American men at the beginning of the twenty-first century have reached a crisis of identity
It has always been the case that more men than women engage in anti social and self destructive behavior as exemplified by the fact that, historically, far more men have populated prisons than women. But until the last half of the twentieth century, men who exhibited pathological behavior represented a minority on the fringes of our culture. The vast majority of men were stable, self assured, goal oriented men who formed a functional and productive part of society as husbands and fathers as well as business, church and community leaders.
Now, however, it is becoming increasingly clear that men in general have a problem; men as a whole no longer know who they are, why they are here, nor where they are going. They are not “fitting” into society well. What exactly is an adult man supposed to be and do, anyway?
Kay Hymowitz cites a long list of book and magazine article titles that demonstrate how rudderless men have become. “Articles and books with such titles as “The End of Men,” “Are Men Necessary?,” The Decline of Males, “The Death of Macho,” “Women Will Rule the World,” and “Is There Anything Good About Men?” point toward a growing recognition that men are not thriving in today’s cultural and economic environment.”
To this growing literary genre we can add these alarming titles: “Men to Boys: The Making of Modern Immaturity”; “Save the Males”: “Why Men Matter, Why Women Should Care”; “Stiffed: The Betrayal of the American Man”, “The Demise of Guys, The Myth of Male Power”, “Why Men Are the Way They Are”; “Mismatch: the Growing Gulf Between Men and Women”; and Hymowitz’s own book, “Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys”.
Men no longer have a roadmap for life
A common theme winding through this literature is that men no longer have a road map for life and, as a result, they extend their adolescence well into their late twenties and even thirties, becoming “child-men,” “man-boys” or “preadults” instead.
“The child-man, then, is the lost son of a host of economic and cultural changes: the demographic shift I call preadulthood, the Playboy philosophy, feminism, the wild west of our new media, and a shrugging iffiness on the subject of husbands and fathers. He has no life script, no special reason to grow up,” writes Kay Hymowitz.
Gary Cross makes a similar observation: “There is not a clear path towards the kind of indisputable maturity that my fathers’ generation could feel…. Our age has systematically rejected the Victorian [Read “Christian,” ed.] patriarch without finding an adequate alternative… Some men have abandoned the traditional ideals of paternal responsibility of family, community, and culture without replacing them with new models of “grown-up” behavior.”
Numerous demographic statistics on men with respect to education, work and family life provide concrete evidence that the directionless male has become the new norm in modern society. Since it is de rigueur for writers on the subject of contemporary men to quote these statistics, I also will oblige.
Statistics on dysfunctional men illustrate the problem
Fewer men (90 per cent) than women (92 per cent) graduate from high school. By 2017, women are projected to earn 64.2 per cent of Associate’s degrees, 59.9 per cent of Bachelor’s degrees, 62.9 per cent of Master’s degrees, and 55.5 per cent of Doctorates. Unmarried, childless women are out earning men in 147 of the 150 largest U.S. cities.
Since 1970, the median age for first marriage has increased five years for both men and women to almost 28. The divorce rate is double the rate in 1960. Prior to 1970, only about 1 per cent of all couples cohabitated. 12 per cent do now. 60 per cent of all adults ages 25-44 have cohabitated at some point. Just 53 per cent of American households have a married couple in them, compared with 70 per cent in 1970.
Up to 40 per cent of children sleep in a home without their birth father. Once a rarity, the number of children living in fatherless homes has tripled since 1960, from 8 million to 24 million.
The result of these depressing figures is that American culture, once dominated by men, is now becoming a woman’s world. “This is what I call the New Girl Order,” writes Hymowitz. “For the first time ever, and I do mean ever, young women are reaching their twenties with more achievements, more education, more property, and, arguably, more ambition than their male counterparts.”
The child-man is the fun house mirror image of the alpha girl
And what about men? “The child-man is the fun house mirror image of the alpha girl. If she is ambitious, he is a slacker. If she is hyper-organized and self-directed, he tends toward passivity and vagueness. If she is preternaturally mature, he is happily not.”
This escalating failure to socialize men is having dramatic and deleterious effects on American culture. “If being unmarried is a measure of “adultescence,” writes Cross, “single American men are seven times more likely to go to prison than married men, four times more likely to be victims of violent crime and twice as likely to be in an accident than the married. Bachelors are much less likely to hold a full time job (62 vs. 75 per cent).
“It is also true that single American men tend to be less well off than married ones (only 21 per cent earning more than $50,000 compared with 49 per cent of their married counterparts)…. In sum, men remain longer in the gang, that is, the irresponsible life. They are allowed, almost obliged, to cling to their teenage mindsets. Some cynics (or evolutionary anthropologists) might just say that men have always been boys-oversexed, irresponsible, self-indulgent, and prone to violent competitiveness. This ignores, however, centuries of culture, especially the civilizing efforts of our Victorian [i.e. Christian] predecessors that created models of maturity for men. And while these efforts were not always successful and often were tainted with hypocrisy, they did produce many men who were not boys. Something has changed.”
So what has changed? What is the cause of this historic male role amnesia? What forces cut the mooring lines for men and set them adrift? Three social factors have been cited: the feminist movement and its attendant sexual revolution, changing economic conditions that favor females, and a mass media that exploits and denigrates young men.
Theory #1: The feminist movement, the sexual revolution and its impact on male identity
On the evening of September 20, 1973, in the Houston Astrodome, 90 million Americans watched Billie Jean King defeat Bobby Riggs in tennis 6-4, 6-3, 6-3. If there ever were a tipping point in the battle of the sexes, this was it. As a young man coming of age in Southern California in the 60’s and early 70’s, watching a woman tennis pro soundly defeat a male tennis pro cemented in my mind the impression that life as I knew it was changing.
It seemed, as the song goes, that everything men could do, women could do as well or better. Women, I would learn, have better relationships, are less violent, go to college in greater numbers, raise children better, communicate better. The list goes on and on. Now, the only thing left for men, it seems, is football and certain forward combat positions in the military.
No longer were women confined to the preordained roles of housewife and mother. An entire horizon of possibilities awaited them. Marriage and children were simply options, not requirements.
“With the emergence of feminism, there was an ever-sharper break with the past-regarding everything from dating and marriage to child rearing and male domestic roles, as well as women’s access to jobs, education, and legal rights,” writes Gary Cross. The old order was fading away and, for women, a bright future seemed to await them.
That old order included the old sexual mores of chastity and marital fidelity. With the arrival of the pill, women no longer had to fear unwanted pregnancy. With education and the marketplace opening up to them, economic independence was now within their reach. And with no fault divorce making the act of dissolving a marriage bond almost as easy as picking up milk at the local store, permanent unions seemed like an anachronistic hangover from the past.
For men, on the other hand, the future was not so clear, perhaps because their past was being reinterpreted by radical feminists. Their former male role models were patriarchs, heads of households epitomized by the sitcom, Father Knows Best. But with the rise of feminism, those role models were viewed as oppressive to women. But if this was the case, then how were men supposed to relate to their future wives and children?
Men have replaced marriage with the hook up and the absentee father
Increasingly, the answer men have given to this question has been, “We won’t relate to them at all.” More and more, young men have jettisoned marriage and fatherhood in favor of the hook up and the absentee father. “Minimized by cultural forces and stripped of the roles that have defined males for centuries, men have been delivered of the expectation that they behave honorably toward the physically more-vulnerable sex and the dependent children she bears,” writes Kathleen Parker.
The result is a view of manhood that resembles some kind of amorphous sludge. As Kay Hymowitz observes, “A girl walks into a bar. A guy gives her the once-over. Is he only interested in one thing, as the old saying used to go? Or is he soul mate material? Is he looking for a friends-with-benefits arrangement or for romance? He could have a girlfriend, a wife, an ex-wife, children, or a spreadsheet. Does he like women or is he gay? Worse, is he one of those guys so filled with bitterness that he hangs around websites like Nomarriage.com, MGTOW (Men Going Their Own Way), or Eternal Bachelor (“Give Modern Women the Husband They Deserve. None.”)?”
And “None” has become pretty much the default option for many women. Having clawed their way to the top of so many social indicators, women stand up, brush themselves off, look around and ask, “Where did the men go?”
As Abigail Trafford laments in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post, “We didn’t want to push men aside. We wanted to join them in the upper deck and enjoy the synergy of merging our talents and responsibilities-in both the public and private spheres of life. After all, we love men. They are our partners, the fathers of our children. We worked hard to get rid of labels that branded women the fragile sex and men the favored sex. We never imagined that society would swap the labels.”
Theory #2: Changing economic conditions that favor females
It’s hard to believe now, but prior to 1970 the majority of households in America were comprised of a husband/breadwinner, along with a wife/homemaker and their dependent children.
I grew up in just such a home. My father graduated from high school and took a job as an errand boy for a large California title insurance firm located in downtown Los Angeles. Over the next forty-five years, Dad worked his way up to become a major executive in his company. During that time, he married my mother and had five children.
On his one salary my father provided for himself along with his wife and children, financed a retirement that spanned thirty-four years until he died at the age of 99, and left a significant inheritance for me and my siblings. Besides all this, Dad tithed ten per cent to his church his entire life. We weren’t rich. We weren’t poor. We were solidly middle class.
Boys used to have a clear understanding of what it took to be a man
Family scenarios similar to mine played out in households all over America in the first half of the twentieth century. With a high school education, a man could get a well paying job, usually in manufacturing or construction, marry in his early twenties and raise a family all on his income alone.
In short, the road to manhood was quick and clearly defined. “Men married young, as early as a median age of 22.5 years in 1956. It seemed that almost every man bought into the provider’s role-few sought to prolong their independence or the playful self-indulgence of the teenager,” writes Gary Cross.
Not so today. Now families comprised of a father as the sole breadwinner, a stay-at-home mother, and dependent children make up only twenty per cent of American households. No longer are families dependent on men alone.
Four factors changed American family structure
Four factors converged to cause this tectonic change in family structure. First, women who had been hired to replace drafted men in their jobs during WWII, continued working outside the home following the war. Then, in the next three decades, what began as a trickle turned into a full fledged flood as women entered the workforce in droves.
Second, manufacturing jobs, the traditional male source of high paying work, were “outsourced” oversees. American males were now competing with cheap foreign labor. The dream of earning a “living” wage, i.e. of being able to support a family on one salary alone, quickly faded, especially for men with only a high school education.
Third, the American economy, hammered as it was in its manufacturing sector, shifted its focus to a knowledge and service based economy, sectors that favor women.
And fourth, women are now outpacing men in higher education. “Between 1975 and 2006, the percentage of women with at least a college degree increased from 18.6 to 34.2 percent. Men barely budged: their numbers went from 26.8 percent to 27.9,” writes Kay Hymowitz.
As a result, men, once the financial backbone of the American family, have become more or less superfluous. Wives and mothers can leave a marriage at any time, and often do simply because they can afford to. “With women moving ahead in an advanced economy, provider husbands and fathers are now optional, and the character qualities men had needed to play their role-fortitude, stoicism, courage, fidelity-are obsolete and even a little embarrassing” writes Hymowitz.
Theory #3: Mass media and consumer culture
As a young boy growing up in the fifties and sixties, it wasn’t difficult to find male role models on TV worthy of my emulation. There was Jim Anderson, the affable father in Father Knows Best, Andy Taylor, the bemused sheriff and single dad in The Andy Griffith Show, Steve Douglas, another single dad in My Three Sons, Ward Cleaver, the wise father in Leave it to Beaver, and Mike Brady, the head of the bunch in The Brady Bunch.
All of these men had several things in common: they were family men, they held jobs and provided for their families, they loved their wife (when they had one) and their children, they were on top of their game, and, most of all, they were respected.
Dysfunctional male characters dominate TV
It’s been downhill for males on TV ever since. One can think, for example of Al Bundy, the loser father in Married With Children, Archie Bunker, the bigot clod in All in the Family, Arthur Spooner, the anger management dropout dad in King of Queens, and Ray Barone, the clueless and directionless husband and father in Everybody Loves Raymond. Safe to say, none of these men are worthy of our respect or admiration.
This coarsening view of males in society has been the trend throughout American culture over the last fifty years, from John Wayne to Adam Sandler, from Carey Grant (in his roles) to Hugh Grant.
Observes Kathleen Parker, “In film and music, men are variously portrayed as dolts, bullies, brutes, deadbeats, rapists, sexual predators, and wife beaters. Even otherwise easygoing family men in sitcoms are invariably cast as, at best, bumbling, dimwitted fools…. At the same time that men have been ridiculed in the public square, the importance of fatherhood has been diminished along with other traditionally male roles of father, protector, and provider, which are increasingly viewed as regressive manifestations of an outmoded patriarchy.” The result, Parker writes, is that “Young men now in their twenties have never experienced a culture in which men were respected or expected to be gentlemen.”
The mass media message is clear: men today never really mature because there isn’t any actual need for them to do so. No one depends on them. No one needs them. The only thing left for men to do is seek to maintain their youth by playing at life. And consumer culture has been happy to oblige.
A desire for perpetual youth results in perpetual immaturity
“Makers of modern consumer and media culture have gradually learned to feed on this rejection of past models of maturity and the desire to return to or retain childhood. In turn, they have figured out how to sell back to men this longed-for image of perpetual youth. Over time, this makes youth, once a life stage, into a permanent and highly desirable lifestyle,” writes renowned cultural historian, Gary Cross. The result is that our culture now openly mocks men at almost every turn.
These, then, are three causes for modern male immaturity often cited by commentators: the feminist movement and sexual revolution, changing economic conditions, and mass media.
Few provide a solution to the problem
The problem, however, is that few of those following the decline of the modern male offer solid solutions to the problem. And when they do, the solutions they propose are vague, such as appeals to tradition (Parker: “Traditional values are traditional for a reason. They have survived the passage of time because they work.”) or altruism (Cross: “We must recognize that as adults we have responsibilities to our partners, families, and communities beyond our own need for experience and pleasure.”)
One would think that an accurate and incisive analysis of the problem with contemporary men would hold within it the seeds of an answer. Could it be that these social causes of male immaturity, as important as they are, are not sufficient to explain the origin of the problem?
I believe the answer to that question is yes. To understand the real reason why men today are acting out as they are, we must look on a more fundamental level, the level of world view-what men believe about reality in general and how their belief system has changed over time.
Theory #4 – My view: The accepted materialistic world view encourages men to act like “animals.”
One hundred years ago, the divorce rate in America was 5%, out of wedlock births were almost unheard of, and cohabiting couples were considered scandalous. This reflected a pattern that had existed for four hundred years in western civilization, starting with the legalization of divorce during the Protestant Reformation.
True, at the beginning of the twentieth century, the topic of sex was taboo, women had back alley abortions and a significant per cent of marriages were brutal. But there was a general consensus about what a family should look like and how men were supposed to act.
The process of becoming an adult man itself was clear and simple: Young men coming of age worked the farm or got a job in the city, married, had children and supported their families. That was it. Adolescence was a brief sojourn on the way to manhood and family life. And while a man’s life could be washboard hard and fleetingly brief, it had this to say for it: it was straightforward and productive.
Judeo-Christian beliefs provided a foundation for society
Buttressing all of this was a set of Judeo Christian beliefs and values that formed the bedrock for a coherent and predictable society. Although theism was no longer accepted dogma in intellectual circles at the beginning of the twentieth century, it still permeated and influenced much of American culture.
For the average man on the street, God was an omnipotent, omniscient and omnipresent Person, holy and supreme, someone to be feared and whose moral law as revealed in Scripture was to be obeyed.
Out of this respect for God’s law came a sense of duty to fulfill one’s responsibility to one’s wife and children. In his marriage and family a man corralled his passions and reconciled himself with the laws of God. Freedom wasn’t seen primarily as the ability fulfill oneself, but rather the ability to worship and serve this God according to one’s conscience.
And conscience reigned supreme. The fear of spending eternity in hell kept most men in line. Sex outside of marriage often resulted in intense personal guilt, not to mention the approbation of the community. A man’s church, his Bible and his culture were univocal: fornication and adultery were sins worthy of damnation.
The result of a culture with a broadly intact family structure and men who played an integral role in supporting it was an upward mobility among the poor. While a married couple themselves might live in poverty in the early 1900s, their generally stable relationship and faith in God formed the template and rationale for their children to marry, sacrifice and be able to work themselves out of poverty.
My own family history is an example of this upward mobility. My father’s parents were poor immigrants from rural, sub-artic Norway. They came to America through Ellis Island, my grandfather at the age of five with his parents in 1880 and my grandmother at the age of twenty-six in 1902.
They met, married, had a family and lived near the poverty line for most of their lives. But their five children went on to build healthy families and achieve the American dream of owning their own home. These in turn had children and grandchildren who, for the most part, also established healthy families and did even better.
Among the descendants of my grandparents are teachers, professors, a land developer, a test pilot, an insurance executive, an engineer, missionaries, a pastor, physicians, artists, computer specialists, and business managers.
But now the Judeo-Christian worldview has been marginalized in our culture
Now fast forward to the present. In the last one hundred years, the Judeo-Christian world view has been acid washed almost entirely from western civilization. The Bible has been stripped of its authority and the church has been demoted to the sidelines, leaving only a faint patina of Christianity layered on the culture.
In America, the Christian religion is simply one among many now. In its place philosophical materialism and its scientific handmaid, Darwinism, reign supreme. Everything, it seems, can be explained by matter, energy, chance and natural law, resulting in cultural reductionism.
People, once regarded as immortal souls created in the image of God, are simply the end result of millions of years of chance mutations and natural selection; just one more species of animal — brilliant, creative and amazingly social — but animals none the less.
The world itself is only a pinprick in an unimaginably vast universe. And morality is no longer founded on the bedrock of a holy God, but rather on utilitarian and always malleable “values”: the social expression of whatever works, “a biological adaptation no less than are hands and feet and teeth,” as philosopher Michael Ruse described the human propensity to moralize.
If you tell a man he has no ultimate meaning, then he will act that way
Given the current intellectual milieu, if one wonders why men act the way they do today, consider this: men are nothing if not logical. And if you tell men over and over again for a long enough period of time that life has no meaning, that all there really is to our existence is immediate physical gratification and that they are just animals, well, pretty soon they will start acting as if — you got it — life has no meaning, that all there is to their existence is immediate physical gratification and that they are, in fact, just animals and should act like they are just animals.
We ought not be surprised, therefore, when men treat women like they’re just animals too. What logical reason do men have to behave otherwise? Kay Hymowitz calls young single men who accept the modern world view and have, consequently, a Darwinian ideology “dating Darwinists” and about them she writes, “Rejecting all manners that enshrined respect and care in an area of human interaction rife with opportunities for pain and humiliation, dating Darwinists unapologetically endorse ruthlessness and deception. ‘You see, Nature doesn’t care about hurting people’s feelings,’ explains dating coach Mike Pilinski…. ‘It cares ONLY about reproductive success in order to keep those precious DNA molecules traveling forward in Time.'”
Laments Kathleen Parker, “Once sex is free of all considerations except what pleasure it brings in that moment, then what? Well, we’re nothing but beasts.” She goes on to quote Theodore Dalrymple: “It is precisely the envelopment of sex (and all other natural functions) with an aura of deeper meaning that makes man human and distinguishes him from the rest of animate nature. To remove that meaning, to reduce sex to biology…is to return man to a level of primitive behavior of which we have no record in human history. All animals have sex, but only man makes love. When sex is deprived of the meaning with which only the social conventions, religious taboos, and personal restraints so despised by sexual revolutionaries…can infuse it, all that is left is the ceaseless-and ultimately boring and meaningless-search for the transcendent orgasm.”
Think this is an exaggeration? One estimate puts the percentage of men currently involved in pornography on a regular basis at 70 per cent. “Everyday, 260 new porn sites go online. In 2005, Time put U.S. porn sales at $20 billion annually,” notes Parker. “The mainstreaming of pornography is no longer a concern,” she writes, “but a reality. Once the world of lowlifes, back alleys, and organized crime, pornography has morphed into a family business where anybody can be a star.”
Without any values, men descend into the sewer
Devoid of any transcendent values to halt the process, our culture in general, and men in particular, are rapidly descending into the sewer. Recent episodes of mainstream, prime time TV shows increasingly display frontal nudity (The Office and America’s Got Talent are two examples) and Clint Eastwood openly refers to unspeakably vulgar sexual acts in a prime time, nationally broadcast speech at the Republican Convention.
The result is increasing chaos in American family life. Want to see what American families are going to be like in twenty years? Then look at the African American community. Writes Joy Jones, “Often what happens in black America is a sign of what the rest of America can eventually expect.”
She then cites Andrew Hacker in “Mismatch: The Growing Gulf between Women and Men: “Andrew Hacker noted that the structure of white families is evolving in the direction of that of black families of the 1960s. In 1960, 67 percent of black families were headed by a husband and wife, compared to 90.9 percent for whites. By 2000, the figure for white families had dropped to 79.8 percent. Births to unwed white mothers were 22.5 percent in 2001, compared to 2.3 percent in 1960.” Today, 73 percent of black children are born outside of marriage and we have no reason to think that the white population will not eventually catch up.
It is the poor who suffer the most
Sadly, it is the poor who suffer most from the tectonic cultural change in world view that has taken place in the past 100 years. Marriage in lower class America is in shambles. Dad has gone AWOL, resulting in single moms with dependent children becoming the norm for families in poor neighborhoods.
No longer do second and third generations of poor people work themselves out of poverty. Rather, the poor have become a permanent underclass, virtual wards of the state with little hope of ever escaping poverty.
I personally lived in inner city Los Angeles — in a black community — and inner city Dallas — in a white community — as a young adult and observed this cycle of poverty and family disintegration first hand. Without a moral, theistic world view and a culture that supported it, impoverished young adults were virtually guaranteed a future of single parent families, bad schools, violence, drugs, alcohol, gangs and prison.
A second demographic dramatically affected by the ascendancy of a materialistic world view is men. On the one hand, women carry with them a natural accountability system called a womb, mitigating some of the effects of philosophical materialism. The knowledge that unplanned and unprotected sex can lead to conception, nine months of gestation, birth and dependent children — not to mention disease — tends to focus a woman’s mind. Even in a universe perceived as godless, babies still have to be fed.
The reality that men are quickly becoming less dependable and less agreeable to parenting and supporting the children they sire forces women to plan ahead for theirs and their children’s future by making sure they get the education they need. And the ticking time bomb of future infertility gives it all a sense of urgency for women.
In the new world view, sex is just an animal function
Not so men. In the new universe, men have been inculcated with the attitude that sex is merely an animal function. “Their problem,” observes Kay Hymowitz, “is coming of age in a culture without reliable conventions to tame the raw egotism and roughness of nature’s mating dance. It’s all about sex anyway, a lot of guys conclude, so why dress it all up in silly manners?”
So men shrug off normal family relationships like sweaty socks and become completely immersed in their selves. As a result, they take American individualism to its extreme conclusion: “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness for me”. Why should men sacrifice for women and children if there isn’t any real need for men anyway, if society only winks at their mutiny, and if there are no moral codes to condemn their behavior?
“Today,” laments Gary Cross, “in some circles there is a veritable rejection of maturity in all of its meanings. Living for today, disdainful of pretense and formality, ever open to new thrills and experiences, but also mocking convention in celebrations of amoral violent fantasy, crude vulgarity, and unrestrained appetite, the boy-man makes a fetish of the ‘cool.’ He turns maturity into a joke, a pitiful loss to be avoided at almost all costs.”
The result: an increasingly depraved culture, with men leading the pack
The tragic result of this degrading trend is that our once noble western institutions are being transformed into little more than “animal houses” – stables for men in heat. A president gets caught literally with his pants down engaging in oral sex in the oval office. A famous general and head of the CIA resigns over an affair with his biographer. A California governor gets his house maid pregnant and raises the love child in the presence of his unsuspecting wife. The SEC misses massive bank fraud because its examiners are watching porn online for hours on end. A football coach besmirches the reputation of an entire university for looking the other way while an underling engages in pedophilia in the school showers. A major Christian denomination pays out hundreds of millions of dollars in settlements for not reporting pedophilia in its own ranks. The head of a national religious organization gets caught having sex with his male masseuse…. And on and on and on it goes.
It would be nice to think that these examples are just the dalliances of famous and powerful men; that ordinary men behave better. But drive down any suburban street in America and the same sad stories can be found — in spades. All we have to do is look at the content of the TV programs, the movies, the music, the magazines, the novels and the online websites that we demand be given us. The same animal house effluent is spewing forth from every mass media orifice. Why? Because this is the logical conclusion of what our modern culture believes to be true: we are just animals, so why not act like it?
A mass zombie invasion
For Christians, contemporary society resembles a mass zombie invasion: legions of soulless people lurching forward on sclerotic legs, jaws slacked, eyes glazed, arms stretched out searching for something — anything — to devour, controlled by some unknown evil, and oblivious to the death and decay that dwells within them and the destruction and despair that lies around them. And in the crevasses and fissures of the wasteland these ghouls are creating hide the Christians, crouched down like roly-poly bugs, squatting on their heels, chins glued to their knees, eyes cringed shut, ears muted with trembling hands as they wait for the jeremiads they’ve lobbed into the advancing horde to explode. But still they come. And out of holes that no longer resemble mouths are heard barely audible chants at first, set to a macabre rendition of a long forgotten children’s tune. But as they continue their inexorable march, the song grows louder and clearer until it reaches unbearable decibels: “We’re all just animals after all…. WE’RE ALL JUST ANIMALS AFTER ALL!”
One might think that this garish vision is just the disgruntled screed of an exhausted evangelical who has been on the losing side of one too many culture wars. But in the very recent past my community has witnessed-all within a few minutes’ drive of my neighborhood-the mass killings at Columbine High, parishioners murdered while worshiping at church (some ushers at our church not only pass out bulletins now, they’re also secretly packing heat and scanning the congregation with furtive eyes, looking for the next mass murderer), another mass killing at a theater, an eleven year old girl abducted, killed, dismembered and then abandoned in a black trash bag by the side of a nearby road, and a student arrested for plotting to kill the President, along with as many children as possible on Halloween (he also possessed blueprints of my daughter’s high school).
Men have become nihilists
Not surprisingly, all of these individuals are men. The philosophical materialism men find so attractive has a certain inextricable logic to it that ends in nihilism. “Some people just want to watch the world burn down, and I’m one of them,” explained our neighborhood wannabe presidential assassin. One might be impressed if this were the kernel of an original thought, but he was simply paraphrasing The Dark Night: “Some men just want to watch the world burn.”
Nihilism oozes through the minds of more and more men like a slow moving sludge seeking the lowest sewer. Truth be told, the day is coming when we will look back on our time with this wistful hope: if only men did act like they were just animals it would be an improvement. Even animals treat their own better than the way these men do.
This post first appeared in NewCommandment.org.
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9 thoughts on “A Men’s Ministry Men Want to Know (Part 1) – The Misery of Modern Men”
Most of the women nowadays are the worst of all since they really have no respect for us men at all since their personality really stinks altogether as well. God forbid if you try to start a conversation with one of them since they’re ready to chew our heads off which it makes it a very bad mistake right there for those of us that had it happened to us already unfortunately.
Thanks for your ministry Herb! Well-written and insightful. I am challenged to pursue the point of logic in men’s ministry. On the flip-side of what you shared, the logic works in reverse – isn’t there more to life than being an animal? Honest reflection demands something more even if one doesn’t recognize the law of conscience or “eternity written on our hearts.”
I agree wholeheartedly, Jon. Non-Christians know there has to be more to life than just existing as an animal. But they have no logical reason to act otherwise based on their unbelieving assumptions. They are caught between the reality that they are immortal souls in fleshly bodies and the logical conclusions of their godless materialism.
If you really think women having the same rights as men makes you less than a man or an animal, then you were never really a man to begin with. All these women blaming is pretty pathetic and weak,blame yourselves for not dealing with the new and improved version of women that doesn’t need a man because she has her own damn brain. It’s was bound to happen sooner or later for women to have jobs, the right to vote, t be educated and be with whoever they want to be. . To imply that these fair actions make you into a crappier version of yourselves just proves to me that men love to have absolute power over a woman’s “place” mind and money and once stripped of that power they have been stripped of their weak slaver identity. There’s really no other explanation as to why men hate feminism, they lost their power over women and resent every bit of it.
On the contrary, the whole point of the post is to point out that men have lost their respect for women as well as their respect for themselves. I also believe that true feminism does not denigrate men.
I have a good idea. First take the gang mentality, cretanism of a mentally ill burn victim man, who steals his bright child taking after the mother, and raises a combo between neanderthal ethics and smarts to crime well — the entire moral standard of such sub-breeds that beat women, break bones, and tell whoppers as a routine of daily life, is such that a large weeding needs to take place, to rid society of this type of quasi-human being. Combine that with all the stalkers, abusers, liars, fearful cowards, home wreckers, and sophisticated yet simian featured wanna-be he-men, up for removal shortly, per the major religious books, and it creates an atmosphere of hope. Until then, all the decent men and women can do, is to be content that they’ve done their best, even when dealing with outrageous lemons, and leave the culpability on the shoulders of those who deserve it — and have trouble sleeping at night, living lives of drug addiction, coke taking, and instilling this in their biological prodigy. Have no fear, there is a god, and all men no matter how hard they beat their breasts like tarzans of the ego realm, carry out god’s wishes thru his tool also known as, inspiration. (Revelations).
the content that i just read is very sadning to me as a christian
and it has raised an awareness in my soul to be even more vigalent
and model the standerd of christ before a demoralistic world.
The women’s movement taught women that marriage was slavery, that they should sexually liberate themselves and that the patriarchy needed to be destroyed. As a result, tens upon tens of millions of men’s lives were destroyed by women through divorce. Why wouldn’t they? Our anti-male government and judiciary gave them every reason and incentive to do so.
Women abandoned their traditional roles – so men followed suit – which brought us to where we are today. What’s hilarious is that people are scratching their heads and bemoaning the fall of men. What did everyone think would happen after women came out en masse against men having power and wealth?
I’m a high income earner, am well educated, have a great career, have tons in savings and wouldn’t dream of getting married or having kids. Giving that kind of power over your life to a woman is the single quickest and surest way for men to destroy their lives. I’ve seen far too many examples of how marriage and family destroy men.
The next nail in the coffin to marriage and family will be the failure to pass the Safe Campus Act – which will allow women to continue to destroy men’s lives through false allegations of rape following regret-sex. Again – the message to men will be clear: Your rights and well-being as a man are secondary to the fickle whims of a woman.
Congratulations, ladies. You’ve won. Now go forth to be strong and independent. Leave men to live lives free of women’s destructive power, sense of entitlement and pathological narcissism.