Why Aren't Men Able to Fix Anything Anymore? - InsideHook
For generations of men, fixing things was second nature.
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Dad Didn’t Need a Taskrabbit
My dad fixed his car engine with a Pepsi can, I complain to Claude about my leaky faucet. What happened to men?
By
Tanner Garrity @tannergarrity
June 15, 2026 12:56 pm EDT
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The faucet in my kitchen sink loves to drool all over itself. If I’m not careful when shifting the handle back and forth, hosing down a pan, I’ll soon have a reservoir on the sink basin. The water laps against our cutting boards and adds to the stains on our laminate countertop. It drives me absolutely fucking crazy.
In these moments I’m liable to launch into a shameful brand of anthropomorphism. Already running late for work, forced to mop up the mess with a backpack on, I’ll get up and personal with the leaky faucet: This was all part of your plan, wasn’t it? You just live for my cortisol, don’t you, you little freak. A couple minutes later, walking to the subway, I’ll black back in, shake the experience away like an Etch-a-Sketch and move on. This has been going on for years. Only recently has it occurred to me that I could try to fix the faucet myself.
My six-story pre-war in South Williamsburg has a small team of handymen who operate on an ad hoc basis. If something needs fixing in your unit, you can request the job via our landlord, whom I’ll call Craig. He’ll send his guys over at his leisure. One morning last fall, they banged on the door briefly, heavily — as I bellowed variations of “One sec!” from the shower — but they came in anyway. I greeted them with a towel around my waist, as they got to work on replacing the smoke detector. I mumbled my gratitude.
Sometimes they’ll conclude a specific task requires a new, expensive part. Craig will then launch a propaganda campaign, sending us a spray of emails explaining that we’re mistaken, the faucet doesn’t actually leak, we’re probably just pushing it with too much force.
“It’s like opening a door,” he wrote to me. “You’ve gotta be gentle.” So: he won’t do it. Which matters, because I’m 95% sure I can’t do it. Like too many men born on this side of 1985, I have little control over these situations beyond disbursing my American dollars. I’m left to my own frustrations and dissociations — to googling Taskrabbit sign-up codes.
If He Broke a Window He Could Fix It
When my dad was 17 he worked on a game farm in Sandwich, Massachusetts. It was a state job; they raised pheasant to sell to local gun clubs or private buyers. The birds lived in tight cages and had a habit of pecking at each other, which threatened their development. (They also sometimes pecked each other to death and ate the remains.) Dad and his peers were responsible for catching the birds, chopping off their beaks with a guillotine, then cauterizing the area. “Your arms would get scratched up like you wouldn’t believe,” he remembers.
Among other tasks, workers emptied 50-pound bags of feed from trucks and mowed the farm. Sometimes the job got especially grisly: “If the brood got sick you’d have to go in there with a fire extinguisher.” Weed whacking meant sometimes eviscerating a rogue bird, invisible in the tall grass. But Dad remembers the job fondly. He had time to lift weights. Lunch was at 10:30 a.m. And Massachusetts took nothing from the $250 he pocketed each week.
Since I was young, I’ve heard stories of my dad’s many misadventures and odd jobs. Born in a suburb of Boston in 1965, he grew up with three brothers, living the kind of rough-and-tumble childhood that would bring a proud tear to Jonathan Haidt’s eye. Dad and Co once had their own Sandlot caper — they lost a Carl Yastrzemski-signed ball after someone hit it into a sewer. Other times they were hitting those baseballs through windows in his narrow driveway, or wrestling throughout the house.
“If something broke,” he says, “we had to try and fix it before Dad came home.” At a very young age, he learned how to rig up a broken bed platform with plywood from the garage. He knew how to go to the hardware store and ask them to cut a new window, then how to install it himself: carving out shards of the old broken window, laying putty, placing the new one, letting it harden. The basement in their house had a vice and a tool room. He’d race down there to build rockets, watch his dad fix a bike. In the summers his family went to Scusset Beach, and as young as 10 or 11 he’d tinker with a small engine on a heavy boat, motoring around to check the lobster traps.
His family had one rule for their teenage boys: play a sport or get a job. So when he wasn’t playing soccer or tennis he was working at Burger King, rotating fries at McDonald’s, thatching a roof at the Christmas Tree Shop, cleaning bathrooms at campgrounds, staining and painting windows for his uncle, a real estate developer. He...