The Manosphere Comes to Dinner

On teenage boys, misogyny, and stopping Lexi before she strangled her stepbrother.

Romy is fifteen, scrappy as hell, and currently convinced he is above reproach.

He is exactly the demographic the internet’s manosphere was designed to influence. The algorithms feed him a steady diet of alpha-male posturing, and lately it has started leaking out of his phone and into our kitchen. The irony is that he has a new girlfriend who leans pretty far to the left, which makes for a fascinating dynamic. He will be texting her sweet nothings one minute and spouting off misogynistic talking points the next, completely unaware of the cognitive dissonance happening in his own brain.

We were sitting at dinner at a restaurant when he dropped his latest gem. He announced, with the unearned confidence of a teenage boy who has never had to pay a mortgage or carry a pregnancy, that he thought Charlie Kirk would have made a great president.

Lexi was sitting two tables away. She is sixteen, fiercely protective of her own autonomy, and not known for her subtlety. I saw her chair scrape back before I even fully registered what he said. She stood up, ready to come for him, and I cut her off before she could get there.

“Sit down,” I told her.

I did not yell. I did not raise my voice. I just turned toward Romy.

This is the strange privilege of stepmotherhood. If Cash had tried to have this conversation, Romy would have immediately thrown his defenses up. If his own mother had tried, he would have rolled his eyes. But I sit in this liminal space where they absolutely see me as a parent, but the history is different. The baggage is not the same. Sometimes the things I say land just a little differently because I am standing slightly to the side.

I looked at him and told him my story for the first time.

I did not soften the edges. I told him what it actually looks like when reproductive rights stop being a political talking point and start being your life. I told him about the IVF, the impossible decisions, the ICU, the girls I lost, the doctors who had to make calls that had nothing to do with politics and everything to do with keeping me alive. If you want the full story, it is here, and just know that it is full of triggers before you click.

I told him it is incredibly easy to spout off about policies until those policies affect your own life. I pointed out that if he ever found himself or someone he loved in a difficult, impossible situation, he would desperately want choices. He would want the autonomy to decide what happened next.

“I am thankful that what happened to me happened back then,” I told him, looking right at him. “Because if it happened now, I would not be here. Lexi, Moose, and Lulu would not be here. And I could not be here with you.”

Button is too young. The weight of it went completely over his head. Romy went quiet, which is not a thing Romy does often, so I knew he heard me, and Maverick did too.

Parenting teenagers is exhausting because you are constantly competing with the loudest voices on the internet. You cannot shield them from the algorithms, and you cannot control what they hear when they leave your house. All you can do is sit at the dinner table, wait for the opening, and tell them the truth.

I hope that at some point my voice and Cash’s voice and the voices of the people who actually love him get louder than the ones who get paid to yell. I have to believe they will. Because the alternative is letting the internet raise my kids, and I did not survive all of the things I did to lose to a moron with a ring light.