As a straight white male, I already check all the boxes. Then add that I'm a husband to a stay-at-home wife and mother, and that we have eight children and homeschool them.
I am the oppressor, then. I am the villain. All that's wrong with the world is ultimately my fault. There is no winning for me except to surrender all my power to others and abdicate once and for all.
Though even there, abdication is no guarantee of absolution. Once the vacuum is created and things fall into shambles, that too will be my fault. And if times are good they will say that I built so-called success at the expense of the less fortunate.
No wonder testosterone levels in men are dropping like a rock. Testosterone levels increase in fans of winning sports teams, and our team is not winning. Moreover, it's not supposed to win. It's not allowed to win.
Check out and you will be called a quitter and a wimp. And you might be a victim to some folks, but we've already established that personal suffering does not make one virtuous. So no guarantees on accolades that direction either.
But double down and get in there, and you will be criticized. There is no avoiding it.
So perhaps what we do to be good men is shrug at the criticism and work as unto the Lord anyways. And perhaps what it means to be a good man is that you turn your back on the frivolous, unscrupulous naysayers and walk away from them.
They're not really listening to us anyway, except trying to hear for something they can use against us.
But in that case, we might as well dig in to what God's Word says about what is true and good and beautiful. Hang our hat on that. Kick up our aching feet beside that fire at the end of the day.
The goal is not ultimately to get our testosterone levels back to pre-war levels. But since our goal is to love and serve God with all our being, and to love our neighbor as we love ourselves, and to provide for the needs of our own household, we'd better pay some attention to the sorts of things that go into facilitating that.
Only a silly person would say they don't have time to stop for gas when they're running on fumes because they're already late for an appointment across town. You're not going to make it there, brother, unless you stop and fill up.
And whatever the teeming throngs of godless, worthless idealogues want to say about both burning fossil fuels and toxic masculinity, at the end of the day we are ultimately giving an account to our Maker, not them.
As Theodore Roosevelt once famously said in a speech at the Sorbonne in April of 1910, just 112 years ago this week:
“It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actuallyin the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself in a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Maybe just maybe if we embrace that kind of advice and wisdom again we will see not just our average testosterone levels rise, we'll see a lot of other attendant downstream problems in society smoothed over and tamped down as well.
