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Michael Collina: Hi, listeners. This is Audible Editor Michael Collina. Today, I have the privilege of speaking to journalist, writer, and podcaster Jordan Ritter Conn about his new book, American Men. Welcome, Jordan.
Jordan Ritter Conn: Thank you so much for having me, Michael. I'm excited to be here.
Thanks so much for taking the time. We're thrilled to have you here with us. So, American Men is a piece of longform narrative reporting that follows the stories of four different men, detailing their jealousies, impulses, and conceptions of what it means to be a man in modern-day America. Living under the patriarchy, masculinity is always the default in our society, but it feels like conversations about men and masculinity have really taken center stage in a new way over the past few years. What was it that first drew you to this topic?
In many ways, it feels like something I've been working my way toward since I was a kid. As a kid, I always had really intimate male friendships, both in early childhood, adolescence, high school, college, and into adulthood. As a journalist, I've always been someone who focuses on kind of longform narrative human stories, and I've done a lot of work in the sports world, so a lot of those stories have been stories about men. Much of my career has been spent having these really intimate conversations with men about pieces of their lives that they don't often talk about. As these conversations that have only gotten louder and louder and louder in our culture began, particularly in the late 2010s, after the 2016 election, about masculinity's place in society, I found myself thinking, "This is something I've been working on and thinking about my entire life."
I'll admit, I would kind of bristle at some of those conversations, particularly about men not having friends or not being in touch with their emotions, not being willing to go to therapy. I, in some ways, felt like that was a little bit different from not only my own experience, but also the experience of a lot of men that I knew. It turns out it's grounded in a lot of truth. It turns out that those are things that men are kind of socialized to have a difficult time with and things that we have a tougher time accessing within ourselves.
So, as those conversations continued, I felt like there would be an opportunity to kind of sink really deeply into the kind of work that I've been doing for a long time of telling these kind of intimate human stories about men's lives, but in a way that was explicitly focused on a group of men's relationship to masculinity, how they've conceived of it, how the expectations that surround it have shaped them, how they've navigated it over time and different chapters of their lives. And that brought me to these four men and to this book.
I'm so glad you brought up your own personal experiences, too, because you do open this book with a really personal introduction, diving into some of your own experiences as a teen at a conservative Bible-study group. Though you shared that that experience helped form a hatred or fear of male bodies and sexualities, it also offered a space for men to open up and have very deep, honest conversations with one another, which isn't something that's often provided to men. What made that personal experience the right way to start and frame this book?
I grew up in kind of conservative, evangelical Christian circles. In that world, what happens is men will talk about personal pieces of their lives through the lens of talking about sin, through the lens of talking about whether they are struggling with sin. And when you are a teenage boy and you are in that world, the thing that is drilled into your head is that anything related to sex is a sin. So, I was in this Bible study in high school where we would meet once a week and we would go around the room at the very beginning, every single time, and answer the question, "Did you masturbate in the last week?" That was not the only question that we asked each other. We also asked each other questions about our relationships to our parents, about how we had treated the girls and women in our lives, about whether we had lied, about whether we had felt jealous or coveted. All sorts of questions about the ways in which we had sinned that week.
It led to a sense of kind of real shame around a lot of these things, this sense that I was spending my entire week trying to do everything I could to show up to that Bible study and answer in ways that made me sound like I had been godly. But also, it led to some real intimacy. Like, the conversations that I had with those other guys were conversations where we really explored pieces of ourselves that you often don't get really the chance to talk about as a teenage boy. We talked about the pains that we were experiencing. We talked about ways in which we were trying to be good and sometimes failing at being good young men. We really cared about each other. I've remained close to those guys over the years. I no longer ascribe to the same kind of theological framework that I did at the time—some of them do, some of them don't—but they've remained close friends.
"I wanted to open the book with something that kind of spoke to the complicated ways in which we inherit ideas about who we are as men and what it's like to exist in our bodies."
Another piece of that is that that kind of conservative Christian framing is one that teaches you that your body is dangerous, one that teaches you that your sexuality is dangerous. I also grew up around a lot of evidence that male bodies were, in fact, dangerous because I grew up around a lot of sexual violence, to be honest, sexual violence that I did not experience myself, but that I heard about from other people who I knew and loved. So, I had this twin framing of this Christian theology that is teaching me to be ashamed of this piece of myself, and then also looking around and seeing the way that boys much like me are behaving in ways that are deeply harmful to other people that I knew and that I loved. It kind of left me with a lot to untangle as I got older, a lot that I'm still untangling now as a 41-year-old man and a father.
I wanted to open the book with something that kind of spoke to the complicated ways in which we inherit ideas about who we are as men and what it's like to exist in our bodies. It felt like that experience with the intimacy of it, the shame of it, the fear that surrounded it, was something that really encapsulated all of that in my own life.
While you explore the lives of four different men in this book, the central argument or framing is around what you call the “masculinity gap,” which is the idea that every man, no matter their background, has an idealized form of masculinity that they're trying and failing to live up to, which leaves a gap between their ideal concept of themselves and their reality. What observations led you to this idea?
Just looking at both my own life and the life of so many people that I've spent time with, both personally and professionally as a journalist. The ideas can look different across pockets of culture, across families, across individual lives, but we all inherit certain ideas about the kind of men that we are supposed to be. And we all, at some point—and maybe it is when you are five years old and you are getting bullied on the playground, or maybe it is when you are in your 40s and 50s and you have typified every ideal for your entire life, but suddenly your body is changing or you are going through a job loss or a divorce, or something else—and you are finding that all of a sudden, I don't measure up to this ideal that I've had of who I'm supposed to be as a man.
For most of us, I think it kind of happens in fits and starts at various points in our lives, and I think we all navigate it somewhat differently. I think there can be an impulse to try to lean into it. A lot of what we see in the culture today right now is kind of telling people to just make themselves stronger, make themselves better, make themselves richer. Like, if you do all of those things, you will live up to these ideals, and that will kind of save you in some sense.
Other people I think kind of reject those ideas outright. But I think a lot of us pick and choose, navigate them in our own ways, lean into them in the places where that feels easy and lean away from them in the places where it doesn't. I think that how we kind of walk that line ultimately defines our relationship to our own sense of masculinity.
Absolutely. Given the title of the book is American Men, and it does focus on the stories of four American men, I wanted to ask, do you think this phenomenon is unique to American ideals of masculinity, or is it really a wider issue across the globe?
It's a great question. There's just a slightly different texture of gender expectations in different cultures. But I think that some of the biggest kind of uniting themes pop up in a lot of cultures. I mean, the idea that a man should be a provider, the idea that a man should be a protector, the idea that a man should be kind of emotionally reserved, you see those a lot of places. That's not really unique to this country.
But I do think there are other cultures where it, for example, is far more accepted for straight men to be physically affectionate with one another than it is here in America. I think in America the military kind of really is such a huge part of how we think of masculinity. I think that is different from a lot of cultures. The individualistic, capitalistic kind of nature of pursuing success as quantified by the amount of money that you have is one that you see in a lot of different places, but I do think there's something particularly pronounced about that dynamic in America.
While I think that there are many things that are universal, there's just kind of a texture to it and there's a texture to kind of the experience of these four men in particular that I think is uniquely American in a lot of ways.
So, let's talk about those four men you follow in the book for a second. There's Ryan, a gay Mohawk MMA fighter; Gideon, a West Point graduate navigating alcoholism and depression; Nate, a Black trans man from Ohio; and Joseph, a law student grappling with the lasting effects of childhood sexual trauma. Each of these men offers a uniquely distinct perspective and view of masculinity and concept of being a man, but at the heart of their stories really are the same insecurities, fears, and difficulties. How did you find these four men?
I cast a really wide net. I knew I wanted a small group, but a group where I could kind of interweave their stories. I started by reaching out to dozens and dozens of men, more than 50 in total. And I did that through people in my own network, friends, and friends of friends, and friends of friends of friends. Through finding people online in spaces where they were talking about their lives. I was traveling a lot in my work as a journalist and just bringing this up on the road when I meet and talk to strangers all the time.
"I think in America the military kind of really is such a huge part of how we think of masculinity. I think that is different from a lot of cultures."
The thing that I found was that everyone, almost everyone, that initial conversation of, "I am writing a book about masculinity, I'm interested in talking to you about your experience of it and how you kind of conceptualize your relationship to these ideals," everyone wanted to have that first conversation. People were really kind of hungry for the chance to talk about their own relationship to this stuff. But over time, I wanted four stories that I felt like would really complement each other well. I wanted to have people who had kind of different relationships to masculinity.
Ryan, violence, physical violence, is a part of his story. I wanted someone who had kind of engaged with violence in ways that he had. Like I mentioned, the military is part of how we think about masculinity in the US. I wanted at least one person who had experience in the military, and there are two, both Gideon and Joseph. I wanted someone who's trans. I felt like the experience of being a trans man offers a perspective that I felt was really, really vital. I wanted also different temperaments in terms of how they respond to stress, whether they respond with anger or whether they respond by kind of withdrawing into themselves.
So, after I kind of cast that wide net, I had a sense of who I felt like was really interested in what this was going to be, which was many years of me being deeply immersed in their lives. It became about piecing together stories that I felt like would really complement each other in meaningful ways.
You definitely did accomplish that. I know one of the other things you mentioned in your introduction was that these men did go really, really deep into their own stories and there was a lot of reflection there. So, what kind of work did you have to do to get this kind of access and level of detailed reflection from each of them?
It took a long time. I will say that all four of them were ready. They were ready to let someone in in this way. I think all writers are kind of dependent upon other people besides themselves to make their work into what it is, but with a narrative journalist like myself, you're really dependent upon other people to kind of give you the trust and let you in. All of these guys were just really, really ready to do that. It was just allowing it to take the time that it needed to take, allowing doing those initial interviews where we talk through one layer of the story and then saying, "I'm going to come back to you. I'm going to ask you for more details," and doing that again and again and again.
None of them live in the same city as me. I went to visit each of them several times and would spend days with them, following them through their lives and also sitting and interviewing them and just kind of allowing them to have a sense that they had some investment in the way that their story was told, too. It's really important to me anytime there's a lot of really intimate detail, there's a lot of description of pretty traumatic events in a number of their lives, the way I approach those interviews is making sure that someone knows at any point, you can stop this interview. At any point, you can say, "I don't want to talk about that."
"You can't spend the amount of time that we spent together, you can't talk about the things that we talked about with one another, and not remain in some way, shape, or form connected to each other's lives moving forward."
I check in time and again to make sure that what we're talking about is still okay. I feel like that really matters for people to feel that sense of safety around their control over what they're sharing. But again, ultimately, it was so much about the fact that they were just in places where they were like, "I'm willing to do this. I'm willing to kind of tell this person pieces of my story that I've never told to anyone else and trust him to tell that story to a larger audience."
You also allowed each man to read their stories before publication, which, as you mentioned, is an unusual practice in journalism. Did any of their responses surprise you?
Yeah. So, it goes against the rules I was taught in J-school of you never let someone you're writing about read what you've written. But this was so intimate, it goes so deep into their lives, that I just couldn't in good conscience publish something that they hadn't had the chance to kind of sit with beforehand. I will say they were all almost entirely comfortable with what I'd written. They knew what we had talked about. They knew how deep they had gone. There was one of them who, there's a particular moment that's incredibly intimate in his story and the first time he heard it—because what I do is the first time I would go and read it aloud to them, and then I would also send it to them—and the first time I read this really intimate moment in this guy's life to him, he was like, "Oh, man. I don't know if I can do that." He was like, "It's all true. That is exactly what happened," but hearing it like that was really, really intense for him.
This man is a father and what he told me was that the thought of his child reading this really intimate, difficult moment in his life, reading about it at 12, 13, 14 years old and knowing who this person was, knowing that it was their dad, felt really scary and vulnerable. But the thought of his child reading this when they are 40 years old, and when he is much older and he is late in his life and they are in middle age and they are trying to figure out a little bit more about who their father is and was, that thought actually seemed really nice. The thought of someday his child being able to know him a little more fully and more deeply, it seemed like something that he would want for them and for him at some point down the road. I just really, really admired and appreciated all of their willingness to kind of sit with some truths about their own lives that are at times kind of difficult to look at, but to sit there and stick with them anyway.
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, each of the men in this book really did grapple with those really deep, dark memories and just reflections about their own life. While you don't give any takeaways at the end of American Men, and you also put a lot of trust in the reader to kind of intuit something larger about these men and their stories, I wanted to ask, what did you take away from writing American Men?
What I took away was a few things. In terms of how this experience has kind of shaped my own life, I have found myself in my own relationships with other men, whether that be my father or other family members or friends, being just a bit more direct about kind of difficult emotional things. Sitting with with these guys, realizing how meaningful it is to take difficult stories, difficult emotions, difficult pieces of themselves, take it head on and talk about it really directly, left me wanting that in my personal relationships. It's caused me to be more direct and taking a conversation from a casual place to a kind of more intense and personal place, to be more direct in expressing affection, be more direct and as simple as hanging out with a friend and just saying, "I deeply appreciated that time you spent with me" or "I deeply appreciated this thing that you said." Being more direct in expressing a desire to be with people.
Another thing that I take away, I have a two-year-old son, and I don't think that he should read this book for many years. It is an adult book. But someday I hope that he will, and I hope that what he will find in it is just the sense that whatever he might be struggling with, whatever ways in which he might be feeling inadequate, whatever ways in which he might be kind of bumping up against these expectations that we have for ourselves as men, to know that he is part of a very, very long lineage of men who have felt these things, who have struggled with these things, who have tried to reconcile these same tensions within themselves, and knowing that that is this universal experience will help him to feel a little less alone.
Let's talk about the audio for a bit, too. So, while you do give voice to the intro, the rest of this book is performed by Daniel Henning, who is a beloved narrator. How did you select the performer for this book? And what made Daniel stand out as the right choice?
I was given several options, and I don't remember the book that I heard him narrating, but I just know that the moment I heard his voice, I just felt myself being swept away in that story.
"Daniel [Henning] just had a sense of warmth in his voice and an ability to kind of heighten tension in certain moments that I just really, really connected to and was swept away by."
I think the great thing about audiobooks is the way that you can feel just almost bodily immersed in the story that you're listening to, and Daniel just had a sense of warmth in his voice and an ability to kind of heighten tension in certain moments that I just really, really connected to and was swept away by. I had full trust that he would make these characters, these real men, come to life in listeners' ears and make the story feel lived in and all-enveloping, and he did. He did an amazing, amazing job.
So, I'm hearing you are an audio fan in that answer as well. Any audiobooks or podcasts that you've been listening to that you would want to share?
My favorite audiobook that I have listened to—and I've read some of this book and also listened to it and the experience of listening to it is just so, so amazing—it's a book called Dirtbag Queen by Andy Corren. It is a memoir of a Southern gay man, writing about his relationship to his mother, who is incredibly loving and doesn't always know how to express that love and sometimes it comes out in ways that are really painful. But the way that he narrates his own story in that book and kind of transports you to 1960s, '70s North Carolina, it just totally, totally, totally takes you away. I saw him read at a live event here in Nashville at Parnassus Books, and hearing him read his story, I was like, "I've got to listen to this one on the audiobook," because the way he reads is so amazing. And I was really glad I did.
Well, I'm sold. I'm going to have to add that one to my library right now.
You really, really should. It's incredible.
Amazing. Thank you. And though American Men ends on an optimistic note for all four of these men, I don't think it's a surprise to say that life isn't always a linear story. So, I wanted to ask, have you heard from or kept in contact with any of these men since publishing?
I'm in touch regularly with all of them. And you're right, the tough thing about writing someone's story when they're still living it is you could end it at any moment. You could pick any scene and any snapshot of their lives and decide that this going to be the end. I would say they are all doing well, that they're all still kind of struggling with a lot of the struggles that are with them in the end of the book, but like you said, the book ends in a hopeful place. I think all four of them feel hopeful about themselves and their futures. You can't spend the amount of time that we spent together, you can't talk about the things that we talked about with one another, and not remain in some way, shape, or form connected to each other's lives moving forward. So, I imagine that they will be in my life for a very, very long time.
I love hearing that so much. That's the perfect response. That's exactly what I wanted to hear.
Yeah, it's exactly what I wanted and anticipated. It would feel very, very strange after talking with them for so many years and spending time together, and some of them I've gone to see even not related to the book. Nate, last year there was a time when I was traveling in that region of the country—he lives in Ohio—and I just added a couple days to go spend time with him and see him.
Going back to what we said about the kind of journalistic faux pas of letting someone read the story before you write it, I just kind of decided that in order to achieve the level of intimacy that I wanted for this book, there was going to be a departure from some of those journalistic norms. And that means these guys are my friends. I care about them deeply. I was committed to telling their stories truthfully. I was committed to telling their stories in complex ways. I was committed to telling their stories in ways that do not always paint them as the good guy. But I can't deny that I developed a real affection and connection to each one of them. I plan for them to be in my life for a very long time.
Well, Jordan, thank you so much for taking the time to chat today. And listeners, you can find American Men by Jordan Ritter Conn on Audible now.
