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In this follow-up to "What's Wrong with Men?, Matt and Sam talk with the essayist and critic Phil Christman about his 2018 Hedgehog Review article, "What Is It Like To Be a Man?"—an article that figured prominently in their conversation—as well as two posts responding to the episode published on his always excellent Substack, The Tourist. They discuss how the discourse about men has evolved in recent years, the darker and more deranged consequences of an "abstract rage to protect," some of the ways gender and class might relate to each other, and more about Matt's psyche than you might care to know.
Sources:
Phil Christman, How To Be Normal (2022)
"What Is It Like To Be a Man?" Hedgehog Review, Summer 2018
"Guy stuff. Boy time. Brosephery." The Tourist, June 11, 2023
"Manfulness. Hot guy stuff. Convening a bro-seph bro-dsky reading group." The Tourist, June 22, 2023
Leonard Michaels, The Men’s Club, (1981)
Rudyard Kipling, “If—“ (1941)
I don't find masculinity super helpful for me as a concept that, like, guides my conduct. It's useful in helping me understand my personal history, and why I have the self expectations I do, why I have some of the blind spots that I do. But when Josh Hawley comes out with a book saying, "We need to restore the honor of men." It's an evasion of the real question. Yeah. I think we need to try being grown-ups, starting with him. I was thinking preparing for this when Sam asked me what it means to me to be a man. I just don't think in those terms much anymore. I think, especially being gay, there was a period of my life where I was so intensely self-scrutinizing, precisely as a man, not wanting to be found out, being closeted, the kind of anxieties that came with that, I got to a point where I was exhausted by all that, and I just stopped caring. There's a way in which, of course, I am a man, and what it means for me to be a grown-up and maybe a protector in some way might be mediated through that. But it's just not like the categories I think through when I engage in introspection and try to think about what it means to be a good person. I don't really drag masculinity in those categories into it that much. At least not explicitly and consciously. It's kind of like, in some instances, it seems like what Freud is saying is that you need to learn to free associate in order to do analysis, and in some, it seems like what he's saying is that once you can free associate, the analysis is over. So with men, it's kind of like once you stop feeling like you need to be thinking about what it means to be a man all the time, at that moment, you're a man, or maybe you're a grown-up. [BLANK_AUDIO]
Matt and Sam are joined by writer Phil Christman to discuss the limits of "manhood" as a lens for thinking about how to be a good person. Subscribe on Patreon to hear the rest!
