Much to my surprise, it wasn’t the sight of the first woman of color nominee for president that moved me the most at the Democratic National Convention. 

No, it was the unscripted burst of unadulterated love and pride by Gus Walz, the 17-year-old son of vice presidential candidate Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz, that brought me to tears.

Gus Walz tearfully saying “That’s my dad!” as his father spoke on stage sparked widespread efforts to explain how or why a teenage boy could have done something so remarkable as to show public love for his father.

Surely there must be some explanation! Some pointed to Gus Walz’s neurodiversity and others, like conservative commentator Ann Coulter in a now-deleted post, called him “weird.” Not to be outdone, Mike Crispi, a Trump supporter and podcaster, described the teen as a “stupid crying son” and to Tim Walz, “You raised your kid to be a puffy beta male. Congrats.”

The fact it was national news that a son would show such unabashed affection to his father speaks volumes in itself. 

During the carefully scripted and stage-managed coronation for Vice President Kamala Harris, Gus Walz’s spontaneous tears during his dad’s speech was a rare genuine moment, and spoke to deeper issues around masculinity and the limits we place on men and boys.

The contrast between the Democratic and Republican conventions served as something of a microcosm of contrasting approaches to masculinity in the U.S. 

In addition to numerous powerful women speakers, at the DNC you had the second gentleman, Doug Emhoff, playing a humanizing and supporting role to his wife, Vice President Kamala Harris, and then Gov. Walz in a supporting role to the candidate herself. And you had arguably the most mic-dropping speaker of them all — Michelle Obama — leading Barack Obama to quip, “I am the only person stupid enough to speak after Michelle Obama.” Indeed.

And then at the RNC, you almost could not have devised a more aggressively toxic collection of men to take the stage. A greatest hits album of the genre, the RNC featured Hulk Hogan, Dana White, Kid Rock, Tucker Carlson, Matt Gaetz and the man whose talent in alienating women knows no bounds — JD Vance. 

And of course you also had the worst offender of all, former President Donald Trump, who established years ago with the “Access Hollywood” tape that there is no misogynistic floor too low for his supporters.

He has so normalized casual sexism toward women that “Trump is just being Trump” has become the new “boys will be boys.”  

Despite the stereotype, Trump is not just popular among older white men. There is a huge gender gap in Gen Z — with young men preferring Trump by 13 points and young women preferring Harris by 38 points, The New York Times reported. They also said about half of men between 19 and 29 believed there was some or a lot of discrimination against men, higher than other age groups. 

In recent years, numerous think pieces have lamented the sad state of men and boys, with headlines like “The Crisis of Men and Boys.” Many of them argue that men and boys are struggling due to the rise in educational attainment of women and the ways in which girls and women take advantage of opportunities that boys and men do not. 

Men, they say, are adrift due to the loss of their perceived place as heads of households and primary wage earners. They also note that women seem less interested in marrying men, a theory confirmed by census data showing that marriage and divorce rates declined for women between 2011 and 2021. 

What these articles rarely say is that despite the increased educational attainment of women and girls, they still earn just 71 cents on the dollar when compared with men of the same educational level. For Black and Latina women, the gap is even larger.

And marriage? According to Bloomberg, 80% of the unpaid work to care for a household and children is still done by women. 

But maybe instead of indulging in a sepia-toned yearning for the good old days that never really existed, we should try something new. Maybe we could encourage men and boys to explore and lean into traits like empathy, self awareness, vulnerability and, yes, emotion. Traits that are too often drummed out of them at an early age as “weak” or “soft” characteristics.

In a thoughtful 2018 piece titled “The Boys Are Not All Right” in The New York Times, writer and comedian Michael Ian Black wrote about this phenomenon, “Too many boys are trapped in the same suffocating, outdated model of masculinity, where manhood is measured in strength, where there is no way to be vulnerable without being emasculated, where manliness is about having power over others.” 

He wrote, “They are trapped, and they don’t even have the language to talk about how they feel about being trapped, because the language that exists to discuss the full range of human emotion is still viewed as sensitive and feminine.” 

He’s right, but we have the power to change that, and kids like Gus Walz are showing us a new way.