Fraser Sherman's Blog

June 21, 2026 · 5:15 am

A masculine memoir: Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man

It’s bad form to criticize a book without reading it. Having discussed Scott Galloway’s formula for performing manhood — protect, provide, procreate — in a previous post, I figured I should read the book in which he discusses it, NOTES ON BEING A MAN (my illustrations are meant to show two wildly different concepts of manhood).

On the plus side, Galloway’s formula is more nuanced and less patriarchal than I thought when I read it. He expands “protect” to mean being generally supportive — break up fights rather than joining them, don’t shit-post about people or your country. “Provide” can include doing stuff so your wife who’s making the bigger salary can get her job done. “Procreate” can include caring for kids as a friend, uncle, mentor. Of course these are not the usual meanings of the words, but if they help a guy feel he’s being manly when he cooks dinner while his wife works late, cool. Then again, Galloway is clear that men should expect to be the family breadwinner (if you split the check, women won’t see you as husband material) and that “procreate” typically should include sex, a partner and kids. Which brings me back to the earlier post’s observation that this requires a woman to play the corresponding role.

Galloway’s argument that toxic masculinity doesn’t exist — if you’re a rapist, a predator, a bully, you’re anti-masculine — is a less successful attempt to redefine a term. If that got more young men and boys to reject that behavior, well, that’s good. However it feels more like a desire to see masculinity as a solid good, no dark side.

There’s a lot of other dubious stuff in the book that I find dubious. As I discuss in Undead Sexist Cliches, “masculine behavior is built into the brain” covers an array of theories that didn’t pan out, starting with “men are smarter because their brains are bigger” in Victorian times. I’m automatically skeptical Galloway has the science right when he explains teen boy brains are fueled by testosterone, making guys run wild, smash things and engage in stereotypical male behavior. Except lots of boys don’t do this. At least one of his references, the book The Female Brain, has some dubious science (I recommend the books Testosterone Rex and Natalie Angier’s Woman for better analysis).

He’s definitely full of it when he argues schools are biased against boys because girl brains mature faster; boys “almost immediately fall behind their female classmates” because they aren’t ready to learn. If that were the case, why is “schools are failing boys” a relatively new issue. Did boys’ brains mature faster in the last century? Why didn’t we accept long before this that girls are naturally superior academically? Because we didn’t. When I was a teen, the media stereotype of teenage girls was that they were boy-crazy and flighty — sure, teenage boys were impulsive and foolish, but they kept their emotions in check better than girls did.

Likewise, I’m wary of arguments that educated women are finding it so hard to get mates they’re (gasp) marrying less-educated men; college ruins women for marriage is another undead sexist cliche. Plenty of women have written about frustration with finding a good man; Galloway seems to think the problem is that they’re too picky, “looking for a man in finance or media” who’s well-heeled enough to be a provider.

Galloway talks about how fighting a war takes “big dick energy” but we’re in an era when America has nearly 5,000 women deployed in combat roles and 150 women in the Army Rangers. That’s only 2 percent of the Rangers but if women can meet those demanding standards, clearly “big dick energy” is not what war requires.

The biggest problem I had with the book, though, is that it’s boring. Most of it is Galloway’s life story; while he’s a good storyteller his life as a child of divorce, coming of age, making bad decisions is not particularly novel or revealing. It’s the kind of stuff I’d find interesting, maybe, if he grew up to be Spielberg or Paul McCartney, but he didn’t. And boy, is it detailed, right down to typical meals and his parents’ brands of cigarettes. Mixed in with that we get the kind of epigrammatic advice I see in lots of business books and “as told to” autobiographies (the latter seem obligated to offer the subject’s Deep Thoughts on Life).

Galloway isn’t as bad writing about gender as I expected but if he has any good answers, they’re not in this book.

Cover by Frank Frazetta, all rights to images remain with current holders.

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June 20, 2026 · 5:02 am

Fake dating and some ferry(wo)men: movies viewed

During an online discussion of Tropes We Hate — not problematic stuff like Stalking Is Love but just tropes the various participants dislike — several people cited Fake Dating as one they can’t stand. That led me to rewatch IT STARTED WITH EVE (1941), an early example of the trope. And a funny one, so obviously I can stand it when it’s done well.

Legendary millionaire lover-of-life Jonathan Reynolds (Charles Coburn) is dying as the movie opens. His son Jonathan Junior (Robert Cummings) rushes to his side and learns all Dad wants is to meet Junior’s fiancee. Trouble was, she’s been delayed and probably won’t arrive in time; a desperate Junior hat-check girl Anne Terry (Deanna Durbin) and begs her to pose as his fiancee so the old man can die in peace. Except Reynolds finds Anne so charming, he starts to recover. Now what are they going to do? Of course you can all figure that out but the fun is watching them get there. It’s an enjoyable journey but Durbin has so much more chemistry with Coburn than Cummings it undercuts the perfunctory romance. Still a thumbs up for me. “What’s a town in Ohio?”

FERRYMAN MARIA (1936) is a German fantasy in which the ferryman who links a small village with the rest of the world meets Death – literally — leaving them stranded (though it looks like the ferry would be simple enough for passengers to work for themselves). Fortunately the vagabond Maria (Sybille Schmitz) shows up, takes the job and soon falls in love with an injured revolutionary hiding nearby. That creates a problem when Death returns, looking for the man … This has a certain charm, but nowhere near enough. “Tonight, no bell rings in the village.”

That film’s director, Frank Wisbar, subsequently remade it in America for PRC, one of the bottom-of-the-barrel studios of the Golden Age of Hollywood that churned out nothing but low-budget crap. THE STRANGLER OF THE SWAMP (1946), however, was an exception, one of the best things the studio put out — and while that’s faint praise, it’s a decent low budget movie.

In this version the strangler of the title is Charles Middleton, the ghost of a man framed for murder, then lynched by the angry villagers. Just as he hung, so will everyone he blames for his death, including the ferryman. His daughter Maria (Rosemary La Planche) arrives too late to see him but agrees to take over the ferryman duties. Too bad the strangling ghost includes the children of his enemies on the list of those marked to die … Fun, and Middleton is always a memorable, malevolent villain. “I don’t care what you say, I am afraid — but so are all the others!”

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June 19, 2026 · 4:08 pm

“Should have known better than to cheat a friend” — wait, that’s not the lesson I learned this week

The lesson is one I already know: I work more efficiently if I focus on one thing per day. If I spend a day working on, say, Let No Man Put Asunder, I focus better than if I do half the day on that, half on, say, newspaper work or sending out submissions.

The divided day (the “divided” theme is a flimsy excuse for posting this Murphy Anderson cover but it’s one of my favorites) goes wrong too easily. I end up focusing too much on one of the two things, typically not the most important one. Getting writing done is usually job A but browsing possible markets online or doing research for The Local Reporter is typically easier. If I’m tired, I may go with easier or at a minimum start it sooner in the day. It’s also possible that I’ll throw in a third task to fill an odd moment and end up with even less writing time.

This week, however, I did have to do a lot of divided time. I was working to get the last steps done for the publication of Southern Discomfort next month. Revising the back-cover copy. Working through Amazon’s cover creation system to get the image (created by Samantha Collins) right on the front cover — that was the big challenge. I created the cover, ordered the sample copy (it arrived Wednesday), saw some problems, went back and did it again.

This takes time but it’s not something I can work on hour after hour. Once I ordered the test copy I was done; when it came in I dropped everything to go over it. For example I discovered my About the Author page in the back was several years out of date so I had to replace it with more recent information.

The end result? A patchwork week. Couldn’t be helped. And it paid off. Southern Discomfort will go live July 11; the initial ebook links are here, which is where Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others will show once they process it. The paperback goes live too, but Amazon doesn’t allow preorders.

That kind of erratically scheduled work is the pits for getting other tasks done on the same day. You’d be amazed how much time fiddling with the cover can consume. But now it’s done and I don’t have to do it again. On to fresh adventures.

I did get some other stuff done. I finished rewriting my short story, “Honey on the Grave” and sent it in to New Myths. I thought the rewrite suggestions from the writing group had made it too long but it was still under 4,000 words. That’s remarkably short for me.

I rewrote one chapter of Let No Man Put Asunder. I’d anticipated doing more but like I said, the book publishing process siphoned off my focus. Equally inconvenient, the last third of the book requires way more revision than the earlier two-thirds. It needs to move faster, scarier, with less talk. Everything that I’ve been hinting at has to be explained clearly. The bad guy has to go down — I know how that will happen but I have to get there logically. So it’s going a lot slower.

I also went back and rewrote one of the earlier chapters, where Paul is discussing his biophysicist mother’s insistence psychic powers are all fake. After reading How the Hippies Saved Physics I wanted to make mention of the early 1970s experiments that attempted to prove quantum non-locality (electrons can affect each other at a distance even though there’s no possible way they can) could be the basis for telepathy.

I still have to rewrite some of the chapters to show Mandy stopping smoking. Or give up the idea and let her keep puffing away. Finding she’s somehow compelled to quit has more potential so I’ll probably go with option A.

I got a little work on Savage Adventures done. I’m close to the end of this draft; one more draft and I’m done with the writing part. I wrote two posts over at Atomic Junk Shop, one on Doc Savage’s Crime College, one on how certain comics writers are so good they make you realize what you’ve been missing.

Another obstacle to getting work done was that I had my annual checkup Tuesday. That took a few hours out of my day. Good news, though, I’ve lost weight and my blood pressure’s down. There’s a couple of other problems that might need some work or checkups with a specialist but nothing calamitous.

With Southern Discomfort under wraps and no appointments next week, I look forward to full days and more productive output. I hope it comes true.

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Tagged as let no man put asunder, Local Reporter, Savage Adventures

June 19, 2026 · 5:15 am

Horror shrimp!

We were shopping in Costco a few weeks back and TYG pointed out how Lovecraftian these big bags of shrimp looked.

I think she had a point.

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June 18, 2026 · 5:15 am

For the Southern Baptist Conference, sexual assault is more forgivable than being a woman

I’ve blogged a lot over the years about the Southern Baptist Conference’s (SBC) long history of ignoring and covering up sexual abuse, harassment and assault by members of the church hierarchy (here, here, here and here, for instance). The Houston Chronicle’s blockbuster investigation some seven years back found 700 credible victims and 400 culprits over the previous 10 years. Given that the SBC also covered up that Paul Pressler — one of the men who shifted the SBC into a Republican Party arm in the early 1980s — assaulted underage boys, I suspect there have been many more victims in the decades in-between (and Pressler unsurprisingly never stopped). As Karen Swallow Prior says, this man, with his warped view of power, gender and morality, shaped the SBC as it is today. Perhaps it’s not surprising they’re such a mess.

As attorney and abuse survivor Rachael Denhollander said back in 2022, the SBC did right in commissioning a third party review of its practices and failures. That’s more than the Catholic Church has ever managed, or many other churches (for example). However, she said, they were also 10 years behind most organizations in their understand of sexual abuse and best practices for dealing with it. In the four years since, things have not improved; plans for a better reporting system and a database of accused church leaders have come to nothing.

Electing Willy Rice, a conservative who thinks SBC is too woke and “the SBC’s sexual abuse crisis was more hoax than reality” presumably means the effort is dead for the foreseeable future. Rape apologist and Trumper William Wolfe is a loyal ally. And once again the convention passed the Mohler Amendment against women becoming pastors — they can manage to take action on that, but not on preventing abuse. And they hate that SBC women have opinions on this.

The standard defense Wolfe, and some conservatives I’ve known is that the SBC is no worse than any secular organization. And no question, lots of secular organizations have horrible track records on this. Um … so what? There’s a systemic pattern of rape and harassment in the SBC, plus refusal to deal with the problem. That is objectively wrong, immoral and unacceptable. “Other people are just as bad” is not an excuse, any more than “I haven’t raped as many people as Bill Cosby or Harvey Weinstein” excuses rape (though many bad judges have decided first-time rapists shouldn’t be punished). Particularly in the case of an organization that claims its policies are based on a higher morality which is why they should get their way.

The SBC does not, however, can talk about its moral superiority all it wants. Its actions give it the lie. I believe religious groomers, because they can invoke God as their authority (as discussed in the documentary Shiny Happy People), are the worst kind. And in the case of the SBC, their theology is the fruit of a poisonous tree and no good fruit can come of it.

As someone put it on Facebook, the SBC can forgive a man for being an abuser. They can’t forgive a woman for being female.

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June 17, 2026 · 5:15 am

An example of a bad cover

The one below, by Peter Stevens.

It does convey this is a story of exotic Arabia, with harems, sultans, turbans and swords. But what is the dude doing? Leading an attack on the women? Pointing at where to kidnap them? Or just going “Yeah, chicks!” And why is the seated woman doing what appears to be jazz hands?

And why does the swordsman keep one of his weapons tucked into a belt right over his groin?

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June 16, 2026 · 5:15 am

Southern Discomfort: my big idea was not what I thought

For umpty-zillion years, John Scalzi has been doing Big Idea columns on his blog: authors get to tell his sizable following what the big idea of their latest work was. My small self-published books are nowhere close to meeting the requirements. However there’s no reason I can’t use a similar format here to discuss Southern Discomfort. And needless to say, I’ll be discussing it a lot until it comes out next month.

As I’ve probably mentioned in past posts, the genesis of this novel goes back to the 1990s, when I read Born to Run, one of Mercedes Lackey’s SERRAted Edge books, about wizards and elves in Los Angeles. The back cover blurb gives the premise: where would elves go in the modern, urbanized world to live comfortably? California, the funkiest, flakiest of the states, where the unconventional and magical would seem normal!

My immediate thought on reading this was no, elves would be much happier in the South.

The South, where it’s still heavily rural (so is a lot of California, but the SERRAted books are urban fantasy). Where life moves slowerl and there’s much stress on tradition. And at least in the last century, there was a lot of emphasis on respecting your elders — and who’s going to be older than elves?

Plus the South has its share of eccentrics; if you’re accepted as part of the community folks may not bat an eye at you being something other than a baseline normal human. Though the “if” is the key — not everyone’s accepted and then things can get cruel.

I get lots of ideas. Many of them don’t stick in my head; as one writer once said, it’s the ones that stick around that are worth writing about. This one stuck. And I had the perfect twist for the climax. The classic weakness of elvenkind includes cold iron; my twist was that cold iron means literally iron. Not steel. Definitely not titanium-steel alloys or the like. That means the fae are way less likely to encounter iron than they would have been a thousand years ago. The climax would be someone stabbing Olwen McAlister with a steel knife, then discovering that while injured, it doesn’t instantly kill or burn her the way cold iron would. The killer goes down hard.

That concept stayed in the book all the way through; the twist did not. As a twist/reveal it was nowhere near strong enough for the climax. As an explanation of how Olwen can move comfortably through the modern world, it worked great.

At that point, “elves in the south” and the cold iron twist seemed like my big ideas. They were good ideas but my good idea came some time and several drafts later. The problem with most of the early drafts was that my protagonist — a tough guy from New York invited down by a friend to help find the killer — didn’t work at all. At first he was a tough, dangerous guy modeled on John Travolta in Get Shorty! Then he became a burned-out veteran; alas, if there’s anything good to be done with that character type, it won’t be by me. Turning the veteran into a woman didn’t help either.

I think what triggered my Big Idea was reading one of Lia Matera’s Willa Jansson mysteries. Jansson is a “red diaper baby,” the daughter of 1960s radicals and her parents politics constantly seep into her cases. In this one — 30 years later, I can’t identify it — the mystery centers on Chris, a former activist whose group turned to violence when it seemed there was no other way to make the government listen. Chris turned her friends in before they could commit murder, a decision that’s come back to haunt her.

Click. Suddenly I had (I thought) my protagonist, a radical who’d made the same decision Chris did. Which meant I was no longer writing a contemporary novel; it would have to be set in the 1970s. A militant today would be a radical right-winger and I did not want to make one of them my protagonist.

That decision, to set it in the 1970s, was my Big Idea. I’ve been working on this book for several years; almost all my political and pop culture references would have become dated, along with the slang. In 1973, things are static. Joan will always have a shelf of Dark Shadows paperbacks on her bookshelf. Maria will always have grown up reading the Cherry Ames nursing Y/A novels. The politics are likewise stable; there’s a lot of politics in the book and if it were contemporary I’d have had to throw in another rewrite the past year or so.

I had my idea, I had my setting. My protagonist still needed work. Stay tuned.

All rights to images remain with current holders. Southern Discomfort by Samantha Collins, Born to Run by Larry Elmore.

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June 15, 2026 · 5:15 am

“The people who write that kind of stuff never fight”: masculine shaming rituals

The title comes from George Orwell’s scathing comment about British “jingoists” — warhawks — of the early 20th century: “The people who write that kind of stuff never fight; possibly they believe that to write it is a substitute for fighting. It is the same in all wars; the soldiers do the fighting, the journalists do the shouting, and no true patriot ever gets near a front-line trench, except on the briefest of propaganda-tours.” The same thing, I think, applies to masculinity: a great many people who aren’t tough, manly men will talk very, very loudly about manhood and toughness as if that were a substitute for being a man.

This is not a new thing. More than a decade ago, Rush Limbaugh was whining that the NFL doing better to shield football players from concussion was a sign America was becoming “chickified.” Easy for Limbaugh to say, as his high school football days were long behind him. Like Orwell’s “true patriot” he wasn’t getting anywhere near the front lines. Back in 2021, Sen. Ted Cruz whined that an Army recruiting ad focusing on a female corporal meant our military — in which he’d never served — was emasculated. How could a girl compare to the might of Putin’s testosterone-laden Russian warriors (the same ones now getting their asses kicked in the Ukraine)?

Or Donald Trump Jr. arguing that Joe Biden is such a wuss, he doesn’t scare our enemies the way Trump Sr. does. Sure, Junior’s never accomplished anything that didn’t depend on Daddy’s name, but his Daddy can beat up Hunter Biden’s daddy!

Or pundit Matt Walsh, who demonstrates masculinity by screeching bullshit online, declaring that women want to marry manly heroes like the first responders in 2017’s Hurricane Harvey — that’s manhood! Dude, if that was true, you wouldn’t be married, neither would I. Neither of us meet that standard of manliness, which isn’t a standard at all (plenty of women are first responders).

Now we’re seeing the same dynamic play out with Texas Senate candidate James Talarico, a liberal Christian Democrat. He appears to be decent and not all toxic-masculine, therefore his masculinity is invalid. Todd Starnes, a career pundit, sneers that Talarico wears “frilly underpants.” Ted Cruz (again) sneers that nobody would think of Talarico as masculine. Jesse Watters, Fox News’ smirking chimpanzee, claims Talarico is a low-testosterone loser who doesn’t eat enough meat or know enough about football to be a real man (he also claims California Gov. Gavin Newsom is too effeminate). GOP Rep. Brandon Gill hints Talarico’s not only gay but a pedophile.

As I’ve discussed earlier, part of this is the toxic-masculine insistence that there’s only one way to be a man. Because if there are alternatives, then that concept of manhood — it doesn’t matter if we’re toxic, we’re guys, we can’t help it! — becomes invalid. It’s one option among many. Which means meeting the benchmarks of stereotypical guyhood — chasing women, smoking cigars, watching sports or whatever — no longer prove you’re a man. And without proof of manhood … OMG, what if I’m not one?

On top of which, Cruz, Walsh and Starnes are engaging in the toxic-masculine equivalent of slut-shaming. In the book Slut! Leora Tanenbaum discusses how women slut-shame each other as proof of their own virtue: “Sure, I’ve blown a couple of guys but I’m not a slut like Janet! She’s a total tramp!” What the guys are doing is the same thing. Watters is obsessed with sneering at other guys’ masculinity — it’s effeminate to use a straw! It’s effeminate to eat ice-cream cones! By so doing, he (in theory) shores up his own masculine cred. Which I imagine he feels a need for, given his manliness consists of sitting on a Fox News set and sneering at other people’s behavior.

Don’t get me wrong, I have no problem with Watters or Cruz or Walsh not being tough, macho guys; I’m not either. Being a pundit rather than a first responder or a soldier on the front lines is a perfectly legitimate choice. And while it does make their macho strutting pathetic, even if they were tough guys, that wouldn’t excuse sneering at other men for not being butch enough; right-wing pundit Jesse Kelly served as a Marine in Iraq and that doesn’t make his bashing other men any better.

Celeste Davis has a related post here.

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June 14, 2026 · 5:15 am

Women in books, mostly fictional

Proceeding in order from weakest to best … THE MARVELOUS HAIRY GIRLS: The Gonzales Sisters and their Worlds by Merry Weisner-Hanks is nominally the story of the Gonzales family, Canary Islanders suffering from a genetic quirk that grew hair all over their bodies. In the late 1500s this led to Pedro Gonzales and later his kids getting swapped around the courts of Europe like baseball cards, passed from the court of one monarch to the next.

That would have made an interesting book but Weisner-Hanks is more interested in the cultural backdrop that would have shaped how monarchs and courtiers responded to them. Beliefs about hairy savages of the New World. The eternal enthusiasm for stories of fantastic monsters and unbelievable wonders. The complicated rules of court life. The uncertainty whether someone like them should be seen as intelligent beasts or human freaks. It’s interesting but the family’s life story fades away in the middle of it all, and ultimately that hurts the book.

THE LIES THAT SUMMON THE NIGHT: A Songs for the Sinless Novel by Tessonja Odette is a romantasy set in a world where artists are criminals, as making or performing art draws Dark Powers to feed on it. The protagonist is a performer forced into service to a demon-hunter whom she finds the Most Obnoxious, Most Irritating Man She’s Ever Met (we know where that’s going) — which unfortunately comes too close to the romantic set-up of Arcana Academy. That doesn’t make Odette’s novel bad, it’s simply that I don’t need two series with that trope (which people more versed in romantasy says is common). I was more frustrated that it’s obvious from the get-go that everything the protagonist believes will turn out to be a lie. I was also bugged (I realized this is an odd complaint) by how contemporary the cussing felt, with everyone dropping the f-bomb as if they lived in the 21st century. In any case, I gave up after 100 pages.

THE NIGHT RAVEN: Crow Investigations Book One by Sarah Painter (cover by Stuart Bache) is an urban fantasy variation on the old crime-drama plot where the hero wants to quit but They Keep Pulling Her Back In.

The hero in this case is Lydia Crow of the Crows, one of the four crime families who run the London underworld. The Pearls can sell anything to anyone, the Silvers are hypnotically persuasive and the Fox family are super-seductive (at least I think that’s it). Curiously the Crows have much stronger powers — or used to, as the magic of all four has dwindled over time. Lydia’s only ability is a spider-sense like flair for detecting magic.

Lydia’s career as a PI in Scotland has flatlined so she’s back in London briefly. But wouldn’t you know, her conniving Uncle Charlie has a little, completely harmless job for her, finding a missing college-student cousin. Sure, why not? Spoiler: there’s more going on than it seems, but you probably knew that.

I enjoyed that this is a relatively low-level magical world, compared to all the series that try to stand out by going over the top. The downside is that outside of Lydia’s ghostly roommate this would work just as well if it were a straight mystery story with no magic. It’s also anticlimactic in the ending reveals and resolution — seeding for future books I guess — and the detective on the case jumps into the sack with Lydia way too quickly. Enjoyable overall, but I don’t know if I’ll pick up Book Two.

THE GIRL WITH A THOUSAND FACES by Sunyi Dean was really good. It starts off like a standard urban fantasy as Merry, an amnesiac ghostbuster in 1975 Hong Kong, discovers the corrupt secret behind a recent boom in hauntings. All is not as it seems and midway through we go into a flashback, something which often ruins fantasies for me. Not this time. The twists are clever, the characters are good and the sense of Hong Kong is much more vivid than Highfire Crown‘s sense of Johannesburg.

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June 14, 2026 · 4:59 am