How To Be a Man That Women Respect

There’s really only one thing a man needs to do to gain a woman’s respect. He needs to be a man.

The good news is that women want a man. The even better news is that there aren’t many to go around—which means that if you can be one, you‘re at the head of the pack.

A man is a multi-storied, burning furnace with a cooling system on the roof. A two legged, upright, impulsive, passion-driven beast with a brain that keeps him in check.

Which means that being a man is mostly about not being the animal you feel you are.

Perhaps a woman can be a woman just by being her natural, human self. Having never been a woman, I can’t really say. But I can tell you that a man is someone who is constantly not being the beast that drives him.

The man says, “Nothing is mine but my own free will. And with my free will, I choose to ignore you.”

The beast says, “Everything is yours! There is nothing else. Everyone is yours! There is no one else. They are all just objects, there to do your bidding!”

And the man says, “There is the Creator who made me and gives me life. There are the people with whom I live and put their trust in me. There is the woman of my covenant whom I respect and love. They are not me, I am not them. She is not me. I am not her. I am a man, and regardless of all the fury with which you may burn, I will act as a man.”

“Who is a hero?” asks Ben Zoma in the ancient Mishnah. “He who conquers his own desires.”

Man is made to conquer. The beast inside a man desires to conquer. But the man cannot conquer a thing until he has first conquered that beast within.

The beast remains a beast, a bull, a horse, a goring ox. The beast may desire, but the man is not a slave of those desires. The man must be the one that tells the beast where it can go and where it cannot, where it can look and where it must not, when it should speak and when it should keep its mouth shut tight.

For only once a man has turned his back to his own maddening passions, resisted the rush of adrenaline pumping through his veins, ignored the screaming amygdala hijack, and just coldly walked away, only then has he touched that which defines him most deeply, that which separates him from beast and angel, that which makes him most divine.

But if a man does not know what makes him a man, how can she know that he is one?

If a man can’t leave space for another, why would she want to stand in his presence?

Many are the men who have never been there. Many are the men who spend an entire life barely cognizant of the power that enables them to become a man.

Many guides have been written by many great sages. If you’re looking for the most potent Jewish classic on being a man, look in a small book called Tanya. It’s also known as “Sefer Shel Beinonim”—meaning “The Book for the Everyman.”

In Tanya, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, a great teacher and disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, teaches us all we need to know about our beast inside. True, the guide is for both men and women. But once you see the advice it contains, it is hard to imagine how anyone could be a man without knowing its teachings well.

To deny the power of the beast over your heart and mind is the height of conceit. To surrender is the height of foolishness. teaches: To deny the power of the beast over your heart and mind is the height of conceit. To surrender is the height of foolishness.

So that life is an ongoing wrestling match. The beast will never throw in the towel. It will grow stronger each day, devising yet more strategies to escape its reins, taking yet more devious gambits to declare victory over you.

Your principal strategy is to ignore its wails and tantrums. But the beast is stronger than the man. To win, you need a fire yet more fierce than the fury of the beast. You must find the divine fire from beyond that breathes secretly in a hidden chamber within your heart.

That is your mission. That is why you were thrown into this ring. So that each day, with that fire, you will bring your beast as an offering upon an altar of divine light.

No wonder a woman admires a real man. The One who made him admires him even more.

“...Which means that being a man is mostly about not being the animal you feel you are...”
********************************************************************
I wrote this post a week or so ago about a psychologist who declared Donald Trump was mentally ill without ever having seen or treated him, and in reading his bio, the head shrink had a feminist mommy psychologist:
********************************************************************
Great article, paints the APA and NOW in exactly the correct colors. This passage really struck me (I know this is long, but bear with me):
“Dr. Gartner casts himself as “a rebel with a cause,” as, he believes, was his mother. His pride in his mother’s early National Organization for Women (NOW) activism explains why he is intolerant of diversity of political opinion today. It also parallels how the American Psychological Association lost moral relevance in American life. In 1969, when our swamp-shrink was a lad of ten, his mother Diana Gartner tricked her way into the last bastion of sex-based exclusivity – male-only hours at a New York bar. Was she fighting for equal rates of alcoholism between men and women?”

It touches on one of the most irritating and corrosive aspects of feminism, IMO. I understand that his mother probably didn’t choose this venue of “inequality” (the male-only hours at a bar) to attack for the right of women to abuse alcohol, but the fact is, one of the facets of feminism I find repellent seems to have been to encourage females to be as stupid and violent as men seem to have the capability to be.

(Before I proceed, I suspect that there are many who may attack my take on this, but being an older, unrepentant male who has values that feminists and other liberals largely brand as mouth-breathing/knuckle-dragging/neanderthal/chauvinist in nature, I fully embrace and accept the labels of my enemies, in the same way I accept and embrace it when Europeans characterize Americans as “cowboys”. They think it is an insult, but knowing what is behind their characterization, I fully embrace it and take it as a compliment)

This is not to say all men or even most men are violent or stupid, but (speaking as a man) we seem to have a greater propensity and susceptibility to this than females, and many of us have to fight the inclination. There are many men who have fought a daily battle to keep from descending into the coarser aspects of our personalities. It is like sin-many people are flawed, but fight daily to not subscribe to those flaws.

For example, coarse language is an indicator of lack of maturity, self-control, and thus, an indicator of weakness. It generally isn’t desirable. Many men, myself included, have fought long and hard to keep our speech civil and clean. I often fail, but that does not mean that I resolve to pick up the gauntlet and try again. Over time, I have improved, and I strive on a daily basis to be better. (As an aside, it is one of the reasons I appreciate Free Republic is the general lack of foul language. There is plenty of inference, but like Alfred Hitchcock, not a lot of fire to that smoke.)

Because I have a propensity towards it, and always have, does not mean I embrace it and rationalize it. I do not have to let it define me.

And the reason this is important to me is that I see it a a critical line of cleavage in the behavior between liberals and conservatives. Liberals look at this (and most other things the same way) and see themselves doing it, but instead of fighting to be better (a Christian value set, as everyone who accepts themselves as flawed and a sinner must recognize) liberals simply embrace it and rationalize it. For example, fourteen year old kids having sex isn’t a great idea, but the fact that it happens and is difficult to prevent is enough to make liberals not only accept it, but encourage it, giving out condoms and birth control pills, providing “safe” places for kids to engage in that behavior, lending it a air of respectability and generally removing any stigma. They have done the same for drug use, out of wedlock birth, same sex relations, illegal immigration, and the list goes on and on.

In this case, they seem to think being equal to men means being just as coarse and stupid as we can be. This is discouraging, because as I often opine, men and women are not equal. We are not the same. We don’t approach things and do things the same way. Our minds operate so differently, that aliens might indeed see us as two separate species.

But it is this distinct difference between men and women that makes the two of us together far greater than either of us have the capability to be individually. It is not considered to appropriate in this day and age for a man to put a woman on a pedestal, but that is exactly what a man should do for a woman who has the capability to make him a better person than he could ever be on his own. With that said, in the past, women have been held, unfairly some might say, to a higher standard in some respects, than men.

I prefer to view it not in the domain of fairness, but in the domain of responsibility.

I propose that is has been a burden that has been knowingly carried throughout the ages by many women who understand this dynamic perfectly. In common cultural parlance, women serve as a civilizing influence on men. I think this concept is so critical to our cultural advancement that the corrosion and destruction of it by the Left has been one of the greatest evils perpetrated by them in modern times.

They have tried to destroy it in three main ways: First, to destroy masculinity as a concept. Look at what they teach (indoctrinate) young people today about “toxic masculinity”. It is shameful and destructive. Instead of recognizing (as smart, feminine women do) that men bring valuable traits and capabilities to the table that they as a woman generally do not and should not be repressed or destroyed but channeled and encouraged, liberals simply attempt to destroy what men bring to the table by emasculating and feminizing men and male traits.

The second way they have tried to destroy the dynamic between men and women is by imbuing women with the notion that there is nothing a man can do that they cannot. This is both destructive and corrosive, but even more, personally and culturally dangerous. Men and women are not equal. Men cannot bear children and easily raise them appropriately independently of a woman, though men may be forced to through necessity.

And women cannot do what men can physically. The just cannot. It is a certainty that an average male will encounter a woman who can best him physically. And it is as much a certainty that any woman who is more physically strong and gifted than 999 other females in physical prowess will find 300 men who she will with certainty, be unable to best or even compete at all with. This is a fact, backed up by medical data and empirical observations. It has major ramifications in military combat operations, and more subtle corrosive ramifications in a society where women are led to believe that sexism is the reason men may dominate in certain areas. The left has tried to destroy this truth as well, by portraying women in the media and entertainment as being 100% as capable physically as any man, one woman taking on ten men in hand-to-hand combat and defeating them handily. It is great fantasy, but when a woman who has been encouraged to accept that and acts as a man would in various circumstances, it can come to a bad end when she realizes too late in an assault that she is not even a close match for a man who significantly outweighs her in both total mass and muscle mass as well as size alone.

But it is the third way the left has tried to destroy masculinity that I find most irritating, that of encouraging women to be as coarse and stupid as any man, and removing any stigma for doing so. Both men and women have long abused alcohol near or total insensibility, but women, due to the sexual nature of things, have had to be more wary of doing so, and for good reason. For those reasons, any woman who found herself in those circumstances more than occasionally would invite the reprobation of other women, and men as well. Fair or unfair, there will always be men who will take advantage of a woman in that state. Always has been. Always will be, and that is just factual.

I am saddened to see this approved coarseness in women. They want to drink and swear like men, and they regard that as “equality”. I regard THAT as the patent stupidity of feminism, and intelligent women reject it. I see it as unseemly and degrading and think even more highly of those women who recognize that as a pig in a poke. Smart women want a place at the table as equals with men, and recognize that stupidity isn’t it. I find those are almost always conservative women. I highly respect all women by default, but I do so while recognizing there is a burden they bear that I, as a man, don’t have to, and respect them even more for that. To see them throw that away in a misguided quest for what they think is equality is disturbing and saddening.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.