When I was around 5 years old, I skinned my knee on the driveway. My dad came out to attend to my wound and noticed I was desperately trying to hold back tears.
“I can see you want to cry. Why are you fighting it?” he asked.
“I don’t want to get into trouble,” I said.
A few days earlier, I’d thrown a fit when my parents wouldn’t buy me a toy I’d wanted, and I’d been punished for it. I also knew big boys weren’t supposed to cry.
Calmly and deliberately, my dad replied, “No, you don’t understand. If you throw a tantrum, you’ll get in trouble for that. But if you cry because you are hurt or because you are sad, you will never be in trouble with me. It’s OK to cry.”
I’ve never forgotten his words. My dad, the toughest guy I know, doesn’t cry a lot. We took martial arts lessons together, he taught me how to shoot a gun, how to work on cars and a lot of other “manly” things. But the lesson I learned that day was at least as important: it was OK for a man to have emotions and to express them.
I cannot help but think about my dad and several other men in my life, when I read debates concerning the so-called “manosphere” — the online communities for boys and men that promote a certain kind of masculinity.
It is the lack of men like my father that made the existence of a “manosphere” inevitable. But my father, and my grandfathers, made it irrelevant to me.
The men who are at the forefront of the manosphere range from martial arts fighter Andrew Tate to podcaster Joe Rogan to psychologist Jordan Peterson, and many more. Each are coaching men on what it means to be a man today, some in positive ways, others, not so much.
They are thriving in this space because too many men feel as if some aspect of what they were meant to be has been taken from them, or that society has failed to appreciate what they have to offer. New York Times columnist David French has noted that the manosphere arose “in response to a genuine void in many young men’s hearts.”
But noticing there is a void, and being able to fill it in positive ways, are different things. The latter is much harder. Madeleine Kearns, now an editor at The Free Press, wrote perceptively, “As for the masculinity crisis, the solution is as straightforward as it is demanding. Good men must lead by example.”
The answer may be straightforward, but it is not easy to come by. And in that area, I’ve been lucky in ways too many men have not.
Let me cite my namesakes. My grandfathers are Clifford Ray “Papa” Fink and Leo Vernon “Vern” Swimm. I’m named after both.
“Papa” was a man of true strength. He joined the Air Force as a teenager, shortly after Pearl Harbor. He flew 25 missions in a B-17, got shot down and spent a year and a half in a German POW camp. He told my father that near the end of the war, he and several of his fellow prisoners carried an ailing, elderly German guard, who could not finish the walk, from one prison camp to another. It was an act of kindness to an enemy most of us cannot even imagine.
Being a POW wasn’t the only hardship in Papa’s life. His first wife and child died in a car crash. But neither was his impressive military background his only triumph. He later met my grandmother, who was already a mother of four, having escaped an abusive marriage. Papa married her and took care of her, and all her children, for the rest of his life.
My dad, then a teenager, was one of those children, and he had never really known a father’s love before then. That Dad named me Clifford after him tells you everything you really need to know about what kind of man Papa was. To this day, if you say to my dad that Clifford was not his “real” father, he’ll correct you, saying, “No, he was not my biological father. He was my real father.”
My other grandfather, Vern, was a World War II Navy vet, gregarious, loyal, hardworking and honest to a fault. He could be hard on people, holding them to exceptionally high expectations. As a boy, I feared this. But something happened that changed my perception of him.
He’d gotten in a dispute with two of his children, and right before Christmas, he decided to take his new truck and trailer and, along with my grandma, simply leave town. Maybe for good. He’d recently retired.
Before he left, my mom asked him, “Dad, is this the sort of life you want to live? Running away from your family?” His failure to answer was deafening.
But weeks later, a cassette tape came in the mail. I still have it. On this tape, among other things, Vern recalled my mom’s question, and said, “I can be quite serious in saying” that life on the road “is not something I would want to do continuously.”
It might not have been a full-throated apology. But for a proud man like Vern, this was a king climbing down off his throne, and, in the only way he knew how, admitting he was wrong. The effect this had on the mind of the 11-year-old boy I was then cannot be exaggerated.
From what I can tell, while some parts of it are benign or even positive, the manosphere has too much of what has been called toxic masculinity, a combination of swagger, hubris, anger and sometimes misogyny. Such things have nothing to do with being a “real man.”
From the real men in my life, I learned that having emotions, and expressing them honestly, is OK. I learned that toughness is the polar opposite of abusiveness, and that a true man admits when he is wrong. On this Father’s Day, I want to say “thank you” to these great men in my life. They’ve mattered more than I can say. I have no need for an influencer telling me what a “real man” looks like. I already know.
