I’m gonna be on Wisconsin Public Radio’s Central Time from 5:30-6pm on Wednesday if anyone is interested. It will be live, so this could be an opportunity to watch someone embarrass themselves in real time. (I will have to practice not cussing.) I think this link takes you to a feed where the thing can be listened to. https://www.wpr.org/listen-live?network=ideas
Then immediately after that, my friend Raechel, whose book you can buy here, and I will talk to each other via Zoom while anyone who wants to listens. That event is hosted by Literati, a store that I really miss walking through and hope to soon walk through again.
These spectral presences will constitute my book tour for Midwest Futures for the moment, though one hopes for more.
Phil Christman 
Hello Philip, I see that your piece on being male has re-appeared again on Pocket. Wondering if your views have shifted at all since then. Tnx Doug
Hi, Doug,
This is an interesting question. I haven’t read the essay in a while (like many writers, I hate rereading my own stuff). One thing that has occurred to me is that I was probably just a shade too deferential to the “all-men-should-be-killed-haha-just-kidding-or-am-I” style of humor that was very popular then—almost required in some left spaces. I was uncritical of it because a) I am, as a person, far too easily guilted and b) it also seemed unchivalrous to go after something that some excellent women use as a coping mechanism. Since the period when I wrote the essay, two of my guy friends—absolutely sterling human beings—have told me that their (verbally/emotionally) abusive girlfriends used this language regularly as part of their abuse. So if I were writing the essay right now, I would have made it clearer that I don’t really think hating men as such is an intellectually respectable position. I suspect that in most other ways, the essay still speaks for me.
Thanks for a thoughtful response Philip. I very much appreciate your honest self-reflection. And you’re a highly engaging writer to boot. It’s telling that you’ve picked up from some stellar male friends that joking about men being useless etc can be a form of bullying, if not outright abuse. Teasing humour usually fits into the passive-aggressive method of communication. I also appreciate that you realized you were playing a bit to the liberal-left attitudes of two years ago (and probably now as well), in which it’s fashionable to adopt an “all-men-should-be-killed-haha-just-kidding-or-am-I” style of humor. (That’s an hilariously insightful way to put it, by the way.) I don’t know if it’s just my own computer history that creates the algorithm that brought me your essay for a second time in a year or two, but it certainly seems a popular piece. Hope you have been suitably rewarded for it! Let me know if you do something fresh on this big subject. All the best, Doug