Tim Walz Is the Role Model Kids Need

I had a difficult conversation with my 13-year-old son, Charlie, recently. You know, the talk. The one every parent knows is coming. I had to sit down with him and explain why some grown-ass adults are terrified of tampons.

Charlie is more involved with politics than I ever was at his age. It’s the world we live in now. When I was 13, I didn’t care who was president, much less vice-president. But today, with TikTok and YouTube, politics are inescapable. Charlie’s well aware that Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, VP Kamala Harris’s running mate, has been labeled “Tampon Tim,” all because he supported a law requiring public schools to carry menstrual products in bathrooms.

“Do they not understand what tampons are?” Charlie asked me. He was genuinely perplexed.

“I think they do,” I said. “They’re just worried that boys might see them … or something.”

Charlie’s grin grew wider. “They’re tampons, dude, not dildos,” he laughed.

I laughed along with him, even though I wasn’t entirely comfortable with my barely teen-aged kid being able to use “dildo” as a punchline.

***

This is the dance of raising a boy. The challenge is to raise him so he won’t turn out to be a raging asshole as an adult. You know the kind I mean—the guy who aggressively shows you his Tim Robinson impression, who owns (or is saving for) a Cybertruck, and says things like, “Not all men …” I have several friends from my youth whose kids turned into those kinds of raging assholes. 

I assume it’s no fault of their own, especially because our culture is filled with asshole role models for cishet boys. 

I grew up idolizing assholes who could charitably be described as man-children. In my teens, I was enamored of David Letterman and Bill Murray. They seemed to have all the answers, and it mostly involved behaving like buffoons, whether it was throwing shit off a roof just to see how it exploded or making a movie career based almost solely on the hilariousness of rejecting authority.

Not much has changed for my son’s generation. Their role models have moved online—they’re all YouTubers or TikTok personalities—but the gist is the same. He loves funny guys who don’t follow the rules and smirk at the world. 

I don’t like any of the assholes he admires, which I guess is kind of the point. The first time I told my parents to fuck off was after they’d told me that Monty Python isn’t funny. But something about these YouTubers feels different. It’s more malicious and aggressive. They lick their lips with their cruelty. One of Charlie’s favorite YouTubers is named “Softwilly,” and that pretty much sums it up. He makes songs with his friends, and they’re all … an acquired taste.

Charlie shared a song with me recently, by a Softwilly cohort named Larry. The song’s called “Took a Perc,” and the lyrics explore topics ranging from killing homeless people to Mexican bisexuals. My son thinks it’s hilarious, but it leaves me feeling uneasy. Also, as music goes, it’s fucking terrible. And this is coming from somebody who owned several Wesley Willis CDs.

Remember that horribly offensive playground game “Smear the Queer” from the 1970s and ’80s? That will give you an idea of what YouTube is like for young dudes in 2024: “Smear the Queer,” but this time in a huge rented house in Arizona where the only sustenance is raw testosterone and PRIME sports drink.

Which is why Tim Walz feels like a gift.

I wasn’t ready for it. The moment I heard Walz described as a “Midwestern dad,” I winced. It felt like an insult. And maybe some people meant it that way. “Dad” is rarely a quantifier that gets added as a positive thing. I still have emotional scars from the first time my favorite band Wilco got labeled “Dad Rock.” It was never meant as a compliment. It meant Wilco’s music was unchallenging, milquetoast, friendly to a fault. The music equivalent of a suburban dad asking how you want your burger grilled. Even Wilco’s lead singer, Jeff Tweedy, bristled at the term. “I think it’s reductive, ageist gatekeeping,” he told Yahoo last year. “I don’t like it. I’ve never liked it.”

If somebody accuses you of telling “Dad jokes,” they are not paying you a compliment. They’re saying your sense of humor is only charming in its clumsiness. If they mention your “Dad fashion,” they probably just noticed your New Balance sneakers. If somebody calls you a DILF, I promise you, they are making fun of you. DILFs are the Bigfoot of zoology. Nobody serious about science believes they exist.

My conservative friends, especially the ones who share my pop culture tastes—we disagree about politics, but share a hatred of “our” music being called Dad Rock—love bringing up Walz’s nice dad reputation. “It’s kind of emasculating, don’t you think?” They’ll ask with a sly grin. “So you guys are going with puffy Fred Rogers? Weird flex, but okay.”

I ignore them, but it bugs me. I recoil at every story about Walz’s nice guy demeanor. “He isn’t cool, and he knows it,” wrote Charlie Warzel for The Atlantic, ostensibly as a compliment. I don’t want Walz to be okay with his uncoolness any more than I wanted Wilco to be the new easy listening for middle-aged dads who think sweatpants are formal wear.

I recall a time when Alan Alda, the quintessential nice guy of the 1980s, was described as an “honorary woman” by the press. “Oh my god, he has a vagina,” I remember one especially boorish football-playing bro declaring. He wasn’t the only male friend of mine talking this way. Alda never stood a chance.

I liked Letterman and Murray specifically because they were the anti-Aldas. They wanted to offend, and they made adults uncomfortable. Watching them made me feel like I’d discovered the secret sauce to navigating a scary world.

I’m pretty sure this new breed of male role models makes my son feel the same. But something about them seems different. They aren’t mean like David Letterman or Bill Murray were mean. They’re mean like they want to leave a scar. And the YouTubers my son loves today are just the tip of that ugly iceberg. Softwilly is a teddy bear compared to the more popular YouTubers attracting huge teen boy followings. Guys like Andrew Tate, Sam Pepper, and PewDiePie use misogyny, homophobia, and racism as comedy fodder. Unlike Letterman and Murray, the joke is never on them. The joke is on everybody else, the motherfuckers who don’t adore them like they think they deserve to be adored.

Letterman and Murray aren’t saints. It’s well documented that they could be shitty human beings. But as role models—the public personas that made the biggest impression on their young male audiences—they showed us it was possible to be a smug asshole and also respectful. The way Letterman adored his mom, gently teasing her but always with reverence, made me try harder to connect with my own mom. And Murray’s jackassery was softened by his sincere love for many of his female cast mates, especially Gilda Radner. That story about how Murray carried Gilda around a party, well aware that she was dying of cancer, still breaks my heart everytime I read it. These guys were assholes, yes, but they loved dogs, they were kind to minimum-wage workers, and when they pulled a prank, it usually involved a phone call or stealing your fries. They created the illusion of danger, but there was no maliciousness, no venom, no rage at the world for how they felt slighted as white, straight males.

I went into the Walz news cycle full of trepidation. The memes and “dad energy” Twitter jokes all felt like backhanded compliments. This was not going to work, my subconscious whispered to me. We do not live in a culture that celebrates friendly dads. We love them with air quotes. But secretly, we want the assholes to take the wheel.

But then Charlie sent me the video. The one where Walz gently mocks his daughter for being a vegetarian. (When she declined his invitation to get a corn dog because she’s vegetarian, he countered with, “Turkey then.”)

“That was savage,” Charlie told me. 

It wasn’t “savage,” necessarily. But it didn’t have the roll-with-the-punches, nice-guy dad energy that we’ve been told embodies Walz. It exists in that hazy realm between actual dickishness and “Calm down, Morrissey, I’ll throw a soy dog on the grill for you.”

Then there was the “If he’s willing to get off the couch and show up” diss, alluding to JD Vance’s (untrue) sexual relations with furniture. And Walz’s drive-by reference to Trump’s many, many crimes. In fact, I have yet to see Walz tell anything that’s even in the ballpark of a dad joke—there are no puns in his comedic repertoire. Just brutal reminders that his opponents are assholes, and he’s fully aware of it.

I’m a cynical Gen-Xer who wakes up every day bracing myself to be disappointed. But every day there are more reminders that Walz is bringing back something we’ve lost in public displays of masculinity. From his endearingly dated taste in records to his obsession with quality speaker wires to his loyalty to the 2014 Ford Edge, the unsexiest of all cars, he’s not the Alan Alda of our youth who’s non-toxic because he’ll hug you in public. He’s the dad who somehow walks the tightrope between lovable zhlub and the guy who can devastate a bully with a single, well-timed one-liner.

He’s not following the playbook of Bill Murray or David Letterman, sure. But I see shades of both of them in Walz. He embodies the joy of embracing your inner nerd, and laughing at your own foibles. Be respectful, but don’t be afraid to push back at jerks. Be kind, but if a vegetarian wants a corn dog, maybe give them some shit. Tim Walz is no David Letterman, but he’s also no stranger to stupid pet tricks. Walz isn’t the next Bill Murray, but it wouldn’t surprise me to see him tied to a boat’s mast, shouting, “I’m sailing! I’m sailing! I’m sailing!” Seriously, close your eyes and try to imagine it. It’s weirdly easy!

There was a tweet from several years ago that’s stuck with me:

The idea of alpha males is so funny bc guys really made up an upper class and then put themselves in it. Ok if you’re an alpha male then I’m a turbo dude. That’s one level higher. You wouldn’t understand bc you’re just an alpha, sorry.

— Ron Iver (@ronnui_) October 7, 2022

Tim Walz is the living embodiment of that tweet. He’s upended every ideal that men and boys (myself included) have clung to about masculinity. He’s not the dad that’s easy to laugh at, or the clever asshole that’s easy to cheer for. He’s somewhere in between. He’s a turbo dude. He’s capable of being both nice and unwilling to tolerate your bullshit. He’s not the antithesis of toxic masculinity. He’s something different, something new and (if you grew up with toxic male role models, i.e., pretty much all of us who came of age in the last millennium) a little scary. With all due respect to The Atlantic, Walz is nothing like the “uncool and he knows it” cliché you want him to be. He’s much cooler than you; he’s just not being a dick about pointing it out.

My son is still an asshole, don’t get me wrong. Boys are hard-wired to kick each other in the balls and laugh uproariously. Charlie still watches YouTube videos of jerks behaving like jerks to each other for attention. None of that is going away. But there’s something new in the mix. It’s like when my wife sneaks just enough spinach into a recipe that Charlie and I don’t even notice.

“Hey, Mom! Why’d you leave tampons in the bathroom again?” He yells at us, with the smirk of a teen announcing his humor like a flare gun. “Are you trying to corrupt me? They’re gonna call me Tampon Charlie!” And then he laughs and laughs and laughs.

My wife and I say nothing. We just look at each other and smile.