I don’t know if anybody else has noticed this or if it’s just me (probably just me) but I have seen an awful lot of advice about being a man/ masculinity floating around the Internet. What I find odd is that the VAST majority of this advice is coming directly from women. Why are women, overwhelmingly, telling men about how to be a man/ masculine? What are the reasons for this? Could this be beneficial or detrimental to a generation that is already growing up soft as hell? The most important question is WHERE ARE THE MEN? My first assumption into why women are the ones waving the flag of advice for young men is fatherlessness.
I was blessed to have a father in my home growing up, as did most of my friend group so I cannot comment first hand on the effects of fatherlessness. That said, I did get to see the effects of fatherlessness in my community and how negatively it affected the various communities that I grew up in. Let me be CLEAR this is no slight on the phenomenal women who are raising and have raised male children on their own, just that there are some things that a man is best suited to teach a boy. I think that we have a generation, more aptly generations, of men who have not stepped up to the plate to father their children. Women have been so used to being both parents at once that giving advice on how to be a man is becoming neigh second nature. Maybe, just maybe if men stepped up to the plate and raise our sons we wouldn’t have this problem.
The issue of fatherlessness brings up a point that bears mentioning. Since we have a generation of men who were raised by women, do they even know how to be men? MY answer is an overwhelming yes. My father did not have a father growing up in the home yet he was able to teach me many valuable lessons as much as I hated it at the time. Outside of my father I was blessed to have many men around me who taught me the same, Mr. Williams, Mr. Jones, Mr. Naeher being a few names that pop most readily in my mind as men who taught me how to be a man. Is it that I was blessed growing up? Sure not everybody got to grow up under such great men but I’m sure there are great men out there molding young men into excellence. These men, while explicitly teaching me things about being a man did much more for me than teach, it was the example that they set.
Leading by example is the most important quality in a leader. You don’t have to tell people what they should be doing when you are living it. THAT is what men need to do. If we are living the right way we are teaching our sons, nephews, brothers and peers the correct way to live. We might not be intentionally teaching a generation of young men how to grow up and be a man but we are doing it nonetheless. When we lay our hands on a woman it sends a message to the next generation that it’s OK to lay hands on a woman. When we are strung out on drugs it sends a message to the next generation that it is OK to be strung out on drugs. If we want women to stop teaching our sons how to be a man then we need to become the teachers.
This new generation is soft as hell. Kids are growing up with no concept of what makes a man. I don’t know the reason and if I did this blog would get way more traffic and I’d be rich. What I do know is that we need men to start stepping up and setting an example about what is OK and what’s not OK. Have a discussion, set an example do something because we cannot allow women to be the sole voice in how the next generation of men will be raised. Don’t just preach what being a man is about, live it.
