Your Monthly Momecdote, Issue 15: July, 2025

This blog post was originally published in my June monthly newsletter. Subscribe to receive next month's essay along with book and music recommendations.

I'm going to do something unusual (?) and talk about men. I certainly talk around the concept of men a lot, what with my frequent references to my son being a future man and therefore the stress of his masculinity being partially my responsibility. But actually—the thing I always want to point out to people who assure me that of course he will be fine because of me—the matter of his masculinity has far more to do with his father.

I was reminded recently of this quote, which to be honest I probably saw on Tumblr:

“Often father and daughter look down on mother together. They exchange meaningful glances when she misses a point. They agree that she is not bright as they are, cannot reason as they do. This collusion does not save the daughter from the mother’s fate.” - Bonnie Burstow, RADICAL FEMINIST THERAPY (emphasis mine)

Mr. Blake is from the very rural midwest where gender roles are incredibly conventional, conservative, and carved in stone. When I met him, the cultural expectation in the context of his extended family gatherings was that the women prepared all of the food, then stepped aside while the men ate first and sat together. "We probably won't be able to sit together," my then-boyfriend of two months or so regretfully informed me, to which I said, "bro, that's insane," and proceeded to do pretty much whatever felt natural to me.

At various points over the course of the day, I tried to approach the group of men to chat casually with them; at my sinister materialization, they abruptly stopped talking. My now father-in-law was kind about it; he told me, gently, that I would probably find their discussion boring. What I did not want to say aloud was that the women were discussing something that made me want to claw my own eyes out (what they should all bring to the church bake sale). Eventually, it turned out that the men were talking about whether it was going to rain or something else related to farming, which was boring. But seeing as I'm a manic-depressive liberal Californian from a matriarchal immigrant family, I didn't like being told which of my thoughts were appropriate for me to have.

As I continued to spend time with my husband's family, I came to observe two main things about the older generations: 1) despite running almost every aspect of the home, financially and otherwise, the women always, without exception, looked to their husbands for confirmation that their deductions, impressions, and even memories were accurate; 2) the men routinely made the women the butt of the joke, and almost never were they, or their errors in judgment, the target of any form of humor. They are all kind, good-natured men, but without exception, they believed themselves to be smarter than their wives and unilaterally above reproach.

People often tell me that of course my son will be a good man, because I'm a smart creative powerful blah blah blah woman. But I think plenty of men have shown they can love their mother without respecting women more broadly, and anyway, my son won't take his cues from me. It's not enough that my husband has never been threatened by my mind or agency—given everything I've observed, it matters far more that, when appropriate, he respects my judgment above his own. My husband thinks I'm smarter than he is (well, he doesn't trust me to order things off the internet with the correct dimensions, but nor should he, that's on me). I don't necessarily think he's right about that, but the fact that he thinks of me, and of women generally, as inherently valuable is already much more important than what I can single-handedly teach my son. I see a lot of women make this... I don't want to cast judgment and say mistake when it comes to marriage between a man and a woman, but yeah, let's just say it! Being an accomplished woman is not enough to ensure that your son doesn't become an incel. It requires a model of masculinity from the father, too.

Which brings me to: good god, the young men! The young women are equally worrisome, of course (seriously, I can't get over the fucking hypocrisy of women who benefitted from progressive feminism just to ideate taking those rights away as a treat), but I don't think I know any mothers who aren't at least a little bit worried about their sons being indoctrinated by the internet. I know that nostalgia is dangerous, but I think we can all agree that the internet millennials grew up with was different than what young people have now, where the sole purpose of almost everything is to sell us things we don't need, including highly dangerous mindsets. It's depressing, so I won't get too far into it, but I do want to note that I'm also observing the mindsets of millennial men: the fathers who think about the act of fathering. I recently listened to Jon Bellion's FATHER FIGURE with this in mind.

With all the attacks on queer rights, what angers me (today, at this particular moment, versus more long-runningly, all the time) is how queer relationships, queer sex, more fluid understanding of gender, etc. have vastly improved almost every quality of life where they've been allowed to permeate, which I also think extends far beyond what we think of as a direct result. The conditions for a young man or woman born to my husband's community are different today, far less acceptable than they likely would have been during his own adolescence. Today, nobody expects the younger spouses or significant others to eat separately from each other; the fathers are generally as active with their children as the mothers; women who do not have children are not regarded as strange. And that's within a community I would still determine massively (cough, dangerously) conservative on the whole. And of course I am able, sociologically, intellectually, to identify that this is exactly the threat to white patriarchy that is under attack—because it has made life so much better for everyone except those who want to believe their supremacy is deserved. But that doesn't make me any less angry, because a better world is right there.

Wow, this is a massive topic to try to cover in a little newsletter note, what have I done? Basically I want to say: I'm so grateful to my husband for not just the man he is, but also the hazy outline he represents of the future man our son will become. And, also, I want to observe with a slight tinge of awe and appreciation that I'm not capable of understanding what fatherhood will be like for him, or what specifically he will comb through and renegotiate from his own adolescence, or to what extent he is already aware that my son is puzzling him out. So this is an ode, but with the sonic end notes of a thriller. The internet exists. The world is dominated by political shit, sponsored by corporate shit, none of which seems to be receding. The "loneliness epidemic" focuses on men, when the reality is that everyone is fucking lonely under capitalism, and white men just have more, institutionally speaking, to lose.

The eternal question of existence is only magnified by the act of parenting. So yeah, this ends where it always does. What lives in the blank space of everything to come?