New essay for HEDGEHOG: “What Is It Like To Be a Man”

Besides teaching and my union (yay!) and moving (boo!), this essay was the main thing I spent time on during the first half of this year. It is about masculinity, a subject some of my acquaintances consider me too little qualified to speak on, and others too much. It also talks about lawnmowing, poverty, The Godfather, Riverdale, Bronze Age wrist sizes, why overworked moms make me feel … small, Samuel Delany’s Triton, and the time my then-girlfriend-now-wife and I got robbed at gunpoint. It settles my beefs with the following people:
–Harvey Mansfield
–Carl Jung
–Carl Jung’s one-man shitty Canadian cover band
–all those “traditional men” with YouTube channels and ex-wives who hate them
–the sport of cross-country. Oh, cross-country, why did I waste my time on you when we were so clearly adding nothing to each others’ existences? Why didn’t I just put in three comfy miles a day and spend all those grueling training hours learning Hittite or something?
–that dude who flicked my balls when I was clocking out at McDonalds that one time. Not cool, buddy. We both work at McDonalds. Haven’t we both suffered enough? Can’t we unite against our true enemy, capitalism?