Month: June 2021

You often notice in older films but it’s clearly on display here just how thin everybody was back then. And this was not in an era of poverty with insufficient caloric availability. A lot of the boys are pretty ripped so are obviously getting plenty of protein.

As you can see, this is an intense program. It’s also very oriented around calisthenics and functional movements. As a teacher says in the video, “We want our students to experience the pleasures of being in a great shape. And we want them to know how to stay that way.”

The program incorporated a number of features no one would every put in a school program today. Students were stratified by ability, not age. Because ability groups wore color coded shorts similar to martial arts belt colors, your rank in the hierarchy was clearly visible. And, as the film notes, “Advancement depends exclusively on performance, not on subjective judgment by a teacher.”

This sort of intense physical education approach fell out of style in the 1970s. By the time I took PE in high school, it was for only one year and was kind of a joke. I think it partially existed just to give the basketball coach something to teach, since in Indiana coaches were required to be teachers. 

Someone made a documentary about this program called The Motivation Factor. I haven’t watched it but you can see the trailer here.

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This is an excerpt from The Masculinist #16

Living in this world, especially in a big city, you constantly hear about how lonely people are.  I am by nature an introverted person. I’m not shy. But I am someone whose batteries recharge when I’m alone and get drained by engaging with people in many settings.  I’ve always had acquaintances and friends, but never really had much skill at creating and building relationships. I wouldn’t say I was lonely, but I was pretty much always one of the most peripherally attached members of any social group I was part of.

I first started learning how to intentionally create relationships when I briefly lived in Rhode Island. This was a pretty bleak time of my life personally for me. I was also pretty detached from the people around me because I was a newcomer to the state. I joined a church and even went to a community group, but I was not particularly engaged or connected. A guy named Josh observed this and took it upon himself to make a commitment to come to hang out with me once per week. That conscious decision to come see me on a regular schedule rather quickly created a relationship.

Now Josh was much more interpersonally talented than me, but this one simple idea was like a light bulb that went off in my head. Josh showed me how you actually go about intentionally creating a relationship with someone who may be tough to reach.

I later put this to good use. There was a guy who came to church who had severe epilepsy. It was a church of mostly very young people, but he was in his 50s. It was a mostly conservative church, but he was militantly and intolerantly liberal. Possibly…

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I’m very excited to tell you about a new initiative I’m helping to launch called American Reformer. American Reformer is a new non-profit focused on confidently bringing the best of Protestant thinking to the problems of today. It is directly intended to address the gaps and failures of the current evangelical leadership class.

The first part of this will be a new publication called the American Reformer Journal, edited by former RTS Dallas professor Ben Dunson. ARJ will feature serious analysis of key issues of our day such as politics, culture, the family, race, and sex and gender. It will publish both scholars and practitioners, including theologians, pastors, and historians, and will include perspectives often excluded from contemporary evangelical publications.

Please read the Founder’s Note from American Reformer chairman Nate Fischer.

Most importantly, visit our web site at americanreformer.org and sign up for the American Reformer Journal in advance of our launch on or around July 12th.

I will also be hosting a special live discussion with Nate and Ben about American Reformer on June TK at 2pm ET. You can watch live or on replay at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p8dofoerU70

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As you’ll see again in this issue, the Masculinist gives you insights you can’t get anywhere else. Please help sustain and expand the mission by becoming a monthly supporter on Patreon or Gumroad.  Patreon supporters at $25/month or more get access to exclusive content, and if you contribute $10/month or more you get early access to each month’s Masculinist newsletter.

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The Online Men’s Sphere

If you’ve been a subscriber since the early days, you know…

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This is an excerpt from The Masculinist Newsletter #4.

My first set of practical improvement tips help with building the social confidence necessary to meet women.  This is valuable on multiple levels.  On the one hand, women are attracted to confident men. On the other, you actually have to have enough confidence to approach a woman and start talking to her before you can even think about asking her out on a date.

Let’s be honest, this can be intimidating. Virtually all dudes have some level of anxiety and fear of rejection when approaching women. This is one of the riskiest things you can do from a self-worth perspective. Getting the door slammed in your face is hard enough when doing cold call sales. But at least then you can console yourself that it’s not personal. But with women, it’s very difficult to not see it as personal. After all, the product in question is you. Our brains are very good at spinning out disaster scenarios of being humiliated by rejection – especially if it’s someone in our social circle, such as a church, where we assume everyone will find out we got shot down in flames. No surprise, men too often exhibit the passivity and apathy that pastors are frustrated with. They aren’t confident enough to overcome their fear of rejection.

I can’t solve all your problems with this today, but I can share two techniques I personally used that helped me gain confidence with women.

The first will help you improve your eye contact. Good, strong eye contact is critical not just in meeting girls but in every relationship, so this one can really pay dividends.

I’m a very introverted guy who traditionally scored pretty high on the geek scale. I used to be a computer…

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Someone sent me a link to an interesting blog called The Practical Conservative: Civic-Minded Natalism.* The blog is designed to push back on any number of conservative conventional wisdom talking points. For example, she argues that families with young children should be hiring people to help out, that it actually does take a village for a mom to handle the stresses of childrearing.

She discusses this in her most recent post, saying:

Fundamentally righties are against spending money at all, ever, even on a minor, incidental, occasional basis for small tasks to help structure and smooth their lives out. They are all unwittingly echoing the evil and broke Lady Susan from the Whit Stillman take on Jane Austen, Love and Friendship: “As there is an element of friendship involved, the paying of wages would be offensive to us both.”

So the left slices, dices and turns into an antisocial, corporatized transaction every kind of task like that and the result is bad working conditions and pay for the people involved performing the services and tasks, further social atomization and isolation and just that little bit more difficulty in building and maintaining that kind of community glue. Because that sort of incidental labor used to be very common in American society. It was looser, more casual and certainly more occasional in scope, but Americans did used to pay people to do various tasks, at even lower-middle class and poverty-class income ranges. The complicated favor trading systems still present in some poverty-heavy communities are remnants of this broader pattern.

A couple years ago I paid an art student to draw and paint with my kids for about three hours five or six times so I could clean out the garage. Righties tend to be of the view that my…

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This clip is taken from one of our live interviews which you can find here.

Stephen B. Clark’s 1980 book Man and Woman in Christ is by far the best treatment of gender and Christianity I’ve read. Clark’s approach is completely comprehensive, covering scripture, historic interpretations, modern interpretations, the social conditions of the early church, historic church practice, and findings from social science. He’s also the only person I know who truly grapples with the challenges to family life posed by industrialization and the rise of modern ideologies.

Unfortunately, Man and Woman in Christ has long been out of print. But that’s about to change. Warhorn Media is reissuing it in hardcover. Warhorn editor Joseph Bayly joins us to discuss this landmark book and its continuing significance for today.

Warhorn is doing a crowdfunding campaign at Fundly to raise money to pay for a proper hardcover printing. You can help bring this book back into print and get your own copy at 33% off retail price for a limited time at: https://fundly.com/clark

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This live interview is with Saurabh Sharm.

Saurabh Sharm is a young conservative in DC who founded American Moment as a personnel training, credentialing, and placement organization for young conservative talent unhappy with the GOP status quo. He joined to give the young conservative’s perspective on the state of conservatism and where it needs to go from here.

Note: This is a political, not religious discussion American Moment: https://www.americanmoment.org/

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Aaron M. Renn

When I started the Masculinist, the church was a barren wasteland for advice on sexuality. I barely saw anyone else writing constructively about even the most basic issues—things like attraction, the differences between men and women, marriage, divorce.

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