John Wayne, Donald Trump, and the American Man

Trip Planner by Expedia.

You were made to outdo your holiday,

your hammocking,

and your pooling.

We were made to help organize the competition.

Expedia, made to travel.

For generations, Hollywood has shaped America's ideas of masculinity.

Decades of boys have grown up wanting to emulate the likes of John Wayne.

But now, with examples of toxic masculinity filling the headlines, have we learned all the wrong things from men on screen?

What have Hollywood's male icons taught us?

And what lessons do we need to unlearn?

This is Radio Atlantic.

Hi.

Welcome to Radio Atlantic.

I'm Matt Thompson, Executive Editor of The Atlantic.

My co-hosts are Alex Wagner in New York, contributing editor.

Hi, Alex.

Hi, Alex.

With me here in D.C.

is Jeffrey Goldberg, editor-in-chief of The Atlantic.

Hi, Jeff.

Hi, Matt.

And today

we are talking again

about men, specifically how Hollywood has defined.

That made Alex laugh for some reason.

I don't even know why that made me definitely.

The season, as they say.

We're talking about men a lot these days.

Today, we're talking about how Hollywood has defined masculinity on screen.

We're starting with two men in particular, John Wayne, who for generations has been synonymous with the phrase man's man, and the movie director who made him into a myth, John Ford.

And today we are also joined by Stephen Metcalf, who wrote a piece for our December 2017 issue with the headline, How John Wayne Became a Hollow Masculine Icon.

Very good piece, by the way.

Very good.

Very good piece.

And hello, Stephen.

Hey, thanks for having me on.

Thank you very much for joining us.

As you can hear, we all enjoyed your piece very much.

I just want to ask for a friend here, though, Stephen.

If you were going to explain it to someone who's never seen a John Wayne movie, could you just describe for me the type of character that John Wayne portrayed in the movies?

Oh, sure.

He ended up portraying a kind of swaggering, shadowlessly confident masculine force, raw masculine force, who fights the bad guys.

Well, take some advice, Pilgrim.

You put that thing up, you'll have to defend it with a gun.

And you ain't exactly the type.

Well, I know those law books mean a lot to you, but not out here.

Out here, a man settles his own problems.

What's interesting to me about that caricature is

how long a period in Hollywood Wayne went before he emerged as

that figure.

It was a long, slow period of creation before he got to that totally familiar icon that virtually every American as a birthright knows today.

That was,

you tell us in the piece about how he sort of starts out and has an unlined face.

He kind of grows into the John Wayne that we all know

and in large part has certain personages to thank for that.

Can you tell us more about that?

Yeah, so he was essentially a kind of prop boy and stunt man and became a real bit player, as bitty as bit players get in Hollywood, as a very young man who'd lost out on a football scholarship at USC when John Ford, the film director John Ford, spotted him and just liked the way he looked.

But Ford, who at that point had made dozens of silent movies and

had not yet started in talkies, but was about to make dozens of sound movies.

He felt that Wayne was somehow unformed and

too boyish, too innocent looking,

too kind of creamy and soft.

And that is not at all what John Ford wanted out of his lead male actor.

You described him as a raw masculine force on screen, which has got to be the best, worst boy band name

candidate in history, RMF.

You reviewed in your piece a book by Nancy Schoenberger, who described Ford's idea of the American hero thusly, quote, he set out to embody a series of mythic figures in his own life, a hard-drinking, feisty Irishman, a take-no-prisoner, successful director, a naval officer, a war hero, a patriot, a man's man.

But Ford had some complexities about that image in real life.

Tell us a little bit about the struggles that John Ford, the director, went through.

Yeah, that's a great question.

I mean, the two things that I learned learned and

really stunned me almost.

First was that, you know, Ford was, I mean, more than instrumental in the creation of Wayne.

I mean,

he really was more important to the creation of the icon John Wayne than Wayne was himself.

And the second really was that it was Ford's cruelty to Wayne, which

really appears to have been unremitting over a period of several decades, that put those lines of experience onto John Wayne's face and converted him from this sort of formless, very sweet in many ways, boy man into this hardened, hyper-masculine figure.

And the really revealing thing, I mean, the takeaway from that Schoenberger book for me as someone who was not predisposed to really enjoy Westerns or Wayne's persona was that Ford was apparently terrified of his own femininity.

He was somewhat small in stature, somewhat mincing in his step.

He hated the idea that anyone would think of him as an artiste or any kind of an aesthete.

And there's a lot of documentary evidence for this.

It was really Ford's ambivalence, is putting it mildly.

One would even possibly say his terror at his own femininity.

And as Schoenberger adduces some evidence for possibly his own homosexuality, that made him compelled really to turn Wayne into not just

a hyper-masculine man, but a man who exhibits absolutely no femininity whatsoever.

You wrote in the piece, quote, Ford was terrified of his own feminine side, so he voiced a longed-for masculinity on Wayne.

A much simpler creature than Ford, Wayne turned this into a cartoon and then went further and politicized it.

Talk about that.

What did Wayne do with his image of men, and how did that reverberate in American culture?

Right.

I mean, so the interesting thing about Wayne is always, you know, well, Ford was, to back up a little bit, Ford was just a tremendous, I mean, you know, I mean, you can't

pile the encomia high enough on John Ford.

He's one of the greatest, and some would argue, some would argue the greatest sort of screen artists this country's ever produced.

And one of the reasons is he, he, from Wayne and from his own Westerns, drew,

you know, an enormous amount of beauty and subtlety where one would least expect it.

The problem was when Wayne departed, you know, sort of moved away from the supervision of Ford and became more of an independent actor in his own right,

tried producing movies and starring in movies that he produced, he moved in the direction away from that subtlety and that artistry in the direction of caricature.

And this linked up with

what were really pretty far-right politics.

I mean, Wayne became a member of the John Birch Society.

He was part of the anti-communist brigade in Hollywood.

And he ended up, unfortunately, I think,

to his, you know, his legacy, which deserves to stand alongside Bogart and Cooper and Stewart and Fondas as truly one of the great

Hollywood leading man legacies.

But

he ended up a complete caricature by the time he was making movies like The Green Berets in 1968.

Is that what you do, sponsor an Inquisition over here?

Is that what you're going to tell the people?

I'm going to tell the people the facts, the facts of what I saw in there.

What you saw in there was nothing.

They don't call brutality nothing.

That man was lining us up for a VC mortar crew.

That's true.

There's still such a thing as due process.

Out here, due process is a bullet.

You know, just sort of

a hard-right, anti-communist, unremittingly unsubtle figure.

Can I just say one word on behalf of enlightened anti-communism for one second?

Thank you very much.

I just don't want to, I don't want to, people think that I'm endorsing the idea that any kind of anti-communism is bad, but I wanted to introduce

the topic of Donald Trump, because that's what we do.

Who?

He's the 45th president of the United States.

I wonder if you could refract something, Stephen,

through the prism of John Wayne.

There's this sometimes superficial judgment made that Donald Trump is acting out as a sort of a macho, toxic male, whatever you want to call it.

But there's something that's extremely un-macho, and

I'm talking about machismo in the John Wayne sense, or more to the point, even in the Gary Cooper sense.

There's nothing stoical about him.

There's nothing

responsible about him.

There's no uncomplaining quality of him.

Could you talk about how Donald Trump might have taken a caricature and made it more of a caricature?

I don't know if you've given this much thought, but I think about it a lot.

Oh, no, I think about it a lot too.

And I think in the same way that there's to, you know, that there's an enlightened anti-communism and an unenlightened one, a barbarous one, There's the capacity to be a man in the best sense, which is to be a mature, fully realized human being, aware of one's social reality and one's debt to it.

And, you know, I think part of what's, and Schoenberger alludes to this explicitly in her book, I mean, there's something called funk, that one could call functional masculinity, where, you know, whatever there is that's supposedly intrinsic to being a man finds its expression in socially productive outlets, whether that's being a soldier or some kind of a worker or a father.

A provider, a defender, something, right?

All of these things.

And

that gives us a socially healthy definition of masculinity.

And when you kick out social purpose from masculinity, you get

this hollow, blustering, other directed, highly unstable and immature masculinity that we're all now kind of living with on a minute-to-minute basis.

Could I reframe my question for you?

It's even simpler this way.

Donald Trump thinks he's macho.

Is Donald Trump Macho?

Is he a real American man by the standards of the non-caricature John Wayne or even better, Gary Cooper?

I mean, I have to think to the degree that there's

a kind of unifying through line to American masculinity that we all, regardless of gender, might be somewhat proud of.

I think it has to do with self-reliance.

And self-reliance is something other than self-help.

And maybe that's a hard distinction to grasp right away, but the best John Wayne heroes were self-reliant.

They didn't depend upon the opinion of others to figure out what the right thing was and then to follow through and do it.

You know, Trump famously was a parishioner in the church of Norman Vincent Peel.

I mean, he's a completely other-directed creature of the religion of self-help.

And that means that he needs approval on a constant basis, which is really the attribute gender aside of a moral child.

Aaron Powell, I was also struck by the fact that a lot of this masculinity is effectively papering over

what the men themselves see as weaknesses, right?

So Ford, as you say, created this hyper-masculine character because he was maybe terrified of his own sexuality.

Wayne became the Ur patriot in part because he was ashamed of never having served in World War II.

You look at Donald Trump and here's someone who never served in Vietnam, which was a line in the sand for his generation and has decided to surround himself with military men and become sort of the face of patriotism or establish this sort of plant a flag in the notion of Wayne, John Wayne's era and style patriotism.

Would you say that that strain of masculinity as it is practiced by character people like John Wayne and to some extent a more bastardized version practiced by Donald Trump is fundamentally about overcoming shortcomings?

Oh, I think absolutely.

And Ford was so interesting on a couple of different...

couple of different ways in that regard.

The first was that he was enormously nostalgic for an Ireland that he had never been to.

I mean, he seemed to imagine Ireland as a place where men could be men, kind of like the old West, which of course he never experienced either.

And so there's this way in which

masculinity, as it starts to become somehow toxic or antisocial, has to do with a longing for being at home in one's own male skin, which is itself dependent upon a landscape in which men are allowed to be men.

But that landscape's entirely mythic, so it expresses itself as nostalgia.

You put your finger exactly on it, too.

You know, Ford found a way to serve, even though he didn't really do it directly.

I mean, he went and made very powerful documentaries in World War II and put himself in physical danger to do it.

You know, Wayne was enormously sensitive on this scale.

When they were making The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, you know, Ford really tore him.

I mean, it was so pitiless.

Jimmy Stewart co-stars in the movie, and Stewart served in World War II as a commander and a fighter pilot and repeatedly put himself in serious danger and was heroic.

I mean, probably along with Cooper, the most heroic of the Hollywood stars who served.

And this was, this just inflamed the sore spot of Wayne.

And Ford

passive, aggressively jibed him about it endlessly

on the set of liberty balance.

And this really, I mean, really the right word is

sadism in a way.

Do you think Trump is tortured by that in the same way?

I mean, do you connect that, his lack of service in Vietnam at all to his obsession with military patriotism?

I mean, it's so different for the boomers than it is for the greatest generation because, you know, there was a social class fault line by and large of dividing those who served from who didn't, which is, of course, not at all characteristic of World War II, sort of universally fought across all social classes and types.

But

I think his insecurity is so

massive that to assign any single cause to it is probably a fallacy.

You know, it seems to come, it seems to, it seems to go all the way back to, I mean, you know, not to be glib, but, you know, toilet draining and edible issues.

I mean, it seems so deep-seated that

it's hard to indicate anything but the deepest and most pervasive cause.

It's probably worth noting at this point, as our producer Kevin Townsend reminds me, in Nancy Schoenberger's book, she mentions, quote, Donald Trump made a pilgrimage to the John Wayne Museum in Winterset, Iowa, Wayne's birthplace, and got one of Wayne's daughters, Aisa, to endorse his candidacy.

She asks, is this simply nostalgia or a deeper yearning for something that's been lost in the last decades of the 20th century?

I was curious how John Wayne's character on screen differed from another Republican president who Americans came to know first on screen, Ronald Reagan.

How was the character that John, the characters that John Wayne came to portray, how did they differ from Reagan's screen presence?

You know, the characteristic thing about Reagan in Hollywood, and it's so interesting in a way, because he never became the star that he wanted to become.

He,

funnily enough, idolized Cooper, desperately wanted to be like Cooper.

I mean, the strong, silent type who carried a picture.

And he was really never that guy.

He was always a secondary player and a kind of A-minus, B-plus star.

But

the odd effect on Reagan, I mean, regardless of what you think of him or where you fall in the political spectrum, everyone who encountered Reagan in the flesh said the same thing about him, especially after the Hollywood years and as he moved into politics, you know, in California and then finally the White House, which is that he was just totally comfortable in his own skin.

He adored the reaction of a crowd without ever needing it or yearning for it in a desperate way.

And on an individual level, he never needed affirmation from the people around him.

There was a serenity to him, which at its worst extreme meant that he was somewhat checked out.

But

people who encountered Reagan, by and large, never

thought they were dealing with someone whose thwarted Hollywood ambition

had made him bitter and had made him grasping.

And I think, by and large, that's a very, very good quality for someone next to the nuclear briefcase to have.

Who do you think is a positive male role model in Hollywood today?

I mean, if John Wayne stood for one thing, Gary Cooper stood for something related.

Who is it who stands for something positive?

I mean,

what's funny is I find how hard these analogies are to draw, right?

So the most traditionally masculine depictions in big screen Hollywood right now, I mean, you sort of have superheroes in the big temple franchises.

You've got anti-heroes in kind of quality streaming TV.

You know, the interesting thing about the superheroes is it's really more about the laundry in a way.

I mean, you know, what five actors have played, or four actors, or whatever it is have played Batman.

You know, several have played now, or two at least have played Spider-Man, and I'm sure more to come.

You know, it's it.

I struggle to come up with a single actor who's so totally

associated with

his own sort of screen image, who's under the age of, let's say, 45, the way that Peck was or Stewart or Fonda or Wayne or something.

So Tom Hanks would be the closest, maybe, but you're not counting that anymore.

Yeah, no, I mean, he's exactly.

I mean, you sort of had that last wave with Hanks and then as kind of the anti-hero type, a slightly older, you have Nicholson.

It's very hard to point to some.

I mean, I'd love to hear names.

I mean, what you do have is you have someone like Channing Tatum, who in one regard is completely traditionally masculine.

He's buff.

He's pumped, right?

You know, he could certainly kick my ass.

But, you know, on the other hand.

Is that our standard now?

Yeah, is that our standard?

Yes.

So on the one hand, he's sort of unequivocally masculine.

On the other hand, he's constantly undermining it and ironizing it, which makes him, I think, enormously sympathetic, but not at all in the paradigm of these sort of golden age

male movie stars.

Christian Christian Bale Christian Bale

well he's a former Batman and was very much he wasn't he didn't undermine his own masculinity and I mean I guess it well the reason I ask the reason I ask this is because I want my son I have two daughters and a son and I want my son to look at Gary Cooper I try to show them black and white movies you know it's not easy

I want to look at Gary Cooper in high noon and say that's a good model of behavior and there are Tom Hanks movies that you would show and say, oh, this is the way you should be.

I just can't, I just can't think of anyone.

I mean, Matt Damon and the Martian.

But, you know, if you're stuck on Mars, grow potatoes.

I don't know.

You know, there's something there.

But

it just, I, the role of Hollywood in today's culture is so different, obviously, that it's maybe impossible to say who was the Gary Cooper.

Yeah, I mean, Clooney, Clooney is not a bad one.

You know, he's not 40 anymore.

But I mean, there's, you know, Matt Damon is not a bad one either.

I mean, they project a certain, you know, decency through strength.

Yeah, but it's, the question is interesting for not being easy to answer.

Yeah.

Stephen Metcalf's a very good piece on John Wayne and masculinity is in the December 2017 issue of The Atlantic.

Stephen Metcalf, thank you very much.

Thanks, Stephen.

Thanks a lot, guys.

It was a total pleasure.

In a moment, we'll be joined by Atlantic staff writer Megan Garber to talk about how Hollywood's idea of men has changed.

Starting a business can seem like a daunting task, unless you have a partner like Shopify.

They have the tools you need to start and grow your business.

From designing a website to marketing to selling and beyond, Shopify can help with everything you need.

There's a reason millions of companies like Mattel, Heinz, and AllBirds continue to trust and use them.

With Shopify on your side, turn your big business idea into

sign up for your $1 per month trial at shopify.com/slash special offer.

Joining us now is at Linux staff writer, Megan Garber, who has been writing for the past several weeks and all time, really,

path-breaking coverage for Infiniti, path-breaking coverage about gender and masculinity and men in this very particular moment.

So glad to have you with us, Megan.

So glad to be with you.

Welcome back.

Welcome back, Megan.

Thank you.

Thank you guys.

Thank you.

So Megan, a few weeks ago, I had this conversation with Chimimanda Adichie, the Nigerian-American writer, and we had an interesting back and forth on some of these subjects.

You're telling boys, you're stunting their ability to express themselves.

You're telling them that to talk about emotion is something to be ashamed of.

And I think a lot has bottled in.

And I really, this is my sort of take, but I think a lot of violence is about that.

It's that men are not allowed to be human.

Men are not allowed to, I mean, you know, sort of it's that boys don't cry thing.

And then you get older and in the relationship, you're expected to always be the strong one, the support.

Sometimes you kind of should be supported too.

But I think it's the way that masculinity is understood.

And there's something about American masculinity in particular.

Yes, there is something about American masculinity, isn't there, Megan?

What is that thing?

What is that thing?

I mean, it's, oh, it's such a good point.

And I, I mean, it's so complicated.

I think,

you know, just these standards for sort of what it means to be a man.

And I will admit I was lurking in on the conversation earlier and listening in.

But, you know, just sort of the John Wayne idea and the Western idea and all these sort of paradigms of what it means to be a man.

And, you know, obviously we have it in both ways.

We have it for all genders.

We have, you know, sort of ideas of what you should be, you know, that you fight against.

But I think for masculinity in particular, there are just so many expectations, economic, sexual, aesthetic.

And so, yeah, it's,

I think, hard not to sort of chafe against a lot of that.

Megan, what do you think the role is for women in constructing a new American masculinity?

You guys, these are hard questions.

That's so colonialist of you.

That's so colonialist, Alex.

30-second answer.

But I just mean,

look, some part of masculinity is written in relief against sort of notions of femininity.

So as we...

We can't have masculinity without femininity.

Yeah.

Well, but we're, I mean, we're at a sort of crisis point in terms of like the relationship between genders.

Yeah.

And

we're redefining femininity in culture writ large.

So I just kind of wonder how you think that informs how we think of masculinity.

Oh, that's such an interesting question.

You know, we have this long-standing paradigm of men as the aggressors, not only in sexual situations, but also in professional and social ones.

And even still in the year 2017, despite all the progress we've made, we still tend to operate under the assumption that it's men who actively pursue and it's women or,

as the case may be, younger and less powerful men who are left in positions to either accept or reject, but they are very much in a passive role.

And you see that general dynamic playing out, not just in sexual situations, but also in our broad and I think deeply embedded sense of what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman, what it means to interact with other people and navigate the world with that knowledge.

So I think if we can get beyond those really basic assumptions about who has the power in a given interaction, that on its own will represent a lot of progress.

And increasingly, it's not just men and women either.

It's a range of different gender identities.

Yes, definitely.

And I'm so glad you brought that up because it feels like, well, you know, we're having this really important conversation about harassment and about sexual abuse and predation.

At the same time, though, that's happening against this broader context of gender fluidity and the idea of sort of men and women,

it's just one thing and the other.

That in itself feels or is starting to feel at least a little bit retrograde.

And we now have, I think, this broader idea of a continuum of gender, of sexuality, of people sort of deciding for themselves what they are in a way that they didn't as much have permission to before.

So that's a great point.

Yeah, absolutely.

Well, thank you.

You're welcome.

I keep going back to the movie Moonlight, of course, which won the Academy Award this year for Best Picture.

Moonlight, which was...

After two seconds of not winning it.

After two seconds of not winning it.

I want to come back to that in a second, actually.

But

so this was a film that was about three different ages of a boy growing into a man and three different ideas of masculinity, three different depictions

of what being a boy and being a man meant or could mean.

And

it was,

I think it was so striking that that movie was juxtaposed

with

with La La Land, with Ryan Gosling.

So he had three different actors playing the role of Chirone at different stages of his life in Moonlight.

And then we had Ryan Gosling playing a classic Hollywood nostalgic

leading man, romantic lead role.

And I think part of the part of the fervor, race was certainly a dimension in why Moonlight had such a constituency, had such a fan fervor.

But part of it was also masculinity, this idea that Moonlight could show us another, could actually wrestle with this problem of men and what they can be, what they should be on screen.

What

that movie would have been better with John Wayne, though, don't you think?

Can I also say what's really what's interesting about those two movies, Matt, to your point, is Moonlight showed us

homosexuality in a completely different way.

Totally.

You had this kind of macho character who was deeply tender.

It was a very nuanced, complicated picture of being a gay man.

And then, you know, you contrast that with a man who's singing and dancing and in other eras and other times would have been seen as the more effeminate character who was the straight man.

Yeah.

And I think both of those movies upturned ideas about masculinity in different ways.

Absolutely.

Megan, are there any depictions of men on screen or men and women interacting on screen that you think have been particularly striking

now for our understanding of this.

Yeah.

I mean, the first one actually that comes to mind is Friday Night Lights and Coach Trust and just sort of the interaction.

Do you guys know them all?

Okay.

Coach T.

Coach T.

Clear Eyes, Full Hearts Can't Lose.

Yes, yes.

And just the respect there, because I, you know, when I'm thinking about these stories and sort of, you know, the instances of harassment that Alex, that you mentioned that we're dealing with right now, and just sort sort of how men and women should be together in a professional context, in a social context, et cetera.

It always just comes back to empathy and sort of, you know, reading the room and, you know, just being respectful of the other person.

Like that is just the fundamental thing.

And I apologize, it's so obvious to say.

And yet, you know, it seems like sometimes that is what is missing.

And what I love about their marriage is it's just so, it's not equal per se, because they are different within it.

And yet it's just, it's so respectful and so empathetic.

Could I ask you this?

There's an expression that people use.

It's maybe somewhat archaic in certain circles, but it's act like a man or be a man.

You just gave me a look.

See, you just gave me a look.

Well, I just, I hate that phrase.

No, no, no, no.

My question is,

can we open up the possibilities?

Can we open up the possibilities of that term and say, I'm sorry to keep coming back to Gary Cooper, but in high noon, that is the, to me, the representation of what American manhood should be.

You know, dutiful, uncomplaining, brave, responsible, empathetic, kind,

non-braggy.

I mean, is there, what's the problem with proposing an ideal for what American manhood should look like?

That might not be a caricature of a John Wayne or a Vin Diesel

or whatever else.

Yeah, well, I just wonder whether it should be for men or just for people in general.

Because I feel those are things I aspire to.

Right.

You know, so that's the hard thing is to sort of say, well, okay, that's ideal, though.

But if you want to go take American men, American boys as they are right now, and if you don't want to degenderize that conversation completely, because it might be ineffective to de-genderize it, that's not actually a word, by the way.

It should be.

It should be a word.

I mean,

is there something that differentiates men from women at all that would allow men to hold something as an ideal that maybe women wouldn't hold it as an ideal?

That's an interesting question.

It really is.

I mean, I feel like in some ways.

Does anybody want to answer it?

We can acknowledge that

fast.

You can't see my finger on my nose right now.

Yeah,

here's part of the thing with that question, though, is

part of this conversation is about the constraints that our depictions of masculinity put on what men can be.

And advancing an ideal, a character, as being this is what manhood or even personhood looks like, it imposes in some ways a constraint on what's possible.

I think that

one of the interesting and striking aspects of the way that our youngest generation, our teenagers and our kids are shaping gender for themselves is that they are advancing a notion that it can be many different things, that there are many different types of ideals, that fundamentally there's a type of confidence in oneself and one's distinctiveness and one's uniqueness that is itself a value and an ideal of a type.

And

I think trying to look to a person on screen to define that for us is almost inherently limiting.

You can see values.

in how people interact in different circumstances.

You can, to Megan's point, identify a moment of empathy of someone being empathetic and say, model that as a behavior.

But model that person as who you want to be is limiting.

So it's wrong that I want to be Captain Jack Sparrow?

That I use him as my role?

No, I mean, I want you to be Captain Jack Sparrow.

You look just like.

Thank God there's no video component of this, as you would see.

Alex, I want to ask you a separate question, which is

when you were thinking about what do you want to show your son to model behavior, to model what type of a person he can be?

What do you look to?

What movie?

Well, that's why I was not so subtly asking Megan what we needed need to do

to make better models of masculinity.

You know, I think when I envision him growing up, I think the most important thing that my husband and I can do is set a really good example of partnership because I think that helps him both understand his role as a man or whatever gender he chooses to identify with

and also understand

women better.

And

the sort of the only the most immediate and first-hand experience he can have in terms of femininity and masculinity is with mom and dad.

So, I mean, I guess that's where I start.

But, you know, I think about, it's weird.

I just keep going back to the Weinstein allegations and the fact that when the first news surfaced about Harvey Weinstein, in the back of my mind, I kept thinking about Miramax, which was, of course, the company that the Weinstein brothers founded, named after their parents, Miriam and Max.

And I think any mother of a son thinks in a moment like that, what must Harvey Weinstein's mother,

what was that relationship like?

I think we often go back to parents.

And, you know, we were talking with Stephen about Donald Trump and he thinks that Donald Trump's sort of like

the imprinting of his masculinity began at a very, very early stage, ostensibly with his parents.

Politico had an article about Donald Trump's mother two weeks ago, and it examines Donald Trump's psychology through the behaviors and occupations of his mother.

So I think to answer your question in a really roundabout way, Matt, it's

the relationship between mothers and fathers and their sons is one place, and then the other is just mother-to-son relations and how you raise a child.

and allow him or nurture him to be, I think, empathetic, but also forgiving of his own faults.

That to me seems like the most toxic part of the masculinity that was on display in the second half of the 20th century is there was no forgiveness of personal shortcomings.

And that, then

that rage and frustration and shame found an outlet elsewhere.

Can we go back to this question of

are there positive but differentiating characteristics between what a man should act like in society and a female should act like in society, a woman should act like in society, or is that all just a construct?

In other words, I want my son to be brave and stoic and empathetic and kind and see the intrinsic value of other humans and be hardy and resilient and self-reliant.

And, and I guess the question is,

those are the things that I want from my daughters too.

So is it, is it all

just made up, Megan?

Alex?

Is it all?

No, I mean, really, is it all just made up?

Well, I think we're talking, Megan, you started talking about how we are looking at gender differently and as much more on a spectrum.

So seeing, you know, masculinity and femininity as

lock boxes, I think, you know, and ascribing different characteristics or ideals to each maybe is going the way of the dodo bird.

It might.

And also, I think it's useful maybe to look at sort of the broader trends as well.

Like just the idea of community is changing so meaningfully right now.

Like in the 20th century, when someone would use the word community, you would usually think about your local place, you know, like your just local institutions, your local government, et cetera.

Now, I think when you think of community, you think of identity.

You think of who you are in sort of a broader sense, you know, and who you've sort of chosen to be versus

who your birthplace made you to be.

And I think that's actually a really profound switch, and it feels very much connected to

all these ideas about gender.

That it is, yeah, it's something that's given to you, certainly, by your body, but it's also something that you choose.

And the interaction between that is what matters.

Megan, do these dudes who are sexually harassing their way out of careers right now, do they think they're acting in

a macho way?

Do they think that they're doing things that American males have license to do and should do?

Anything from, you know, all the way from forcing themselves on women to putting interns in compromising positions, asking them to trade sex for career advancement?

Is this in their own mind some sort of definition of, well, this is what a guy does?

I mean, it's such a good question because I do think that like power and sex and money, et cetera, have been so bound up together in American culture for so long.

I mean, the idea has sort of been like, you know, you earn money so that you can have a nice car, so that you can woo a lady, and all of this stuff.

And it's, you know, a very sort of hetero idea, but it's very much been in our culture and in our, I think, mindset.

And so I don't know about the, obviously, the individual psychology of the harassers, but it does seem like there is like all of those sort of things.

So, male power provides the privilege to go to younger women and say, Well, obviously, you want to be with me because I'm this powerful guy.

Basically, it's sort of like the women are physically attractive and men become attractive, you know, through there is one, there's one aspect of this that is that really strikes me as delusional, these 50, 60, 65-year-old guys who believe themselves to be attractive to 25-year-old women.

I mean, is that some sort of byproduct of,

I can't believe I'm about to say this, but like sort of masculine privilege?

I only say that because I hate using the word privilege because it's jargony, but you know what I'm saying?

No, I know what you mean.

Yeah, no, I think it definitely is,

I would say.

And yeah, it's entitlement.

It's sort of an understanding.

It's sort of your own idea of yourself.

I think.

And I think there's, in a lot of these instances, sort of a combination of outsize egos, you know, and just sort of a, you know, recognition that the system is not going to hold you accountable for any of this.

The guy thinks I'm self-evidently a powerful male because I'm a powerful figure in my job.

And so therefore, my power is the aphrodisiac that should melt your heart and make you want to be with me or something.

Yes.

And I've attained this level of power to begin with because I'm exceptionally talented, good, whatever.

So there's a delusion.

At the core of a lot of this is delusion and narcissism in some kind of weird conversation.

I think so, which is not to exculpate any of it because I think, you know, as I was saying before, I think.

But you're responsible for your own delusions.

right there you go yeah exactly the other thing that comes back to what you were asking before Jeff about exemplars and ideals is that I think one of the ways in which we reinforce a particular and mod mode of behavior among men that turns into toxicity is that men are not given uh examples of women leading that are also

options for them.

We don't say,

you know, I don't want to get all bare naked ladies, what a good boy about it,

I don't even know what that means.

It's a song.

I got it that song from Bare Naked Gender

by the Bare Naked Ladies.

But

there's a presumption that boys should look to men on screen and model that behavior.

The boys should look to men around them and model that behavior.

You know what pisses me off about Hollywood, one of the 94 things that pisses me off, is the way that sitcoms over the last, I don't know what period of time, have made fatherhood into a a mockery.

They've turned fatherhood into a caricature, as a joke, undermining fatherhood as an idea and making it into...

There's a right-wing male critique of this, which I've heard, but you don't have to be on a particular side of the culture wars to see that the fathers, people who are presented as fathers, aren't modeling behavior that you would want your father to model.

It just, it strikes me as an undermining thing.

It doesn't, it strikes me as,

going back to this idea that

models in the culture are useful, and I do think that they are useful, you don't see

fatherhood portrayed in a way that might give a boy a clue about how to behave in a good way.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: And similarly, if there are not best director nominees who are women, for example, then there are not models of behavior that men who are directors can learn from

that are women.

If there are not enough women running shows, if there are not enough women running companies, magazines, models of leadership, and

just one.

We are deprived of a whole range of

examples that we could all be learning from.

And I think that

that's an absence that's a big part of this tragedy.

Let's turn to keepers.

Megan, what do you not want to forget?

Sure.

So I've been needing something just kind of escapist, especially this this week.

The news has been so hard.

And so I've been looking for something just sort of nice and comforting.

So my favorite holiday is Thanksgiving.

I love it so much.

I want to keep my favorite Thanksgiving dish, which is French.

Which is...

Waiting.

No, this is.

Okay, okay.

I want to know this.

This is very important.

Okay.

I want to keep my favorite Thanksgiving dish, which is

green bean casserole.

Oh, Oh, okay.

I thought you were going to say French toast.

Well, so I got ahead of myself because the best part of the green bean casserole is the like French-fried onions on the top.

Do you guys think?

Yeah, yes.

For Minnesotans listening, that she means green bean hot dish.

Record.

No, she doesn't.

So you're prospectively remembering something that you haven't had yet.

Basically, yeah, I'm keeping it from previous years.

So basically, this is, so we, we, in our household, we do lots of variations on the standard Thanksgiving meal.

So we do not actually do turkey because turkey, I think, is nonsense.

And we sort of experiment.

Do you know what turkey thing we do?

I don't care.

But yeah, so we experiment with all the other dishes, but this is like the one Thanksgiving non-negotiable that I will entertain.

And that is the green bean casserole.

It's and the classic kind, by the way.

So like the canned green beans, the canned mushroom soup.

It's got to be really disgusting and turkey stuff.

It's got to have a gray sort of sheen to it.

Yes.

And then, oh, and also you put the onions all over the top.

Some recipes will tell you to just selectively put them around the side, but don't do that.

Just put them all on the top.

Not going to talk about my theory of Midwestern cuisine because Megan's heard it many times.

Jeff, what do you not want to forget?

Well, now it's two things because Megan's talking about Thanksgiving.

She's getting me hungry.

Well, then I have a second one.

No, that's not the rules.

Let's start again.

Megan's just making me hungry.

I was actually going to say High Noon, which is one of my favorite movies.

And it's, I mean, The Searchers, by the way, the John Wayne movie is fantastic.

And there is a complicated male response to trauma.

And there's a really weird at the end.

You wouldn't know this, Matt, because you've never seen a John Wayne movie, because you are a communist.

My cannon is different than yours, white man.

It's a spumper sticker.

He has that on his NPR coat bag.

My cannon is different than yours.

But I love, there are some John Wayne movies.

I love, but I love High Noon because it does, I love it more now because I would rather have presidents who act in the the Gary Cooper manner than act in the current manner.

And so I want to watch that over Thanksgiving, but I want to watch it over Thanksgiving while eating stuffing.

I was just thinking about stuffing because you're talking about French beans or whatever you're talking about.

And I'm carbophobic most of the year.

Like I'm seriously carbophobic, but I just

love stuffing.

I can't wait.

Reserving looks of judgment over there.

I don't need, you know, by the way, I don't even need the turkey.

I don't.

I was going to say, so it's an okay.

Yeah.

I'm not hostile to turkey the way you are.

You have almost a Kurdish attitude toward turkey.

But

I just, I'm just looking forward to stuffing and Gary Cooper.

Awesome.

In that order.

Stuffing, Gary Cooper, green bean hot dish.

Casserole.

And Mike Euphra.

I do love regional differences.

Since we are talking about,

we're talking about men.

and screen depictions.

I watched a documentary this week that was stunning.

And it's called Uncertain.

It's about the town of Uncertain Texas, population 94,

and focuses on three men of different generations, each of whom is

trying to get out of a trap that his life is in, essentially.

It is

a beautiful movie.

It's these bayous of Texas.

It is just fog and water and these majestic sloping trees.

It's dappled sunlight lingering across a field of lily pads.

It's just great to look at.

But it's also, it's a movie unlike almost any I've seen.

It's a nature documentary/slash meditation on regret,

and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Uncertain.

Uncertain Texas.

Go see it.

Alex, what is it that you have heard, seen, watched, listened to, read recently that you do not want to forget?

Well, Matt, I, as you know, and as I talk about ad nauseum, I'm a new mom.

And the kid is largely sleeping through the night, though sometimes he decides to get up at 2 o'clock in the morning and not go back to sleep.

So I'm profoundly exhausted.

And I am...

part of the vanguard of breastfeeding moms, which is to say I'm breastfeeding, which means unfortunately that if you do the math, you combine the pregnancy and the breastfeeding, it means I haven't really gotten very drunk in a very long time.

But every now and again, one is allowed a tipple, if you will.

And I will say my keeper for this week is a fine drink at the end of a long week.

Something that I have come to enjoy in, I will say, an almost anachronistic John Wayneian fashion.

I would imagine that John Wayne retired at the end of the week with a strong drink.

That's a form of old-timey masculinity that this lady is carrying well into the 21st century.

Thank you, and cheers.

Cheers to that.

And with that, that brings us to the end of another Radio Atlantic.

Jeff, my esteemed co-host, Megan, my esteemed colleague, Alex, thank you all so much for joining us.

Thanks, guys.

Thank you.

Thank you, Matt.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Happy Thanksgiving.

See you next week.

That'll do it for this week's Radio Atlantic.

This episode was produced and edited by Kevin Townsend and Diana Douglas with production support from Kim Lau.

Thanks again to our guests, Stephen Metcalf and Megan Garber, and to my esteemed co-host, Jeff Goldberg.

Our theme song, an instantly classic rendition of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, is by the one and only John Batiste.

Got thoughts or stories to share after listening to this episode?

Leave us a voicemail at 202-266-7600 and don't forget your contact info.

That's 202-266-7600.

Check us out at facebook.com slash radioatlantic and theatlantic.com slash radio.

Catch the show notes in the episode description.

And if you like what you're hearing, rate and review us in Apple Podcasts and subscribe in your preferred podcast app.

Most importantly, thank you for listening.

We'll see you next week.