Just because it is taught does not mean it is true.

Deti makes this comment about what men are taught in the church…

Men are always told to work on and develop comfort traits, to the exclusion of attraction traits. Most men, especially Christian men, are told that comfort traits are more important. Confidence, dominance, projection of his influence, standing up for himself and not budging, asserting the Captain role, and telling a wife “no” when the husband is sincerely convicted that his decision is best — according to most of these authors, all of these traits are the mark of mean spirited, abusive, controlling, weak, insecure, mentally unstable, cruel, and unChristian men.

That is all wrong. It misses the fundamental point, as Brother Zippy points out.

Women are very good at figuring out the difference between the appearance of social status and its reality. You can’t snooker them – they can’t snooker themselves – by putting a nerd in a position of power. A nerd in an artificial position of power is still a nerd, and most women are going to find powerful nerds about as attractive as most men are going to find an obese woman in a bikini. Young women are always going to find themselves unwittingly attracted to men who have actual social status as accorded by our actual society, those who are seen as independent and “cool” in context (which is not the same thing as money, position, etc); just as men are always going to find themselves attracted to

You cannot fake authority and you cannot fake leadership. Most women are attracted to that the same way most men are attracted to women who look good on the beach.

And yet we are told in the church this is not to be. Either (a) the people teaching us are natural leaders and blind to it or (b) they themselves are deceived.

My money is on the second. We look at the rhetoric of the current society and forget what we are. Because we are trying to fit in and be nice, we forget to be good. Ani diFranco gets it half right here.

I cannot speak for women. I’m a bloke. But Ani here hints at the various changes in people’s moods — how a woman, particularly when fertile, changes from week to week. You do not need more than one woman in your life for she is fluid and not fixed. As a man, your job is not change, but allow that to occur around you.

And to protect. To allow the feminine perspective to happen, for there is a beauty there, instead of crushing it.

I do become quite disoriented by the loudness and the frequency of the alarm, both pounding and piercing at the same time, so I am glad that Lucy is now able to calmly walk down the stairs without coaxing or extra help.

When we got out into the street, I was a tad dizzy and not completely able to maintain proper balance. Lucy, sensing my hesitation, tried to help me navigate the crowds waiting outside the cafe for their takeaway coffee, as we headed for the grass patch, to get away from the noise and the people. It was only a brief 5 seconds of hesitation and confused wobbling through the throng of coffee fanatics, obviously undeterred by the horrible noise, when I suddenly felt a man roughly push past us. I turned to look, and he growled at me, “Come on, mate, what’s wrong with you? Stop moving here and there, get out of the way, you’re blocking my path!”

Nasty creature. Not even 5 seconds to spare? This chap is one of the 10% of course. I guess I pity him. What a sad, bleak and angry world it must be, not being able to appreciate the beauty of a dog, any dog, let alone one as lovely as Lucy, and not being able to wait 5 seconds for someone who is confused and uncertain of her balance, while meandering through noise and crowd.

What makes people react the ways they do? How do their bodies respond to the brain’s reactions to external stimuli, and how are these internalized? What triggers this kind of anger and animosity

Now, if our secular friends who seek truth and beauty can see that there are flaws in the progressive idea that we are all the same and interchangeable — that our hormones do not matter, that being mammalian does not matter, and that the project to disavow our masculinity and femininity has failed, why are we holding to these failed ideas within the church?

It seems that the progressive end of the church runs 20 years behind academia. What we have tested and abandoned they adopt — from psychoanalysis to socialized justice. This should not be so.

You see, we have the writings of those who went before us. They had to deal with every issue we have, and more. Many of the church fathers were killed for their faith, and it is still within living memory (just) that Lutherans and Catholics joined their Jewish neighbours in Auschwitz — because they sheltered them. We don’t have to be fashionable. We can look to what happened before the most recent revolution — because that failed.

But to do that we must test teaching. We must hold it to the standards of scripture: we must compare it with teaching over the last two millenia. The difficulties we have do not change during history (for it is always modern, and old advice is always ignored). In this time of published sermons and worship services on Youtube, the need for this testing is even greater. One of the roles of the Christian nerdspace is to allow correction to occur across the various divisions within the church.

Because what has infected the RCC will be in the PCUSA. Or Anglicans. Or the evangelicals.
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Coming back, what should we do, as men? Well, we should not think women are any more holy or intelligent or intuitive or anything. We should reject any teaching that does not see us all as equally bereft of virtue when compared with God.

We should also reject any teaching that goes against the clear way we are built. This requires that you know some neurology and neurobiology and stop using models of 50 or 100 years ago (as examples, First wave feminism and Freudianism).

Instead we should be teaching about how we all, as imperfect beings, should live together. This requires that everyone give up total freedom to have some freedom. It requires compromise. It requires hard work.

It’s boring.

But it builds a civilization.