Michael Foster on Being a Man

Conversations That Matter

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Welcome to Conversations That Matter podcast, my name is John Harris. Little warning before we get started with the interview today with Pastor Michael Foster.

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For some of you, depending on the rules of your household and how you want to raise your kids and everything, you may not want, if you have young kids, them to hear some of the things we're going to talk about.

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We are talking about masculinity and some things get mentioned in passing in this interview that I know some parents would not appreciate their kids hearing at younger ages.

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So I just wanted to put that out there so no one's surprised when certain things get mentioned later on in the podcast.

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I hope this is helpful to you. It may raise more questions than it answers, but hopefully it starts to answer some questions that I know

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I've had and maybe some of you've had as well. So without further ado, here's Michael Foster, pastor of the

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East River Church in Cincinnati as well. Tavia, Ohio.

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And then also podcaster, It's Good to Be a Man is the project that Michael Foster's working on.

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You can go to it's good to be a man .com and there's a lot of blogs there, podcasts, recommended books, all sorts of things.

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You can support his ministry to men. You describe yourself, Michael, as kind of being a missionary to men.

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So first question, do men need a missionary? And then what inspired you kind of to take that role?

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So my friend George Bruno, who's a pretty well -known YouTuber, told me

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I was a missionary to men. He kept saying it over and over again, and I thought it was kind of funny.

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So I stuck it in my Twitter bio. So look, I'm a missionary to whoever

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God sends my way, right? That's who we preach the gospel to. But in the times we live in, there is a concentrated attack on manhood.

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Just like if you were in the third century, you're going to be fighting over the deity of Christ in the

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Trinity more than, say, other doctrines. Not because other doctrines don't matter, but because that's the point of conflict.

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That's where the enemy is focusing his attacks. And one of those areas right now that we see the enemy really going after is anthropology and, in particular, masculinity.

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So men need an advocate to tell them it's good to be a man.

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That's the whole purpose of the name, was not be a good man, which is something you need to be as well, but actual your masculine nature is a gift from God.

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It's part of God's design. Just as a feminine nature is if you are, in fact, a biological female. So it's good to be a woman.

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But you hear people saying that everywhere. They might be rejecting a biblical definition of femininity, but femininity and womanhood isn't directly under attack in the same way that masculinity is.

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So I wanted to produce content and just things that media that would encourage men to live out their

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God ordained sex. OK, you said something at the end there I want to focus on a little bit.

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God ordained sex, because this is it seems like the crux of the issue. I for background here,

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I posted reposted something of yours the other day, and that's really what I've known you from, honestly, social media.

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That's that's the interaction that I've seen of yours is when you post something on social media like, hey, men are this way.

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And then you have like a bunch of people saying, no, they're not. How can you say that? What Bible verse do you have? And I had posted something of yours,

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I think, on, I don't know, how men banter, how men banter.

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Yeah. And I was like, oh, this is so true. And then someone, you know, there was someone who kind of took a little bit of an issue with that.

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And I thought, you know, I see this everywhere. You say like men are this way. It's an obvious truth in my mind that, yeah, that that is how men behave.

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And then it's like, you know, where's your biblical justification for this? So here's what I want to ask you.

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How do you from from Scripture? And then if it's if it's not from Scripture, I guess explained from natural revelation where you find this, but where do you find the telos, if you would, of what a man looks like and the form?

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First things first, when the Westminster Assembly was completing the

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Westminster standards, the confession, the shorter catechism, larger catechism, the form of Presbyterian government, which they didn't end up accepting directory of worship.

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They actually didn't back up almost anything in there with verses. And they were required to,

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I believe, by Parliament to put verses in there for proof text. And that's because that's not how men thought back then.

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They didn't think of like chapter in verse. They didn't have that mentality. It was like, well, look, this doesn't hang on one verse.

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This hangs on the analogy of faith, the whole of Scripture. And we have this mentality now that to prove everything, you basically have to find a verse that explicitly states it doesn't matter what your actual experience is.

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You know, some of these people are like, do you need a verse that the sky is blue?

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I mean, I don't need a verse to prove everything. I do what divine revelation does.

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The particular purpose of divine revelation is to explain the way of redemption, right?

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We know you can't know the way of redemption from natural revelation. That's one thing that natural revelation doesn't do.

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It brings you under judgment, brings you under conviction, reveals some things about the divine nature of God.

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A lot can be deduced. And so natural revelation, it teaches us all sorts of things.

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And even in the Westminster Confession, they talk about the light of nature. But our problem is that we live in a time that doesn't understand the principle of good and necessary consequences.

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So when you look at, like, for example, when you look at something like the Trinity, there is not really a one verse that spells out the core doctrine of the

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Trinity. It's more that you look at the whole of Scripture, that there is one God, that that one God exists in three co -equal persons forever and ever, that we're able to come up with that doctrine.

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We see it across the whole of Scripture. And so through good and necessary consequences, through logical consequence, we're able to say this is a cardinal doctrine.

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Masculinity is very, very similar. It's weird that you have to prove something so natural, right?

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It's weird that we have to teach men how to be men when they're in their 20s.

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I always point out to people, we don't teach cats how to be cats or dogs how to be dogs. There's an implicit nature in cats and dogs and people and things, right?

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And that nature should develop as one grows. But there's been such an attack on sexuality, sex being biological sex, that there's been such an attack that people are so confused.

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They already question like, well, how do I know how a man's different from a woman?

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That is such a dumb question. Why are we acting like these are reasonable things to say?

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Because we have different hormones and our bodies are shaped different.

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And when a little girl screams, right, my neighbor heard, I just moved into a farm, my neighbor heard my daughter scream.

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He was like up, like looking, because this is a little girl screaming happy, but he hadn't heard that in a long time.

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He's like, I was ready to go jump in a pool or, you know, men run towards danger. They have, right?

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Men like the fight. Like we look at history and experience and we see things that men do on in a general sense that women don't do and things that women do in a general sense that men don't do.

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And what we're supposed to act like that's not real. That doesn't exist. Like there isn't a truth that is across cultures and across times.

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And so first thing with a lot of this, you say, hey, the way you read the Bible is wrong. The way you use logic, if we can say you use logic is wrong.

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The way you deny experience is wrong. Where does scripture teach us, you know, you get to all these, it's like, don't eat the daisies.

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Those rules, they call them, don't eat the daisy rules. Like, you don't, I don't have to tell my kids not to eat daisies, right?

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Like, no, son, you don't, you don't need daisies. Like, well, you never told me that.

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Well, I told you not to do stupid things, you know. As a general classification, eating daisies falls in that.

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So you start to attack some of these things. But we cannot, you cannot let someone set a faulty premise.

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You have to start to attack a premise right away. And my premise is like, first off, I'm not playing your games.

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You know that there are very real differences from men and women. You know it.

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And we see it in like these transgender athletes right now. You know what I mean? They're just smoking these girls in these, and it's because they have testosterone and they have different bone density and they're built.

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I mean, like, it's obvious there's a design. So that's where you can go. But you can also look at the sex specific commands that are made in scripture and the assumptions about men and women that are made in scripture.

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I, I think it's name. I can't remember where it is in scripture. I don't have it. But there's a

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God himself says that, look, when the day of battle comes, your soldiers are going to be like scared women.

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Right. They're going to shake like women. What was God a misogynist? No, you're a you're not a heretic, but you're in error.

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If you if you think that's something wrong, like men, we get scared in battle, but not in the same way that women do.

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Right. And that's assumed right there in scripture that women are don't react the best in combat positions.

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You know, they have they're totally different. So you can see these these teachings throughout scripture.

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And what a lot of times happens when we get into these dialogues is someone wants that one verse. And when you start to show them the narrative or the points spread throughout the scripture that build the argument, the good and necessary consequence argument, they just shut down because they've been taught to come to the scripture and atomistic way and to misapplication of Sola Scriptura, which

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Sola Scriptura says scripture is the final and highest authority, not that it's the only authority, but other authorities are interpreted or understood through it.

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So natural revelation is an absolute necessary part of knowing truth, in particular truth that relates to nature, hence its name.

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Yeah, well, that was very good. I mean, that's what I've suspected that I don't know if you want to call it the dividing line, but this agreement that I see so often play itself out on social media over this, that there's sort of this underlying assumption of a creative norm for being masculine and being feminine, and that you see glimpses of it throughout scripture with, like you said, the different duties and descriptions that are attributed to different genders.

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The verse that you were thinking of is Nahum 3 .13, which says, Behold, your people are women in your midst.

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The gates of your land are open wide to your enemies. Fire consumes your gate bars. I think that's the

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NASB. Yeah, that's one of them. There's another one too. But the idea is your people are like, are women in your midst.

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They're scared because the judgment's coming down. It's so, so wrathful, you know, so fiery, so intense that now your women, instead of men being bold, they're reduced to women.

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So they're calling them, God's calling them sissies, right? In a nutshell. And if we said that nowadays, it would be proof of laden misogyny.

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Well, your Twitter is proof of that. You do say that nowadays. Oh, yeah.

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And those things are hilarious. And people will say, oh, well, you're just using inflammatory rhetoric.

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And I'm like, no, no, no, no. I am literally saying the sky is blue, the cow goes moo sort of stuff.

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That is all I'm saying. And you have bought into the lies that were told to you in academia and the lies that were sold to you through media.

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And you think these things are offensive. There is nothing offensive. These things are stupid.

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This whole conversation, we live in a dumb time, a post -truth, post -modern ignorant time where we can't say things that Scripture says repeatedly, you know, over and over again.

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Look at some of the like women gossip more than men. Right. And if a man gossips, he's effeminate because it's not a masculine trait.

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Oh, how do you know that? Well, when Paul is rebuking or correcting or exhorting men, the issue of gossip doesn't really come up, obviously applies in the general.

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But when he's saying, like, here's the sort of women we want to trade up your young women or the sort of women we want to be on the rolls, he immediately points out that they can't be gossips.

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Right. He also says they can't be giving the wine. He says the same thing about men. But as he describes them, you see that there's these sin tendencies that are more prevalent in women and less prevalent in men and vice versa.

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Right. And there's a reason us fathers have to be told not to exasperate our children is because fathers can be, you know, throughout the ages.

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We can't judge everything by our modern moment here. But throughout the ages, fathers have been the ones that crack the whip, that drive it hard.

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And sometimes they're teasing and poking can become intense discouragement. And that's why those people, when they saw me talking about teasing, were like, oh, no, my dad was terrible.

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And he did all these things. Well, have you considered maybe I'm not talking about your dad, like diminishing you in such a terrible way?

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Like, could there isn't a spectrum here? Is there some more categories or, you know, our culture is hilarious.

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It's spectrum when it should be black and white and black and white when it's right. I've often thought that there.

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So I want to talk to you a little bit about the white knight. I don't know what you do. Archetype, you talk about a little bit on your blog.

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I don't know. Did you write those blog pieces? And I noticed that there's some titles on your blog about being a white knight.

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I think non wrote a lot of those. But usually they come out of long conversations we have.

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And it's certainly something that we we just finished. I'm half a chapter away from finishing our book called

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It's Good to Be a Man. That's on a lot of topics that Canon is publishing. Can you order that yet?

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Or no, I don't know. Like they're in the editing phase. Let's see if what we can get past them, you know,

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Rose Before Hose makes a appearance in that book. I don't I don't think that one's going to make it.

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Oh, goodness. Wow. So you use some locker room jargon they would. Well, it's in italics.

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We're explaining the principles behind these things. So that's what's interesting is that there's these masculine tendencies or ideas that exist throughout ages.

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And when you talk to people, they treat them as if the tendencies in themselves are sinful, not the particular manifestations of them.

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And and so we try to tackle some of that stuff in there. And sometimes we use, you know, modern vernacular, not in a necessarily a proven way, but just like this is what that's explaining.

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So I'm about now I'm excited for this book, by the way, and I think it's good to try to get behind that and talk about why do these tendencies exist?

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I'm about to get myself in a little trouble here, probably. So I do want to dive a little more into this this white knight thing, and I'm going to give you a scripture verse to kind of set this up.

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But before I do there, there is and I'm totally going to be guilty right now of stereotyping or generalizing a little bit.

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But there is a tendency I've noticed even since I was younger of especially mothers who and understandably so they want to keep their kids safe.

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Right. But they like keep them entrapped, like in the side, friends like this growing up in their like thick carpet, scented candles, sweater wearing, you know, prisons.

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And they weren't allowed to go outside and play and certainly not with guns. Right. That would be really bad.

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But certainly, you know, don't go in the woods. You might get ticks in there. Don't go play with animals that could bite you.

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You know, all the things that I was allowed to do as a child, which made my boyhood awesome, they weren't allowed to do.

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And and I don't want anyone to get resentful about this. Not what this is about. If you had to spend all your time playing

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Sega Genesis or something, but there's this kind of like tendency to just want to protect men and to keep them from being the way men have traditionally been for centuries.

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And so here's here's the verse I wanted to read for you. This is from. Oh, I just oh, here it is.

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Second Samuel 10, 12. King James says this. Be of good courage. Let us play the men for our people and for the cities of our

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God. And the Lord do that which seemeth him good. You see a lot of things in that verse that offend people, not just play the men, but also for our people, which means, you know, you're representing kind of like the people that you come from, the area you come from, which now that's,

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I guess, considered like Christian nationalism. It's it's all bad. It's all wrong. There seems to be this tendency to want to go have adventure, to want to save damsels in distress, beat the bad guys, then like playing with swords and guns when they're kids, that kind of thing.

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Naturally, they just make their fingers into guns or they chew their bread into guns if they can't do that. They want to protect their people.

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OK, so what happened is the big question here. And I suspect maybe some of the push against, oh, like, you know, it's wrong to to love your country too much.

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It's wrong to even for for European people of European descent, it's wrong to be a white person because of all the horrible things you've done.

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Is that short circuiting that separation from our history, what men have traditionally been like?

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What's the issue there and why in the world are our men growing up this way? There's a lot going on there.

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I mean, so first off, feminism started it in the

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West. The first identity politics really was everything going back to suffrage is where you see that sort of identity politics politics playing out, which now is just standard and has been standard for a long time.

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But prior to that, there there's been a lot of things going on. Right. It didn't start there.

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Churches have Protestant and Catholic churches have not had a lot of men in them.

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They've always had more women in them since about 14th century on, maybe even a little earlier than that.

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And we know that guys like kind of Mather back in the colonies was complaining, like, where is all the men?

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And so then you have to ask yourself, like, well, is religion more feminine? Well, that's what a lot of people think.

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And, of course, it's not. God made worship. Worshipping God, knowing your creator is neither feminine or masculine.

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It is human in that sense. It's something for all of us. So why are men checking out from church?

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Well, there's a lot of different theories on it. A guy like Leon Pottles will say that it goes back to the bridal mysticism of Bernard of Clairvaux in the 12th century, and that basically men were being told, like, you're the bride of Christ and he's going to give you sloppy kisses, more or less is how it felt.

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Right. So it felt kind of gay. The guys are like, you know, yeah, that's not really for me.

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So that might be that's a thread. Another thread, I think, is a misunderstanding of justification by faith leads to passivity, where justification by faith is a change in status, not in nature.

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And it's done by by faith alone. Right. And faith is the instrument that does it. So when we're saved, like in that sense, justified, it has nothing to do with us.

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But that doesn't mean that works don't proceed from being justified.

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Right. We have sanctification, which sanctification requires striving and working or whatever.

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We're not working for our salvation. We're working it out. Right. And so I think there is a passivity that kind of snuck in through a misunderstanding of justification by faith.

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Then I also think what happened after that is that there is this romantic notion that entered the church that saw women as angels.

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Well, angels are always in the masculine in scripture. And this idea of like when you talk about the woman as your lover, her being an angel that that enters into a romantic period.

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And there's this idea that women are cleaner. I always say feminine angels, masculine devils.

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Right. Is the sort of archetypes that come from that. That goes also back to sort of knights and damsels chivalry.

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Right. And and so all that kind of gets balled up and then this will really offend everybody to a lot of people.

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But I also think dispensationalism, again, reinforces a level of passivity, consistent dispensationalism, where like Jesus is going to come rescue us.

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And we're like in a holy huddle, at least that form of dispensationalism. I've met a lot of I have a lot of dispensational people that back the ministry that I don't see them live their life that way.

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So I'm like very thankful for it. But on a broad scale, I think what you get is this idea that men are bad or at least spiritually inferior to women, that Christianity is all about kind of like this weird romantic relationship with Jesus and that it's all about passive being passive.

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All that stuff kind of mixes together to create a understanding of Christianity that repels men.

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You know, you don't have this problem with religions like Islam or in Eastern Orthodox churches.

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You actually there you're at parity or or above parity, sexually speaking, in terms of the adherence and people that are actively involved.

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Same thing's true for Orthodox Jews. So religion itself is not a feminine thing, but Protestant Christianity in particular has become associated with a feminine way.

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And our ministers, too. A lot of times the clergy are referred to as a third sex, right? Think of how they're portrayed both in books and films going way, way, way back, but also how other men talk about them.

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And it's because guys that couldn't make it in law, guys that couldn't make it on the farm, whatever, look for this bookish, soft way of living.

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And it sometimes attracted men who weren't the most masculine guys and all.

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And so it's hard to take. You know, I've been in churches where it's like that guy a couple weeks ago.

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He was talking about how one way to keep your marriage spicy or whatever is that women need to lose weight. Right.

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Remember this guy? I don't see everything that happens on Twitter, so I don't know if I remember that one, but it was a national story and he was kind of crass.

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It was really ham fisted. The thing that did him in, though, why he had to step down from his pastoral office like, hey, women, if you want to keep your marriage good, you got to stay in shape.

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Well, the thing that really did him in was he was like pretty fat himself. You know what I mean? And you're like, hey, fatty, maybe if you're going to like lecture people on that, you should have some relative mastery in your life.

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And so I think when you get all these guys up there that are rebuking men and calling to man up, you know, and they got faux hawks and tight pants and they don't look very masculine.

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Guys are like, you know, this isn't really for me, you know, and right now.

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Yeah, that's interesting. I to maybe narrow the the because I was very broad and I appreciate that going back to Bernard of what you say,

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Clairvaux, you went back to the Middle Ages to kind of answer that. What about just between like the

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World War two generation and now where, you know, my dad's generation, right? Even like they were watching

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John Wayne movies when they were growing up. They like that kind of stuff. They wore cowboy hats and rode their bikes down the street.

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And like that, that seems to be gone. And that's just within a couple of years.

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That's not like a long period of time there. Yeah. And that's because what what you have is things moving exponentially faster in cultural decay.

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Probably a big part of it is ideas were cementing over those centuries.

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And I think this is important for people to understand, because a lot of times they'll say, oh, it was all about the 60s or all about this.

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I'm like, hey, this has actually been a really long attack, but it it it has moved quicker and quicker.

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And this is also why we have a problem with the boomers and the white knights. And here's what happened. Essentially, what happened is that religion itself became feminine in America, like Christian religion, and more and more men checked out in the church, lost its place as the pulpit of society.

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It's something so men were that that became a problem. And then what happened is with the sexual revolution that came in several phases, but probably the the biggest thing that happened was

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Kenzie and Kenzie writing his two reports on human sexuality.

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So he normalizes all sorts of deviant behaviors in their homosexuality. The claim that eight to 10 percent of Americans were homosexual comes from that.

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It's like totally bunk. It's more like half a percent, maybe a percent. And of course, he studied like guys that were in jail for all sorts of sexual crimes, not like it was a messed up sample of the population to begin with.

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But that stuff starts to work. It works its way into government stuff, right?

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How we're going to do education, whatever. Then as families break down with things like no fault divorce and birth control, both which happened in throughout the 60s, but really take root in the 70s.

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So people forget that when you were a boy, if you're my age, I'm 41, I was born in 1980.

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It was pretty rare to have a lot of divorce families represented in your classmates in public school, but it was even rarer in the 70s.

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But then it just really starts to snowball. Right. And so you've got that happening at a governmental level where they're allowing

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Ronald Reagan's the one that pushed no fault divorce. Right. In California. And regretted it.

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Yeah, he did. But, you know, you see where this has come from multiple directions. Then what also starts to go on then in the 80s and 90s is all those feminist ideas that were in government agencies and the academia start to make their way into schools where now kids are growing up without fathers.

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So they don't have a good masculine influence. And they also have women that are educating them, that are treating them like girls, right?

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Like little boys are wiggly. That doesn't mean they have ADHD. It means they're little boys.

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They're wiggly. So we start drugging the boys when they're young to keep them calm because we homeschool and my sons start a little bit of a fight.

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But my little girls are like, hey, daddy, could I learn math today? And I'm like, what in the world? You know, where my kids are like,

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I've done my math. Did you show your work? No, I didn't show my work. You haven't done it. But my girls are like wanting me to teach them all sorts of things because they start out differently.

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They all average out pretty close to the same over years. But in the beginning, girls are much easier to manage.

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So we start managing boys like they're girls. And then every point of validation in a man's life is pretty much feminine validation.

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Female teachers, broken home, staying with mom. The dad doesn't have as much influence.

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Dad's backed out for whatever reason. There's multiple reasons. And so from the 80s on, these guys are growing up where to be a man, you have to be validated by a woman.

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A woman has to validate your manhood. And that's not how manhood works. Manhood is both caught and taught.

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So it's caught from dad, but it's also taught from dad. And throughout most of history, you had what were called rites of passage.

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So a woman becomes, right, she starts her period, she develops, you know, and now she is welcoming to the world of women.

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That's the way it has worked out throughout the ages. And there's not exactly some task that she has to accomplish that proves she's a woman.

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The things that she does, she's like a flower in that sense. Whereas a man has to kill a buffalo.

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He has to kill a wolf. He has to pass his bar mitzvah, right? A man has some sort of thing that happens.

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Build a house, yeah. Whatever. And so it used to be that, you know, when he could pull up a table and sit with his dad and his uncles and play a game of cards, right?

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There's a moment where he's welcoming to the world of men through masculine validation. But that doesn't happen in a society where marriage is broken down or where the man is weak.

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And so what you have going on with the white knights, this is how this all goes back for centuries.

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What you have going on with the white knights are these are guys that have defined their life by protecting a damsel in distress because what they're looking for is female validation.

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Even if the woman's not a damsel, right? Like if we if we point out like this is a monstrous, feminist, horrible, you know, kind of prostitute like chick and we're calling them out or this is a woman that is ignoring the commands of scripture and that you know she's teaching and we like say that's wrong.

31:11

They're like, oh, you're so terrible. And they attack you. And like, hey, this this is someone that should be rebuked and corrected.

31:18

You know, but they can't see that. They can't. All they see is a woman. And they think if I if I show up as a man,

31:24

I'm coming to rescue her. And therefore, now I know I'm a man because I'm validated by this woman. That's an interesting thought because I've often wondered,

31:32

OK, you know, even with because they are related, even with like the current controversy over critical race theory,

31:38

I thought like, why is it that, you know, like an event happens like a shooting or something like that and immediately, you know, heartstrings are pulled and there's not a critical analysis given to it.

31:51

And we're just so swayed emotionally that this must be, you know, some kind of a narrative. And so it's just a it almost seems that way, like what you're saying resonates with me, like some men are trying to like show that this empathy that women often have women, this maternal nature to comfort and to console.

32:13

And now men are trying to kind of like play into that somehow to say, like, well, I'm just like that. I have empathy, too, even if the facts are all wrong and they don't support, you know, the, quote, unquote, empathy you're trying to show.

32:25

So, yeah, interesting thought. What would you see guys on Twitter say she's not going to sleep with you, bro?

32:31

That's why I see that, because you see that happen in like the kind of non -Christian Twitter world.

32:38

And and then there's this forum on Reddit that I sometimes point people to if you really it's it's pretty rough.

32:43

But if you want to see what women think about nice guys that suck up, they don't they don't like them.

32:49

They're useful tools. But there's I think it's called Nice Guys on Reddit.

32:55

You'll see these guys. They'll flatter this, flatter these women in hopes that they'll enter into a relationship with them or get something.

33:02

And then these women will eventually say, hey, it's been nice. Thank you. But I'm not really interested.

33:07

And then the guy will lash back. He'll be so angry. And when I see with white knights,

33:12

I see angry men. Right. I know that when they don't get that when the when this actually when they realize that this is not a good strategy for being a man, they get very angry and they lash out.

33:26

And so it's helpful to look at those things and realize what's going on with these sort of nice guys and white knight sort of archetypes that we're dealing with all the time right now.

33:35

So one thought. Yeah, no, that's that's interesting. Do you think another observation that a lot of whatever masculine pursuits that people men would have growing up as boys has been pushed to this kind of abstract world because of video games and media where you can't have a gun?

33:56

I mean, I know like in New York State where upstate New York where I was raised, like when I was like 12, it was against the law to sell realistic looking like, you know, like cowboy guns or police guns.

34:07

And and they just got eliminated. It used to be like whole aisles full of like weapons, you know, for boys to play with.

34:12

They're gone now in California. Now, I think they're combining. You can't have like a men's toy section and a woman's toy section.

34:18

But you can buy these games where you go and you can completely annihilate a village in the most violent way possible.

34:25

And men will play this. And and I'm wondering, you know, pornography certainly, I think, would factor into this as well.

34:32

Men sort of have whatever kind of like masculine things they wanted to do have been pushed into this fake fantasy world where they it's not the real world and they're not real men, but they

34:43

I don't know. Like, is there something to that that's like crippling our society? Yeah.

34:48

So the easiest way to view it is productivity, right? So porn is sex without productivity.

34:56

It doesn't tighten the relationship. It doesn't lead to children. It it actually does the opposite.

35:03

So you want to talk about the most sterilized. There's no fluids involved.

35:08

It's clean. There's no smells involved. It's all imagined. There's no work involved for pornography.

35:15

Right. Like, are you a married man? I can't remember. I am. Yes. Yeah. So like sex starts in the morning, even if you have it in the evening.

35:23

Right. It starts with like flirting with your wife and talking to her and being on top of the things in your household.

35:29

All those things. Sex ends up being this like consequence of it's weird.

35:36

The more you want it, the less you'll get it. The more you take care of life, the more it'll set up doing the dishes is better than a pickup line.

35:44

Right. I don't know about doing the dishes, but like mowing the lawns better than I'm going to have to justify myself now, you know, anyway.

35:53

Well, we have an article called Who Does the Dishes? You should read that goes through why that's why that trope is interesting.

35:59

But let me stick to this point. My point is that same way with video games.

36:05

The problem with video games isn't that they're not masculine. They are super masculine. Like video games is about as masculine of a thing as you get.

36:14

You have to master skills to exercise dominion in the most popular video games tend to involve a gang or tribe of men that work together.

36:23

That's right. And so that's why men are drawn to them. And and that's why even if people say, well, there's female gamers.

36:32

Well, on Twitch, half naked half the time. I'm not saying that there aren't female gamers, but even if you look at the games, female gamers play or why they play them is very different.

36:44

On the whole, we're speaking in generalities here than men. So the problem with video games isn't that it's not masculine.

36:50

It's that it's not productive. Right. What does this lead to? Like I tell my son, like Ninja was this famous gamer.

36:56

I don't know if he's still a big dealer or not, but he was making millions of dollars a month at one point.

37:03

And I said, you know, Ninja is not a professional gamer. You understand that Ninja is a professional marketer like he markets.

37:09

He's selling you an idea. He's selling you a dream. He's got a BA in marketing. He's selling you products and whatever.

37:15

You know, he actually doesn't make money gaming per se. Gaming is how he gets

37:21

FaceTime with you and how he gets you to like him and buy into his brand. It's just a marketing channel, son.

37:27

So no one really makes money gaming per se. Right. And gaming is not productive on the whole.

37:36

It can be good for recreation. There's nothing wrong. Like I hear a lot of people hate on video games.

37:42

And I'm like, well, what's the difference between playing Risk and playing video games?

37:48

Now you're going to tease out a few differences, but they still belong to the same general category.

37:55

It's just, are you actually developing, are you mastering skills in the real world that produces something?

38:02

So we have a, so think of like there's an attack on productivity. Men that produce things have things.

38:10

They have influence. They have money. They have the ability to shape their local community. Men that are consumers are easy to control.

38:17

Men whose appetites are their gods are super easy to control. And so we live in a consumeristic society where we've got people like Bill Gates telling people in the future, you'll just rent everything.

38:29

You won't have to own anything. And by the way, I own more farmland than anybody. Wait a second.

38:35

Why do you want me to rent, but you own all this stuff? Well, you want me to be your surf.

38:41

You want me. And so you see this direction we're moving in American culture where the oligarchs are more or less trying to get us to be, uh, to addicted to what they're selling, which is an easy life, a life of consumption, a life of a slave slavery to your appetites and not a life of productivity.

39:02

And so what, what we really focus on in our books, and this, this is one way we screw with the egalitarians and the complimentary is both is that we have focused heavily on the idea of a productive household.

39:13

Um, and, and the concept of androgyny, because we didn't want to be part of the same, uh, the same old conversation that we saw happening in the circle, which is like, uh, can women preach, right?

39:26

What can women do in the church? We're like, man, this is a tired conversation. How about we reframe this about how do men and women together create productivity for the glory of God?

39:37

Because ultimately that's what you see in the cultural mandate and what is expanded to the great commission, because through the great commit a great, uh, great commission.

39:47

Now we have been, uh, reoriented from building our own kingdom, being sons of the devil to now building the kingdom of God, being sons of God.

39:56

And that is a very productive lifestyle. Last two questions. And that was very good. Um, I, so we only have a few minutes left, but I'm thinking about the guy who might be listening to this right now and just, um, for whatever reason, didn't have a model, maybe growing up in his life, doesn't is confused on masculinity to some extent.

40:16

Um, and maybe let, let, let's say this, you know, if you, if you believe this, I'd have assuming you do legitimately.

40:22

So there's things he likes that aren't, uh, you know, traditionally considered masculine, maybe like going to the gym, isn't his thing.

40:30

And he really does like to do upholstery, right. Or something, which I don't, I, I've known men who

40:35

I've done upholstery before, but, um, like, I don't know. It's something that isn't considered like in that masculine category.

40:43

And he just feels maybe like, am I an underachiever? Am I effeminate? Like, is there something wrong with me? Um, how do you talk to someone like that?

40:51

Who, you know, a programmer, you know, that's what they do for a living. They're not out there on the farm, you know, as we would get a lot of traditional masculine type people would think of a man being, uh, how do you encourage that person to be a man in the, in a job he has the world he he's living.

41:10

And, uh, yeah. So, so I guess that's it. Yeah. What, what do you say to the guy like that? Well, programming's super masculine and almost all men are in it, right.

41:19

Because writing an order from chaos. And even when you write code, the code is productive and it keeps on producing.

41:24

If you do good code down the line. And so men always, uh, it's interesting when you look at the cultural mandate or creation mandate, wherever you want to call it is that God plants the first garden.

41:36

And so it's this prototypical garden. And then he says, Hey, now rule and reign in the world. Uh, and I agree with a lot of the biblical theologians that see that prototypical garden as something that Adam was supposed to expand into the world.

41:48

Right. And so men look at, look at mountains and want to climb it or look at hills and want to flatten it to build farm.

41:56

Men look at things, it's called visual transformation. Guys like Tesla were able to lay out all their plans in their mind and then like build these crazy things.

42:06

It's nuts. And, uh, some people actually say autism is, is the masculine brain on steroids that desire to order and, and, uh, clarify things.

42:16

But so what I would tell guys is, look, you are a man. God has made you to be a man.

42:22

So you want to order things. You want to be great at things.

42:27

I think focusing on mastery is, is where you start. Be the best upholstery guy.

42:32

You can be the best coder you can like, don't get super obsessed with whether this is masculine or not.

42:40

The way you develop virtues by throwing yourself into the work of life, you know, there's not a guide.

42:46

This is what we run in with guys a lot of times. So like here, I'll give you a great example is, um, a feminine dress, right?

42:53

Women are known by their beauty. They just are. And, uh, we don't have as men, lots of makeup on our masculine, on our men's magazines.

43:03

It's not like how to look sexy in seven new ways, or, or at least it, it hasn't been as pretty recently.

43:10

Women are concerned about their beauty. We also, well, where can you prove that from scripture? Actually, I can, it's pretty easy where Paul's like, look, uh, make sure your beauty is inward and spiritual and not just outward.

43:23

He's not rebuking men for that. Right. So for a guy to be caught up with his appearance, like totally obsessed with how beautiful he is, is a feminine.

43:34

It's not normal. It's not a masculine thing. Men are known by their strength, by what they get done by their output.

43:42

That's what we respect people for. That's why a lot of people respected Trump, right? You can say whatever you want about Trump, but he is very much a doer and a hard worker.

43:49

I don't know how that guy is like in his seventies, sleeping like four hours a week night and just doing the things. He never stops.

43:54

But, um, so men are known by their output. So there is such thing as a feminine dress and like, oh, well, how can you prove it from scripture?

44:03

Well, I just did right. By, by being obsessed with your appearance, then they're like, well, do you have a style guide?

44:09

I do not have a style guide, man. Right. Like you can, you know, when you see it to some level, um, and Clement of Alexandria or was it

44:19

Rome? One of the Clements, I think it was Alexandria wrote how guys back then would shave their beards.

44:25

And what was interesting about it was they're saving their beards to look more boyish and more girly. Cause that was something that appealed to the women.

44:32

So they're trying to look all pretty to be players and Clements like going on about it. So with a lot of things with what's a feminine, what's masculine, we're not, you're not going to get the one, two, three, four, five steps that you want.

44:46

People want this complete, a style guide for all things, for clothing, for work, what's masculine is a wanting to build, to get things done, to make a life for you.

45:00

I always tell people, if you want to be a better man, go read a women's magazines and tell them what to do, right.

45:06

Or do what they tell you. So women's magazines tell women to be independent, to be driven, to climb their way up the ladder.

45:12

Like, yeah, that's, that's, that's good advice for a man. Um, I think men should do that. And so that's why

45:17

I tell the guys out there, like, look, you got to father yourself to some degree you're behind the eight ball. You're always going to be behind the eight ball, right?

45:24

You just are. I was, I learned things in my thirties that I should have known in my twenties. And I'm learning things in my forties.

45:30

I should have known in my thirties. I came from a broken family, like many of us did.

45:35

And you can either cry about it and blame everything on your daddy and going on and on, or just say like, well, you know what?

45:41

That wasn't my fault that that was done to me. But what I do now is my responsibility.

45:46

And there's a difference between fault and responsibility. You're absolutely responsible for your life. So the first thing is take responsibility for yourself and stop being a victim, right?

45:56

So you are a man. God says you're a man and you're going to be a man. And that starts by taking responsibility for yourself.

46:03

I would say, look at, um, Proverbs chapter 30, where there's this vineyard and it's all broken down as this lazy guy, what in your life is broken down?

46:13

What, what do you need to rebuild? You can also look at second Timothy two 22, uh, flee youthful loss, but pursue faith, righteousness, et cetera, with those that call on the

46:23

Lord from a pure conscience, a good conscience. So what are the things you need to flee? Well, pornography is one of them.

46:30

Laziness and unpredictability is the other. Those are masculine problems a lot of times. So flee those things.

46:35

What do you need to pursue? Well, being the sort of guy that's worthy, uh, that a woman thinks is worthy of her love, right?

46:42

A guy that has that much gravitas and ability, and, uh, you need to start building your house. So if you just get on that general trajectory, a lot of these things will start to, it's like, uh, getting a bike chain on a bike, you know, where you just get it on and then you turn the wheels.

46:58

It's by turning the chains that the movement starts to happen. And so any point of contact you can get that chain on is, is a good place to start and don't obsess about it.

47:09

Just go for it. Well, that's good advice. I think, yeah, obsessing about it. I've seen that too.

47:14

That, that other door, the pendulum swings the other direction and someone's always like, is this masculine?

47:20

Am I being masculine? And it's like, well, if you have to ask the question, you know, uh, that many times, it's probably, you know,

47:26

I, I like what you're saying. Just live life. Greased up bodybuilders are effeminate. Greased up bodybuilders.

47:32

If you, if you were shaving your chest and getting super big and you want everyone, and it's hilarious.

47:37

I know I've known a lot of professional bodybuilders that were, uh, not, not Christians. And they tell me that they, uh, they almost never get hit on by women, but they constantly get hit on by gay guys.

47:50

And, and their DMS are full of like, Hey man, what's your routine? Right? It's not like girls.

47:55

And it's because the guy's trying to be super pretty or whatever. He's trying to make himself the object in, in the room.

48:03

Don't try to make yourself the object in the room. That's a good, that's how you dress. You dress are appropriate to the work you're doing, you know?

48:12

But, uh, but that's another way to think about being known by what you have accomplished by what you've built with your own hands.

48:19

Well, I think we'll have to end on that note. That's really, uh, I think good advice there, uh, Pastor Foster. And if people want to go check out, uh, some of your material, they can go.

48:28

It's good to be a man .com. Um, I'm sure, you know, for a lot of people listening is probably raised more questions, perhaps than even answered.

48:37

I'm sure it answered some, but, uh, there's a lot more material on. It's good to be a man .com. And, uh, thank you once again,