The Man Child vs. the Man’s Man
Unlike JD Vance, Tim Walz offers a healthy masculinity.
IF KAMALA HARRIS BECOMES the first woman president, her first accomplishment could well have already happened—elevating and honoring the positive side of masculinity.
Tim Walz, whose politics are to the left of most Americans and certainly most swing voters, has been welcomed not as a box-checking, progressive pick, but as a Midwestern dad who poses with his hunting dog, served for 24 years in the military, and coached the high school football team to a state championship. He’s a man’s man without being a strutting jackass. He can speak of volunteering for the national guard at age 17 and then segue to naming his first child Hope after years of infertility.
I don’t know if any of this factored into Harris’s calculations, but a good male role model is an excellent foil for the swaggering, snarling, cartoonish version of masculinity on offer from the Republican party right now.
Men are struggling in our society. Boys are falling behind girls in grades and graduation rates. Men are falling behind women in college attendance, participation in the labor force, and connection to family and friends. Men are more likely than women to be lonely and to succumb to deaths of despair. It’s not a man’s world anymore, even if some have been slow to notice.
The causes are partly structural. The decline of industrial jobs, as in mining and manufacturing, results in fewer opportunities for low-skilled men, while information age jobs tend to demand skills women possess in abundance. At the same time, the decline of the two-parent family has hit boys harder than girls. Boys raised in single-parent homes are less ambitious and more prone to every kind of trouble (including failure to launch) than are their sisters raised by the same parent.
There is a cultural side to this as well. Boys and men are picking up the signals that there is something inherently wrong with them. The word “masculinity” is hardly uttered in some precincts without the modifier “toxic.” Our culture has been in a time warp vis-à-vis boys and girls, stressing girl power and female “firsts” long past the time when boys are the ones who are struggling. As Richard Reeves has noted, in 1972, the year Congress enacted Title IX to promote gender equity in higher education, the gender gap in college enrollment was 13 points in men’s favor. In 2019, the gender gap in bachelor’s degrees was 15 points the other way. The results are similar for masters degrees and doctorates. And yet there is no widespread effort by the government or civil society to improve the lot of boys.
Men are feeling it. A Brookings Institution survey found that fewer Generation Z men call themselves feminists (43 percent) than do Millennials (52 percent), and the gap between men and women on this self-ID is much larger for Gen Z than for older cohorts. Another sign of discontent is that nearly half of men aged 18 to 29 report that they face discrimination as men.
The right has a response that is reactionary, misogynistic, and smutty. The party that once prided itself on traditional values now features at its convention, as David French put it, “an OnlyFans star, a man who publicly slapped his wife, a man who pleaded no contest to an assault charge, and another man who had sex with his friend’s wife while the friend watched—and that’s not even including any reference to Trump himself.”
Not content with being an adjudicated sexual abuser, Trump continues to fill out his dance card with the vilest male “influencers” online, most recently sitting down for an interview with Adin Ross, the 23-year-old most known for association with accused rapist/human trafficker Andrew Tate and neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes. Trump knows there’s a longing for male affirmation out there and is choosing the very worst ways to satisfy it. His masculinity bears none of the hallmarks of manly virtue—restraint, honor, service to others, responsibility, or self-sacrifice. Instead, he offers braggadocio, put-downs, disrespect for women, and vulgarity.
Trump’s running mate has been fishing in these waters for several years and now trails a train of cringe-worthy quotations he must own. Like Trump and the alt-right figures he surrounds himself with, JD Vance does nothing to encourage men to be their best selves but instead spews contempt for women. He chose to unburden himself to Tucker Carlson—yes, the guy who perseverates over low testosterone readings and advises testicle-toasting—“We’re effectively run in this country, via the Democrats, via our corporate oligarchs, by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made. And so they wanna make the rest of the country miserable, too.” He then name-checked Harris, Pete Buttigieg, and AOC.
One could dissect that comment for all of its snide wrongness—Harris is a step-mother, Buttigieg is not a lady (and yes, I see what he did there), and AOC is only 34 and in any case is not “running” America. (Buttigieg and his husband adopted twins after the interview aired.)
What’s offensive is not just that Vance is wrong about Harris or Buttigieg but that he would use such a personal matter as an opportunity for abuse. As Jennifer Aniston, who underwent years of fruitless fertility treatments, put it: “Mr. Vance, I pray that your daughter is fortunate enough to bear children of her own one day.”
So, yeah, often people are not childless by choice, but even if they are, a quote from Walz’s stump speech seems appropriate here: “Mind your own damn business.”
I’m about as pro-natalist as you can get. I think children are one of life’s greatest joys. It grieves me that so many young people hesitate to have kids for what I regard as unsound reasons (like worrying about the effect of more humans on climate change). I believe the government should be generous to parents through the tax code because children are an investment in the country’s future, just the way everyone pays taxes to support public schools, even if they themselves don’t have kids or send the kids they do have to private or parochial schools.
But leave it to MAGA to mar a completely benign idea like pro-natalism with contempt for others. Vance recycled his insights in a fundraising appeal: “We’ve allowed ourselves to be dominated by childless sociopaths - they’re invested in NOTHING because they’re not invested in this country’s children.” Really? George Washington and James Madison might like a word.
In the face of this brutalist version of masculinity, the Democratic party is now honoring a different kind of man in Walz. The hunter/fisherman/veteran/football coach is no pajama boy.
When he comes out for restrictions on gun purchases, he can’t be dismissed as someone who can’t tell a rifle from a javelin.
Don’t discount the coach credential. Many a coach has changed lives for the better. Good coaches mold the characters of the athletes in their charge. They teach boys to channel their natural competitiveness and even aggression into socially acceptable channels. They help girls to feel confident and proud.
Walz is a regular guy at a time when the country needs reminding that being a regular guy is actually pretty great. As the Atlantic put it, “Dad is on the Ballot.”
Harris’s selection of Walz gave rise to a whole genre of warm dad memes: “Tim Walz just slipped me a 20 on my way out the door because ‘you never know if some place doesn’t take credit cards.’” Another posted that Walz would “take care of the wasps nest for you.” Still another mused that “Tim Walz beeps at you at a red light, motions for you to put your window down, and tells you that your right rear tire could use some air.”
What unites these posts is the sense of security and comfort they exude—the very things a good dad conveys. There’s one more theme that frequently arises. As romance writer and editor Jennifer Prokop put it, “in all seriousness, i think there are a lot of us who hope our dads would have ended up a lot more like tim walz than jd vance if it wasn’t for fox news, and maybe that’s why he makes us feel the way we do.”
Tim Walz may be the father figure the Democratic party—and the country—needs.