Trending Discourse
On soft daddy energy + "you're not my real dad" energy
We’re not really in the business of “trending discourse” over here, but there’s a couple cultural bees in my bonnet this week, so we’re gonna hit them both.
Performative males.
I fucking hate this joke, and the sooner this internet trend blows over, the better.
The idea of straight men feigning sensitivity in order to appeal to women is a longstanding, recycled bit. There was a men’s group at my preppy New England college that, despite their seemingly genuine dedication to interrogating masculinity over pizzas in dorm rec rooms, to me seemed like a great way to cruise for pussy. I mean, surely they couldn’t be serious about this gender equality stuff, am i right?!
A “performative male” is a wolf in sheep’s clothing, a lout masquerading as a culturally evolved intellectual and humanist. Reading Sylvia Plath, wearing nail polish, and experiencing a full spectrum of human emotion is apparently just a façade to adopt for fuckability’s sake. Underneath, we are meant to understand, is the face of the “true” masculine, a socially stunted, beer-swilling, cargo short’ed bridge troll.
Listen, if we’re being honest, I’m here for the show. If it’s a performance? Then let’s go, boys, make your run for that Emmy. There’s a storied history to the art of intellectual poseurdom. Cultural pretension as a currency for sexual exchange is a cornerstone of liberal elite dating customs,1 and it’s not just for the boys.
Haven’t I myself pretended to enjoy highly experimental, honk-squeak performances on MULTIPLE occasions while pursuing Jazz GuysTM? Have I not entertained dubiously Marxist ramblings from hot communists? Haven’t I pretended, at the queer wine bar, to have read Audre Lorde2? Whether it got me laid is… besides the point.
Meanwhile, I would like to propose that this form of masculinity, rather than being simply performed, should instead be formally mandated. In my cultural dictatorship, men will not be permitted to wear shorts with an inseam of greater than five inches.
(All men will also be required by law to study tap dance).
Furthermore, the pinnacle male rite of passage will involve the Hillary Duff musical canon, and synchronized choreography with 25 of your dugout bros.
Now, let’s give it up (in every sense of the phrase) for nontoxic masculinity!
NPEs in the New Yorker
This one’s a deeper cut, but landed up being surprise Emergency Contacts fodder. NPE, per this article, is a colloquial acronym meaning Not Parent Expected – basically describing the phenomenon of taking a fun, at-home genetics test and discovering the fun, at-home fact that your Dad isn’t your father.
There is a rich cottage industry of podcasts, content creators, and for-profit enterprises surrounding the article’s estimated 2 million (?!) Americans who have taken a genealogy test and found themselves to be in the NPE gang. That’s not even the folks – including at least 3 people that I know in real life – who have discovered a previously unknown sibling. [Let’s also leave aside the fact that we’ve inadvertently made an at-home test for female fidelity, and created a wellspring of rage against deceitful mothers. There’s no at-home swab test that proves that your dad is a trifling ho, but we’re not ready for that conversation.]
The rallying cries around NPEs largely fall into the somewhat icky idea of genetic determinance: you are who you are related to by blood, not who you were raised by, and everyone has an inalienable right to this knowledge. On some level, this speaks to the common teenage fantasy that all our troubles would be commuted if we suddenly were revealed as the heir to the throne of Genovia. Some argue that birth certificates should be legally required to bear the identity of any donors, surrogates, or side pieces involved. Some even advocate for mandatory paternity testing for every baby. This rigid definition of family, and identity, should be troubling to many of us – for biological, legal, and philosophical reasons.
As Andrew and I have been frequently reminded in our own parenting journey, there is a marital, or at least sexual, assumption of parentage in the eyes of the law.3 If you are married – or willing to legally aver that you’ve banged (literally sign a separate form attesting to “natural sexual intercourse”) – then parentage is to be assumed. Same-sex parents, if married, enjoy a similar privilege at least in terms of birth certificates [which aren’t always an ironclad establishment of parentage].
The hospital registrar’s paperwork that Andrew and I completed upon our child’s birth technically encouraged us to imply he was conceived through “natural sex,” in order to establish parentage without requiring a court date4 (I mean, who’s to define what “natural” sexual intercourse is, anyway??). We are again dealing with that same legal/medical confusion now, as we work through some future planning with our never-used cryopreserved embryos from 2020.
There’s been a slapstick, “who’s on first” routine of trying to determine whether Andrew and I are, as the medical paperwork explicitly indicates: “sexually intimate partners.” Absent that designation of intimacy, the office is now trying to chase down the nonexistent documentation of our legal separation, divorce proceedings, or separate physical addresses in order to sign off on release of the embryos. You might be tempted to think people are stymied by the removal of marriage from parenthood, but I’m starting to think it’s really about the removal of sex.
It is this same sexual propriety and policing that comes to play for these genetic surprise-reveals – people’s concern with their parents’ sexual purity seems to be one of the primary components of these discoveries. Ironically, expansive definitions of family seem to have little space in the orthodoxy of the NPE movement.
The reaction to the (legitimate!!) discomfort and pain of unearthing a parentage secret, is to muscle straight towards codifying genetic relationships as a universal definition of family ties — disregarding the reality of the non-nuclear, the nontraditional, the LGBTQ, and anyone5 who chooses their family outside the basis of marriage …and, when it gets down to it, sex.
Bad Ideas
I’ll leave you with something light. I’ve been revisiting some old journals for a project, and one of the funniest things is finding my running list of “brilliant ideas” which, like all such lists, is mostly duds.
Here’s one of my favorite worst ideas from the writing-inspo vault:
“Genre: Musical (theatre or TV show): An MTA worker with a rich fantasy life who dreams of musical transcendence – each of the trains has a different character/musical genre/storyline: A=jazz; L=indie pop; J=industrial”
Share a bad idea of your own, and/or what musical genre would your local train/bus line would be…?
Not that I identify as liberal elite, but “Socialist-leaning Medicaid recipient” doesn’t roll off the tongue either.
It’s on my list, okay?! For the last twenty years…
You can learn more about the legal backstory in Season 1, Ep6 of our podcast, “The Business (and Law) of Babymaking”
The birth backstory is detailed in Season 2, E1: “One Year of Platonic CoParenting”, and the initial embryo freeze way back in S1, E3: “The Big Chill”
I will take a moment to note that i’ve left adoptive families out of this – a close friend is a transracial, international adoptee, and recently experienced meeting her birth family. She has shared with me some of the complex discourse in the adoptee community around parentage, including questioning the ethics of adoption existing at all. That is not my story to tell (though i’d welcome a guest essay from her any time!)
Bump the weekly jams:
I really appreciated your take on the New Yorker piece, which has caused a real backlash in the “genetic identity” community. I totally agree that these anxieties are more about the separation of sex from parenting than marriage. It’s interesting that these communities are trying to ensure that all genetic relationships have corresponding social relationships, as it’s so contrary to feminist and reproductive justice frameworks that depended on seeing procreation and parenting as separate/separable.
I co-wrote this on a similar topic ages ago, if you’re interested!
https://reallifemag.com/the-parent-trap/
As the child of a transracial international adoptee, I was about to comment that there is something to be said for honesty and knowledge about genetic parentage before I saw your note at the end. But you make a good point that we could acknowledge it without reifying it over other types of kinship.