Weakness is NOT a Virtue
Tonic Masculinity Series
How far we have fallen.
Western society has embraced the antithesis of true manhood, encouraging males to be easily offended, embrace dependency, and identify with their weaknesses rather than overcoming them. It has attacked masculinity and manliness as something dangerous, harmful, and toxic.
A March 12, 2021 article in Psychology Today by Silva Neves encourages readers to “confront the roots of ‘toxic masculinity.’” He attributes this “toxicity” to a “strict set of rules that prescribe what being a man should be.” Neves then conjures up a banal list of “man rules”—which are absolute myths—seemingly out of thin air, without explaining how he came up with them.
1. Myth: A man should suffer physical and emotional pain in silence.
Are whining and complaining better options, regardless of gender? Authentic men do talk about their challenges, and—depending on personality—many share their feelings to various degrees. But they don’t dwell on them. Being men, we pick ourselves up and seek a solution, knowing that ultimately only we can face it and allow it to transform us. We turn pain to power, growing stronger from adversity. That’s healthy.
“Bless you prison, bless you for being in my life," wrote Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago. "For there, lying upon the rotting prison straw, I came to realize that the object of life is not prosperity as we are made to believe, but the maturity of the human soul.”
Whenever my sons fell off a bike and skinned their knee, I’d hug them, check to make sure they weren’t seriously injured, and then tell them, “Get back on the bike, son.” This is a quality that they will need for life. When you lose a job, take a break to catch your breath, and then find a new one. If you get a leg blown off serving overseas, mourn, heal, and then learn to walk with an artificial leg. Get back into life.
Because life can be hard, a man seeks to become harder than it…life requires strength training.
A man shouldn’t seek warmth, comfort, or tenderness.
A man can and will enjoy these things. But he doesn’t “seek” them. He is more likely to seek challenges, opportunities to grow, and ways to get stronger. It’s easy to enjoy warmth, comfort, and tenderness, but life requires strength training. Because life can be hard, a man seeks to become harder than it so he will prevail against whatever it throws his way.
2. Myth: A man should only have the emotions of bravery and anger. Any other emotions are weaknesses. Weakness is unacceptable.
Read the rest of the article at https://realfreedomtalk.com/weakness-is-not-a-virtue-2/