We’re back! And we’re still talking friendship dynamics. You have probably heard the trope about how, when out with their friends, ladies love to talk about their feelings and fellas just want to name baseball players they remember from when they were twelve. Is it essentialist? Sure, but also…it sure feels like there’s some truth there.
This week, we hold the trope up and look at it from as many angles as possible, like a gorgeous gendered diamond. Does Garrett host a makeshift version of the Newlywed game for Sarah and her husband? Does Sarah reveal some surprisingly nuanced thoughts about “Waterfalls” by TLC? And somehow, by the end of the episode, do we discover a new lasagna-based benchmark by which to judge the quality of male friendship? Yes, yes and yes.
It’s fun, you all. And we probably don’t talk too much about Tony Shalhoub’s mustache, though that’s debatable.
Links:
“Against Hating Men”— includes the screenshots of the tweets we discuss (Mindy Isser’s newsletter)
Theorizing Mankeeping: The Male Friendship Recession and Women’s Associated Labor as a Structural Component of Gender Inequality by Angelica Ferrara and Dylan Vergara (Psychology of Men and Masculinities)
“Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of Mankeeping” (New York Times gift link)
Were you curious as to Boomer humor columnist Dave Barry’s take on Mankeeping? Well, he’s got one!
Sarah Wheeler’s favorite TLC songs (Spotify) (Publisher’s note: Sarah DOES have a fifth favorite TLC song, and it is “Case of the Fake People.” Glad we set the record straight!)
“She wants to talk, you just want to watch Youtube” (Make Men Emotional Again)
Read Boymom by Ruth Whippman (a perennial This Week in Breeders recommendation)
More:
This Week In Breeders is a podcast! And you can listen to it wherever you like to listen to podcasts (Apple; Spotify; everywhere that groups of men get together and wordlessly grunt their non-feelings at each other).
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