Why I Want my Sons to be Masculine and my Daughters to be Feminine
I wrote an article recently on the emasculation of men due to technological advancement, and received a bit of push-back on my own future homeschooling plans for my sons.
The main issue seemed to be the question of why I would want to “box my children into antiquated cultural gender norms”.
Rather than get caught up in a lengthy discussion in the comments, I thought I’d use my platform to express and explain myself in more detail.
I’m not going to get swept up in rebutting the obvious strawman nature of the claim. I’m just going to tell you exactly why I want to encourage masculinity in my sons and femininity in my daughters.
For starters, I myself am the product of a milquetoast, girly Jesus, so meek, mild and submissive Christian upbringing within the broader culture of a commonwealth communistic globalist agenda.
As a boy, I was taught to elevate women and diminish my own masculinity. I was raised to think masculinity was aggressive, morally weak, the bullying behavior of the unintelligent masses, and that “true strength” was passive, non-confrontational intelligence and femininity — because women have babies and that’s harder than anything a man can do.
As such, I was molded by those ideas; my main pursuits in life have been creative writing, music, languages, theology, academia and family.
So I’m not coming into this discussion as some stereotype of a macho jock farmboy with some strict militaristic view of what a man is and should be.
I’m speaking as someone who was emotionally abused as a child into believing that men were inherently bad and existed to serve women by protecting them, providing for them, and being the “bad cop”; disciplining the children for their wives so the women always appeared in a good and virtuous light in the children’s eyes. As such, I actively sought to take on as many feminine characteristics as I could growing up because that was, in my mind, good and virtuous.
And that actively harmed me for decades.
However, since leaving my religious upbringing in pursuit of truth and holistic health, I’ve shifted views on a huge number of things that I used to think were very black and white. As such, I myself am not boxed into almost anything.
So why then would I be desirous to “box” my own children into a seemingly stricter gender paradigm?
Well, I think there’s a few fundamental things about reality we need to set straight in order to have this discussion.
Firstly, a “box” is a framework. A container. It has boundaries, limits, a general shape. Structure. Everything in this world, even the world itself requires some basic structure for life to exist.
We can see that plants (when left untouched by people) will grow however they can based upon the structure provided by their natural environment. Above ground, they will grow towards the available light, and below ground towards water and minerals in the soil, bending and contorting in whatever way they have to in order to survive. And when conditions are too harsh for them to grow any more, they will attempt to propagate seeds before they die so that life may continue in some capacity.
Furthermore, we can see that people (if they can understand what the plants really need and are able to give it to them) can facilitate an environment or structure in which the plant can thrive, live a long healthy existence, and be really fruitful.
A poor patch of soil can be fertilized, hydrated, aerated, remineralized. A weak plant can be given a stake or tresses for support as it grows. A plant that is growing in a sub-optimal way can be pruned, trimmed, shaped, have any premature buds nipped, all so it can be shaped into the best version of itself it can be.
A gardener who ignores the needs of his plants will find them growing sub-optimally. Likewise, a gardener who over-prunes, over-waters, or overly restricts the growth of his plants will find them stunted and incapable of providing back optimal value to either the gardener or the garden.
Now, just as with a gardener and a garden, there is an inherent symbiotic relationship between parents and children that can be extremely rewarding and beneficial to everyone involved.
A man and woman through an act of nature create a child. That child requires some basic framework/structure in life. If parents fail to provide that, the child either a) dies, b) is stunted, or c) something else in the environment intervenes to provide structure to the child.
Much of the structure that used to be provided by parents, extended family and trusted community members has been replaced now by television, media and government schooling.
When you look at what reciprocal value those controlling corporations seek from your children, it’s certainly not the health, happiness and best interest of your children, family and community. Instead, they want what serves the beast control system; obedience, compliance, attention, subservience, followers, money. They want your children addicted, distracted, indebted, just another cog in the machine and not questioning their place in it.
In short, they want whatever will help them squeeze the most value out of your children without regard to your children’s well-being.
Now, you can choose to give that structure to your children. I don’t. I see that entire pathway as an epic failure.
I think the people controlling the world right now have taken what was a lovely architectural masterpiece — one that has already stood the test of time — and pointed out cracks in the facade in order to tear the whole thing down and replace it with some ugly, contrived and stifling box made of scaffolding that offers no actual protection under the guise of greater freedom.
I want to set my children up to thrive.
I want to create conditions for my children that will give them the best opportunities in life for peace, well-being, holistic health, happiness and great relationships.
And I do believe that that in turn will probably make me happiest in my old age; if I can see my children and grandchildren thriving, healthy, happy in life, I will have no regrets, because that is real wealth.
So, that being my stated goal, I then need to assess what structure will provide my children with the right conditions for optimal growth.
So I looked and I looked for the actual people who had this real wealth; the health and happiness that I want to give to my children. And this is what I found:
People who had real wealth didn’t belong to a particular religion or class or nation or diet or worldview, except in that they sought what was good, beautiful and true in life, in harmony with the natural world.
They owned their own land, kept a garden, raised animals, had bigger families, had tight-knit, like-minded local communities, had some belief in some sort of creative force or higher power beyond us, and had a sense of internal balance with the world around them.
Good. Beautiful. True.
So what does any of that have to do with encouraging my boys to be masculine and my girls to be feminine?
Well, when I look at what good, beautiful and true structures lead to the most abundant real wealth outcomes, it always comes back to what is real in nature. As Crrow Triplehorn says, there is no lie in nature.
In nature we see many patterns and rules geared towards abundance. Gender distinctions are prevalent across virtually all known forms of animal life. Even many plants produce “male” and “female” flowers with different purposes.
Some people in recent years have attempted to reduce the distinctions between the genders to genitalia or chromosomes only, but this is inconsistent with reality.
There are thousands and thousands of genes that express differently between men and women that make them better suited to different complementary roles. To ignore those natural distinctions would be to ignore reality.
When my wife and I married, I was a more effeminate man, and she in many ways (as she would freely admit) was a very domineering woman (as a self-protection mechanism). We complemented each other. But we also weren’t living in reality.
We had been trained by our environments and by childhood trauma to be in survival mode constantly. But as we both underwent healing journeys, confronting our traumas, seeking truth and learning to find embodiment; peace and stability within our own bodies, my wife became more and more “feminine” and I naturally grew more and more comfortable in my “masculine” self.
We learned by our own experiences that believing lies and falsehoods and hypocrisies created internal dissonance with our bodies. On some level, our bodies knew the truth in harmony with our natural world all along.
Learning to listen to our bodies, to bring our mind and body together and resolve those dissonances, to actually live in reality, was the key to holistic healing, health and happiness.
The inherent needs of healthy male and female bodies are different. They want to eat differently. They want to move differently. They want to express themselves differently. And by focusing on embodiment and healthy emotional processing with our children, we see that the men naturally want to be more “masculine” and the women more “feminine”.
Moreover, there’s an important social aspect to all this we don’t want to overlook.
My wife and I were both broken and attracted each other because of our complementary natures. But the healing journey has been a long and rocky road.
If we want our children to attract healthy wholesome friends and romantic partners later in life, well, healthy masculinity attracts healthy male friends and healthy female lovers. Likewise, healthy femininity attracts healthy female friends and male suitors.
And so it’s been important for us to determine what healthy masculine and feminine behaviors to encourage in our children, and you know what we’ve found?
The better example I give my sons of healthy masculine behaviors, the more they inherently just follow my example. And the more my wife models healthy feminine behaviors, the more my daughters want to be like her.
It’s not convoluted socio-cultural programming. It’s not even second nature to them. It is a reinforcement of their own inherent primary masculine and feminine natures.
Now, yes, parents can through their own unresolved issues be overly restrictive or structureless with their children, and cause problems very early on. But the more we focus on what’s good, beautiful, true, healthy and in balance with nature, the more these problems resolve themselves over time, and in so doing, create more “masculine” men and more “feminine” women.
