Mike Tyson, Logan Paul, and Human Intimacy

(I’m also going to talk about Rocky!)

What happened was this: while I was visiting my parents in Pittsburgh, Matt started watching this reality show called Paul American about the lives of Logan and Jake Paul. The Paul brothers were vaguely in my consciousness at that point; I knew that one of them was a YouTuber and also founded that drink company that has captured the hearts and minds of nine-year-old boys everywhere. I maybe also understood that one of the brothers had become a professional fighter. So, basically, I was not interested in watching this reality show when Matt pitched it to me. Pitch is maybe too strong of a word to describe it. What he said was that he thought I might relate to the competitive dynamic between the two brothers. Hmm.

I don’t know how long it took me, a week or two, but I found myself choosing to start the first episode one night and quickly discovering more things not to like about the Pauls. Namely: Jake Paul’s beard (horrific, horrendous!). Also: realizing that they were/are both YouTubers and that they had both turned into professional fighters. I don’t want to have to look this up to get the initials right, so suffice it to say that Logan is one of those scripted wrestler guys. Like Hulk Hogan. And Jake is an actual boxer. You probably heard about his fight with a 58-year-old Mike Tyson?

In case you forgot, my personal sport hero, the emblem of this Substack, is Rafael Nadal. The ultimate fighter (but make it sweet), el toro, Mr. Never-Gives-Up (new nickname?), an all-time great who didn’t throw his racket in anger once! (I’m worried you don’t understand how rare this is. Everyone in tennis throws their racket. Even I, as a 16-year-old high school player, threw my racket—though only in practice and only in a mostly-controlled way as I knew I couldn’t actually do damage because I only had two rackets total.)

Which is all to say, I wasn’t won over by the Pauls despite Matt’s correct assumption that I did find the competitive sibling dynamic compelling.

But then, just as I was about to abandon the show, something really fascinating, to me at least, happened at the end of the first episode: Logan Paul’s fiancée (a Danish swimsuit model who must be cajoled to participate in the reality show) gets pregnant. Watching the show from that point on honestly felt like being in a gender studies class. I found myself thinking about the Pauls during non-watching hours!

For example, in an age where it feels like everyone is talking about how young people in America are choosing not to have kids, it was kind of amazing to see these young, very rich people become straight-up giddy about a pregnancy. It was also interesting to watch this hyper-masculine bro, Logan Paul, freak out when he starts to consider that the baby might be a girl.

In Ruth Whippman’s BoyMom: Reimagining Boyhood in the Age of Impossible Masculinity, I learned about something called “gender disappointment.” Here’s Whippman:

There’s a neat story we tell about gender disappointment, a phenomenon that, if the internet forums are anything to go by, at least in the West, overwhelmingly affects mothers of boys. In this story a mother has a short burst of sadness when she realizes that she is pregnant with a son, and that her fantasies of pink dresses and mother-daughter shopping trips will not be coming true.

There’s more from this specific passage that I want to share, but first I’d like to say that I’ve talked about this with other mothers of boys plenty of times. I know one woman who cried when she found out she was having a second boy. And another woman who followed specific steps to try to guarantee she would have a girl for her second child after already having a boy the first time around. (p.s. It worked!) I’d just never had a term for it. And until I watched Logan Paul wrestle (see what I did there?) with this idea of being a girl dad (#girldad) I’m not sure I’d really considered the other version: a dad’s gender disappointment. But it’s clearly there with Logan. When they get the official word that the baby is going to be a girl, Logan admits it in his own words. I think he says something like, “it fucked me up.” And the viewer watches as he’s forced to reckon with his own, as well as other people’s, misogyny. (Now that’s good TV!)

Finishing up her thoughts on the “neat story” we tell about gender disappointment, at least when it happens to a specific, politically-minded woman, Whippman writes:

But as soon as [this imagined mother] holds her baby in her arms the [sad] feelings are swept away. She realizes that these things are superficial, that gender is a construct anyway.

But Whippman’s own story wasn’t so “neat.” She explains:

[My] reality was more complex. I was deeply invested in that same belief system—that stereotypes were just that, and boys and girls could do or be anything they chose. But my sadness [about having a boy] spoke to something deeper buried in my sense of self and other. Because gender might be nothing, but it is also everything.

Case in point? My husband, Matt. If you know Matt in real life, you know that there is nothing toxic about him. (Gender might be nothing?) He’s like a real-life Totoro, and bonus, he loves being a dad.

That being said, he really, really likes Rocky movies. (Gender is everything?) He and the boys have watched them all. Even the much later ones like Creed (I had to look that up!). It’s something they do without me. My youngest son was Rocky for Halloween two years ago. But of all the Rocky movies, their favorite is Rocky IV. Matt’s a verbal processor (Gender might be nothing?) so he’s also talked to me a lot about Rocky IV. About why it’s so great. And so, on the seventeenth anniversary of our wedding, I agreed to watch it with them. (Timing was coincidental, but it really was our anniversary that night.)

Here's what I can say about my viewing experience: I get it.

And I’m bored! Rocky seems like a really solid bro, but the fight scenes go on for so long. Way too long. I ended up slinking out of the room to do some yoga. And it’s moments like these when I really feel like the only female person in the house. Like there’s just something magnetic for men when it comes to physical fighting. (Very relatedly, if I try to snuggle my older son, I usually get rebuffed, but he will wrestle me. Like, at any time; he’s ready to go.) (So far, I can still win. #thechamp)

We’re getting to Tyson, I promise! So, because the first season of Paul American culminates with Jake Paul’s fight against Tyson, throughout the episodes I’m picking up on this cultural thing I somehow missed, which is that Tyson holds this mythic status as a fighter. How did I miss out on this narrative? (Gender is everything?) Obviously I knew that Tyson was a boxer, but my main frame of reference for him up to this reality show was a combination of that Nintendo game I sometimes played—but more commonly, watched my brother play—and his cameo in The Hangover. Also, didn’t he bite someone’s ear off? (I feel moved to insert that I had no recollection of his rape conviction, which also feels tragically gendered to me.)

My point is that I didn’t take Tyson seriously. He was just like a floating piece of culture in my mind. But Matt (verbal processor) was trying to explain just how dominant he was. How no one could hang with him in the ring, et cetera and so on. And so, I became curious. One night when everyone else was asleep (Gender is everything?), I did a search for Tyson within the ESPN app. I found a 30 for 30 that was more about Evander Holyfield, but I watched enough of it to feel like I understood Mike’s status as a boxer.

But when I reported this to Matt, he was like: No. You need to watch a Tyson documentary.

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I think part of the reason I was so blown away by this documentary (Tyson by James Toback) must be because it was not what I expected, which must’ve been one fight scene after another. I mean, it is that, but it’s also one gigantic monologue from a mostly very thoughtful, forty-year-old Mike Tyson walking you through his emotional life.

I don’t want to make excuses for Tyson. I’m somewhat exhausted by what feels like a narrative trend of making space for every single villain’s backstory. But I did like him from the start. Plus, there is simply something happening in this documentary in terms of gender stereotypes. Tyson, with his face tattoo and lisp, is speaking eloquently and with a level of self-knowledge I’m not accustomed to hearing outside of a Glennon Doyle podcast.

At the very beginning, he tells the story of getting bullied as a child, how some older kids take his glasses and “put them in the trunk of a milk cart.” He’s so shocked by this, and you can see it on his face even as a middle-aged man—the surprise and confusion. How the cruelty felt so random. But he’d never fought anyone at that point, and so, he ran away. He wishes he could have fought the guys, but he explains that he was afraid. He says this over and over again. “I was afraid. I was just so afraid.” It’s so tender and also, so relatable.

The bullying continues though, and the next time is much worse. The stakes, way higher. Little Tyson had bought some pigeons. He liked to fly them. (Apparently, he still does this?) But these guys, the bullies, found out where he kept his birds. They were trying to take them from him and young Tyson was trying to chase the guys away. But they got one. And right in front of him, the bully twisted the pigeon’s neck and threw its lifeless body on the ground.

“And that’s the first time I ever had a fight,” Tyson says. “And I won.”

Everything changed after that, he explains. Everyone wanted to be his friend. He says he could wear his jewelry and “pretty-looking clothes” without worrying about anyone bothering him.

This is the origin of his origin story. But I want to jump ahead to years later.

After multiple stints in what sounds like a more local juvenile detention center—he’s first sent there at the age of twelve, which I mention because it feels so crazy to me—he’s sent to what sounds like a more serious detention center, what used to be called the “Tryon School for Boys,” where he meets a boxer named Bobby Stewart who, it sounds like, runs some sort of boxing class on the weekends. Tyson explains how guys would go there to “get the hell beat out of them just to relieve some tension.”

It's here that Tyson takes a real interest in boxing. He wants to learn, but Stewart seems to withhold teaching him until Tyson can prove that he’s serious, which he does by becoming a “nice guy.” There’s so much irony here, but what happens next is what I really want to discuss.

So, Tyson shows a lot of promise. And when it comes time for him to be released from this detention center, Stewart tells him to go to this other boxing teacher named Cus D’Amato. I didn’t know any of this, but D’Amato is the one who Tyson really credits as molding him into being the phenom that he becomes.

What pulled me in was how emotional Tyson is when talking about D’Amato. He says:

That’s why, once I got involved with Cus. I was a young boy, but once he, uh, spoke with me every night about discipline and character, I knew that nobody ever [begins to choke up and stammer], nobody physically, uhm, would ever fuck with me again.

[Long, emotional pause]

Once I talked to Cus and Cus talked to me, over and over again, over and over and over again, every night, for hours and hours, when I was a young kid, when I was thirteen and fourteen, I just never had to worry about nobody ever bullying me again… [pausing because he’s crying]. I knew that would never happen again.

[Long, long pause] Because I knew, uhm. Cause I knew back then, oh man, I can’t even say it. [Here, his tone changes. He forces the words out, almost violently. It’s a little scary.] Cuz I knew I would fucking kill them if they fucked with me.

[Crying, he can’t speak]

Watching this, I felt so weirdly in touch with what it meant to Tyson. What it meant to him to know, to truly know, that no one would ever be able to physically bully him again. I just kept thinking to myself: It’s like he won the golden ticket. I could feel both his relief and how endangered he’d felt. Next I thought about what that would mean in my own life; what it would mean to feel that I could defend myself no matter what and come out on top. And then I thought to myself: Who wouldn’t want that?

But I wasn’t done thinking! Next, I thought about this line I’d heard from someone who I find very smart and very rational. They said, re: using violence as a retaliatory response, that you do this because that’s the only language the other side understands, implying that words don’t work. It made me wonder: is that true? Is violence the universal language? I specifically thought about trying to communicate with the guy (kid?) who’d killed Tyson’s pigeon.

I thought about being a writer and how, if I’ve experienced any power at all, it has been through words. I thought about how good it feels to finish a piece. To feel like I’ve come to a new understanding about something and that I now had proof of this. And then I thought about how my mom didn’t seem to understand Wildcat at all. And then I thought about all the times I’ve worked so hard to explain myself in writing, thought I was being so careful and so precise and then ended up being completely misunderstood.

(Tyson thought D’Amato might be gay because D’Amato was saying so many great things about him, but as Tyson eventually figures out, he was just trying to build up his confidence ❤️‍🩹.)

By the end of the documentary, I felt exhausted by Tyson’s story. To go through life needing to physically overpower people is exhausting. It’s such a demanding, destructive way to live. Because the price Tyson pays for this worldview is that he can never relax. I mean, is that how anyone wants to live? It’s not a great choice, but what would you pick between the following two options? Hypervigilant, hard-bodied and alive orrrrr more relaxed, soft-bodied, but potentially dead?

Which brings me back to both Paul American and Ruth Whippman’s BoyMom!

In the epilogue of BoyMom, Whippman writes about her youngest son’s first day of kindergarten and a very subtle dichotomy she witnesses. On her son’s way into the classroom, two little girls are in front of him. A male teacher is standing there as greeter. Both girls receive a hush-toned, “Hi, sweetheart,” whereas Whippman’s son gets a deeper voice, a high-five, and a loud, “Hi, buddy!”

Here is Whippman:

Buddies and sweethearts carry different emotional and social burdens. A buddy is a peer, someone to grab a beer with. A sweetheart is a cherished darling in need of love and nurture. We take care of sweethearts, but not buddies. While “sweetheart” centers emotion and intimacy, “buddy” is an early initiation into the performance of masculinity in all its avoidant fist-bumping and defensive overcompensation.

As parents and educators, we do this to boys with the best of intentions. We call them buddy instead of sweetheart to help them survive in a system in which the costs of appearing weak or feminine are still very real. Masculinity lives right on the edge of humiliation, always just a tick away from transgression or failure or even violence.

One of the things that endeared me the most to Logan Paul—Lol, what a start to a sentence!—was the way he seemed to both understand how toxic his own dad’s masculinity is and yet, he doesn’t fight him on it. As problematic as Greg Paul is, Logan seems to have consciously accepted him for who he is.

And it’s weird because on one hand, Greg Paul “gets away” with bad behavior. And yet on another, Logan’s acceptance of his dad’s asshole-nature feels almost healing, like a path towards stopping the cycle. If you think about it, it’s a very soft approach. Some might say feminine.

In the last minutes of the Tyson documentary, Tyson admits that he still has this feeling of emptiness despite having accomplished so many things. “I had all these things in life but none of them fulfilled that big hole that I had…So it has to be something else that I’m looking for.”

“Patriarchy is a complicated beast,” Ruth Whippman writes.

For men and boys, privilege and disadvantage are intertwined, feeding off each other in a way that makes the injuries hard to pinpoint. But at some deep-level, in this system, men get everything except the thing that’s most worth having—human intimacy.

Oh man, that one stings. And I suspect it’s gonna hurt for a while.