Forging Masculinity Today pt. 1

Good morning, all - When I started writing this week, I realized this would be a two-part newsletter. I hope you enjoy part one this week and part two will arrive next week.

I.

I listen to a lot of podcasts. Spotify kindly reminds me at each year of the thousands of minutes I spent on podcasts. Recently, one of these podcast episodes stood out. Much of the episode was a discussion on masculinity that I connected with and it sparked this letter. I hope you find it interesting and can benefit from it.

The podcast is the Rich Roll podcast, and this episode was Rich’s recent interview with Scott Galloway (link below). To start, I was going to say I was surprised at how dynamic this conversation was, but that’s a silly thing to say given who was speaking. Scott is an NYU professor, best-selling author, entrepreneur, and podcaster with over $100M in net worth. Rich is an ultra-marathon athlete, having been one of the top in the world, a best-selling author, and runs one of the most popular podcasts today.

They open the episode with some statistics on men:

• Men are three times as likely to be substance addicted as women.

• Men are four times more likely to commit suicide than women.

• Men are twelve times more likely to be incarcerated than women.

It’s not the first time I’ve heard these harrowing statistics on men. It seems to come up too often not to start paying more attention.

My first takeaway and the topic for this week: Men need to become capable of serving, confident, and connected to other men in order to fulfill their purpose in the world.

What does this look like?

Scott mentioned the men of WWII as an example: in the 40’s, a large number of men in the US had to fight the largest war we have ever seen. They trained, sweat and bled together. They formed bonds under strong leadership and became capable of accomplishing tasks, from as small and breaking down a rifle to as daunting as storming Omaha Beach.

This generation returned as capable, confident, and connected men. And it led to a boom in the US economy and family – the baby boom. It led to one of the strongest and most prosperous times in our country.

II.

Our current generation of men has been fortunate not to endure the horror of fighting in WWII, but the initiation into masculinity those men received has not yet been recovered in our generation. We are trending downward: men don’t have the same battles to fight to pull them together and give them purpose.

Men are lonely. They have less male role models, both in the home and publicly. They have less friends than ever before. And within the friends they have, there is less of a driving purpose binding them together – grabbing beers once a week doesn’t exactly form a band of brothers.

So, men become depressed, anxious, and lonely. It’s not because there is anything wrong with these men. It’s because we have lost our call and purpose as men.

Men need a purpose that makes them capable, needed, and even dangerous.

In one of my all-time favorite quotes, Dr. Jordan Peterson says, “A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control.”

A contributing factor to these statistics is that we have too many harmless men. Because of the prosperity of our society, men have not faced the challenges of prior generations.
What America got after WWII was a large number of dangerous men that had it under control. Those men came back to the homeland and served.

Regarding this initiation into manhood, John Eldredge says in the book Wild at Heart that masculinity is an essence passed from man to man. When a boy is celebrated by men for catching his first fish, making his first tackle, or doing his first push up, it’s not just that he learns how to do it. He receives the validation that he has what it takes. The masculine initiation process we are missing is the process that tells a young man, “You have what it takes for this.”

Those men returning from WWII knew they had what it took.

When that message is not passed along to men, they become angry, depressed, anxious. That central question unanswered is what we are seeing play out in society today – gender confusion, technology and substance addition, financial struggles – these are symptoms of men who haven’t had been taught skills and principles by other men. Their question remains unanswered as to whether they have what it takes.

So, what do we do to build young men, short of sending them to war?

We become intentional about the three items mentioned earlier: capability, confidence, and community:

· Capability – we teach young men skills. Skills about life, fitness, school, sports, hunting, reading, and respecting others. The list goes on.

· Confidence – we encourage them according to our principles and values and celebrate them when they make the right decisions. We support and teach them when they fail.

· Community – we surround young men with role models and other young men, working together for the goals of capability & confidence. This is not done in isolation.

Conclusion

Being intentional to build up young men doesn’t have to be groundbreaking. I took two boys rock climbing last month. They are family friends at ages 11 & 12 from a single mother home. We weren’t breaking any records, but those young men got to challenge themselves, accomplish something hard, and receive encouragement from an adult male. Another step in their initiation to manhood.

It was only one day, but it was one step further for them in their capability, confidence, and connectedness. It’s a step away from the statistics about addiction, suicide, and incarceration.

We don’t need a war to forge the next generation of strong, capable and caring men. We just need to look at the examples of men that came before us and intentionally pass that down.

___

P.S. - Below is the link to the video. While I don’t agree with everything Scott and Rich say across various topics on the podcast, I encourage watching the couple minute intro to see if it sparks your interest like it did mine.