Real Men Aren't Afraid of the Barbie Movie

 I haven’t seen Barbie yet, but I have listened to a bunch of dumb motherfuckers tell everybody what men are supposed to do all my life. And just so we’re clear, y’all are the problem.  

The Barbie movie isn’t some Zionist plot to destroy manhood, because the truth is, manhood, as defined by the low IQ set, needs to be destroyed. If you listen to them, around every corner, someone’s trying to make men soft, or gay, or trans, or whatever it is “real men” are afraid of this week. And let me tell you, “real men” are about the most fear-filled and insecure people walking the planet.

“Real men” think that you can be made to become something you’re not, contrary to the way brains work, and because they think that, their biggest fear is someone changing them from a “real man” to something that they think is less than a real man. That’s why they go around saying silly shit like, “there’s a gay agenda to put gay shit on TV, so the youth will turn gay.” A dumb motherfucker thinks that shit sounds true, but if you really think that all it takes to become gay is season four of “Modern Family,” then there shouldn’t have been any gay people before Little Richard got on TV.  

“And how did Little Richard become gay?” you might ask. This is how much dumb shit you have to believe in order to buy any of this. They would tell you that all gay people were raped by other gay people, and that’s how they became gay. Because, you know, they’re like vampires. So who was the first gay person? “The Jews.” The universal answer for everything stupid in this world. A shadowy cabal of Jewish people created gay people to destabilize the solidarity between our people by making men soft.  

Now, the last two paragraphs is just bullshit that I've picked up over the years from “real men.” These are the lengths that they would go through to explain their worldview. For them, it is easier to explain the existence of gay people like that rather than accept that homosexuality is a naturally occurring and non-damaging phenomenon, and you can’t be turned gay by eating a banana head-on or watching RuPaul’s Drag Race. It’s a biological imperative, not an infection. 

But that’s what “real manhood” has done to us. It has made men into ridiculous creatures that fear that threats to our manhood (and most importantly, our bootyholes) are hiding around every corner.  

For me, manhood has nothing to do with that. For me, manhood has always meant being responsible, doing what needs to be done, and taking care of those around you. That’s the example that’s always been set for me, even if it was never explicitly communicated. My dad got up and went to work every day, and provided for us. He got out there and cut grass and raked leaves, and fixed things around the house. My dad was strong, and did what needed to be done, whether he wanted to or not. No excuses.  

That’s not to say that my mom never did that, but as a boy, I patterned myself on my dad. I wanted to do what he did. So when it was time for me to take care of myself, that's the example that I followed, for the most part. All those lessons didn’t take, because i always hated cutting the grass and I still can’t work on a car, but the lesson that did take was, “If it’s gotta get done, then you gotta do it, because you’re the man.” And that’s why I took my toilet apart last month.  MANHOOD. 

My dad never said stupid shit like, “boy, you have to eat your bananas sideways.” My dad never told me, “you can’t play with dolls, because that’ll make you feminine.” “You can’t watch shows that are too feminine, because that’s for girls.” And I don’t think that’s because my dad was particularly enlightened. My dad’s not a feminist, and my dad has had some ideas about things that I didn’t agree with, but I think my dad understands that in the grand scheme of things that people are who they are, and them being who they are doesn’t hurt anybody. I have other family members who are not so enlightened.

 

I get it, watching a person transition into a different gender might be a jarring experience, and learning new pronouns is fucking confusing. I’m in my 40s, “they/them” will always be plural to me. Please forgive my neanderthal brain. But what “real men” need to understand is that it isn’t about you. They’re not doing these things for your approval or acceptance and those things are not required. Who the fuck are you?

 

People are doing what they need to do to feel secure and confident in themselves, and it doesn’t matter how anyone else feels about it. If they have to wear these shoes, those shoes need to be comfortable, and if it takes puberty blocking medication to make those shoes comfortable, then so be it. And if it makes you uncomfortable to see them like that, then you need to sit with yourself and figure out why that is. But the answer is not lashing out at them because you’re afraid of what their transition means for you. It doesn’t mean anything for you. And part of being a “real man” is letting people be who they are, and loving them anyway. Give guidance when it’s needed, but only soft men think that everyone has to conform to their standard.

 

Look at all these men in religion or politics who are trying to control what you can read or who can have abortions or what you can wear or how your hair is styled or any number of things that are all personal decisions, and tell me you don’t see a weak man behind it. Donald Trump, or Ron DeSantis, or Greg Locke, or Lindsay Graham, or Mike Pence, or Sean Hannity, or Tucker Carlson, spend all this time trying to project strength, because they want to you to thing they’re “real men,” (and in the case of one of them, he hasn’t come out yet) but the things they want you to be afraid of aren’t actually threats. If you’re secure in yourself, all you see is a bunch of scared little boys, raging against a world of progress that they can’t control. 

Treating a gay or trans person like a person doesn’t reduce me, it empowers them. A “real man” should understand that. And a “real man” should want to support the people around them who are in those vulnerable positions. The world is hard enough for them, you want them to feel alone and unprotected around you, too? You want them to be miserable dimming their own light to make your insecure ass feel more comfortable? That’s not what “real men” do.  

So when you’re watching the Barbie movie (something I plan on doing at some point), and (allegedly spoilers, I don’t know, I haven’t seen it yet), when you get to the part where Ken is freed from “the patriarchy,” it isn’t a threat to your manhood. That’s just fear talking. We’ve let those scared voices to define what we are for centuries, and that has done nothing but limit us and hurt us. Women are out here enjoying themselves, and we can’t even smile in pictures, because we think being a man is “being hard.”  

Take the message as it’s intended: That you don’t have to worry about phallic foods turning you gay. That boys can play with cooking playsets. That men can wear pink. That manhood isn’t something that can be taken from you or defined by someone else. You are a man, even if you sing the woman parts on your favorite songs, or if you like to go to brunch, or if you don’t like changing your own oil. We can get manicures and pedicures. We can have a skin regimen. We can fucking cry. We can be whatever we want to be, however we want to be it.  

That’s what real men do.

Did Ellie Kemper really need to apologize?

I get it when people apologize for things they said when they were teenagers. I don't necessarily agree, because if you think back to when you were a teenager, there's probably no end to the regrettable positions you took.  Taking regrettable positions is part of that idealistic and hormone-driven period of our lives, because we don't know shit, but because we're exposed to a larger world, we think we do.  Like, there was a time in my life where I thought that I was helping by suggesting that gay people settle for civil unions instead of pushing for marriage. Not because I didn't want to see gay people get married, because I did, but because a:) I didn't understand the depth of the problem, and b:) I thought that civil unions and marriage were kinda the same thing. I was so wrong, and luckily, no one read that blog. Shit, I thought I was solving problems here.  And I was in my mid-20s when I did that.

So teenagers getting wild online, while hurtful and wrong, shouldn't be held against a person when they're in their 30s, and that's what y'all are out here doing.  I don't think people should be losing their jobs over shit like that, especially when their lives after that moment tend to be a direct repudiation of the things they said as teenagers.  People grow up, they leave home, they have new life experiences, and they develop a different outlook.  The problem is, this generation has a permanent record of all of the wrong stuff they said, and it's called "Twitter." 

None of that applies to Ellie Kemper (so far, although I'm sure you've all dug into her social media history by now).  She didn't say or do anything racist, she just hung out with them, mostly because she grew up around a lot of racists. So now we're attacking people for their childhood proximity to racists? I'm from Biloxi, MS. You know how many people I grew up around turned out to be racist?

I guess it's newsworthy, in a "wow, that's fucked up," kind of way, but to attack her over it or to turn against her or to suggest that she needed to apologize in the way that she did is kind of ridiculous.  She acknowledged white privilege and said she was sorry, and no one's lives were changed by this. No one was hurt by her being honored in a Klan pageant, either.

Was anybody out there rocked to their core by this stunning revelation? Does anybody look at her differently or feel a sudden surge of energy to organize a boycott of "The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt?" No, because that would be silly.  This is something she grew up involved with, and she should be allowed some measure of grace as a result.  She even said that ignorance isn't an excuse, but it kind of is.  That's the kind of thing that's said for speeding tickets or capital offenses.  You can't be expected to know the history of every organization you're dealing with when you're 19.  We hear every day when people tell stories that they didn't know they were poor growing up, and we're like, "Yeah, I get it," even though it's plainly obvious to an adult.  I'm not comparing poverty to racism, but I am making the point that your awareness of the environment around you isn't complete and total when you're a teenager, especially when she was 19. She was 19 in the days before everybody had internet.  There was no Wikipedia entry for her to stumble across in 1999.

Point is, you have blind spots to the things that you think are normal.  We see this all the time, especially with white people (sorry, white people, but I have to address the fact that you are physically white right now).  It isn't that white people aren't aware of the existence of racism, it's that the actual racism happening around them doesn't match with what they were taught racism was. Which is why, unless they see actual Klan robes, or hear the n-word, they don't think it's racist.  It's the same thing here.  

Some stuff is pretty clear when you're 19. "Hey, my dad's an alcoholic."  "Hey, my mom is verbally abusive."  But even things like that aren't so obvious when it's part of the culture of your environment and you think everybody does it.  I know people who think verbal abuse is normal, because it was normal where they came from.  So in a society where some politicians want slavery removed from textbooks, or think that Confederate generals should be honored; in a society that routinely attempts to make Jim Crow politics seem as benevolent as possible, you think some 19 year old kid from Missouri or wherever the fuck, is going to be compelled to investigate the history of some group that holds a debutante ball?  Why would she have thought there was anything wrong with that group?  It's a group of people she grew up around that were asking her to put on a dress and parade around a ballroom.  They weren't asking her to visit a compound in the woods to make napalm for the movement.  Nothing about that would elicit suspicion from a teenager, unless that teenager is Encyclopedia Brown.

Look, I don't know Ellie Kemper, I don't watch her show, I remember her from the latter days of "The Office," when it wasn't as good, but the show was part of my routine and I was powerless to break it.  This is not me caping up for her. This is me saying that the idea that she needed to apologize is ridiculous.  We have a real problem with not understanding that people aren't permanently who they were when they were kids.  We all have questionable things in our history.  The question is, are you acting on those questionable things as an adult.  If you're are, then you should have plenty of ammo in your present that can be used against you, and if you're not, then good job learning and growing.  But holding the acts of a child against an adult is petty and counterproductive, because if you have no space to learn and grow from the most tumultuous stage of development in your life, then why even bother with learning and growing?