Esquire's cover story on what it's like to be a white teenager in Wisconsin stirs controversy for being tone deaf

Esquire magazine stirred up the latest social media controversy for its March cover story — and again made Wisconsin a stand-in for the state of our country.

The story, released during Black History month, profiles a 17-year-old white boy growing up in West Bend in the time of Trump and #MeToo. Ryan Morgan, a senior at West Bend High School, loves hunting and the Packers. He plays video games and has a girlfriend.

In the words of Esquire's editor in chief Jay Fielden, "What we asked Jen (Percy) to do—and she did brilliantly—was to look at our divided country through the eyes of one kid." 

The cover features Ryan in his bedroom with the cover line: "An American boy: What it's like to grow up white, middle class and male in the era of social media, school shootings, toxic masculinity, #MeToo and a divided country."

The critique on Twitter and elsewhere is that the article is tone deaf and uses the #MeToo movement — the point of which was to show that no one was listening to women, people of color and LGBTQ people — to tell yet another story about a white, straight, middle-class male.

"It's struck me as a sort of an odd choice for Esquire, who claims they’re doing this series on experiences of different young people." said Elana Levine, a journalism advertising and media studies professor at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee. "To have started with the straight white man, I'm sort of shocked that no one there thought how that might read."

And there's #MeToo, splashed on the cover and addressed in the story.

Ryan is aware of the movement, but he doesn't understand it. He asked Percy, “I’ve heard of that. What does it mean again?”

The profile talks about how Ryan got in a fight with a girl at school. He ended up getting a ticket in municipal court. He got picked on in school about it — kids called him a "woman beater" even though, he says, she struck him first. In the article, the teen said that if he were a girl, he wouldn't have been punished. 

There are also some classically Wisconsin moments in the story. Ryan's divorced parents schedule their trade-off time around Packers games. He's 17 years old, but he can get into a bar, no questions asked. In his government class, the students sing a song written by another West Bend teacher meant to help kids remember the difference between political ideologies. It's sung to the tune of "Beer Barrel Polka."

And there's division. 

After President Trump was elected, students in his high school responded. Ryan said, "The liberal students became enraged and the conservative students emboldened."

The teen talks about Milwaukee Brewers pitcher Josh Hader whose racist, sexist and homophobic tweets resurfaced last summer. 

He said, “Just so happens that something Hader said seven years ago about hating gay people came up the day of a big game. Now he has to go to all these sensitivity trainings ... Someone must’ve been jealous of him and said, ‘Oh, I have this message from when he was 15.’ It’s like, yeah, you say a lot of stupid stuff when you are 15.” 

Yes, people say a lot of stupid things at 15. Sometimes magazines will publish them. And then, just like Hader's tweets, the words are out there — forever.

Fielden said in his editor's letter that the story is the first of a series, and this one just happens to be about a white, middle-class kid. Future stories will profile black kids, LGBTQ students and women, too.

"I think there’s an assumption that white youth is the norm to start with and then we’ll talk about variation," Levine said. "And there’s no reason that whiteness should be the starting point."

Fielden said he thinks of his own son, also a teen, and how he has to deal with regular teenage issues, "Add to this the passions and change this moment has unleashed — #MeToo, gender fluidity, Black Lives Matter, 'check your privilege,' and #TheFutureIsFemale — and the task of grappling with the world has to be more complicated for kids than it’s ever been."

Except that, as Twitter has pointed out, it's always been that way for women, LGBTQ people and people of color.