Start with a low weight to get the form down. For instance, a 25 lb plate on either side of a 45 lb bar equals only 95 lbs, which is a great place to start. Because the 25's have a relatively small radius, they don't give you the clearance you need off of the ground so lay a plate beneath each 25 to give you more height. Focus on driving up through your heels, keeping your back straight, and the bar close to your legs throughout the motion.

Here you can find an excellent beginner's weightlifting plan with 45 minute workouts and no fluff: Stronglifts 5x5.

One of the things that struck me in the Stronglifts literature is that fitness magazines need to keep coming up with things like "8 Abtastic Exercises" in order to sell copies. Kinda like personal finance mags/shows and their "6 Steps to Financial Security." That reminds me, I was at a house party and in making convo with a professional financial adviser I just met, I mentioned Austrian economics, wondering if he could help me understand the current market risks. He replied that many European economists saw the bubble blah blah blah. Incredulous, I excused myself to get a B & B refill.

Michael Kimmel notes: Typically, each nation constructs a model of masculinity against which each man measures himself. This hegemonic image of manhood is constructed often through articulation of differences with a variety of "others"-- racial or sexual minorities, and, of course, women. The hegemonic definition of masculinity is "constructed in relation to various subordinated masculinities as well as in relation to women," writes sociologist R. W. Connell (1987, p. 183). As the sociologist Erving Goffman (1963, p. 128) once wrote,

In an important sense there is only one complete unblushing male in America: a young, married, white, urban, northern, heterosexual, Protestant, father, of college education, fully employed, of good complexion, weight, and height, and a recent record in sports. . . Any male who fails to qualify in any one of these ways is likely to view himself - during moments at least - as unworthy, incomplete, and inferior.

Have evangelicals made Jesus into the archetypal American man? Therefore to be a Godly man means the following:

(1) white
(2) married
(3) Protestant
(4) a father
(5) college educated
(6) employed as a busy worker
(7) physically strong

Therefore, if you're not these things you'll never be considered someone to look up to in evangelical circles. The problem, of course, is that none of this is in the Bible as something to determine Godly masculine identity. Evangelical leaders are white men (NOT women, not men or women of color), married, etc., or at least to aspire to me like one of them.

So if you're not a married white male with children, college educated, with a good job, etc. you will likely remain an outsider in evangelical circles. Will Black and Latino men will only be accepted in evangelicalism if they adopt the white hegemonic masculine norms.

Kimmel argues that white America men define their masculinity by excluding others. Is this why some black and Reformed guys adopt an exclusionary posture? Do white evangelical men look for ways to exclude others?

Black and Latino men are often as told "tone things down"? Could this be an indirect request to adopt white hegemonic masculinity in order to be included?

Hegemonic definition from Wiki: "In gender studies, the theory of hegemonic masculinity refers to the belief in the existence of a culturally normative ideal of male behavior. Hegemonic masculinity posits that society strongly encourages men to embody this kind of masculinity. Hegemonic masculinity is said to be marked by a tendency for the male to dominate other males and subordinate females. According to the theory's proponents, it is not necessarily the most prevalent form of male expression, but rather the most socially endorsed that always contributes to the subordinate position of women they perceive. Proponents point to characteristics such as aggressiveness, strength, drive, ambition, and self-reliance, which they argue are encouraged in males but discouraged in females in contemporary Western society, as evidence of the existence of hegemonic masculinity."

Thoughts? Is there a problem here?

Unlike Joel Northup, the 16-year-old homeschooled wrestler who defaulted rather than wrestle female Cassy Herkelman, Rick Reilly gets pinned under the equality myth:

And where does it say in the Bible not to wrestle against girls? Or compete against them? What religion forbids the two-point reversal?

Remember, Northrup didn't default on sexual grounds. Didn't say anything about it being wrong to put his hands in awkward places. Both he and his father, Jamie, a minister in an independent Pentecostal faith called Believers in Grace Fellowship, cited the physical pounding of it.

Does Reilly need a diagram? How does he think the "physical pounding" occurs, via Harry Potter magic spells? Or could takedowns come from grappling, grabbing, pushing, pulling, etc.?

"We believe in the elevation and respect of woman," the father told the Des Moines Register, "and we don't think that wrestling a woman is the right thing to do. Body slamming and takedowns -- full contact sport is not how to do that."

That's where the Northrups are so wrong. Body slams and takedowns and gouges in the eye and elbows in the ribs are exactly how to respect Cassy Herkelman. This is what she lives for. She can elevate herself, thanks.

Sometimes the best way to respect someone is to deny him the chance to be stupid. Joel gave Cassy that chance; but Rick wasn't so fortunate.

This is a far better analysis:

It seems to me that Joel Northrup was raised to be a gentleman, and when he drew his first opponent at the state tournament, this ideal ran hard into the leveling impulse of the age. Or to put it in old-fashioned terms, gentlemen don't wrestle with ladies. Reversing the sentence provides another truism: ladies wouldn't dream of wrestling with gentlemen or of wrestling with anyone for that matter. Now I am on thin ice here, for if I embrace the idea of a gentleman, I am simultaneously embracing the idea of a lady. Doing so must appear, through the caustic lens of liberation, to be suggesting that ladies and gentlemen are substantially different and that a gentleman treats other gentleman in ways markedly different from the way he treats ladies. Precisely.

From the Daily Princetonian Newspaper: Bill Zeller, a fifth-year graduate student in the computer science department, died Wednesday night at age 27 as a result of injuries from a suicide attempt.

Zeller was found in his University apartment by Public Safety officers at about 6 a.m. Sunday, shortly after he attempted to take his own life. Brain damage due to oxygen deprivation left Zeller in a coma at University Medical Center at Princeton until the evening of Jan. 5, when he was removed from life support.

He left behind a 4,000-word suicide note (from Gizmodo.com):

"Bill Zeller

I have the urge to declare my sanity and justify my actions, but I assume I'll never be able to convince anyone that this was the right decision. Maybe it's true that anyone who does this is insane by definition, but I can at least explain my reasoning. I considered not writing any of this because of how personal it is, but I like tying up loose ends and don't want people to wonder why I did this. Since I've never spoken to anyone about what happened to me, people would likely draw the wrong conclusions.

My first memories as a child are of being raped, repeatedly. This has affected every aspect of my life. This darkness, which is the only way I can describe it, has followed me like a fog, but at times intensified and overwhelmed me, usually triggered by a distinct situation. In kindergarten I couldn't use the bathroom and would stand petrified whenever I needed to, which started a trend of awkward and unexplained social behavior. The damage that was done to my body still prevents me from using the bathroom normally, but now it's less of a physical impediment than a daily reminder of what was done to me.

This darkness followed me as I grew up. I remember spending hours playing with legos, having my world consist of me and a box of cold, plastic blocks. Just waiting for everything to end. It's the same thing I do now, but instead of legos it's surfing the web or reading or listening to a baseball game. Most of my life has been spent feeling dead inside, waiting for my body to catch up.

At times growing up I would feel inconsolable rage, but I never connected this to what happened until puberty. I was able to keep the darkness at bay for a few hours at a time by doing things that required intense concentration, but it would always come back. Programming appealed to me for this reason. I was never particularly fond of computers or mathematically inclined, but the temporary peace it would provide was like a drug. But the darkness always returned and built up something like a tolerance, because programming has become less and less of a refuge.

The darkness is with me nearly every time I wake up. I feel like a grime is covering me. I feel like I'm trapped in a contimated body that no amount of washing will clean. Whenever I think about what happened I feel manic and itchy and can't concentrate on anything else. It manifests itself in hours of eating or staying up for days at a time or sleeping for sixteen hours straight or week long programming binges or constantly going to the gym. I'm exhausted from feeling like this every hour of every day.

Three to four nights a week I have nightmares about what happened. It makes me avoid sleep and constantly tired, because sleeping with what feels like hours of nightmares is not restful. I wake up sweaty and furious. I'm reminded every morning of what was done to me and the control it has over my life.

I've never been able to stop thinking about what happened to me and this hampered my social interactions. I would be angry and lost in thought and then be interrupted by someone saying "Hi" or making small talk, unable to understand why I seemed cold and distant. I walked around, viewing the outside world from a distant portal behind my eyes, unable to perform normal human niceties. I wondered what it would be like to take to other people without what happened constantly on my mind, and I wondered if other people had similar experiences that they were better able to mask.

Alcohol was also something that let me escape the darkness. It would always find me later, though, and it was always angry that I managed to escape and it made me pay. Many of the irresponsible things I did were the result of the darkness. Obviously I'm responsible for every decision and action, including this one, but there are reasons why things happen the way they do.

Alcohol and other drugs provided a way to ignore the realities of my situation. It was easy to spend the night drinking and forget that I had no future to look forward to. I never liked what alcohol did to me, but it was better than facing my existence honestly. I haven't touched alcohol or any other drug in over seven months (and no drugs or alcohol will be involved when I do this) and this has forced me to evaluate my life in an honest and clear way. There's no future here. The darkness will always be with me.

I used to think if I solved some problem or achieved some goal, maybe he would leave. It was comforting to identify tangible issues as the source of my problems instead of something that I'll never be able to change. I thought that if I got into to a good college, or a good grad school, or lost weight, or went to the gym nearly every day for a year, or created programs that millions of people used, or spent a summer or California or New York or published papers that I was proud of, then maybe I would feel some peace and not be constantly haunted and unhappy. But nothing I did made a dent in how depressed I was on a daily basis and nothing was in any way fulfilling. I'm not sure why I ever thought that would change anything.

I didn't realize how deep a hold he had on me and my life until my first relationship. I stupidly assumed that no matter how the darkness affected me personally, my romantic relationships would somehow be separated and protected. Growing up I viewed my future relationships as a possible escape from this thing that haunts me every day, but I began to realize how entangled it was with every aspect of my life and how it is never going to release me. Instead of being an escape, relationships and romantic contact with other people only intensified everything about him that I couldn't stand. I will never be able to have a relationship in which he is not the focus, affecting every aspect of my romantic interactions.

Relationships always started out fine and I'd be able to ignore him for a few weeks. But as we got closer emotionally the darkness would return and every night it'd be me, her and the darkness in a black and gruesome threesome. He would surround me and penetrate me and the more we did the more intense it became. It made me hate being touched, because as long as we were separated I could view her like an outsider viewing something good and kind and untainted. Once we touched, the darkness would envelope her too and take her over and the evil inside me would surround her. I always felt like I was infecting anyone I was with.

Relationships didn't work. No one I dated was the right match, and I thought that maybe if I found the right person it would overwhelm him. Part of me knew that finding the right person wouldn't help, so I became interested in girls who obviously had no interest in me. For a while I thought I was gay. I convinced myself that it wasn't the darkness at all, but rather my orientation, because this would give me control over why things didn't feel "right". The fact that the darkness affected sexual matters most intensely made this idea make some sense and I convinced myself of this for a number of years, starting in college after my first relationship ended. I told people I was gay (at Trinity, not at Princeton), even though I wasn't attracted to men and kept finding myself interested in girls. Because if being gay wasn't the answer, then what was? People thought I was avoiding my orientation, but I was actually avoiding the truth, which is that while I'm straight, I will never be content with anyone. I know now that the darkness will never leave.

Last spring I met someone who was unlike anyone else I'd ever met. Someone who showed me just how well two people could get along and how much I could care about another human being. Someone I know I could be with and love for the rest of my life, if I weren't so fucked up. Amazingly, she liked me. She liked the shell of the man the darkness had left behind. But it didn't matter because I couldn't be alone with her. It was never just the two of us, it was always the three of us: her, me and the darkness. The closer we got, the more intensely I'd feel the darkness, like some evil mirror of my emotions. All the closeness we had and I loved was complemented by agony that I couldn't stand, from him. I realized that I would never be able to give her, or anyone, all of me or only me. She could never have me without the darkness and evil inside me. I could never have just her, without the darkness being a part of all of our interactions. I will never be able to be at peace or content or in a healthy relationship. I realized the futility of the romantic part of my life. If I had never met her, I would have realized this as soon as I met someone else who I meshed similarly well with. It's likely that things wouldn't have worked out with her and we would have broken up (with our relationship ending, like the majority of relationships do) even if I didn't have this problem, since we only dated for a short time. But I will face exactly the same problems with the darkness with anyone else. Despite my hopes, love and compatability is not enough. Nothing is enough. There's no way I can fix this or even push the darkness down far enough to make a relationship or any type of intimacy feasible.

So I watched as things fell apart between us. I had put an explicit time limit on our relationship, since I knew it couldn't last because of the darkness and didn't want to hold her back, and this caused a variety of problems. She was put in an unnatural situation that she never should have been a part of. It must have been very hard for her, not knowing what was actually going on with me, but this is not something I've ever been able to talk about with anyone. Losing her was very hard for me as well. Not because of her (I got over our relationship relatively quickly), but because of the realization that I would never have another relationship and because it signified the last true, exclusive personal connection I could ever have. This wasn't apparent to other people, because I could never talk about the real reasons for my sadness. I was very sad in the summer and fall, but it was not because of her, it was because I will never escape the darkness with anyone. She was so loving and kind to me and gave me everything I could have asked for under the circumstances. I'll never forget how much happiness she brought me in those briefs moments when I could ignore the darkness. I had originally planned to kill myself last winter but never got around to it. (Parts of this letter were written over a year ago, other parts days before doing this.) It was wrong of me to involve myself in her life if this were a possibility and I should have just left her alone, even though we only dated for a few months and things ended a long time ago. She's just one more person in a long list of people I've hurt.

I could spend pages talking about the other relationships I've had that were ruined because of my problems and my confusion related to the darkness. I've hurt so many great people because of who I am and my inability to experience what needs to be experienced. All I can say is that I tried to be honest with people about what I thought was true.

I've spent my life hurting people. Today will be the last time.

I've told different people a lot of things, but I've never told anyone about what happened to me, ever, for obvious reasons. It took me a while to realize that no matter how close you are to someone or how much they claim to love you, people simply cannot keep secrets. I learned this a few years ago when I thought I was gay and told people. The more harmful the secret, the juicier the gossip and the more likely you are to be betrayed. People don't care about their word or what they've promised, they just do whatever the fuck they want and justify it later. It feels incredibly lonely to realize you can never share something with someone and have it be between just the two of you. I don't blame anyone in particular, I guess it's just how people are. Even if I felt like this is something I could have shared, I have no interest in being part of a friendship or relationship where the other person views me as the damaged and contaminated person that I am. So even if I were able to trust someone, I probably would not have told them about what happened to me. At this point I simply don't care who knows.

I feel an evil inside me. An evil that makes me want to end life. I need to stop this. I need to make sure I don't kill someone, which is not something that can be easily undone. I don't know if this is related to what happened to me or something different. I recognize the irony of killing myself to prevent myself from killing someone else, but this decision should indicate what I'm capable of.

So I've realized I will never escape the darkness or misery associated with it and I have a responsibility to stop myself from physically harming others.

I'm just a broken, miserable shell of a human being. Being molested has defined me as a person and shaped me as a human being and it has made me the monster I am and there's nothing I can do to escape it. I don't know any other existence. I don't know what life feels like where I'm apart from any of this. I actively despise the person I am. I just feel fundamentally broken, almost non-human. I feel like an animal that woke up one day in a human body, trying to make sense of a foreign world, living among creatures it doesn't understand and can't connect with.

I have accepted that the darkness will never allow me to be in a relationship. I will never go to sleep with someone in my arms, feeling the comfort of their hands around me. I will never know what uncontimated intimacy is like. I will never have an exclusive bond with someone, someone who can be the recipient of all the love I have to give. I will never have children, and I wanted to be a father so badly. I think I would have made a good dad. And even if I had fought through the darkness and married and had children all while being unable to feel intimacy, I could have never done that if suicide were a possibility. I did try to minimize pain, although I know that this decision will hurt many of you. If this hurts you, I hope that you can at least forget about me quickly.

There's no point in identifying who molested me, so I'm just going to leave it at that. I doubt the word of a dead guy with no evidence about something that happened over twenty years ago would have much sway.

You may wonder why I didn't just talk to a professional about this. I've seen a number of doctors since I was a teenager to talk about other issues and I'm positive that another doctor would not have helped. I was never given one piece of actionable advice, ever. More than a few spent a large part of the session reading their notes to remember who I was. And I have no interest in talking about being raped as a child, both because I know it wouldn't help and because I have no confidence it would remain secret. I know the legal and practical limits of doctor/patient confidentiality, growing up in a house where we'd hear stories about the various mental illnesses of famous people, stories that were passed down through generations. All it takes is one doctor who thinks my story is interesting enough to share or a doctor who thinks it's her right or responsibility to contact the authorities and have me identify the molestor (justifying her decision by telling herself that someone else might be in danger). All it takes is a single doctor who violates my trust, just like the "friends" who I told I was gay did, and everything would be made public and I'd be forced to live in a world where people would know how fucked up I am. And yes, I realize this indicates that I have severe trust issues, but they're based on a large number of experiences with people who have shown a profound disrepect for their word and the privacy of others.

People say suicide is selfish. I think it's selfish to ask people to continue living painful and miserable lives, just so you possibly won't feel sad for a week or two. Suicide may be a permanent solution to a temporary problem, but it's also a permanent solution to a ~23 year-old problem that grows more intense and overwhelming every day.

Some people are just dealt bad hands in this life. I know many people have it worse than I do, and maybe I'm just not a strong person, but I really did try to deal with this. I've tried to deal with this every day for the last 23 years and I just can't fucking take it anymore.

I often wonder what life must be like for other people. People who can feel the love from others and give it back unadulterated, people who can experience sex as an intimate and joyous experience, people who can experience the colors and happenings of this world without constant misery. I wonder who I'd be if things had been different or if I were a stronger person. It sounds pretty great.

I'm prepared for death. I'm prepared for the pain and I am ready to no longer exist. Thanks to the strictness of New Jersey gun laws this will probably be much more painful than it needs to be, but what can you do. My only fear at this point is messing something up and surviving.

---

I'd also like to address my family, if you can call them that. I despise everything they stand for and I truly hate them, in a non-emotional, dispassionate and what I believe is a healthy way. The world will be a better place when they're dead--one with less hatred and intolerance.

If you're unfamiliar with the situation, my parents are fundamentalist Christians who kicked me out of their house and cut me off financially when I was 19 because I refused to attend seven hours of church a week.

They live in a black and white reality they've constructed for themselves. They partition the world into good and evil and survive by hating everything they fear or misunderstand and calling it love. They don't understand that good and decent people exist all around us, "saved" or not, and that evil and cruel people occupy a large percentage of their church. They take advantage of people looking for hope by teaching them to practice the same hatred they practice.

A random example:

"I am personally convinced that if a Muslim truly believes and obeys the Koran, he will be a terrorist." - George Zeller, August 24, 2010.

If you choose to follow a religion where, for example, devout Catholics who are trying to be good people are all going to Hell but child molestors go to Heaven (as long as they were "saved" at some point), that's your choice, but it's fucked up. Maybe a God who operates by those rules does exist. If so, fuck Him.

Their church was always more important than the members of their family and they happily sacrificed whatever necessary in order to satisfy their contrived beliefs about who they should be.

I grew up in a house where love was proxied through a God I could never believe in. A house where the love of music with any sort of a beat was literally beaten out of me. A house full of hatred and intolerance, run by two people who were experts at appearing kind and warm when others were around. Parents who tell an eight year old that his grandmother is going to Hell because she's Catholic. Parents who claim not to be racist but then talk about the horrors of miscegenation. I could list hundreds of other examples, but it's tiring.

Since being kicked out, I've interacted with them in relatively normal ways. I talk to them on the phone like nothing happened. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I like pretending I have a family. Maybe I like having people I can talk to about what's been going on in my life. Whatever the reason, it's not real and it feels like a sham. I should have never allowed this reconnection to happen.

I wrote the above a while ago, and I do feel like that much of the time. At other times, though, I feel less hateful. I know my parents honestly believe the crap they believe in. I know that my mom, at least, loved me very much and tried her best. One reason I put this off for so long is because I know how much pain it will cause her. She has been sad since she found out I wasn't "saved", since she believes I'm going to Hell, which is not a sadness for which I am responsible. That was never going to change, and presumably she believes the state of my physical body is much less important than the state of my soul. Still, I cannot intellectually justify this decision, knowing how much it will hurt her. Maybe my ability to take my own life, knowing how much pain it will cause, shows that I am a monster who doesn't deserve to live. All I know is that I can't deal with this pain any longer and I'm am truly sorry I couldn't wait until my family and everyone I knew died so this could be done without hurting anyone. For years I've wished that I'd be hit by a bus or die while saving a baby from drowning so my death might be more acceptable, but I was never so lucky.

---

To those of you who have shown me love, thank you for putting up with all my shittiness and moodiness and arbitrariness. I was never the person I wanted to be. Maybe without the darkness I would have been a better person, maybe not. I did try to be a good person, but I realize I never got very far.

I'm sorry for the pain this causes. I really do wish I had another option. I hope this letter explains why I needed to do this. If you can't understand this decision, I hope you can at least forgive me.

Bill Zeller

---

Please save this letter and repost it if gets deleted. I don't want people to wonder why I did this. I disseminated it more widely than I might have otherwise because I'm worried that my family might try to restrict access to it. I don't mind if this letter is made public. In fact, I'd prefer it be made public to people being unable to read it and drawing their own conclusions.

Feel free to republish this letter, but only if it is reproduced in its entirety."

(Personal note: This was extremely hard to read and for those of us who did not grow up with "Normal Rockwell" families there is much in this note that rings true)

While Lecrae, Flame, Shai Linne, Trip Lee, and the rest of the Reformed rap constellation are definitely spreading the light, can any of them shine like Lupe Fiasco does on this track?

Heart-rending, man. We oughta play this video in churches and classrooms.

If one of the guys on Reach or Cross Movement Records spit it like that, would they get any pressure to "Christianize" this song? Do songs by Christians have to always be "prescriptive" with the Gospel, or can they just be truthfully "descriptive" and therefore a benefit to man and pleasing to God? We know we got cats that can light it up about being saved by grace through faith in Christ, and thank God for that, but have any Christian rappers incorporated justice issues artfully into their music?

I mean, this is poignant stuff:

...Starting to use red markers on his work
His teacher say they know he's much smarter
But he's hurt...

...Now he's fighting in class
Got a note last week that say he might not pass
Ask me if his daddy was sick of us
Cause you ain't never pick him up
You see what his problem is?
He don't know where his poppa is
No positive male role model
To play football and build railroad models
It's making a hole you've been digging it
Cause you ain't been kicking it
Since he was old enough to hold bottles
Wasn't supposed to get introduced to that
He don't deserve to get used to that
Now I ain't asking you for money or to come back to me
Some days it ain't sunny but it ain't so hard
Just breaks my heart
When I try to provide and he say 'Mommy that ain't your job'...

Wow.

That's the claim of this study:

In the study of more than 1,000 unmarried young adults between the ages of 18 and 23, Wake Forest Professor of Sociology Robin Simon challenges the long-held assumption that women are more vulnerable to the emotional rollercoaster of relationships. Even though men sometimes try to present a tough face, unhappy romances take a greater emotional toll on men than women, Simon says. They just express their distress differently than women.

But I thought young men were only invested in video games, sports, and making money?

Simon suggests a possible explanation for the findings: For young men, their romantic partners are often their primary source of intimacy -- in contrast to young women who are more likely to have close relationships with family and friends. Strain in a current romantic relationship may also be associated with poor emotional well-being because it threatens young men's identity and feelings of self-worth, she says.

Men need to diversify their emotional portfolios.

While young men are more affected emotionally by the quality of their current relationships, young women are more emotionally affected by whether they are in a relationship or not, Simon says. So, young women are more likely to experience depression when the relationship ends or benefit more by simply being in a relationship.

There's apparently a strong binary function when it comes to women; either they got a man or they don't. But men don't experience the romantic relationship integers of 0 or 1; they exist in the decimals between? I think that's what this study is saying.

Who has some anecdotal evidence to bring to bear on this?

If I owned an NFL team and saw my future QB that happy to pose with Kid Rock, I would have cut him immediately.

Compare and contrast:

"Kurt was a man," another player said. "He'd get the crap knocked out him and never say [anything]. He was playing with half his body banged up, needing surgery, and he'd give you that Kurt, positive-attitude stuff. He was the real deal ... Matt? Whatever. He gets a hangnail and he's whining."

One friend I recently converted into comic fandom has found the medium to be a rich way to connect with his young son. Every boy needs his father to teach him how to dream of being a hero, sacrificing comfort, living with virtue, pursuing justice and truth. In fact, us fathers need to dwell on these things, too, so why not do it together?

IGN has some "Best of..." lists that won't get you the classics but can inform the uninitiated where to jump in and start enjoying this unique art form in current publications. You couldn't share most of the listed works with a child, but if your 6-year old son peruses Ralph Cosentino's age-appropriate Batman: The Story of the Dark Knight while you feast on, say, Frank Miller's Batman: Year One, you both will be thrust into a shared world that ultimately can display how Jesus is the true hero we all need.

"Confessions of Fatherhood"--Crossroads Tabernacle, The Bronx

Most evangelical churches foster environments where men are not free to struggle and, therefore, would not produce such a realistic conversation about fatherhood by men who know they need all that the church as to offer.

This Crossroads video, at the moment, receives the most views by 13-to-17-year-olds? Why? Teens long for this type of honesty and instead they are trapped in churches where the public persona is "I'm ok." Test this. Ask the leadership of your church to produce a video like this for your community for the sake of encouraging conversation and support of fathering and watch what happens?

Fatherlessness (physically absent and/of emotionally absent) is the greatest social problem in America outside of divorce. The stats:

Incarceration Rates. "Young men who grow up in homes without fathers are twice as likely to end up in jail as those who come from traditional two-parent families...those boys whose fathers were absent from the household had double the odds of being incarcerated -- even when other factors such as race, income, parent education and urban residence were held constant." (Cynthia Harper of the University of Pennsylvania and Sara S. McLanahan of Princeton University cited in "Father Absence and Youth Incarceration." Journal of Research on Adolescence 14 (September 2004): 369-397.)

Suicide. 63% of youth suicides are from fatherless homes (U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Bureau of the Census)

Behavioral Disorders. 85% of all children that exhibit behavioral disorders come from fatherless homes (United States Center for Disease Control)

High School Dropouts. 71% of all high school dropouts come from fatherless homes (National Principals Association Report on the State of High Schools.)

If your church or Christian organization is not specifically, directly, focused on building strong men and nurturing virtuous fathering you are not positioned to actually bless your community. To win the war we must build strong, virtuous men. Period. And, by the way, "preaching the gospel" alone doesn't build strong men. We send our kids to school because the gospel message is not enough and neither is the gospel enough to teach men how to live lives of virtue and wisdom and fulfill their roles at home and in local communities. Believing "the gospel" does not automatically translate into prudent application. Jonathan Edwards knew the gospel but did not apply it while he owned slaves. Do we even need to talk about pastors kids? The gospel is the beginning.

When churches boast, "we are here to bless the city" or "bless our community," and so on, I asked what are they doing to build virtuous men? (other can provide theological information). When I hear crickets I struggle to take them seriously because they seem to not be plugged into reality. This is justice.

I wrote about the Black marriage crisis at Black Christian News.com this week.

In the black community, the institution of marriage is essentially dead. While marriage in Western developed nations is declining in general, the black community and black women are being disproportionately affected. Unless marriage and family issues receive a higher priority, tackling other major problems, like declining high school graduation rates, will be like treading water in the Mississippi River 10 feet above a strong undercurrent.



ABC News recently cited a Yale University study reporting that 42 percent of African-American women have yet to be married, compared to only 23 percent of white women. By their early 40s, 31 percent of black women have never been wives compared to 9 percent of white women. An alarming 70 percent of professional black women are single. ABC also reported, citing the Journal of Blacks in Higher Education, that at least 60 percent of black students who receive college degrees are women. Black women also make up 71 percent of black graduate students. According to the most recent data, only 43.3 percent of black adult men are married compared to around 60 percent for white males.

Both the novel by Cormac McCarthy and film portray a haunting image of fatherhood. This story is driven by an essential fatherly quality: strength and protection that is not tyrannical but tender. Add it to your list of godly masculinity resources; the film would be easy to watch and discuss with some dudes. Here's the best trailer:

Yesterday, the Chicago Tribune newspaper included an insert with the photo above. The player depicted with a female figure skater's skirt and legs is Chris Pronger, the most annoying NHL player alive. The Trib was basking in Pronger's horrible game 5 that helped the Chicago Blackhawks win and put them on the verge of the Stanley Cup.

Not everyone was laughing:

"I'd like to see that editor out on skates. I'll take them one-on-one on the ice any day," three-time Olympic medalist Angela Ruggiero told The Associated Press. "They obviously have never seen women's hockey and are living in the dark ages."

Ruggiero found out about the poster via Twitter and expressed disappointment and anger that such demeaning portrayals of women and hockey are still being made.

Really? Is this an insult to Pronger or women?

This video had 438, 535 views. Why are peeps listening to this gamer?

This is the rise of Americana clothing and people's search for the "authentic".

From The Art of Manliness

In the 2010 Oscar-nominated film "Up in the Air," Vera Farmiga's character, Alex Goran (portentous masculine name), tells George Clooney's character as they are establishing their sexual relationship, "Just think of me as yourself...only with a vagina." This is precisely the same offer, even if unspoken, many "liberated" women are making men today.

In this gender-bending environment, is it any wonder that Clooney's character, who like all people is both victim and victimizer, makes the fatal mistake of rejecting the image of God for the image of a shark? Here is his philosophy:

Andrew said:

A man who works hard, is a good provider, and will defend the woman he loves at all costs is considered a chump by these types.

Not necessarily. The dark side of "game theory" is attested to by the players themselves, that running game soon becomes a vacuous, numbing, malforming experience. The man you describe can either be a chump or not.

The real question is: Are you a chump? If you are not aware of how feminism has eroded our social structures and made the hope of marriage, kids, provision into a seemingly poor gamble, then you probably also don't know how this systemic change has helped you act like a chump.

For instance, the phrase: "I gotta check with The Boss" should never be said by a husband when referring to his wife.

Godly masculinity is a big topic. It is part of the creation, fall, redemption, restoration biblical plotline and rooted in the Imago Dei. It is passed on by other men, ideally from father to son, but not always. More to come, hopefully...

****

We need Anthony to post on what he learned from Marcus Lutrell's Lone Survivor.

(full statement here)

Ok....I don't want to just go ahead and bash him or his wife, or judge harshly. God knows we are all as vulnerable as the next guy to fall. However, what really makes me uncomfortable is his claim to living a practically perfect life:

"I also want you, my very dear partner, to know that there was absolutely no immorality involved in my life or in Suzanne's, ever," Hinn tells his partners in the statement. "We both kept our lives clean and were totally committed to each other for 30 years of marriage."

and also, what gets to me is the fact that he's not even planning or thinking of taking time to work things out, seek forgiveness, restoration and reconciliation, but rather, he'll stop at nothing to "fulfill his calling".....

"I want you, as my partner in this ministry, to know that I am going to continue preaching the Gospel and praying for the sick as I have for 36 years. I will not allow anything to slow me down or stop me," he said.

This is so sad....thoughts?

Andrew asked an important question that many young men want answered:

Is it possible for a man be a Christian and not be labeled as a "beta"?

Read it in context, then let's hear some of your thoughts.

Every man in America must read this article titled "The New Dating Game" by Charlotte Allen and understand its implications:

Thanks to late marriage, easy divorce, and the well-paying jobs that the feminist revolution has wrought for women, the bars, clubs, sidewalks, and subway straps of nearly every urban center in America overflow every weekend with females, young and not so young, bronzed, blonded, teeth-whitened, and dressed in the maximal cleavage and minimal skirt lengths that used to be associated with streetwalkers but nowadays is standard garb for lawyers and portfolio managers on a girls' night out.

The reaction to this movement?

While it's a truism that the main beneficiaries of the sexual revolution are men, it is only some men: the Tucker Maxes, with the good looks, self-confidence, and swagger that enable them to sidle up successfully to a gaggle of well turned-out females in a crowded and anonymous club where the short-statured, the homely, the paunchy, the balding, and the sweater-clad are, if not turned away outside by the bouncer, ignominiously ignored by the busy, beautiful people within.

What about men who are frustrated at these new rules? Most either become passive victims or go on the offensive:

In the late 1990s, Mystery developed a precise and exacting "algorithm" of moves and routines--pre-scripted lines to be practiced in the field--that are virtually guaranteed (according to Mystery at least) to lure a female into your bed after just seven hours in her company from a cold turkey meeting in a public place.

But there's no way men could game women like that, right?

If it all sounds cheesy, tedious, manipulative, obvious, condescending to women, maybe kind of gay, it's because it is. But here's the rub: This stuff works.

What's the basis?

Pickup mentors are relying, consciously or sub, on the principles of evolutionary psychology, which uses Darwinian theory to account for human traits and practices.

But why would women respond to game?

Evolutionary psychology also provides support for a truth universally denied: Women crave dominant men. And it seems that where men are forbidden to dominate in a socially beneficial way--as husbands and fathers, for example--women will seek out assertive, self-confident men whose displays of power aren't so socially beneficial. This game of sexual Whack-a-Mole is played regularly these days in a culture that, starting with children's schoolbooks and moving up through films and television, targets as oppressors and mocks as bumblers the entire male sex.

So the "alpha" male take advantage. Who loses?

Some argue, though, that it is actually beta men who are the greatest victims of the current mating chaos: the ones who work hard, act nice, and find themselves searching in vain for potential wives and girlfriends among the hordes of young women besotted by alphas.

Who are these men?

Not surprisingly, the "seduction community," at least as it manifests itself in blog comments on seduction websites, skews heavily toward divorced men still furious at their ex-wives and single young men whose experience with absent or feminism-cowed fathers, or with young women who have not deemed them sufficiently exciting, has made them cynical about all relationships with the opposite sex.

Conclusion:

...every aspect of New Paleolithic mating culture discourages the sexual restraint once imposed on both sexes that constituted a firm foundation for both family life and civilization.

The Admiral:

Air Jordan:

What struck you? Would you rather be the greatest basketball player or a great man? What does each man pass on?

A year ago, the Mexican Roman Catholic Church proposed a way to end violence against women. They asked women to stop wearing "provocative" clothing because that is the cause, or at least one of the main causes, of violence against them. To this proposal, the reaction is what we see in the video...a group of women wearing miniskirts and shorts protested in front of the Cathedral against the absurdity of the proposal.
I wonder....as Christians...can't we offer better proposals than these? I mean....really....isn't there a more hollistic way to approach the issue than just blaming it on how much leg is shown? What does this say about men? About women? Thoughts?

From Publishers Weekly:

Dyson's descriptions of the women he meets are nearly novelistic: "I can still see her face: a honey chocolate, pie-shaped visage silhouetted by a shock of dark curls and lit by bright eyes that were lanterns of learning through which her students illuminated the first time to dark corners of black history," he writes of his fifth grade teacher in the book's opening sentence. But he goes on to give astute accounts, peppered with dialogue and compelling historical digressions, of the binds facing successful black women, who have to contend with racism in the workplace and the threat they represent to black men still struggling to find their own collective professional identities. . .The author sneaks a remarkable amount of history and political content into this energetic, clearly voiced title.

After spending the last few years quarantined from black (and Latina) women because of coincidental professional choices (won't do that again, ever) and in light of the CNN special on black America, black women continue to demonstrate amazing models of femininity that cannot be appreciated in the dominant culture.

We need more black and Latina sistas writing about femininity in traditional Christian circles because most of the stuff in print I could never give to my sister or mom because it's written either from a Eurocentric cultural perspective that is Bible proof-texted and then called "biblical" or it's the anti-male black/Latina feminist theology stuff.

Of course, Dyson's book could be written about Latinas and Latin American sistas who also have had to validate models of femininity that do not fit with dominant culture's paradigm.

"Beauty" is culturally defined. What makes a black or Latina women beautiful to black and Latino men often is inconceivable to Eurocentrists of the dominant culture.

I was recently at a black church where Dyson was speaking (over 1200 people in the crowd) and he mentioned why chose to marry a black woman (as opposed to others). The crowd erupted in cheers. I felt bad for any white people that might have been there that day.

Be careful around that soccer mom sitting next to you. She may just be a trained killer.

Courtesy of the Stiletto Spy School, ordinary women around the country are channeling their inner Bond girls -- learning everything from hand-to-hand combat to seductive dancing, SWAT team-style firearm skills to keeping a poker face among high rollers at casinos. Based in both Las Vegas and New York, the school puts women through vigorous weekend training sessions that come straight out of tongue-in-cheek Hollywood action thrillers -- but are designed to help its students feel confident and empowered in the real world. (full story here)

This should be fun....

Prince, shown above as a kid proud of his dad, took the crown Monday night and kept adding to his fame, but how long will he and his father, former MLB All Star Cecil Fielder, be unreconciled?

Cecil's financial woes came to light in 2004, during his divorce proceedings with Stacey. Each blamed the other for the family's financial ruin: Stacey pointed to Cecil's gambling; he cited her extravagant spending. Prince took Stacey's side, engaging in shouting matches with Cecil in the courtroom and over the phone. "Prince felt like he needed to protect his mother and become the man of the house, so we had some heated conversations," says Cecil. "Some bad things were said." Prince also accused his father of taking $200,000 of his signing bonus without permission. "My father is dead to me," he told The Detroit News in 2004.

Man, divorce crushes kids, especially when when it forces them to act like adults too soon. In 2007, after becoming the youngest player to ever hit 50 bombs in a season, instead of celebrating Prince was talking about getting to 52. Why?

"My dad had 51," Fielder said. "Then, he can't say anything."

Heart-rending. It sounds like Prince channeled his anger into performance on the field in the past, but that is an unsustainable way of life. Without forgiving his dad, Prince will eventually either break down and/or slowly poison his own relationship with his kids. This is the stuff Jesus died for, but is would dudes like Prince find God's grace in your church?

Truly, the UK needs the Gospel:

Men who go to church regularly prefer "proper macho songs" and feel uncomfortable with hugging and sitting in circles discussing their feelings, a survey for Christian men's magazine "Sorted" has found.

These guys need to be converted, stat.

Nearly 60 percent of respondents said they enjoyed singing, but were more motivated by "proclamational" hymns than sentimental-type songs.

Haven't these guys read the Bible verse proclaiming "Jesus, lover of my soul"?

Men were also uninspired by church discussion groups, with many suggesting that the pub would be a much better place for interacting.

Ok, enough sarcasm. Seriously, do small groups even work?

Over at World we're discussing if it's ok for husbands to tell their wives the content of their friend's accountability confessions. Some are arguing that because married couples are "one-flesh" when, for example, man "A" confesses sin and confidential struggles to man "B" (even if "B" is a pastor), that man "A" should be comfortable and expect that man "B" is going to tell his wife everything. In accountability and vulnerability contexts men should never withhold information about their friends to their own wives. If you can confess it to a pastor or good friend you should be able to tell his wife as well.

I know of situations where this has caused, and is currently causing, real tensions between the fellas.

Should wives and husbands tell each other everything? I am inclined to say no. Here's why: Suppose John and Sam have an accountability relationship with each other. John decides, based on the principle of "truth with his wife no matter what," breaches confidence and tells his wife about Sam's struggles without Sam's knowledge. John feels justified in telling his wife about Sam's sins and struggles because their marriage is built on honesty

The rest is here.

From Time Magazine:
If only it were the worst thing that a Roman Catholic priest has been caught doing. The Mexican celebrity magazine TVnotas recently published 25 paparazzi photos of the Rev. Alberto Cutie, the popular Miami Beach priest famous for his Spanish-language television and radio talk shows, cavorting amorously on a Florida beach with an attractive woman. Over a three-day period, the pictures also captured him kissing her in a bar. In one of TVnotas's "in fragranti" shots [Note to TVnotas copy editors: it's "in flagrante"] the woman wraps her legs around Cutie; in another, Cutie has a hand down her swimsuit, fondling her rear end.

So the now infamous and until a short while ago much loved charismatic catholic priest was caught by the paparazzi in Miami Beach with his Guatemalan girlfriend (a mother of 2) according to the New Miami Herald (who even published her home address). Many questions arise, celibacy will be questioned and once again, Christianity comes under attack as one of its leaders falls victim to sin and also to the unrealistic expectations we many times place on imperfect men.

CBS News Video of the story here.

I figured that if I was going to have my son circumcised, I needed to watch the surgery:

Are you kidding me? No. Thanks.

The medical arguments seem to equate circumcision to an early STD-prevention step, similar to HPV vaccinations for baby girls. But there's a better way to prevent STD's: find out and then teach your kid why the LORD created and is redeeming sexuality (as Anthony says, this goes way beyond "Don't have sex until...") Also, help churches and other parents with this so that your kid has some friends that get it and someone to marry in the future.

Man, John Piper's message yesterday was the hotness. He admitted he was a "mama's boy" as he touched on Paul's spiritual fatherhood of Timothy. Check it out on the Gospel Coalition website when they post it, but until then, here's an excerpt:

(Paul writing to Timothy)

My Beloved Child

And if you are wounded, or sorrowful, or timid, because your father was so absent or so passive in your spiritual upbringing, remember: I am your father. I don't call you "my beloved child" (1:2) for sentimental reasons, or merely because God awakened you under my preaching. I call you my beloved child, because I am right now being a father to you.

The grace that I am delivering to you right now is coming from your heavenly Father (1:2) and flowing through the words of your spiritual earthly father. That is what I am, and love to be. That is why I long to see you that my joy may be full. I love you. I never had a son. You never had a father who connected spiritually. That is who we are. This is a grace for us, son. Be strong in it (2:1). That's the first thing Paul says to deliver grace and power and courage to Timothy.

Update:

Here's the link to the video.

This past Wednesday at a correctional facility for minors in Guatemala, Jorge Winter, a teacher there, was brutally murdered by interns there. The full report here.

The interns took 3 people hostage and demanded that their conjugal visits and tv privileges restored (remember, this is a facility for MINORS) and as a result for not having their demands met, they chose Jorge because according to them "he had already lived too much", took him to a separate room, destroyed his head, opened his chest and tore out his heart.

Jorge was there as a teacher and also looking to minister to these young kids, most of them members of juvenile gangs. His goal was to preach the Gospel of Jesus Christ. Jorge died in the line of fire and left behind 4 children and a wife with terminal cancer.

There are still people in this world that are willing to go where we would never have the guts to go, and give their life for the sake of the Gospel.

Rest in peace Jorge. May the Lord keep those who are left behind and may the seeds planted bear much fruit.

This past Thursday (2-5-09), El Periodico (a Guatemalan newspaper), published an interview with a "Mara Salvatrucha" gang member caught red handed killing a bus driver after he refused to pay the extorsion (or war taxes as they call them) these gangs charge in order to keep the peace in Guatemala City's red zones.

The captured gang member is Anibal Juarez Lopez. He is 23 years old but claims to have 18. He lives in a "red zone" neighborhood, does not know his father and lives with his mother. He is a member of the Salvatruchas and he learned to fire an assault rifle when he was a boy.

I will transcribe the interview in the extended section of this post so that we might reflect a bit on the situation poor, young and undeducated fatherless guys go through in this part of the world.

Has a Christian high school athlete ever come at his recruiters like this?

"I basically told them, 'This is me,'" said Te'o, from Laie, Hawaii. "I'm LDS. I'm thinking of serving a mission, and I want that to be available to me. If that's not in the cards for your university, I have to respect that, but I have to consider others."

Just when you thought that the video documentary "Jesus Camp" went too far, you encounter Nezareth Castillo, the now 13 year old boy from the province of Trujillo in Peru who has been for quite some time (the video posted is a few years old) a child-star preaching sensation in South American megachurch circles.

Some people call him an alien, or even a midget posing as a kid. Others, more attracted by him, call him the greatest preacher of the 21st century. When interviewed by TV Chile when he was 8 years old, he expressed his wish to continue to preach the Word of God as he grew older and later even become president of Peru.

In all the videos I've seen of him, interviews, articles, etc., not once do I see either of his parents in the picture. Not once do I see him in the company of an older, wiser man that can teach him and guide him in the hard path of ministry. Instead, I see a young boy, speaking words well beyond his age or school level, arguing evolution ala "answers in Genesis" style, mesmerizing crowds of stupified church folk that jump up and down as they witness yet another irresponsible act of sacrificing the life of a young Christian on the altar of "leaderhip" or "annointing".

I ask myself if this is not simply Evangelical Child Abuse.....or as Paul once put it...despising our youth....throwing them onto the stage without guidance, time, experience and parenting. He is now 13....and we all know what begins to happen around that time. Let's just hope that after missing out on childhood, his teenage years do not destroy his life and that the Lord may keep him from temptation, from danger and especially, from blood thirsty, money loving preachers ready to make a quick buck by parading as a circus act a young boy that is definitely gifted, but is still that, a young boy.

From CNN:

While CTE in an ex-NFL player's brain may have been expected, the beginnings of brain damage in an 18-year-old brain was a "shocking" finding, according to Dr. Ann McKee, a neuropathologist at the Veterans Administration Hospital in Bedford, Massachusetts, and co-director of the CSTE.

Maybe I'll steer my son towards basketball...

"I've been married to my wife for 42 years, and never told her," he said, wiping tears away with a handkerchief. "I don't know how often in a week I think about that."--Dick Colon

Wow. This is a really difficult story.

MARIANNA, Florida (CNN) -- Leaning against his cane, Bryant Middleton shuffled toward the makeshift cemetery. Tears welled in his eyes as he leaned down to touch one of the crosses.

"This shouldn't be," he said. "This shouldn't be."

Thirty-one crosses made of tubular steel and painted white line up unevenly in the grass and weeds of what used to be the grounds of a reform school in Marianna, Florida. The anonymous crosses are rusting away but their secrets may soon be exposed.

When boys disappeared from the school, administrators explained it away, said former student Roger Kiser.

They'd say, "Well, he ran away and the swamp got him," Kiser recalled. Or, "The gators got him." Or, 'Water moccasins got him."

Kiser and other former students believe authorities will soon find the remains of children and teens sent to the Florida School for Boys half a century ago.

Read the rest of this sad story here.

Mr. Colon's quote up top is so common. Lots of guys have stuff they can't even tell their wives no matter how long they've been married. That's how bad it is. I wonder what gave Mr. Colon, and others, the courage to speak up now? All those years for trying to keep it down. . .whew

A comment yesterday from a regular Worldmag.com reader about what I write over at World:

# 41 BY Bianca 12.15.08 AT 5:08 PM

I'm sorry, but like Victoria and others, I get so tired of reading Bradley's "men's pain, secret pasts and desperate need for missional this and missional that" articles. It's creepy.

This is in response to my comments about men needing help.

And then continues to tell men to go "fix cars," "mow lawns," and "grow up." (see below)

I wrote this over at World Magazine last week. "Barracuda's" and "Cuthalion's" comments tell the story of most men in the church. My heart really goes out to guys like them. It's soooo tragic that the church remains very unsafe space for hurting men.

Do men hurt?

Written by Anthony Bradley
December 10, 11:15 AM

In the past few weeks, several conversations I've had highlight the fact that many churches are ill-equipped to deal with people who suffer emotional pain, especially men in pain. The band R.E.M. has a song "Everybody Hurts" with these opening lyrics:

When the day is long and the night, the night is yours alone,
When you're sure you've had enough of this life, well hang on
Don't let yourself go, 'cause everybody cries and everybody hurts sometimes

Everybody hurts because everyone is affected by the Fall. Sadly, for many men, pain is often dismissed, ignored, or confused with sin. Many men do sinful things not out of a rebellious spirit but to self-medicate real pain. We all find ways to deal with pain, and sometimes it opens the door for sin.

In challenging a former pastor's high school-aged son about his chronic pot smoking, I realized that he was using drugs as an escape. It was the best way he thought to deal with the relentless verbal abuse received from a father who thought it was a good idea to be harsh and emasculating with his son to teach him how to be a man. It didn't work. Telling this teen simply to "stop" smoking pot did not really address his real problem: He was bleeding.

I have heard stories of men who have lost teeth because of regular beatings at the hands of their fathers--men who heard phrases like "I'm going to kill you" (with a screwdriver pointed at the face). One 21-year-old recently told me about how his father used to put a knife to his throat to threaten him (this young man smoked a lot of pot, too). Moreover, if we really knew about the high percentage of men who were sexually abused growing up and developed a distorted view of sexuality, it would change the nature of men's ministry. Or imagine if men could be really honest about how angry they feel for reasons they cannot explain.

Read the rest here.

In a minor "aha" moment I realized that the piestistic/doctrinalist churches seem to be the LEAST safe churches for men to get help because men's issues are reduced to them behavior modifying sin ("just be good," "pray a lot", and so on). You're not a broken man, just a sinful one.

Not just for gym class.

James Vaznis, Boston Globe:

If it didn't run afoul of employment laws, principal Thomas DeVito would consider taking out the following newspaper advertisement: "Wanted: Male teachers."

The article goes on to mention:

At a time of increased emphasis on improving student achievement, especially in inner-city schools, education specialists are raising serious concerns that male flight from classrooms could be hindering boys' ability to learn.

Boys need women, but they also need to be rescued from the world of women and initiated into manhood. But are there any dudes coming out of college who are willing to deal with educational bureaucracy so that they can teach?

Devin Friedman, who writes for GQ, posted an ad on Craigslist to get black friends because he thought it was quite pathetic that all of his friends were white:

My Craigslist post said, among other things, "I'm a 36-year-old white guy. I grew up in a diverse neighborhood and have always gone to diverse schools. I've always had a decent number of black friends. That's changed over time. I work in the publishing industry, which is super white, and I've realized that my group of friends is getting whiter and whiter.... It's amazing to me that almost everyone I know has either black friends or white friends, but not both. We could have a black president, and still not have a very mixed country." Then I added a few more lines about don't let me show up at the bar and you've got a horse tranquilizer for my drink. I guess you could say the post ran a little long. I guess you could say I was worried about the possibility of a misunderstanding.

Why one would take out an ad on the Internet looking for a black friend is a legitimate question. Here's my answer:

I had a cocktail party the other night. A natural moment to look around at the demographics of your life. And I thought: Jesus Christ, there are a lot of white people in this room. I've always thought of the whiteness of my adult life as a temporary condition. Like somehow all these white people have been foisted on me; pretty soon it'll change; it's probably my wife's fault. But it's time to acknowledge that I've become a character in a Wes Anderson movie. . .

(he's got a sobering paragraph describing how married guys often trade their friends for the husbands of their wife's friend).

Young men are delaying adulthood as long as possible. Makes sense especially in a culture where no one really cares about forming boys into men and masculinity is viewed as something negative in general.

Newsweek has an article about the book Guyland:

In his new book, "Guyland," the State University of New York at Stony Brook professor notes that the traditional markers of manhood--leaving home, getting an education, finding a partner, starting work and becoming a father--have moved downfield as the passage from adolescence to adulthood has evolved from "a transitional moment to a whole new stage of life." In 1960, almost 70 percent of men had reached these milestones by the age of 30. Today, less than a third of males that age can say the same. Click Here

"What used to be regressive weekends are now whole years in the lives of some guys," Kimmel tells NEWSWEEK. In almost 400 interviews with mainly white, college-educated twentysomethings, he found that the lockstep march to manhood is often interrupted by a debauched and decadelong odyssey, in which youths buddy together in search of new ways to feel like men. Actually, it's more like all the old ways--drinking, smoking, kidding, carousing--turned up a notch in a world where adolescent demonstrations of manhood have replaced the real thing: responsibility. Kimmel's testosterone tract adds to a forest of recent research into protracted adolescents (or "thresholders" and "kidults," as they've also been dubbed) and the reluctance of today's guys to don their fathers' robes--and commitments. They "see grown-up life as such a loss," says Kimmel, explaining why so many guys are content to sit out their 20s in duct-taped beanbag chairs. The trouble is that the very thing they're running from may be the thing they need.

At least, that's what I hope. On the weekend this story goes to print I am getting married in a loft in midtown Manhattan, tying the knot at 27--the national average for guys. But by the way some of my single male friends reacted, you'd think I was appearing on an episode of "Engaged and Underage." "Maybe you're making a big mistake," said one buddy when I told him of the engagement. A 27-year-old technology consultant living in New York, he can't remember the names of the women he's slept with (let alone the number), and gives them nicknames like "Biff," "Dino" and "the Little Maniac." I'm happy to take in the night with him every few weeks, but still a little uncomfortable belting out "Sweet Caroline" to a bar full of people, and tickled pink when I'm back home with my girlfriend--soon to be wife. Guyland is not without its charms, but it pales next to what I have known with her over the past three years.

A bad attitude about marriage is not the only thing that's holding these guys back. A series of social and economic reversals are making it harder than ever to climb the ladder of adulthood. Since 1971, annual salaries for males 25 to 34 with full-time jobs have plummeted almost 20 percent, according to the Center for Labor Market Studies at Northeastern University. At the same time, women have crashed just about all the old male haunts, and are showing some signs of outpacing their husbands and boyfriends as breadwinners and heads of family, at least in urban centers. Last year, researchers at Queens College in New York determined that women between 21 and 30 in at least five major cities, including Dallas, Chicago and New York, have not only made up the wage gap since 1970--they now earn upwards of 15 percent more than their male counterparts. As a result, many men feel redundant.

Today's guys are perhaps the first downwardly mobile--and endlessly adolescent--generation of men in U.S. history. They're also among the most distraught--men between the ages of 16 and 26 have the highest suicide rate for any group except men above 70--and socially isolated, despite their image as a band of backslapping buddies.

Of course guys 16-26 have the highest suicide rate of any group of men. The combination of growing up in a gynocentric culture with passive men leaves most young men feeling hopeless regarding their own self-efficacy. "Why live if no one needs me."

Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men and Save the Males: Why Men Matter Why Women Should Care

"Guyland" got a couple of bad reviews because the book does not address the gynocentric culture that often dominates the lives of boys and young men.

(HT: Kyle)

A student fatally shot a 15-year-old classmate during a dispute Thursday at a Knoxville high school, police said, as other teenagers watched.

Police identified the victim as Ryan McDonald, a sophomore who lived with his grandmother and had alopecia, a condition that left him bald and the target of endless teasing.

The shooting happened in the Central High School cafeteria, Chief Deputy Bill Roehl said. Jamar Siler, 15, was charged with one count of first-degree murder and was held in a juvenile court facility, police spokesman Darrell DeBusk said. The nature of the dispute was not revealed.

Full story here.

Judging from the Siler's first name, "Jamar" I'm assuming, and I could be wrong, that he is black. We'll know for sure later but if Jamar is black, I hope this does not escalate race tensions.

Anybody remember back in the day when high school boys used to just fight--when the thought of killing a dude you had some static with never crossed your mind? In many cases it was reserved for the last day of school 'cause you couldn't get suspended. High school boys fighting is normal but all the killing's at various schools the last few years is "crazy" (as my friend JJ would say).

From Details Magazine:

He used to be envied. Now the perpetual bachelor is a social pariah.

-By Kate Hahn

It's 11 a.m. on Sunday, a time that during your single days was reserved for sex or the gym. But for your newly grown-up, coupled-up crowd it means . . . brunch. Now that most of your friends are over 35 and some have children, this kids-'n'-coffee routine is beginning to feel pleasantly familiar. Until he shows up--the guy who's never been married. He's late, fresh from the gym, and accompanied by a woman who's about the same age and build as the aspiring-actress waitress.

You used to envy this man. Sitting there with his hand on a 23-year-old's thigh while he sips his latte, he makes your banana-pancake domestic life feel lame. But lately that guy's beginning to seem--to you, your friends, and your wife--well, kind of creepy. His brazen rejection of the life stage that most of his peers have gotten to is starting to make it look like there's something wrong with him.

Joe (who asked that only his first name be used), a 39-year-old union organizer in New York who's never been married, has been getting disapproving looks from his friends ever since he turned 30. "There is nothing like a group of married people--especially with kids--when you come into their circle with a younger, thin woman," he says. "It's a terrible reaction."

"These guys get labeled playboy, loser, commitment-phobe," says Carl Weisman, author of So Why Have You Never Been Married? According to U.S. Census Bureau statistics, in 1980 only 6 percent of men between 40 and 44 had never been married; in 2008 it was 16 percent. But even though there are more of them around, men with long-term single status still have a hard time explaining their situation to potential dates, who see a guy entering middle age without ever having been married as damaged goods.

In fact, a man whose marriage failed spectacularly tends to arouse less suspicion than a straight, still-single 41-year-old. "If he's over 40, you would hope that he's divorced," says Janis Spindel, a high-end matchmaker in New York who gets calls from hundreds of single women asking for setups. Evidence that even unmarried men in their mid-thirties are suspect is in her fee structure: The up-front charge for guys under 35 is $25,000; for those 35-plus it's $50,000.

If you ask a guy in his late thirties or early forties why he isn't married, he'll have his answer--you could call it his defense--ready. For some, the rationale is a self-fulfilling prophecy. Joe tends to date women younger than he, who are less likely to want to settle down than those his own age. "I would still like to have kids," he says. "But if I date someone who's 40, it's going to be chaos, a lot of pressure if we want kids--because we have to start that immediately, and even then you're not guaranteed. . ."

In fact, seeing friends' marriages fail can make never-wed guys more gun-shy. Which brings us to another stereotype: that these guys are afraid of being saddled with a less-than-perfect match. Eric Mark, 41, a partner at a national consulting firm in Los Angeles who last year was the best man at a friend's second nuptials (after having been a guest at the first), estimates that 70 to 75 percent of the weddings he's attended have resulted in broken marriages.

Read the rest from Details Magazine.

This is article is so true. It would make a great documentary or something. The gun-shy thing is dead-on. Between the epidemic of wives cheating and guys marrying women devoted to emasculating their husbands daily I've got lots of friends all over the country who have become misogynists, and that's just among my church-going friends. For the non-church goers it's even worse. I've got one friend in town here who is a serial womanizer, women see him doing it and they still line right up? I don't get it.

I've also know a couple of recently divorced guys (wives cheated) and they've got women nearly beating down their doors once the word got out. this much attention when he was single. Some guys have basically concluded that the best pick-up line for women nowadays is, "I just got divorced."

To date, about 48% of black men fall in the never-married category. CNN talks about it here.

Why won't men disclose to their close friends how much they earn post-college age years? I don't understand why salary is such a big secret or what the big deal is? If you want to see your closest friend zip his lip fellas, ask him how much he makes. I don't get it. A guy will talk about struggles with sexual perversion before he will disclose to his closest friends how much he makes. Why?

I recently tested this out and the guy went dead silent. I didn't press it but it was hilarious!! (And we have discussed more vulnerable things than that, I thought). I don't get why that's such a big secret?

Why is accountability, vulnerability, and openness not financial? I don't get this at all. It's so weird. I just don't care if my closest friends know how much I make. I want to be financially accountable to them as well. "Anthony, are you sure you can afford that?"

[Times photo: Brian Cassella]

From USA Today 7/23/08:

Churches nationwide are fretting and sweating to reel men into their sanctuaries on Sundays. Women outnumber men in attendance in every major Christian denomination, and they are 20% to 25% more likely to attend worship at least weekly.

Although every soul matters, many pastors say they need to power up on reaching men if the next generation of believers, the children, will find the way to faith. So hundreds of churches are going for a "guy church" vibe, programming for a stereotypical man's man.

"I hear about it everywhere I go," says Brandon O'Brien, who detailed the evolution of the chest-thumping evangelism trend this spring in Christianity Today.

This is such a broken record now for many of us who are aware of the crisis. I'm not even going to really comment because I've been talking about this here now for YEARS and, strangely, I get the same push back "what do you mean? I don't see that? Do you expect churches to be some macho, jock sports club, blah, blah." Other Christians and non-Christians, Protestants and Catholics, are looking at the churches in America and asking, "why don't many men attend them?" (esp. men ages 18-30). Many Conservative evangelicals (especially Reformed ones it seems) are still mostly asleep at the switch on this one. And it's so bad that most men are like, "huh, there's a problem?"

Don't ask me to explain or elaborate but AGAIN, here are the books: The Feminization of the Church, by Kaye AsheThe Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, by Leon Podles. Why Men Hate Going to Church, by David Murrow. How Women Help Men Find God, David Murrow.

As Podles reminds us about most men's confused masculinity in the church:

These are the 10 states with the highest levels of adult obesity, according to a 2007 survey by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

1. Mississippi, 32.0 percent
2. Alabama, 30.3
3. Tennessee, 30.1
4. Louisiana, 29.8
5. West Virginia, 29.5
6. Arkansas, 28.7
7. South Carolina, 28.4
8. Georgia, 28.2
9. Oklahoma, 28.1
10. Texas, 28.1
Source: Associated Press

ATLANTA, Georgia (AP) -- The South tips the scales again as the nation's fattest region, according to a new government survey. Overall, about 26 percent of to the CDC's telephone survery were obese.

More than 30 percent of adults in each of the states tipped the scales enough to ensure that the South remains the nation's fattest region. Colorado was the least obese, with about 19 percent . . .

Why is the South so heavy? The traditional Southern diet -- high in fat and fried food -- may be part of the answer, said Dr. William Dietz, who heads CDC's nutrition, physical activity and obesity division.

At first glance, I thought this was the AP Poll's Top 25 college football rankings. Can anyone out there link us up to a sermon in one of these states where a preacher dude is talking about this problem? Just curious.

More and more young, single men are getting vasectomies instead of using condoms according to a depressing and fascinating article in Details Magazine. Actually, this isn't the first time we've seen a story like this. It's actually a real, growing movement. The Today Show did a huge story in this back in Nov. 2007.

"I was interviewed for this article. I paid in cash so didn't have to show any ID. I'm single so didn't require a wife's signature. I love kids, just don't want to raise any- I'd rather live my life like I've been doing. Can always adopt later in life too. If you can afford it then go for it-never have to worry about birth control again," says "areseepee" Jul 15, 2008 12:08:17 AM

Young, single men terrified of unwanted pregnancies, and sick of condoms, are turning to vasectomies for liberation.

-By Richard Morgan, Details Magazine

Sex scared Marcus Whitlock. It was a tense, fraught ordeal. He couldn't get through it without being gripped by panic that it would lead to pregnancy. Then one day in April, Whitlock, an athletic 23-year-old college student in Illinois, says he walked into a doctor's office, told the receptionist he was 30, and had an hour-long consultation. A week or so later he returned, paid $850, and walked out after a 15-minute vasectomy. The way Whitlock saw it, he was free. He wouldn't have to worry anymore about whether his partner was on birth control. . .

[V]asectomies are becoming the province of young, single men who claim to be tired of worrying about their partners' vigilance with the Pill. So rather than use condoms--less than ideal in terms of pleasure and, compared with vasectomies, which have an estimated 1 in 2,000 failure rate, only so-so on the contraception front--they're opting for a permanent fix.

Guys just don't want to have kids. It kind'a makes sense when sex is often described primarily as a unitive activity. And outside the church, sex is like nothing more than holding hands and kissing. I'm amazed by the growing "I don't want any kids" movement among men.

We're also seeing a growing trend in women who trick their boyfriends into getting pregnant by lying about birth-control.

As convenient as it may be to paint all young men with vasectomies with a broad brush, your stereotyping falls short. My husband had one when he was 25, after he realized he would never want children. At that point, why risk the high rates of failure of other forms of birth control?--MothEffect, Jul 15, 2008 6:22:21 PM

Here is the full article in Details (caution: if you're used to reading secular things the photo of the scissors may offend).
There's a national organization for people that don't want kids by choice called, "No Kidding."

"Masculine behavior is acceptable as long as the person engaging in it is not actually male."

Fellas, you gotta read this article in Salvo Magazine about the media's assault on masculinity. Seriously, you'll see so many parallels in our current gynocentric evangelical church that it'll make you think for sure. The assault on masculinity in the gynocentric evangelical church is bearing bad fruit as well. Boys are checking out completely. On Sunday, I was at a large suburban church whose youth activities are always attended by at least, yeah, at least a two-to-one, girl /guy ratio. Among the most insidious assaults on boys that I've seen around the country is in the Christian school sector--gynocentrism tends to be the Christian school norm these days for some reason. I'm not sure how that happened? I was at one Christian school and a group of boys pulled me aside and told me that they believed that, their mostly female faculty, "hated boys." If a boy raises his hand in class he's likely not to get called on at that school because he's not a girl and so on. The high school guys see what's being done to them but are powerless to do anything or get help. I was so angry.

Here's a quote from the article titled "Girly Men."

Thus, the war against boys seems to have created three main character patterns for the adult male of our time: sensitive guys who want to please women; weenies and dorks who want only to be left alone to drink beer and play video games with their dork buddies; and thugs who, in rebellion against their unnatural education, are perpetually concerned with proving their toughness through increasingly loutish behavior. There are, of course, examples of decent, positively masculine males in the culture, but they are becoming increasingly overwhelmed by the products of educational and cultural feminization.

Here's the rest of the article. Fellas, all you should post this on your blog and e-mail it to all your friends, etc. This type of feminization is what your children (when or if you have them) will see in the future in the media and confuse as normal. This feminization is so pervasive that most guys don't even notice the subtle assault on masculine identity in every sphere of Western society.

Some have argued that the three types mentioned about is the exactly the kind of men that boys are raised to be in the church. It seems that the church focuses on producing "sensitive guys" and "weenies and dorks." Could you imagine an article about men in the church with this title, "Church Men: Sensitive Guys, Weenies and Dorks?" It would cause such a stir (haha)--especially from the sensitive guys, weenies and dorks, and the women who want to keep men in those categories. And to even challenge such a pathetic pattern will get you charged with trying to make men "macho" or you'll be called "patriarchal." In fact, most men who are aware of the current crisis are simply trying to save themselves and their sons from the church's gynocentric ethos so that they can be the kind of men called to serve the priorities of the Kingdom well.

Fellas, read this article. Also, Salvo is one of the best new Christian magazines out there. It's worth a subscription!

The photo above is taken from the pathetic show "Big Bang Theory" which showcases two of the most emasculated dudes (among the many) on TV today.

(JR, thanks for sending me the article)

For more on the gynocentrism of the church read The Church Impotent: The Feminization of Christianity, by Leon Podles. And for those bothered by Podles' use of the word "feminization" your beef is really with Kaye Ashe who, in 1998, published the book "The Feminization of the Church?" Ms. Ashe praises feminization saying, "The church's feminization has begun. The process will be complete when women's voices, gifts, energy, and creativity are given free rein, and when their power and authority in the church are commensurate with their service and responsibility." Ms. Kaye hopes that the church be feminized have been realized in new ways a decade later after the manifesto.

CNN Health has a list of five symptoms men should never ignore. The first is chest pains and number two is depressing:

2. A big belly

"Belly fat is the worst fat you can have," says Dr. Harry Fisch, a professor of clinical urology at Columbia. "A big belly is a sign a man has low testosterone levels. And the lower the testosterone, the greater the risk of diabetes and coronary artery disease."

While a woman might go on every diet in the world to lose weight, men often have a different solution: They lower their belts.

"I've had men say to me, 'See, my pants size hasn't changed.' I say, 'Baloney. Your belly is still there. It's just above your belt,' " says Simon.

Fellas, you can get the rest of the list here.