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The modern culture criticizes men for not showing our emotions or not publicly grieving, for being excessively silent and reserved. These voices fail to understand that a man should inspire in his wife, children, and employees a sense of being protected, provided for, and well guided. That cannot happen if he runs around crying and acting like an emotional chatterbox. A man shows logic, self-control, restraint of passions, and confidence… even if he’s hurt, scared, and dying inside. He takes his pain and doubts to the Lord and to his brothers, not to the general public and not to those under his care who depend upon his stability. We can look to Christ’s dignified and self-disciplined response to his arrest, torture, and humiliating public execution as an example of this.
Men are also criticized for being aggressive, violent, and destructive. If not for men’s violence and destruction, trees wouldn’t be cleared away to plant crops, animals wouldn’t be killed for food, firewood wouldn’t get chopped, and women would not be protected from predators, invaders, and criminals. If men were not aggressive, they would not pursue wives with determination and confidence. The Lord’s commandment to be fruitful and multiply, to fill the earth and subdue it, depends on male aggression and forcefulness. The human race would have gone extinct if men were anything like what modern society want them to be.
Violence and aggression are only wrong if committed selfishly at the expense of the innocent. Otherwise, the ability to exercise force is God’s way of inclining a man to protect his wife, children, elderly parents, and the community in which he lives. In a society in which most men no longer perform physical labor, produce their own food, or train to defend the community, this natural aggressiveness is often suppressed until it becomes toxic. This is why our society suffers so much pseudo-masculine crime, sexual promiscuity, domestic violence, and self-destructive thrill-seeking. Men who are alienated from nature and even from their own bodies, men who have been raised without fathers and taught to loathe their natural male inclinations, will of course fail to exercise those inclinations properly.
Much of what modern society now expects of men is an anti-natural fantasy constructed by feminists and Cultural Marxists who use the entertainment industry, media, schools, and leftist versions of Christianity to destroy society and invert what is normal. Yet authentic Christianity presents a very different image of manhood, from warriors like Samson and David to Christ himself, who used violent force to cleanse the Temple, defending what was holy against desecration.
Tempering our nature with God’s grace, men are called to chivalry rather than boorishness or barbarism. God created manhood and took it upon himself in the Incarnation. But we men, especially in a secularized and hedonistic culture, sometimes take what is good and pervert it. Male aggression, like many other things, has been distorted. The same applies with the male sex drive, which is fundamentally good, can become corrupted. When these things are severed from their intended purpose of love, all that remains is a warped and vulgar expression which has nothing to do with defending and protecting others. Sex is meant to be a life-giving expression of affection, a bond of fidelity. When we exclude marital love from the act, all that remains is something crude and self-centered. Thus we see that both the drive to reproduce and to kill can become counterproductive to survival when selfishly severed from their primal purpose.
St. Paul wrote that a man is the head of the family and that wives should obey their husbands. But he also wrote that husbands should treat their wives with the same care as his own body, and St. Peter wrote that God’s responsiveness to a man’s prayers is directly dependent on how a man treats his wife. Paul wrote that a man should be like Christ to his wife, and we all know that Christ loved his bride the Church so much that he died for her without complaint. The Christian model of husbandly love is therefore humble, self-sacrificial, and romantic.
Manhood, then, is like fire. A gift which God gives humanity through nature. A gift which is deadly if misused but gives warmth and light when properly handled with the right intentions. Men are called, like fire, to lead the way in darkness and offer ourselves up that others may have light.
(Communities of St. Michael, the Archangel)