On men wanting issues

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Housekeeping notes: Paid subscribers, I am sorry that you did not get the essay on The Cremator I promised you this Monday. You will get it this coming Monday! 

Paid subscribers to this newsletter also get the premium version of The Political Cycle, a weekly podcast I co-host on politics in the US, UK, India—and the wider world.

With that! Onto news, views, and Jews. 

THE NEWS

• I’m quoted in this Vanity Fair piece that looks at why “George Soros’s foundations are supporting Compact, a publication that’s flirted with authoritarianism” (that’s not my quote).

• This week on the podcast, we talked about the discourse around motherhood and womanhood in this year’s presidential election with special guest Kelly Weill of Mom Left.

• For some counter-programming, I recommend this VSquare piece on how Central Eastern Europe’s biggest oil company’s promise to go green is full of leaky, oily holes.

MY VIEWS ON…

…”men’s issues” in the election!

If you listen to our podcast, you’ll recognize some of this, but: Kamala Harris is having trouble in the polls with voters who are — how to put this? — men. Donald Trump, who recently told a story about how well endowed, genitally, Arnold Palmer was, is performing better with men. Some have responded by asking how much of this is because of intangible (and, in some cases, very tangible) sexism, while others have taken to asking why Democrats haven’t done more to speak to men, specifically. 

I am confused by how talking about the economy, healthcare, education, etc. is not addressing men, but that’s another newsletter for another time. In this one, I would most like to ask why policies that benefit both men and women are considered to be women’s issues, as if they are special enticements for women and women alone. 

Almost every straight man I know has benefitted from birth control. Planned Parenthood offers STD testing for men, too. Abortion, which is, among other things, an economic issue, impacts men, too. Thirty to 40 percent of infertility cases involve male factor infertility, so let us not pretend that IVF is some great gift just for women. And it’s, of course, not only straight, cisgender couples that use fertility treatments: I know gay couples, for example, who used IVF to expand their families. 

And so when, for example, a Politico op-Ed offers that “There is a new Gender Policy Council in the White House, but it has not addressed a single issue facing boys or men,” I am confused, as that council’s national strategy includes a section called “Protect, Improve, and Expand Access to Health Care, including Sexual and Reproductive Health Care.” Did I miss something? Are those not issues facing men and boys? They don’t have sexual and reproductive health that needs to be cared for? (Leaving aside that I would hope that something like “maternal mortality” is an issue concerning men, too, as at least some of them have wives, partners, daughters, and mothers whom they would like to see live through childbirth.) 

What we’re talking about as “women’s issues” aren’t actually women’s issues at all. Even if men can’t care about these issues out of concern for women because we’re full people who deserve healthcare, they should care about them because they’re also men’s issues. It’s not just genuinely offensive to pretend otherwise. It’s also factually incorrect. 

AND SOME STUFF ABOUT JEWS

• If you’re in New York, please join me next Tuesday for this LBI event on Jewish identities in the early 20th century in Germany and in the United States today. 

• In the New York Times, Marc Tracy has a report on Holocaust survivors’ grandchildren and how they’re trying to make art and meaning from their family members’ experiences.

• From JTA: “An array of liberal-leaning Jewish groups, including the rabbinic associations of American Judaism’s two largest denominations, joined 500 Jewish clergy in calling out “an election season defined by xenophobia, fear, and lies.”

• In Haaretz, Etan Nechin argues that “The American pro-Israel pundits joining Netanyahu's grand framing of the Gaza and Lebanon wars as the defense of the liberal, Western world are a cohort of reactionaries inflamed by Islamophobia…”

• This piece on undecided Jewish voters in swing states frustrated me for a number of reasons (I’m not sure what Harris has done to suggest she wouldn’t support Jewish voters or even, for that matter, Israel; these pieces either include frustrated Democrats who say they’re still voting for Harris or who say their family is voting Trump but they known they are in a minority, something that never seems to impact the framing of the piece), but: If you are a Jewish voter in a swing state who is somehow undecided in this election, I would strongly encourage you not to vote for the person who preemptively blamed his election loss on Jews.

-ET

"Harris to Booker Save Our Care Rally U.S. Capitol" by Mobilus In Mobili is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.