Post-Moustache Nick Offerman Is All About Books, Feminism, And Civil Rights

It’s been three months since we tearfully said goodbye to the Parks and Rec crew. Now, Andy Dwyer is some totally ripped, dinosaur-fighting version of himself; Ann Perkins is a cop; Leslie Knope went back to her old job as a camp counsellor; and Tom Haverford has written a book about dating and “looking for love in the Digital Age”.

That last one was a freebie. Thankfully, Aziz Ansari will never change.

But amidst all this, Nick Offerman is still pretty much Ron Swanson. Both are woodworkers and no-nonsense, stereotypically masculine types; they’re both even married to Tammy. Megan Mullally has been Offerman’s wife for 12 years, and in his recent Netflix stand-up special they talk at length about red meat, scotch, and their straight-up animalistic sex life.

Now, in a move which is thankfully much more subtle than depriving the world of his glorious moustache, Offerman is making a slight deviation from his enduring Swansonevity (deal with it, it’s a word now). In an interview with Time about his latest book, Gumption: Relighting The Torch Of Freedom With America’s Gutsiest Troublemakers, Offerman has gone all out for equality and feminism and civil rights. They’re all things which would of course be Swanson-approved, but with a whole bunch of bonus empathy:

“One of the themes of the book is ‘How can we be more decent to one another?’, so I have to point out the people I feel are being mistreated,” he says. “Minorities, people in same-sex relationships, women… or eaters of red meat. In the theatre we learn pretty quickly that we represent everybody and so that’s when these things started to occur to me, when I left my small town in Illinois of white people.”

And, here’s the portion which was presumably plucked from his acceptance speech for the Dorothy Everton Smyth Female Empowerment Award:

“Feminism is an important quality in society. It’s something which needs to be talked about until we can legitimately complain. Until the guys are like, ‘Hang on, you’re making more money than us’. That’s when we can stop talking about feminism.”

This guy.

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Gumption: Relighting The Torch Of Freedom With America’s Gutsiest Troublemakers will be released in Australia on September 23. According to Offerman himself, “you can buy it using capitalism”.