Originally published at Pushing Rubber Downhill on April 4, 2021. You can purchase Adam’s books here.
The defining characteristic of men today is that they are effeminate, and effeminacy is defined as an attachment to pleasure. It is the opposite of sacrifice and taking responsibility, which are the two main hallmarks of being a man. I get asked quite a bit by men on what they should be doing to improve themselves as men. Well, the first thing that you need to do is to wean yourself from your attachment to pleasure. This attachment obstructs your ability to develop as a man, as it is through the hardships that we face as men and the great things that we achieve by the sweat of our own brow that enable us to become men.
Remember the age old truism – men make themselves; women find themselves.
So on this Easter Sunday which is a symbol of rebirth and the beginning of growth, let us examine some of the ways in which you can break free from your attachment to pleasure and to begin your development as a man.
We need to first consider the various forms of pleasure that men engage in today. The obvious one is the physical act of pleasure, whether that be from sex or from other things such as food or wine. One of the great pushes by the counterculture movement in the sixties was the embracement of the hedonistic goal of free love. This in of itself was an inversion and thus a perversion of actual love, a good reminder and yet another example of the truism that everything that our enemies declare is the opposite of what is claimed.
The pursuit of sex outside of marriage for the sole benefit of personal pleasure is the mark of being effeminate. A man is chaste. That is because a man is in control of himself. If you are unable to control yourself in this sense then you are enslaved to your own passions. Such a man is not trustworthy on multiple levels.
An extension of this is the act of self pleasure which is in a state of being completely out of control today with the near ubiquitous use of porn among young men. This is connected with another avenue of pleasure which is that provided by the use of technology. At least in the past if you wanted to imbibe in pornography you would have had to mooch your way across town to an outlet of dirty books and the like. Whereas today, you can engage in your pleasure of porn through the pleasure of technology. It is a double helping of an attachment to pleasure. Perhaps while viewing your porn on your brand new technology device which you ordered from the internet and thus did not have to leave home to go through the struggle of physically purchasing, you can simultaneously consume various snacks and drinks from the comfort of your couch, or even in your bed.
Don’t get me wrong; controlling yourself in this way is very hard, but that is the entire point. If you want a quick answer for how to be a man then this would be it. Every time you are faced with a decision, big or small, and there is an easy option and a hard option, then the hard option is about being a man. Everything else is effeminacy.
I think that a great factor in the willingness of populations to succumb to government tyranny over the Covid lockdowns, and by population I am talking specifically about men who are supposed to take the responsibility of leading, is due to the fact that men are addicted to pleasure and that the lockdowns only encourage and support that effeminate behavior. It is not about living in fear so much as luxuriating in the fact that the government is actively pushing men to revel in their attachments to pleasure. In other words, your attachment to pleasure is now a state sanctioned virtue.
Men today are not just encouraged but brow-beaten into being in touch with their emotions. Men are told that women love men who are emotional. Women actually despise emotional men but they go along with the narrative because women also like to be in control and we are not the only ones fallen in this world of today. An emotional man is an effeminate man. He will collapse under pressure. He will constantly search for the easy way out and he will use his emotions that he is in touch with as a convenient and ready excuse. In other words, he will avoid all responsibility, including the responsibility of growing up. This is how you can find men in their 40s and 50s who are still reading comic books and agonising over the latest Star Wars abomination. Once again, this type of man is untrustworthy.
Emotions for men are a pleasure because the attachment to following emotion embraces the avoidance of responsibility. At its darkest heart is the emotion of being happy. But men are not here to be happy. We are here to sacrifice ourselves to God. Thus, the attachment to the pleasure of emotions renders a man impotent in regards to his masculinity.
All of these attachments to various pleasures makes men soft. Physically soft, intellectually soft, and spiritually soft. If you examine the lockdowns imposed by Western governments, two of the major areas affected have been churches and sports and recreation. This has been catastrophic for masculinity. Men need to be physically hard and spiritually hard. We go to a real gym to battle with ourselves to get physically strong. We do it because it is hard and thus it is the right thing to do. We go to a real church to battle with ourselves in a spiritual sense so that we may become closer to a state of grace. Doing these things are not easy. But once again, that is the point. It is the level of self-discipline that we posses that marks us out as men.
I am not advocating a life of complete abstinence here. Men need to relax every now and again and enjoy what life has to offer. But using something as a disposable tool is one thing; being attached to something in an emotional or physical sense is another thing entirely.
In essence, if we want to get to the very heart of masculinity, it is the pursuit of truth regardless of the outcome for ourselves as men. As men we will tolerate nothing less than the truth. This is what the concept of self-sacrifice is all about. The government lockdowns are not truth. This is why the submissive nature of most men in the face of this type of untruth is so insidious. It is yet another collective failure of men on top of all of the other collective failures over the last several decades. We will be lucky if we get out of this with just the 70 years of communism that Russia had to go through for its failures. Then again, perhaps the only way for men to escape their attachment to pleasures will be to have those pleasures most cruelly taken away from them.
