OMG. She totally nailed it. She completely understands how it feels to be a toxic white male. I'm overflowing with new insight.
In fact, I'm so energized, I've just finished my own soon-to-be Pulitzer Prize-winning piece for the New Yorker, "Dealing with postpartum depression and menopause, a personal retrospective, by Thomas Spritzer Esq".
By David Marchese, The NY Times
I spoke with the author Caitlin Moran about her new book on the masculinity crisis, “What About Men?”
Caitlin Moran pictured left.
Part of the framing of your book is that there’s not enough discussion about young men’s struggling to adapt to changing ideas about masculinity. I feel as if that’s a big topic of conversation these days. What is the fresh thinking that you’re bringing to it?
Feminism has a stated objective, which is the political, social, sexual and economic equality of women. With men, there isn’t an objective or an aim. Because there isn’t, the stuff that is getting the most currency is on the conservative side. Men going: “Our lives have gotten materially worse since women started asking for equality. We need to have power over women again.”
What should the future look like for men?
There’s no sense of a continuing conversation; of there being a new pantheon of men being invented all the time; then those inventions embedding themselves more firmly in the mainstream. Look at Beyoncé or Phoebe Waller-Bridge: When we invent a new kind of woman or new way of talking about women, it gets quickly absorbed into the mainstream.
Why has it been harder for the left than the right to gain the kind of currency you mentioned earlier?
Men on the liberal left, while feminism was having this massive movement, were like, OK, we’re not going to start talking about men while this is happening. They sat it out for a decade, and now their sons have grown up in an era where they have heard people go, “Typical straight white men; toxic masculinity,” and those sons are like, “[expletive] this,” because they don’t see what a recent corrective feminism is to thousands of years of patriarchy.
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