Manning Up

Manning Up

 

 

One of the great gifts that I have been given as a teacher was being asked by my department chair, Joe Betz ’01, to teach the senior Theology elective, Christian Manhood. “Manhood” as the boys call it, is a course in virtue. Developed by the late Jim Skerl ’74 in the 1980s, the course was and is designed to help our students—young men on the cusp of adulthood in an often confusing world—begin to discover and hone the tools necessary for living a meaningful life. 

Tools provided by the Carpenter from Nazareth.

Inheriting this class from Jim via Tom Healey ’77 and Drew Vilinsky ’97 has been a little like being the Paul Butterfield Blues Band following Crosby, Still, Nash, and Young at Woodstock: good for you, you get to play Woodstock, but you quickly come to see that you can’t hold a candle to the masters. Nonetheless, the show must go on.

To begin the course, I recount a series of incidents that happened at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point a number of years ago. A number of male cadets were accused (and found guilty) of harassing—verbally and sexually—female cadets who were also part of the “Long Gray Line.”

After lawsuits and a fair amount of soul-searching, the academy leaders recognized that there was a cultural problem at West Point that needed to be resolved. Authorities called in psychologist Michael Kimmel to meet with the male cadets and try to get at the root of the problem. After all, something told these young men—purortedly the “best and the brightest” our nation could offer—that made them think that treating their fellow cadets (or anyone, for that matter) in such a way was acceptable.

To get at the root of the problem, Kimel asked these cadets (outside of earshot of any administrators or faculty members at West Point) two questions: questions I ask my students at the beginning of each academic year as well. The first question very simply is: “What does it mean to be a ‘good’ man?” The responses are basically the same between the cadets at West Point and members of FIFA, a police academy in Sweden, and other colleges and universities where Kimmel has put on the same program. They include, he noted in an article for New York Magazine: “[Having] integrity, honor, being responsible, being a good provider, protector, doing the right thing, putting others first, sacrifice, caring, standing up for the little guy.”

It’s the next question that really becomes grist for our conversation mill. Here Kimmel at West Point—and I at Saint Ignatius—ask the question: “What does it mean to be a ‘real’ man?,”  that is, when someone tells them to “man up” or “be a man,” what do they mean? The answer from the men at West Point was: “never cry, be strong, don’t show your feelings, play through pain, suck it up, dominate, be aggressive, win at all costs, get rich” and—how do I put this delicately?—use women. When asked where they learned these attitudes, universally the answers included (in this order): “my father, my coach, my older brother.” 

When I ask my boys the same question, the answers I get are different—throughout each section and over the past six years—“be responsible, be assertive, be a leader, be brave, be strong.” 

Their answers to my queries, I hasten to add, are submitted anonymously with the direction to be honest.

In looking at our young Ignatians’ responses to this question about what it means to be a “real man” one realizes that he or she could easily slip every one of those into the “good man” column with ease. All of these characteristics are good and necessary for living in our world and yet they’re very different from the messages that have been given to these other young men at the very school (or type of school) to which many of our boys aspire. When I ask the guys where they hear these messages, they respond that they are hearing them from their fathers, their coaches, their teachers, and their older brothers. So if these messages are coming from the same sources, I ask, and if they’re being directed to young men about the same age, why do they think there is a difference?

Their answers are heartening.

Given time to reflect in small groups, my students tell me the difference is the environments in which they find themselves, environments almost always characterized by practiced faith. Their fathers, coaches, teachers, and brothers (for the most part) have a vision of “real” manhood and “manning up” which is defined by self-sacrifice, compassion, assertiveness, respect, and self-control, and not by aggression, domination, and exploitation. Theirs is a refreshing alternative for the boys to the “manosphere” which has infected social media of late. 

It is a vision the older men are not afraid to share with the boys for whom they feel responsible. It is what “Christian manhood” looks like on a Tuesday. And while we have had students and graduates—usually fuelled by alcohol—who have forgotten the message, most have heard it loud and clear, because their dads and grandfathers and coaches manned up and showed them the way, as much by how they live their lives as what they say.

In the style of the One Who manned up for His followers 2,000 years ago.

 

A.M.D.G./B.V.M.H.