I’ve been watching with curiosity a trend that seems to happening in the males of our species. I’m not exactly sure when it started or why but I find by the whole thing strange.
The first thing I saw was that our boys were really emotional. They cry for everything. Yes, we want our boys to be able to cry and not hold things in but they cry over things that don’t seem to be important. They cry when the vending machine is out of their favorite soda and they have to pick another. Is that really an issue to cry over? What is going to happen when life doesn’t hand you what you want and you’re a father of three kids?
In counseling I am talking to married men on a regular basis who say things like, “I hate my job and I am seriously thinking about quitting because I deserve to be happy.” Yes, it would be great to be happy but you have a wife and kids and you are the sole support of your family. YOU CAN’T JUST QUIT! I don’t think my grandfather ever once came home and threatened to quit his job. He understood his role in his family as the support of the home. He probably hated his jobs. He worked out in the fields and drove truck and was a card dealer at night I would bet that it was a pretty miserable to work two jobs and sleep in the cab of your truck as they loaded up your trailers yet not once did I hear him complain. His words to us were simply, “I am working hard to provide opportunities for you so that you don’t have to work this hard.” Since when do emotions enter into sustenance decisions that affect our families?
In speaking to Pastor Doug he felt that there was a shift when men were told they weren’t sensitive enough. So we created a generation of emotional males. I agree he is probably right but there is a problem with that. When a man thinks emotionally he thinks irrationally. Men tend to problem focus while women tend to emotionally focus. When a man thinks emotionally he doesn’t think clearly and it frustrates him and therefore runs the risk of making rash decisions that ultimately hurt the family.
I think there has to be a happy medium. Yes, I believe men have emotions and they need to express them appropriately. It’s normal to cry when your dog dies, when your mom dies, when something is truly sad. It’s not okay to cry when Chili’s is out of baby back ribs. It’s not okay to cry when your baby needs diapers and you have to spend your poker money on them. No one has ever promised you that life would be fair. Life is just but it’s not fair. So your best friend got a Wii for Christmas and you didn’t. It’s okay, your day will come and you’ll get it too. This is nothing to cry about.
I am not in any way including tender-hearted men in this blog. Some men are just touched by sensitive things. The difference is they cry over a baby’s birth or a sad movie not whether they can go golfing or not. I am talking about the crying over life’s issues that just happen. I am talking to the women raising men. If your son didn’t clean his room and wants to go to the movies and your deal was he had to clean his room, no amount of crying should move you to change the deal. These aren’t things to cry about and we need to teach this. These are simply consequences.
I don’t know if I am the only one who thinks this, but this is a very serious issue to me. I see men not stepping up to the plate as men because they don’t “feel” like it. As a woman I am wondering what happens to our children when men seek their own happiness over their the well-being of their family. It used to be that a man would abandon his family very rarely. It was an oddity. Now not having a dad is pretty normal, most births in America are to single moms. The number one thing I hear when a father doesn’t want to be a dad is because he isn’t getting his way. A few years ago I heard a man say, “Well, she bought clothes for the baby and so I spent the same amount on a couple of tickets to the WWE, it’s only fair.” Want to see my head explode? This is a good way to see it happen. We have work to do or rather undo.
Pastor Susan 
You can thank the feminists for bashing men for their male qualities. Some men have adapted female personas and a lot of women have adapted male personas. I don’t like it either. A lot of women demand the right to say no to their husbands sexual overtures but you don’t see men demanding that right.
The Bible says it best when it says: “They sowed the wind and reaped the whirlwind”
Blessings on you and yours
John Wilder
I have to agree with you. Thanks for your post. I appreciate your insight.
Blessings!
As you continue to blog, I would exhort you as you feel lead to deal with the issue of sex. Feminist philosophy has crept into the churches and gained acceptance.
I have been in churches around the country and never have I seen a sermon or sunday school lesson on how sex is a wonderful gift from God. All we do is teach especailly girls that sex is bad, dirty and wrong and good girls don’t do it.
Once they are old enough to embrace their sexuality they can’t relax and enjoy it. It shows up in inhibitions in the bedroom and their refusal to wear lacy and sexy lingerie for their husbands. Women incorrectly infer that only slutty women wear such things and that they feel like they are not sluts, therefore they won’t wear it. Men are visual creatures. I try to reason with women that if they were going to get a present, would they want it in a rumpled up old grocery bag or wrapped in pretty papers and ribbons. They have trouble adapting that anology.
Blessings on you and yours
John Wilder
Hi John,
Scroll down to the post about detached emotions. We do deal with issues of sexuality on the blog. Perhaps because our church is made up of young families, I haven’t found sex to be an issue with the women. Could it be certain denominations or ages of women? We teach about sexuality and the difference between men and women during our pre-marital classes so we may be addressing it there. We also did a month long class on caring for your husband.
I remember once we had a woman in the church that was starting a lingerie home-based franchise, think of like Mary Kay, except lingerie. We invited the married women of the church to come and sparked the biggest controversy ever. Our elders were called by a woman who thought this was the worst thing we could do. Our elders replied that they hoped married women in our congregation would attend and that they saw no issue.
PS I have never seen a feminist point anyone to Jesus.
John Wilder
It is rare to see a ‘real man’ these days. so sad, so many young men do not know how to be responsible, they are all about themselves
Well kudos again. It gives me hope that there may be a change on the horizon.
Blessings on you and yours
John Wilder
I’ve had a problem with this issue for a while…not crying at the drop of a hat but women who make cry babies out of their boys. It’s like the boys aren’t allowed to be rough and tumble, inquisitive and challenging.
I don’t want fighting for fighting’s sake but I hate the fact that a boy isn’t taught to stand up for himself. Women I know are horrified when boys get to wrestling or like dangerous sports. It’s in their nature to do these things. Our job isn’t to prevent them or stifle them but to educate them to wisdom and taking precautions.
Some of my favorite family stories are about the stupid things the men in my family did out of sheer testosterone. (The time my grandma persuaded her cousin to jump out of second story hayloft with just a large umbrella claiming he would float to the ground! I think he broke his leg…)
But historically we have to admit men have made a real hash of it overall. Authority in the home became dictatorships where their word was unquestionable, their sexual drives became licenses for neglecting their wives hearts and emotions, and their political ambitions led us into wars that killed off real men for the sake of the greedy power hungry ones.
The women’s movement happened because the abuses were going on too. To ignore our history is unwise. John quoted that Scripture about reaping the whirlwind, well men sowed evil and eventually society said “enough!” and this is the result. I don’t like it anymore than anyone else, but I see the whiplash effect of power out of balance.
At the same time real men are out there who teach responsible behavior and solid thinking—wisdom and reason are a confluence of logic and emotions. We killed off our men, told them they were good for nothing but earning a living and pleasing women, then complained because they softened too much. The women’s movement wanted the sexes to be the same and we’re now discovering (and I know a lot of feminists who agree) that we like the differences because they balance each other out.
Yet, in a world where sin rules what else can we expect but confusion over how things operate? As a whole the world ignores the truth for the sake of fiction and promotes a lie over the truth of Christ; this is the result. We are a light to the world as followers of Jesus. Our examples should be in stark contrast to their inconsistent attitudes and choices. The reason the people of Christ don’t stand out as much as their counterparts is because they’ve learned to lead quiet lives and mind their own business.
The world and its ways are doomed, but the man who does the will of God lives forever.
True Jon, and then compound all of this mess with the latest statistic that 4 out of 10 babies are born to single moms and some statistics where it shows that backward. Either way almost half of all births don’t have an intact family which is where we learn the dynamics of interaction between the sexes.
I am a great mom but I don’t think I can successfully raise a MAN on my own. This is why I love the stories you tell of your time with the J-Man because he desperately needs his daddy to balance out his lessons from his mommy.
too many women in general and feminists in specific think that they can both mother and father to their children. Now I know that a lot of feminists take on a male persona but the plumbing and the hormones are not the same. You can be a great mom but a completely worthless dad. Women are not meant to be dads. Girls especially need their dads in their lives. They get a lot of their self image through the eyes of their fathers. They feel pretty and desirable from their dads.
Boys on the other hand will seek out inappropriate role models for being a man absent a dad. This is why gangs thrive. Once a boy hits adolescence a mother loses control over him. It takes a strong male influence to sit on the boy and keeep his raging hormones under control. In other words the alpha male.
This is God’s plan and no feminist can change it.
Blessings on all on here
John Wilder