4 days ago
When Men Talk About Their Feelings
To the Editor:
Re 'Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of 'Mankeeping'' (news article, July 28):
Articles like this are how we push more men toward the manosphere.
For decades, men have been told to open up, to be vulnerable, to talk about their feelings. We've been asked to stop shutting down and start showing up emotionally. Many of us listened. We did the work. And now we're reading that doing so is a burden to our partners.
Articles like this don't just spark debate. They quietly build resentment. They add one more brick to a wall of alienation between men and women. They suggest that even emotionally available men are still failing in some fundamental way. That we are too much, even when we're trying.
This is the kind of cultural messaging that drives young men into the arms of figures like Joe Rogan, Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Andrew Tate. Those voices don't rise in a vacuum. They grow in response to articles like this that imply men are either emotionally shut down or emotionally draining. That's a false binary, and a truly harmful one.
If we care about healthy relationships and mutual growth, we need to make room for men to express needs without being framed as problems to manage. Otherwise, the wedge will continue to deepen. We will accelerate this death of our beloved country.
James DamronNovi, writer, a business executive, is a 44-year-old married father of three.
To the Editor:
In his 70s, my father forged a meaningful friendship in — of all places — a doctor's waiting room. He and another gentleman were being treated for the same type of chronic leukemia and, discovering that they lived not too far from each other, decided to schedule their clinical visits at the same time and drive into the city together.
The other patient was younger than my father and had been a city bus driver, while my father was a renowned optometrist. Nevertheless, their regular commutes enabled deep conversations and mutual discovery, and no doubt gave their wives a break from caregiving.
In time, my mother met the friend and his wife and, now that my father has passed, remains in touch with them. Yet the backbone of the relationship was always between the two men.
I'm grateful that the anxiety of this period in my father's life was alleviated, even a bit, by the joy of connecting with this new friend.
Laurie Greenwald SalomanBasking Ridge, N.J.
Supreme Defiance
To the Editor:
In 'There Really Are Rogue Judges' (Opinion guest essay, Aug. 4), Adrian Vermeule argues that federal district court judges who issue orders reining in President Trump's authority, notwithstanding settled appellate law to the contrary, 'have almost no accountability.'
He likens them to 'feudal lords who lay down the law in their local courts,' adding, 'If they are reversed, at least they will have stymied for some time the implementation of presidential policies they find objectionable.'
But the more critical issue is with the Supreme Court's majority of conservative justices, who are accountable to no one, and through the court's emergency docket repeatedly set aside district court orders that aim to properly limit the president's authority. (The order to halt President Trump's unconstitutional ban on birthright citizenship is one obvious example.)
Technically, these justices are just putting those orders on hold until the Supreme Court can hear the merits of these cases on direct review. But until then, to use Mr. Vermeule's language, the court's conservative justices will have 'stymied' for some time the implementation of constitutional principles they find objectionable.
Elliott B. JacobsonScarsdale, writer was an assistant U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York from 1985 to 2017.
Separating Migrant Families
To the Editor:
In 'Trump's ICE Uses New Way to Split Migrant Families' (front page, Aug. 6), you report that ICE agents are separating children from their parents if the parents refuse deportation.
Eighty years of research entailing thousands of studies conclude that children's sense of security in the world rests primarily upon their reliable access to loving parents or parental figures.
When children are forcibly separated from their parents or parental figures, they suffer extreme grief, anger and despair, and they become at high risk for becoming impaired in their physical, cognitive and social-emotional development.
When we see ICE agents separating children from decent and loving parents, we are witnessing the traumatization of these children and state-sponsored child abuse.
Dyer P. BilgraveBaltimoreThe writer is a clinical psychologist.
