When did we muddy the waters as to what it means to be a man?

My new computer is mostly set up – I’m using it now. Some things didn’t go smoothly, though most are resolved. And as I was about to buy the latest version of my music program they announce that as of today they aren’t selling it anymore. Something about the core of their program is too old to continue to develop on it. They negotiated a big discount to a different program. But I and my users forum friends have never heard of it. It also doesn’t read files from my current program and the transfer mechanism was improved after I last updated fourteen years ago – as each new release came out I’d ask my forum friends if an update was worth it. They would always say no. So I may need to keep the old program and old computer around to have a method of migration. I finished the book Educated by Tara Westover. I bought it a couple years ago because it was on a table of buy one, get another half off and I already had one from that table. This one looked good enough to buy for half off without reading a review to see if it is any good. And it is good. Westover writes quite well. From the title one would guess the book is about the struggle Westover went through to be able to get a good education. While true, that is only part of the story. The other, bigger, part is why it was a struggle. She is the youngest of seven children and the second daughter in a devout Mormon family. She assures us there is no correlation between religious/nonreligious and evil/good. So it wasn’t just that they were devout Mormon. In an author note at the beginning Westover lists sixteen names she says are aliases. I referred back to that list as I read and found the names of her parents, two brothers, and sister. Others in that list referred to roommates and minor characters. The story opens at the time of the Ruby Ridge incident where federal agents killed members of Randy Weaver’s family. Westover’s father, already declaring schools and modern medicine evil, thinks the agents will come after him and his family next. He makes sure their home in mountainous southeastern Idaho can be self sufficient. Only much later does she figure out her father might be bipolar. So she didn’t go to school. And wasn’t exactly homeschooled either. Sometimes she had access to textbooks and sometimes she didn’t and could only study them when her father didn’t demand her labor elsewhere. That bigger part is that her father is verbally abusive and her mother supports her husband. One older brother is physically abusive and her parents support him over her. Also, when his children work for him around the property he seems amazingly disinterested in safety. Yeah, that gets coupled with his distrust of modern medicine. So a lot of what Westover relates is the effect of all that abuse has on her. She is able to relate what it did to her at the time and also discuss what was really going on when she looks back on it fifteen years later. This isn’t exactly an enjoyable book. It is a very good, important, and worthwhile book. My Sunday viewing (yeah, the new computer was enough together and I needed a break) was the Netflix show Stand Out: An LGBTQ+ Celebration. This is the companion piece to Outstanding: a Comedy Revolution about LGBTQ+ comedian history I watched at the beginning of the month. This one is the actual comedy show the documentary was built around. Stand Out is about a comedy show back in 2022 in which more than two dozen comedians were able to participate. That by itself was groundbreaking. The minor downside is we get to see only 5-6 minutes of each one, though they were very good at making their few minutes count. And some of them only did an introduction to someone else, such as Lily Tomlin introduced Sandra Bernhard. I had hoped for more from Tomlin. My favorites were Tig Notaro, Wanda Sykes, and Sandra Bernhard, with my top favorite being Eddie Izzard who did a marvelous story of dogs protecting an estate (“The assassins are here!” said the dog) and how useless the 160 million years of dinosaurs were. All they did was roar at each other. There were no dinosaur poets. In the midst of my computer update I did read a few articles. In an article for The 19th and posted on Daily Kos, Amanda Becker discussed manhood as portrayed by the two recent political conventions. Walz made menstrual products available in public schools. Other men talked about fertility, pregnancy, abortion, being a caregiver, the challenges women have, and men giving up their careers so their wives could advance. The nasty guy made his entrance to “It’s a Man’s Man’s Man’s World” and there was lots of “demonstrations of physical strength and masculine prowess.” New York Gov. Kathy Hochul told The 19th:

The generation of men who are fathers today, who were raised with mothers who more likely worked than not, who understood that a man had responsibility at home, it’s a 50-50 proposition. The men you saw ... helped raise kids, helped change diapers, helped find child care, helped buy the groceries. “For men to be able to stand up and talk about what it means when a woman is not able to get an abortion to save her life or the life of their child or future children, that's powerful. That hits right here. [She pointed to her heart.]

Ryan Hamilton, a married father in Texas with an infant daughter, said:

When did we kind of muddy the waters as to what it means to be a man? For me, and what I'm noticing at the convention, and it feels really good to see, being a man is standing up for the women that you love in your life, and being an example for your daughter.