Rape culture is the normalization of violence against women as reflected in our cultural norms. It’s the glamorization of sexual violence against women in pop culture; it is the dehumanization of women in the media. Rape culture lives on today, not just in our politics but also among our children—in the playground, at the dinner table with their parents, in front of the TV. Luckily, there is a solution. Our boys need to be brought up from a young age to respect women. To believe them. To be their allies at school and eventually at work. I tell my boys it is not enough for them to simply be men who don’t mistreat women; they should strive to be men who also advocate for women. Who stand beside women even when it doesn’t directly and personally benefit them in any way. And to recognize the rape culture in which we live and fight against from the inside, because women aren’t going to fix this alone and this is truly a shared fight. This garbage only ends when men make a serious effort to get involved and be allies. That’s a message we need to instill in our boys as early as possible.
PARENTING TIP #30: The problem with porn and hookup culture
I saw my first Playboy when I was still in grade school. Another boy had smuggled it into the Protestant church I was forced to attend as a young kid. He showed me the centerfold in the church basement where we usually hung out to skip Sunday School. A few years later when I was in the eighth or ninth grade, my dad showed me what he thought was my first Playboy during an entirely uncomfortable rite-of-passage-moment, which resulted in me pretending that I hadn’t already combed through stacks of those magazines and memorized each Playmate of the Month. That was also the year I discovered softcore porn on Cinemax (or, as we called it, Skin-emax) and spent far too many hours sneaking downstairs during sleepovers at my house to watch poorly acted skin flicks with my friends.
Today, those days in the nineties are thought of as wholesome, nostalgic moments, because now, there’s Pornhub.
Instead of the rare instances in my youth when I could actually get my hands on a VHS porn cassette, Pornhub has been providing free, unadulterated porn clips to anyone with an internet connection since 2007. The widespread availability of just about every kind of porn you could ever imagine, all searchable in different categories, makes imparting a realistic view of sex to our boys very difficult. A December 2018 Esquire article by Sarah Rense found that in 2018, people made a grand total of 33.5 billion visits to Pornhub, representing 92 million daily average visits to the site and nearly 4.8 million pornographic videos uploaded—enough hours for a single person to continuously watch porn without breaks for more than a century.”65 So, little Johnny, who you think is an angel and who you’re sure would never watch smut? He’s watching. He’s watching a lot of it.
If you need proof, Peggy Orenstein’s book Boys & Sex has it— in all its brutal honesty. She interviewed more than a hundred boys between the ages of sixteen and twenty-two who are either college-bound or in college, and most of them use Pornhub constantly. When they wake up in the morning, Pornhub. If they have ten minutes to spare in between classes, Pornhub. One college junior she interviewed said it’s so reflexive he’ll often find himself calling up Pornhub on his phone when he meant to check the weather or the news. A college sophomore in the book said Pornhub’s launch coincided with him hitting puberty, which meant everything he learned about sex and masturbation was tied directly to Pornhub.66 Boy after boy in her book admitted to watching untold hours of porn, many of them progressing from innocent searches to more hardcore pornography until they were viewing things such as women defecating in hotdog buns.
As absurd as it sounds, this is the baseline expectation for many, many men when it comes to how their sexual experiences should unfold. One survey of 2,500 college students found that 60 percent of respondents use porn to learn crucial information about sex.67 With Orenstein’s research of talking with boys, which directly backs up that sobering statistic, the fact of the matter is that Pornhub is acting as a sex educator for a majority of young kids, simply because their parents are uncomfortable with having the birds and the bees talk. As a parent, that should scare you. Actually, that should terrify you to your core. Because even if you tell boys to respect women and get consent, what they’re hearing from you and what they’re seeing on the internet are two very different (and conflicting) things.
While there is certainly feminist porn and ethical porn being made, that is generally not the kind of porn most kids are watching on Pornhub and across the internet. I went to Pornhub.com, and here were the videos that popped up just from going to the homepage: “Therapist Cures Your Anxiety,” “Fucking My Auntie’s Face As My Stepuncle Walks in And Catches Us,” “Petite College Freshman Moans Daddy While Fucked Doggy,” and “No Mercy Anal Compilation—Tight Teens | Relentless Rough Fucking | Painal.” The common theme in all of these videos is well-endowed men treating women like blow-up dolls with pulses, their fake and unconvincing moans silenced when men haphazardly jam their veiny third legs down their throats. Absurd? Yes. To be fair, even seventy-five percent of those 2,500 college students surveyed cited unrealistic expectations in the porn they watch. But, and this is the key, they’re watching it anyway and internalizing what they see, because in the absence of proper sex education and honest conversations with parents, Pornhub fills the void.
So, what are kids internalizing when they watch porn? Orenstein’s book finds that while heterosexual males who watch porn are more likely to be accepting of same-sex marriage, they’re less likely to support affirmative action for women and to only tepidly endorse gender equality as it relates to work, politics, and life. Also, college students who regularly consume porn are more likely to consider what’s being portrayed as real, become sexually active sooner, have more partners, have higher rates of pregnancy, and experience more sexual aggression. And if you stop and think about it, it makes total sense. When watching porn, boys are bombarded by images that tell them they have to have ridiculously gargantuan penises and stamina that lasts for hours, and that women exist in the sexual realm solely as props to please them. The default in most heterosexual porn is rough sex that includes forcing a woman’s head down to gag on an erect penis or rough sex (often anal) that takes place without a condom and with little to no communication between partners.
Look, I’m not going to go all anti-porn on you (I still watch porn occasionally, and sometimes with my wife on the rare occasion that we have the house to ourselves). Curiosity about sex is natural and to be encouraged, and I think some kinds of porn when consumed responsibly and in moderation are generally okay, provided that parents properly communicate with boys the realities of sex, outside of the porn industry. The latter is what’s missing most of the time because parents aren’t letting kids know that most of what they see in porn is not normal, healthy, or realistic. It’s why we have a generation of confused boys who grow into men who are shocked when they try to get intimate with women for the first time and find that those women don’t appreciate any of the nonsense they’ve seen acted out their whole lives. It also leads to boys assuming this rough and non-communicative sex is what women want, which has a higher likelihood of ending in sexual assault if boys are forcing a woman’s head down to their crotch without asking.
Parents, don’t assume your boys know not to do that. Orenstein’s book has some devastating examples of nice guys engaging in extraordinarily problematic sexual acts with girls without the slightest recognition of a problem. Even outside of porn, hook-up culture for many teens is all about status and the number of partners you can get up to, and too many boys are only thinking of how to get that number higher so they can gain credibility with their (usually male) peers. Is she into it? Is she enjoying herself? Did she say she liked it? These are not questions boys are taught to ask—either by watching porn or from talks with their parents. Sure, if they step back and gain some perspective, they’re usually able to see the problem. But if no one has told them otherwise and they’re inundated by a deluge of porn telling them women love it when guys absentmindedly orgasm all over their faces? Well, is it any wonder why the #MeToo movement exists and why there are so many stories about sexual assault?
Boys are taking what they learn from porn and applying it in the real world despite there not being much reality in those videos whatsoever. That mindset not only has negative repercussions in the bedroom, it also further perpetuates the stereotype of women being seen merely as holes to be plugged and unimportant props that exist solely for the benefit of men. This impacts how boys view and treat girls outside of the context of sex as well. Not to mention the damage this does to girls. Girls who watch porn and think they need to take an inherently passive role and be sexually demeaned in order to keep men happy are also put at a devastating disadvantage; after all, porn teaches them to prioritize a man’s needs and desires above their own.
I was going to wait to talk to my son about porn, but after reading Orenstein’s book, I changed my mind and spoke with him immediately. It was awkward, no ifs, ands, or buts about it. But it was also extremely necessary, because as it turns out, at just eleven years old, he was already past due for that chat. And while I’m certainly not going to tell him to watch porn or send him a selection of my favorites, I’m also not going to pretend it doesn’t exist or harbor any delusions that he’s not going to watch it. Despite all the filters and safeguards I have on his phone and our computers, kids will find a way. They always have and always will. Just like I don’t believe abstinence is a realistic solution to teen pregnancy, I also know that shouting, “NO PORN!” isn’t going to work, either. I’m explaining to him that these are actors engaging in fantasy, and that even though they’re paid most of the time, most of them are not making much and are sometimes doing it in dangerous conditions. I’m telling him in no uncertain terms that porn is fake and that when he does eventually find himself in a sexual situation with a girl (he’s identified himself as heterosexual), he doesn’t have to guess at what she likes—he should just ask her and find out straight from the source. I also urge parents to check out amaze.org, which has content that, as they market it, “takes the awkward out of sex ed” by sticking to the “More Info. Less Weird.” mantra.
As one of Orenstein’s subjects says, kids want their parents to talk to them about sex and porn. They might cringe, but boys are not only looking for that information, they’re looking to their fathers for personal advice and anecdotes. They want to hear about what works, what’s healthy, and what they found regrettable. Yes, that’s going to be super uncomfortable, and it might feel like a root canal is a preferable way to spend the hour, but it’s worth it. I promise.
If you take anything away from this book, I hope it’s remembering that if you don’t talk to your boys about porn and sex, then Pornhub and the internet will be their default sex-ed instructor. And as we’ve seen, that’s unacceptable.
PARENTING TIP #31: Don’t fear the #MeToo movement; learn from it
The #MeToo movement, which has held many high-profile men accountable for rape and sexual assault during the past few years, is often erroneously seen as an attack on men. While some men have looked inward and taken note of the fact that one in three women experience sexual violence while nearly one in five women experience completed or attempted rape during their lifetimes at the hands of men,68 others have dismissed #MeToo as nothing more than gender propaganda fueled by social justice warriors. Instead of listening to victim accounts and engaging in self-reflection to see how their past actions may have contributed to the toxic culture that dismisses victims while protecting perpetrators, their only actions have been doubling down on the angst aimed at women and engaging in acts of self-preservation.
For instance, there is a belief among many evangelical men called the “Billy Graham Rule,” named after the famed preacher, where men of faith decide not to spend any time alone with women who are not their wives. The original idea is to limit the temptation to be unfaithful, but lately, this line of thinking has come into vogue again for slightly different reasons. Today, we have named it the “Mike Pence Rule” because Vice President Pence refuses to be alone with anyone other than “Mother” (which is the not-at-all creepy way he references his wife). Likewise, Mississippi gubernatorial candidate Robert Foster made headlines in the summer of 2019 for invoking the Billy Graham Rule when he denied a female journalist the opportunity to shadow him for a day on the campaign trail unless she brought another male colleague with her. While many people saw this as outright discrimination against a professional female journalist simply trying to do her job—a job Foster allows men to do with no problems—Foster maintained his actions protect him not only against any potential infidelity, but also against the current #MeToo movement and any allegations of impropriety from women.
The problem here is indicative of preexisting gender bias being taken to an extreme and going sideways. The desire to remain loyal to one’s partner is a good one at its core, but it’s bullshit when it gets to the point of disallowing yourself or your spouse to ever interact on a one-on-one basis with a member of the opposite sex. I have female friends and my wife has male friends. Sometimes we hang out with those friends alone. Why? Because I trust my wife, and she trusts me. Honestly, if you’re in a marriage that can’t withstand a solo dinner with a colleague or a catch-up with a friend who happens to be of the opposite sex, then that marriage is already in extraordinarily peril. What a horrible message we’d be sending to our boys as parents if they hear one parent tell the other that they’re “not allowed” to hang out with a friend of the opposite sex because of distrust and fragile egos. Again, as we’ve discussed, this assumes men are untamed animals who operate solely by their id and can’t be trusted without fear of whipping out their erections, while women are all just jezebels out to steal a man. It also flies in the face of the mutual trust and commitment that should be the foundation of a marriage. It shouldn’t take a sexist rule to ensure fidelity in a marriage, and frankly, it’s a form of abusive control to forbid your spouse from hanging out with a friend just because you’re not secure.
Unfortunately, Pence and Foster are hardly the only men adopting this antiquated mindset, and it isn’t just a problem in the home. According to a 2019 survey from LeanIn.org, 60 percent of male managers in America are uncomfortable participating in a common work activity with a woman, such as mentoring, working alone, or socializing together.69 That represents a 32 percent increase from just one year ago. Men who hold senior positions are twelve times more likely to avoid one-on-one meetings with female junior colleagues, nine times more likely to hesitate to travel together for work, and six times more likely to hesitate to go to work dinners with women as opposed to male coworkers. Why is this phenomenon suddenly occurring? 36 percent of American men surveyed reported being uncomfortable with how it would look being alone with a female coworker. Today, the Billy Graham Rule is occurring in workplaces all over America, and it is extraordinarily damaging to everyone.
For example, I’m overweight, but I know the answer to my obesity is not locking myself away in solitary confinement and avoiding all foods forever. The solution is to learn how to make more informed nutritional decisions so I can be healthier. One of my sons used to be completely petrified of elevators, but while avoiding them and taking the stairs might do wonders for his cardio, it’s not a realistic solution for him to avoid elevators for all of eternity. So, we taught him how elevators work and gave him the confidence to eventually use them with less and less unease every time.
So, it stands to reason that the solution for men at work who are wary of spending time with women colleagues—because they don’t want to be “#MeToo”-ed or accused of anything untoward— isn’t to lock themselves away and ignore half the population. It’s simply to—wait for it—not sexually harass their female coworkers!
Another example of fairly routine preexisting gender biases turning into something harmful is the Men’s Rights Activist (MRA) movement. For the blessedly uninitiated, MRAs are a group of wildly off-kilter gentlemen who believe it isn’t women, but rather men, who are discriminated against in society, namely because men are obligated to sign up for the military draft at eighteen, men work the majority of backbreaking industrial and manufacturing jobs, men are victims of domestic abuse at the hands of women, and men primarily get screwed over in divorces involving custody battles and alimony. The thing is, they’re not totally wrong about the last two points, which is what makes the vitriol and hate so frustrating and disturbing. MRAs have some legitimate points, but those points get lost in an avalanche of anti-feminist, anti-equality, and often violently misogynistic fury that negates any and all sense they had in the first place, such as their belief that feminist women gatekeep their vaginas unfairly. For MRAs, everything that doesn’t go right in their lives is the fault of women.
I’ve run into these guys on social media a few times, and their mindset is terrifying. It’s all alpha male, anti-woman nonsense fueled by anger and entitlement. They are known to go after prominent feminists online with unbelievably degrading insults and even violent rape fantasies, as described in Katie J. M. Baker’s 2013 Jezebel piece titled “Rape and Death Threats: What Men’s Rights Activists Really Look Like.” In that piece, Baker describes how a feminist named Charlotte who protested at an MRA speech paid the price via online harassment after the fact. “They’ve circulated her personal info, dredged up details about her past (one fellow told Charlotte that her dog who died years ago would be ‘disappointed’ in her), and sent her messages threatening to rape and kill and rape her again—one of the more PG-rated ones promises that ‘we will not rest until your unholy blood is shed.’”70 This male ugliness came out again in full force during the 2016 election as the nation faced the very real possibility of its first female president in Hillary Clinton, and I’ll go to my grave believing that it helped fuel a misogynist’s rise to the office in Donald Trump.
The irony in all of this is that MRAs claim they do what they do to lower suicide rates among men, create more fairness in the family court system, and generally advocate more for boys and men. But in reality, I believe they’re simply looking to silence women by strengthening the negative societal forces that brought us the patriarchy in the first place. MRAs, Billy Graham rule enthusiasts, incels—these groups didn’t just magically appear out of the ether. They are the inevitable outcome of gender biases that take hold when our young boys are subject to things like pornography that degrades women, media messaging that reinforces patriarchal values, and failure of parents to talk with boys about gender bias and toxic masculinity.
Our boys need to know that you don’t build yourself up by tearing other people down, and that this amount of anger, resentment, and violence isn’t going to help anyone. If your version of “helping” involves name-calling and wishing someone gets raped or has a cock put in their mouth to shut her up, you’re on the wrong side of the fence. Unfortunately, changing an adult male MRA’s mind is a Herculean if not impossible task, so it’s incumbent on parents to give boys the foundation they need when they’re still young to value equality of all kinds. Teach boys that women don’t owe them anything as far as sex is concerned, and that while unfairness and bias does exist for us all, the simple fact is it’s much more advantageous to be a white, straight male in America than it is to be a woman (or a person of color or a member of the LGBTQ+, etc.). And once your children are equipped with this knowledge, teach them to advance society in such a way where there will be more understanding, more dialogue, and more acceptance.
The answer isn’t taking on an Us vs. Them mentality, isolation, or fear of repercussions; it’s even more integration, communication, and self-education. It’s not that difficult to be a good and respectful human being. I don’t care whether it’s women, gay people, people of color, or trans folks—my boys need more interaction with a wider variety of people, not less. I want them to know that an incalculable amount of knowledge can learned by engaging with other people who don’t look like they do. I also want their relationships to be based on trust, not fear. The Billy Graham Rule only serves to further divide us and throw up walls, and holy shit do we have enough talk of walls lately.
PARENTING TIP #32: Don’t spank your kids
I wasn’t spanked often growing up, and I was never hit with a belt or a switch. But, like most kids I knew, the threat always loomed. If I was spanked, it only happened when I was little, for fighting with my brother, trying to run into the street, and one time for swearing. As a kid, being spanked by my parents felt like I was getting into the ring with Mike Tyson, but in reality, it was simply a swat on the backside that hurt more emotionally than physically. So, when I became a parent, I took spanking and put it in my toolbox of parenting techniques to use when necessary, since “I was spanked and I turned out fine.”
With my oldest son, it worked. I can count on one hand the number of times we had to spank him, and each time we did, it had the desired effect. Once, as a toddler, he was standing in the dog’s water bowl and trying to pry the protective covers off the electrical outlet. When I looked up, fears of electrocution flooded my mind as I rushed over to yank him out and then popped him on the butt before I could even think about it because I was so scared. He never did it again, and I continued to look at spanking as an effective weapon in my arsenal of parenting techniques.
I recounted that story in an online parenting group I was part of at the time and was surprised by the disapproving responses. Then, other parents started linking to peer-reviewed research that showed, in no uncertain terms, that spanking was unequivocally bad for kids.
According to a piece by the American Psychological Association (APA) in 2012, “many studies have shown that physical punishment—including spanking, hitting, and other means of causing pain—can lead to increased aggression, antisocial behavior, physical injury, and mental health problems for children.” In the piece, Alan Kazdin, PhD, a director of the Child Conduct Clinic at the Yale University Parenting Center, said, “Spanking doesn’t work. You cannot punish out these behaviors that you do not want. There is no need for corporal punishment based on the research. We are not giving up an effective technique. We are saying this is a horrible thing that does not work.”71 In the same article, Sandra Graham-Bermann, PhD, psychology professor and principal investigator for the Child Violence and Trauma Laboratory at the University of Michigan, said that while physical punishment can work at temporarily stopping problematic behavior via instilling fear in the child of being hit in the moment, it doesn’t carry into the long-term. And in many cases, it makes kids even more aggressive. Furthermore, the United Nations Committee on the Human Rights of the Child issued a directive in 2006 calling physical punishment “legalized violence against children” that should be eliminated in all settings.72
I read these studies, and I saw these recommendations, and I heard the experts extolling the virtues of finding other punishments outside of spanking. Yet I refused to eliminate it from my child discipline repertoire because 1) I truly didn’t think it was harmful; 2) I thought kids who aren’t spanked get spoiled and bratty; and 3) it worked with Will, so what did these “experts” really know?
Then came Sam, our second child.
Sam misbehaved from the get-go. Classic middle child. He had none of my oldest son’s composed and contemplative nature, but he made up for that in curiosity, impetuousness, and temper. Sam did everything he wasn’t supposed to, and we tried everything we normally would have before going to the extreme step of spanking—redirection, positive reinforcement, distraction, bribery, timeouts; you name it, we tried it. But nothing worked. One day, after Sam repeatedly pulled our dog’s fur, grabbed his paws, and tried to ride him for the thousandth time, I warned him that if he didn’t stop, he was going to be spanked. When he kept going, I followed through on my threat. I’ll never forget, until the day I die, what happened next. He looked at me, wide-eyed in surprise, without a hint of fear, and said, “No hurt!” Then he went right back to torturing the dog, but this time with more gusto. As time went on, I mistakenly thought that I just needed to be firmer and escalate the situation. I threatened to smack his butt harder until it did hurt, except he was digging in as well and acting out even worse than before. If anything, I realized that the spanking just made him more aggressive and entrenched. With Will, it was one spank and he was good, but Sam? Sam was an entirely different beast. That was the first time I learned what should have been an obvious lesson—that you can’t parent your kids the same way because they’re all different.
When I noticed Sam trying to spank his brothers and sometimes his friends soon after, I realized his default responses to stimuli were all turning physical and rough. Then came the ADHD and ODD diagnoses and a laundry list of questions from doctors about how we were raising him and, yes, whether or not we spanked him. I sheepishly answered in the affirmative and proceeded to get lectured on why that’s not a good idea. Of course, I already knew the reasons why—because I had read and ignored them based on my own upbringing and the toxic masculinity bullshit I was still buying into, even though I always tried so hard to overcome it. I had been duped into believing I wasn’t a real dad unless I smacked my kid around to stop him from becoming a spoiled brat.
Thinking about how ridiculous my actions were still brings a tear to my eye. There I was, fully aware that boys are thrown into a world of physical brutality and aggression, and somehow I thought adding to that via spanking was different. Better. That it would magically be exempt from all the other forms of violence young boys are exposed to. Sam is proof that aggression breeds aggression and that kids don’t benefit when the people they’re supposed to trust most in the world choose to hit them. I naively thought that if I smacked him on the butt with an open hand and not on the face or body with a closed fist, I was okay and not part of the problem. When I take a step back to really think about that “logic” for a second, it boggles my mind. Yet I know full well I’m not alone and that millions of well-meaning parents think nothing of spanking their kid and even consider it responsible parenting.
Here’s the real test. If you walk out of your house and whack the first person you see on the street on the ass, what do you think will happen? Spoiler alert—the police will be called and you will likely be arrested for assault, even if that person was being loud and obnoxious. It doesn’t matter—you hit someone, you pay the price. If smacking a stranger is a criminal offense, why the hell is smacking your kid any different? The answer is it’s not.
In a world that sees our boys resort to violence as a default setting for just about everything, spanking unnecessarily adds to the stew of toxic masculinity in a way I don’t want to be a part of anymore. We’ve never spanked our youngest, and I’ll never spank any of my kids again. I actually went up to each of my two oldest sons to apologize—I told them that I had been wrong and that it would never happen again. Men are not infallible, nor should their authority be beyond reproach. If you’ve wronged someone, you need to own up and apologize, and I hope to model that behavior for my kids.
I won’t sit here and tell you I’ve found the answer to my child discipline problems, because I haven’t. I try reward charts, timeouts, physical labor, positive reinforcement, redirection, taking things away, and everything else every expert has recommended. Does it work? Sometimes. When it doesn’t, I try something else. But I will no longer hit my kids, and I’m sorry I ever thought that was a good idea. If you’re still a proponent of corporal punishment, I hope you reconsider. Your kids might still misbehave, but at least you won’t be joining them in the process.
PARENTING TIP #33: The problem with chivalry
When I started frequenting feminist circles to expand my perspective on things, the topic of chivalry was a major roadblock and an embarrassing stumbling point for me.
Chivalry was originally a code by which medieval knights were supposed to conduct themselves gallantly, and, like a lot of men I know, I was raised to believe in it and apply it to my dating life. Open the car door, pull out her chair at dinner, always pay for said dinner, put your hand on her lower back as you introduce her into the room first, walk her to her door, hold open doors in public, and walk closest to the street when you’re both walking side-by-side—these were the things I had been taught were non-negotiable. I never gave it a second thought, because why would I? They seemed like good things. Kind things. Noble things. Many men, myself included, are brought up to believe chivalry is as necessary as basic good manners, like “please” and “thank you.” And why the hell would anyone possibly be against good manners?
I even went so far as to pen a truly unfortunate guest column in August 2011 at the Good Men Project, sticking up for chivalry and lambasting the people I saw as attacking good manners. Reading it now makes me cringe. Looking back on how little I knew and realizing how wrong I was is painful beyond words. I hate that my ignorant blathering still floats around on the internet, but that’s part of my journey. To embrace it, here’s a little snippet of my idiocy: “If the biggest problem you have with men is that they randomly hold open doors or help you carry heavy groceries to your car, I really don’t want to hear it. In the words of Jack Nicholson in A Few Good Men, ‘I’d rather you just say thank you and go on your way.’ . . . As someone who routinely holds open doors and gives up his seat on subways to women (and some men) without any expectations whatsoever, I have to request we put a stop to this idiocy. Common courtesy is a good thing. Manners are a good thing. Let’s keep it that way.”73
I was soon taken to task for those views. At first, it was really hard to hear the criticisms, and frankly, I was confused as I truly had no understanding of how anyone could be against chivalrous actions. But after poring over response after response, largely saying the same things, I knew where I had gone wrong.
The problem with chivalry is rooted in the topic of “gendered civility”—that the chivalrous person is being polite solely and specifically to women, and usually because they hope to gain something from the transaction. The people who had commented on my article pointed out that many women do feel infantilized at the automatic assumption that they need men to walk them to their cars or pull open doors for them, as if they lack the strength or agency. They also pointed out that I was foisting my own patriarchal values on them, even if they didn’t want or ask for chivalry. Finally, the knockout blow came when someone in an online discussion asked me if I fancied myself a gentleman, to which I answered yes, and then she proceeded to ask me how it was gentlemanly to forbid a woman from paying for a dinner or opening her own door even if she expressed her desire to do so. Chivalry, if unwelcome, completely ignores a woman’s perspective and wishes.
At the end of the day, I explain to my boys that all we’re really talking about here is kindness and civility—the sex of the recipient shouldn’t be an issue at all. Holding a door open for someone is still a good thing, as long as I’m holding it open for any man, woman, or child and not doing it based solely on the other person’s gender and my assumptions about what they need. Paying for dinner is usually appreciated, as long as the person I’m trying to treat is on board with it. And if someone is nervous about walking back to her car or back home late at night, ask if she’d like you to accompany her. If the answer is yes, great. If it is no, don’t force your knightly code on her because all you’re doing is taking away her agency, after she’s told you that’s not what she wants.
But make no mistake, I’m not advocating for a world without manners or kindnesses. And I’m certainly not saying that women want to do everything themselves or that they don’t appreciate help. That’s not the case at all. But as boys and men, we have to be aware if our chivalrous intentions come with an expectation of reciprocity, which may force women into a position that makes them uncomfortable. Some men may complain that they’re damned if they do and damned if they don’t—that was the title of my piece on the Good Men Project . . . so I’m talking about 2011 me—but those men haven’t yet realized that they don’t need to choose between being a gentleman and being an asshole. There’s a whole lot of in-between to be found.
Parents need to remind boys that being nice is its own reward, and that niceness and kind gestures are not a reward card that ends with benefits if they get enough points. Raise kids to be considerate because that’s the right way to act, not for a reward, especially if the reward is sex. Remember, boys need to hear they are not owed sex from women as much as possible, no matter how many dinner tabs they pick up, doors they open, or jackets they give up to keep another person warm. Gendered politeness is not really polite at all, and communication, as always, is key. If a woman really wants to pay for her own drink or meal, then teach boys to respect her wish just as they would if a person of the same sex asked to split the bill. When in doubt, kids can never go wrong listening to and respecting the wishes of other people, so try to make that the default setting for boys.
PARENTING TIP #34: Let boys know it’s not all about the money
I have always struggled with my attitude toward money, as well as the concept I have that it is tied to my masculinity. It’s been a deeply problematic issue to the point of negatively impacting my marriage, and just before writing this chapter, it popped up again, this time in my children.
Growing up, I always knew my dad was obsessed with money, mainly because he spent most of his childhood being raised by a single mom, and they didn’t always have much. He always swore that when he had kids, he’d make damn sure that they wouldn’t want for anything. For the most part, he delivered on that promise. When my parents had me in their early twenties, neither of them had a college degree. My mom managed a McDonald’s when I was a baby, and my dad helped start a stainless-steel business that he still works at to this day as vice president. We lived in a ramshackle house for the first ten years of my life, and I barely remember seeing my dad because he was always at work, building a business with his partner from scratch. When he wasn’t working, he was serving various roles as an elected and appointed official for our small Massachusetts town. Even from a very young age, I knew he was tortured by the knowledge that he was missing our childhood. He missed the moment I hit my first over-the-fence homerun in Little League, so we drove over to Town Hall where he was serving as a Selectman after the game, and I caught his attention mid-meeting and mouthed homerun, at which point he jumped out of his chair to come over and give me a tearful hug. He’d constantly apologize to us for not being around, but the reasons were there was a mortgage to pay, mouths to feed, and clothes to buy.
When we moved into a new, bigger house, my dad was so proud and happy. We had two-and-a-half bedrooms, and my brother and I no longer had to sleep in the same room. We had an actual shower, when before we’d only had a bath. I also remember that he bought a 50-inch big-screen TV to mark the occasion, and it was the very first thing to enter the new house (even before us). I knew that in his mind, he had made it. He had accomplished what every breadwinner strives for—a proper home for his family to grow up in. The only problem was a bigger house equaled a bigger mortgage payment, and my dad had to work even harder while my mom did her best Superwoman impression as the world’s most involved stay-at-home parent.
I’ll never forget the camping trip our family took when I was in high school and getting ready for college. My dad sat me down and had a talk with me that I wouldn’t fully understand until much later in life. He opened up about all the stress he felt as a provider, all the plates he had to keep spinning in the air and the masters he had to serve. He tearfully spoke about the sacrifice men like him had to make and all the time he had missed watching us grow up in order to make sure we’d have the things we needed. And he jokingly lamented the fact that just as I was becoming interesting and fun to be around, I would soon be leaving for college. While Teenage Me couldn’t fully grasp his message, Adult Me now understands his pain all too well and has felt those same moments of loss and helplessness.
When I first met MJ, I was working as a sales representative at my dad’s business making peanuts; she, on the other hand, was a rock-star manager for Bank of America, and damn did she make bank! She was a top-performer in the top 1 percent of managers and earned trips to the Bahamas, as well as fat bonuses. Her salary was more than double mine—and that, ridiculously, was a problem for me.
My friends referred to MJ as my “sugar mama.” The men in my life smiled and asked if I received an allowance from her. They openly questioned why someone as beautiful and successful as MJ would choose to be with me, especially since I wasn’t bringing home a fat paycheck. On the outside, I rolled with the punches and embraced the teasing, jokingly referring to myself as a “kept man” and telling my friends who wanted to go out that I had to “check with the boss.” Hell, I even managed to convince myself that I had become a progressive, modern man who was just fine with his wife making more money and being more successful than me. I performed a rousing “fake it till you make it” performance to convince myself and everyone around me that I was fine with the situation.
But when the recession hit in 2007 to 2008, MJ lost her job. Even though she got a new one, it wasn’t at the same level. Then she got sick and couldn’t work, and suddenly money was very much an issue. I was a newspaper reporter at the time, making even less money than I had been making as a sales rep, so I began looking for a new job. When I found one as a content manager for a company near Boston and discovered the salary would be double what I was making at the newspaper, my heart nearly leapt out of my chest. I was ecstatic. But my happiness wasn’t an “oh my God we can finally start paying our bills on time and MJ won’t have to go back to work so she can focus on getting healthier and we can survive as a family unit” type of happy. Instead, I felt a decided and intense emotion that screamed, “Thank fucking God I finally make more money than my wife; I’m a real man now! ”
I hated that I felt that way, even in that moment. It was dickish, stupid, and completely backward. I feel shame just writing it down on these pages. But it’s the truth, and I have to own it. I was feeling a primal, Neanderthal-level urge to unfurl my manhood on the table next to my paycheck. Even though I now hate the idea of a “Man Card,” at that moment I wished someone had been there to give me mine. I felt like, at any moment, all of my male relatives, dead and alive, were going to come out of a room filled with cigar smoke, with firm handshakes and bourbon, while clapping me on the back and welcoming me to the club. All that posturing I had done telling people I was cool with a wife who out-earned me? Garbage. I had been lying to myself, and the second I made more money than her, I was relieved in a way that both perplexed and disturbed me.
I don’t want this feeling to ever strike my boys. Or any boy. That kind of pressure is toxic, and it will ultimately manifest itself in a negative way. My wife is truly proud of me and all of my accomplishments, but she felt that way even when I was a thirty-two-year-old print journalist making $34,000 a year despite having a decade of experience. Meanwhile, even though I was proud of her and all her accomplishments, it wasn’t pure or wholehearted. Despite putting on my best act, it’s clear I was also very jealous of her success. When she was let go and had to take another banking job for less money, a part of me was actually happy, because I felt it got us a little closer to being even. Just think for a second how fucked up it is that a small part of me rejoiced even though my family had less money to stay afloat, simply because my fragile male ego couldn’t take being out-earned by a woman. Not only is that anger-inducing, it’s also pathetic. A partner who can’t be happy for his significant other’s success is a pretty shitty partner, and I’ve spent a lot of time since that realization trying to make it up to her.
Whoever my sons end up partnering with, I hope they fully support them without selfishness or shame. And whatever their financial state in life, I hope they feel proud of their successes without buying into the misconception that they have to earn enough money to be considered “a man.” I urge them to not only value their partners, but also themselves, regardless of how much their take-home pay is at the end of every week.
But I also want my boys to know that in some respects, salary absolutely matters. Namely when it comes to the gender wage gap.
According to PayScale’s report “The State of The Gender Pay Gap in 2019,” the uncontrolled gender pay gap sees women making only $0.79 for every dollar men earn. But even when they examined the controlled gender pay gap—women and men with the same employment characteristics doing similar jobs—women still only earn $0.98 for every dollar earned by a man with the exact same qualifications.74 Men’s rights activists and misogynists everywhere will argue until the end of time that there is no gender wage gap and that women earn less because they take off big chunks of time to have kids, which is garbage reasoning. Women are paid less. End of story.
Never was that more glaring than during the 2019 World Cup, which saw the US Women’s National Team win its fourth title since 1991. The men? They have had just one quarterfinal appearance and three trips to the Round of 16 in that same time-span. Despite their winning ways, a lawsuit filed by US women’s players claims there were distinct differences related to the manner of compensation for the men as compared to the women for past performances at the World Cup. The women received $1.725 million for winning the 2015 event, according to the lawsuit, while the men received $5.375 million simply for reaching the Round of 16 in 2014. And while the women were galvanizing a nation and battling the best opposing players from around the globe, in addition to fending off attacks from their own president, the men didn’t even make the last World Cup held in Russia.
It’s vital for parents to talk openly and honestly with their kids, especially boys, about the existence of pay inequality for men and women because, with any luck, it will motivate boys to join the fight for equality. It can’t be stressed enough that women fighting these battles on their own is not ideal. Boys can and should know about these issues so they can grow up to become men who will help fight for equality in the workplace, at home, and in society in general—simply because it’s the right and fair thing to do.
PARENTING TIP #35: Reexamine your religion when bringing up kids
We’ve tackled politics and guns, so why not complete the trifecta of controversy and move right on to religion?
I grew up a non-Catholic in a very Catholic town and went on to marry a Catholic woman, and for the life of me I’ll never understand how so many wonderful people associate themselves with a religion that is clearly not intent on equality. Mary McAleese, former president of Ireland, said in a March 2018 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) article that the Catholic Church is one of the last great bastions of misogyny,75 and you can’t really argue with her on that point. Can women be priests? Nope. Are women told by the Catholic Church that they’re going to hell for eternity if they maintain their own bodily autonomy and opt for an abortion? Yup. Does the Church look kindly on women taking contraception in order to avoid getting pregnant? Not one bit.
It is perplexing to me to have Catholic friends and know Catholic people and be married to a woman who still considers herself Catholic—good, decent people—who fight for equality and against misogyny every single day; yet you also find them adhering to a religion that clearly views women as “other” and therefore lesser. And although they try to excuse it to me by claiming their specific church is progressive, the fact remains that only men are allowed to hold power in the Church as priests and bishops and cardinals and popes. Men dictate what women should and shouldn’t do with their own bodies. And Catholic men spent decades covering for and enabling rampant sexual abuse by male clergy members—not only perpetrated on parishioners, but also nuns. It was only in 2019 that Pope Francis acknowledged the Catholic Church’s “persistent problem of sexual abuse of nuns by priests and even bishops,” according to a New York Times article by Jason Horowitz and Elizabeth Dias that was published on February 5.76
It’s not just Catholicism, of course. Many fundamentalist Christian sects don’t allow women to be ordained and evangelical Christian values like sexual purity and the submission of women to their husbands are considered sacrosanct. I guess that’s what happens when you base a faith off a woman fucking it up for all of us by snacking on fruit that she was tricked into eating by a talking snake. And whether it’s the Muslim faith (although widely misunderstood and exaggerated for political purposes by so many), which undoubtedly has issues with veiling, divorce laws, the young legal age for marriage, polygamy, and even honor killings in extreme instances, or the entrenched misogyny of orthodox Jewish people, the bottom line is that women aren’t treated well by many religions—all while men are simultaneously and undeservedly exalted. I’d ask parents to take a step back and simply ask themselves if their religion is an acceptable model or belief system to bring kids up in if they want to teach them to become respectable, functional members of society.
As you might’ve already guessed, I’m a heathen atheist.
I didn’t start off life that way. I’m the product of a Catholic father and a Protestant mother who was baptized and confirmed in a liberal Protestant Church after many years of Sunday School. Shit, I was even a church choir standout. In addition to my maternal grandmother being a member of the Boston Pops, Tanglewood, and a master concert pianist, she was also the church choir director. Which meant, whether I liked it or not, I was not only going to church every Sunday; I was also going to sing unto the Lord while there.
But it wasn’t long until a confluence of events began to make me question my religion in general.
For starters, biblical literalists have always confused me, because even from a young age, I could tell these were just stories and allegorical tales meant to prove a point. Except it was clear that not everyone felt that way, and I quickly learned that questioning the Word of God went over like a fart in church. Ultimately, it was discovering how other religions shut down women and rejected members of the LGBTQ+ community that put the nail in my believer coffin. Well, that and my intense love of sports, which saw practices and games coincide with church. I can’t tell you how many times I had a soccer or baseball or basketball uniform on under my choir robe, and I can still hear my grandmother scolding me for wearing cleats in church and ducking out early to get to my games.
I could also never get over the fact that so many people said they believed in a God who supposedly valued all human life as equal, but who would allow rampant discrimination and even hate to rule the day and the values of the Church. Even today, the official stance of the Catholic Church is that homosexuality is a sin and Pope Francis—by far the most liberal and progressive of popes—is against allowing women to enter the priesthood. I truly believe that you’re not helping the case for equality if you subscribe to a faith that treats people differently based on sex or sexual orientation; and if you give money and time to that organization, you’re enabling it. Even for those working to change the culture from the inside, I just can’t square participating in something I know to be problematic.
Which is why one of the biggest fights my wife and I have ever had was about our kids and religion.
Although all of my kids have been to various church services, none of my children are baptized—a fact that deeply disturbs some members of my family. MJ wanted to baptize them as babies, and I vehemently refused, for all the aforementioned reasons. I placed a priority on raising our boys to be free-thinkers who stand up against harmful societal norms and advocate for underrepresented minorities by pushing back against patriarchal and discriminatory institutions, and I saw no way I could voluntarily initiate them as members of an organization that I feel is among the worst offenders—especially when they are only babies who have no agency or choice of their own. I understand baptism doesn’t mean kids can’t ultimately change religions or have no religion at all, but I still viewed it as a commitment to the faith and an affiliation I was uncomfortable making.
We finally agreed that neither of us would “poison the well,” so to speak, by being overly preachy or biased when it comes to religion. We’ve allowed them to go with relatives or friends to Catholic and Protestant church services, and we’ve waited for them to ask questions and show interest. Right now, my oldest is in sixth grade, and he generally believes in God. He’s heard his mom’s view, he’s heard my view, and while he doesn’t know enough to commit to a religion, he’s a spiritual kid who simply believes in a higher power. And that’s fine. My six-year-old? Staunch atheist. I’m sure part of that is because of me, but he’s also a very literal kid who says that Bible stories sound fake and made up. This is an emotionally intelligent and cause-oriented kid whose Christmas present was to ask us to donate ten dollars a month in his name to an organization called Planting Peace, which owns the Equality House across the street from Westboro Baptist Church and is run by my friend Aaron Jackson, because of their work with the gay and trans community, as well as their efforts to deworm children in third world countries.
All of which rebuts a claim I’ve had leveled at me by many religious folks—that without God and religion, there is no path to goodness, no way to possibly understand right and wrong, good and bad. But I’m raising living proof that you don’t need organized religion to have a moral compass. Furthermore, I think being free of the constraints of existing discriminatory beliefs that are deeply entrenched and institutionalized will help parents who are raising children to start with a foundation that isn’t riddled with bigotry and intolerance.
I’m not writing this to convert anyone to being a nonbeliever (though that’s already happening no matter what I say: a 2015 Pew Research Center poll reported that 34 to 36 percent of millennials (those born after 1980) reported no religious affiliation, adding that this was a dramatic increase from 2007, when only 16 percent of Americans said they were affiliated with no religion77). My ask is that parents who are considering raising kids within an organized religion think very carefully about what messages they might be sending if they do so. Children are observant, and they will internalize anything, for example, if your religion tells you to “hate the sin” of same-sex attraction or bars women from serving in positions of power. So, either address it head on and explain why discrimination is wrong and that churches and religions aren’t perfect—or you can always hop on over to the heathen bandwagon.
Either way, it never hurts to step back and take an unbiased, holistic view of what you’re entering into with your kids. If they hear you preach equality and tolerance outside of church but see you heed a religion that discriminates against women or gay people, that’s a potentially harmful mixed message.