How can men speak honestly about relationships and fatherhood? Easy — don’t include women in the conversation. That way, laughable irrelevancies like fairness, equality, communication, and sharing housework can be left behind and you can get down to discussing what really matters and what really works.

That’s why I’ll be participating in a panel at “BOND’s Annual Conference on Fatherhood and Men,” which is open to all men 13 and older. BOND — “Rebuilding the family by rebuilding the man.” — is the organization run by the courageous preacher and frequent “Hannity” guest Jesse Lee Peterson. I once wrote of him in a City Journal profile:

Peterson decries the transformation of the civil rights movement from a principled appeal to the American creed to a politicized shakedown of guilt-ridden whites. He condemns the government subsidies of single motherhood that have helped set loose a plague of black illegitimacy and its attendant plagues of generational poverty and crime. And he bemoans the black culture of dependency on government support that even welfare workers privately call “welfare psychosis.”

But Peterson is no metropolitan academic. Despite his quiet demeanor and delivery, his message is charged with that old-time religion. Where [Shelby] Steele views the last 40 years of civil rights activism as a complex and poisonous blend of white guilt, black opportunism, and government incompetence and corruption, Peterson sees an intentional power grab by an anti-American Left, a self-interested attempt to destroy the nation by destroying manhood and marriage, part of the ongoing and eternal struggle between the forces of Good and Evil. “You cannot control a moral people,” he tells me. “You have to keep them immoral in order to control them.”

Hit the poster for more information on the conference. And look here for the rest of my profile of this brave and important man.

****

Cross-posted from Klavan on the Culture

Terry Holdbrooks Jr. is a former Guantanamo guard who, he says, was so impressed with the faith and perseverance of the detainees that he converted to Islam in 2003. Now he makes a living traveling around the country telling dubious and lurid tales of Guantanamo tortures for the Muslim Legal Fund of America, and explaining why he converted. “I had all the freedom in the world,” he says. “But I was waking up unhappy while these men were in cages, smiling and praying five times a day.”

For Holdbrooks, the contrast couldn’t have been more stark. Before his conversion (and for some time after it, until he rededicated himself to Islam), he was drinking, smoking, using drugs, and indulging in promiscuity – in other words, he was a relatively typical, rudderless early twentieth-century American male. The Army gave him an honorable discharge in 2005 for a “generalized personality disorder.” But then he renewed his Islamic commitment, and, according to the New York Daily News, “found discipline in prayer.”

Discipline. The Islam4theWorld website explains: “Islam is a complete way of living. Unlike other religions, Islam is not a religion consisting of a few rituals, which are to be practiced occasionally. Islam covers every aspect of life.” This is no exaggeration. The Union of Islamic World Students elucidates exactly how Islam covers every aspect of life:

Islam has rules of etiquette and manners covering every aspect of life. These are applicable for the whole society, the old and the young, men and women. These manners cover even minor acts such as entering or exiting a bathroom, posture while sitting and cleaning oneself.

The same site then approvingly quotes a hadith in which “one of the polytheists” ridiculed the Muslims, telling one of them: “Your prophet has taught you everything, even the manners of going to the toilet.” The Muslim, however, affirmed that that was indeed true:

Yes, the Prophet forbade us from facing the Qibla [the direction toward Mecca] when urinating or relieving oneself. The Prophet asked us not to use the right hand when cleaning ourselves and to use at least three stones for cleaning.

Islam, indeed, has a rule for everything that a human being could imaginably do, with the horrifying punishments of hellfire awaiting those who fail to observe them. So why would a smokin’, tokin’ American boy choose a belief system in which everything he does is regulated, and he has to devote the bulk of his time learning the arcane rules of Allah for brushing his teeth, trimming his beard, and how many stones to use when going to the bathroom?

Over at MSN, in the “Men’s Department,” an article cutely has a caption asking if a commercial portraying men as dirty, unkept imbeciles is sexist:

Television maker Samsung is taking heat over a new commercial portraying men as dirty, unkempt, flatulent couch potatoes.

In the new ad for Samsung Smart TV’s Evolution Kit called “Evolutionary Husband?” posted May 14 on YouTube, a woman daydreams about plugging in the Evolution Kit into her man, who then becomes an “evolved,” multitasking marvel – caring for the baby while simultaneously making breakfast, painting, decorating a cake and watering a plant.

Her daydream is brought to an abrupt closure by a loud emission of flatulence from said husband — who remains the same dirty, zombie-like caveman who appears to have not left the couch in several days.

“Samsung TV is an Evolutionary TV,” says the message on the ad.

The man in the commercial is acting like a woman; that is how one becomes “evolved” in our screwed-up society. The only man worth dealing with is a metro-sexual. It’s no wonder men no longer want to get married as often.

Watch video on next page.

If you’ve been anywhere on the internet in the last couple of years, there’s probably a good chance that you’ve heard of Bronies —older, typically male fans of the children’s cartoon My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. There’s also a good chance that you may not have seen them in the best light. Often Bronies are presented as socially awkward, slovenly, and generally pathetic for liking a show for little girls. But is there more to the show and its fans than one would assume based on first glance? I called up a friend of mine, Adam Young, to ask him what led him to become a Brony and just what it is about this seemingly saccharine show that could inspire its legions of older fans to have such devotion to it.

Adam is 28 years old and resides in Champaign, Illinois. He attended Illinois State University and graduated in 2007 after obtaining a Bachelor of Science degree in Studio Arts. He is a huge fan of several movies and television shows, including Star Trek, Star Wars, The Simpsons, and Back to the Future. He is also an avid gamer, enjoying several Nintendo titles in the RPG genre such as Pokémon, Earthbound, and Paper Mario. Adam currently works for an outdoor specialty retailer.

How did you become a Brony?

Well, it was a very gradual process. I go to a lot of message boards on the internet for artwork and games or whatever. Around probably winter of 2010, maybe spring of 2011, I kept seeing all these strange memes, image macros, and user-avatar images of these weird horse-looking things popping up all over my message boards that I go to frequently.

At first I just kinda thought that was weird and didn’t think too much about it, and then the more they kept popping up I thought: “What the hell is this? I gotta figure out what the hell this is.” The art style was very reminiscent of either Genndy Tartakovsky or Craig McCracken, or any of the 1990s Cartoon Network people. First I iMDB’d Craig McCracken, the Powerpuff Girls guy. He had recently done Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, and it looked quite similar. I saw that his name was not on the credits list for this show, but, coincidentally enough, his wife Lauren Faust was. She was the executive producer of Foster’s Home for Imaginary Friends, and she got her start in the industry working on Powerpuff Girls in the later seasons, so I was familiar with her work.

After seeing that she was the one who developed My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic, I was like, “Well that’s kinda weird, I guess she really needed money or something.” I left it at that because of the preconceived notions a show like that would have attached to it, being based on a line of dolls for little girls and all.

So I really didn’t think too much about it, and then later I subscribed to a lot of YouTube channels, especially ones that review cartoons, video games, and anime. One of the channels I subscribed to was because they were doing reviews of the series Madoka Magica, which I was watching at the time. I really liked their Madoka reviews, and one day out of the blue this really, really long video of theirs, almost an hour long, popped up in my subscription feed. It turned out to be about the new My Little Pony show that I had seen all over the internet, and I was like, “Okay, if these guys are reviewing it, I guess it’s worth a look.”

So I went to YouTube and did a search for My Little Pony, and by that point most of the first season was already over, but there were still a few episodes left. I immediately tried to catch up as soon as I could, and after giving it a fair chance, I turned out to really, really enjoy the show. After watching all of the first season, I was like, “Well, I guess I’m not really allowed to judge a book by its cover ever again.”

“Peace will come,” Golda Meir once famously remarked, “when the Arabs start to love their children more than they hate us.” The obstacle to peace was not actually Arabs as such, but Muslims who had imbibed Islam’s doctrine of jihad and hatred of non-believers and primarily Jews — a hatred so intense that it drives people to prefer death (and murder) to life. And as we have seen recently with the monstrous grandstanding of Mama Tsarnaeva, this hatred is passed on in some Muslim families – and Zubeidat Tsarnaeva is by no means the only mother from hell.

Islamic supremacists avowedly and proudly love death. Jihad mass murderer Mohamed Merah said that he “loved death more than they loved life.” Nigerian jihadist Abubakar Shekau said: “I’m even longing for death, you vagabond.”

Ayman al-Zawahiri’s wife advised Muslim women: “I advise you to raise your children in the cult of jihad and martyrdom and to instil in them a love for religion and death.” And as one jihadist put it, “We love death. You love your life!” And another: “The Americans love Pepsi-Cola, we love death.” That was from Afghan jihadist Maulana Inyadullah.

Ultimately, this idea comes from the Qur’an itself:

“Say (O Muhammad): O ye who are Jews! If ye claim that ye are favoured of Allah apart from (all) mankind, then long for death if ye are truthful.” — Qur’an 62:6

This love of death is instilled in children. A Muslim child preacher recently taunted those he has been taught to hate most: “Oh Zionists, we love death for the sake of Allah, just as much as you love life for the sake of Satan.” This young man’s mother was probably much like the quintessential mother from hell, Mariam Farhat, or Umm Nidal (mother of Nidal), a Palestinian parliamentarian who died in March. No one more fully embodied the Hamas ethos — and the ethos of infanticide that permeates contemporary Palestinian culture as a whole — than Umm Nidal, a mother who willed the death of her own children and the children of others.

Having a hard time finding a real man, Lena? Maybe you’re looking in the wrong place?

 via Pretentious, Psychotic, Pathetic or Puerile: The Boys of Girls | Acculturated.

It finally had to be done. I had to catch up with the rest of the world and watch Lena Dunham’s Girls. After fortifying myself with three days or prayer and fasting, I dove in. I purchased season one, and watched the season two marathon on HBO.

Girls has been overanalyzed, so I won’t offer a broad interpretation. I can only point out what I think is Girls most glaring flaw: Lena Dunham did not include any control.

As in a control in a scientific experiment that serves as a “normal” component that you are not conducting the experiment on. Girls is the story of four twenty-something women in Brooklyn and the pathetic “men” that they date. There is Adam, the attention-deficit artist who always seems to be banging on something and has degrading sexual fantasies. There’s Ray, the schlub who manages a coffee shop and is almost too insecure to function. There’s Charlie, the soft-spoken musician who is so passive he can barely open doors. There’s Thomas-John, who has a job making real money but is written so one-dimensionally we really don’t know that much about him. And then there’s Booth Jordan (seriously?), an artist who locks one of the girls inside one of his works of art. He’s short and vulgar. (Doesn’t a single one of these guys–New Yorkers!–like or play sports?)

Girls creator Lena Dunham is very talented, and she’s only twenty-six, but it has to be said: like so many liberal Hollywood and New York artists, she has a powerful streak of cowardice. Girls would have been a much more compelling and less narcissistic show if Dunham had the guts to introduce a control into her Brooklyn petri dish.

Read the whole thing at Acculturated

Most people think Marv is crazy, but I don’t believe that. I’m no shrink and I’m not saying I’ve got Marv all figured out or anything, but “crazy” just doesn’t explain him. Not to me. Sometimes I think he’s retarded, a big, brutal kid who never learned the ground rules about how people are supposed to act around each other. But that doesn’t have the right ring to it either. No, it’s more like there’s nothing wrong with Marv, nothing at all — except that he had the rotten luck of being born at the wrong time in history. He’d have been okay if he’d been born a couple of thousand years ago. He’d be right at home on some ancient battlefield, swinging an ax into somebody’s face. Or in a Roman Arena, taking a sword to other gladiators like him. They’d have tossed him girls like Nancy, back then. — Sin City

Manly Activity

Ever watched a classic action flick? Of course you have. Movies like Die Hard, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Lethal Weapon, First Blood, and 300 have become fixtures in the American psyche. All these movies feature either a lone man or a small group fighting in a desperate, violent struggle and yet, somehow, coming out on top. Throughout most of America’s history, the average man could more easily relate to the experiences in those movies the way someone who shoots hoops at the park could relate to watching an NBA game. Sure, they might not have been able to do what they were seeing on the screen, but they were well-acquainted with violence. Either they had inflicted it, suffered it, or seen it up close and personal. We’re a nation that was birthed in a bloody revolution, where feuds and dueling were frequent occurrences, where intermittent battles with Indians occurred until the twenties, where roughly twenty percent of the male population served in WWII, and where fist fights and brawling were relatively common.

Today?

The average man may have seen hundreds of thousands of murders on his TV screen and committed tens of thousands more playing video games, but he has also probably never struck another human being in anger in his entire adult lifetime. In other words, he may be captivated by the imagery he sees at the movies, but he goes home knowing that he will never even live out a pale imitation of what he’s just seen.

America’s muddle in Afghanistan is not merely an unwise policy. Two prominent American authors — one a serious analyst (and former badass warrior), the other a bestselling novelist (who created one of our biggest badass heroes) — worry that it is an affront to American manhood as well.

For years Bing West has argued that our carrot with no stick approach to counterinsurgency and nation building in Afghanistan is sapping the “martial spirit” of our armed forces. Recently, he even wrote a column titled “We’re Too Nice to Win in Afghanistan,” detailing how a wimpy approach to a truly savage enemy is making victory impossible.

West proposes we change from a counterinsurgency protocol (winning hearts and minds in order to recruit allies against the terrorists while building a civil society) to a counter-terror strategy (kill them whenever and wherever we can find them and let the Afghan government build its own society).

Vince Flynn, in his new book The Last Man, has his fictional alter ego, Mitch Rapp, take a very direct approach. Upon being introduced to a former Taliban official the CIA has recruited to be part of the Afghan security infrastructure as America prepares to leave the country, and who is certainly playing both sides, he sees only one incentive structure that can work:

Pistol-whip the sneaky bastard and threaten to kill him if he doesn’t cooperate.

So, based on West’s superb book on the war in Afghanistan, The Wrong War, and Flynn’s best thriller to date, here are 5 ways that Obama’s approach to Afghanistan is an affront to American manhood.

It’s the end of the summer, I’m about to leave on vacation, I’m under several deadlines at once, so I think I’ll spend these last few blogging days with briefer posts — though I will try to address the really important issues of the day.

For instance, the ten macho films every man must see.  This is a Popular Mechanics list I found through the never-ending miracle of Instapundit. And not a bad list either. It actually does include several films that you must see if you’re a man and which, if you haven’t seen them, you’re probably not. Not that there’s anything wrong with not being a man, you understand. Unless, of course, you are one. Then you should be. But if you’re not, feel free to wear perfume and walk around in high heels. It’s nothing to be ashamed of. As long as you’re not a man. If you are, don’t.

Where was I?  Oh yeah, the Pop Mech list isn’t bad. But it includes a couple that I really have to question. Possibly with a truncheon. I mean, The Wrath of Khan? Get a grip. Stone Cold? I don’t know, bro. And while I’ll accept Machete as macho despite its absurd politics, if you don’t want to watch it because of that, you definitely get a man pass.

To replace those three?

His wasn’t the first brilliant plan to end in the emergency room.

The two boys had a problem they needed to solve. You see, there was an opossum on their farm and the boys had to capture it.

I’m not real clear just why, other than that’s just the way of things in a boy’s mind — opossums were made for trapping.

Nonetheless, the two set about their adventure by Googling “how to make a opossum trap.”

The contraption that inspired them consisted of a heavy rock, a rope, and a high tree branch — constructed and powered solely by two 11-year-old boys. It’s really not hard to see how this plan landed one of them in the emergency room to have his collar bone X-rayed.

Just as the mother of the chief architect was about to remind him that this was exactly why boys should put on clean underwear and socks every day, the triage nurse walked in.

“What brings you in today?”

“Well, you see, there’s this opossum on our farm.…”

For the next ten minutes the hospital air filled with the dreams and designs that ultimately knocked the starch right out of the young trapper.

Trying to keep a straight face, the nurse simply smiled and said the doctor would be in soon.

Apparently the boy’s adventure made the rounds ahead of the doctor. It wasn’t long before a stream of hospital staff including the janitor “needed” to hear the story.

At last the doctor entered the room. The gray-haired gentlemen pulled up a stool, leaned forward, and began listening intently.

“So tell me what happened.”

Once again the tale began:

Well, you see, there’s this opossum….

The doctor asked many questions; he seemed mostly interested in the construction of the trap. Shaking his head with a grin, he ordered the X-rays.

When the results came in, he returned with an announcement:

Well, boys, it looks like it’s back to the drawing board.

Your collar bone isn’t broken, just bruised. But I want you to know you made my day just to know that there are still boys that act like boys.

What do you think he meant when he said he was glad there are still boys that act like boys?

I think his idea of a boy is a bit old-fashioned. He remembers when boys were allowed to be a bit dangerous, adventurous, and industrious — before they were feminized.

Here are five ways parents can capture their boy’s heart, douse it with character, and send a real man out to conquer his own world.

Women are complicated because they have: A) a layer of logic, B) laid across that a mood, and C) on top of that an ever-fluctuating stream of emotion. If men are like checkers, then women are like chess — except the pieces are all kittens hopped up on catnip with broken glass taped to their paws.

I’m puzzled listening to my female friends tell me they don’t understand men. This is like a rocket scientist telling you she can’t figure out how a flush toilet works. Men are fairly simple; so how can we be so confusing to such comparatively complex creatures? How can women not already know these things?

1) Sleep with him too soon.

Setting aside moral concerns for the moment, let’s talk about when a woman should have sex with a man she views as long-term relationship material. There’s actually no wrong answer per se. If the guy is really clicking well enough with you, he’s probably going to stick around regardless of whether it happens on the first date or your wedding day.

However, women should understand that after just 3-4 dates, they probably don’t really have much of an idea of what’s going on in a guy’s head. He may be a player who’s saying what you want to hear in hopes of getting laid. Alternately, he may be perfectly sincere, but he’s just a lot more on the fence than you realize because he’s weighing that he thinks you’re really hot and sweet against that when you yelled at him last week, it reminded him of his ex — and he’s bored to death with you monotonously reciting to him what you did today. Of course, he’s probably not going to come out and just say that and after just a few dates, you won’t know him well enough to tell something’s wrong.

So, if he flees the relationship like you just contracted Ebola after you sleep with him and that’s going to upset you, well then, you should probably wait a little longer to make sure he intends to hang around. It’s also worth keeping in mind that to you, going out with a man three times, sleeping with him, and never hearing from him again may be a disaster, but to him it’s probably going to be viewed as a win. Not saying anyone’s right or anyone’s wrong with that, just noting a big mentality difference.

No, I'm not kinky. The handcuffs are because I want to talk about getting engaged right after we're done.