REAL TALK: I said “feminists.” Some men heard “feminized”

Was it something I said?

The other day, I went on “Morning Joe” and was talking about the right wing’s media ecosystem. The right has built a conversion funnel that takes people from minor irritation and social confusion and pulls them all the way to full-blown radicalization.

What would it look like to build an infrastructure on the political left that could similarly — but, hear me out, with truth and honesty and values of humanity and openness and equality — raise consciousness from relatively low levels of political engagement up through deep commitment?

Specifically, I said we need media to meet men where many of them are, which is in a state of anxiety and between-eras confusion, and move them not toward fascism, which the right is doing, but toward feminism.

Well.

This triggered people. For much of the ensuing weekend, my suggestion that we need more men to be feminists roiled the right. Megyn Kelly did a segment about it. Right-wing sites felt the need to respond to it. And I began to get some very weird emails.

I will spare you the profanity and the attacks. Buried in the bile was something significant and revealing.

When a lot of men listened to me say that we need more men to be feminists, what they heard, apparently, was that I was saying we need more men to be FEMINIZED.

It wasn’t an audio issue. It wasn’t a microphone thing. In some deeper realm, where hearing meets philosophical presuppositions and innermost anxieties, a significant number of men heard the suggestion that more of them become feminists and thought that I was proposing to castrate them, put them on hormone therapy, and change their gender.

It’s preposterous, on one level. But one of my aspirations right now, in the wake of the election, is to try to be curious about what is preposterous.

And so I chatted about it all in the video above with my friend Nastaran Tavakoli-Far, a great journalist and podcast maker and former BBC whiz.

As we chatted, the conversation broadened, getting into so many of the ways in which our visions of progress crash on the shoals of how hard it is to move individual people.

Watch and tell us what you think, as ever.

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