Man Enough

 “I used to want to be a real man

I don't know what that even means”

Jason Isbell “Hope the High Road”

Fifty years on this earth has proven to me by experience what I first learned in a middle school science textbook. "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction" (Newton's Third Law of Motion). Metaphorically, the "pendulum effect" describes a historical or social narrative that swings between opposing viewpoints. I’ve lived long enough to witness how these scientific and metaphorical truths have influenced our cultural depictions of what it means to be a man.

In my youth there was an almost comical stereotype of manhood. Watch most movies and sitcoms from the 80’s and you will see masculinity reduced to beer drinking, sports watching, and woman ogling. Even the music got in on the act: see any hair metal video or Beastie Boys song for examples. When stereotypes become culturally reinforced archetypes, it doesn’t take long for abuses to arise and shifts to emerge. Boys who grew up watching and listening to these stereotypes naturally adopt many of them — too often without rebuke from adult male authority figures — and become men who embody those stereotypes as a sort of masculine identifier. Many of those boys become men who behave badly and have their bad behavior excused as “boys will be boys”.

As the calendar moved toward the 21st century the equal and opposite reaction came to the forefront. Decades of vile behavior by too many men — often without significant, or even any, consequences — created a climate where vulnerable populations “had enough” and stood up en masse and demanded accountability. For decades, much of the physical, sexual, and verbal abuse perpetuated by men went unpunished and in many cases, unacknowledged. Around this time, these traits earned the label “toxic masculinity”, and for good reason. But pendulums don’t find middle ground and stop, they swing to opposite extremes. Over time these stereotypical traits that were toxic, bled over to how masculinity itself was viewed. No longer were there behaviors that were forms of toxic masculinity, but masculinity itself was considered toxic by many. Fortunately, this extreme position did not last very long, unfortunately it provided the necessary momentum for another pendulum swing to an equally harmful extreme concerning masculinity.

Fast forward to the present and we are witnessing the rise in popularity of masculine caricatures in the form of “influencers” who glamorize misogyny, promiscuity, violence, materialism, arrogance, and the subjugation of women as portrayals of what it means to be a “real man”, an “Alpha Male” as opposed to a “Beta Male”. A stereotype is a fixed, often unfair, generalized belief about a group of people based on their shared characteristics, while a caricature is an exaggerated or distorted representation of some of those characteristics. There are a lot of men who like to drink beer, watch sports and ogle women, hence the stereotype, but there are equally a lot of men who don’t. You can’t define manhood by characteristics that are far from universal. Caricatures focus on singular characteristics and hyper inflate them to be THE defining characteristic of manhood. The biggest difference from my youth and today is the X factor that is social media amplifying these voices at an unnatural level. 

Because we live in a consumer driven culture, “manhood/masculinity” is a big and lucrative business. Even the church has gotten in on the action, with virtually every branch of American Christianity having a specialized wing that focuses on promoting (or better yet, selling) “biblical manhood”. Allow me to stress, there is no such thing as “biblical” manhood. There are men in the Bible, and those men spanned millennia, occupying space in radically different cultures and circumstances that would frequently contradict the other’s norms for masculinity. Each time I see a ministry promoting a plan to return to biblical manhood I immediately think “which portrayal?”

Should we mimic the Ancient Near Eastern Bronze Age manliness of Jacob who took two wives and two concubines? If you’re keeping score, in that culture the more baby mama’s a man had the more prolific and prosperous he was considered. Perhaps we should adopt the cultural depiction of strong men by wearing makeup like Joseph and Moses between the 12th and 19th Egyptian dynasties. Should we adopt the hairstyle of alpha male Sampson who wore his long hair in braids? Do we need to write poetry and cry like David was known for doing? Maybe we should return to first century wardrobes from the Roman Empire, where Jews and Gentiles alike wore tunics, which is just another word for man dresses. 

Rather than arbitrarily prescribing cultural trends - be they contemporary or ancient - as examples of what it means to be a man, we would all be better served by adopting the universally righteous and just actions and attitudes of Jesus. By any culture’s metric, Jesus was a strong, brave, tough man who exuded authority and courage in every setting, and yet, He was also gentle, vulnerable, non-violent, advocate of women and children. He wasn’t just willing to protect and die for women and children, He made it His business to create a space at the table for all vulnerable or minority demographics. Did He ever sit and allow women to serve Him, certainly, but He also adopted the form of a servant Himself, even to the lowly position of foot washing, while teaching the men under His influence, “I have given you an example, that you also should do just as I have done to you.” So many times I’ve listened to men boast, “I’d die for my wife and kids”, which is a noble gesture that I share, but those words ring hollow when you aren’t willing to live for them or serve them. The likelihood that you would ever have to die for them is virtually non-existent, but the likelihood that they would need you to do laundry or dishes or prepare meals or give baths is practically daily. There simply is no way to avoid the fact that the greatest man to ever live cooked meals, cleaned up, and washed feet. You can grow a beard, carry a gun, flex your muscles, and make it clear you wear the pants in your family, but if you can’t do what Jesus did, well, maybe you just aren’t man enough.