Esquire’s Shallow Deep Dive

By Study Hall staff writer Allegra Hobbs (@allegraehobbs)

Esquire Editor in Chief Jay Fielden believes he has done something remarkable and brave in publishing over 6,000 words tracking the day-to-day mundanities of life as an average white teenage boy in middle America. This is made apparent by the sanctimonious letterprefacing the issue, in which Fielden bemoans the “fresh hell” of national life, a hell characterized by ideological division and social pressure to not be an asshole. Watercooler chit-chat and dinner parties, he explains with the soap-operatic swoon of a man who has never faced real persecution, now feels like, “a Kafkaesque thought-police nightmare of paranoia and nausea, in which you might accidentally say what you really believe and get burned at the stake.”

Fielden represents a certain type of media figure, a self-styled maverick who believes being told you’re wrong is a form of tyranny and that feeling wounded is indicative of persecution. Faux-intellectual site of “dangerous” opinion Quillette runs on this ethos. It’s pretty much Bari Weiss’ entire shtick, with her dread of online “mobs”  — and sure enough, unsurprisingly, it looks like Weiss reached out to console Fielden, who in turn lamented the “digital Jacobins prepare the guillotine for me.” Why can’t you just say things, they ask, and face no scrutiny?

Fielden wonders — probably furrowing his brow in a tweed jacket, like in his author photo — what impact this constant threat of being burned alive is having on our youth, who now  must face that scrutiny as well. He frets over his son, who is having a difficult time coming to grips with how complicated the world is now, what with movements centering feminism and racial justice like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter. And so as a means of tackling these concerns over coming of age in a divided America, Esquire will profile a diverse array of young people in an ongoing series, beginning with a 17-year-old white boy growing up in Trump country. The aim is to “look at our divided country through the eyes of one kid,” writes Fielden.

Except the kid in question, Ryan Morgan of Wisconsin, has almost no fully-formed opinions, and in fact seems to be largely oblivious to the very real circumstances fueling the heated climate in his high school. On the #MeToo movement: “I’ve heard of that…What does it mean again?” On Trump’s sexism: “He is respectful towards his wife, as far as I know…I don’t think he is racist or sexist.” On Trump’s inflammatory rhetoric: “Sometimes I think it’s funny, but I guess it’s really not that funny in the end.” On an internet stranger telling him to shut up about feminism because he’s a white man, after he calls her post “stupid”: “I guess they think since I’m not a girl, I don’t have an opinion.”

Any real challenges faced by our young hero in the culture war are either hypothetical or hugely exaggerated: When Ryan recounts getting into a physical fight with a girl at school (she hit him first, he hit back) he and his mother muse about the possibility of the girl slicing her face open with a knife and blaming it on him (this does not happen). He further muses that if he were a girl, he would be able to commit acts of violence with impunity (this is not the case). He bemoans that he “couldn’t say anything without pissing someone off,” but no concrete examples are given.

Fieldman praised Ryan for being an “unusually mature, intelligent, and determined young man,” but Ryan doesn’t appear to question anything deeply. Fielden gives #MeToo as an example of something complicating the landscape, something teens are now grappling with, but Ryan hasn’t even bothered to learn what the #MeToo movement is; Fielden also rattled off Black Lives Matter, but the only mention of the movement in the feature is a passing reference to t-shirts worn by classmates, and the word “race” doesn’t appear once.

So why would Fielden choose him to carry out his stated editorial mission? If you’re going to “look at our divided country through the eyes of one kid,” why a kid utterly divorced from the seeds of that division?

As NPR’s Gene Demby observed, Esquire could have written a piece that “interrogates whiteness and masculinity, but this just sort of follows around a random kid and presses him [about] things he hasn’t thought too deeply [about].”

What Ryan does have to match Fielden’s praise is confusion and ambivalence. “I know what I can’t do, I just don’t know what I can do,” says Ryan, which Fielden exalts as uniquely courageous. It’s clear, now, that Fielden is using this kid to vindicate himself. Fielden is alarmed by the sudden need to censor himself at parties but resists any real introspection about the views he holds back; Ryan is alarmed by his classmates’ emotional reactions to his pro-Trump stance, but doesn’t seem interested in exploring why they feel so strongly. “Like, what did I do?” he asks, incredulous.

Fielden is not lamenting the apparent unpopularity of Ryan’s worldview, so far as he has one; he’s lamenting the fact that there seems to be some degree of pressure on Ryan to cultivate a coherent worldview at all, and pressure to defend that worldview. Ryan seems to have been profiled because he is a white kid who a few decades ago could have easily moved through his homogenous ecosystem without once being challenged to consider questions of racism and sexism; now, in large part because the internet has made the world smaller, bringing otherwise external movements into a sheltered teen’s line of site, he’s being challenged. He is being challenged to think about what it means to be white and what it means to be male. He is not necessarily rising to meet that challenge. But it’s obvious that Fielden thinks the challenge is inherently unfair, that it’s a shame it’s being presented at all, that Ryan should have the right to move through the world in his whiteness, unburdened by the considerations that people of color, women and members of the LGBTQ community have no choice but to face every day. In short, he believes both Ryan and himself have a right to easy ambivalence.

The nation is divided because what’s at stake is a matter of life and death to many, not a “thrilling intellectual exercise.” Fielden doesn’t seem to grasp that. Neither does Ryan. Ryan, however, is a teenage boy who will hopefully grow intellectually and go on to reflect more deeply on his place in the world. Fielden is a grown man, a father, and the editor of a major men’s publication. He seems to have chosen what he values, which is being able to run his mouth off at social gatherings. He shouldn’t be as incredulous as a sheltered 17-year-old when people respond poorly.