Tonnyray:
The Emasculation of Modern Man 3

The Emasculation of Men In Our Society
-Johnny Youssef March 31, 2016

What do many television shows, movies (mostly comedies), and reality TV have in common? Almost all of them have a male lead role portrayed as childish, stupid, and Hot. After my latest blog post on “5 Reasons Why Christian Men Are Not Pursuing Women”, several men expressed some of the struggles they face and shared how they felt which has lead me to follow up with this post. The more I speak to men, the more I see how this frustration is an issue that many of them share in common:



Think of shows like “The Big Bang Theory”, “Modern Family”, and “King of Queens”; even superheroes that used to be sophisticated, intelligent, and hopeless romantics, are now being portrayed in a different light. Chris Pratt’s character “Peter” in “Guardians Of The Galaxy” and Chris Pine’s “Kirk” in “Star Trek” are the heroic protagonists, who also happened to be childish, stupid and Hot. If you take a look at almost all reality TV, you will notice that they always cast at least one guy with these attributes.

Another irony you will find is that all of these shows and movies typically have a sophisticated, intelligent, woman that has to continuously “fix” the man or knock him down a peg or two if he shows any signs of strength or confidence. If a show or a movie portrayed the woman with those negative attributes, there would be an uproar and endless accusations that the writers, producers, and networks are sexist.

When we as men are being told from almost every media outlet that we are stupid and our brains aren’t located in our heads, we start to believe it. It’s becoming more difficult for a man to embrace their opinions and to embrace any sort of a leadership abilities whether at home or at work.

This serious problem is leading to many negative outcomes. When men are being forced to shut their mouths and believe that they are just immature boys, they end up getting stuck in their teenage years. A huge percentage of millennial males are uninterested in the idea of getting married. A lot of this lack of motivation comes from associating marriage to being controlled. When men say things such as “A happy wife is a happy life”, they are really saying “We are too dumb to understand women so we will just shut up, be submissive, and do whatever they want so that we can keep them happy and our lives aren’t miserable”. These men don’t see marriage as a place of respect and compromise from both ends.

Emasculating men in our society has led men to stay boys. Our society applauds a guy that sleeps around with girls without any sort of commitment or sacrifice and despises a guy with any sort of expectations from his wife or that wants to be a leader leading a home.

Don’t believe me? Let’s compare two big shows, Hugh Hefner’s “Girl Next Door” and Kody Brown’s “Sister Wives”

Hugh Hefner, the Playboy founder is celebrated by many in our society and is viewed as a powerful man. After all, he is able to get as many girls as he wants into his bedroom while making a lot of money doing it. On the other hand, Kody Brown, a Mormon that is married to four women, is despised and looked at as a sexist pig.

While I find polygamy to be extremely disturbing, I think it’s a tragedy that we praise the player who uses women as objects and despise the man whose religious beliefs gives him the option to have multiple wives. After all, both of them are sleeping with bunch of women. The main difference is that one is in long-term committed marriages (Brown) while the other is using them until he gets bored (Hefner).

The way our society has praised and criticized men for the wrong reasons, has led the way for many men, like Hugh Hefner, to stay teenage boys; unable to commit and unable to treat women the way they should be treated.

There are legitimate reasons why men have been portrayed in a negative light including women legitimately feeling used and unsafe by men. The solution, however, is not to bring men down as some sort of revenge. We are called to call men to rise up rather than embrace lies and spread them to a whole society.

Even within the church, I have seen so much emasculation that has not only discouraged me, but also scared me, of the idea of marriage. For some reason, it is acceptable in a small group setting for a wife to tell her husband “You are just a bad cook” or “honey, you can’t function one day without me” in front of people for a good laugh but imagine a husband telling the same words to his wife in front of others. Why have we accepted a double-standard? Have we forgotten that one of the core longings for a man is to feel respected?

It seems that society has accepted the notion that men have clear roles in marriage but women have none; that men are guilty until proven innocent but women are innocent until proven guilty.

My all-time favorite show is “Friends”; when I recently watched it, I was disturbed by how, for so many years, I thought Joey, the guy who is childish, dumb, and Hot, is hilarious. One of the main recurring jokes throughout the seasons is that Joey sleeps with many women but never remembers their names or calls them back. This is not funny. It is wrong and it sends a message to women that they have every right to look down on men and treat them as children, idiots, and Hot beings.

What can we all do about it?

1. We need to encourage boys to grow up and become men: sophisticated, intelligent, and responsible.
2. We need to recognize mens’ leadership skills, opinions, and the need to feel respected.
3. We need to stop praising or even laughing with boys that sleep around, objectify women, and refuse to commit.
4. We need to stop the double-standard adopted in our society where it’s okay for women to casually mock and criticize men.

Until a man is ready for marriage, Commitment is not for me

Tonnyray:
The Emasculation of Modern Man

The Emasculation of Men Is Doing Society No Favors
-Ryan Moffatt


There are few products more synonymous with manhood than the razor. Boys watch their fathers for years awaiting their turn to partake in the daily ritual. Lather, shave, rinse, repeat. It was a simple yet symbolic rite of passage into a forever-binding entanglement with the biological realities of being a man. It was an innocuous task that had little part to play in the political arena.

Last month’s Gillette commercial changed all that. The two-minute video, which quickly went viral and drew both praise and scorn, asks men to “be better” while juxtaposing scenes of bullying, leering, and mansplaining as a chorus of suburban dads standing before barbecues chant “boys will be boys.”

The response was swift, and a tidal wave of consumers smashed their Gillette razors in defiance and disgust at Gillette’s characterization of men. To the ad’s supporters, this was evidence that Gillette was on point and that any man who took exception only resented being outed for his own bad behavior.

The truth, however, is not so simple.

A Collective Shaming
The ad struck a nerve because of its insinuation that men are brutes who need sorting out. The dads chanting “boys will be boys” as the ad depicts men behaving badly makes a clear statement: All men either partake in or excuse this behavior.

Gillette’s intention may have been benign but they took the wrong approach by virtue signaling their progressiveness and taking their entire customer base to task. Though the ad rightfully exposes those men who may be reprehensible in character, the rest are forced to share a collective shame and accept an inherent toxicity in their gender. And that is Gillette’s great mistake. It asks men to be better by insinuating they are malevolent by nature.

This brings us to the #MeToo movement, which has also placed good men in an awkward position. Not knowing what society will accept of them, they are relegated to uncomfortable silence, wary of expressing their views.

There was a time in Western society when men were expected to adhere to a set of heroic values—to protect, provide, and lead. This was the measure of a man. Such attributes gave each man something to aim for.

But as society has progressed, these values are often seen as antiquated. Some might argue that they are an ill fit for our modern world. To outwardly embody heroic, stoic virtues is to open oneself to criticism for perpetuating gender stereotypes.

In this time of moral relativism there is no North Star for men to chart their course. As a result of decades of gradual emasculation, men no longer know what manhood means.


The Lost Boys
If manhood is in crisis, boyhood is not far behind.

Warren Farrell and John Gray’s well-researched book “The Boy Crisis” offers some sobering statistics about the many challenges facing the next generation of men. It’s irrefutable that boys are falling behind across many key metrics.

Worldwide, boys are 50 percent less likely than girls to meet basic proficiency standards in reading, math, and science. In North America young men now account for only about 40 percent of recent university graduates, and the high school dropout rate for boys is nearly double that of girls. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder diagnosis in boys is on the rise, as is the suicide rate.

Gray and Farrell closely correlate this decline to one common denominator: absent fathers. Missing in most of these boys’ lives is a male role model. Boys fare better with good men in their lives to provide the guidance and moral compass necessary for a meaningful life. The void left by absent fathers can easily be filled by the negative influences of social media, pornography, and video games, preventing boys from taking the difficult but necessary steps toward self-actualization and manhood.

As Farrell and Gray put it: “The traditional boy’s journey to self-sacrifice incorporated service to others, and required responsibility, loyalty, honor, and accountability. It created his mission. And his mission created his character.”

Adolescent male energy can be channeled in a positive direction if it’s not chastised and repressed. The competitive drive is not the tyrannical impulse it has been made out to be, and when grounded with strong morals it can shift the balance of the world toward the good.

Pathologizing Masculinity
The American Psychological Association (APA) recently released its Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men. Conservative critics have expressed concern that the new guidelines are nothing more than an attempt to pathologize masculinity itself.

Most surprising is the guidelines’ explicit rebuke of what it calls “traditional masculinity ideology.” The term is ill-defined but seems to encompass the whole of masculinity.

“Socialization for conforming to traditional masculinity ideology has been shown to limit males’ psychological development, constrain their behavior, result in gender role strain and gender role conflict, and negatively influence mental health,” the guidelines state.

“Traditional masculinity ideology” as determined by the APA fails to acknowledge the virtuous side of masculinity, namely, a sense of duty, self-sacrifice, and pursuit of a noble and moral goal. To discredit these ideals with such a broad brush is more likely to result in confusion rather than cohesion. Without acknowledging the principled ideals of the women and men who came before, future generations may well be taught that their forebears were nothing more than tyrannical oppressors.


The guidelines go further, stating: “Research suggests that socialization practices that teach boys from an early age to be self-reliant, strong, and to minimize and manage their problems on their own yield adult men who are less willing to seek mental health treatment.”

Strength and self-reliance are necessary traits in overcoming life’s inevitable challenges. Taken to an unhealthy and isolated extreme they are bound to have a negative effect, but self-reliance in the conventional sense of the word promotes following one’s conscience and avoiding conformity. It’s even more bewildering to argue against strength as a desirable quality. Are the guidelines suggesting that weakness and dependence are the qualities men and boys should be cultivating?

To be fair, the guidelines attempt to address very real mental health problems plaguing Western Society, but it seems they have thrown the baby out with the bathwater by over-generalizing masculinity as a negative trait.

There is a reason masculine virtues have long been held in high esteem—they formed the cornerstone of Western civilization and evolved over thousands of years to create the high standard of living we enjoy today.

It is not the virtues themselves that are the problem but a confusion over their application and definition. The indecency depicted in Gillette’s ad should not be attributed to masculinity per se, but to a perversion of the virtuous ideals and high aspirations of good men.

Great men creates good times
Good times creates weak men
Weak men creates hard times
Hard time creates Great men
And the cycle continues