Why Men Keep Inventing New Ways to Suffer

First, a huge announcement and honestly a bit of a pinch-me moment for us: Marc Maron is coming on Boy Problems, and we’re doing it live!!

Marc has spent decades saying the things most comedians won’t, about relationships, masculinity, grief, addiction, and getting older. More recently, he’s become one of the loudest critics of the MAGA-fication of comedy and the rise of bro podcasts that mistake sucking up to powerful people for fearless conversation. As WTF comes to an end after sixteen years, we’re excited to ask him about all of it.

We’ll also be joined by the endlessly fascinating David Farrier, so this has all the makings of a truly unhinged night.

We’ll be at Elysian Theater at 7 p.m. next wednesday Canada Day, no less!!!! So if you’re having mixed feelings about the Fourth of July, consider celebrating Canada and emotionally vulnerable men instead. Grab your tickets here.

Ok, now to the main event: Jackass.

If you’ve read For the Love of Men, you already know I have an embarrassingly serious academic obsession with it. I genuinely think it’s one of the most interesting studies of masculinity ever put on film. Underneath all the shopping carts, tased testicles, bull attacks, and exploding port-a-potties is a surprisingly tender story about masculinity’s strangest bargain: put your body on the line and you might finally be worthy of love. The franchise isn’t just about men getting hurt. It’s about how masculinity rewards risk, how pain becomes proof, and how suffering earns men admiration, belonging, and affection from other men.

What’s fascinated me even more is how the guys themselves have evolved alongside masculinity. Steve-O is sober and talks openly about recovery. Johnny Knoxville has become reflective about aging, therapy, and what all that punishment was actually for. The franchise has aged from “watch these idiots hurt themselves” into something closer to “watch these men figure themselves out.”

But Jackass Forever introduced a new obsession for me, and her name is Rachel Wolfson.

Rachel is the only woman in the main cast, and suddenly the entire premise of Jackass looks different. Because if Jackass is about men voluntarily seeking pain, women have a completely different relationship to it. Women’s pain is rarely elective. It’s menstrual, reproductive, medical, and routinely minimized. Men sign up for Tough Mudders, ultramarathons, cold plunges, and getting tased by their friends. Women get handed pain whether they wanted it or not. As Rachel and I discussed when she came on Boy Problems, while I was ironically having period cramps so bad we had to stop filming multiple times, women learn about pain while we’re still girls.

Women don’t meet pain in adulthood. We meet it in middle school, while boys are still playing video games. Men pay hundreds of dollars for obstacle courses to experience the kind of resilience women were forced to develop at fourteen for free. The difference isn’t that men experience more pain. It’s that men often choose their pain, while women are expected to quietly accommodate theirs.

Our entire world revolves around men’s comfort and the minimization of their pain. Female pain on the other hand, is routinely normalized. Female-specific diseases receive less funding than conditions that primarily affect men. More research exists on male pattern baldness than on endometriosis, a disease so painful it sends millions of women to the hospital. A man losing his hair outranks a woman losing consciousness from pain. Or in some cases, her own life. Make it make sense.

Abortion laws tell you everything about how much pain we expect women to endure. Especially relevant given that it’s been four years since a group of men in robes decided they knew better than every woman alive. Childbirth is one of the most dangerous things a woman can survive, yet the people making these decisions, men who will never become pregnant, have decided that women can be forced to give birth even if they don't want to or can't afford to. Women are being forced to carry pregnancies in states where abortion is illegal, yet the diseases that only affect them remain chronically underfunded and under-researched. Society is willing to mandate childbirth, but not invest in the health of the people expected to give birth. That contradiction should outrage all of us.

So maybe that’s why men keep inventing new ways to suffer. Research shows men who seek help for pain or mental health are often seen as less masculine, by both men and women. So instead they seek out pain they can control. Ultramarathons. Cold plunges. Tough Mudders. MMA. Entire industries have sprung up around proving men can take it. Which makes me wonder if what’s driving all of this isn’t just masculinity, but pain envy. Not because men wish they had periods or wanted to give birth, but because there’s something undeniably powerful about enduring pain., something undeniably powerful about being a woman that perhaps men wish they could acquire. Women develop resilience by virtue of being alive. Men have to go looking for it. So maybe Jackass isn’t just a performance of masculinity, maybe it’s an attempt to earn the kind of toughness women have been expected to possess all along.

And if you don’t agree, come argue about it with us on Canada Day :)

And if you can’t join us in person, you’ll be able to watch the episode by subscribing to the pod!

xo Liz