Nathan Beacom has an article in Comment Magazine titled, “Men Only Want One Thing: The moral equivalent of monkhood.” This gets into treacherous waters because it’s about men and generally the pushback is, “How hard can it be for you, a white guy?” Thus, issues are pushed deeper and go unresolved… or get ugly.

Nevertheless, I want to at least mention it no matter the “feedback.” (Not that there would be any. I just type this stuff up and leave it, knowing it barely exists. LOL)

The statistics Beacom gives about men in American culture today is shocking:

There’s something about America today that doesn’t jibe with the male psyche. Just look at our morgues. Men account for four of every five suicides and about three of every four overdoses. Every five minutes an American man dies one of these “deaths of despair.” That is more dead men in just the last year than perished in the entire Vietnam War. Men also make up more than three-quarters of homicide victims. That’s just death. For the living: working men have had declining wages for decades, have been doing worse in school, and have an increasingly lower likelihood of graduating college. On top of this—and likely because of it—many men suffer from mental illness in silence.

There is suffering in silence. It’s a constant battle. I allow too many other voices in that tell me, “How hard can it be for you??” I let good friends ignore me and pushback with things like, “Well, at least you can get a job” when I try to open up about things like my weight control issues and health. So, I can blame myself for allowing those other voices to get too far into my head. And we’re back to where it started: silence.

The extremes we try to go to when we “solve” the issue of manhood are untenable for me. Beacom mentions two:

First is the tough guy. When I was a younger pastor, the men’s retreat was about meatfests and skill tests of manly proportions, like throwing axes. Now it’s all sports and the beefier you look, the better a man you must be. And for God’s sake! You don’t cry! Quit talking about your feelings and please, PLEASE don’t like the ballet! Or poetry!

I am never an adequate man by this measure. No pressure there at all.

But then there is what Beacom calls the sophisticated ally. This is the guy who knows how bad the “tough guy” is.

The ally tends to talk down his own sex in an effort to set him apart from the negative strands of masculinity. In keeping with prevailing theories, he takes manhood to be a certain kind of social performance and sees himself as having transcended it.

It leads to as many problems as the “tough guy.”

We need a better conversation about all of this. We need what Beacom would call a full man, and that has more detail in his article than I want to repeat here. But we need a better “balance” or combination of things. We need to aspire to things as men. It’s okay! We also need meekness without surrendering the manhood.

But… I’m a white guy. How hard can it be?