I don't find masculinity super helpful for me as a concept that like guides my conduct.

It's useful in helping me understand my personal history and why I have the self-expectations

I do, why I have some of the blind spots that I do.

But when Josh Holley comes out with a book saying, we need to restore the honor of men.

It's an evasion of the real question.

Yeah, I think we need to try being grown-ups, starting with him.

I was thinking preparing for this when Sam asked me kind of what it means to me to be a man.

I just don't think in those terms much anymore.

And I think especially being gay, like there was a period of my life where I was so intensely

self-scrutinizing, precisely as a man, not wanting to be found out, being closeted,

the kind of anxieties that came with that, I got to a point where I just was exhausted

by all that, and I just stopped caring.

And so there's a way in which, of course, I am a man.

And what it means for me to be a grown-up and maybe a protector in some way might be mediated

through that.

But it's just not like the categories I think through when I engage in introspection

and try to think about what it means to be a good person.

I don't really drag masculinity in those categories into it that much, at least not explicitly

and consciously.

It's kind of like, in some instances, it seems like what Freud is saying is that you

need to learn to free associate in order to do analysis, and in some, it seems like

what he's saying is that once you can free associate, the analysis is over.

...