How can we 'raise good men' in this culture?

Hi friends, it has been a pleasure writing to you every week, and hearing stories about your parenting wins and solutions to the roadblocks we all hit as managers of tiny humans. I’m shifting my role in the newsroom, so on November 27, I’ll be handing this letter off to HuffPost editor and mom of two young sons, Kate Auletta.

Kate will be looking at parenting through a bit of a broader lens: how not to raise a jerk. We’ll still help you figure out how to raise a feminist — but also, how to raise kind, empathetic, compassionate, engaged, self-aware doers (read: people who don’t suck). Kate’s letter will be a guide to raising the kind of person you’d like to know.

I’ll see you in your inbox next Monday, and then Kate will take it from there. If you have feedback on this letter, please let us know! We’re always looking to make it better.

xo,
Emily

I Don't Know If I Can Raise A Good Man

I always thought it would be worse to have a girl.

Sexual assault, body image, slut-shaming ― I’ve been reliving the shit show of female adolescence on my therapist’s couch long enough to know what it entails. When I became the mother of a son, I thought I’d dodged a bullet. All I had to do, I figured, was make sure he never raped anybody, and I’d be OK.

These days that seems like a pretty tall order.

It’s a strange moment in the history of gender politics. Triggered by Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long parade of consequence-less sexual predation, women are speaking up about both the giant tragedies and the daily indignities that accompany their existence. Hollywood, and as its rapidly become evident, everywhere else, has a problem with sexual assault and harassment. Women’s rage has become a breathing, tangible creature with teeth large enough men have been forced to take notice. The whole system teeters on its edge like a top as we hold our breath waiting to see whether it will fall or simply settle back into place.

One thing is clear: Masculinity, as an experiment in a world where we care about women and their wellbeing at all, has failed.

It’s an even stranger moment to be raising a son. Amidst all the rage and the pain, we naturally find a sliver of hope in the next generation. “Raise good men,” a chorus has risen. “We’ll teach our sons to be better,” we vow. And then we carefully pick our parenting battles while a gender war rages outside our door.

Of course, we all want to raise feminist sons. I wrote an article a few months ago, detailing the ways I try to do just that. The problem is that lately my efforts are starting to seem like grains of sand against a steady wave-crash of misogyny and rape culture.

In my previous article, I wrote,”In my sweat-soaked, sit-straight-up-in-bed feminist nightmares, I can imagine a future in which my own spawn makes some woman feel as voiceless as the boys in my high school once did, a world in which he blithely argues against the existence of male privilege and shit-talks the latest all-female remake on Twitter.“ Lately, I can imagine it even more clearly.

My first-grade son is sweet, sensitive and loving. When we talk about the fact that there are people in this world who don’t think women are as good as men, just as there are people who will think he is less valuable because of his brown skin, he angrily denounces those people as “the worst.”

And yet, my son loves Power Rangers, “except the pink and the yellow ones.” He scoffs also at the pink Wonder Woman shirt he used to wear before he started school and began picking up gender stereotypes like a communal cold. He seemed to enjoy a dance he was doing at school, until he found out it was ballet, which, he shouted angrily, he doesn’t like.

These may seem like small or harmless stereotypes, but to me they’re clear warning shots about who’s doing the teaching around here, and it isn’t me.

Children never fully belong to their parents. I started losing mine to the world of men years ago. My voice is strong, but what chance does it have against the chorus of voices that are ready to drown me out every time he steps out the front door, or turns on the TV? Being told to “raise a good man” is starting to feel like the devil is telling me to “keep cool” while steadily raising the thermostat in hell.

Worse, when I look around at the adult men I know, I’m not sure exactly what good men I’m supposed to be raising him to be like. Even the men who I love and trust seem tied up in knots about this gender business ― one gets the impression they are constantly fighting against their instincts, carefully choosing their words while I carefully arrange my face to receive them so that we can all feel good about remaining friends. To be intimate with these men is to always be waiting, a little, for the microaggression that may or may not come.

If we gain anything from the sheer magnitude of horrendous stories to come out in the last few weeks, it’s the knowledge that the problems we are now facing are systemic. Parents alone didn’t create Weinstein and his many, many counterparts and parents certainly aren’t what shielded them from consequence for so long.

Ultimately, for my son to become a good man, he needs more than a strong, take-no-shit, feminist mother. He needs to see her values reflected in the media, in advertising, in pop culture, among his friends and at school as well as at home. I’m not giving up ― in fact, I’m thisclose to having a man-to-man real talk moment with a 6-year-old about how he should never masturbate in front of strangers or co-workers ― but there’s a whole screwed-up culture to fix if we want “raising good men” to look like more than fighting a desperate battle for our boys.

This Week's Teachable Moment

"A funny Halloween story: My youngest daughter (5 years old) asked to be Cinderella for Halloween. I told her she had to be someone who could support themselves. The next day she returned to me with "Mom Cinderella is a house cleaner. She buys groceries with her house cleaning business money." I bought a Cinderella costume." -- Ellen Lacey