Combine insecurity with abundant opportunity, the prevailing wisdom goes, and every man’s a cheater … right? For the past two weeks, every day has brought a new article analyzing the seemingly perennial question of why men cheat. The sad saga of Anthony Weiner serves as the latest catalyst for all this punditry. Blame it on […]
There’s something that still fascinates people about the Playboy mansion and Hugh Hefner. Despite the magazine’s falling circulation numbers (which, with an internet is full of free porn, seems like a forgone conclusion) and rumors about the mansion being sold to pay off Playboy’s debts, coverage of the goings-on of Hefner and his buxom blondes […]
American ideas about “real men” are contradictory and impossible to live up to. So stop trying! You’ve almost certainly heard feminist rants about impossible cultural ideals of femininity: how standards of femininity are so narrow and rigid they’re literally unattainable; how, to avoid being seen as unfeminine, women are expected to navigate an increasingly narrow […]
Eighteen months ago I looked at my husband and said, “I have an idea. What if I return to the United States with our children and start over while you stay here in New Zealand and do what you feel you have to do?” He asked, “Are you okay with that?” I replied, “I am. […]
When do you start to feel like a father? For Brian Gresko, it was during a solo visit to the NICU after a traumatic delivery. In the movie The Matrix, Morpheus tries to convince Neo that he has the power to manipulate the “reality” of their computer-simulated world. “There’s a difference between knowing the path and […]
This article originally appeared on Hypervocal. Who teaches men to be men? I was recently thinking about this question when I stumbled upon a brilliantly funny article by Tom Chiarella in this week’s Esquire called What is a Man? In the article, Tom writes about the time he decided to strip himself of behaviors associated with being a […]
I’m not judging individual politicians. I’m judging a trend. Clinton. Sanford. Lee. Ensign. Vitter. Straus-Kahn. Weiner. Example after example of men in power not just cheating but abusing their powerful positions in sexual relationships with structurally less-powerful women — and then trading on their trust and credibility with the public to try and cover up […]
1. I’m unsure why, but I get asked—quite often—about the hardest part of being a father. The people who ask me this are almost all younger cats who are about to become fathers or are there already. That question is a Pandora’s Box. Being a father is hard in a million different ways: Balancing fatherhood […]
This week, the press is abuzz with the news of the latest celebrity wedding, in which a beautiful commoner comes into the spotlight to marry a charming man from a large, powerful family. I’m talking, of course, about Bella Swan and Edward Cullen, the main characters in this fall’s new Twilight film, Breaking Dawn. Although […]
“I am so bored with that question,” the woman told my wife, M, who had just asked her how they structured their family life so that she could go back to school with three kids. M wanted to know, What was their model? “We used to talk about that all the time,” the woman added. […]
Last week, in one of the highlights of my year (and okay, life), I was honored to sit down in a small group of New York-based writers over lattes and lemon pancakes, along with Anna Quindlen. She is only one of my all-time favorite writers, and possibly yours too, if you’re a parent who writes. […]
There is a seismic shift afoot that affects all aspects of what it means to be a man or a woman. Census data reveal part of the story: Women have been outpacing men in bachelor’s degrees since 1996 and, for the first time, more women now have advanced degrees than men, too. Women now make […]
