The idea that lack of paternal guidance can explain today's masculinity crisis doesn't make sense. I suspect rather that underneath the sons' charge that their fathers did not teach them how to be men lies another, unadmitted complaint - that their fathers taught them only too well how to be men, and they are choking on the lesson. These men, as boys, faced the age-old tradeoff: If you undergo the painful process of renouncing the 'feminine' aspects of your humanity and follow your father into manhood (and what choice do you have, really?) you will share in the spoils of the superior half of the race. Now, as men, they find that the spoils are far more meager than expected. No wonder they feel betrayed.

By definition, the conventional wisdom of the day is widely accepted, continually reiterated and regarded not as ideology but as reality itself. Rebelling agai…

Surely we have had enough of confusing maleness with 'usefulness' and other human virtues. If men had a more modest view of what their masculinity ought to ent…

The project of organizing a democratic political movement entails the hope that one's ideas and beliefs are not merely idiosyncratic but speak to vital human n…

When I kiss my sons on the mouth, people look at me oddly. They look at closeness as a weakness. But a boy needs physical closeness with his father as well as …

As the little boy said when asked if he wanted to be a lawyer like his mother, 'Oh no, that's women's work.' (Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions)

As boys without bonds to their fathers grow older and more desperate about their masculinity, they are in danger of forming gangs in which they strut their mas…