American Masculinity

The first paragraph of the story already left me in a fit of giggles. While I thought the genre is going to be masculinity and chauvinism, I didn't care what the story was meant to be, and read it anyway.

This is 'Mother of Men' by Lauren Groff, published in The New Yorker on November 2, 2025. 

There are men in my house, too many men, I am being driven mad by the men who are always in my house. There is my husband, a man I can’t resent because he’s grandfathered in, and there are also the four men who have been building the bathroom addition to our bedroom downstairs, a tall and wiry Italian guy from New Jersey who talks a great deal and wears so much cologne that he seems to linger in the rooms even when he’s gone, plus three quiet Venezuelans who often have to quickly redo the things that the Jersey guy has done while he’s taking a break. In and out of the house the workmen go all day, their boots crunching on the Ram Board over my rugs.

What I didn't expect was, the stalker in the story. He's the stuff of nightmares and the narrator's bane in this life. He singularly gives her grief and she can't find peace. The stalker seems to have made the narrator his life's mission. He seems to return every few years, stalking the narrator for ten years now. There was nothing the police could do till he actually harmed the narrator or her family or the properties. The family's predicament is known to everyone in the neighborhood and on the street. Some could even identify the stalker now. 

It's absolutely terrifying for the narrator, and anyone, to run into their known stalker on the street. Thankfully for the narrator that night out walking her weak dog, she had a neighbor nearby with her two Afghan hounds who saw her and the stalker, and kindly walked them home. The narrator was kept safe that night. But the next day, the stalker was back, sitting on a curb across the street watching her house. 

That was when we asked my stalker’s roommate for help in contacting his family, and the roommate blushed and couldn’t look at me and said she’d kind of suspected something wasn’t right, she’d always thought it was totally weird that I’d be having, like, a hot and steamy affair with her roommate, who, she said, often forgot certain crucial elements of personal hygiene and stank like the four packs he smoked every day. She gave us his sister’s number, and the sister was suitably horrified, though not surprised—it turned out that he’d done something similar in his teen-age years, down in Jupiter—and she drove north in a pickup truck the very next day and moved him out. That evening, the roommate came over and said she was so relieved, she was shaking with relief. She showed us her trembling, pale hands. She said that she hadn’t wanted to tell us because she didn’t want us to panic, but a few days ago my stalker had shown her a gun—he’d got it from somewhere—and she’d spent the past few nights barricaded behind her dresser, she’d been so scared he was going to do something bad with his weapon.

Jesus Christ, my husband said grimly, and bought a second baseball bat so that he could sleep with one under his side of the bed, and it would not be only me rising up out of sleep already swinging. We had a period of relief, but every two years or so the stalker comes back to town and falls into his old ways.

We see him loitering on the sidewalk opposite our driveway, or I’ll forget to lock the car and will discover a bouquet of magnolia flowers ripped off our trees disintegrating in the passenger seat. Then, whenever my husband, a very tall and muscular man, sees the stalker, he will go outside without a shirt on, holding his baseball bat loosely in his hand, and warn the stalker off in a voice so quiet it could only be terrifying, because there is nothing more frightening than when the extremely gentle among us, the peacemakers, are pushed until they snap. 

The narrator is also a mother of two teenaged sons, almost adults. They're tall and muscular. They do their part in walking the dog in the nights so that she doesn't have to. The workmen in the house during this period provided some company and hopefully deference to the stalker lurking across the street. But that's not enough for her to feel safe. She's traumatized especially when she sees the stalker stalking her. She can't sleep, can't eat, and can't relax.

Then the narrator's worst nightmare came true. The stalker entered the house via an unlocked kitchen door.  She froze. She had a ukulele in hand but couldn't even move to swing it at the stalker. Her older son was right there, and firmly told the stalker to leave. 

And now, with this trespassing in the house and a witness, the family could finally take out a restraining order against the stalker. It is however, not the end of the story though. The stalker isn't incarcerated or dead. He would return again and again, and I only hope that the narrator will find the strength to fight him, physically. 

In an interview with the magazine, the author was asked about American masculinity and toxic male and female chauvinism. 

I was at Bread Loaf for a few days this past summer, and was sitting at dinner with the writers Carter Sickels and Emet North—both of whom have spent an enormous amount of time thinking about gender constructs and masculinity—and one of them asked me what it was like to be a feminist raising men in America. I said that I don’t think it’s possible to be anything but conflicted about it, if you’re paying any kind of attention. The first tiny seed of the story was planted then. Masculinity is a hell of a drug, served up with a heaping side of privilege and obliviousness, and I sometimes feel despair that maybe my sons aren’t really listening to me when I tell them that they have to be aware that their bodies are immediately seen as a threat by smaller, more vulnerable people; that they need to understand the insidious ways that misogyny lives in them (to be fair, it lives in all of us, unless we work hard against it); that they need to check themselves when they have the urge to immediately refute something a woman is saying because knee-jerk negging of women is built into American masculinity, even when what the women are saying is correct. They’re both good people who care about others, but I’m up against tens of thousands of years of male supremacy and normalized violence and domination. I have to keep on and hope for the best.