The Problem with Men
The Gift of Masculinity
(We’re having technical difficulties and ask for your patience. If you receive this post more than once, please forgive me, knowing that technology is not my forte.)
And to Adam He said, “Because you have listened to the voice of your wife and have eaten of the tree of which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread, till you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; for you are dust, and to dust you shall return.”
- Genesis 3:17-19
Did you know that men have two distinct areas of the brain that interpret the facial expressions of others? Two! The problem is that seven areas of the female brain engage in the same task. That explains the ‘deer in the headlights’ look that men get when trying to decipher feminine opinion, attitude, emotion, and so forth. It applies to husbands and wives, but also to fathers and daughters, colleagues – every male-female relationship configuration. A woman has a certain look on her face, and every other woman knows exactly what she’s thinking while some poor male is standing there waiting for another clue.
Another interesting factoid… Within hours of birth, even though eyesight is limited, a male baby’s begin tracking mobiles and stuffed toys – really, any inanimate object that moves. In contrast, female babies’ eyes begin to follow faces. Given the poor eyesight of newborns, the ability to distinguish between a living being and a material object is surprising but nonetheless true.
One more… Men secrete a particular hormone that increases and/or maintains libido – (is that word still in use?) – until his wife becomes pregnant. Though still present, that hormone declines, and another hormone increases – the one that drives a man’s desire to protect and defend. In other words, men want to have sex with their wives, but once the woman is pregnant, his focus shifts to protecting her and providing for her, at least in some degree.
Two questions come to mind:
First, how does his body know to change based upon what is happening in her body?
And second, what happens when through casual sex (as if there is such a thing) a man fathers a child with a woman with whom he has no additional relationship?
Does he ever go through the development of the masculine desire to protect, to provide, and to defend? In other words, perhaps there is a good reason for the irresponsibility of young men who indiscriminately reproduce with willing young women. Maybe they never grow up because they never entered into the circumstances that would facilitate maturation.
I don’t know. There are many steps to becoming adult. I do know that we have far too many forty- and fifty-year-olds who have never taken them and a plethora of twenty- and thirty-somethings who do not even know the steps exist.
The opening chapters of Genesis are an endless fount of insight into human nature – what we were created to be, the vocation of our humanity, the potential we have, what’s wrong with us, and why we our potentialities are misdirected and misused in unsatisfying ways and in dangerous dead-ends. If any culture could possibly distort and misconstrue the human being more than twenty-first century western civilization, I would be amazed. Virtually everything we praise and pursue in this generation is the opposite of what produces human vitality and flourishing.
There are indications that we are beginning to recognize the emptiness of our understanding of the human being in our society. Whether our dawning realization of the nihilism and futility of our collective view will lead to a truly human correction depends entirely upon Christians and the Church. We are the ones who have seen authentic humanity in Jesus Christ. We are the ones who have been granted salvation and entrusted with the Good News.
Take men, for example. If we want to understand what true masculinity is, we must look at what God created, the consequences of sin, and redemption in Jesus Christ. God created male and female in His image, tasking them with dominion over the earth and being fruitfulness in bearing children. For centuries, Christianity taught that male and female had the same nature, the same basic capacities, though they had distinct tasks to fulfill. Only after the Fall, as God ushers them out of the paradisiacal Garden, do we see the nature of male and female separate into two distinct and often competing archetypes tied to physiology.
The man is tasked with working the ground by the sweat of his brow, and the woman, with bearing children in pain. The masculine nature is now aimed not toward communion with the woman, but at conquering the land and forcing it to provide for her. His task is to bring order to the created world. The feminine nature is tied to the nurturing of life in the womb and the bearing of children. Her task is to bring life into this world. If before the Fall the man and woman had the same nature in the image of God, then after the Fall, the man imaged the transcendence of God, and the woman imaged the immanence of God. To be sure, both men and women possess some sense of transcendence and immanence, but overall, men look outward at the world, and women look inward at relationships.
Funny that from almost the moment of birth, baby girls look for faces and baby boys looks at things. Telling, really…
The popularity of the belief that men and women are the same is waning because frankly, both men and women know we are not the same regardless of what the experts say. Much ado has been made about “roles” for men and women, as if some shadowy group of malicious men sat around and decided that women should be barefoot and pregnant. That’s absurd. Roles, as we define them today, arose as a function of biology, nature, and sin. Roles are not fiction such as actors portray, but they come naturally from what we are.
Think of it like this: the man took the responsibility of dominion over the earth and in sin, turned it into domination as he sought to subdue the land and make it produce. The masculine “role” was shaped in the man’s creation – dominion over the earth – and as a consequence of the man’s sin – listening to his wife instead of choosing obedience to God. The man would work the ground by the sweat of his brow. He was to provide food for himself and his family by his work, and then he would die and return to the earth from which he came.
To be fair, the man was in a bit of a pickle. God had essentially torn him apart to create the woman (cf. Genesis 2:21-22), and for him to be whole, he needed her. Still, he would have been better served if he’d been obedient to God instead of listening to his wife. That’s true for all of us: obedience to God always leads to the better end than does listening to the voices of others.
For a moment, consider the male body. A small untrained man has a musculoskeletal build larger and stronger than that of a well-trained athletic woman. The role of men is to protect and defend – not because of some nefarious cultural cloud they pass through – but because men are stronger and bigger and attuned the world around them by their very nature. Men seek to force nature to provide and to conform. What men do not do is get together for coffee or beer and talk about their relationships. They do not need seven different sectors of the brain to interpret facial expressions. They aren’t looking at faces. Men are oriented toward the external as they seek to transcend circumstances and situations in an effort to bring order.
How many women complain that, when talking to their husband about a problem, the man immediately begins to look for solutions? He is working to transcend the problem and bring order. The woman, on the other hand, is wanting to talk it through, share and communicate her feelings about the difficulty she’s facing. She is an immanent creature seeking an immanent and intimate connection with her husband. He’s thinking that if he solves her problem, he’ll be her hero and maybe they can have sex. I jest, but only partially. Humor helps us see what is true about ourselves.
All of this should be obvious to Christians, but it is not. We have absorbed so much from the world around us that we no longer even question assumptions that are wildly wrong and patently absurd. As our society scrambles for sanity and solid ground, it is incumbent upon us as Christians to live lives in keeping with our salvation in the truth revealed in Jesus Christ. Christian life is a sane and purposeful life in which we live as we were created to live. We flourish when we live as God intends. Moreover, we are obligated to show a lost world the promise, goodness, and abundance of life in Jesus Christ.
In hopes of living obediently and joyfully, let’s start with the redemption of masculinity. Paul wrote in Ephesians 5 that men love their wives by laying down their lives as Christ laid down His life for the Church. If in the Fall, the man tried to preserve his life by agreeing with the woman, then his redemption comes when he sacrifices his life for her good. He must do what he should have done in the Garden but did not. His redemption comes by choosing what is right in God’s eyes and becoming the man God created him to be. God did not create men to dominate women – though they have certainly tried over the centuries. He created men to lay down their lives for women. Think: “women and children first” as the boat is sinking.
As I type this, I have this image in my mind of a particular childhood friend screaming obscenities at me. Should she read my post, she would be appalled. However, just because we don’t want to hear the truth doesn’t mean it isn’t true. Life is infinitely easier when conform ourselves to the truth rather than seeking to conform the truth to our own wishes and desires.
We need masculinity. As a society, we need men who look beyond the immanence of the moment and transcend the urgencies of today in pursuit of what is true and right and good for human flourishing over time. Women have sought to change men by making them sensitive listeners – and men will do almost anything to please women. We see that in the Garden as well. But learning and living in an immanent environment does not suit those whose nature is to transcend. Nor is it a good environment for immanence, as we should be able to see by watching our culture grinding through the sludge of individual self-absorption and the effort to make everyone happy.
The screaming cacophony of irresponsibility and immaturity that inundates social discourse reflects the loss of respect for men and the widespread ignorance of true masculinity. The capacity to transcend the immediate circumstances for the purpose of bringing order for the greater good over time is a uniquely masculine trait. It would be oppressive and cruel (and has been) if it’s not tempered by the considerations of the immanent interest in the needs of today. But that’s not the sin of this generation. We are so obsessed with today that we’ve forgotten the lessons of the past and forsaken the good of the future. We women have certainly had an impact on our society, as have the men who want to please us.
The problem with men is that they are not women. For that, we all should give thanks. Likewise, we need to be grateful for the blessing and gift of masculinity. May Christ’s example of self-sacrificing love become the beacon of Christian men across our nation, and may the arrogance of women be tempered as we face the failures of a culture obsessed only with this moment and these wants and desires.
It’s the temptation in the Garden played out on a national – even civilizational – stage, and the consequences are going to be the same.
Unless… Christians accept the responsibility for becoming living examples of authentic life as God created us and saved us for.
In Christ…
This is the first new post in the “on Marriage” section on the Christian Outpost substack. I hope the post provokes you to think about the meaning of Christian marriage, the nature of the human being, and what it means to be created. While this post is made available to all, future “on Marriage” posts will be available to paid subscribers only. I hope the article was sufficiently interesting that you will become one! Thank you!