From Touchstone: Mere Comments section.
The YMCA?
Recently we've been discussing on this site the feminization of American men, especially in the American churches. I wonder whether we're using the wrong word.
Let's suppose that "feminization" describes what happens not when you actively pursue a policy of turning boys into girls, but when you indolently neglect to try to turn boys into men. A better word might then be "emasculation," with the caveat that you are not cutting off what has made someone a man already: you are failing to provide what would make a man a man in the first place.
The implications are crucial. I am suggesting that it is a foolish dream to say, "We ought to stop encouraging our boys to be like girls, and ought instead to hold before them examples of manliness," unless you are willing to back encouragement up with traditions, customs, institutions. Manhood needs to be won; it does not steal upon you while your body develops. That cannot happen regularly unless boys are for a time trained by men, apart from the company of girls. The old Boys Clubs of America were founded for that purpose -- they took the street toughs and tried to train them up in civic virtue, giving them also skills for men's jobs (woodworking, auto mechanics). Now those clubs are co-ed, which means that you do not take in the street toughs (how can you have such, around women and little children?); they are day-camps and summer kindergartens. The YMCA is no longer Christian, nor for the Young, nor for Men.
Show me where a troubled boy in the United States can now go to learn to become a man. Maybe the Boy Scouts -- and yet even they now, in a partial capitulation to stupidity, allow women to be scoutmasters. The Knights of Columbus? Show me where. And if the boy does grow up to be a man, show me the institution wherein he can exercise that manhood freely, speaking his mind and using his judgment to sever right from wrong, wise from foolish. A university? The town council? I say it again: the reason why we do not develop manhood in our boys is not that we are afraid we might fail, and turn them into louts and bullies. We fail now, and our streets are full of louts and bullies. We are afraid we might succeed.

The above text is from a website called Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity. There is a blog there called Mere Comments. This is today's blog.

Those of you who know me well know that I carry a card that says "Become a Dangerous Man for Christ!" I believe that Men's Ministry is vital today that that most of society's ills are associated with the problem listed here. Boys 2 Men is the name of a musical group, but a rare occurrence.

More later.