Jared Yates Sexton > Quotes

“In the digital age, the troll is essentially a caricature and embodiment of all the worst traits associated with masculinity. They’re culturally and intellectually shallow. Angry. Violent. Aggressive. And, after years of wading through graphic images, postmodern stew, racist propaganda, and disgusting and misogynistic pornography, they have grown into nihilists with no other purpose besides punishing the world while laughing to prove they’re stronger than their humanity.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Trump’s true talent was finding the pulse of these ignorant, livid people and playing them like a virtuoso strumming an instrument.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“Men like my father, and men like him who attend Trump rallies, join misogynistic subcultures, populate some of the most hateful groups in the world, and are prisoners of toxic masculinity, an artificial construct whose expectancies are unattainable, thus making them exceedingly fragile and injurious to others, not to mention themselves. The illusion convinces them from an early age that men deserve to be privileged and entitled, that women and men who don’t conform to traditional standards are second-class persons, are weak and thus detestable. This creates a tyrannical patriarchal system that tilts the world further in favor of men, and, as a side effect, accounts for a great deal of crimes, including harassment, physical and emotional abuse, rape, and even murder.

These men, and the boys following in their footsteps, were socialized in childhood to exhibit the ideal masculine traits, including stoicism, aggressiveness, extreme self-confidence, and an unending competitiveness. Those who do not conform are punished by their fathers in the form of physical and emotional abuse, and then further socialized by the boys in their school and community who have been enduring their own abuse at home. If that isn’t enough, our culture then reflects those expectations in its television shows, movies, music, and especially in advertising, where products like construction-site-quality trucks, power tools, beer, gendered deodorant, and even yogurt promise to bestow masculinity for the right price.

The masculinity that’s being sold, that’s being installed via systemic abuse, is fragile because, again, it is unattainable. Humans are not intended to suppress their emotions indefinitely, to always be confident and unflinching. Traditional masculinity, as we know it, is an unnatural state, and, as a consequence, men are constantly at war with themselves and the world around them.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“I’ve always believed that when the devil’s at your door you have to tell him to get the fuck out.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“These men, and the boys following in their footsteps, were socialized in childhood to exhibit the ideal masculine traits, including stoicism, aggressiveness, extreme self-confidence, and an unending competitiveness. Those who do not conform are punished by their fathers in the form of physical and emotional abuse, and then further socialized by the boys in their school and community who have been enduring their own abuse at home. If that isn’t enough, our culture then reflects those expectations in its television shows, movies, music, and especially in advertising, where products like construction-site-quality trucks, power tools, beer, gendered deodorant, and even yogurt promise to bestow masculinity for the right price.

The masculinity that’s being sold, that’s being installed via systemic abuse, is fragile because, again, it is unattainable. Humans are not intended to suppress their emotions indefinitely, to always be confident and unflinching. Traditional masculinity, as we know it, is an unnatural state, and, as a consequence, men are constantly at war with themselves and the world around them.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“That afternoon planted the seed of crisis. Even just a fleeting moment of approval from my father was enough to set me in a direction that would irrevocably change my life. I’d been searching for years for shortcuts to acceptance. Fitting in as a man was an impossible task, a Sisyphean effort that could never be conquered. As a boy the masculine world seemed alien and incomprehensible with its jumble of contradictory expectations. Every one of the men around me had seemed in conflict with themselves and the world. In high school, none of the available personas offered any comfort. I’d resolved, by the time I turned eighteen, to live outside of the paradigm, had decided masculinity, with all its warts and foibles, was something I could simply opt out of.

What I didn’t know then, and what I’m only coming to understand nearly twenty years later, is that because patriarchal masculinity is built into the structure of society, there is no such thing as opting out. It lies dormant in every man, regardless of his acceptance or denial. It permeates everything, reverberating throughout our language and tainting our power structure; it plagues our every action and thought. Because it is presented as reality from our nascent beginnings, it continually colors our perception regardless of how we might fight against its influence.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“With a start that I realized the paranoid fantasies I’d been hearing the men around me tell my entire life had found purchase in the zeitgeist. Just as we’d all stood around a truck full of guns years earlier, here we were, out in public, discussing international conspiracies meant to inspire racial and societal unrest. Black people were in on it. Immigrants were in on it. Academics like myself were in on it. Even white women were in on it. Everyone, that is, except white men who would either have to stop the plot before it was realized or else die in a blaze of fire defending their homes and families.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“For secretary of education there was Betsy DeVos, a fierce promoter of privatized schools and a wealthy lobbyist who raised ungodly amounts of money for Trump. Her post would put her in charge of America’s public education despite her record of effectively destroying Michigan’s educational system.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“Each one, on the surface, seemed like a bizarre pick, but a pattern soon emerged and it became obvious that Trump and his team had one domestic goal: dismantling decades’ worth of progress. In essence, every worldview and priority that had run in opposition to the interests of the American people had bought a seat at the table. The foxes were given free rein in the henhouse.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“In these years we did the tried-and-true masculine things. We watched ball games on the TV, fished for catfish and bluegill in stripper pits in the Greene-Sullivan State Forest, shot guns, stood out in the garage, as is customary, and generally bullshitted. But what was most amazing, other than my father’s apparent transformation, was that Dad, seemingly exhausted by years and years of near-silence, began to speak openly about the burden of masculinity.

He told me the expectations he’d carried, as a father, as a son, as a man, had sabotaged his relationships and prevented him from expressing himself, or really enjoying intimacy, emotionally or intellectually, his entire life.

Shocked at the depth of frustration and despair my dad had suffered, I listened and realized, for the first time, that the masculinity I’d sought, the masculinity I’d been denied, had always been an impossibility. Deep down, I realized that masculinity, as I knew it, as it was presented to me, was a lie.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“The attack in Charleston prompted a brief national debate on guns that pivoted to the Confederate flag, which Roof had been pictured with multiple times. As pressure began to mount over the symbol, there were several black churches set on fire in the South. I drove from one decimated house of worship to another and found the areas teeming with more Confederate symbols, as well as frequent scrawlings of swastikas and hate speech. There seemed, at that moment, to be something incredibly ugly and dangerous starting to seep out from under the country’s veneer.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Even more tragically, change has always been in their (white men’s) best interest. The occupations they cling to so desperately-the factory jobs, the mining jobs, the manual labor jobs-were awful in the first place. Men who toil in these careers are underpaid and miserable. They suffer horrific injuries, die prematurely, and are exploited by companies that hardly ever reward their labor or loyalty. But men have long fallen for the great myth of American capitalism. They strive to make it and when they fail they find solace, no matter how dismal, in their pursuit and their work.

They’ve been tricked, and to admit now that the lie isn’t real, after generations of buying into it and basing their identities on a fraudulent and faulty worldview, would be one of the greatest emasculations of all time.

So they double down nearly every single time….No ground can be given to the forces of progress here because with each case of men being held accountable for their actions the whole house of cards could come tumbling down.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“It’s a story of men refusing to come to terms with their situation because to be a white man in America is to expect everything to already be on your terms.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“I’d been a member of what I now call the Cult of the Shining City: a white identity evangelicalism rooted in the myth of American exceptionalism, a myth that has co-opted the United States of America and, by proxy, the rest of the world. That nationalistic, white identity evangelicalism has corrupted American religion and all but broken our politics.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“By chipping away at the cognitive dissonance that is patriarchal masculinity, men can see for themselves what they’ve probably always known. This construct is artificial and dangerous. It fits like an ill-tailored shirt and we can see the damage it does and the hurt it inflicts when we look into the eyes of the people we love. The suspicion is there; traditional masculinity is so fragile that it’s always on the verge of imploding. This is why the patriarchy is so ever-present and contains so many rules and consequences. Why else do men overcompensate so wildly and so desperately? It’s because they’re always just moments away from watching the paradigm crumble to pieces.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“This was a group that lived their lives steeped in unbelievable anger. They were either poor or less rich than they thought they should be, they were middle class or upper middle class, and they were, almost to a person, white. They were angry and all they wanted in the fucking world was to blame somebody. Trump wasn’t the cause; he was the disease personified.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“Trump’s candidacy was the media gift that kept giving, and the more outrageous he became the better the payday for networks.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“Sanders was unequivocal. A Donald Trump presidency was too dangerous a concept for third-party politics or protest votes. Earlier in the day, he’d sent a message through the media that he didn’t want his supporters interrupting the convention—which they did anyway, booing whenever Clinton’s name was mentioned—or walking out of it altogether.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“The American Myth paints the process as divinely inspired and the result of a work of distinctly American genius, the Constitution itself an impeccable guide in all things and a means by which freedom and liberty might be bestowed upon every citizen.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“Bernie was their last chance. A politician who came so very close to the nomination and the levers of power that he gave them back something they didn’t realize they’d lost or ever wanted in the first place: hope.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“Ever since I was a kid, my family had been telling paranoid stories of far-flung conspiracies, chief among them that a shadowy cabal had rigged the economic system and intentionally shortchanged my people, the working poor. They believed in smoke-filled rooms where the world’s rich and powerful met to conspire against them. To defend themselves, they bought overwhelming arsenals of guns and maintained veritable armories in their houses and garages in preparation for a long-rumored invasion of the United States by the combined forces of the New World Order and the United Nations. They horded supplies and prepped for the fall of America, a dystopic horror companies advertising gas masks and rations and gold coins were too happy to use to peddle their wares. Because of this irrational fear, many of my relatives and people like them were vulnerable to the manipulations of white supremacists. The election of Obama and the propagation of progressivism, including a vigorous fight for multiculturalism and equal rights, was seen as a scourge that threatened to undermine “traditional” American values.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“Clinton, after all, was not the candidate of those who wanted to see a shift in policy or direction.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“In an effort to grow an ungrowable product, corporations try to be all things to all people. And once they reach that point, they suffer.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“What had started with Ronald Reagan had now come full circle. The day-to-day actions of the United States of America had been packaged and sold back to the American public as a television show with a cast of good guys and bad. Past foreign policy mistakes and the sacrificing of ideals were laundered and scrubbed clean of the stain of hypocrisy and effectively commoditized. With world events playing out on their television screens, all of it appearing to be divorced from them, Americans began to feel as if their government and the course of human events were a spectacle to be watched, an entertainment beyond their control.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“when Clinton strode on stage after a playlist of millennial pop songs—“Happy,” “Stronger,” “Best Day of My Life,” and Rachel Platten’s “Fight Song,” which would plague reporters and rallygoers for the next year—it was like existing in a living, breathing car commercial.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“Trump was the walking, talking embodiment of the cable news show, a rambling, bombastic blowhard who said nothing at all but said it fucking loud.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The People Are Going to Rise Like the Waters Upon Your Shore: A Story of American Rage

“My path from a sensitive misfit boy to the drunken man in a cop car was a road paved with innate conditioning, preconceived notions, blatant rationalizations, a desire to be accepted, painful insecurity, and the persistent delusion that I had somehow overcome my upbringing and escaped the gravity of my patriarchal role models. I was woefully mistaken. The trauma I’d survived, the conditioning I’d been subject to, the soiled reality I’d been living and breathing throughout my upbringing, would continually plague me, perhaps for the rest of my life.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“This approach blended the rigidity of control in past and existing empires with Enlightenment thinking, instituting a new reality where people were to be controlled but believe themselves to be free.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, American Rule: How a Nation Conquered the World but Failed Its People

“Unfortunately, rants like these are becoming all too commonplace in American discourse. The narrative of the Man Under Attack has spread far and wide throughout the country with severe consequences. Insecure men in every state and town echo the story my relative told, and though the details are often varied, the implication is universal: sinister forces are conspiring to destroy men and the world they have built.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making

“Of course, this doesn’t explain his behavior in full. Men, particularly white men, in America have enjoyed unbelievable privilege, and when that privilege is threatened their response is to often react violently and in anger.”
― Jared Yates Sexton, The Man They Wanted Me to Be: Toxic Masculinity and a Crisis of Our Own Making