Making Manhood Matter Again
We need to teach our sons that a woman is not the same as a man -- and women are to be honored and respected because of that, not dishonored by expecting them to fulfill their role and ours, too.
Decades ago, I first saw the reports and subsequent studies in National Geographic concerning juvenile male elephants rampaging through unfortunate villages, crushing huts, destroying crops, and intimidating terrified villagers.
The researchers finally realized that the juvenile male elephants lived in a herd where the mature, dominant bulls had either been poached or removed.
It seems the juveniles didn’t know how to act when it was mating season, and their testosterone levels went into overdrive. They needed mature bull elephants to show them how to act and control their behavior—with severe “trunk trouncing” when required. But they didn’t have those mature bulls when they needed them, and the villagers paid the price.
Similar phenomena have been reported more recently. In South Africa, park rangers moved a herd of elephants from the overpopulated Kruger National Park and resettled them in the Pilanesburg National Park. However, the large mature bulls were left behind due to transportation issues.
Sometime later, park rangers in Pilanesburg started discovering dead white rhinoceros (an endangered species) that had been violently killed, suffering torso trauma and deep puncture wounds. Suspecting poachers, even though the Rhino horns were not taken, hidden cameras were installed, and soon enough, the bad guys showed up and were caught red-handed.
They weren’t poachers at all, but a marauding gang of aggressive juvenile male elephants that were chasing down rhinos (as well as other animals) and goring and stomping them to death – a previously unknown behavior in elephants.
When the rangers identified the juveniles as part of the Kruger herd, they imported some mature bulls from “home” as an experiment. Within weeks, the juvenile delinquents stopped “acting out,” leaving the other animals in the park breathing more easily.
Like our highly intelligent and social friends, the elephants, this phenomenon is also readily observable in the human family. The artificial manipulation and purposeful destruction of the nuclear family has had profound repercussions in the United States and around the world.
Where Are the Men?
It’s not new knowledge, of course. The family unit is a critical in the well-being of children – male and female. It’s been obvious common sense for thousands of years. Humans remain hardwired to live in a community with a family unit. The roles of nurture, discipline, education, and character are like the glue that assembles a person (or an elephant), passed down in the family structure at least in part by the varied and unique roles that females and males play in rearing offspring.
In the U.S., we now have a culture where ancient wisdom handed down over thousands of years is treated like poison. We have turned over the official duty of explaining how children “should” be raised to legions of “professionals” – and we’ve gone even further as a culture to enshrine an awful lot of stupidity into our educational systems and family law.
The family is now seen – virulently by some and in part by others – as a structure that is detrimental to raising children. Some critics argue that it needs, at a minimum, to enforce “scientific” methodology as practice; the family unit itself might even need to be disbanded altogether. (Whether cause or effect, births to unmarried women comprised more than over 40% of all births for the last 12 years.)
How has it happened? The nuclear family unit has only been questioned in the modern era by the learned class of fanatical academics, sociologists, and political feminists who have deconstructed the obvious and replaced it with simple-minded inanities straight out of classical Marxist dogma that claim the nuclear family builds the sociopolitical structure for the acceptance of capitalism, and a passive tolerance for hierarchy and the dreaded patriarchy. The tip of the attack by radical feminists is the hatred of men, which is exceeded only by their hatred of God.
Villagers Paying the Price
Yet the social issues – especially with young males – stand in absolute rebuttal to all of this. Males are in trouble in our culture, homes, and distressingly broken schools.
Certainly some women are doing a great job rearing both boys and girls, even if it’s a much harder job without two parents. Those women deserve our support and praise.
However, the staggering statistics speak for themselves: 35% of the male children in the U.S. live in single-parent, female-headed households. Of that number, more than 35% rarely or never see their fathers, and 25% see their fathers less than once a month.
Young males in fatherless families “act out” much worse than boys from homes with fathers present:
They are 20 times more likely to end up in prison; five times more likely to commit suicide (males represent 75% of all youth suicides); 20 times more likely to have behavioral disorders; 14 times more likely to commit rape; nine times more likely to drop out of high school; and 10 times more likely to use drugs.
Becoming a “man” seemed pretty cut and dried when I was growing up, and one suspects those expectations probably haven’t changed all that much over the nation’s history.
But now? Well, let’s just say it’s a bit confusing.
Leading by Example
Many argue that the assault on “manhood” began with the Great Society programs of the 1960s; others say that the rise of radical and aggressive feminism played a larger role. Still others suggest that our changing manhood is simply a response to the changing economy. Perhaps all are true in part.
Personally, I think the elephants are more instructive.
Without involved dads or other dominant males around the family, young males don’t have a model to follow to control their escalating emotions — or one that interdicts bad behavior with a swift kick in the pants. It’s not too complicated.
We need a new national “attitude,” a movement among men, led by men and insisted upon by men — and there are some signs that this is happening. In fact, in the last election, young men of all ethnic backgrounds supported Donald Trump by surprising margins. It is a rebuke to the war being waged on them that is bubbling up from the grassroots, and it does our boys, our communities, and our country a favor: purposefully teaching our boys to be men.
We need to put our foot on the gas, showing boys that doing things for themselves and for their families and neighbors is essential. It’s God’s answer to self-centeredness. We need to show our boys, by example, that loving our neighbor makes everyone better – including us.
It starts by teaching our sons and boys how to clean up yards, pull weeds, paint, chop firewood, swing a hammer and drive a nail, use a saw, a drill, and a tape measure, turn a wrench, and fix things.
We need to teach our boys that peace isn’t the absence of violence and that character is built one right decision at a time, usually when it isn’t convenient. We need to show them that brains outweigh emotions. We must teach them that nothing is more important than God, family, and country – and show them that by how we live our lives.
We need to teach them how to fish, how to use a firearm, and how to clean both so that they would come to value and respect life — every life.
We need to teach our sons that a woman is not the same as a man, and that women are to be honored and respected because of that – not dishonored by expecting them to fulfill their role and ours, too.
Will raising boys to be men cut into their fun time? Sure—and that’s the whole point. It’s not easy, but it is a high calling.
Michael Giere writes award-winning commentary and essays on the intersection of politics, culture and faith. He is a critically acclaimed novelist (The White River Series) and short-story writer. A former candidate for the U.S. House of Representatives from Texas, he was a senior executive in both the Reagan and the Bush (41) administrations, and in 2016 served on the Trump Transition Team.