Happy Father's Day

CULTURE

From MAMA Magazine

By Unc Corkner · June 20, 2026 · 5 min read

On this father’s day, we’d like to address the epidemic of soft, cowering, skinny fat dads that plagues our nation.

Dadhood should be an exclusive club. Many more women than men have reproduced successfully across history, and tons of men had no surviving descendants. Men are disposable. While everyone needed a MAMA, not every man got to be a dad.

In modernity, something broke in the handoff. Many dads today are not patriarchs. They are mere sperm donors.

You can see the wreckage in the wild. Boy Scouts, (sorry, now just “Scouts”) is a great example. Like everywhere else in America, we let women infiltrate. I noticed a sterling example of the type of man who let this happen. Shockingly for this day and age, this man was probably 30 pounds underweight. His emaciated white arms poked through a tanktop. He wore a long scraggly beard, his head topped by a purple Pokemon hat. “Gengar,” he tells me as I hide a grimace.

The activity this month is a series of relay races. My son’s team alternates between shoving each other and barking out a military-style cadence during the races. “Hope they don’t join the army,” says one flabby dad. While I generally share this sentiment, I have to respond incredulously, “You know the Boy Scouts were founded as a pipeline for military officers?” He looks at me like I have a cock growing out of my forehead.

Failure comes in many flavors.

You know the neutered dad, but not all anti-patriarchs inhabit this milquetoast abrogation of masculinity.

Consider the undisciplined brute: an obese black dad attached to the other teeball team. He doesn’t shut the fuck up, he speaks harshly to his five year old son, and also he’s fat. A non-examplar of being in control, a being of pure volume and mass.

There's Phone Dad. Ok, we’ve all been phone dad, but this guy is locked into reddit for the duration of any public event. Maybe he’s avoiding the surrounding soyim, but we’ll never know, and neither will he. He’s on the sidelines of life, not attending to anything of import, like developing a world renowned men’s magazine.

Zoom out and scan your surroundings. Turn your attention to modern dads. Size them up in the school parking lot. 60% of them boast a physique that is both skinny and flabby. Beyond litigation, they present no threat. Witness them at your kid’s school, driving a Subaru with a fruity bumper sticker. Their wife is probably named Meredith or some shit, and their 8 year old Failbert already identifies as non-binary.

This man may have been prenatally and chemically set up for failure, but he didn’t become this way overnight. He needed his ass kicked 20 years ago, and no one bothered to oblige him.

This is a betadad: physically unimposing, morally apologetic, spiritually absent. He exists, but he does not impose. His father before him came softly and produced this modern pile of soft-serve. He microaggressed his micropenis into his wife's macrovagina. He apologized upon climax.

The cycle of degradation continues. In a few generations, his progeny will be a half baked sperm and egg, resembling a squid. Is there hope for these soggy golems?

There’s always hope, but the real hope lies in salvaging their sons.

There’s more time for them.

How do we do it? If the problem is a lack of friction, then the solution is controlled friction. Sports are the closest thing you have to a silver bullet to inoculate your son from transing to a were-pussy.

My son will almost certainly never be in the MLB. His natural baseball IQ is middling. But he’s fast and aggressive. At the end of the first day of practice, coach summons the boys in a semi-circle. My son yells, “Dog-pile!” He tackles two teammates and the rest join in. That’s a real fucking big league chew clubhouse guy. Coach is pleased with the energy and restores order. Let ‘em cook.

There are 2 types of dogpile: one comes out of your dog, the other is a manifestation of your progeny’s lupine spirit: an instinct to collide, organize chaos into hierarchy, and be useful to the pack.

There are basically zero Tim Walz type coaches out there. In my day, a DUI was a requirement to coach J.V. football. Now you need multiple background checks proving you're not a Kid-didly-iddler.

There are also a ton of assholes who coach as well. It's important that your son meet these assholes, early and often. The point isn’t that coaches are saints. It’s that they’re not you. Your son needs exposure to other hierarchies, other temperaments, other forms of pressure.

You are just one guy. Solo coaching your son requires Tiger Woods’ dad levels of insanity. Team sports provide your son with a sense of peer pressure and camaraderie that will serve as an amulet against the estro-men.

Team sports are just one example of a way to engage. I find them to be a shortcut, but there are many ways you can lean in to help.

My own father took us on these 10 mile deathmarches up 10,000 foot mountains in the Sierra. He’d bring his .22 pistol and we shot beer cans off granite rocks.

My brother was basically failing middle school. Then he was issued a six week summer job chipping mortar off old bricks until his hands became. This proved to be more powerful than any tutor.

Shit, when I was fifteen, I wasn’t really eating my dinner, complaining about my football coaches. My dad interrupted by banging his fist on the table and calling me “weak.” Tough medicine: but memorable, actionable.

Dadhood isn’t a club you inherit. It’s a burden you carry. Pick it up.