David McElroy

making sense of a dysfunctional culture

I’ve always done my best work when I’m allowed to fix things

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I was hired to fix the Bolivar Commercial. I was a brash 24-year-old managing editor brought in to shake up a very bad small daily newspaper in Cleveland, Miss. I made some enemies in the building, but I fixed that newspaper, at least for the time.

Nobody in the newspaper was happy to have an outsider come in and change what they had been doing for years. The head of the composing department hated me, because he had been accustomed to telling editors that the things they wanted couldn’t be done.

I called his bluff and used his own equipment to show his people how to do what I wanted. He seethed with anger, because he didn’t want things to change. But he knew he had lost when I shot a film positive and stripped it into a page negative and double-burned a plate to produce the reversed caption I wanted on my first day there. He hated me — and he was angry the entire time I was there — but he didn’t lie again about what couldn’t be done.

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Quit using the word ‘masculinity’
if you really mean ‘abusive jerks’

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If the marketing folks at Gillette thought their customers wanted a condescending lecture about other men’s sins, they were badly mistaken.

For years, there has been a growing tendency in this culture to treat masculinity as a terrible thing. Some people would be a lot happier if all men were passive wimps. They don’t want us to be competitive. They don’t want us to have strong drives. They want us to be the losers who have become the butt of jokes in bad movies.

These culture warriors have taken the very worst possible behavior of certain men and conflated that with a form of masculinity. Lately, their campaign has started calling that sort of behavior “toxic masculinity” — as though masculinity had anything to do with it.

For those of us who have despised jerks and tried to stand up to them all our lives, this is insulting. A jerk or abuser might or might not be masculine. More emotionally healthy men might or might not be masculine. There is no connection between masculinity and toxic behavior.

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How did memory get it wrong? Why did I edit truth about her?

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I was absolutely certain that I remembered what happened. It was eight years ago, but it was important enough to me that I had a clear picture in my mind of what was said — and what wasn’t said.

But now I’m confused. My head is spinning just a bit, to be honest. But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let me tell you the story.

Almost 16 years ago, I met a woman who I was crazy about, but nothing came of it at the time. About six years later, we reconnected on Facebook, but she was dating somebody else by then. It seemed serious, so I didn’t express any interest. Still, she took my breath away every time I paid attention to her. She was beautiful and smart and lots of other things that mattered to me.

Eventually, I noticed that her relationship with the other guy seemed to have ended. Every mention of him and every photo of him disappeared. But I hesitated. How in the world could I say, “I’m crazy about you; would you let me get to know you better?”

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