I’m writing this on International Women’s Day, which feels fitting since last night, Book Therapy Project discussed The Bluestockings: A History of the First Women’s Movement. It seems fitting to still be thinking about those women today and how we can continue the fight for equality and liberation for all.
The Bluestockings showed us a glimpse of the phenomenal women who pushed back, gently and sometimes obsequiously, against the patriarchy. By insisting on creating space in their lives to read, think and gather at salons, they helped create a new world for women, but one that wouldn’t come for generations. Indeed, it was striking to me how much of our conversation related the bluestockings’ experiences to our own today.
It might seem odd, then, to jump from a book about 18th century learned women to “a roadmap for a 21st-century definition of manhood”, but it is actually a perfect counterpoint. I think a lot about masculinity these days and even more so since the second election of Trump. I think of the way he and Vance dismissed and castigated Zelensky. Is this how men are supposed to act? Is this how boys are meant to be raised?
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Surely not, is what I hope reasonable people would think. So what to do then? Enter The New Masculinity: A Roadmap for a 21st-Century Definition of Manhood by Alex Manley (they/them). Published in 2023, The New Masculinity is a guide book of sorts for boys and men, with 13 chapters devoted to things men don’t do.
In each chapter, Manley makes a case for doing each and every one of these things, because as they write, “only once you’ve gotten comfortable doing the things men don’t can you start being someone who’s not hemmed in and hampered by .. narrow, fragile masculinity”.
But this book applies to more than just boys and men. Just as people other than women can be feminists, anyone can absorb and perpetuate the toxic traits of traditional masculinity (think of the ways the bluestockings were often the architects of their own oppression).
The book is short – just ~250 pages – with large font and footnotes that sometimes take up half a page, so the actual content is even shorter. It’s also conversational and informal, and easy to read. You can easily get through this in a weekend.
I hope you’ll join me for what should be a spirited and lively conversation around all the ways men are expected to show up in the world, and how we can subvert that expectation.
The Details:
Book: The New Masculinity: A Roadmap for a 21st-Century Definition of Manhood by Alex Manley
Podcast: On Boys: The New Masculinity
Date: Wednesday, April 2
Time: 6pm food and mingling, 7:30pm discussion
Where: Email for details
Food: Will be provided, always vegetarian
Drink: BYOB
RSVP by email by Sunday, Mar 2.