Nowadays, especially via TV and Hollywood, men are seen as despicable, cruel, pusillanimous, selfish, ineffectual oafs, veritable bumbling idiots who need women or some gay guy to help us through our primal fog towards metrosexual healing.
If you’re a guy who wants to keep his guy-ness and not trade it in for the androgynous imago of the 21st century puss, then you will receive more scorn than Michael Moore at a NRA luncheon. From the college classroom to the corporate boardroom, men have been meeting with man-hatred for quite some time now.
Look, I’m sure men need some retooling, and I confess we do egregious things for which we need to take responsibility. Y’know, just the other day while I was on a hunting trip without my wife during our anniversary, after not bathing for 5 days, while eating cold refried beans out of a can, chasing the beans with a hot Budweiser and belching so loudly that a Bull Elk came to our cabin looking for a fight, I was thinking that maybe I need to take some etiquette classes.
However, the little tweaking that I’ll admit to needing with respect to balancing out my mannish weirdness will not be coming from our current culture of castration but from the scripture and from classical masculine values of days gone by.
What are the basic elements of the masculine spirit? Well, from Homer to Gomer, from Abraham to the Apostle Paul, there are three primary traits that men, if properly raised and allowed to express their biology, will and should naturally exhibit.
They are the following:
· Competition
· Independence
· Responsibility
Let’s look at number one, competition. Guys will fight over anything, and you know what, we’re supposed to. Probably the thing that separates the men from the ladies more than the Austin Power-like hair on our backs is man’s innate combative nature.
Take the animal kingdom, for instance. While on one of my glorious and many hunting trips, I had two bucks feeding in front of my stand about 75 yards away. To my right, out of a thick stand of trees, comes a doe in to feed with the grass-munchin’ boys, and the next thing you know … it’s a WWE match in a South Florida palmetto patch. The two young bucks commenced to smashing their heads together over Bambi’s cute sister. The kicker is, while Frick and Frack are locked up vying for dominance, a more mature buck appeared and began to walk off with the doe … that is until I shot him.
Male animals will fight over who gets to breed, who gets to eat, and who owns a particular piece of turf, and aside from our cell phones we bipods are no different. Men clash over women, ideas, politics, business, war, and if that does not suffice, we will make up crap to wrangle over.
Nowadays, men are reviled and harangued for this traditionally esteemed and essential, God-wired, gung-ho spirit. It is this positive bellicose behavior that causes men to rightly protect, even to the point of death, women and kids from whatever threatens them. This is what men have been classically known for, and this is what should be re-tabled for men in this Age of Wussification.
In addition to and closely connected with this confrontational role, is the classic male mission of fetching vittles and acquiring a killer crib. Men looked for the new castle in a safer hamlet. Men sought increased opportunity for their kids and a greater slice of the bliss pie for the entire family.
And lastly, the male competitive spirit caused the production of a better breed of people. You know, in the animal kingdom, you don’t get to mate if you don’t exert your masculinity in the field by dominance.
The competitive spirit within the man, together with its spin-off fruits, is a must for our nation to continue to be the solid country it is. Sure, this viable spirited competitive distinctiveness, allowed to grow on its own, ungoverned by greatness, can fester into an O.J. However, the competitive spirit, governed by biblical ethics, has always produced powerful and productive patriarchs who were the backbone of whatever culture they grew up in. That’s why traditional Judeo-Christian communities invested so much time, capital and oomph in the ordering of this potential force through the institution of rights, rules and heroic narratives.
As society becomes more secular, dispensing with Judeo-Christian values that relate to man, and diluting the values which address their combativeness in a constructive fashion, man’s competitive bent will deteriorate rapidly into free-for-all competition and success at all costs. On the flip side of that competition-minus-character coin is the current overcorrection of poo-pooing competition and turning men into Charmin-like creatures.
Traditional society esteemed and structured man’s aggressiveness, realizing that men who like to fight were a must for the good society. Our forebears bridled the bad fruits and released the good produce of combative behavior by recounting great biblical narratives, by conducting ceremonies, and by maintaining an ethical code built around properly releasing this warrior spirit.
to be continued …
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