Guys, we need to stop being ashamed of being men.\u00a0 Virtually every behavior that is natural to a man is now being criticized and we are made to feel ashamed about being the male gender.<\/p>\n
Perhaps if we spent more time uplifting men instead of trying to annilate masculinity, we\u2019d have better men.\u00a0 I recently posted this comment on a social network site:<\/p>\n
Not a huge fan of Men\u2019s Health Magazine, but this ain\u2019t bad advice- The point was that men should have an attitude of gratefulness.\u00a0 Is there anything wrong with a man being grateful?\u00a0 Hardly\u2014I\u2019d say it\u2019s one of the foundations of authentic masculinity.<\/p>\n Men were almost embarrassingly silent regarding the post, but a number of women responded with snarky comments like, \u201cso humble\u201d or \u201cvain,\u201d or \u201cvery prideful.\u201d<\/p>\n Really?\u00a0 Are we so threatened by passionate, proud masculinity that we (as a culture) are programmed to immediately take steps to keep it squashed down.\u00a0 After all, if we can keep men ashamed of themselves, we can keep them docile.\u00a0 And docile men are easy to control.\u00a0 We\u2019ve raised a generation of docile sons and we now call them slackers.\u00a0 If I had posted a note encouraging women to be proud of how they were created I\u2019d have been lauded as an enlightened and highly intelligent human being.<\/p>\n In the past, men\u2019s conferences such as Promise Keepers were met with criticism and distain by the media and women (even Christian women).\u00a0 They were portrayed as men getting together to plot and scheme with some ulterior motive to dominate or control women, putting them back under the thumb of oppression.\u00a0 Recently a Christian men\u2019s conference focusing on inspiring men to act more manly has been heavily lambasted by Christian men and women in the media as being chauvinistic and rather stupid.\u00a0 Comments such as \u201cWhy do men need a conference to teach them how to be men anyway?\u201d were cavalierly tossed about intending to humiliate the men who attended (yet interestingly national and local conferences that teach women how to live fulfilling and satisfying lives as wives, mothers, and women are thriving).\u00a0 As a culture we seem to be highly threatened when groups of men get together so we do all we possibly can to demolish (or at least integrate with females) men\u2019s clubs, boys groups, or any other male-only domains.\u00a0 After all, we wouldn\u2019t want men getting together without the supervision of a female\u2014who knows what might happen?\u00a0 When men have gotten together in the past they\u2019ve only done things like, oh, put a man on the moon, or write the Constitution and Bill of Rights for the greatest country ever created in the history of the world.<\/p>\n Men are damned if they do and damned if they don\u2019t.\u00a0 If they make no efforts to improve themselves they are criticized as being lazy and self-centered. \u00a0If they do try and improve themselves by learning from other men they are accused of trying to usurp a woman\u2019s rights and it\u2019s assumed that there must be some nefarious motive behind what they are attempting. \u00a0And when they do good and right things (like the young Catholic men in the photo above who were praying together to protect a Catholic cathedral from vandalism) they are mocked and chastised.<\/p>\n Guys don\u2019t buy into it.\u00a0 You need other men in your life.\u00a0 Learn from them what healthy (and unhealthy) masculinity looks like.\u00a0 And when you make mistakes (which you will) learn from them and don\u2019t be ashamed.\u00a0 If you are not making mistakes (and getting criticized by someone), you\u2019re not accomplishing anything.<\/p>\n Now go out and figure out how to accomplish something great!<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Guys, we need to stop being ashamed of being men.\u00a0 Virtually every behavior that is natural to a man is now being criticized and we are made to feel ashamed about being the male gender. Perhaps if we spent more time uplifting men instead of trying to annilate masculinity, we\u2019d have better men.\u00a0 I recently […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1113,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[44,83,130,82,164,53,126,16,136],"tags":[26,27,87,85,158,28,7,14],"class_list":["post-2243","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-leadership","category-masculinity","category-mens-ministry","category-mens-studies","category-persecution","category-politics","category-pop-culture","category-sex","category-women","tag-anger","tag-angry","tag-anti-bullying-awareness-month","tag-bullying-2","tag-feminization","tag-males","tag-men","tag-sons"],"yoast_head":"\n
\n\u201cYou can\u2019t be a topnotch man unless you\u2019re deeply grateful. For what? Glad you asked. For the gift of your gender. For those muscles in your back. For those neurons in your brain. For your mirth. Your lust. Your courage. For your possibilities. A man in full appreciates the twist of fate that made him so strong, so cunning, so stalwart, so alert, so sexually skilled, so fully equipped, so good to go. Live the appreciation, by using it all.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n