Most Important sentence Drake Cain

Gomez gets straight to the heart of this issue before the first paragraph is even over. He says “Men puff up their chests and curse and yell and fight and even die to avoid being called afraid, as if it were a mortal sin, the worst one of  all.” The topic of manhood, what defines a man, and the “initiation” of boys into manhood is something I am very passionate about so I was really excited to get into this reading. There are books upon books upon books written about what it takes to be a man or how to be masculine or what real men do with their lives. I believe that there is such a MASSIVE amount of confusion among men today about what it takes to be a man, how to act, what to say, what to wear. My favorite book of all time is centered wholly around this issue, more so on what has caused the “wound” to manhood and how to go into that wound to heal it. The book is Wild at Heart by John Eldredge. In the first chapter Eldrege says “ ‘Where are all the real men?’ is regular fare for talk shows and new books. You asked them to be women, I want to say. The result is a gender confusion never experience at such a wide level in the history of the world…” Now before you shut this out as just another argument against men showing emotion and the way to manhood is to drive a jacked up truck, shoot guns and chew tobacco. Allow me to summarize the rest of the book, in a very rudimentary way. Eldredge states that Men as a whole have experience a deep wound, not physical, but on a soul level. That is the deepest root cause of the lack of  “real men”. However, he does not encourage men to run away from it. He says that the only way for men to be who they truly are is to go into that wound, whatever caused it and face it down, admit that it matters, and FORGIVE whomever caused it. Only than can a man be who he is meant to be, and he doesn’t say that men have to be big tough guys. They can be emotional people that are open about their fears as well as their hopes and dreams for the world.

This is a hugely rough summarization of a book that really speaks to this identity issue and I wish there were more room to dive into it.  

I really think that there is such a huge problem with the way that manhood is viewed in the world and the identity of men is under attack in a lot of ways. Readings like this one and books like Wild at Heart do a great job of calling that to attention and opening people’s minds about what it really means to be a man and they myths that surround manhood.  Men don’t have to be “macho” tough guys, in fact that can be a sign of a deep fear of something.