Bad Ass Dads?
This project demonstrates that caring masculinities today are not rebranded as “tactical” or “hypermasculine,” but are being normalized, racially diversified, and quietly domesticated.
Background
This five-article dissertation examines how fathers and fatherhood are represented and lived when...
...care and masculinity increasingly overlap.
Through analyses of advertisements, social media, and interviews with fifty fathers (thirty-five of them military veterans) the project traces how babywearing and caregiving have become ordinary rather than exceptional practices.​​
This dissertation began taking shape in 2014, the year Doyin Richards went "mega viral" for a photo of himself babywearing while doing his daughter’s hair. The public reaction, ranging from celebration to backlash, exposed how deeply ideas about gender, race, and parenting were still contested.
That same year, a new company, Mission Critical Gear (MCG), launched its first baby carrier styled after a military tactical vest. I was struck by the coincidence: one image of fatherhood centered on tenderness, another on toughness. Being a career veteran in the U.S. Air Force, I was also enthralled by...
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...the paradox of an item invented to enhance life was now styled as an item used to assist ending life.
I began following MCG’s early marketing and social media presence, conducting an informal content analysis of its website, advertisements, and Instagram feed.​ I reached out to the company directly, obtained consent to include their materials, and received sample carriers for closer study. I talked with fathers and their loved ones in my social and professional circles, both civilian and military, about what they thought of this “tactical” approach to caregiving.
Fathers and loved ones reactions were mixed: some found it playful or affirming, others found it unnecessary or performative. These early insights made clear that military aesthetics in baby gear were more than novelty, they were cultural symbols connecting gender, class, race, and fatherhood.
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To situate this work, I expanded my focus to other baby carrier brands: BabyBjörn, Tactical Baby Gear (TBG), Commando Dad, and JACs. Snugli, the original American brand, had already disappeared from the market, but its influence lingered through BabyBjörn’s enduring popularity.
I found it striking that two new tactical brands emerged on opposite coasts: MCG in San Francisco, California, a politically liberal city, and TBG in Bluffton, South Carolina, a politically conservative one. Both were selling the same idea: that care could look masculine.
By 2017, I formally proposed my dissertation on these three brands’ visual and cultural politics (BB, TBG, MCG), while also working and teaching in military and academic settings and raising my own two children with my partner.
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Between 2017 and 2020, I deepened my theoretical grounding in feminist intersectionality, critical studies of men and masculinities (CSMM), and sociology of gender and family. In 2021, I launched the interview phase, recruiting fathers nationwide through social media, veterans’ networks, and community organizations. By 2022, I had completed 50 in-depth interviews, including 35 veterans, which became the core data of the final three empirical papers.
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Studying this is vital because representations of fathers influence how men see themselves, how families share care, and how institutions define responsibility. By tracing the aesthetics, marketing, and lived practices of caregiving across race, class, and veteran status, this project illuminates a quiet transformation: men’s care work, once framed as exceptional, is becoming both visible and ordinary.
12 years ago today, I was on paternity leave from my corporate job and set up my camera to snap this photo of me caring for my two young daughters. I didn’t think much of it (because, you know - moms do this stuff everyday and nobody blinks an eye), but I thought it was cool so I posted it on social media.
That decision changed my life forever.
The photo went mega viral for reasons I still don’t understand to this day. I was interviewed by the TODAY Show, Good Morning America, Sunrise Australia, NPR, my favorite journalist of all-time @katiecouric and many more. I received a ton of hate and racism - but also many people wanted to build a statue in my honor for doing what’s expected of me as a father.
I didn’t deserve any of it.
At the end of the day, the thing I am most proud of was taking paternity leave to bond with my daughters - because now we are incredibly close. I’m also proud that I didn’t use that platform to celebrate myself, but instead used it to promote active/involved fatherhood as normal.
Cheers to all of the dads who show up and show out for their kiddos, and cheers to the companies that offer parental leave. I see you and so do the tiny humans who will become the future of this world.
SIDE NOTE: I don’t know what’s more amazing.
1) That I still have this same outfit 12 years later.
2) That a High Schooler and a Middle Schooler agreed to recreate this.
3) That as a 50yo man, I was able to lift and hold my 12yo 5’7 136lbs daughter who is solid muscle with just my left arm.
Richards, Doyin. Daddy Doin' Work. Instagram. October 7, 2025. https://www.instagram.com/p/DPtlTuHkY4J/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link&igsh=MzRlODBiNWFlZA==
Accessed October 17, 2025.
I am committed to public sociology, so this work moved beyond academia and into communities. I was super pleased when my public affairs troops wanted to highlight the fatherhood of men in our wing. I absolutely love that my research inspired a performance piece in Arms Across America (UCLA World Arts and Cultures by Dan Froot & Company). When I supported Postpartum International events, I was so happy to chat with community organizations serving new and expectant fathers in San Diego. What a joy to begin working with Allan Shedlin to help shape public conversations through the Daddying Film Festival & Forum, where I facilitated a reflection circle and spoke about fatherhood and care. I was also fortunate to be invited to guest lecture in several UCLA Sociology courses. People at the American Sociological Association conferences as well as summits in the Pat Tillman Foundation responded enthusiastically to my presentations and helped inspire me to keep going because this resonated with so many.
Paper 1
"Bad Ass Dads?"
This paper test the Late Show parody of “tactical dads” against Mission Critical Gear and Tactical Baby Gear’s actual Instagram content. A visual frequency analysis of 160+ photos shows only ≈11 % of images display overt hypermasculinity. Most images depict racially diverse, ordinary fathers without occupational markers. These brands, while using military styling, circulate inclusive, non-sexualized images that depart from earlier white, muscular, heteronormative fatherhood depictions (Lupton and Barclay 1997, Smith 2018).
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Paper 2
“Not Yo' Mama’s Baby Carrier”
Provides a deep qualitative visual analysis of 62 photos from BabyBjörn, Mission Critical, and Tactical Baby Gear. The carriers are militarized, but the men are not. There are no other props or indicators that the fathers depicted are American military members or veterans, or somehow affiliated with first responders. Across brands, fathers of color appear middle-class alongside white peers, signaling racial inclusion with minor exceptions (e.g., the exoticized leaf prop). The imagery normalizes fatherly care through multiple masculinities.
Paper 3
“Kind of Indifferent”
Focuses on 35 veteran fathers to test hybrid-masculinity theory. Most did distance themselves from hegemonic norms, but valued caregiving as fulfilling, difficult, and interdependent. They dismissed militarized baby carriers as gimmicks, sometimes funny and sometimes subversive - as if to say "warriors can nurture, too." Rather than compensating for gender-boundary crossing, they treated care as routine, echoing caring-masculinity frameworks.
MSgt Jospeh Prouse wearing his baby my sample Mission Critical carrier while at a California Public Affairs Conference 2021.
Paper 4
“Bare Minimum?”
Analyzes all 50 fathers’ reactions to the viral image of Doyin Richards, a Black dad babywearing while doing his daughter’s hair. Two-thirds had worn carriers; most failed to mention it until prompted, showing that babywearing is no longer seen as gender transgressive. Men of color and veterans alike read the media spectacle as misplaced—care had become mundane.
Paper 5
“Are Our Egos So Fragile?”
Compares men’s preferences for BabyBjörn versus Mission Critical. Forty-three of 50 favored BabyBjörn; enthusiasm for Mission Critical was playful or ironic. Veterans and civilians alike viewed nurturing babies as part of the job description, rejecting the notion that men need “tactical” props to engage in care.
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The first two papers in this dissertation examine how fatherhood is represented across baby carrier marketing which provides some interpretive texture of contemporary visual depictions of care. While the papers draw from overlapping data, they pursue distinct analytic aims and use different methodological and theoretical tools. Paper 1 provides a a wide exploratory, quantitative mapping of what kinds of masculinities appear in baby carrier advertising, whereas Paper 2 offers a close, qualitative reading of how those images construct meaning. In short, Paper 1 asks what is represented, while Paper 2 asks what it means.
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Paper 1, “Making Involved Fatherhood Bad Ass?,” uses quantitative content analysis to measure representational patterns across 161 marketing images, 20 from BabyBjörn, 22 from Tactical Baby Gear, and 119 from Mission Critical Gear. While these numbers are not even, they represent how much the brands invested time and resources to showcasing fathers. These numbers alone tell a story. Every image of a father wearing a baby and his face showing was coded for variables such as hair, facial hair, tattoos, body type, race, props, and setting, producing frequency counts and percentages. This breadth permits a systematic assessment of popular assumptions about “tactical” fatherhood, namely, that such advertising would center hypermasculine, white, heteronormative men using babies as props to display strength. Theoretically, Paper 1 engages hegemonic masculinity and its offshoots, hybrid, inclusive, and caring masculinities, to ask whether these visual patterns reinforce or unsettle dominant ideals.
Contrary to these expectations, the findings show that only 11 percent of men were notably muscular and that racial diversity, while limited for African Americans and Indigenous men, was present across brands. The carrier was the most military masculinity indicator compared to their clothing, accessories, or props in the setting. The paper concludes that rather than amplifying hypermasculinity, the brands depict fathers performing care in ordinary, even tender, ways.
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Paper 2, “Not Yo' Mama's Carrier,” narrows the lens to 62 strategically sampled images, 19 from BabyBjörn, 22 from Tactical Baby Gear, and 21 from Mission Critical Gear, to allow for detailed visual interpretation of a fair sample. I attend to framing, pose, props, and color schemes to explore how brands construct fatherhood as a visual narrative. Here the goal is not to count but to read: how does each brand’s aesthetic produce particular meanings of care? The paper extends the discussion of hegemonic masculinity, intersectionality, and theories of gender presentation and display. Through thick description of individual images, such as a Black father framed by tropical foliage or a founder wearing another man’s children, the paper demonstrates that military aesthetics can signify responsibility and service to family, and that brand curation itself functions as a cultural actor shaping the legibility of fatherhood. These brands show how feminine mothering behaviors are seeping to masculine domains such as fatherhood.
Methodologically, the two papers are complementary. Read in tandem, they provide a comprehensive account of how contemporary marketing simultaneously normalizes caregiving and continues to delimit which fathers, and which masculinities, are deemed worthy of recognition. Paper 1 adopts a broad sampling strategy to explore what this is; Paper 2 uses systematic sampling to explore what this means. The former aggregates data to identify trends; the latter particularizes meaning through detailed case analysis. Their organizational logics differ as well: Paper 1 groups findings by analytic variables across all brands, while Paper 2 structures them brand-by-brand to trace each company’s distinct narrative of masculinity. Consequently, the evidentiary styles diverge, percentages and statistical comparisons in Paper 1 versus thick visual description in Paper 2, each serving the epistemic goals of its respective method.​
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Each has its limitations, neither can access men’s lived motivations or interpretive perspectives without interview data, which is the next part of this project.
Overview of Part 1:
Representation
Papers One and Two
Overview of Part 2:
Reception
Papers Three and Four
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The third and fourth papers in this dissertation extend the project’s examination of fatherhood and masculinity, they trace how men navigate, articulate, and contest cultural expectations of care in both their everyday practices and their readings of fatherhood depictions in media.
Paper 3, “Kind of Indifferent,” asks whether fathers, particularly military veterans would like to use militarized baby gear as a way to masculinize caring for infants. Drawing on interviews with thirty-five fathers, this paper tests the explanatory power of hybrid masculinity theory, which describes how men adopt selective elements of femininity or other masculinities but flex other characteristics and behaviors to reinforce their social capital, thus privilege. Organized around the theory’s three tenets, discursive distancing, devaluation of traditional breadwinning, and boundary fortification, the paper evaluates whether these patterns appear among fathers who engage in babywearing. The findings complicate assumptions that tactical or “mission-ready” baby gear serves as compensation for gender boundary crossing. Most participants described babywearing as practical and unremarkable rather than as a threat to masculinity. They were indifferent about others' perceptions of their caring labor because their day to day goals ranked higher in priority. My analysis therefore raises 'caring masculinities' theory as having explanatory power rather than hybrid masculinity theory.
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Paper 4, “The Bare Minimum” reunites the sample of 50 fathers, to ask both civilians and veterans how they interpret the viral image of Doyin Richards, a Black dad celebrated online for babywearing. Paper 4 foregrounds the racialized politics of recognition: which fathers are seen as extraordinary for ordinary care, and whose caregiving remains invisible. By attending to what fathers noticed, critiqued, and ignored in this media event, the study reveals how visibility, race, and class intersect in the recognition of paternal care. I organized men by three practice-based groups based on what they said or did not say: fathers who mentioned babywearing, those who wore but did not mention it, and those who did not wear. These claims or omissions signal a stance towards accepting or rejecting this kind of care.
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Paper four shows that men recognize and support a broader cultural shift: babywearing has become largely normalized, no longer a radical departure from masculine norms. Yet they also claim that recognition of care remains uneven, mediated by race, class, and visibility. Richards' image went viral because of the shock of a man, a black man, at home providing this kind of care for children. They see and hope that this will no longer be the case when their kids have their own kids.
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By pairing an analysis of men’s embodied practices with an exploration of their interpretive frames, Papers 3 and 4 reveal that the boundaries between masculinity and nurture are not fixed but continuously negotiated, both in action and in representation.
Overview of Part 3:
Identification
Paper Five
After tracing how fatherhood is represented in marketing (Papers 1 and 2) and how men interpret those messages (Papers 3 and 4), this final paper focuses on how fathers make choices about baby carriers and what those choices reveal about changing ideas of masculinity. The central question is whether “tactical” baby carriers appeal to men or whether the cultural need for masculine props has faded as caregiving has become ordinary.
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The analysis returns to the same group of fifty fathers but centers on how they evaluated different brands, including BabyBjörn and Mission Critical Gear. Earlier papers assumed that tactical designs were necessary to make caregiving feel acceptable for some men. Here, those assumptions are tested directly as men reacted to #dadstories and Mission Critical Gear advertising. Most participants preferred BabyBjörn, describing it as comfortable, accessible, and familiar. Few found Mission Critical Gear’s military styling appealing, the marketing logic of re-masculinizing care does not aligns with how fathers see themselves, across this sample of civilians and military veterans.
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Instead of comparing civilians against veterans - which had no statistical significance anyway, this paper uses three practice-based groups as in paper 4: men who wore and mentioned babywearing, men who wore but only after prompting, and men who did not wear. Within each group, brand preferences were coded and then interpreted qualitatively. Interviews were analyzed through the lens of cultural and practice theory, treating brand selection as a small but telling part of how men express belonging, competence, and care.
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I examine whether the aesthetics of toughness influence how men approach caregiving. The findings suggest that while many assumed military imagery offered masculine reassurance, its symbolic value was not present here. Babywearing is no longer experienced as a gender boundary crossing that requires compensation. This challenges earlier claims that men must masculinize care to participate in it. Fathers now interpret tactical branding as excessive or ironic. The results show that the need for masculine props has diminished because involved fatherhood has moved from rare spectacle to routine care.
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Fathers emphasized price and practicality, describing tactical carriers as unnecessary luxuries. Across the sample, civilian and veterans, men of color and white men, fathers spoke about their choices as practical rather than symbolic, reinforcing that the politics of care now play out in everyday decisions rather than in grand gestures.
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For marketers, the message is clear: appeals to toughness is not what fathers want. Authenticity, usability, and representation matter more than rebranding care as masculine. For policymakers, the results emphasize that fathers need time, support, and flexibility rather than products that reaffirm masculinity. For researchers, the findings point toward a new area of fatherhood studies focused on the ordinary and the ongoing.
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