To be a man is to dominate others. This is what I absorbed as a boy: masculinity means mastery, power, control. To be socialized into manhood is to gain a love of hierarchy and a willingness to do whatever is necessary to preserve your own position within it.
IT IS, in fact, possible to have a decent time on Goodreads. You just have to ignore everything about the way the site is designed and how you’re supposed to use it. When I first signed up in early 2012...
LAST SUMMER, five months into lockdown and two hours past midnight, I found myself glaring at my reflection in the bathroom mirror with five drops of Bertolli extra virgin olive oil drizzling down my nose. After an evening spent picking at my pores, I had found a buried Reddit thread suggesting I massage my skin with oil to rid it of the tiny grey spots that dotted its surface. These little nuisances—or “sebaceous filaments”—are not acne but passages that carry oil from the pores to the skin’s outer layer. Everyone has them, and they are not visible to the human eye except from an intimate distance. But, under lockdown, with the distance between my visage and the mirror shrinking with each passing day, I’d become obsessed with purging my face of these invaders.
