If men want to perform their best, they must be under threat. If women want to perform their best, they need to be removed from threats.
This is based on actual differences in the ways that men and women are designed to respond to stress. Everyone knows the language of fight-or-flight as a response to threat. The human body, when faced with a threat, produces extra adrenaline so that the body can be ready to either fight the threat or run from it. What is less known is that this is a primarily male response to threat. Women generally respond to threats in a different way, referred to by some as “tend-and-befriend.” When faced with threats, women will usually tend to their own children (or their own “tribe,” by extension) and ally with others (“befriend”) in order to insulate themselves from the threat.1 If you consider that women are generally less able to overcome a serious physical threat and are made even more vulnerable due to pregnancy and children, this is a more reasonable way to protect themselves than attempting to fight or flee.
In short, women are set up to mitigate the severity of threats through relationships and support but not to overcome them, while men are set up to overcome threats by confrontation or to avoid them if they are too formidable to overcome. Women are good at living with threats, but men are built to step up and remove threats.
For example, how do people deal with the ordinary threat of a schoolyard bully? Girls tend to handle this kind of thing by traveling in packs or spreading rumors about the bully in order to make physical aggression less likely in the first place. Boys tend not to make any changes proactively, but are much more willing than girls to stand up and face the bully when physically confronted or just avoid the threat when it arises. The same relational tactics attain in the world at large.
For a biblical example, you see this in David and Abigail (1 Samuel 25). David, in dealing with an unreasonable refusal of hospitality by Nabal, rises quickly to a confrontation. Abigail perceives the threat, steps in, offers David a gift in order to mollify his anger, and makes clear the implications of such an attack on the household as a whole. She finds a social solution to a physical danger, and successfully mitigates the threat. In the end, she marries the threat, making what was a danger into a strength.
Even today, you can see the difference in the manner in which men and women respond to a child who claims to be LGBTQ (or claims some identity which is considered undesirable by the parents – liberals responding to a child coming out in support of Trump goes this way as well). The visceral response from a man is usually to express strong disapproval, attempt to dissuade the child, and finally, to distance the family from the erring child. The visceral response from a woman is to find ways to maintain the relationship with the child, even if they do disagree with his or her aberrant belief.
This often means women are less condemning than men, even if their position on the issue is otherwise identical. The long term consequences are predictable as well. The longer this relational rift continues, the more likely it is that the mother will compromise her position in order to preserve the relationship and that the father will become more aggressive and frustrated with the child. The mother mitigates the threat, and the father tries to remove it. Even in the examples we have given, you can see that the various strategies are sometimes more or less accommodated to the issue at hand.
Now consider that we live in a society where the presence of immediate physical danger has been minimized almost to the point of nonexistence. Women begin to see the male response to threat (increased aggression and intensity) as a problem rather than a potential solution. This leads to the male response (and men, in turn) being universally condemned, while the female response is held up not only as desirable but necessary. Schools (virtually always run by women) accommodate kids claiming to be LGBTQ in extreme ways, historically solid churches drift toward more and more liberal positions as women call more of the shots, and DEI becomes the regnant ideology of the entire country. You have a system where conviction and truth are always sacrificed for the sake of relationship and accommodation. The drift is inevitable. Nature guarantees it.2
Unfortunately, this will continue as long as men don’t need to be men. The extraordinary prosperity and state-sponsored social safety net of our day mean that no one is ever under serious economic threat. Advancing socially in a safe, prosperous society is essentially a feminine game – a game that rewards tending-and-befriending rather than fighting-or-fleeing. The men who succeed are often those who are more relationally skilled and more feminine in affect.
Perhaps this would even be fine if we had reached the end of history, where prosperity was forever assured, the money would never run out, and we all found real satisfaction in unending indulgence, but you and I know absolutely none of these things are true, natural, or even good.
I wish it were enough to change society back towards sanity when we insist that “this isn’t the way God designed it.” I wish it were enough to paint men an inspiring picture of what biblical masculinity is and all the myriad ways it would benefit them and please their God. I’m glad some godly men are doing both of these things, but much of the encouragement about biblical masculinity today fails to recognize that men will not be men unless they have to be men. Inspiration or aspiration will only ever elevate a small segment of men, most of whom already have substantial spiritual, relational, and economic resources and simply need a definite form into which to pour those gifts. Most men, who are beaten down, deeply discouraged, and lacking in strength and gifting will not be helped by these approaches. When all the incentives in society align to make men into women, men will become women, and no harangue will make any difference except in the margins. We have to be about changing the incentives, or the dystopian predictions are more and more likely to come true.
None of this minimizes the need of a revival of Christianity in our country. My attempt here is to suggest reforms we ought to consider to make our communites more righteous and biblical. It would be no good having a Christian nation if that nation still preserved unnatural and perverse laws and incentives.
Men need to be under threat to live as God designed them to live, and that means that the world needs to become a more dangerous place (or rather that we need to recognize the danger that has always been there, but has been suppressed in the West for so long). “Fight-or-flight” is part of how God designed men, and that means we need clear fights to which we give ourselves that aren’t playacting. Video games and CrossFit are no real substitutes. Similarly, we need to make sure we are carving out spaces where women can tend-and-befriend, build strong relational networks, and do so without exposing themselves to predators and liars. When it all works, it’s remarkably symbiotic. Women need protectors and men need a cause to stand up and protect.
For those of you conjuring visions of a sort of hellish dystopia, I don’t believe that we ought to either desire or presume that kind of world is necessary. It does mean, however, that we need to push for societal conditions that are substantially less comfortable. Proverbs 16:26 says, “A worker’s appetite works for him; his mouth urges him on.” Everyone with an ounce of sense knows we ought to work, but we will not unless we are pushed to work. Unless there is a real threat of hunger at hand in the case of our failure, no positive aspiration will be adequate. The removal of the state-provided social safety net at a large scale might seem like chamber of commerce republicanism (and is, if we are just trimming around the edges), but it is the kind of move which, if you really gutted social services thoroughly, may begin to move men en masse into a set of sane incentives.
We do some simple homesteading. It’s just a few sheep, chickens, rabbits, gardening, etc…, but it’s been fantastic for our family. In many ways, it forced me to become more of a man and take ownership of my property and my household for the sake of God’s kingdom. It was, however, a choice – not a necessity. Calling everyone to move out of suburbia, grab some land, and raise some chickens is not going to solve our societal dysfunction in any measurable way, even if it is great for those who can do so. It’s playing around the edges, against the incentives, and amounts to a luxury choice.
Unnatural, ungodly, rebellious societies will not persist. If we want to live in a saner world, let’s start with the basics and get back to a world where the lazy go hungry. It will require that men become men again, and not just as a hobby or a fetish.
- Taylor, S. E., Klein, L. C., Lewis, B. P., Gruenewald, T. L., Gurung, R. A. R., & Updegraff, J. A. (2000). Biobehavioral responses to stress in females: Tend-and-befriend, not fight-or-flight. Psychological Review, 107(3), 411–429. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.107.3.411 ↩︎
- Don’t read this as suggesting that punching harder is always what is necessary either. Abigail did what was right – David did not. Only by receiving the correction did David deal with the crisis correctly. Some conservative pundits, in trying to move as far from a feminine response as possible, become a caricature of masculinity when they always feel the need to leap to aggression and confrontation. ↩︎
