Modern Dads Are Embarrassing. Which Just Might Be Good Politics.

Public acts of fatherhood, no matter how mundane, tend to attract positive attention. One of my earliest memories of being a father is walking our infant daughter through downtown Baton Rouge in her stroller and having several motorists slow down to lavish praise on me. (“You’re doing the right thing!” one shouted.) At the grocery store with my daughter in her carrier, rocking her to sleep on the stoop, even holding her at the doctor’s office — for these deeds I received regular, rapturous affirmation that, it probably goes without saying, is seldom the standard for moms. Visible acts of dadliness are subject to a kind of social grade inflation that Gomez is savvy to utilize.

All this generosity toward dads rests on lowered expectations. Gomez seems to be collecting the same positive reinforcement for changing Hodge’s diaper in the House cloakroom that Hodge will one day collect for using a big-boy spoon to smear mushed peas on his face for the first time. Images of dadhood have evolved — from stern authoritarianism and menacing threat to bumbling inadequacy and then back again — but the modern, middle-class, liberal dad subject is generally pictured as a figure of education. He is doing his best to learn, to catch up, to be better. He is goofy, seemingly harmless, well intentioned, sometimes self-aware but probably not aware of his kids’ next dentist appointments. Gomez understands the power of today’s dad — his jokes, his bod, his rock music, his hats. Professional moms are pilloried for the domestic duties they are perceived to have abandoned, but dads like me and Gomez are credited for social perks we’re perceived to have valiantly given up: coolness, independence, masculine command.

This, I think, is precisely what the announcement of the dads caucus sought to leverage: the high cringe of being a dad. Gomez tweeted a link to the livestream of the announcement by writing, “As Lizzo would say, it’s about damn time.” (Stop, Dad, you’re embarrassing us!) At the small news conference, the dads appeared alongside Tlaib, the group’s one mother. The mood was light, cute, with much gregarious chuckling. Representative Dan Goldman held up a note his daughter had left him on a legal pad in his very congressional-looking folio. “HI. DADDY,” it read. “I. LOVE. YOU I. WILL. GIVE YOU HUGS. AND KISSES. WHEN YOU. GET HOME.” The archetype these men deliberately embodied was both faintly embarrassing and comfortable with embarrassment — a vision of fatherhood, even masculinity, that gains what strength it has from a willingness to seem soft.

A notable aspect of both this vision and the dads caucus itself is that they are not bipartisan. An influential segment of today’s conservative movement is allergic to such embarrassment. These conservatives recognize a similar transformation in contemporary dadhood, but they register it as diminishment and decay. In the last two years, Tucker Carlson has both released a series called “The End of Men” and mocked Pete Buttigieg for taking paternity leave by saying he was “trying to figure out how to breastfeed.” On Twitter, the commentator Matt Walsh refused the very concept of paternity leave with the same energy that dads refuse instructions for Ikea furniture. The Missouri senator Josh Hawley has written a forthcoming book entitled “Manhood: The Masculine Virtues America Needs” — “A free society that despises manhood,” the promotional copy reads, “will not remain free.”

The dads caucus offers a bit of aesthetic counterprogramming to these dads under siege. The type of dad they choose to play is often caricatured as weak, but it’s also one that seems secure in its dominance of the contemporary imagination. While their opposite numbers recoil from anything that puts their nostalgic vision of dadly masculinity at risk, these dads are confident. The aura of embarrassment that can surround baby-wearing, diaper changing and paternity leave still reeks of sexism and homophobia; the congressional dads know that to give in to this embarrassment is to lose, to be lost in time. So they play it cool, or at least as cool as a bunch of middle-aged dads can. It’s all right, buddy, they whisper. Take off your AR-15 lapel pin and strap on your infant. As Lizzo would say, you’ll feel “good as hell.”