Masculinity Archives - Page 3 of 15

Stand for Something

I’ve begun to notice a certain genre of Christian in my local Church who avoid taking a stand for anything. Instead of clearly separating right and wrong, they are ambiguous. They allow certain behaviors to slide under the table. They ignore the stupidity of others to preserve relationships. they get their feelings hurt if they have to correct anyone.

These men care more about preserving relationships than about behaving morally. They would rather let a person wander off a cliff than correct him. Allowing someone to fall off a ledge because you do not want to correct them is not love, it is hate. It is easy to behave that way. It is easy to take the middle ground and do nothing for those around you. Any man can do that.

What is difficult is taking on the burden of correcting others. It is difficult to be the “bad guy” who rebukes the sinner in the presence of all (1 Timothy 5:20).

There is no nobility in indifference. There is nothing honorable about not choosing sides. Those who refuse to take sides are simply trying to avoid offending others. It would be better for you to offend others than be a weak, shell of a man who stands for nothing.

What you must do is decide to stand for what is right. Whether it is religious, political, or otherwise, you need to take sides. We as humans are built to go to war and fight. We are designed for “Us against them” interactions. Humans thrive in tribalism, though that word has been corrupted by modernity. Men need something to fight against, and you can start by fighting against stupid ideas. You can start with attacking those who decide to remain indifferent. Attack those who stand for nothing. This is the way of the warrior.

Men stand and fight. Those who stand idly by are worthless.

The Solution-Oriented Mind

One of the more recent things I have discovered as one of the differences between men and women is the following:

Women are relationship and problem-focused. They have people-oriented minds.
Men are progress and solution-focused. They have solution-oriented minds

I believe this single fact can explain why there are more male inventors than there are female inventors. It has nothing to do with a difference in intelligence and everything to do with the difference in the focus of the genders.

Women focus on problems and need to talk about them. This is why women get together and grow their interpersonal relationships by commiserating. They feel better by expressing their emotions and sharing in one another’s problems.

However, men focus on solutions to problems.

If men get together and actually talk to one another, the conversation typically revolves around solving problems. While the discussion could center around sports or some other pastime, generally men will be busy suggesting possible solutions for every problem in the world, from politics to home repairs.

Now this difference in men and women can actually be complementary if both sexes do not take their natures to the extreme. By that I mean if a woman takes her problem-oriented mind to the extreme, she will chronically complain and nag. And if a man hyper-focuses only on the solutions he generates, he becomes overconfident and oblivious to the holes in his own solutions. But if both sexes appropriately complement each other, they can generate powerful solutions to any problem.

This is accomplished by a man first creating the rough draft of a solution to any problem, followed by a rational critique of the solution by a problem-focused woman to which he responds by fixing the problems that she points out.

Unfortunately, this does not happen often. Women typically end up nagging and men end up as isolationists because neither had the self-awareness to correct their extreme natures.

The new issue, however, is the sad reality that men themselves have lost their solution-oriented mindset. Men have become like women and simply complain about problems instead of doing anything about them. This may come as a shock, but improvements cannot happen if all parties merely sit around and complain about the situation. Someone must have a solution-oriented mind. Someone has to take some action, and traditionally that has been the men. But in the 21st-century much of religion has become feminine centric, and every scrap of traditional masculinity is ridiculed or “educated” out of boys by the time they are old enough to be men.

At the root level, when men stop focusing on solutions and start focusing on problems, they become more effeminate. This is because it is the woman’s job to focus on the problems and it is the men’s job to focus on the solutions.

A man has the solution-oriented mind.

I have noticed this with modern Conservatives and Republicans in politics and with religious Conservatives as well. While political Liberals and Democrats and religious Liberals have always been problem-focused and effeminate in their positions, this is new territory for Conservatives. I believe this is why Conservative, Republican men are beginning to mirror the feminine traits common in Democrat or Liberal political parties. It is due to the simple fact that they complain about problems without providing solutions. The same happens with religious parties.

These are not value statements; I am not trying to argue a moral point regarding politics in this essay. These are simply facts and observations I have noticed and common occurrences that you have likely noticed as well. Everyone is more than welcome to their own opinion.

Back to the focal point. Men in the church have resigned themselves to complaining about problems instead of actually solving them.

You can pull up a video of any congressional speech made by a Republican and watch this very phenomenon play out (with the possible exception of Dan Crenshaw, one of the few masculine men left in congress). Or watch a video of any modernist sermon today and you will see men complaining about the state of the world without providing actionable steps for improvement.

Sure, these men may make a few comments about “trusting God” or “Grace” or something. But rarely if ever are men given actionable steps that they themselves can start taking to improve their minds and become solution-oriented.

We have plenty of people complaining about problems and the state of the world and we have very few men doing anything about those problems.

We have plenty of people in the church complaining about this issue or that situation and no one doing anything to provide solutions or change the situation. Even the more Conservative men in the church do nothing but complain and offer no solutions. This is because men have been specially bred to worship women instead of God. Feminism is built into their pedigree. Their entire focus has been reoriented from making God the focus of their lives to making women the focus of their lives and checking all the correct behavioral boxes so they can win women’s approval and intimacy. But that is an essay all by itself. Let’s move on to some applications.

Affirmation: I create solutions and never complain about problems.

Application: The Problem: Men have become effeminate by being problem-focused.

A Solution: Men must reorient their minds so that they generate solutions. They must become Solution-Oriented.

Men should be producing solutions faster than everyone else can generate problems. Men were not placed on earth to be masters of empathy, they are here to build and renovate homes, civilizations, and societies.

Key to Masculinity: Stop complaining and start solving. You need to allocate maximal mental resources to solutions and minimal mental resources to problems. It is fine to simply state a problem, but be sure you have some solutions to go along with those complaints. Every complaint you have must be followed by a solution if not four solutions to choose from. If you do not provide a solution to the problems you state, you are effeminate.

“90 % of mental resources should be focused on solutions and only 10% on problems” ~ Tony Robbins.

If you are around males who spend time complaining, question them about possible solutions to the problems they complain about. If they complain about politics, ask them what action they would have the politician take. They should have a ready answer since they obviously have so much knowledge about managing hundreds of millions of human beings in the world of political war. Or if they are complaining about church protocol, ask them for four possible solutions. If they cannot answer the question, press them on the fact that they have no solutions to problems and are nothing more than mere complainers. They will hopefully become embarrassed and consider their position more rationally before they vomit their partially digested criticisms onto whoever has the misfortune of being nearby.

Plant the seed in your mind that you are a man who finds, creates, and executes solutions to problems instead of just complaining about them.

Be able to discuss those solutions in a calm, rational, stoic manner. No one listens to the guy who yells at the leader, “You should do X, Y, and Z you moron”. State your position eloquently and with a rational mind, giving respect to those in the positions of authority who are able to execute those actions. By doing this you protect their ego.

You can also leverage their ego by expressing how wise it would make them look if they implemented your solution, and they do not even have to give you any credit. If they implemented it, you not only solved the problem but strengthened a trade embargo. This is life, and life is a manipulation.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

The Sexual Market Value of Joseph

It is fairly simple to understand how a woman’s sexual market value is determined. All you need to know is if she is attractive or not. Sexually, a woman’s value is based on how good she looks. When men look for a sexual partner, this is all they consider, from a secular point of view. Even religious men first determine if a woman is attractive and then consider her character when they are looking for someone to date or marry. A man will not even talk to a woman if she is not attractive, despite what the “beauty is on the inside” proponents have to suggest. Unfortunately for them, you cannot have sex with inner beauty, so it is not the first consideration for men looking for women. What we will learn momentarily will help us understand how high the sexual market value of Joseph was.

For men, on the other hand, there are many more components that go into determining their sexual market value.

Looks are only a component, and though they are important, they must be supplemented with additional characteristics for a man to be sexually marketable. Most notably, looks must be supplemented with traditionally masculine features and behaviors along with a man’s ability to game a woman, and finally topped off by his status or affluence. At the end of the day, women have more criteria for what makes a man a desirable sexual partner, both short and long-term.

Also please note, when I say “sexual partner” I do not mean “husband material”. The religious world does its best to convince young men that behaviors such as being a good provider, taking care of a woman’s emotions, and being a good father are what make men sexually attractive. This is not true. While those behaviors make men good long-term marriage partners, they are not good for generating genuine sexual attraction in a woman. That is best done by a combination of masculine behavior plus game, masculine features (muscle mass, lower-pitched voice, etc.).

Women have different criteria for who they want to have sex with versus who they want to marry.

The church has tried to educate and condition women to desire those long-term provider characteristics (good provider/good father etc.), but conditioning cannot undo a woman’s basic biological need to breed with the man who has the best genetics. She will desire to marry the long-term provider, but she will desire to have sex with the most masculine man. This is also why many Christian wives will rarely if ever feel a genuine sexual desire for their husbands.

That is a brief glimpse into the female sexual selection process and there is much more to cover at a later time, but those few paragraphs should give you enough information to make the story of Joseph much more compelling.

What we have in Genesis 39 is a man named Joseph who checks all the boxes for a good short-term sexual partner for a woman.

The sexual market value of Joseph is quite high. Let’s have a look at these:

I. He is Physically Attractive – Genesis 39:6

The Bible says Joseph is handsome in both form and appearance. Meaning he had an attractive body and face. These are two basic characteristics that form the foundation of a man’s sexual market value. But that is not all, we also learn that:

II. Joseph is Successful and Becomes an Overseer of Potiphar’s House – Genesis 39:3-4

Arguably, even more important than a man’s looks are his status and ambition. Not only is a man’s success in his career reflective of his ability to be an efficient long-term provider, but it also reflects mastery and ambition, each of which women usually find masculine and attractive. Joseph climbed the ranks in Potiphar’s house until he was in charge of everything. Potiphar’s mind was free to focus on business and the kingdom of Egypt, and he must have enjoyed that mental rest.

III. Joseph becomes “Forbidden Fruit” – Genesis 39:8-9

Women want what they cannot have. So when Joseph refuses Potiphar’s wife, that only makes him that much more desirable to her. Now she has to have him because he is not only attractive and successful but also a challenge to be conquered.

Potiphar’s wife likely was not interested in one single sexual encounter, I argue that she wanted a long-term affair.

I base this on the fact that the Bible says “He did not heed her to lie with her or to be with her”. Why separate “lying with” and “being with” unless they describe two separate events. Potiphar’s wife wanted sexual access to Jospeh over the long term (Genesis 39:10).

Men like Joseph are what women want:

1. Successful
2. Ambitious
3. Attractive (Fit)

Consider these points the next time you hear a lesson on the story of Joseph. Go to your preacher and ask him about the sexual market value of Joseph and see what he says. Most men have no idea the temptation Joseph faced when dealing with Potiphar’s wife because they themselves are not sexually marketable enough to be valued by women and subsequently be tempted by them. Women like high-value men. Most men in the church are too busy using their virtue to justify their poverty to have time to train their bodies or build their wealth.

Consider how you can make yourself more like Jospeh if you want to be more attractive to your wife. Be masculine and work hard and put yourself first.

How Failure is Like Inflammation (Failure Part 2.)

Failure can be likened to inflammation in the body. When the human body is damaged, it undergoes a process of inflammation to heal itself. This same basic inflammatory process happens whether you scratch your arm or break your leg. It consists of three processes that overlap one another.

The first component is the inflammatory stage.

This period lasts about a week during which the body is trying to stop bleeding, get repair materials to the injury site and fight infection if necessary. This is the stage that is the most painful, because it begins the moment an injury is sustained. The body is rapidly performing all the “damage control” processes it can in order to limit the extent of the damage.

The second stage of inflammation begins somewhere between the 6^th and 20^th day after the injury, though many experts disagree as to when this stage actually begins.

This second section of injury repair is called the proliferation stage.

Here the body is trying to repair the overall damage of the injury by building new blood vessels, build new tissue to replace what was lost or killed, shrinking the size of the wound, and covering it with a new layer of skin. Each of these four processes happen at the same time, it is a masterful renovation of the body. During this stage, the body is recovering in a broad sense, not really paying too much attention to detail but rather simply trying to restore the structural integrity of the injured tissue or body parts. In this stage, you can move the injured site around and even poke the injury, and while it still may be tender or painful, it is much better than it was during the first week.

The final stage of inflammation is called the maturation stage; this stage can last from months to years depending on the injury.

This is where the body is finished with the rough renovation of the injury and really starts focusing on the details. It tries to line up collagen and other cells nicely so that you look like you never injured yourself.

Now what could this possibly have to do with dealing with failure? Here is the answer: when we are hit with a failure as men, we go through an eerily similar process of recovery.

Recovering from Failure – The Steps

I. Inflammation Phase: The moments right after failing a test, performing poorly in a sport, or at work are some of the most painful moments you experience. You may find that your lower back and kidneys begin to hurt. Your head may start to spin, and you question your adequacy as a man and perhaps question if it is worth it to stay alive.

The most important action you can take at this moment is to avoid ruminating on the failure. Just like you put an icepack on a new injury to limit inflammation, you must put an icepack of sorts on your mind. You need to do anything you can to distract your mind and put it on a different loop. What you are trying to do is prevent your brain from replaying the failure over and over again and also prevent yourself from thinking about what you would have done differently.

You can derail your train of thought by training extremely hard, playing a game, or diving into your favorite distraction. You have to prevent yourself from ruminating. One failure is enough, there is no need to mentally relive it for the next hour; that is the source of the majority of stress in people’s minds.

This first action is the Damage Control Maneuver.

II. Proliferation Phase: If you scratch a chunk out of your arm, the body dutifully fills that hole. If you take a chunk out of your pride or self-esteem by failing, you must repair it the same way. At this point, the pain of the failure itself is leaving, though your pride may still be aching. In this period, you can begin to assess what went wrong with your performance in a rational, detached way. You will want to wait several days to begin this process if possible because the pain and emotions of the inflammatory stage make it impossible to be rational about your performance.

You must simultaneously repair your self-esteem by winning small successes in other life areas and reassess and prepare to go to war with your enemy – be it an exam, a project, or a speech. Once you have clearly located the gaps in your ability, attack them with ferocious force. You must train and practice far more than you did in your first attempt with the enemy. You must also put your mind in a superior position. If you go into the next project or exam already demoralized or defeated, you will get crushed. But if you go into the project with a fire in your eyes and the intense desire to annihilate that enemy, you will be victorious.

This second act of mass preparation is the Sword Sharpening Maneuver.

“The general who wins the battle makes many calculations in his temple before the battle is fought. The general who loses makes but few calculations beforehand.” ~Sun Tzu

III. Maturation Phase: This is the long-term recovery from failure where you integrate the lessons learned into your character and actually learn to become thankful for the failure. You learn some of the most important lessons of your life in failure from how to manage your immediate emotions, recover self-esteem, and become more intense in your work. Once those lessons are integrated into your character, you are more masculine, and the pain of failure is essentially gone. Perhaps you feel a few nagging aches every few weeks, but for the most part, you have completely recovered.

You complete this phase of healing by looking back on the failure while completely detached and free from the painful emotions of the first two phases. From this perspective, you can see all the ways your failure actually made you better, stronger, and more mentally prepared for your future.

This final action is the Reclaiming the Throne Maneuver.

As bad as failure feels at the time, what you will notice over time is that the more you attempt anything, the more you will fail. The more you fail, the shorter the inflammation of failure becomes. Your first major failure may take you two months to recover from. The next failure just 6 weeks. This will progress until you have accepted failure as a part of life, extract its benefits, and recover within a few days or even within a few hours if you are a master. Learn to manage and appreciate the inflammation of failure and you will undoubtedly be a great man.

You also need standards for your own personal failure, weather in your physical training in personal growth. Without standards and the reality of failure, we have no way to evaluate our performance. When we cannot evaluate our performance, we cannot know when we have failed. If we cannot know when we fail, we will not know when we need to improve. When we do not know if we need to improve, we will remain stagnant. Therefore, failure is a compass of character, it directs us towards who we want to be. A man must first decide who he wants to be before he can begin working on becoming that ideal.

“Those in athletic pursuit first chose the sport they want, and then do the work.” ~ Epictetus

Be willing to fail. Do not let the fear of failure prevent you from acting. Failure is a surefire path to growth and learning. And it comes at a fraction of the cost of a modern college education.

The next time you hit failure, try to rush being thankful for that failure. You just learned a lesson you will never forget. That alone makes failure a better teacher than any egghead in a classroom.

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; . . . who at best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly.” ~ Theodore Roosevelt

Conduct Yourselves like Men.

Reference: Epictetus, and Robert Dobbin. Discourses and Selected Writings. Penguin Books, 2008.

Gaining The Respect of Men

Men have always cared about what other men think of them. They care about their reputation for skill or strength. Men have always been interested in knowing how they are perceived by other men and whether or not they are respected in the group. Respect is a critical component of masculinity.

In more recent times, this concern for the opinion of other men has begun to fade. In a way, this is a good thing because fewer and fewer men are worthy to be judges of men and masculinity. There are few men masculine enough to warrant them giving their opinion in any affair, much less on matters of masculinity. Why should a young man care what the standard effeminate man in the church thinks of him? He is not trying to alter his life to gain the approval of those weak men.

On the other hand, this separation of men from one another is negative because it means men will look to some other standard to guide their behavior. They will find new people to judge their masculinity in ways that may not be masculine. Most commonly this tends to be women.

If you think about it, you can see that the average man lives his life trying to gain the approval of various females.

His early years are spent pleasing mommy with good, “civilized” behavior. The days of youth and adolescence are spent trying to gain the approval of the primarily female school teachers. A man then tops this off by living his life to please a wife or girlfriend. Unfortunately, by the time most men are 20 they have not had a single masculine role model they can model their lives after. They are unconsciously trained to live for women.

As men, we should be working to undo this focus we have on winning female approval. What should matter in our minds is how other masculine men perceive us and if we are respected by them or not. And if we are not respected, we should want to learn how to gain respect. It should be important to us to be valued by other men. And in the end, if we are valued by other men, we will automatically be valued by females though they should never be the primary goal.

One important thing to note is that we cannot care about what every man thinks of us.

This was mentioned briefly, but it bears repeating. The majority of men have not earned the right to give their opinions and have them valued. There are less than five men I know whose opinions and thoughts I truly value and whose lives I want to model. This means there are less than five men who I would take advice from.

When another man gives you an opinion or offers some advice, ask yourself if you admire his life. Do you want your life to end up the way that his life has? If not, then completely ignore what he has to say. This applies just as much to your father as it does to the common men in the church. If a man is fat, do not take nutrition advice from him. If he is not masculine, do not take advice from him on how to be masculine. And if he is not successful in the secular world, do not take career advice from him.

To gain the respect of other men you must make yourself valuable.

Men care about levels of skill, this is why they will invariably ask each other, “What do you do?” within moments of meeting each other. The primary way men size each other up is by evaluating their skills. By finding out what skills are valuable in the world and to other men, you can then focus on increasing those skills. Then even if you do not necessarily have a valuable line of work, you at least have a valuable skill that you work at on the side. So the first tool to gain respect is to increase your skill.

The second path to increase respect is to increase your knowledge.

Skill and knowledge go hand in hand. Men value advice from people who know what they are talking about. You should work hard to increase your knowledge of valuable subject matters. When a man comes to you with a question or asks for advice, he respects you. Men do not accept non-solicited advice because it is insulting to them. If you willy-nilly offer advice to everyone you are suggesting that they do not have the necessary knowledge to make a decision. While that may be true, men must come to you and ask for advice, you cannot just throw it out at everyone. That will be insulting to their intelligence.

Another path to respect is to have a streak of wise decisions.

These do not have to be massive, life-altering decisions, but you do need to have a streak of good decisions. A good decision streak demonstrates that you are in the habit of thinking before you act which automatically places you in the top 10% of men. Other men need to see that you make wise dating decisions, can lead in the church effectively, can avoid embarrassing yourself and your ancestors, and that you do not blow your money on frivolities if you are not in the financial position to do so. As David did, you must behave wisely in all your ways (1 Samuel 18:14), and then others will take note of your wisdom (1 Samuel 18:15).

The fourth path to respect is to control your emotions and be calm, especially in public or high-stress situations.

I cannot tell you how many times I have completely lost respect for individuals because they lost control of their emotions under pressure. If you want to know a man’s true character, pressure him and see how he reacts. Is he calm, cool, and collected, or does he lose control of his emotions and bowels? Even if a man becomes frustrated during a task, that is also a weakness. You must be the man who is calm and collected. You may be having a heart attack or be in a state of internal panic, but that should never show in your face or your words. Demonstrate repeatedly to other men that you can handle yourself and your emotions under pressure and you will have their respect.

The fifth path to respect is to allow others to uncover your success but never talk about it yourself.

One of the reasons that humility is masculine is because it is a demonstration that you do not need to praise and admiration of others. This is an area where every man has room for growth. Who does not love a good compliment? We can enjoy compliments and praise, but we should not actively seek it out by boasting about our accomplishments. You gain the respect of other men when they find out about your accomplishments from people other than yourself. Perhaps they talk to one of your co-workers and hear about how you handled a situation or delivered an epic project weeks before a deadline. That knowledge will boost that man’s respect for you because no only does he learn that you are skilled, but also that you do not need to brag about it.

The sixth path to respect is to speak directly and truthfully.

While this is not a popular form of communication, it is valuable and useful. Direct, blunt communication was even utilized by Jesus when dealing with certain unsavory groups of people (Matt 23:27-28; John 8:44-45). While I am certainly not advocating that you act like a jerk and tell every single individual every one of your thoughts, I am saying that you cannot be a man who beats around the bush and still be respected by others. You need to have the tenacity to speak directly and not water down the truth. You need to be able to tell another person that their choices of words or actions are poor. And ou must be able to call out wrongdoing when you see it. If you cannot do this, you resign yourself to a life of cowardice and will never have the full respect of other men.

The seventh and final path to gain respect is to simply avoid actions that would cause you to lose respect.

This is the simplest path to respect. Simply do not be stupid or dishonorable in your conduct. Think back on times in your life when you have lost respect for a man. What caused you to lose respect for him? Whatever he did, you must then do the opposite. Sometimes you can gain the respect of others simply by avoiding foolishness. The root of wisdom is first the removal of foolishness.

Now it’s your turn. Think up some ways that you can gain respect from masculine, admirable men and write them down. Leave them in the comment section below! This list is not exhaustive and you may notice that there are missing paths to respect. Perhaps in your own life, you have gained or lost respect for other men based on their actions. Write down those experiences. The negatives ones are just as valuable as the positive ones. If you lose respect for a man because of the way he acts, do the opposite of whatever he does as mentioned before.

Conduct Yourselves Like Men.

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