It Is What It Is…..

The Masculine Journey…..still thinking about that concept. Really, it’s just another way of saying “learning the things we should have learned from our fathers, but didn’t”.

I skimmed through a book in the “Christian Inspiration” section last night at Barnes and Noble called “More Than Sexy”. It caught my eye because of the title supplemented with the picture of a little black dress on the front. I knew mostly what I would find–a treatise on how women have more value than just their looks and encouragement to have a respectable self-worth. I was surprised initially by the author’s tone because it was a little censuring of women (and by that I mean in any way not absolutely positive towards them). The author continued on about how society has made the value of a woman lie mainly in her breasts, etc. etc. When the author started saying that this attitude is not entirely men’s fault, and women might bear a little responsibility, I knew something was up. And yep! sure enough, the author was a man. It would have been really gratifying if it was a woman, but I kept on reading.

He made some good points. In one section advising women on the deep mysteries of the male brain (with the aim of helping women understand how to keep a man), he talked about how men don’t like male-bashing talk, or being nagged. In a chapter humorously called, “Radioactive Woman” he dove into types of women that turn men off or are used by men like the needy woman, the woman with low self-esteem, the slut, etc.

Now, of course, I think it’s great that things like this are published because on the whole women act like they are ignorant of them.  But the important thing was more in what was not said as said.  I’ve seen these things in almost every marriage and relationship self-help book Ive read (and I’ve read several of them). Things like, “You should respect your man’s opinion”, “You shouldn’t be a harping nag who is wound too tight,” or the previously-mentioned, “Male-bashing is a sin.”

It astounds me that women even have to be told these things. To put this into context, a major, influential Christian book on marriage called “Love and Respect” actually has a chapter introducing the concept that men have opinions too and they deserve consideration. Another major marriage book, “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands” actually has to explicitly say that “men have feelings and needs too, and you just can’t berate your husband because you think he can take it” !!!

I could go on with this for 2 or 3 blogs, but just saying that makes point.  This is outrageous!

Back to the first author. Sure, if you’re a woman, you can write off his statements as a biased point of view, and if you’re a man you’re probably inclined to think “he’s just angry at his last girlfriend.” Or you could take an objective and mature look at the premise behind the statements. Just because a person is paranoid doesn’t mean someone’s not trying to kill them.

Now for my tastes, the author didn’t go far enough because he was hesitant in his indictment of our matriarchal culture, but the fact that he made the stand is encouraging to me.  Things won’t change until men take back our God-given leadership and responsibility.  Im not calling for men to take away women’s right to vote, or right to work, or to repress women.  That’s an asinine conclusion to draw.   Look at how society pedastals women and denigrates men.  It’s a call for everybody to treat everybody else with respect and love, and not to shrink back from the fact that God has assigned gender roles.  If this movement is to have any credibility, men must avoid the excesses and abuses that came with the feminist movement.

I won’t lie, Im angry at our culture and with women in general. On the whole, I think the behavior of women is disgusting and extremely damaging in our nation.  Do men bear no responsibility? Of course we do. And Im the first to say it. And one might make the argument that since men have been called by God to be the leaders of family and society, we bear more responsibility. I don’t know.

However, our culture at large is distorted in that women are looked at as the moral standard and men are denigrated as being only a little better than animals, when we’re all human. But I try and keep as objective an opinion as possible because only the truth will improve things for men and women alike.

The truth like……

……men and women are of equal value as human beings.

……men are not morally inferior to women.

……men and women have been shown, on average, to have almost equal intelligence (a slight edge goes to men)

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-405056/Men-intelligent-women-claims-new-study.html

http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/why-men-are-more-intelligent-than-women/

……men are not animals because we have a strong sex drive.

……men are more than just a wallet.

No One Said Life Was Easy

Life sucks sometimes.  Especially when you’re soldiering on the battlefield of manhood.  Sometimes you feel like you’re dying, and sometimes you’ll wish for death.  And sometimes you’ll ask God to kill you.  You feel like you’re huddled in a foxhole, your right arm shredded from grenade shrapnel, your left riddled by turret fire, terrified that the next explosion will be the one that blows you to kingdom come.

A old mentor of mine used to say, “Fair is where you go to see the cows shit.”

That was an understatement.

 

I’ve lost nearly every battle in manhood this week.  I’m facing some incredible consequences.  Sometimes sin just wins the battle.  And, while losing the battle, a good friend of mine, Bruce, called me the other day.  Bruce is a 70 year old gentleman who has faced and won some of life’s most threatening battles.  After telling him my failures, he said, “Dustin, it took me 17 years to get to my first year of sobriety in AA.  And now I have 26 years.  But I just kept going to meetings, talking about my problems, and calling people.”

And that’s what everyone of us have to do.  We can’t quit going to meetings, whether it be church, or a men’s group, or AA.  And we have to keep calling and telling our friends about our struggles.  Just by talking out our struggles we bring them out into the light where they have less power over us, allowing someone else to carry it with us.  It’s a spiritual principle, and it works. Don’t ask me how.

Don’t quit fighting, soldier on. Don’t run from God, run to God.  When we [are] still powerless, Christ died for us.  It’s hard for me to believe that, especially right now.  But I know it’s true.

The Renaissance Man

The Hardest Thing You Will Ever Do

Over the past 8 months I’ve started to realize the importance of something we all do as humans, something that is critical to advancing on the masculine journey.  It’s the idea of escape, release.  Trying to escape life and it’s effect on our emotions is what life in America is all about.  We have TV, pop music, media, drugs, alcohol, sex, food, you name it; we’re so immersed in this attitude that we all do it and hardly any of us realize it.  Eventually the escape becomes life, and the thing to which we look for release becomes our master.

Having avenues of recreation and “escape” like hobbies, exercise, etc. helps relieve stress in our lives, but when we start using natural things for an unnatural means to avoid confronting ourselves and our emotions, we become avoiders, escapists.

And when we’re avoiding, we can’t grow.  Our masculine journey grinds to a halt because avoidance is failure to take responsibility, which is the central tenet of masculinity.  Masculinity is being like Christ.  Not the sissified Jesus most churches teach about, but the real Jesus, the Jesus that makes people uncomfortable with tough-love and in-your-face challenge.  The Jesus who said, “This world is gonna suck, but don’t wimp out, I’ve already taken care of the world.”

I use sex and food as escapes.  It used to be TV, but I got rid of that back last year. When Im not courageous enough to look inside and understand myself, why Im feeling like garbage, I turn to sex with random women or eating a whole box of Klondike bars in one night.   I’m afraid of what I’ll find inside and of confronting myself, and what God might say about it. There have been harsh consequences for my life, and will continue to be if something doesn’t change.

But no matter how hard I try, I can’t fix the problem, I can’t quit sleeping around and eating crappy foods.  I literally do not have the ability or power to do it.  I want to, and I try, but when the rubber hits the road I wimp out.  I give in.  I’m coming face to face with my absolute powerlessness and the unmanagability it’s causing in my life.  And it sucks.  It sucks when you’re totally weak and start admitting that to yourself.  But knowing I can’t do it makes me desperate enough to ask for help, to turn to God.  Im slowly learning to turn to Him instead sex or food.  The more desperate I am, the more I ask for help.  So staying desperate is the best thing for me.

Facing ourselves and turning to God are the first steps.   The longer we put off facing ourselves and life, the longer we put our masculinity on hold.  The world needs strong men, and it needs us NOW!  Has anyone seen the world lately? We can’t afford to put this off any more.

Stark195

The World Has No Place for Men

The world desperately needs men, but I know of only a handful, and even with them I have my doubts.  I don’t even meet my own expectations, but Im journeying towards the goal.

As long as anything controls our lives, we are bound men at best.  Most of us let sex (women) control our lives.  We go from one woman to another and another.  We repent after each mistake, but then we can’t wait for the next fix.  As Esther Vilar points out in “The Manipulated Man”, men are raised with a life-view that says, “Im a man, I can’t control myself.”  And of course you’re not going to be able to control yourself easily if you’ve believed that your whole life. Society looks at promiscuous men as normal, while promiscuous women are called ‘sluts’.  Women are held to a higher moral standard, but since they have less desire for sex, and men are raised to think we must have sex all the time and cannot control ourselves, this gives women power.  Most men will sacrifice everything for a little more booty from their girlfriends.  Control over their lives, money, time, you name it.

But that’s really the crux of the matter: We relinquish the power.  We give in.  When it comes down to it, we are the ones responsible for our own powerlessness.  Was it right that we were programmed not to control ourselves? Absolutely not.  Do many women use their sex appeal to manipulate men, get their money, and have power? You bet.  But we as men only have power over our own lives.  And if someone is controlling us, it’s our fault, because we had to say ‘yes’ to the bondage.

I have spent most of my life suffering in self-imposed bondage and I finally started getting sick of it after my last girlfriend.  In the aftermath, a brother in arms helped me to grow some balls, and I started asking the hard questions like, “Who am I?” and “What do I want?” and taking a hard look inside.  And life is getting harder all the time.  I’m confronting some huge things in my life that have too much control.  I don’t always win the battles.  As a matter of fact, lately I’m losing more than winning.  But I know that if I endure, God will deliver to me victory in the end.  I have to keep pressing towards the goal of the upward call in Christ.  And that’s what we all have to do.  The road is hard, but we must walk it.  And starting is always the hardest part.

We can look out into the world and start fighting the feminist ideals that control our world, but in the end, if we don’t have control over ourselves, we will lose.  Women are not the enemy, feminism is.  The body of thought that lifts up the female gender while systematically destroying the male gender.  Even then, there’s something deeper to this life, something more important: It’s connecting with God and coming to know who we are as men, what manhood really means.  Out of that connection, we will find God bestowing masculinity upon us.  Our job is to become slaves of no one, except the Almighty.

So, connect with God.  Forget your guilt: ask His forgiveness and move on.  Call your brothers in the fight.  Find a couple of men that have insight and talk about the struggles.  You won’t make it without your brothers in arms.

“Give Me Liberty Or Give Me Death.”–Patrick Henry, March 23, 1775

“Nothing is more difficult, and therefore more precious, than to be able to decide.”–Napoleon Bonaparte

“I prefer liberty with danger to peace with slavery.”–Jean-Jacques Rousseau

“Freedom is the will to be responsible to ourselves.”–Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 1888
“Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed.” –Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Maternal Expectation

I’ve been reading a lot of anti-feminist literature lately, such as “The Manipulated Man”, “Feminists Say the Darnedest Things” and “The Myth of Male Power”.  I just overheard a co-worker say to his sister that he wasn’t coming home to visit his parents for Christmas because he was opting to see his fiance.  His sister apparently also wanted to leave home and was afraid about telling her mother.  This brings up a key to manhood that few men seem to grasp–the power of female expectation.  In just one verbal paragraph my co-worker demonstrated that his life has been completely controlled by the expectations of women–first his mother, now his fiance.  It would be shocking if this weren’t the norm for most men.

Then I thought about my own life realized that a reason I have been able to begin throwing off the shackles of female manipulation is because though I have a good relationship with my mother, I refused a long time ago to be bound to her female expectations.  I decided in my teens, when the relationship with my mom was tenuous, that I would do whatever I felt was right to do with my life regardless of what other people, especially my parents, thought.  My mom knows that if she begins interfering too much in my life that I will begin to put her at arms length because I have gotten angry with her before and told her how things were going to be.  So in my late teens I ceased putting so high a value on my mom’s opinion and approval, but I began to seek it in other females.  This began a series of relationships characterized by the female’s domination.  It was not until recently in my life that I finally gained the strength to throw off the need for approval from any human being.  I am the first to admit that even though I take pride in being my own man, being able to make it on my own, that the hunger for approval still raises its ugly head every so often.  It is something in every one of us that will never fully be conquered and so we must always be on guard and be ruthless with it!

Now, we as human beings need approval.  And finding a form of approval in our friends and family is a good thing.  We should however find the ultimate source of our approval in God and never set a high price upon woman’s (or man’s) approval.  This is called fearing God and not fearing man in biblical language.  “The fear of (wo)man brings a snare,” is what the good book has to say.  Men must be on guard NOT to make women their most important source of approval, but God.  This includes your mother, your sister, your girlfriend, and your wife.  To do that takes stones.  We have to be like Dennis Miller and “[grow] a pair of tungsten steel cahones!”

Don’t be afraid to make a woman angry.  We’ve been programmed in society to assume that woman is always right (which, in reality, she hardly ever is).  We have been deceived into thinking women feel more deeply than men.  This is a lie.  We as men were raised our whole lives to repress and not express our emotions.  Therefore if something makes us cry or makes us angry, it has to be something that deeply impacted us.  So when women cry, most men assume they have deeply hurt them.  The presence of tears is never reason enough for men to back down when confronting a woman.  She deserves to cry and get angry if she’s being a controlling witch.  We as men have to throw off female expectation and lead our lives according to God’s expectations and our own.  Period.

stark195

Tin Man and Manhood

I find myself today haunted by old memories of summers past.  Like always when Im in lab and working on a weekend, I put on my Pandora John Mayer playlist and kick back emotionally with Mayer, Jack Johnson, Jason Mraz, and others.  It was summer of 2005 when I interned at the University of North Texas and first started listening to Johnson and Mayer.  This is the one summer during my college years that was “THE” summer for me.  Everybody has one.  The summer you remember for years to come.  The summer where you really came into your own.

Im always haunted by that summer.  My heart was a lot more alive back then and much more able to enjoy myself and the people in my life.  And that’s what it was really about–going with Jon to the soccer field to play ultimate with Zeke and the physicists; eating at the fancy Italian restaurant with the Rachels; getting kicked out of a country-western bar because the crew got too rowdy and so on.  I enjoyed life alot more back then.  And that’s one aspect of where Im at in my masculine journey.

John Eldrege says that as a man progresses through the stages of manhood, he must come to a place, a stage where his heart is awakened.  Most of us have experienced that as men–when we see a sunset or read a particular author and our hearts are warmed and comforted, stirred, and resonate with what we have experienced.  Of course part of this is noticing the beauty of women and something deeper than just a pair of tits and great legs, but that’s just a part and certainly not the purpose or the end.  We are connecting with a part of God.

I knew that part of my heart at one point, but it has come and passed.  Since that summer, my heart has become colder and darker, and the routine of the world leaves me little space for such “emotional frivolity”, especially now that my career is the most important thing in my life.  Scientific research leaves little room for the heart.  Not to mention the fact that I enjoy the warrior aspect of manhood more than most men.  I love a good argument, a good fight.  Eldrege says we have to be careful lest the battle is all we know.  The battle is central to manhood, but it is not all of manhood.

Maybe I can recapture my heart somehow.  Im reading more literature nowadays.  Granted, Sherlock Holmes is about as heartless as you can get, but Im looking for other authors as well.  I always think about getting back to drumming and learning guitar.  I need something in my life that is more than analysis, logic, and warfare.  I’ll never give up those things mind you.  But I need to stretch myself, expand my life.  And I guess I really need to root myself in relationships more than anything. But when it comes down to it, God is central here.  My heart isn’t going to come alive again and I won’t have the balance I need unless He helps me.

Soldier on, Men!

stark195

The Masculine Journey–Wednesday, August 25, 2010

Since you don’t know my story, Im going to start off with an introduction.

Im a man with struggles, a man with skills, and a man who knows I can’t do it alone.  Im 26 years old, single, and I’ve seen a lot over the past few years.  I moved from Bowling Green, KY four years ago to New Jersey for grad school.  Im working on my doctorate, so it’s not always easy.  I’ve been in Pittsburgh, PA a year now and in that year life has become intense.  More intense than I would like.  And Im an intense man!

Until recently in my life I didn’t realize I wasn’t being what a man is supposed to be.  Sometimes it takes an event, relationship, or whatever, but you have to be awakened eventually. You see the stark contrast of manhood against what you are, and you are shamed, broken, and embarrassed.  Or maybe you just have this inner sense that something is missing, but you don’t know what.  That’s what happened to me.

It was painful.  I grappled with my identity for the first time.  All my
life I had been used to sacrificing the very core of who I was for
other people.  I didn’t stand my ground, my identity was weak.  I
finally reached the breaking point.  I knew I needed to be a different
man.  Not just some guy floating along in life.

Most men stop right there, though.  They don’t look inward and start asking the big questions, like “Who am I?” or “What do I want?”  They repress it, ignore it, and just continue on the lazy river of life even though they just got crushed by the fat woman coming over the water fall.

All of society tells us it’s bad to be masculine.  Every expert is trying to feminize us. Women want “sensitive men” and then they criticize their boyfriends for not having any balls!  We’re looked at like we’re barbarians for being competitive and perverts for having a strong sex drive.

The odds are against us, men, but we’ve gotta be Rocky, going 15 rounds with Apollo to the end.  We won’t get there without perseverance.

stark195

A New Day Dawns in Manhood

Hey there wordpress!  Im a veteran to the blog scene–I used to write all the time on myspace and then facebook a few years back.  Then about a couple years ago I got out of it.  Life has changed much since then and Im looking to chronicle the life of a man on a journey.  Many simultaneous journeys as a matter of fact.  So if you just so happen upon this blog let me tell you a couple things:

I hate it when people think other people want to read their blogs about going to the hair salon, or the number of reps they just pulled in the gym, or whatever mundaneness their life revolves around.  We all have mundaneness and no one wants to hear about it. That’s my blogging philosophy.  Therefore Im looking to put some real meat out there for those who want something deeper to ponder and hopefully I will be enriched by those of you who read it also.

Like I said, Im a man on a journey.  I’ve come to realize over the past couple years that the masculine journey is difficult.  And not very many men are on that journey.  Im tired of men thinking they have to be wimps and “owe” it to women because women were treated so badly decades ago.  Let go of the past ladies!  Im also tired of macho brainless men who abdicate the responsibility and leadership we as men are given.  Getting to a place of being the right kind of man is a long, hard journey and no one can do it alone. We men here in America are rarely given an actual flesh and blood example of how to be a man, how manhood is fleshed out day-to-day, so no wonder it’s difficult.  So Im going to chronicle my weekly struggles and I hope some real men and women will read and ponder and comment.

To men!

stark195