It’s a cultural assumption. An unspoken paradigm. A Way Big Fail in the logic of Western civilization.

View it here in full-colour hype, and wherever conservatives and liberals, rights and lefts debate statism, morality and reproductive rights. It’s the Fail of the Missing Male.

Cheap Trick

This is a culture where moms are dressing their eight-year-olds like Britney Spears (who is now old and gross by media standards of youthful beauty), and pornography is handed down from father to son. The ongoing message is towards sexual engagement.

For this is the will of God, your sanctification; that is, that you abstain from sexual immorality; that each of you know how to possess his own vessel in sanctification and honor, not in lustful passion, like the Gentiles who do not know God.

~1 Thess. 4:3-5

As I’ve said in other times and places, the biggest mistake of the feminist movement was the false assumption that men have some innate right to sexually irresponsible behaviour, and therefore so should women.

Fatherhood is not for Wimps…Or Maybe Anyone?

What this misrepresentation has done in practical terms is transfer even more decision-making responsibility onto the shoulders of teen girls and women. Fathers may abscond or pressure, but they are considered participators only in a secondary sense, if that.

I recall a savvy crisis pregnancy worker who related to me a conversation her teen daughter had with some male classmates. The guys were off in a corner, discussing sex in the naive glamourizations of 16-year-old boys. The girl said to them, “Oh, yeah? And what are you going to do when you get your girlfriend pregnant? You do realize you have no say in what happens after that?”

Sorry, Buddy, You’ve Been Benched

In the name of female empowerment, evidence is regularly collected in demonstration that women (especially young women) are still deeply susceptible to a partner’s misuse of his God-given ability to lead.

But I want you to understand that Christ is the head of every man, and the man is the head of a woman, and God is the head of Christ. ~1 Cor. 11:3

For Christians, this is a no-brainer. It’s also an incentive to train our boys to use their unique powers for good and not evil. And likewise for our girls and their unique powers over men, so readily evidenced in the world by the popularity of Playboy et al. There are strengths and weaknesses to each gender, and used correctly, they uphold and defend each other quite well.

However, in a paradigm where women are not equivalent to men, but identitarian to them, this is not an acceptable interpretation of social circumstances. No, this oppressive male influence must be dealt with.

Nearly 1 in 4 girls who have been in a relationship (23%) reported going further sexually than they wanted as a result of pressure.

51% of teen girls say pressure from a guy is a reason
girls send [text-chat] sexy messages or images; only 18% of
teen boys cited pressure from female counterparts
as a reason.

Three of four girls and over half of boys report that girls who have sex do so because their boyfriends want them to.

Since 1960-something-or-other, we have been theoretically training ourselves out of this apparent weakness of responsiveness to leadership. Combine our perpetual retraining with ongoing advocacy to ensure that women have the final say in reproductive rights, and heterosexual men are painted as an aggressive, overbearing hit-and-run proposition in need of being put on a leash. Not leaders, not protectors, not allies but enemies.

For a lot of guys, it’s an impossible battle to advocate for genuinely equal reproductive rights. But let’s not forget, unless it was a rape scenario, there were two consents involved in conception. And I say this with full acceptance of my own past choices.

It Takes Two

I was eighteen, and startled to find myself with a partner who was unfazed by impending fatherhood. He did not timidly approach me about maybe keeping the baby. For that particular 20-year-old, giving security and care to me and our child was a foregone conclusion. It was his lifelong dream to get married and have babies.

And with that, the secular feminist illusion of the Missing Male was shattered for me. The Victorian image of the lustful dilettante who visits prostitutes while repressed wife lies back and thinks of England; the stain of the detached, self-centered post-war money maker; the obnoxiousness of the early 1980s chauvinist before STD awareness took root; the psychologically impotent and mildly whiny metrosexual who wouldn’t want to break a nail (come here, sweetie, let me show you how to tie up that steel-toed workboot properly).

However, if I’d rejected David and gone with the stereotypes–particularly those regarding Christian men–what recourse would he have had? And what would the effects on him have been, to have that dreamed-for role destroyed? In fact, awareness of that potential devastation was a factor in keeping me with him through a rough shakeup, though I didn’t yet share his faith in Christ.

What’s Really Missing

These cultural stereotypes will always be present in one form or another, no matter how much advocacy takes place for any group. Remove them from one part of the culture and they’ll show up in another. Because these are not cultural problems.

It’s flesh against Spirit. Culture alone, Christian or otherwise, will never truly sound the bottomless well of self and its hungers–only the conviction and transformation of the Holy Spirit can do this to any true effect. Culling the strengths of manhood to compensate for the weaknesses is no more effective than doing so for women ever was.  That way lies an insanity of the heart which no one should have to endure.

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