Jeff Cassman

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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In other words, civic organizations in Allentown connected the economic elite to others in the community. But in Youngstown civic organizations were dominated by economic elites and thus the civic organizations, though separate entities, just reinforced existing networks rather than creating new ones. Other people were left out, unconnected. For our purposes, the Youngstown type system could create the illusion, if you were connected both to the economic network and the civic network, that you were connected to two separate networks, when in reality you were connected to only a single real network.

It’s very easy to see how this effect can come into play in Christian circles. For example, let’s say I’m connected to John Piper’s network (Desiring God) and the Council on Biblical Manhood and Womanhood network and the 9Marks network. I think I’m accessing all of these networks, but the fact is they overlap enormously. All of the networks in conservative Reformed circles are highly interconnected and form a largely closed system. There’s a vast array of Christian networks to which these groups are mostly not connected. (Even just within lower Manhattan, Evangelical churches and people are not nearly as connected with each other as you might think). So if you are trying to reach Christians and you are starting in Reformed circles, one of your asymptotes is this closed network structure.

A guy who saw this kind of problem coming a mile away and took preventive action was Tim Keller. Keller’s Redeemer is a big and successful megachurch, but his ambition was to reach New York City (and beyond) for Christ. Obviously no one church, even a multi-site one, could do that. So he decided to plant other churches.

Here’s where the ceiling comes into play. Keller’s church is part of the Presbyterian Church in America. He could have,…

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After watching my interview with C. R. Wiley on building a 21st century household, a reader wrote in with his observations on this topic from the pandemic – Ed.

Here are some thoughts I’ve recently had on the 21st century household arising from my experience of working from home for more than a year (COVID), schooling from home, and spending every day in the same house as my wife and children.  Going into this I thought it would be like the pre-industrial life in which the whole family lived and worked on the farm or shop.  But now I’ve concluded it is nothing like it, and the reason is because my children make no substantial contribution to the family enterprise.  Instead, they are largely a time drain due to the schooling that they need.

What is different now from pre-industrial times?  I think foremost is that there are very few low-skill tasks in which children can make a positive contribution to the family economy.  The pre-industrial trades and crafts might have taken many years to master and require high skills to create the finished product, but I imagine that many low-skill tasks were required along the way in which children could help.  Such is not the case for my 21st-century job as a university professor.  I analyze large datasets for my research and teach undergraduate and graduate classes, neither of which can my children offer any help.  Why?  The computer and printer do the low-skill tasks of arithmetic computation, data recording, copying, text formatting, multiple-choice grading, etc. much more effectively than any human could.   Only the high-skill and high-knowledge tasks of directing the computer (coding), teaching and advising, and scientific writing and reviewing are left.  It’s typically the case that people cannot make a net positive contribution…

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Jake Meador, editor of the online journal Mere Orthodoxy, will join us to talk about his publication and its role in the Protestant intellectual ecosystem. We will also discuss his recent book In Search of the Common Good.

Check out Jake Meador at Mere Orthodoxy and check out his book In Search of the Common Good.

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Boise State University political science professor Scott Yenor joins me to discuss his new book The Recovery of Family Life. We will discuss the “rolling revolution” on gender and the family that tends towards to abolition of both. We will cover a bit of the history of feminist thought, the beliefs of political liberalism, and the natural “grooves” that still seem to shape our life trajectories as men and women.

Read more about the book on his website, and you can buy the book on Amazon.

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