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[This originally appeared on the Mars Hill Church blog] I was originally assigned the task of looking at advice on how to be a man from a men’s magazine. Problem is, there wasn't any. Esquire's June/July 2010 issue was called How to Be a Man. Appropriate. With a title that declarative and a tagline of “Man at His Best,” I was anxious to comb through it to see what they had to say about manhood. With a base circulation of 700,000 and competition like GQ, Maxim, and Details, Esquire is arguably one of the largest and most influential men’s magazines in the world. They've got to know what they're talking about, right? Esquire’s website describes their audience as "the affluent and successful man." Should be exactly what I'm shooting for here. With Irony As Our GuideHere’s the twist – and I’m putting it up front because that’s where I found it in the magazine – according to Esquire, you can’t define manhood or what it means to be a man. Here’s what the Editor-In-Chief wrote in his introduction to the issue: There are no guides to manhood. Not really. We try on selves – constantly. We see traits exhibited by other men and we emulate them. We learn by example and trial. We keep trying. Those of us who’ve had fathers who were engaged in our lives always measure ourselves by them…Those of us – like our cover subject – whose fathers were absent develop in reaction to that absence and either triumph or collapse, or both. [Manhood is] a huge topic, impossible to be definitive about, and not all our advice will work. But look, we men are always gonna do stupid stuff. It’s who we are, and how we learn. So, 20 pages in, and we're already told that the thing this issue sets out to be, a guide for manhood, cannot exist. The trouble is, if you don't define something, you certainly can’t issue a guide of how to do it, and so we’re left with the orphans running the orphanage. More precisely, the magazine is left with manhood being defined by what you individually consume, from clothes to technology to women. The Blind Leading the BlindNonetheless, they proceed (boldly or foolishly, I don't know) to fill the pages of the guide-that-isn't-a-guide on manhood with the following:
One hundred and seventy pages later, I don’t know how to be a man. I learned some general life lessons and heard some nice stories about Tom Cruise and A.J. Jacobs' kids, but I haven’t left the How to be a Man issue with any tangible instruction as to how to be a better man, let alone a better husband or father. Misguided GuysThe truth is, as Granger pointed out at the beginning the issue, culture has ceased being able to define manhood, which makes creating a guide for it, well, misguided. But the thing is, the fact that they would nevertheless promote the issue as a guide is revealing. Beneath culture’s ambiguity, men’s questions still lie tangled in video game controllers, bar tabs, and browser tabs of porn. As Esquire knows, men are built to learn and share knowledge. The problem is - as this issue illustrates clearly - if men go to the culture for the answer to the question of manhood, the answer is geared around consumption. Moreover, if there is no instruction, and young men aren't learning from older men, there is no accumulated knowledge or collective wisdom, and each man is left to fend for himself, making the avoidable mistakes thousands of men have made before him, as he tries to define a hyper-relative sense of masculinity. The How to Be a Man issue is a harrowing example of that. The rise of the Omega Male is the culmination of years, maybe decades, of unanswered questions. It only makes sense that if a question goes unanswered for long enough, people will stop asking or caring. Go Boldly – with Wisdom – to JesusMark Driscoll put it well when he said that men need to know who they’re to protect, who they’re to defend, what truth is, what righteousness is, and what justice is. These are questions that resonate with every man and that God answers from the beginning of the Bible to the end, from the Garden of Eden in Genesis to the wedding feast in Revelation. It takes a certain boldness to want to ask and answer those questions because their answers are costly, and it's not just a desire for sentences in the imperative. A man isn't going to be able to base his life on what he can buy with a credit card. For those of you brave enough to be asking the question of what it means to be a man, and selfless enough to commit to pursuing that, let’s look at what one passage says about Jesus. Have this mind among yourselves, which is yours in Christ Jesus, who, though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but made himself nothing, taking the form of a servant, being born in the likeness of men. And being found in human form, he humbled himself by becoming obedient to the point of death, even death on a cross. Jesus was in authority as part of the Trinitarian God but submitted to the authority of the Father and was obedient in coming to earth to take responsibility for the sin of His bride, the Church. Those four verses are but a glimpse of what truth, righteousness, justice, defending, and protecting look like. While our culture remains largely silent on the topic, we need more men to look to Jesus (cf: 1:25) and the Bible for answers to the question of what it means to be a man. For more on masculinity, as based on identity in Christ and not Call of Duty, check out these sermon series from the Mars Hill media library:
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Comments
I guess that's more or less how things are. With women it's the same thing. We look at what the competition is doing and try to do it better. It's just human.
I guess you could say its as human as sin.