We Came So Close to a New Model of Masculinity
I’m five years old, and I’m walking down the hill to our neighborhood elementary school, holding tight to my grandfather’s rough and calloused hand. The school is doubling as a polling place, and my grandfa- ther cheerfully greets our neighbors in line. He shows me off proudly; maybe I even speak a little French to entertain the crowd. In our booth, he lifts me up in his strong arms so I can see the ballot. I understand, without being asked, my responsibility: to quietly read aloud the candidate names and proposition descriptions. This is my task, as both a precocious reader and a kid whose adult has a complicated relationship with literacy.
I am entirely and uncomplicatedly happy.
From then on, in every single election, it was my duty to help him vote. This was the first way I provided care for my grandfather, and one of the very last; I mailed his final absentee ballot in 2020, mere weeks before he left us.
Instilling in me the mandate to vote was just one of the endless ways Daddy cared for me. He was not a soft or gentle man; he believed we needed him to be hard and strong, he enjoyed being that way, and the world rewarded him for it. But he was not ashamed to care for me in small, tender ways—the sense memory of him pressing a homemade breakfast sandwich, still hot, into my hands before driving me to my SATs stays with me. He saw no contradiction whatsoever between any hands- on caretaking he was moved to perform and his unshakeable confidence in his own masculinity.
As I sit with this election—and the sinking feeling that I have somehow failed to protect the dreams he expected me to bequeath to my own children—I am, curiously, experiencing vivid flashbacks of my grandfather’s moments of tenderness. Watching the men grinning and sneering in the news these days—rolling out plans to dismantle everything I care about with the breathless anticipation of children writing to a Santa they have just discovered is real—male tenderness and male care feel practically archaic.
For the four months of the Harris campaign, Kamala Harris—and, in particular, Doug Emhoff and Tim Walz—pre- sented a vision of male strength through tenderness and caring as an antidote to what the authoritarian right wing has to offer. Thrillingly, it validated what I had seen in my own life, the decent men I knew who were too busy caring for their families and their communities to police women on the internet. I allowed myself the luxury of a little hope, fantasizing that Americans would be reminded of the decent men in their own lives and endorse that vision of interconnectedness. Millions did. Not nearly enough.
This summer, before the election, I eagerly read two new books about care and gender: When You Care and The Resilience Myth. Both are centered around how we create com- munity around caring for others, what it does for us, and how it strengthens society; both books also touched on how caring and tenderness affect men. Initially, I felt quite drawn to the tone of When You Care. Written by Jewish feminist journalist Elissa Strauss, it grounds a wide-ranging journey through areas rang- ing from neurology to history to spirituality in the specificity of the everyday care of children and adults. Reading When You Care whiplashed me back and forth through decades of my own caregiving, from hazy sense memories of thin wails in the night to the disorienting, lonely moment when I stopped consulting my grandfather about his problems, let alone my own. Among the voices of mothers and female carers, it introduces the nar- ratives of men who have been transformed by the hands-on care of children and adults, sometimes both at the same time. These men—such as a filmmaker caring for his elderly mother, a veteran navigating life as a stay-at-home dad, and Colin Allred (who was the first male member of Congress to publicly take parental leave after his child’s birth)—represent the millions of men who derive great meaning from caregiving.
Watching the DNC in parallel was exciting, as if change was happening in real-time. The men I saw onstage reflected the decency of the men in my own life, who were, in turn, reflected in the books I was reading. A schoolteacher and a loving Jewish dad (both lovingly and derisively called a “wife guy”) were representing fatherhood on the global stage, normalizing male tenderness, humility, and love.
Walz centered his record of creating policies to benefit hungry schoolchildren and expand abortion rights—and spoke passionately about what it is like when people in communities care for one another. Colin Allred told the story of being raised by a hardworking mother and explicitly rejected Trumpian toxic masculinity, calling Trump and Ted Cruz “me-guys” who didn’t understand the value of caring for and about other people. They did this in familiar ways, establishing their American masculin- ity bona fides (former football coach, former NFL player) before speaking about care. Doug Emhoff, however, did something different. He walked onstage and, charmingly, showcased a paradigm of masculinity I rarely see in popular culture: the modern Jewish dad archetype.
I saw it, right away, in Emhoff’s profound silliness. Men, especially fathers, who merge silliness and competence aren’t that common in popular culture. Usually, a father’s silliness soft-
ens his slightly-to-dangerously incompetent care for his children (Phil Dunphy) or serves as a narrative counterweight to lighten rage (Archie Bunker).
But this real-life combination is commonplace in the Jewish community, where humor is a love language (although it can certainly be honed into a weapon). I suppose it is the product of a community that lionizes male achievement while recog- nizing the power in self-aware humor, adoring men who are able to poke fun at themselves and never, ever stop punning. This archetype may include: picking up a kid from Hebrew school, grabbing your hand to pull you into a raucous hora, or getting into a semi-serious argument about whitefish. Some of these traits, off course, teeter on the border of ashkenormative stereotype; and silliness, if it takes the place of the real work of everyday caring, can sour into the weaponized incompetence of the average sitcom dad (see above).
But to me—during the summer of Doug Emhoff—this arche- type presented itself as a viable, alternative type of masculinity: a husband who is confident enough in himself and his achieve- ments to poke fun at himself, and can spend an evening as the most famous “wife guy” in the world, celebrating a wife who remains one of the most powerful women in the world.
I reread both books a few days after the election, and what- ever optimism had fed that exploration of Jewish masculinity was impossible to recapture. While When You Care is funda- mentally optimistic, seeing a steady if painfully slow march towards a world that admits and understands the primacy of care, including the care that men perform, The Resilience Myth (whose author also wrote Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger) now feels prophetic—unhappily so.
Any reader of self-help books, consumer of parenting advice, or casual scroller through Instagram is familiar with the popular conception of resilience. It is based on the concept of “rugged individuality”; people—usually men—survive traumas on their way to unqualified success because they are utterly self-sufficient and emotionally repressed. On a wide-flung intellectual journey, Soraya Chemaly relentlessly tracks this myth through history and across continents, ferreting it out in the rise of book bans, in deregulation that leads to environmental disasters, and, most presciently, in online extremism.
Chemaly’s book presents a picture of America where the toxicity of the resilience myth and its disastrous implications for masculinity make our present moment inevitable. The prognosis she reports on for men is grim: “by 2023, because of a combination of demographics, distorted risk assessment, denialism, and disinformation, having voted for Donald Trump was statistically a risk factor for Covid death.” Men, who voted overwhelmingly for Trump in 2020 and 2024, were and are more likely to contract and die of Covid than women due to multiple factors, one of which may be that resilience myths encourage “rigid adherence to masculine ideals and cognitive inflexibility increased risk-taking behavior, all while actively putting other people at risk.” Chemaly also notes that men who hold themselves apart and don’t ask for help are at increased risk for suicide.
Meanwhile, the boys and young men searching for com- munity online often find it in casually misogynistic podcasts and YouTube channels. Algorithms gradually turn up the tem- perature, showing them more and more extreme content, until they find themselves in formerly shadowy corners of the internet that now feel empowered to come out into the light. Presciently, Chemaly calls these spaces “a serious threat to our political stability.” The masculine energy of the leaders these boys find there, even at its least harmful, swaggers and sneers. These men hate women, grandiosely, contemptuously. They dismiss women out of hand and yet women are never, ever far from their minds. They hate women’s leaky, imperfect bodies, yet they are angry if those bodies are not made available for regulation or sex. They hate women who talk and women who are quiet and, most profoundly, women who are unfettered, free, and enjoying themselves, women who are alight with the joy of being alive.
But, most bizarrely, they hate men, too. These casually sexist denizens of the internet roundly dismissed Doug Emhoff, Colin Allred, Tim Walz. An anti-care philosophy doesn’t just hate women, but also hates men who embrace their crying sons, who rock their newborns in the middle of the night, who are proud of and unthreatened by the women in their lives. And it mocks men who, when they are afforded power and privilege, share it or give it away—even those who wield it to protect others.
What can we do with a movement of men who explicitly reject male tenderness, who demand a return to a time when, they believe, “real men”—hard, strong, cold—enacted their fantasies of domination and control on adoring women?
In some of their most effective passages, both Strauss and Chemaly demonstrate that these fantasies are ahistorical; male-provided care was there all along, reframed or shunted by the wayside to uphold resilience myths that are attractive to people in power. Chemaly helps us rethink explorer Ernest Shackleton’s disastrous arctic voyage; he is consistently held up as an example of resilience due to his control, determination, and self-discipline, but his demonstrated emotional intelligence in creating a close- knit, mutually caring community out of a group of starving men on an ice floe for ten months goes unremarked-upon. Strauss spends an incredibly moving chapter with Charles Darwin, doing a deep dive into the scientist’s character and well-documented passion for hands-on fatherhood. In particular, his care for his daughter Anne, who died at age 10, helped spark and inspire his work about humans and society. He did not understand “survival of the fittest” to be the entire argument of On The Origin of Species; on the contrary, his enduring love for Anne led him to suggest interdependence—in particular, caring for and protecting oth- ers—as an equally important social mandate. Essentially, Darwin rejected the same “resilience” paradigm, based erroneously on his own work, that The Resilience Myth exposes and critiques.
One holiday season, Daddy bought my toddler son a baby doll in a blue onesie. I was both delighted and perplexed; he would have absolutely derided such a thing when he was raising his own sons. My family’s ultimate conclusion, after pondering this separately and together for almost 20 years, is that he heard that boys were playing with dolls these days, and he simply wanted his great-grandson to have everything that was available to him.
As the promise of America continued to open up, he demanded that we claim every freedom we were owed. That meant that a man who was not by any definition a feminist could still push my mother to get her teaching degree, work into his seventies and beyond to help put me through college, and brag about the accomplishments of his granddaughters and great-grandchildren. He even gave his tiny great-grandson a version of masculinity that expanded, just a bit, to include an opportunity to embrace caring.
Is the future my grandfather empowered us to claim slipping through our fingers? Will we have to work to change the world yet again, rebuilding a future our own children visited briefly but will never live in? I feel such grief right now, letting go of a future that the ascendant men of 2025 are doing everything in their power to make sure never comes to pass. It is a future they hate and fear, and they are planning structural barriers as I write.
Strauss’ When You Care highlights care-focused policies that these men are desperate to roll back—but can they roll back change on an individual scale with a stroke of the pen? Chemaly tells us that conventional masculinity leads to “cognitive inflexibility, emotional repression, and interpersonal stress”. Taking us down to the molecular level, Strauss shows us that the experience of parenting disrupts these effects, literally altering men’s brains and bodies; caring for their children decreases men’s testosterone and activates pleasure and motivational systems. On a broader, societal level, men’s parenting habits have already changed over the past 50 years. Between 1965 and 2012, the amount of time per day dads spent caring for their children quadrupled, and, according to Pew Research, nearly 1 in 5 parents are stay-at-home dads.
Some of those dads are creating constructive, supportive communities for themselves, an antidote to the toxicity of main- stream male culture. Strauss visits with the founder of Fathering Together, an organization that builds online and in-person communities for fathers and has the explicit goal of mobilizing dads “to change the political and cultural landscape to become better fathers.” Circles of interconnected care like this—fathers supporting fathers caring for their children—that share infor- mation and provide mutual support are a toolkit marginalized people have used to survive a hostile world. Traditionally, women, women of color, queer women, have grown and suc- cessfully managed these care circles. But more men are opening themselves to these values, growing and nurturing more circles, more communities, joining men who have been doing this work all along. This mutual care, this real resilience, this sustainable masculinity—is how we can—how we will—survive the unfettered rage that seeks to destroy us.
Marcella White Campbell is an essayist and journalist exploring Jewish multicultural identity. Her debut children’s book is set to be published in 2026.
