The second sin after Adam and Eve’s fall was an act of violence, the fratricide of Cain.  After that we get Lamech’s killing of a man and then apparent sexual sins in taking on multiple wives.  That men have a propensity for sins involving sex and violence is manifest.  When manhood goes wrong, that’s what happens.

A friend recently sent me an initiative called “A Call to Men,” which is a sort of secular “re-think” of manhood in light of those same two things: sex and violence.  All over the website is the point that men are in fact the source of most violence.  This is absolutely true, and a point I stressed in Leaving Boyhood Behind.  If tomorrow all men stayed home violent crime would be practically non-existent.

But what to do about it?  In the past, boys had violence “done to them” in disciplines around rites of passage.  Today we protect them from harm, keep them safe and all that.  The result is an increase of violence – and ever steady one.  But set that aside…  What does a good man look like to them?

In the very first sentence of the “Healthy Manhood” page we get the definition of this outfit’s vision of a good man: “Healthy, respectful manhood means valuing and respecting women, girls, and LGBQ, Trans, and nonbinary people — and respecting and valuing oneself by striving to live authentically.”

To them, violence is a matter of power, so balancing out things through “equity” will help with violence and be a sign of success.  For example, the site points out over and over how men still dominate in places of power like CEOs and politics.  The makeup of society as “patriarchal,” in other words, happens at least partly because men keep it that way through physical violence.

And, “Healthy Manhood” also clearly means bowing to the sexual revolution.  These people are even ahead of the game on this.  Did you notice they took the “T” out of “LGBTQ” and let it stand on its own: “LGBQ, Trans, and nonbinary people.”  And after poking around one sees this is a serious focus of the movement, since to “live authentically” seems to mean in their publications being trans, since that is the word used to describe men becoming women, being “authentic” to themselves.

The next steps are to reject a sort of cliché list of, ya know, toxic man stuff like not crying, being tough, and not asking for help. 

One of the most frustrating parts of this whole thing is the way the past – the inheritance of the patriarchy, which includes the society built by the Church – is all lumped together as creating the present problem of violence and toxicity.  Their answer is to value and let lose the sexual revolution even more as a means to combat the violent tendencies of men.  If we just valued LGB[T]Q and all that, if we just let lose a little more “authenticity,” and if we value whatever the outcome is, then we would not be hurting each other.  A few corrections:

One, if men are the source of violence is does not mean that non-men are the main recipients of violence.  Generally, men aren’t only ahead of women by being the aggressor, but also of being the victim.  This means that men still deal with the sin and problems of violence more, and it does not follow that they need re-education of the value of a self-declared sexual identity.  If we were going by the numbers, in fact, we would advocate that men learn to value the lives of men more.  But that is absurd to our ears (rightly so).  So too is it absurd to define your movement for (or against?) men by once again demanding an acceptance of the sexual revolution and that acceptance being the main reference point of progress and the source of renewal.  I am not made violent by being repulsed by sexual perversion.  If I am a violent man that “values” sexual perversion I will still be violent.  In fact, women-on-women harm done through “domestic violence” in homosexual relationships is way higher than that of heterosexual women.  So, that would mean that being in an all-female intimate relationship poses a greater risk of “partner violence” than men beating up girlfriends and spouses.  Kind of disrupts the narrative around men a bit, doesn’t it?

Two, the sexual revolution is the very source of the objectification of women that the site cites over and over.  If human sexuality is purposed toward personal fulfillment and not children in marriage, then this makes the purpose of other people’s bodies the pleasure of one’s own.  Sure, we can pile on all sorts of other language of value, consent, respect, and the rest, but the purpose of sex remains individualistic and unrestrained and primarily oriented toward personal pleasure, and the result devalues life.  This is of course most pronounced in the simple fact of abortion, which is the backup mechanism when the truth of sex slips through the proverbial cracks in the foundation.

Third, the so-called patriarchy of the past had all sorts of restraints on men that came by way of custom and discipline.  This was simply because “healthy manhood” meant virtue, and part of virtue is self-mastery.  But, trying to balance being absolutely unrestrained sexually with valuing human dignity does not go well together and increases sexual violence by promoting sexual “freedom.”  The major news sites will have a headline deriding (rightly) some terrible crime involving sexual abuse while at the same time having the posterchildren of sexual “liberation” all up and down the side of their sites in ads and other stories.  You can’t have both.  Or, to put it in their language, you can’t defend the perpetrator and blame the victims.

The source of violence is sin and error.  The answer is virtue and holiness, and the refining and directing of strength toward sacrifice.  For that we’ll need more masculinity, of a sort these people will never know, because they’re still making it up as they go while the box at ghosts that don’t exist.