These are difficult and perilous times for boys. A distorted culture has robbed them of virtue to measure themselves against. The good once associated with masculinity in a patriarchal society has been tossed out with the bad. This, alas, is the era of feminist ascendency. Read more…
About a year ago I was picking up an older family member from the airport. As she made her way to the car with her large suitcase in tow, I jumped out of the driver’s seat with the intention of heaving her suitcase into the trunk. I’m no weakling in that sense and take a certain pride in being able to lift my own heavy loads, but I stood by flabbergasted when a twenty-something guy walked over and without a word picked up her suitcase and deposited it into the trunk. He then opened the passenger side door for her. I’m sure my mouth was agape. Read more…
John Blake’s recent CCN article, “Why Young Christians Aren’t Waiting Anymore,” sparked a flurry of thousands of responses. Released in September 2011, the piece cited an article in Relevant magazine entitled “(Almost) Everyone’s Doing It,” exploring the sexual activity of Christian singles. But one finding, in particular, stood out from the miscellany: According to a December 2009 study by the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, 80% of evangelical young adults (18 to 29) reported having had sex—just under the 88% statistic of unmarried adults overall. “Relevant theorizes about why it’s so hard for so many young Christians to wait, including the saturation of sex in popular culture, the prevalence of pornography and a popular ‘do what feels good philosophy,’” Blake writes. But are these listed sociocultural factors solely to blame? Or is there a concomitant reality at play here? Read more…
by S. T. Karnick
The tendency of the nation’s schools to suppress boys’ natural way of seeing and doing things, brilliantly documented by Christina Hoff-Sommers in her 2001 book The War Against Boys: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men, is becoming increasingly evident in the culture. Read more…
An excellent post from Athol Kay.
You are correct that monogamy isn’t natural and that men and women are biologically wired to have a primary partner and opportunistic sex with others. However much of our modern society isn’t natural. Democracy isn’t natural, nor is capitalism, or education, the rule of law, hospitals, flushing toilets and plentiful food. (Autotuned pop music isn’t natural either, so that I guess slightly ruins the point I’m making because let’s face it, autotune is awful.) Read more…
David Tyree, whose name is well-known to football fans, is standing up for marriage in New York. Here is an interview he did recently:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i6lwIx9f5uk&
It starts off with footage of “the catch”–take a look!
If you want to get good at something, you’ve got to tinker with it. Whether it’s mastering a new sport, a new musical instrument or trying to get stronger with a workout routine. You have to play around with the object of your interest so as to maximize growth.
But that’s not all you need. Let’s say you want to develop a better backhand in tennis. To do this, you need to practice doing backhands. But you also need some knowledge. Just picking up a racket and chopping at the ball will likely wind up being counterproductive. In the worst case, you may adopt some bad habits and practice them until they’re second nature, dooming your tennis game as a result of all of your hard work.
The same goes with marriage. Read more…
In this blog, I have often advocated that men learn how to talk to and deal with women most effectively. In my life, I have seen men lose their marriages because they did not know how to deal with their wives. I’ve watched their interactions with their wives and feared correctly for their future. I wished I could teach them what they needed to do to get better results from their interactions with their wives. I have also met single men who were frustrated in their attempts to find love and marriage because of their lack of skill in dealing with women. Having once been hopeless with women and having learned on my own what to do, I know the value of this knowledge. Read more…
This article is heartbreaking.
Keith Macdonald is called Britain’s Most Feckless Father. Admittedly, competition for that title is fierce, but Keith established a comfortable lead on Monday night when BBC1’s Panorama asked him to name his children. Tall, wan and sepulchral as a Dickensian undertaker, Keith was hesitant at first, trying to recall the eight children by eight different women that his 25-year-old loins had spawned. He managed the first six names, but then, with two children still to go, he got stuck, shrugged, took a stab at the seventh before finally admitting defeat. Read more…
There are those who doubt that our society has come to the point where it has come to the absurd conclusion that men and women are exactly the same, but that women are better.
It has.
But that’s not the only absurd conclusion that it has come to. It has also concluded that men are, unless proven otherwise, unspeakably evil.
Last week, the lieutenant governor of Massachusetts, Timothy Murray, noticed smoke coming out of a minivan in his hometown of Worcester. He raced over and pulled out two small children, moments before the van’s tire exploded into flames. At which point, according to the AP account, the kids’ grandmother, who had been driving, nearly punched our hero in the face.
Why?
Mr. Murray said she told him she thought he might be a kidnapper.
And so it goes these days, when almost any man who has anything to do with a child can find himself suspected of being a creep. I call it “Worst-First” thinking: Gripped by pedophile panic, we jump to the very worst, even least likely, conclusion first. Then we congratulate ourselves for being so vigilant. Read more…
Dr. J has often discussed the essential public purpose of marriage. Many of our commenters have dismissed her account of that purpose because it emphasizes the procreative aspect of marriage as the public purpose. They seem to think that this purpose was made up in order to exclude certain non-favored groups from marriage.
Well, here’s a definition of marriage that has been with us since time immemorial, encoded in the Yoseph Karo’s immortal Shulchan Aruch, the basic code of Jewish Law. It’s the very first paragraph in the very first chapter in the volume containing the laws of marriage (emphasis added. The Rem”a, by the way, is a slightly later gloss added by a different author, Rabbi Moshe Isserles).
1. Every man is obligated to marry a women in order to be fruitful and to multiply and anyone who doesn’t engage in being fruitful and multiplying is as if he spills blood, and lessens the appearance, and causes the divine presence to depart from Israel. Rem”a: He who does not marry is not allowed to make a blessing or to engage in Torah etc. and he is not called a man, and when he marries a woman his sins are cast into doubt, as it is said: “One who has found a wife has found goodness and obtains favor in the eyes of God.” (Prv. 18:22)
While this purpose somewhat differs from Dr. J’s purpose in detail (and somewhat in practice as well), I think the case that marriage is about procreation (and always has been) is well nigh overwhelming.
Lest you think the sentence, “anyone who doesn’t engage in being fruitful and multiplying is as if he spills blood” is wholly without basis, I quote from a recent article about our nation’s second least fruitful city: Seattle. “There’s something missing from many Seattle neighborhoods: the sound of children’s laughter.” The same thing would likely be missing following a general massacre. Surely, Jewish Law does not literally consider a childless person a murderer. Nevertheless, it is essential to note that childlessness and murder share some practical results. (Seattle is the second least fruitful city. Any guesses as to the very least fruitful? No points for correct guesses. That one was just too easy).
I’ve commented many times on the reliability of studies. But this study confirms such an obvious proposition that you can bet it’s reliable. Here goes:
The researchers found that men with fewer nasty qualities were more likely to eventually end up married. But among men who did marry, some showed signs indicating that their bad behavior decreased after the union.
These findings address a long-standing debate among researchers, concerning why married men display fewer qualities associated with antisocial personality disorder, such as criminal behavior, lying, aggression, and lack of remorse. Is it because marriage reforms them, or because men with more of these nasty traits are less likely to get married in the first place? Read more…
This post on Yahoo Answers has been making the rounds as of late.
Can you make a male baby sitter pay child support?
I’m a single mom going to college with my sister. We currently rent an apartment together. A couple weeks ago, I asked my neighbor, a trustworthy guy, if he could watch the kids for two hours while I went to class and my sister wasn’t home, and he agreed. If he babysits and doesn’t accept pay, can I sue him for child support because he took on a fatherly role?? I’m sure I can convince a court that he accepted a fatherly role. Read more…
Here. Here.
My dad cordially invites you to play Risk. Or talk sports. Or just wear a stained t-shirt and eat meat.
Plagued with five daughters, he sought consolation in mandatory family nights, reading aloud “Danny, the Champion of the World,” “Tarzan,” and the “Lord of the Rings.” During a reading of “The Two Towers,” we sketched Gandalf with pastel pencils and dozed behind the couch. Although I didn’t always listen, his treasured classics exposed me to manliness worthy of respect. Read more…
from the National Catholic Register’s story on military chaplains during the Christmas season in Afganistan and Iraq:
Father Michael Duesterhaus has been deployed to combat areas three times, including Fallujah, Iraq, in 2006. The Navy chaplain said “close teamwork, mission focus and personal deprivations [can] deepen one’s faith” and recounted how “one Marine, who I baptized, confirmed, and gave first holy Communion to in the Al Anbar Province told me one night, ‘Catholicism is a tough religion. … Have to believe that the Eucharist is truly Jesus and not a symbol. And confession — whoa, there’s a challenge. Yeah, it’s tough. But I’m a Marine. Who wants a wimpy faith?’”
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