As his wife smoothed his collar and straightened his tie,
Denise said, “I’m glad you listened to me and shaved off the mustache.”
“Thanks. It's almost time. You’d better get out of here.”
He sat in the chair facing a laptop balanced on a stack of
books atop a TV tray. He could see the small square preview video. Though the
setup was crude, Denise was right—it gave him a distinguished backdrop: his
expansive bookshelf and the sliver of wall next to it where his diplomas hung. Credentials.
A production assistant’s face filled the screen.
“Hello, Dr. Morrison. I’m just going to test the connection,
and then I’ll go over the process, time limits, and guidelines for the panel.”
Since the 24-hour news cycle had become a permanent fixture
of American culture, he had participated in a dozen of these experts-weigh-in-on-current-events
panels: the pros and cons of Viagra when it first came out, the rise of STDs in
retirement communities, the decline of teen pregnancy.
In the early years, however, he would go to a local sister
station and sit with a crew, lights, makeup, and a production assistant
actually in the room with him. Professional and polished how work should be done.
But now everything was done over the internet and alone. He
sat in his own home, with only his wife to help. In the room where his youngest daughter had slept until she moved out.
Normally he didn’t mind participating in a filler news segment to plug gaps in the broadcast schedule. However, the president of the university had made it clear they intended for this segment to help “contain the situation.” So he spent a week composing rebuttals in the shower and jotting phrases from her interviews on legal pads, circling the same words over and over.
By “the situation,” he of course meant the institution’s recent dropout and newly notorious alumna, Jasmine Kopernick.
That pebble in Dr. Morrison’s shoe that continued to poke
the tender sole of his foot no matter how many times he tried to shake her off.
The production assistant smiled and held up five fingers.
“The countdown begins now… five… four… three…”
One and two were fingers only—silent.
Four faces filled the screen.
A female news anchor behind a studio desk, long blonde hair
in loose curls, with the plump lips and hollow cheeks that all TV personalities
seemed to have developed in the last few years.
A man with a crew cut and polo shirt, seated in front of an
American flag with the male symbol printed on it.
Jasmine Kopernick, sitting casually, with an artfully
arranged bowl of oranges and a nude female statue—perhaps a foot tall—on a
table to her right.
And himself.
Bloated. Red-faced. Too fat. Too old. Sitting in front of a
wall of books, awards, and framed paper.
The news anchor gave them a bright, television-friendly
smile and slipped into her on-air voice.
“We are joined now by Dr. Timothy Morrison of the Men’s
Sexual Performance Laboratory housed within the Sexual Wellness Institute at
Southern Wisconsin University, Jasmine Kopernick, cofounder and contributor to
the DommyMommy blog, book, and subsequent movement, and Barry Smith, men’s
rights advocate and host of the Man Today podcast. Welcome.”
A pause.
“The DommyMommy blog and the recent New York Times
bestselling book of the same name have caused quite a stir. Jasmine, what do
you have to say about this?”
Jasmine cocked her head slightly and smiled warmly.
“Well, the name DommyMommy is cheesy, of course. But the lifestyle is much more than that, and—”
“—But you understand why people find it concerning,” the anchor interjected.
Jasmine’s face seemed unfazed as she replied, “We’re just people sharing honest portrayals of our life and lifestyle. If people are interested in applying aspects of it to their own lives, that is a choice they make.”
The newscaster’s expression tightened, “Dr. Morrison, you
have expressed strong opinions on Ms. Kopernick’s work. Your response?”
“I’m an expert. I have decades of academic, professional, and research—”
“—Dr. Morrison, hold that thought,” the anchor said. “I want to bring Barry Smith in.”
“I have reports of men swindled out of their life savings and then subjected to iron-clad NDAs. Men who have lost everything. Men injured or physically harmed. Sexual, physical, and financial abuse at the hands of women operating under the guidance of—”
“Ms. Kopernick?" the anchor interrupted again, "Your response?”
“No one is forcing anyone. Some don’t pay anything. For
those that do have a monetary exchange, the men name their prices. But
really—is this much different than OnlyFans accounts? Buying an engagement ring
or a house for a wife? Subscribing to the premium content of a podcast? Can
your followers name their price for your premium content, or do you?”
The newscaster leaned into a more serious tone.
“But Ms. Kopernick, there are concerns about your
qualifications. When a world-renowned expert like Dr. Morrison cautions against
your lifestyle, why would anyone listen to you?”
Briefly looking down, he saw his hands clenched into hard
fists and forced them open. White crescents—ghosts of fingernails digging into
skin—remained like little smiles on his palms.
He was enraged by how calm she seemed.
Confident.
Reasonable. Approachable. Charming.
All the things he and the other man were not.
To the average viewer, they would appear to be complaining
men angry at a woman simply living her life and talking about it, while she
seemed like a lovely woman only asking to be left in peace.
Jasmine smirked—or maybe it only seemed that way—and stared directly at Dr. Morrison through the tiny video box.
Morrison had the sudden, irrational thought that he was watching something escape.
“Who has read Dr. Morrison’s research? Peer reviewers, other
researchers, students he assigns it to. It’s hidden behind paywalls and written
in convoluted language. The average person—the person this research is
about—can’t access it.”
If he had more time, he could have responded well.
Convincingly.
As if he didn’t partially agree that academia shouldn’t be a foreign quagmire to the layman. As if he didn’t feel guilty for his role in what she had become.
So all he blurted out was, “Our participants have informed
consent. There are avenues to access it.”
Unsure whether it was a blessing or a curse, the men’s
rights activist—framed by his American flag with the male symbol blazing across
it—chose that moment to speak up.
“We need to quit worrying about professionals and experts
and return the focus to the real men who are losing their lives and morale over
feminist propaganda. Militant, anti-men women like Ms. Kopernick. Erectile
dysfunction, mental health collapse, parental rights disparity—men are losing
everywhere! This is where men should be holding the line—not following snake
oil sold by women with breast implants like her.” He pointed at the screen accusingly.
Though crude, perhaps Mr. Men’s Rights was not completely
useless in this segment.
Except, of course, the newscaster then shone a spotlight on
the elephant in every room Dr. Morrison had entered since that blog and
subsequent book.
“Speaking of credentials, Dr. Morrison—up until a year ago, you were considered Ms. Kopernick’s advisor. Is that not true?”
“That title has largely been a technicality on paper. There
is a long record of my discouraging, refusing, and disapproving of Ms.
Kopernick’s actions. Additionally, she withdrew over a year ago, will not be
graduating, and I have not spoken to her since before the blog began.”
At this point, he should print that on the back of his
business cards to save himself from having to repeat it so often.
“Okay, last question. Dr. Morrison and Barry, you both seem
to agree that this is dangerous and harmful to men. But how do you explain the
hashtag DommyMommy trending on TikTok, the spike in interest after
prominent YouTuber Derek Gregory—Mr. D-Man himself—disclosed his own DommyMommy
relationship, and the DommyMommy subreddit alone having twenty thousand
followers? If this is so damaging, why do men and women seem to be flocking to
it? Barry, you first.”
“This is a social contagion. A fad. It’s the Tide Pod
challenge and anti-vaxxers combined. It will die down—but not before it does real damage to real men.”
Jasmine responded calmly.
“First, Mr. Smith’s podcast seems concerned about the male
loneliness epidemic, yet condemns men who have cured themselves of loneliness.
Perhaps it’s not right for the men who subscribe to his podcast—but you can’t
deny the numbers. This started with just two people. Now we’re looking at tens of
thousands of people at least interested in the information, if not
incorporating these principles into their lives.”
Was that a personal and professional dig at their last conversation—when he had pushed her about the low sample size? A sample of two?
Probably. Yes.
She smiled sardonically and continued.
“There are over two hundred true personal accounts on the
website you can read. Anyone can read them. For free. But we are not saying all mental
health issues—or even your mental health issues—can be resolved. We are just
saying it has cured ours.”
Morrison had read several of the accounts Jasmine mentioned.
A few sounded disturbingly sincere.
"We’re almost out of time,” the anchor said quickly. “Final thoughts—fifteen seconds each.”
Dr. Morrison didn’t even hear what Jasmine and the podcaster said. He barely remembered what he himself had said.
The oranges, the statue, the soft smile—none of it accidental. Of course she paused before saying two people. Of course she looked into the camera then. It couldn’t be coincidence that the anchor used Jasmine’s language—lifestyle, not scheme or operation.
As the video window closed, he knew one thing with
certainty.
This was not mission accomplished.
The situation had not been contained.
And worse—
he had likely given it accelerant and momentum.
Who even was Barry Smith?
He typed “Barry Smith podcaster” into the search bar,
and a recent article from The Atlantic appeared as the first result.
“Barry Smith says in podcast he doesn’t read books
because his brain is too advanced for them.”
He roughly rubbed his furrowed brow.
How he missed the days when Jasmine was only an apparition
from his student past—appearing in his inbox as long, meandering emails that
used too many words to say she still wanted to finish her PhD, but that her
indefinite break would continue indefinitely.
Regretfully, for years he had hoped she would wake up renewed—ready either to finish the program or simply withdraw and fade away.
So for years he placated her when he should have
extinguished any spark of hope.
Now he was being made to answer for his passivity.
A brief rap sounded at the door.
“Tim,” his wife called through the wood, “change your
clothes. I laid them out on the bed. They’ll be here soon.”
Time to take off Dr. Morrison and just be Tim: husband to
Denise, father to Jamie and Jessica, golf enthusiast, and most assuredly not
late for a dinner party with friends.
He would put on the dress shirt and slacks laid out on the
bed. He would sit at the formal dining room table, its two leaves expanded to
fit fifteen, and eat the lovely Julia Child–inspired meal his wife had prepared
for the occasion. They would use the expensive plates that normally resided in
the china cabinet, watching the family eat sandwiches off paper towels any other evening.
He would laugh, enjoy time with his friends, and just be Tim
for the rest of the night.
Just Tim had no situation to contain. No dean or president to
answer to on Monday.
Within the circle of their friends—stabbing, cutting,
chewing, swallowing bites of beef Wellington—Madeline, a longtime friend and
generally clueless woman, paused to ask:
“Did anyone catch Tim’s segment on CNN tonight?”
Just Tim hadn’t lasted long.
For decades his career had been a delightful source of
dinner-table conversation fodder. Guests were delighted, titillated,
enraptured, or horrified by salacious tales: men whose honeymoons ended in the
ER due to drug-induced erections lasting longer than seventy-two hours, or
stories of men who developed Pavlovian arousal at the smell of gasoline due to
childhood abuse.
Madeline couldn’t know that this time it wasn’t a little anecdote like in the past.
The excited murmuring of the other guests showed they had
seen the segment—and were pressing for more information.
As a young man, he had loved Frankenstein and empathized with the misunderstood monster. But for the past few months, he had come to see himself as Dr. Frankenstein.
Precariously balancing the impossible task of warning the
villagers of imminent danger—a monster on the loose—while also trying to make
them understand how he hadn’t seen it coming as he created it.
He tried to explain it without sounding hysterical.
Too calm, and they would laugh it off.
Too alarmed, and they would stop listening.
“Yes, at this point most people have heard of DommyMommy—the
blog, the book. It’s become something of a phenomenon.”
He had the absurd urge to use air quotes around "New York Times Best seller" and ask whether anyone at the table had read her "book."
“But I met her when she was eighteen, nineteen. She wanted
to research sexual confidence through successful experiences and it seemed aligned with my work with
pharmaceutical treatments.”
He tried to choose his words carefully. They needed to
understand how he couldn’t have seen the clearly until recently.
“She isn’t the first—nor will she be the last—student who
wants to study human sexuality because they have some adolescent wet dream to
pursue. Most eventually let the fantasy go and get serious.”
A pause.
“She never did.”
Looking around the table, he saw nodding, friendly,
understanding faces. It emboldened him to pivot—to arrive at the stark warning
he actually wanted to deliver.
“Her clinicals were a turning point. It should have been
simple—hand out rubbers, pamphlets, easy enough. But she started interviewing
prostitutes and call girls. I told her to stop. Then she said she wanted to
become a stripper, and I told her no. But she has this way about her. She talks
about unethical and manipulative things in ways that seem logical. Becoming a
stripper, to her, was like a field trip to the zoo for a biology class.”
He paused.
“You can imagine my shock when I found out she took it
further and became a hooker.”
It wasn’t new information about Jasmine Kopernick, yet the faces around the table had gone grave. They had stopped eating to focus on him.
He needed to pull back—to regain sympathy.
“She could only take a break or withdraw. Hell, I encouraged
it. Get her head right. That was years ago.”
David, abandoning his usual jovial style, voiced the thought
hovering around the table.
“I don’t understand. How long was the break? I thought she
withdrew last year.”
“God damn it.”
He slammed a damp fist on the table, making a wine glass
wobble back and forth to his wife’s wide-eyed horror.
“Maybe I was too soft. Maybe I held out hope she would come
to her senses. Maybe I liked her! She wasn’t the smartest student ever—but smart
enough to get into grad school. Charming. Nice girl. What can I say?”
Approving nods moved around the table as his wife said gently, “Tim has always been softhearted with his students.”
Their sympathy made something in him panic.
“Don’t think this is safe. She has taken up a crusade. I’m
no prude—I’ve been in this field for decades, from the early days, when we
still had to borrow professors from sociology and anthropology just to cover
the classes. Have your kink, your orgies, cuckolding, whatever. But this—this
isn’t some harmless cute blog.”
He heard himself talking and recognized the tone at once: the shrill register of a man losing the room.
He told himself to lower his voice. Instead he leaned in.
“Mark my words. The next Charles Manson! Or Jim Jones! Jasmine Kopernick!”
Even as he said Manson, some part of him knew it was too much. He said it anyway. Another heavy fist shook the table, finally tipping a glass of red
wine over.
“Jesus Christ, Tim! Listen to yourself.”
His wife jumped from her chair and began sopping up the
spreading red stain with a napkin.
“Oh Denise, let me help,” Madeline chimed in, the two women
bustling toward the kitchen for cleaning supplies.
Silence fell over the table.
Frightened and confused faces.
His friends. Too far yet again.
“Tim, really? It’s not a big deal. Popular this week and gone the next. It’s just another sex thing.”
“Yeah. It’ll be like the planking challenge or swallowing
goldfish. Wake up one day and it’ll be DommyMommy who?”
The group sat through several minutes of uncomfortable silence before David ended the tension.
“So… who’s excited for the Packers game this weekend?”
“Oh, I can’t wait. We’re going to slaughter them.”
Maybe Timothy Morrison, PhD was just an old man.
Maybe it really would all pass.
But as his friends talked football and his wife cleaned up
the mess he had made, he sat there smiling along—
alone inside his own mind.
Jasmine.
Her followers were everywhere now—forums, videos, comment threads, even his inbox. In emails he tried not to read too closely, men thanked her. Some of them even claimed it had helped them. He tried not to think about those messages.
How could he—one man—protect the world from something he had helped create through nothing more than passivity?
He wondered—too late—whether indulging her all those years had been a mistake.
And now the system he believed in could not stop it.
To do things the right way required peer review. Publishing
fees. Editorial boards. Months—maybe years—before evidence could reach the
public. If ever.
Meanwhile she had probably already written ten pages about
the news segment.
Photos. Clips. Links blasted across TikTok, Instagram, and
whatever platform came next.
It had likely already been read by more people than his last research article, and tonight had only made it bigger. Millions had watched her sit there—calm, confident—legitimized by him and another fool on national television.
For months—no years—he had told himself that she would fade away.
Instead she had grown.
Louder. Larger. Untouchable.
Now that he was finally shouting warnings, the world seemed
to believe exactly what he once had—that she would disappear on her own.
He didn’t believe in God. But he prayed anyway.
That maybe—just maybe—this time what he had made would
vanish overnight.
Even as he knew she wouldn’t.
That night, after everyone was gone and Denise was in bed, he would return to his office. His laptop still
glowed on the desk.
A notification blinked.
New post: DommyMommy CNN Appearance.
Thousands of comments already.
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