Tag: Misc

This post is the third and final post in a series and is taken from excerpts from Masculinist Newsletter #40. Here are Part One and Part Two.

Lean into your support network, recognizing that they will struggle to help you and may well fail you.  If you are going through a personal trauma like divorce, you need to have personal relationships to sustain you through that. Sadly, many men don’t have many other male friends, and divorce itself may end up cutting you off from what you thought was your support network. Many married men, for example, are friends primarily with other married couples, and that because the wives are friends with his wife. It can end up that the divorcing wife keeps the friends and the husband gets frozen out or ends up more distant from his previous network.

Churches tend to be unrelentingly pro-wife in their public teachings, but in my admittedly limited observations, pastors tend to be more evenhanded in private counseling situations. Nevertheless, you may find yourself explicitly or more likely implicitly expelled from your church. The other women of the church may well side with your ex-wife, which can render your position untenable.

In either case, I don’t think there’s much to be gained to try saving these relationships once they evaporate or go south, except for other men who were your personal friends prior to meeting and marrying your wife. In my view, they are just part of the losses you take when divorce happens. Best to accept it and move on. You can always try to rebuild these relationships later when the fallout of the divorce has died down.

You do need to press into what relationships with other men you do have. (I’d avoid relationships with…

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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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The GOP here thinks it’s clever. Last week the Biden administration got less than stellar economic news, and the GOP is trying to pile on. However, they’ve managed to self-own themselves. They’ve worked themselves into the position of wanting to separate children from their mothers. Getting mothers back to work, because the “economy” is more important than the family.

The GOP is denigrating motherhood and putting children in poorly run government schools to own the libs. An anti-family movement is growing in the GOP; we’ve posted about that before.

I have a traditional Christian perspective. Because of that, I am admittedly more sympathetic to the Republican party. In the recent past, the GOP used to show lip service to the idea of “family values” or caring about families. But boy, is it hard to support the GOP when it puts out tweets like this. 

Neither major party supports families or wants to see families flourish. The GOP, which we thought would stand for these issues, has a strong current within it that’s more interested in owning libs than actually seeing this country succeed. 

Keep that in mind when supporting politicians or going to the voting booth.

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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.

Continue reading

There is almost an implicit social rule today that you are only allowed to advocate for men if you justify it by talking about how it will benefit women and children. (Or, alternatively, if it’s a woman who is doing the advocating).

The classic example of this in the Christian context is a minister saying that he wants to reach men because if the father comes to church, the wife and kids usually follow, whereas there’s a much lower probability of the entire family coming to church if it’s the mother who is converted.

I’m not saying this is per se wrong (although the claim itself seems to ultimately trace back to only one study from Switzerland), but it does in a sense treat men as an instrumental good rather than an end in and of themselves. The man is valuable here because he enables the church to reach the people it really wants to get.

So I try to be careful not to fall into the trap of saying that it’s good to build up men because it’s good for women. (This is harder to do than you think). But I do think it’s important that while we build men up, we should not tear women down. Because men and women do have a key stake in each other’s thriving.

There’s a quip often attributed to Henry Kissinger that, “Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.”

There’s a lot of truth in that. The vast majority of people are heterosexual and would like to be in a relationship or marriage with someone of the opposite sex. Because there are roughly equal numbers of men and women, this means that to the extent that one gender struggles, the other gender’s relational prospects are compromised.

The classic example…

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Nathan joins Jon to discuss the differences in coaching women’s sports. As this is a controversial topic in our world today. Learn why girl’s sports are different. How we raise girls can lead to interesting outcomes when they try sports. Nathan is a Teacher, Athletic Director, and Texas State Championship coach. To learn more about Nathan, check out his blog.

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The New Criterion has an article up by John Kekes on the ideal of the gentlemen that is a window into misguided conservative thinking on the topic of how men should act. He writes:

Being a gentleman is not a matter of inheritance, wealth, or refinement. It needs to be earned by having a character with a sense of honor at its core. Character sets limits a gentleman will not cross and acknowledges responsibilities he will not shirk. It involves a commitment to a way of life that in some small or large way, by example or by action, contributes to making some lives better or protecting them from getting worse. Since this is not the best of all possible worlds, it is often difficult to be a gentleman and live honorably within self- imposed limits, meeting responsibilities both to oneself and to others.

He explores this through stories of three people, a French aristocrat who sacrifices himself for the king during the Revolution, a woman (???) who declines an offer of marriage from a British aristocrat, and a Japanese officer during World War II.

What’s notable in this take is that the concept of the gentlemen it promotes is almost entirely one of self sacrifice.

If honor is the central principle of gentlemanliness, then it would have to follow that the traditional defense of one’s honor would be included. A gentleman would fight a duel or otherwise avenge insults to his honor, but that seems missing here.

Rather than a traditional take, this is a modern, highly edited version.

The rules of gentlemanly behavior have been historically defined by the upper class. Indeed, to be a gentleman was to have a certain social status in society. Even once the gentleman appellation was more generally extended, the standards…

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Henry Kissinger quipped, “No one will ever win the battle of the sexes. There’s too much fraternizing with the enemy.” This encapsulates the broader truth about the relationship between the sexes. We are in this boat together. When men struggle, it affects men’s relational prospects. But that’s also true the other way around. We should want to see women flourish. So in working to build up men, we should not look to tear down women.

Also, in this issue, I provide an extended excerpt from my major retrospective on the old White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (#WASP) establishment and the implications of its collapse. As a product of Catholic peasant stock on both sides of my family, this was an interesting one to research. It is also a critical topic to understand the dynamics of our contemporary world.

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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.

Continue reading

The opening lyrics say:

You better watch what you say
You better watch what you do to me
Don’t get carried away
Girl, if you can do better than me, go
Yeah, go but remember

 

Good love is hard to find
Good love is hard to find
You got lucky, babe
You got lucky, babe, when I found you

It’s great to put a high value on your wife or girlfriend and hold her in esteem.

But too many men don’t recognize their own value.

If you are a basic solid guy – a Christian man with a college degree who doesn’t watch porn, has a job, etc. – then you are a hot commodity yourself.

After all, remember how often you hear the complaints about the lack of good men, about how the church is 60% female, about how women are earning 60% of degrees.

In this tough dating and marriage environment, a quality man such as yourself has a high value.

It may well be that you are lucky to be with her. But she also got lucky when you found her.

Petty’s character in this song understands the truth. Good love really is hard to find. So don’t sell yourself short.

This character also understands that women want to date and marry up. Or at least the certainly don’t want to date down. So the by putting a proper high value on is own marketability, he makes himself more attractive as well.

Note too that he describes himself as the active party. He says, “When I found you” not perhaps the more obvious “when you found me.”

Men would be well served to know that they are often a much higher value dating prospect than they might think, and to think of themselves…

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