Musculinity, Emasculation and the Masculine Soul: Part 1

God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them. Gen. 1:27I received an email recently asking why I don’t quote or recommend the author John Eldredge more often.  Though I’ve enjoyed and benefited from much of what John has written, I’ve been hesitant to endorse his 'constructive' view of masculinity.  To be sure, it’s an attempt at a corrective, as John reaches down off his cliff to pull the emasculated, “nice” Christian out of the abyss of genderless asexuality.  I get that.  And I agree with John when he writes:The problem with men, we are told, is that they don't know how to keep their promises, be spiritual leaders, talk to their wives or raise their children.  But, if they will try real hard they can reach the lofty summit of becoming...a nice guy. That's what we hold up as models of Christian maturity: Really Nice Guys.Yet, Eldredge proposes a different model that I find to be a stretch when thinking about biblical masculinity.  It’s man as wilderness warrior.  It’s Donny Deskjob finding himself depressed and dominated in his relationships moving to the Denver mountains in order to find his inner Wild man, a noble nod to the ancient rituals of initiation, but a distracting divergence from a biblical theology of manhood, which finds God not in the wild but descending on man by his Spirit right where he is.  We’ll get more into the strengths and weaknesses of male initiation in a future installment, as well as the radical revolution of God’s locale in the sending of the Spirit.Then, there are things too ridiculous to mention, but we must anyway.  In his great Christianity Today article, Brandon O’Brien analyzes the men’s movement, talking about the organization GodMen, who provide men with an experience of masculinity which includes “videos of karate fights, car chases, and songs like "Grow a Pair!" whose lyrics read:We've been beaten downFeminized by the culture crowdNo more nice guy, timid and ashamed …Grab a sword, don't be scaredBe a man, grow a pair!And then there are the critics of an increasingly feminized church, pastors and theologians who find that the slippery slope of liberalism follows the women.  The rhetoric is usually strong and dramatic, calling "dudes" to follow a Warrior Jesus.  What I find particularly troubling is the public use of language describing men as "sissies" or "limp-wristed" or "effiminate" or "queer," language that has no place coming from pastors or theologians who follow a Messiah who was found, most often, among the outcasts of society.  Having counseled many men who wrestle with their gender identity, I've seen the power of this kind of mocking, shaming, and emasculating language, a power to bring a man to the brink of suicide.I remember talking to a man at a men's retreat.  The language of "real men" permeated the weekend - "real men are rugged," "real men are competitive," "real men won't shy away from a fight."  The testosterone ran high that weekend.  If you didn't play paintball or throw a football with a tight spiral, you were shyly watching and wondering if God had made a mistake with you.  So it was with Randall, who contemplated leaving because he didn't fit in.  Randall was gay, and there was no place for him in this group of real men.  Randall would fight suicide, in large part, because he was all alone, a stranger among Christians, a movement that began among the marginalized.This clarion call to men, however, is not new, nor is it an evangelical Christian phenomenon.  Bly, Keen, Gilmore, Hicks, Levant, Gillette and Moore, and others have been challenging men to inhabit the ancient ways of the warrior for three decades.  Prior to that, however, the Muscular Christians of the English Victorian Era brought about radical changes to public schools, and men’s secret societies such as the Masons and Oddfellows.  A public school manual envisioned men “going through the world with rifle in one hand and Bible in the other.” Men were defined by their inherent superiority, by their work, by their larger contributions to society, and in contrast to the clear weaknesses of women, evidenced in their inferiority in sport and in physical combat.  Curiously, the real man was defined as the hunter, the adventurer, and the national patriot, categories with extraordinary resonance in the Christian men’s movement today.I call this version of masculinity musculinity. After doing some extensive research in 2006 while working on my Ph.D. in Psychology, I saw the modern (re)emergence of wilderness masculinity in many, many writings.  For those skeptics who’d point the finger at prominent evangelicals in the men's movement, the seminal thinking was done by those outside the camp, pioneered in large part by esteemed mythologist Joseph Campbell and the Harvard poet and scholar Robert Bly.  Musclinity was not necessary a theologically conservative invention, but a deliberate movement among prominent intellectuals to expose the futility of a feminized culture.  For those fundamentalist Christians who continually lament cultural accommodation, I’d challenge them to consider their intellectual influences.That said, there is an equal and opposite extreme.  On the one side, we find the musculine man (no, not the Michelen man).  On the other, we find the emasculated man.  Of course, the old-fashioned notion of emasculation refers to the removal of the male genitalia, something the GodMen, as we’ve seen, clearly disagree with when they sing “Grow a pair.”  In the world of sociology, this is called ‘feminization’.  But we all know what this really means.  Many men tell stories of being called a sissy or a fag.  Homosexual men fear coming out because of the torment they’d experience.  A man I knew confided in me at a men’s retreat that he’d dare not avoid participation in the paintball wars and locker room conversation for fear of being exposed as effeminate.  The emasculated man looks at John Wayne, Ronald Reagan, and James Bond and wonders, “Why am I so different?”  It’s a lonely place for him, but it’s also a place where many men reside.The emasculated man, I’d argue, has had his genitalia cut off, figuratively at least.  No doubt, he continues to use his primary sexual apparatus in procreation.  But, he is embarrassed to be a man, at one level.  But, this existential reality leads some to call for an an end to all gender talk, spurring an intellectual movement among Christians and non-Christians alike for androgyny.  In a recent CNN Beliefnet blog, a writer advocated for an androgynous future, a genderless culture where the uniqueness of male and female fades into the background, a distant remnant of an earlier and less progressive time.At a recent conference on a Christian view of marriage, several couples were frustrated by the speaker’s distinctions between men and women.  “We’re human,” one man commented.  “Gender distinctions only serve to forward an agenda which prioritizes a majority over a minority.”  And his life served to demonstrate this lack of distinction.  He works and she works.  He cooks and she cooks.  And perhaps eventually, with scientific advances, he’ll bear children and she’ll bear children.  In today’s parlance, he’s a metrosexual.  He’s a trendy, sophisticated, culturally-advanced human.  And he hopes that one day he'll live in a genderless society, a sign of true progress.But I worry that his passion for being a genderless human clouds his identity as a unique man.  This neutered identity is not, in fact, more human, but ultimately less human.  It robs him of becoming a wonderfully particular manifestation of God’s image.  He pushes back, though, citing the Apostle Paul in Galatians 3:28 in his oft-cited “there is no longer slave nor free, Jew nor Gentile, male and female,” God’s vision of androgyny.  But Paul not so much has in mind the erasing of male and female identity as much as the distorted stereo-typing that prevented full inclusion, full equality, full humanity.      Genesis 1:27 reads, “God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”  The fullness of God is caught up, in some mysterious way, in both male and female, living out their unique identities in the dance of relationship.  The emasculated man, at some level, fears his masculinity, though.  He has tucked his head in the sand, withdrawn into his shell, cut off his genitalia.  While the musculine male displays a kind of hyper-masculinity, the emasculated man denies his masculinity.  And both extremes are distortions, robbing a male of both the strength and vulnerability which enables him to live out his call and identity uniquely in the world.In the next post, I'll offer a picture of man as the image of God - as both relational and royal.  This, I'll suggest, gets at the heart of masculinity.  No, not the wilderness man.  No, not the genderless human.  Man...relational and royal.  Stay tuned.