“Of all the rocks upon which we build our lives…family is the most important. And we are called to recognize and honor how critical every father is to that foundation.” That was said by then-Senator Barack Obama in 2008. “If we are honest with ourselves,” he went on, “we’ll admit that…too many fathers are…missing from too many lives and too many homes.”
Here’s a secret that every woman knows: Women want real men—men they can count on and, yes, look up to. No amount of feminist theory will change that. I don’t know any woman, at any age, who is attracted to a passive man who looks to her to be his provider, protector and leader. Every woman I know wants a strong, responsible man. That’s not a consequence of a social construct or cultural pressure—it’s innate.
The devaluation of masculinity won’t end well because feminine, passive men don’t stop evil. Passive men don’t defend, protect or provide. Passive men don’t lead. Passive men don’t do the things we have always needed men to do for society to thrive.
In his book, The Abolition of Man, English social philosopher C.S. Lewis writes about this problem. He describes the tension “between cerebral man and visceral man.” “By his intellect,” Lewis explains, man “is mere spirit and by his appetite mere animal.” We need both. Take away one, and you’re left with a man who’s either weak or wicked. And in a world of wickedness, weak men are nothing more than enablers of wicked men. Rape, murder, war—they all have two things in common: bad men who do the raping, murdering, and warring; and weak men who won’t stop them. We need good men who will. It’s not masculinity that’s toxic. It’s the lack of it.
And it’s worse than that. According to the APA, traditional masculinity bumps up “against issues of race, class and sexuality,” maximizing both interior and exterior conflict. Ryan McDermott, psychologist from the University of South Alabama who helped draft the new APA guidelines, suggested that gender is “no longer just this male-female binary.” Rather, gender is a mere social construct that can be destroyed without consequence. Here’s the APA, making the extraordinarily dishonest statement that gender differences aren’t biological at all, in contravention of all known social science research: “Indeed, when researchers, strip away stereotypes and expectations, there isn’t much difference in the basic behaviors of men and women.”
Masculinity and femininity are not simply a matter of tradition and social construct, but are matters of biblical morality. Biblical masculinity has characteristics of protectiveness (1 Peter 3:7), servant-leadership (Matthew 23:11; Eph. 5:25-29), sacrificial love (Eph. 5:25), strength, the male husband of a female wife (marriage; Genesis 2:24), fatherhood (Eph. 6:4), strength and headship (Eph. 5:21-23; 1 Peter 5:3), which are not in any sense toxic or harmful. Masculinity also includes kindness, compassion, humility, gentleness, and patience (Col. 3:12).
Biblical masculinity is one of the greatest blessings to women and compliments to femininity. The APA and progressive left isn’t really trying to get rid of biblical masculinity — they’re over-correcting a flawed cultural bravado of so-called “masculinity” that is not based on God’s design.
“That’s a very tiny of proportion of men. A huge proportion of people who are seriously disaffected are men; most people in prison are men; most people who are on the street are men; most victims of violent crime are men; most people who commit suicide are men; most people who die in wars are men; people who do worse in school are men.” “[W]here’s the dominance here, precisely? What you’re doing is you’re taking a tiny substrata of hyper-successful men and using that to represent the entire structure of Western society. There’s nothing about that that’s vaguely appropriate.”
We are witnessing the medicalization of masculinity. It starts early, when schoolboys are dosed with psychotropic drugs to keep them from acting like boys, and now it continues all the way into adulthood and beyond. The message to men and boys is clear: there is something wrong with you. It is not okay to be the way you naturally want to be. You must be different. You must be more like women.
Masculine traits Assertiveness Industriousness More interested in abstract ideas and concepts. (Facts over feels) Strength Courage Independence Violence Protectiveness Competitiveness Sexual appetite Passion Confidence Decisiveness