, and they show up because they think it’s right to do the thing that they feel they can do at that time. It’s a story that’s not popular, it doesn’t get told because it doesn’t feel exciting in that western mindset, and also because in part it’s not a white story.

REMOY: These are brown superheroes, dog, and so often in this world, we don’t get these stories. In the mainstream we’re either the butt of the joke or we are the Robin and never the Batman. But that is not historically true.

By centering stories from India, Palestine, and Mexican farmworkers (in the third episode), Performing the Revolution insists that the fight for justice has always been led by those pushed to the margins, and that their stories are not side notes but central chapters.

There is something deeply moving about how these stories converge. They show that change comes from people who see exploitation in their neighborhoods, their factories, their farmlands, and decide to act alongside their communities. It comes from women like Mala, who choose persistence over martyrdom, humility over recognition. It comes from farmworkers who turn their picket lines into stages. It comes from Palestinian artists who refuse to stop telling stories even when silenced by violence.

This podcast, this conversation, it stirred me. Change can mean so many things, it can mean just sitting beside your neighbors as they cry, it can mean just showing up to the people you love and move together. It can mean choosing not to change the world, but to change your world, and trusting that those ripples will spread.

The podcast will be officially released onthe week of October 19th, 2025, with a launch event hosted by UnionDocs in New York City. If you’re in New York you can find out more about the event here: UnionDocs Performing the Revolution Podcast Launch.

It’s hard to talk about male victims of domestic violence, not because the stories don’t exist, not because the data isn’t clear, but because the conversation has been hijacked by people who often aren’t interested in ending abuse at all.

I hesitantly call myself a feminist, and I say hesitantly because the term male feminist gets thrown like an insult, yet here I am. However I care deeply about all victims of violence. That care has always included women, trans people, queer people, and - yes - men. But every time I try to talk about male survivors, I can feel my inner squirm. I’m either walking into a trap laid by anti-feminists looking to use this issue as a “gotcha,” or thinking that they have another male rights advocate (I’m not, fuck those people). Or I’m at risk of being seen as diverting attention away from the real, ongoing epidemic of violence against women and gender minorities.

It’s a balancing act that feels exhausting, or just not one that is worth weighing on. The truth is, domestic violence disproportionately affects women and queer people. It’s much more violent, it usually leads to lethality more so than men, and it’s something that affects directly almost all non-males in some way. This is clear and it deserves space, resources, and our continued attention.

But also, men can be victims, and when they are, they are often invisible, unsupported, and actively disbelieved, not just by institutions, not just by other men, but by the very communities that claim to fight for justice and compassion. This is not meant to be an attack on feminists, but it is an attack on society at large, in which feminists and anti-feminists exist in. In some cases I feel that both camps should take this more seriously than they do.

Recently, Open Access Government published an extensive review compiled twenty years of research on male victims of intimate partner violence (IPV). Over 246 peer-reviewed studies show that roughly 12% of men report experiencing physical IPV. In some national data sets, men make up a quarter to a third of all reported victims. From the study:

”Global data confirm that men represent a substantial proportion of IPV victims. In the US, 47.3% of men report experiencing IPV in their lifetime, accounting for 46.9% of all IPV victims. In Canada, 2.9% of men and 1.7% of women experienced IPV in their current relationships. In New Zealand, nearly equal percentages of men (29.9%) and women (30.9%) reported lifetime IPV. Australia and the UK report that roughly one-third of IPV victims are men. France and Portugal report that 25-28% of official IPV cases involve male victims. In Africa, male victimization is also substantial; for example, 43.6% of IPV victims in Uganda and 31% of victims in Sierra Leone ⁽are men. In Asia, men represent one-third of IPV victims in Korea. ^“

It’s easy to take those numbers and weaponize them. I’ve seen it happen, in online threads, debate panels, and posts from bad faith contrarians who just want to score points. These people are not there to advocate for men. Not to build better shelters or fund survivor services. But to say “See? Feminists are liars.” Or the typical “What about men?” in a tone that is not really asking but accusing. I have seen this from the height of the men’s right advocacy times of 2013, to even recently in 2025 from, who else but Charlie Kirk.

That’s not advocacy it’s deflection. And it makes it harder for people like myself, who care about male survivors but also care about feminist issues, to have these conversations in good faith. It just leads people to stay silent. I know I have felt that too, like I’m running into a minefield. I feel anxious even writing this post.

What gets lost in all of this? The actual survivors. The ones who were never given the language to name what happened to them. The ones who may have internalized shame so deeply they still can’t say it out loud. The ones who may have tried to ask for help and were mocked, arrested, or blamed. Or the ones who felt that they didn’t have the privilege to ask for support.

The ones who were abused and then told that it couldn’t be possible. Or that if it was possible there is nothing to do about it. From this study in the UK:

“Males, relative to females, report a lack of awareness and recognition of coercive control (Lagdon et al., 2022). The Criminal Justice System (CJS) may further act as a barrier, with policies such as the Domestic Violence Disclosure Scheme – more widely known as Clare’s Law – being perceived as exclusively for females due to the female name, given only 4% of requests were from males (Mankind.org, 2015). This misconception further reinforces the belief that males cannot be victims and continue to be labelled as the perpetrator, thereby deterring males from reporting their victimisation given the uncertainty in how they will be perceived (Reed, 2018).”

Don’t get me wrong that this is a societal issue, not just a feminist issue. Meaning that the people who hold up hegemonic and traditional masculinity are also at fault for why men don’t report, or suffer in silence. But it is true that the majority of these case go under reported and they are suffered in corners of the world.

One survivor, who posted on Reddit’s r/MensLib subreddit shared their story described their experience this way:

“I experienced this at 20. The experience, the total mindfuck of like... not having any vocabulary to even name the experience, let alone feel like I had a right to call it what it was and wasn’t making it up, plus the cracks I fell through that allowed it to happen for so long in the first place, plus the invalidation and derision from my community after the fact (including from people who were very vocal public champions of ‘consent’ and ‘believing survivors’ at the time), really affected me. It was the biggest push I ever had towards ‘radicalization’ for lack of a better word.

I feel I guess... validated? Encouraged? to see this research. But also to be honest pretty failed. Like we knew that this was a thing that could happen for decades prior.”

I sympathize when a survivor turns to some community members who preaches “believe victims” and is met with silence or suspicion because they’re not the right kind of victim. Or when a survivor turns to another community member that claims they are the only ones who will help men, is then turned into a wedge for a battle they didn’t want to be in. Well we all lose there. Most importantly those survivors lose.

So yes, it’s hard to talk about this. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t.

In fact, feminists are uniquely positioned to lead this conversation with compassion and integrity, because we of all people, understand the power of systemic violence. We’ve spent decades naming invisible violence and exposing the ways institutions ignore and retraumatize survivors. That lens should include male survivors. It’s not just women or queer people who fall through the cracks. It’s anyone who doesn’t fit the template of “acceptable victimhood.” And again, I’m not saying they are equals, but they deserve unique attention. See how hard I’m stepping around things?

I also know many feminists who also don’t believe that’s the case. There are many feminists who not only accept male survivors as part of the cause, but actively advocate for them. They are not the problem, and they believe that treating these men is an expansion of their beliefs not a betrayal of them. I agree wholeheartedly.

Also, and I have to give credit where credit is due, I have been hyper critical of male rights advocates who all they do is complain about feminists on the internet. However, when the MRA’s who opened the Family Shelter for Men in Toronto, they were one of the first to do so. That organization has also been involved in platforming some of the worst bad faith contrarians in Canada, but with this shelter they have put their money where their mouth is.

I want all people to live free of abuse. I want all victims to be seen and supported. I want to end the cycles of violence no matter who is caught in them.

I don’t want to let contrarians and misogynists co-opt this issue to tear down decades of work that feminists have done to make abuse visible. But I’m also not going to ignore the harm that happens outside the advocacy. We can, and should, do both.

It means amplifying research like the Open Access study not to score points in gender wars, but to demand better systems of care. It means pushing for funding and safe spaces for male victims without taking anything away from women’s shelters. It means listening, really listening when men say they’re hurting, even if the language is messy or uncertain, because they have not had the decades and decades of support women have had to advocate for themselves. It also means challenging our own internalized biases, even when they show up in the communities we trust most.

If you’re a male survivor reading this, or someone who’s struggling to name something painful, you are not alone. You are not broken. You are not weak. And your story deserves to be heard without caveats.

If you need help, the National Domestic Violence Hotline (in the US) is available 24/7 at thehotline.org or by calling 1-800-799-7233. In Alberta it’s the abuse helpline (https://www.alberta.ca/abuse-helpline)

We owe it to survivors to keep building a world where their stories don’t have to be whispered or politicized. Where they’re just heard, and they matter.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another is maybe the most talked about film this year outside of Sinners. It also may be this year’s best, is it the best movie of the 2020’s as some might suggest? I don’t know about that, I don’t know if I would say that, however I have thought about this movie a lot after I watched it. I think it’s an important movie. Especially coming in a year where there was a lot of movies that were not only exciting but thought provoking (ie. as movie goers “we eatin’”)

There’s also been a lot of takes about this movie, not only about it’s commentary on revolutionary politics, it’s commentary on black resistance, and it’s commentary on parenting a mixed raced child. One of the things I noticed on reflection and one that hasn’t been portrayed often is that it’s also a story about men. Not just men with power and guns, or men with daughters, or racist men with plans, but men grappling how to be seen, how to be saved, and how to belong.

This whole Substack is about masculinity, so it should not be a surprise that I want to talk about this, so bear with me. Because the more I think about it I see these three performance of masculinity being portrayed in it’s three primary men: Bob (Leonardo DiCaprio), Lockjaw (Sean Penn), and Sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro). And what their arcs tell us about power, vulnerability, and the real weight of manhood.

Be warned, there will be spoilers.

Bob: The Masculinity of Being Rescued

Leonardo DiCaprio plays Bob/Ghetto Pat/The Rocketman, a washed-up revolutionary and perhaps the film’s emotional center outside of Chase Infiniti’s Willa. He spends much of the film lost. Lost from his former lover, lost from his daughter, and lost from his cause that we don’t know for sure he was fully into. The movie doesn’t make it totally clear that he was completely down for the cause or just lost in love. He could talk the talk, but for most of the movie he is detached, haunted by guilt, and increasingly reliant on others for help.

Throughout, Bob is rescued, over and over again. By old comrades, by strangers, by the French 75 underground, by Sergio and his tunnel networks, and in the beginning saved by his lover Perfidia Beverley Hills (a deeply complex figure that you could easily write full dissertations about). At the start of the movie all he wants to do is help, (“tell me what to do and I’ll do it.”) He is not a man in command of events, but one caught in their swirl, and yet still kept afloat by the others around him, especially his daughter.

Bob is such an interestingly simple character because if anyone wades into radical politics of any kind, you will find a Bob. Someone who knows that something is messed up and wants to do something about it, however understands that there’s more to life than blowing up banks. A out and out radical may say that he’s naïve, he’s a tourist, or he just doesn’t get it. I have seen this, I have been there. You can even see his push and pull from how he talks to his daughter Willa, he’s upset at her for not following his wishes, yet praises her for standing up to him (possibly knowing that he is “the man” and not only that a “white man”). Even though he’s been a radical for 16 years plus, he’s still someone who feels like they are in the start of their journey. Especially when you compare him to someone like Sergio, who we’ll talk about later.

But this lack of confidence, this lack of conviction, is why he needs to be saved over and over again.

Bob’s character departs from the traditional myth of the autonomous male hero. He barely makes it from scene to scene without someone bailing him out. His performance of masculinity can have thee notes that he wants to be in command, but he generally exists outside this traditional frame. He’s soft-spoken at times, angry at times, willing to be told what to do, remorseful, guilty, messy. The one thing he is straight about though is his to his daughter. The times he shows his emotion and vulnerability is always to his daughter.

One of the more poignant scenes in the film is when Sergio is driving him after he saved his ass again, and Bob tears up about possibly losing Willa, wondering what kind of dad he was to her, especially about her daughter who is of mixed race. Through tears he exclaims: “I couldn’t even do her hair”

Bob’s ability to just be fucking messy keeps him human.

He’s not the hero though.

Lockjaw: The Masculinity of Dominance (and Desperation)

Colonel Lockjaw (Sean Penn) enters the film like a caricature: the alpha male archetype, in full regalia. His back straight, his jaw clenched, his boots clicking like punctuation marks. His ridiculous haircut. He’s a man of command, of status, of self-certainty.

Yet the first scene that we see of him is of his raging boner being controlled by Perfidia.

Lockjaw is the monster of masculinity, because underneath it all, he’s similar to Bob, he doesn’t care so much about the external cause (ie the military and law and whatever that means to him) he just wants to move up the hierarchy, and that means being accepted. Even by devils like the Christmas Adventurers. Even by those he brutalizes, like Perfidia.

His posture is stiff to the point of absurdity, his walk is going to be remembered for years to come, it’s as if his entire identity depends on projecting force, but is easily broken down by Willa asking if his shirt is too tight. This is a man desperate to prove he is strong, and scared that he got got so easily by Perfidia.

Lockjaw embodies toxic masculinity but what makes him unique (and familiar at the same time) is not his power, but his longing. He longs like Bob, but instead of accepting the help, he wants to cut the ties through hell or high water. Suppress everything, even his sexual desire to join the worst people in the world. Literally selling his soul to the devils.

He wants acceptance, the kind Bob receives freely, that Sergio earns quietly. He needs to be seen as valid, which makes him far more pitiful than powerful. Because you saw how little he matters to the people he cares about the most. You see this play out with so many guys, that they lose themselves in the sauce of wanting to be accepted that they sell their values and ethics.

For example, I have seen guys just go head strong into a business they know is toxic and dangerous just so they can get ahead. They leave friends, family, and lovers behind for the pursue of money or popularity (a tale as old as time), this is a masculinity tale (even though it happens to many genders).

I have also seen many guys perform masculinity in a way that is derogatory to others (saying bullshit jokes or being racist/sexist/homophobic) just so they can be part of the in-group. These people will either thrown out by the thing they are pursuing or just get further and further lost.

Lockjaw is the performance of this, and the film is smart to show how stupidly vulnerable he is. Dominance without ethics or values only leads only to exile. And in that way, the film lets Lockjaw stand as a monument to a failed kind of manhood: brittle, anxious, and empty.

In direct contrast to the film’s most virtuous man: Sergio.

Sergio: The Masculinity of Community and Guidance

Sergio St Clair aka Sensei Sergio (Benicio Del Toro) , a teacher, an organizer, a guide (“ocean waves”). While Lockjaw tries to climb hierarchies and Bob drifts in limbo, Sergio walks a different path: the path of grounded, rooted masculinity.

He’s a man of action but not of ego. He makes sure that everyone in his home gets an introduction, regardless of how hurried he is. He tries to reach everyone as a human. He operates the tunnel network not for glory, but out of responsibility. He helps Bob not because he has to, but because his sense of community matters more.

If Lockjaw is the broken stone and Bob is the drifting wood, Sergio is the river. He has no problem being compassionate when he needs to, and the film does a masterful job in showing his compassion not through speeches or hard truths, but through others. There’s countless of people who were not only willing to listen to and help Sergio, but through Sergio’s connection they were willing to help Bob too. One of the best moments in the film is Bob being broken out of jail by a connection of people of working in the police station which ends in a selfie with Sergio. These are people willing to risk their lives for Sergio, because I think we’re led to believe that he is willing to do the same. This is rooted emotional labor, moral clarity, and collective well-being.

His influence is quiet, but unshakeable. In that, he represents a transformative masculinity, one that neither denies emotion nor flees from responsibility. There’s a reason why Bob is not only shepherded by Sergio, but so is Willa. Sergio’s character is the strongest in the film outside of the women in the film.

Three Men, Three Models

The film’s loudest themes are not about the difference between these three characters, it’s mostly about the sacrifice of revolution, the generational divide, the strength of conviction, and the messiness of revolution. However I do think it’s poignant that these three are the main three male characters, their tensions are a commentary in itself. Three performances of masculinity, each incomplete on its own.

Bob is a masculinity of vulnerability and survival. He is saved by networks of solidarity. Lockjaw is a masculinity of dominance and insecurity. He performs power but dies unloved. And lastly Sergio as a masculinity of guidance and rootedness. He leads through quiet strength. Each character mirrors a model many of us know:

• The man who needs saving but doesn’t know how to ask.

• The man who commands others but has lost his values.

• The man who leads without dominating, who builds instead of conquers.

In the end, masculinity isn’t a static role. It’s a performance we rewrite every day. And in One Battle After Another, we’re reminded that even if you feel like you’re a Bob and not a Sergio, there’s redemption there. That maybe the strongest men are the ones who walk underground, have conviction even if it’s just to family. To build networks, protecting the lost, and leaving behind tunnels instead of walls.

I was in a virtual meeting, and was hit with my least favorite meeting invention, the icebreaker. It was a pretty easy question, “what was one book or movie you watched recently that you liked?” Personally, I picked “On the Calculation of Volume Pt 1” by Solvej Balle. A book I had been obsessed with as I was reading it. A high recommend from me.

Out of the 10 mostly business minded people and by more men than women, only three people picked a fiction book. Even though a lot of people picked books. A lot of people picked business books, or self-help books.

I was kind of disappointed by this.

Why I stopped reading Books

In my 20’s, I read a bunch. I would read a couple of books a month. I’m a slow reader, always have been, however I would still read. At my peak of reading I was living in England and I took a lot of train rides. This was also a time of the early internet, right on the cusp of Facebook blowing up, so I wasn’t completely addicted to social media.

However I was addicted to blogs, and reading and writing in blogs. I had a blog, I had friends with blogs, etc. But it was before the iPhone where the internet was on my phone available at all times. I was by myself, I needed to do something with my time. I read a lot.

I remember a day in 2005ish where I was in between paychecks. I was going to get paid the next day but I was stuck in London in a decent hostel. I had enough money to get a transit pass the next day and then enough for a cheap Subway sandwich for dinner. I couldn’t afford to do anything except walk around, take pictures, and read.

I woke up, got my free breakfast and plucked myself down in the common room and tried to finish “The Kid Stays in the Picture” the autobiography by ex-Hollywood producer Robert Evans. I got through most of it. It was good.

I read out in the open, I had nothing else to do. It didn’t seem weird for me to do this. I feel like if this happened 10 years later, I would’ve been on my phone the whole time.

However in my 20’s I not only did not have social media, but I also wanted to be cool. In 2005, I brought books everywhere I went, and during that time in Europe I finished a lot of books. I also read a huge selection of different kinds of books. Graphic novels, non-fiction, biographies and a lot fiction. Old and new. I also remember going into places like HMV to buy CD’s and music (crazy I know), and found a pretty decent section of books. There was a culture of book reading and book having that extended being “knowledgeable” it was cool.

This is relevant because those are the places where you would most likely find young men. Books, at least men reading and buying books seemed cool. And because I was in my mid 20’s I was in the peak of my idea of trying to be cool. Book reading was a part of it.

Those years I could’ve easily made a top ten read books of that year and actually hit more than ten books. Two decades later and I don’t think I read more than two a year.

So when I see articles like this pop up: Why Did the Novel-Reading Man Disappear? I have first hand experience as to why I specifically stopped not only reading fiction books, but books in general.

Social media replaced Books.

At the time in my 20’s I already was addicted to writing and keeping a blog, and I was always fascinated about what was going on online. I got into online culture in the mid to late 90’s, conversing in chat rooms, finding and keeping different websites, learning HTML then Java and C++ later. So the jump to social media when it started was natural for me, and honestly it was not good for my personality. I became more combative, more contrarian, got into beefs with other writers, and wrote some really unfortunate stuff.

Social media posting was something else entirely, and not something I was prolific or even good at. For others, posting was easy, I didn’t make that jump easily though.

At the same time that social media was taking over my life, I felt like the books I was reading was leaning more into the young adult realm. This is around the time of Harry Potter ending and then later books like Hunger Games, Maze Runner, beginning their popularity. I didn’t mind YA although I found it trivial. I liked the stories, I liked the characters, however it felt like empty calories. The writing was usually cheesy, I couldn’t relate. No slight to people who loved YA, but I wasn’t getting the same satisfaction, the same deep introspection, the same pull back as books did before and the draw of social media always won.

I remember a time where the promise of blogs and then of social media was that we would read more, we would write more, and we would be smarter because of it. I believed, I wrote about it, but the truth is as we all know, is that it made writing and reading like fast food. We stopped having time for longer things, we stopped having the patience for books, for movies, for music, and it’s come to a point now that these artistic measures are just called “content.” This is not a hot take, many people have observed this. However I do think for men specifically, especially young men, this is important because I do think young men are more primed to get sucked into the attention economy black hole than other genders.

They get told to make money, they get told to stand out, they get told to be different, be unique. And these are young men (like myself) who grew up with 90’s gangster culture (that stretched back from the 70’s) where being remembered as an “icon” or a “legend” was the most important thing for a man. Or more so it was the opposite, where being forgotten, being a nobody, was the worst thing that can happen to a man.

The only place to stand out in the 2010’s was online. Reading is introspective, it’s not outward expression. So what was the point of books? Well one of them was an instructional manual of how to stand out.

How to Influence People, by Reading a ton of Instructional books

Anecdotally when guys read books, reading non-fiction books. Not only just non-fiction books, but instructional non-fiction books. Books I would call self-help but they were just “how to get ahead” books.

Books like “How to Win Friends and Influence People", “Rich Dad Poor Dad”, “The Game”, books by Malcolm Gladwell, books by Yuval Noah Harari. A lot of pop psychology, and a lot of books about the human world but not books about people or specific events, and a lot of books swearing at the reader.

Of course these books are not new, this trend has been popular for decades. However whenever I encountered a guy that has read a book, it was usually one of these types of books.

I also got sucked in to these books, I was moved by some of these books, I liked them, I absorbed them. Some I thought were great. Now looking back I think most of them are trash. Badly written, badly sourced, repetitive, and advice that is either very biased, or just plain wrong.

But, guys were reading right? Was that a bad thing? In my opinion, if they were only reading this, then yeah it was bad.

The people who only consumed these type of books, rarely if ever moved on to different kind of books, and they rarely described themselves a book lover of some kind. These books were a means to an end, and the end wasn’t "enjoying books.”

What we have seen now is that this type of content has been taken over now by podcasts and influencers on YouTube with hour long essays on how to build a “meaningful business strategy” using Marcus Aurelius’ “Meditations” or whatever. They are part of the same economy of social media. They are part of the content cycle, the attention economy. That’s why they all swore at you.

This is why I was disappointed when I was in that meeting that this is still going on. That these business people are not reading other types of books, it’s all a means to an end to me.

It’s interesting to note this because when we say “are men reading books?” we usually don’t mean books like this.

I have also found that people who solely read books like these routinely dismiss fiction, narrative, and even other type of non-fiction books because they may not in their words, give them real world advice. Obviously this is a bunch of horseshit, as anyone who has read any type of fiction will tell you.

I used to be one of these people. I wasn’t dismissive of fiction books though, I was always looking for the next cool thing. But I can blame the culture I was around, and the friends I had at the time. I can also say that it was my fault.

I don’t mean to denigrate these books entirely, I did learn from them , there are some lessons that I took away from some of them that I carry today. Some of them even lifted me up when I felt my lowest, gave me a guide to carry on. That’s not something I will give away lightly. However the books that I remember and had the most pure feeling was not these books.

Looking back I also noticed what else was going on in my life, I was in a big rut.

Men are in a Rut Culturally

I was disillusioned with my career path, my love life, and I felt sometimes lonely, and sometimes disconnected to people and things I loved. Books was something I loved. But when I was in a rut that I was in, I didn’t go back to them.

Also when I picked up a book, I judged myself. I struggle to this day to read books quickly, and internally I judged myself for that. I wanted to read more however if it was a big book I pulled back, and I found others who did read, read a lot, and read all the time. It was a knot that I hated, I loved books but it didn’t feel natural to me to read them. I didn’t like that.

My dad is the opposite, there isn’t a book he won’t read. He’s read a ton, and a ton of books he will want to read. He will die with a pile of books he will want to read. If he could take a ton of books to the afterlife he would. So my comparator was him, and I could never keep up.

When I felt less connected, the less connected with books I became. It was cyclical to me.

As the world is looking at men’s mental health as a global issue, some may call it a crisis, I do think a lot of men look for these bite sized content to make them feel good, make them feel important, make them feel unique, connected, and alive. Through podcasts, through tiktok, through video games, through social media. But all of this is just making men more hollow. Less empathetic, less engaged, less connected. This is not just a male issue, but I do think it affects men uniquely.

Right now, as a general consensus they are in a rut. Just like I was. And the comparison are people older than them that could read like it was drinking water. Picking up a book, any book that didn’t give them “life advice” may feel like a waste of time.

Why Did I Return To Books

This year I noticed how much social media was affecting my day to day. I don’t think I became obsessed with notifications, but I definitely found myself reaching to my phone more often than not. I know I’m not the only one, I feel this is so common that I can throw a rock and find someone talking about how they want to quit or has quit social media. However I knew I needed to replace that habit with something else, or else I would get sucked into it.

Books and writing came back. It also helped this year that I found some amazing books to read. One book in particular, Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection” was a perfect start, specifically because it talked about the languishing millennial dread that people chasing happiness through social media and gig culture.

It perfectly captured push and pull of chasing that ideal makes you lose things, and captured my feeling and cynicism that I held over “books that didn’t teach me anything.'“ Not only that, it was a small book, I crushed it over a week.

I started waking up early and made it a point that anytime I wanted to open my social media app, I would pick up the book instead. That created a snowball effect where right now in the last few months I have read five books. That’s an incredible output over the zero books I was reading before. Not only that I started becoming passionate about reading again. I started to pick up the nuances of reading, the style differences, what made a good book and what didn’t. And most importantly, I picked up that feeling again. That feeling of being alive.

When I finished “On the Calculation of Volume Pt 1” I had some true philosophical thoughts about what that character was feeling, her loneliness, her existential dread, her feeling that everyone was leaving her behind. I felt that truly, and I learned to focus my feelings around that as well. This was not instructional, this was pure empathetic felt emotion. An emotion you can only feel when putting yourself in another person’s anxiety, and their wants and needs and goals. Truly my favorite book of the year, and one I may return to.

But man, getting that feeling back, was priceless to me. I had to stretch my brain to find that feeling, I had to open up my soul to find it. Open up my heart.

A lot of men out there are searching for feelings like this, yet I truly believe they are going to the wrong source. They look for instruction when they should be looking for empathy. They’re looking for answers, when they should be looking for questions.

I can’t think of a better place than fiction books to find them.

A few months have passed and we as a society have collectively decided that we have crowned a new “Good Man” and his name is Pedro Pascal. The Chilean born, American raised actor has three movies out this year (‘Materialists’ 1the new movie by Celine Song, ‘Eddington’ the new movie by Ari Aster2, and the a high profile MCU movie “Fantastic Four: First Steps”3) plus a high profile TV show (the just ended second season of HBO’s “The Last of Us”4), so it seems like a good time like any for us as a collective to shine a spot light on him.

Every year we have an “It” person, and this year it seems like it’s Pascal. However, the way people have been talking about him has given me a bit of an…ick. At least in regards to crowning Pascal not only a good actor, not only a good person, but an ideal person. Some articles are even calling Pascal…a movement.

From the newspaper El Pais from Spain, “More than a man, a movement: Why everyone loves Pedro Pascal”, it’s an opinion piece that make effort to sy that Pedro Pascal is not just a human, he is leading the chorus of rejecting toxic masculinity. From the article:

“Hence part of the mass furor toward Pascal, or other men like him, who ‘offer alternatives, sexy alternatives at that, to the model promoted by the manosphere, the incels, and, in general, all those masculinities that revolt against change and entrench themselves to defend privileges they feel are threatened.’ Aresti believes it’s “important” that such men exist.”

Personally, I like the ideas of alternatives of masculinity, my personal favorite masculinity/gender thought pattern is called Multiple Masculinities,. It was coined my Raewyn Connell, but popularized by Joseph Gelfer’s Five Stages of Masculinities. The Five Stages talk about how as a society and individually as we become more aware of our gender identity (specifically Masculinity) and question how societally it moves then our view of gender changes. The fourth stage is called “Multiple Masculinities” and it’s a guideline on how we speak and think about masculinity in general.

If we are in Stage 4 we believe in three things:

• “First, masculinity can mean anything to anyone (including being embodied by women)”

• “Second, masculinity is defined and categorized through power dynamics such as patriarchy and hegemony as a way of regulating people”

• “Third, by rejecting categorization we subvert regulation and power”

When I personally think of masculinities and gender identity my first thought pattern goes straight to Multiple Masculinities. It gives me a clear guideline for how I speak and think about masculinities as a whole. .

I say this up front, because Stage 4 is the mindset that I want to talk about someone like Pedro Pascal, because this essay is not so much about Pedro Pascal the person. I will talk about him, but honestly there’s nothing here that I know to criticize. Right now though he’s the lighthouse of positive masculinity right now in a stormy sea. However, he’s just a lighthouse.

This is more about how people talk about people like Pedro Pascal. How people are stuck on Stage 3 of Gelfer’s Stages of Masculinity called “Critical Masculinity” and how silly it is how we haven’t moved past it, especially after it’s bitten us in the butt before (and frankly not too long ago).

We’re Starving for It

“It’s because Pedro Pascal embodies a type of masculinity that finally feels safe, soft, and self-aware. He’s not the lone wolf or the growling alpha; he’s the man who will cradle a tiny alien baby and your feelings. And culturally? We’re eating it up because we’re starving for it.”

The online magazine Betches wrote this syrupy essay about Pascal espousing his virtues by saying for example: “He’s not telling anyone to smile. He’s not giving lectures about “men being men.” He is, instead, giving soft eyes, forehead kisses, and the distinct energy of a man who would bring you tea without being asked, run you a bath, and let you pick the movie” because in their words “we are starving for it.”

This is the vibe that someone like Pedro Pascal has earned in the eyes of a publication like Betches (more of a younger audience magazine who likes to think of themselves as the female feminist version of Barstool Sports), in this context in comparison to what’s going with the manosphere, Donald Trump etc, then someone like Pascal is a breath of fresh air. Because we’re “starving for it”

This is an issue right? Adding to the parasocial relationship that this may breed, we’re giving Pascal crazy high expectations that he himself can’t possibly meet. But this is Betches, they’re just pumping up someone like Pascal for their younger readers and frankly who cares, it’s a bit of fluff.

However, the article in El Pais is the one that truly took me back, not only do they fawn that Betches does, they tie it to gender theory and our current discourse around masculinity. They explicitly say that this is not “just a massive groupie craze for another good-looking actor.”

I guess it’s not just a groupie craze, but it’s honestly not that far off.

I believe that we’re clinging on Pascal because he checks off a lot of the 2025 progressive positive masculinity bingo card:

• He’s good looking

• He’s successful

• He sometimes dresses in “feminine styles”

• He’s a migrant

• He’s American

• He speaks about mental health

• His sister is trans and he is pro-trans who called JK Rowling a “heinous loser”

• He has spoken about Gaza

• He’s charming

• And most importantly he doesn’t come across as pretentious, or inauthentic. He looks like he’s just living his life.

That last part is the most important because honestly, 90% of this can also be attributed to someone like Joaquin Phoenix as well, except that Phoenix is not charming and can be called pretentious.

So El Pais has decided say Pascal is not like others because in their eyes he’s more deserving. The performance is better, it feels better. For our sake, we don’t know if that’s true, is even fair for Pascal, or even right to do. To me it feels icky honestly.

Well not as icky as my next hypothesis.

Performance Parentage

There’s something else that Pascal gives his fans and it’s mostly through the roles he plays. In the last few years, some of his most famous parts have been acting like a father to someone smaller. Most notably as The Mandalorian, and in The Last of Us. El Pais states:

“He takes care of Baby Yoda, protects Ellie in the midst of the apocalypse, he looks tired, but he always comes back to save you. He’s not your dad, but he’s the dad you might have needed. Why does he connect so much? Because he embodies in his characters that image of a masculinity that many people didn’t have in their fathers: warm but firm, protective but not controlling, vulnerable but still strong.”

I think we as a society have a collective case of ‘daddy issues.’ If I would paint a broad brush it also seems that people who have I would say “not favourable views of men” usually have “not favourable views of their fathers.” I realize I’m making a gigantic assumption, but it is weird that not only does Pedro Pascal carry a label of “new ideal version of masculinity” but also carry the label of “daddy of the internet.”

Pascal for his part plays up to this, and seems like he’s not ashamed to be called “daddy.” He doesn’t shy away from it, and seems to kind of enjoy it. Especially ironic since he doesn’t have any children of his own.

However as a media aware public we also don’t have to continue with this ‘daddy’ thing either. Because, let’s be real, it didn’t start from a heart warming “I want him to be my dad,” it came from people being attracted to him! We can’t lie to ourselves about that.

Honestly! If we do take what El Pais and what Betches say as text, that ‘daddy’ is not just an attractiveness thing, but it’s Pascal’s ideal version of caregiving, then what does that say about us when you’re asking this 50 year old actor who you don’t know anything about to be your father from afar? Or at least the personification of the ideal father? The whole ‘daddy’ thing surrounding Pascal is so weird!

The Positive Masculine Men Graveyard

The more Pascal gets labelled in these fanciful terms (from ‘daddy’ to ‘a movement’), the more we move away from seeing Pascal as a complex human being. And we have seen this story play out before, we have seen this with people like Harry Styles.

In this video the creator “Greenstocking Society” makes a great point on how confusing it is when we attach these labels to a person who is honestly just doing their thing. Trying to understand their meaning not as much as a person but as symbol. And this is where I believe we lose the plot.

Because we lose the sight that these are just people, and people are messy. To be messy is to be human.

The gender discourse is littered with men who we claim to be movement making positive masculinity performing people and then thrown out either because they have done or said something awful. People like:

• Joss Whedon

• Neil Gaiman

• Justin Baldoni

• Terry Crews

• Junot Diaz

• Michael Kimmel

These are just people I can name from the top of my head. Also late last year we also had the fall out of another male performing feminist, Justin Baldoni who not only performed this, but made a lot of content specifically about male vulnerability.

And we as a progressive landscape do this a lot, driving these symbols onto these men who will let us down, because they can’t be symbols of positive masculinity. No one can live up to that standard.

Are we Crisis Actors too?

Joseph Gelfer, when he was writing, would often say that the way we talked about masculinity now is very much in line to Stage 3 Critical Masculinity discourse. Meaning that we as a society are aware that many societal traditional forms of masculinity are destructive to the masses (including men), so we tend to lump in whatever looks traditional to that idea of destruction and toxicity. He spoke specifically to the idea of the “Crisis of Masculinity” a never ending cycle of discourse trying to answer the question “What’s going on with the boys?” We’re in the middle of another cycle right now. Gelfer mentions that the way people in Stage 2 (Conscious Masculinity) talk about the crisis of masculinity is different on what people in Stage 3 (Critical Masculinity) talk about the crisis of masculinity. People in Stage 2 believe that the crisis is that men are not “manly” enough and Stage 3 people believe the crisis is that men are maybe “too manly” and that’s causing harm.

So when Stage 3 people see other men who “look” and “act” like a rejection of traditional masculinity then we tend to raise them up to a pedestal. Often as a rejection to what this tweet would say “incels and insecure men.”

The issue with Stage 3 discourse is that it flattens men and the experience of men, and we talk about them like they are a mass of people who act and believe in a specific way. Not only that, they believe that men are social symbols of either positivity or toxicity, and cannot give up the thought that men’s experience are human and come in multitudes. I repeat, to move out of that idea would mean these three things (Stage 4):

“First, masculinity can mean anything to anyone (including being embodied by women)”

“Second, masculinity is defined and categorized through power dynamics such as patriarchy and hegemony as a way of regulating people”

“Third, by rejecting categorization we subvert regulation and power”

We can also speak about Pedro Pascal in these ways as well. That Pedro Pascal has a specific masculinity that is traditional and non-traditional (he dressed like a traditional man in some cases, and I’m sure as a Latino may have thoughts about how he may inherit or reject machismo, maybe someone should ask him about that); Pedro Pascal’s masculinity is also defined by what is going on around him, the roles he takes, Hollywood and acting culture in general, being an American, and specifically an American during Donald Trump’s presidency; Pedro Pascal is also a human being, and we only see what we see from media and from what is shown to us. That’s not a nefarious thing, I don’t believe anything bad is happening in the background, that’s just the truth.

We as a critical, writing mass, think and talk and opine strongly about the “crisis of masculinity.” Whether it’s real or not, how men and non-men feel about it, how it’s seen in the real life, and how it’s affected real life. I write a newsletter about masculinity, I know I’m a part of this mess too. And when I read about Critical Masculinity, and when I read about how Pedro Pascal is not just a human being but a movement, I think sometimes, am we just adding to the crisis of masculinity? Are we crisis actors as well?

Prelude

"There are a couple of biases the first is that the majority of therapists are women and the majority of patients are also women historically which means that if you're looking at a population and you say talking about emotions really works for my patients if you're just a therapist we don't really segregate between our male patients and our emotional on our female patients we sort of like look at this and we say like this is what works now there are lots of trials that actually show the opposite" - Dr. K with Chris Williamson

This is a quote from Dr. Alok Kanojia (aka Dr. K) on the Chris Williamson show describing how men have been given the short stick encapsulates what bothers me about Dr. K in general. The framing subtly suggests men should be mad at society and that women are somehow to blame—never mind that most therapeutic modalities were invented by men. I know this is not his intention, and I know in context he is talking about male mental health and their approach to therapy. However, it just….bugs me. It's Dr. K in a nutshell: saying things that are slightly true but completely off-putting.

Dr. K has talked extensively on many different podcasts about how men are disconnected from mental health and specifically therapists, proclaiming his approach—which includes Indian spiritual practices and one-on-one coaching—as the way forward for men. He's been noted by many as a role model of healthy masculinity, (even listed as a team member in the American Institute for Boys and Men), and when claims like that are made, my ears perk up. If men and boys should follow what someone like Dr. K says, then I have a reason to understand fully what they're promoting.

Let me be clear, before anyone comes after me: Dr. K isn't even close to the toxic masculinity manosphere that people like Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson inhabit. Not even close. This is a critique of someone who generally has good intentions and his mind in the right place. However, his approach and views are worth investigating because he's positioned himself as a voice of reason for masculinity, for male mental health, and someone who has marketed himself intensively. He’s worth taking a look at.

Who is Dr. K?

Dr. Alok Kanojia, known through his YouTube channel HealthyGamerGG, is a Harvard-trained practicing psychiatrist and founder of Healthy Gamer, an organization focused on gaming addiction and motivation. He's also a Twitch streamer and YouTuber who conducts live "psycho-education" sessions with gamers, spreading advice on everything from addiction to dating. Because of his gaming niche, his major clientele and focus is men.

Dr. K claims to be a former monk, having studied in India in his early twenties, making him a major advocate for controversial Ayurvedic approaches. Through his YouTube notoriety, he's participated in various organizations, including the White House.

His popularity stems largely from conversations with popular Twitch personalities like Destiny and Asmongold, as well as problematic figures like Sneako. But he's not without controversy. When people talk about Dr. K two major issues stand out:

• First, his strong belief in Ayurvedic practices, which he claims value individuality over population studies, while simultaneously using specific archetypes to label people he encounters.

• (CW: Suicide) Second, and more troubling, is his practice of what appears to be therapy on stream while claiming it's "not therapy"—just "psycho-education." You can hear an example of this when he talks to Asmongold. This became tragically relevant after his emotional live stream talk with gamer Reckful, who died by suicide days later, leading to investigation and reprimand from the Massachusetts Board.

These controversies have been covered extensively by others, in fact the main reason I knew about Dr. K was through the Decoding the Gurus podcast when they did a three-part episode about him.

For the most part I don’t have many issues on the way he does that “psycho-education” as he calls it. He’s great at not getting into a debate with the other person and he’s good at relating and getting to their true feelings about the situatuon. This is typical of what a good therapist can do. Again, the fact that he’s not calling this “therapy” and calling it “psycho-education” is crazy to me, but let’s put that aside for the time being.

My main issue with Dr. K is his approach to male mental health. Stating like a lot of people in this space that his way is not only the best way, it’s the only way. He also believes in putting men into specific boxes and through his content with HealthyGamer, men and boys may come to a conclusion about therapy that I think is harmful to them. This is what I want to delve into today.

But there’s more to Dr. K than just this, so let’s call this Part 1.

Dr. K Thinks Therapy is Bad for Men

Dr. K consistently argues that traditional therapy doesn't work for men. His reasoning? Men prefer what he calls "instrumental support" (problem-solving) over "emotional support" (talking about feelings). As he puts it:

"One paper actually points out that there are two kinds of therapy that you can give one is what we call emotionally supportive therapy where you talk about your emotions and the second is something called instrumental support which is like problem solving and what we tend to find is that men prefer problem solving but if you look at therapy training we are actively disincentivized to problem solve with our patients we're not there to solve your problems"

This is problematic on multiple levels. Dr. K is conflating models of support with therapeutic approaches—there are far more than two of each. In a truly holistic model (which he claims to advocate), people would have multiple forms of support: emotional, instrumental, esteem, and tangible. This little quote is also a sneaky way to promote coaching as a therapeutic alternative while playing into the bias that women can't relate to men and that only men can help men, creating both a vacuum of support and a culture of distrust around non-male therapists.

You can see this bias clearly in his thoughts on couples counseling:

"So if you look at studies of couples counseling the reason that men are reluctant to go to couples' counseling is because they are not good with verbal expression of their emotional state so anytime they go into coup's counseling they feel outgunned because they're is a heterosexual couple their their female partner is able to like articulate their emotional experience better and the therapist ends up it feels like the therapist ends up understanding and siding with the female partner more" Dr K with Tom Bilyeu

There's a kernel of truth here—men may feel disadvantaged in emotional articulation and because of that may perceive therapists as taking sides because they may not have the skills of emotional communication. But the downstream effect is positioning therapists as fundamentally bad for men, which he does say outright.

The Contradiction in Dr. K's Logic

Dr. K admits with Chris Williamson that his understanding of therapists comes from a 16-week therapy course where he learned that therapists are instructed not to give direct solutions. He presents this as a flaw and that somehow it fails men, but it completely misses the point. Men don't need more solutions handed to them—they need skills in emotional communication, they need to feel that the therapist is not taking sides. They need to understand that behaviors are not emotions, they are guided by emotions and just because they may act violently it’s not saying that people don’t understand their emotions. The questioning approach therapists use builds these crucial skills that men often lack. But yet here’s Dr K. not understanding this point in this clip:

What bugs me most is that Dr. K knows that emotions and emotional communication are important. I have seen him talk about it, I have watched his "psycho-educational" talks where he encourages people to explore their feelings, even when they push back saying "feelings aren't important" (see his conversation with Sneako). He clearly understands the value of emotional processing. Yet he says something like this which kind of invalidates his point. Or at the very least will make a lot men just feel extra angry about society.

The contradiction becomes glaring when he discusses men's emotional nature. He claims men suffer more from "broken heart syndrome" (Takotsubo Cardiomyopathy), though Harvard Medical School states women suffer from this condition far more frequently.

But even accepting his premise that men like to have instructional support—if men are highly emotional regarding relationships, why wouldn't they benefit from emotional support rather than just instrumental support?

Dr. K doesn't lack knowledge about emotional attunement—I see it in his practice with other men. The issue is that he paints men into unemotional boxes while simultaneously demonstrating their deep emotional capacity.

The Real Agenda

I think the truth slips out in this quote from his conversation with Chris Williamson:

"I diagnose the depression tell me about your life I'm 30 years old I have no job I've never been in a relationship and so like what would this person look forward to right and so a big part of helping them is not just talking about your problems a big part is helping them build a life and that's not something we're trained in as therapists does this require an entire new type of therapy it it almost to me based on what I know about the definitions of therapy almost sounds like it gets into some kind of coaching in a way yes yes so so I I think that that's why coaching has emerged as a field"

Ah. There it is.

In his conversation with Chris Williamson, Dr. K promotes approaches like Motivational Interviewing as better for men (a course I've taken, and many therapists have too) but doesn't mention Solution Focused Therapy, which is literally about problem-solving. He claims journaling and meditation provide better results than therapy while running a coaching business that incorporates these elements.

The Broader Harm

Dr. K's messaging creates several problems. First, it reinforces harmful stereotypes about masculinity—that men are inherently different from women in ways that make standard therapeutic approaches unsuitable. Second, it discourages men from seeking proven therapeutic interventions by suggesting they won't work. And not only that it encourages an image of therapists that are just women who hate men or at the very least that women don’t understand men.

Take a look at someone like Connor Beaton who talks about this and also regurgitates these same talking points about the psychological industry which again further drives the wedge between men and women:

The reality is that countless research shows therapy works for men when they engage with it, something Dr. K himself admits:

“So we will have trials on cognitive behavioral therapy that look at 50% men 50% women both of them have good effect sizes but there too I think there's a selection bias because even if you're looking at success in therapy you're not counting all the people who left that didn't go to therapy in the first place” Dr. K with Chris Williamson

Men avoid therapy primarily due to cultural stigma and internalized biases about seeking help, not because therapy is fundamentally incompatible with male psychology.

I believe many men avoid therapy due to generations of being told to "suck it up" and handle things alone, combined with internal sexism and homophobia that make emotional vulnerability feel threatening. Dr. K's approach, while well-intentioned, reinforces these barriers rather than dismantling them.

Why This Matters

Dr. K isn't Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson, but his influence on young men's attitudes toward mental health is significant. When someone positions themselves as a reasonable voice in the men's mental health space, their messaging carries weight. The subtle undermining of therapeutic approaches while promoting alternatives (that happen to be his business model) is frankly concerning and at least worth mentioning.

The irony is that Dr. K demonstrates excellent therapeutic skills in his "psycho-educational" sessions (again, crazy that this still happens and these videos are out there especially after his reprimand). He helps men access and express emotions, shows genuine empathy, and avoids getting defensive when challenged. These are exactly the skills that good therapy provides—yet he consistently argues that therapy isn't suited for men.

I hate this because Dr. K’s genuine care for struggling men is evident, and his ability to reach audiences that traditional mental health messaging hasn't connected with is valuable. However, his systematic undermining of therapeutic approaches while promoting his own alternatives deserves scrutiny. And I think if you’re reading this, and if you’re an organization like the American Institute for Boys and Men, it’s worth to know his bias against therapy.

Men need more pathways to mental health support, not fewer. They need to be encouraged to develop emotional intelligence and communication skills, not told that these approaches are fundamentally incompatible with masculinity and who they are as man. I think that’s honestly nonsense.

The conversation about men's mental health is crucial, but it should be based on expanding options and breaking down stigma, not creating new forms of gender essentialism that limit men's access to proven therapeutic interventions.

If this was the only thing that bugged me about Dr. K it wouldn’t be too much of a problem. However, this issue is not the only problem I have with Dr. K

Stay tuned for Part 2 of analyzing Dr. K

“But I like my masculinity…”

This is a thing I have heard many times from men, especially when they are confronted with the idea that gender is a social structure, and if that’s the case then it can be undone. Gender abolition is an idea that a lot of people who study gender come across many times. The idea is simple, if gender is causing so many problems in the world, then why don’t we abolish it. What’s making us sit with this frankly made up identity in this world?

Well…a lot.

Identity and authentic expression is at the core of what makes us human, and that is evident with what this man is saying. “But I like my masculinity” is saying “I like my identity, and I don’t think you have a right to decide if it exists or not.” And that man is right.

I have time for the gender abolition debate, but this is the crux of the matter: For some, throwing away the ideas of gender can be easier than others. In fact, I would say that for most, throwing away gender is not only hard, but would be akin to losing who they are as a human. So to say we can just throw away gender to solve societal issues just like that I think is naive.

On the other side of the debate are the positive masculinity people. The people that say that we can keep our gender and expect that masculinity should be, for lack of a better term, softer.

More emotionally expressive

Kinder

Happier

Positive masculinity has been associated with men crying, men wearing a dress, men helping each other out, men talking, men having salads, men wearing earrings, men hugging, men cooking, men cleaning, men having coffee together, men dancing. Among many other things. If I were to take everything that people claim to be positive masculinity, I would say it’s “men doing things that are traditionally feminine.” To me it always felt from moving from one strict gender box to another.

In a more good faith thought, I would say positive masculinity ideology is a starting point. A place to expand on those thoughts, read some more, examine what’s going on not only individually but systemically, and move on from there. Usually that’s what a lot of my favourite gender writers end up doing. Yet for the most part, many others just stop at positive masculinity without questioning it.

As Celeste Davis posits in her brilliant essay here, Positive masculinity to me is just femininity repackaged.

Celeste writes:

“I’ve noticed that when it comes to gender discussions, most men agree we should foster more healthy relationships for men.

They are on board with having more access to community. They want love, friendship and strong connections.

We’re all one happy team on these points.

But the very second that you mention that the way to get there might involve embracing some feminine-coded skills like vulnerability, compassion and emotional openness…

Op.

You’ve lost them. Especially if you use the word “feminine.”

This is bang on, and ironically this is also the reason why a lot of gender teachers (people who work with men specifically to talk about the patriarchy or men’s mental health as some people have repackaged this), have stopped using the term “toxic masculinity.” The reason being in a nut shell is that men don’t like to hear it. They don’t like to hear that masculinity is toxic, and also they don’t like to hear that a more emotionally version of masculinity is feminine. What a knot we’re in.

I’m a person who ends up speaking with men sometimes, and I have no issues saying the words “toxic masculinity.” I believe exposure therapy is the way, I believe that if someone has an issue with that term that they haven’t really dug into what that term really means, and usually when that happens they end up agreeing that sometimes a lot of the things men traditionally do, cause harms and issues and that’s called “toxic masculinity.” But then…

“But you’re saying masculinity is BAD”

“I’m specifically not”

“A lot of people are saying men are bad. I like my masculinity!”

When this happens eventually we’ll talk it out and come to some sort of agreement, however I insist that I say the words. The point being is that the words “toxic masculinity” is not the problem. It’s men’s perception that people are going to take their identity away.

“Act More like Women”

My favourite new punching bag, Scott Galloway said in an interview for Maria Shriever’s Sunday Paper:

Since I wrote that article, I have come to appreciate Scott Galloway as an every person, a masculinity simpleton who has his feelings in the right way, but completely misses the mark with what he says (why people believe he’s some sort of expert, I don’t know). So I take what he says as the chorus of the well-intention but simple minded guy. He voices out this binary that a lot of men are feeling. Either you act like a toxic guy or you act like a women. Not knowing that there many other ways to be a man. However to think in this third, maybe new, maybe enlightened way, men have to do two things:

1. Explore the expanse of what masculinity has to offer men

2. Hold this identity less tightly

Number 2 will be the hardest part, but let me address the first part.

Expanding the Landscape of Masculinity

Here's what I want to say about the first part: masculinity is far more expansive than what we've been told. The research is clear on this. When we look at men's actual experiences, rather than the narrow stereotype men have been handed, we find something much richer and more complex.

• Men used to wear dresses, a lot. Some men still do. Some masculine cultures still do.

• Men used to hold hands and be closer with each other. Some men still do.

• Men used to dance and write and care-take more freely.

• Men out there are emotionally mature and caring and work to be that way.

Men have always had access to these different expressions of masculinity. Men just haven't been allowed to admit it. Especially within their cultural group. Allowing to admit it would be dangerous to their identity because someone (mostly other men) would question that identity.

The difference between how they express masculinity is not a biological one—it's a cultural one. One that’s been entrenched for centuries. Expression outside of that traditional cultural space is seen, like Galloway has said, as “acting like women.” But the key word here is 'expression'—not feeling, not capability, but expression.

The full scale of masculinity includes tenderness, vulnerability, fear, sadness, nurturing, softness, and yes, even what we might call more traditionally 'feminine' qualities.

However, and this is something that a lot of gender specialist find hard to say, the full scale of masculinity also is owning a truck, wearing plaid, playing sports, and other expressions of gender that fit into the traditional mould. None of those activities in of itself are harmful, those activities are some men, especially North American men, feel the most “manly.” But it is part of the spectrum of masculinity. None of these make a person less of a man. None of these make them more of a man. They make a person who happens to be a man.

When I think about the men in my life who feel most comfortable with their masculinity, they're not the ones who are the most rigid about it. They are the ones that will do something traditionally masculine and something traditionally un-masculine, and not make it their thing. They're the ones who can cry when they're sad, who can be gentle with their children, who can admit when they're scared, who can ask for help when they need it. They are also the ones who may wear plaid, or wear a dress, and make it who they are as a person rather than the performance of masculinity or un-masculinity. They're the ones who embody their own view of identity rather than performing it.

But here's the thing—and this is where the second part comes in—all of this expansion only works if men are willing to hold the identity of masculinity less tightly.

The Practice of Neutral Masculinity

Identity is not something that we can give away freely. This is why I find talks of gender abolition to be fruitless. To be fair, when some people speak about gender abolition they speak specifically to social systems holding gender tightly .

However, that’s not what some people who will speak about this at length will say either. And it’s not what men, especially people like Scott Galloway, our masculinity simpleton will hear.

The reason being is that men have been told to hold their identity around masculinity as tight as possible. That manliness equals success. This is a form of patriarchial systems, because those men are right. We have seen time and time again that the more “manly” someone acts or expresses themselves, usually the more success they have. Be it through financial success, or accessing certain parts of the culture.

The issue comes when people use that masculine identity as their sole guiding identity. Because the other form of patriarchial society is that men’s masculinity is always in a precarious state. A house of cards waiting to be toppled. This is why you have the manosphere. This is why you have grifters and charlatans begging men to take their course, or read their book, or listen to their content so they can be better men more rigid men. That is all a charade. A scam. This is where men become lost, become confused, and become lonely.

So I want to try something out here, call it neutral masculinity—a way of being that neither celebrates nor demonizes masculine traits, but simply recognizes them as one way of being human among many.

This is not new. In fact this is a part of gender abolition, if you don’t take the abolition part very seriously.

Neutral masculinity is not about being masculine in the right way or the wrong way. It's about recognizing that masculinity is a personalized set of values as a man, they are neither positive or negative and neither are anyone else. It’s just holding lightly what masculinity means in that person’s point of view.

This requires a lot of men to stop thinking of masculinity as a precious possession that can be taken or gained.

The double edged sword here is that for a lot of men, this also means that they would have to find identities that don’t involve masculinity, a practice that we as guys don’t have a lot of skill in. Because everything we do we have learned to perceive as either masculine and un-masculine.

The way we do our hair

The way we dress

The way we walk

The things we play with

The way we talk

Everything

I’ll tell you the funniest time a guy tried to bring down my masculinity, and one I still think about because I thought it was so absurd. I got a white iPhone 5, and my guy friend looked over at my phone and said “does that come with a tampon?” I was in my 20’s and I did a double take, like “Are you serious?” Even at that time, I thought how sad this was. That for this guy a white iPhone made him feel like it was made for women. Imagine if I got a pink one? Stuff like this happens all the time for guys.

So for someone to say “well you can just live without thinking about gender” right now, in this world, seems like an impossibility, and frankly a non-starter for a lot of people.

I personally don’t mind thinking of myself as a guy, but it’s not in competition to all the other identities I carry, including ones like “hobby photographer” which I hold very lightly.

This is where the practice comes in. Instead of "I am masculine," it is "I practice masculinity."

Instead of "I am a man," try "I am someone who engages with my own masculine ways of being." The difference is subtle but profound. One is about identity, the other is about choice. And the choice is for masculinity neither to be positive or toxic, it’s neutral. It’s there. It’s present, it’s a part of who we are, and because society at large doesn’t stop reminding us that we are guys (in good and bad ways), now we are in control of what our masculinity looks for us.

This is also why I don’t disparage the man that says “….But I like my masculinity.” I don’t expect that man to give up their masculinity, but I do expect them to make better choices. To perform masculinity in a way that is healthy for them, and for others. Including in ways that may seem feminine.

This also includes the idea that femininity is not a bad thing, or performing masculinity through femininity won’t make you less of a man, or an evolved man, or a better man. It’s just different. It’s yours.

It’s in neutral. But it’s personal.

I know this is hard.

I know that for many men, the idea of masculinity as practice rather than identity feels like losing something fundamental about themselves. Many guys remind other guys about their own masculinity. Society reminds guys about being a man. But I think what we're actually losing is the fear that someone might take our masculinity away from us.

When we practice masculinity rather than cling to it as identity, we become more flexible, more resilient, more capable of adapting to different societal changes.

You become more, not less, yourself.

“You accepted me way too fast!”

This is what Tim Robinson’s character, Craig says to Paul Rudd’s character, Austin after Austin gives him the bad news that he doesn’t want to hang out with him. It was a phrase that kept dinging in my head when I was watching the movie “Friendship.” A maximalist comedy that takes the sensibilities of the sketches of “I Think You Should Leave” with a film making that skews more A24 drama. The movie is about Craig meeting Austin and Craig tripping over himself to be friends with him. And through that journey completely unraveling his life.

I watched this movie and yes I think it’s funny. Its the main thing. Tim Robinson is nothing but a master of the absurd and Craig is absurd, there’s some gags in there that are laugh out loud ridiculous. However the setting is realistic, the characters are realistic even though they may not act that way, and maybe it’s just me, but this movie outside of the idea that it wants you to laugh a lot, also asks you to take it seriously. So that’s what I’m going to do.

Most of the critical reviews of this movie talk more about the comedy aspect of it, very little of them talk about the actual theme of this movie, that male friendship, especially as an adult, is a tiring and exhausting and possibly crazy making experience. And since this is a substack about masculinity, let’s just go full out. Let’s talk about how cringe male friendship can be and why this movie “Friendship” is a great example of it.

Why this movie and why Tim Robinson?

Tim Robinson’s sketch show “I Think You Should Leave” is a masterclass on weirdness. A lot of Robinson’s sketches involves taking a situation that may seem normal and have a chaotic person (usually played by himself) enter the situation who will say or do the thing that you wish they didn’t do.

For example, it will be Tim trying to push on the pull door because he’s embarrassed to be wrong. It will be Tim playing a stupid video game on the work computer as the others are having a serious conversation, and the game becoming weirder as it goes on. It will be an elderly professor stealing food from his students. It will be Tim wanting to wear a stupid hat, and how that shows up in an unrelated court trial. A lot of the sketches stretch a normal social scenerio to it’s furthest limit, to a point where it can’t possibly get worse, and then they end. That’s how most of them go. But sometimes, they will reveal the heart of what I think Tim Robinson goes after. ”Ghost Tour” is a great example of this.

The premise is simple, Tim goes to an adult ghost tour which the host says that the guests are allowed to swear since it’s an adult tour. Tim, of course, takes that invitation to a point where it makes everyone uncomfortable and gets kicked out. However at the end of this skit, his mom picks him up he confesses to her that he didn’t make any friends.

Some of Tim’s skits end in this meloncholie way. It’s the heart in the middle of the chaos. It’s the characters admitting that they are insecure, or that they lack confidence, or they lack competence to live in the social world.

This lack of competence I believe is hidden at the heart of “Friendship” and I believe it’s the message. The tagline of this movie is a hint to that, and one that I want to explore thought this movie, a message that a lot of men (and maybe a lot of society) believe “Men shouldn’t Have Friends”

Friendship is Cringe

*this may contain spoilers for the movie ‘Friendship’, be warned*

Jamaal Burkmar, a writer and, where I found him, a TikTokker, says the phrase “Form Affects Results” in relation to how males usually relate to one another. Meaning that we were socialized to relate on a side by side setting. That both males before we could bond would have to do something in order to connect, that may be playing sports, or working on a project together, or fighting a battle together, or playing video games together. Generally doing something together would create a sense of comradery.

This is the form that most males encounter during their youth. There’s a bit of nature/nurture thing going on, because genuinely I don’t know where it comes from. I have seen young boys that are in pre-school that interact in this way, and that may come from their parents and how they were nurtured. But I also have seen this from boys who have been nurtured in ways to be more relational.

However one thing I do know about humans is that we have a pretty flexible brain that continues to learn until the day we die. And that it doesn’t have to be this way. If we believe that the foundation of male friendship comes from this side by side interaction, then the foundation becomes pretty weak pretty quickly.

@jamaalburkmarI will talk about this forever! #dating #malefriends #friendship #men #relationship

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What Jamaal says is that males are not accustomed to learning more about their male friends and the foundation of friendship is so fraught that for example, the breaking down of that activity that was shared, will result in the loss of that friendship. If someone outgrows the video game, if the project is complete, if the war is over, then all what happens is you’re stuck with another person and you have no idea on how to relate to that person. The result is loneliness.

Form affects results.

In “Friendship” you see this play out right at the start. The movie does a good job setting up Craig to be a man who is helping his wife who is battling cancer and his only son who is just being a teenager. He tries his best to be supportive but also has his own frame of view.

His wife, played by Kate Mara, is dealing with her own struggles, and Craig finds himself isolated even within his own family unit. His wife mentions that the only thing he does is stay in his couch the whole night after he gets back from his soul crushing job (an app developer that wants to create more addicting apps, a funny nod to the addiction Craig goes through).

When Craig meets Paul Rudd’s Austin, a cool weatherman on TV who just moved into the neighbourhood. It’s through Austin’s nonchalance that they even interact. Their meet cute is just generated through Austin’s coolness which Craig is attracted to, but not overly won over in the beginning. And at the start you can see that Austin and Craig really don’t click together, but this superficially is really not a problem, this is how most people meet honestly. This is not the issue.

The problem lies afterwards. The social incompetence that Craig has been operating from is a playbook that doesn't exist for adult male friendship. Austin represents the other side of this coin—a man who has learned to keep others at arm's length by performing coolness. And both of these styles of performative masculinity clash in ways that are hilarious, and chaotic. It’s a real neat trick to play this as a comedy, but there’s a lot of truth in this.

The Austin Problem: Coolness as Armour

Austin's character arc reveals another crucial aspect of adult male friendship: the performance of coolness as a defense mechanism. Throughout the film, Austin maintains a careful distance, presenting himself as effortlessly cool while Craig desperately tries to match that energy. But Austin's coolness isn't authentic confidence—it's a learned behavior designed to avoid the vulnerability that real friendship requires. It’s lack of sincerity. It’s trying to create depth where there’s only a shallow pond. And Craig who doesn’t know any better, buys this hook line and sinker.

When Austin initially accepts Craig's he's not being genuine; he's being polite. This is what makes Craig's eventual realization—"You accepted me way too fast!"—so devastating and insightful. Craig recognizes that Austin never actually wanted to be his friend, but was too socially conditioned to say no directly. And Craig gave his full self to Austin and Austin only shunted him away after a truly awkward hang out, a hang out (where they started to play fight) that showed a bit of weird macho male socialization.

This reflects a broader problem in male socialization: we're taught to be pleasant and agreeable in the moment while avoiding the honest communication that real relationships require. And the way we want to play, is through competition.

The Sincerity Trap

Craig's sincerity—his desperate, unfiltered need for connection—becomes toxic because it's unhampered by social awareness or respect for boundaries. Meanwhile, Austin's insincerity protects him from vulnerability but also prevents genuine connection.

This creates what we might call the "sincerity trap" of male friendship: be too genuine about your need for connection, and you become Craig. Overwhelming, desperate, lacking the skills to maneuver these social boundaries or even to talk about them.

On the other side, be too guarded, and you become Austin, emotionally unavailable, insecure, and not the cool guy that you want to be. You will, as Austin does, be found out. The film suggests there's no easy middle ground, which is why male friendship feels so precarious.

The Loneliness Epidemic

"Friendship" arrives at a time when male loneliness has reached maximum discourse. We have talked about this for ages, but I think it’s something that males have dealt with for centuries.

Studies consistently show that men report fewer close friendships than women, and that these friendships tend to be less emotionally intimate.

The film exaggerates this reality to absurd proportions, but the underlying truth remains: many men are starving for genuine connection while simultaneously lacking the tools to create and maintain it.

Craig's unraveling throughout “Friendship” represents the extreme end of this loneliness. He's so desperate for male companionship that he's willing to etry to copy something he doesnt have, coolness. The failing that, he spirals, the lesson he learns at the end is “we need rules!”

Form affects results. The foundation of male friendship was not there, and therefore the rules were never taught.

It's comedy through horror, showing us what happens when the need for friendship becomes pathological. However when you see this play out in real life, it’s cringy! It’s one person trying to act cool, while the other person not knowing what to do or what to say. Combine that with internalized homophobia and you have a recipe for awkwardness that ends up with the phrase “no homo!” as part of the male lexicon.

Beyond the Comedy

While "Friendship" operates as an absurdist comedy, its emotional core speaks to real struggles many men face. The film asks uncomfortable questions: What happens when traditional forms of male bonding (sports, work, shared activities) aren't enough? How do you form friendships as an adult when you lack the natural contexts that facilitated childhood connections? And perhaps most importantly: How do you express need without becoming needy?

Truth be told, I don’t have an answer for this. There is no magic bullet here. I know I’m not good at this, I have had male friends tell me that they are not good at this either. I have had many awkward things happen between male friends through the guise of trying to be friendly. And it’s awful, always. It’s not like all males are like this, there’s some that this social dance is very easy. I do know that I can’t be like Craig, but do people know that they can’t also be like Austin either? Tricky stuff.

The phrase "You accepted me way too fast!" becomes the key to understanding the entire film because it reveals the fundamental dishonesty that often underlies male social interaction. We say yes when we mean no, we perform interest when we feel indifference, and we avoid the direct communication that might actually lead to genuine connection.

Craig's realization is both an accusation and a confession. He's calling out Austin for his insincerity, but he's also acknowledging his own role in accepting superficial connection rather than demanding genuine interest. It's a moment of painful clarity that cuts through all the performative nonsense that has defined their relationship.

The Impossible Task

"Friendship" ultimately suggests that male friendship in its current form might be an impossible task. We're socialized in ways that make genuine connection difficult, we lack models for healthy adult male friendship, and we're often too proud or scared to admit our need for companionship.

But perhaps that's the point. By pushing these dynamics to their absurd extreme, Tim Robinson forces us to confront the ways that traditional masculinity fails men. And we as humans have ways to change that. We have the capacity to be different.

The film is funny because it's true, and it's disturbing because it reveals how broken our approaches to male connection really are. Or maybe you like it because you’re just a huge Tim Robinson fan, whatever. Why have a substack if I can’t take these things to the extreme.

“Friendship” offers a mirror. In Craig's desperate neediness and Austin's protective coolness, many men will see themselves. And maybe that recognition is the first step toward building something better—friendships based on genuine interest rather than social obligation, honest communication rather than performed coolness, and mutual vulnerability rather than competitive posturing.

In the end, "Friendship" is a comedy about the absence of friendship, a film about connection that reveals our profound disconnection. The fact that we can laugh at Craig's desperation doesn't make it less real; it makes it more urgent.

The tagline might as well be: "Men shouldn't have friends—but they desperately need them." And until we figure out how to bridge that gap, we'll keep getting movies like "Friendship"—brilliant, uncomfortable mirrors reflecting our collective failure to connect.

If you don’t know who Scott Galloway is a marketing professor from NYU who has suddenly positioned himself as an advocate for young men and boys. Leveraging his large network from the marketing world, he's been everywhere lately discussing the plight of young men—from major podcast appearances on The Diary of a CEO and The View to writing extensively on the topic, including his upcoming 2025 book "Notes on Being a Man." Galloway has also been a key supporter of the Brookings Institute, where Richard Reeves (author of "Of Boys and Men") works, and I suspect Galloway's marketing savvy has helped amplify Reeves' recent prominence in this space.

As far as I know, Galloway is not a researcher, nor a sociologist, nor a gender specialist. He’s a marketer. He’s a public speaker, he cares about brands and tech, and he has a consultant background. And yet here he is. Talking about why toxic masculinity is “bad” and how men need to be masculine. He brings about real stats about suicide rates and education which are true, yet brings upon this non informed conclusions that come from things that Reeves already has talked about. Or he talks from his own point of view conclusions that are so traditionally masculine but framed in the most liberal way.

Frankly, he is not equipped to talk about gender issues. I want him to stop.

Let me show you the why.

Share The Ferdinand

I wanted to talk about Galloway because one of my friends Dr Brendan Kwiatkowski-Hartman (@re.masculine on Instagram) made this Instagram post

In Brendan's post, he breaks down Galloway's "how to be masculine" advice and shows how Galloway doesn't know what he's talking about—it's worth reading for his detailed analysis especially since Brendan talks specifically about the research. But while Brendan kindly suggests having a conversation with Galloway, I want to be more direct: Galloway is doing more harm than good with his constant defensive attitude about boys and men. Like Reeves, he frames pushback as proof that his ideas are somehow "dangerous," when in reality they're not dangerous, they're just stupid.

The conclusions they both give not only come from this specific Gen-X / Baby Boomer point of view, but for Galloway specifically, it comes from a view of a business person.

I looked up the post that Brendan is referring to and it’s this one:

But to save you the click, he talks about “How to be Masculine” in his eye. I want to break this down for you.

I love these posts from people like Galloway because this is where the rubber meets the road. When you ask anyone talking about masculinity how someone can be “masculine” you will find out how their mind is shaped. And through this I can tell that Galloway doesn’t know what he’s talking about (I’m sure his new book will show that as well).

Make Money

Now Brendan has a good opinion as to why this is a weird one to start with however Brendan is nicer than I’m going to be, because I’m going to say if you start your “How to be Masculine” by “making money” you should just shut it down. You should not be allowed to talk about masculinity and boys and men anymore.

Brendan talks about this point relating to how making money comes at a cost of relationships. However I know the reason why Galloway starts with this and that’s because Galloway believes that the biggest core tenant for a man is to be a “provider."

And with that lens in mind if you pair being a provider with “making money” and not have the inkling to pair that up with suicide statistics for men when unemployment rate goes up, then you’re looking at this like a marketer and business person instead of sociologist.

The pursuit of making money is the reason why a lot of men struggle, it’s also the reason why young men and boys were attracted to things like crypto, and gambling which Galloway mentions. Again without any specific analysis as to why young men reach to gambling and get rich quick schemes.

The provider tag is the most traditionally masculine idea of being a man, and it’s something that has caused the most pride and also the biggest downfall for men and boys. Because if you extrapolate this further, for a man that has connected their value of provider to their value as a man, if you can’t make the money, then who are you as a man?1

This making money idea gets filtered a lot through men’s coaching when they talk about helping them through business goals, or when people use Men’s Work to support for profit enterprises. The Men’s Work space is FULL of business bros wanting to create “deep masculinity.” Galloway speaks their language. And every time this happens I roll my eyes.

Don’t get me wrong, financial literacy has it’s place and it is important. But it has nothing to do with being a man.

Get Super Strong

This is where Galloway gets into the stupid traditional masculinity thought that you as a guy need to feel like you can physically overpower anyone in that room. To fill the whole “protector” mindset. In his words:

“In your mind and in the gym, you should be able to walk into any room and know. You could kill and eat everyone or outrun them”

He then clarifies “not suggesting you do that.” And I think that’s the catch for him because he still believes in the kill or get killed mentality that I would us as a human race have dropped that ages ago. You know, when murder became illegal.

Brendan is a bit more good faith that this maybe tounge in cheek but also pushes him to say “if you push this thought further it comes into some nasty territory.” Again I’m going to go further than Brendan to say that Galloway will not think about this further, this is what he thinks a core part of masculinity is and it’s frankly stupid and awful. It steers so close to the manosphere bullshit.

But it is Galloway’s vision, a version of masculinity he saw most likely through the business world, through his possible view of “non fit people” as lazy or sloth-like (my speculation), and again this stems from a Gen X/Baby Boomer view of the world.

Galloway has a connection of fitness with masculinity, because it has all to do with physical protection. Not emotional. Not spiritual.

Fitness has it’s place, especially for young boys and young men who are more sedentary and especially ones who struggle with mental health. But once again, physical fitness is good for everyone, and it has nothing to with wanting to kill and eat everyone in the room. Nothing to do with being “masculine.”

Have good relationships (so you can have Sex)

This one is super weird to me. He starts off strong by going “You need to get out there and join groups of people like church groups, softball leagues and meet people…” Cool, good start, I have no problem with that. Relationships are one of the things that men and boys uniquely are not good at (for the most part) and we have all noted that. In fact there’s a pretty good essay about how male friendships are really tough

Hell there’s a new comedy about that out right now.

So in general I agree that relationships are important and that getting out there and doing that is great. However, Galloway finishes with this:

“You need to get out there and join groups of people like church groups, softball leagues and meet people…and try to have sex”

What?

So upon further research I noticed that Galloway has a real bug up his ass about declining birth rates in America. He thinks that guys not having more sex is bad for America and therefore a crisis. He’s worried about this for everyone, but in general about guys. He has written and spoken about it extensively . The reason why he cares about this a lot can be summed up with this sentence. Galloway says:

“First, less partnering and propagation means fewer babies. Declining birth rates are toxic for economic health.”

Economic health. There it is, the connection of money and masculinity. If you’re not pumping out babies it’s bad economically, and if it’s bad economically it means you’re not a man. This is a straight connection to the “make money” point.

Again this is the way Galloway thinks “real men” should behave. The “code” that he talks about in The View.

It’s overall very frustrating that THIS guy is out there even talking about men and boys.

Business People are not Experts Outside of Business

Galloway comes from a long line of business people who think they should talk more about boys and men. Or relationships. Or sociology at large. I personally have met local ones here in Edmonton, and I also know a bunch of them outside of this network. All of them I can say are successful at marketing themselves, but when talking about the issues at large, are usually awful at it. Not only that, they share the same type of code that Galloway has and if challenged about this, they share the same defensiveness, they dig in more, and pretend that the push back is more proof that what they are saying is right. All of them do this. Because in their hubris, they think they’re the only ones talking about this. From Diary of a CEO podcast, Galloway says:

“We’ve decided when it comes to men, compassion is a zero-sum game. And if you feel bad for men, it immediately kind of ‘outs’ you as someone who might be anti-women.”

This is a mirror of what Reeves said in his book “Of Boys and Men” when he recalled that others thought he was wading with snakes when defending boys and men.

But this is entirely wrong. There have been decades and decades of people who made it their life mission to help young boys and men, and did it in a way that were not labelled “anti-women.” I know this because I have been one of those guys, I have NEVER gotten push back that I was “anti-women” for talking about men. In fact, women have been some of the biggest supporters of these initiatives.

These issues have not been taboo. They have an incredible history to them, something that Galloway has no idea about. But god, even an ounce of self-awareness would see how incredibly popular both Galloway and Reeves have become to note that talking about boys and men is not dangerous and taboo, it’s actually profitable and successful. Both of them get invited to gender conferences, both have talked with female and non-male feminists, have been invited to major galas and places that are female centered, and yet they still say this shit?

Having him talk about boys is not a Net Positive

So even if you agree that Galloway sucks about talking about men and boys, there’s a prevailing thought that “well at least he’s making people aware of the issue right?”

I want to push back on this idea, because it’s still bad that he talks about it.

Galloway and in other parts Reeves is sucking up the air for this issue. Any time we have conversations about manhood and masculinity you will hear Reeves and Galloway’s name come up as people who are “good” about talking about men and boys2 . But all of their ideas about manhood and masculinity are liberal status quo nonsense. They skim the line of being “healthy masculinity” but providing conclusions that are at their best minimally controversial and at their worst something that Andrew Tate might want to say. I have never heard Galloway talk and agreed with his conclusions or be fired up about what he says. He’s usually either parroting points that have been discussed at length by others who are better equipped to do so, and then providing solutions that steer close to manosphere talk but with a liberal bent.

He’s not adding to the conversation, he’s polluting it.

That’s why he needs to stop. I don’t want to discuss it with him like Brendan wants to, I want him to end.

I don’t know about you, but I’m fucking tired of business people thinking that because they are successful in business and have some talent in public speaking, that they think they have answers about sociology. Or sociological things.

You don’t see this the other way right? You don’t see sociologists or social science people talking about the intricacies of economic and business drivers right? Why do we let these morons get away with this all the time?

Unfortunately we’re going to get more of him, because his book about men and boys comes out in November and he’s making the rounds of media already. But just be aware of what I said, I want to get ahead of it.

And if you know of any business dudes who all of sudden want to do a TedTalk or do a podcast about healthy masculinity, just tell him to start reading others before he gets up on the mic. Maybe we can all be spared another one of these fools.