A Sociological Eye

  We live in the era of the GigaChad. Of U.F.C. cage matches on the White House lawn. Of teenaged looksmaxxers progressing from mewing to bone smashing to hardmaxxing with chin implants and buccal fat excision, in pursuit of the prominent jaw and high cheekbones of their chiseled masculine paragon. They claim it is the eternal, evolutionarily-compelled ideal that all men have always hoped to embody.   It isn’t! Consider Cesare Lombroso, the 19th century eugenicist and pioneering criminologist who invented the photographic mug shot. He was a misogynist and a racist, and a big believer in the glory of Rome and Western civilization. So you’d imagine he’d be a fan of GigaChad faces. But the truth is absolutely the opposite! The eugenically-inferior physiognomy that proved a man was born to criminality and evil acts, he claimed, were the “animalistic” features of “enormous jaws” and “high cheekbones.” Superior men of innate good character had “refined” features, wrote Lombroso...

This is a chart showing you the number of babies given a certain name over time in the USA—the name my father was in fact given. His name was Dick. Ok, that was the name he always used, but his actual given name was Richard. That Dick is a nickname for Richard seems peculiar to many Americans today, but here’s how that emerged: a classic Medieval nickname for Richard was Rick (as it remains today!). Rick was a shortened version of the name, which at the time was pronounced rather like “Rick-hart.” And in Medieval England, new nicknames were coined via rhyming—hence Rick became Dick.  In the 1930s when my father was born, Richard was the fifth most popular name for children designated male at birth. But plenty of parents skipped the formality of naming their kid Richard before calling him Dick. They just named their children what they intended to call them. And you can see in the graph that Dick (as a given name) peaked in popularity in 1934. You can see similar patterns with other ...

  Look, I say this as a dad. As fathers go, I have sacrificed more than many--I'm a gestational father, who carried and delivered my kid like seahorse fathers do. I've dealt with the gauntlet of gender transition so that I can be recognized as a father, so that my kid can roll her eyes at me and say "Daa-aaaad!" when I tell a punny joke. Being recognized as a primary-parent father is important to me. But Father's Day is still an annoying holiday. Mother's Day has a grand political history. It was founded by Victorian feminist pacifists during the Civil War to demand recognition of the unpaid labor of love and care performed by women. It took hold in the imaginations of women of the time, who performed all sorts of labor as charity without pay in the 1800s and early 1900s, and wanted recognition of the vital work they did to save the lives of impoverished children, serving as an unpaid social safety net. It was a feminist holiday at root. Then it got commercial...