Years ago, I got to meet a man who was quite, as we would say, “camp”. Somewhat limp-wristed, high-pitched voice … you get the drift. I thought, “Hmm, this guy must bat for the other side”.
Then I met his wife and two children, which was one more wife and two more children than I had … I was more than a little embarrassed, I must say!
Here’s my point. In much if not most popular discourse, the word “effeminacy” generally means “campy”. Now, many gay men are not camp, and (as this story reminds me) some camp men are not gay. So - I’m wondering if a good rendering of malakos, in many a context, might well be, “unmanly”?
(Please, I am not trying to disagree with the force of this post …)
It seems like you are at least slightly confused about what we’ve been driving at. Our whole point is that effeminacy is a separate sin from homosexuality. Yes, they are related, but they are separate.
The problem with “unmanly” is it is basically the same as using the word in its definition. “Unmanly” is fine as far as a definition goes, but then you’ve got to define what manly means. “Gay” or “campy” both communicate effeminacy just fine. So does “soft” if used in the right context and manner.
Ross, I agree with your observations about campyness and what it sometimes incorrectly signals, as well as correctly.
I know a fellow whose manner is pretty campy. He related to me one time how a gay man was hitting on him. I’m convinced he had no idea that the gay man was misreading my friend in exactly the same way that other straight men might have been reading him! Yet, he was married with four sons! And a rancher to boot.
Your suggestion would have more merit except for:
A long-established linkage between the term malakoi and the English translation effeminate;
An equally settled association of the term effeminate and campyness; and,
An aggressive promotion of the just-mentioned association by the “gay community,” who though their number include a great many non-campy men nevertheless confess a kind of ownership of the style.
If one wishes a term other than effeminate that accurately captures the ethos of malakoi, I’d opt for “soft men.”
Perhaps “feminized” would be a useful description. I’ve noticed that many professional-class men of the Millennial generation who are working for corporations or the government come off as effeminate, but not in a homosexual or campy way. Instead, it is as if they have undergone years of indoctrination that trained them to act according to feminine norms.
I’ve also been thinking lately about the different mechanisms used by our culture to feminize men and masculinize women.
Women are strongly encouraged to adopt male behaviors and invade male spaces: “you go, grrl!” It’s largely OK for women to adopt feminine roles and behaviors, but the women who get celebrated are celebrated for mannish behavior.
Men, on the other hand, are largely shamed away from masculinity, rather than celebrated for adopting effeminate roles and behaviors. Men get “toxic masculinity,” not scholarships to nursing school or affirmative action for preschool teaching.
I don’t know what that all means, but it seems interesting to me.
Yes, your terms of “feminized” or “soft men” are much closer to what I was aiming at, and possibly more likely to be understood by the wider populace than using the term “effeminate” to mean the same thing? Thanks.
This is so good and was used to rebuke me. Thanks for sharing, KR. I can see many of my sins more clearly as I reflect on this paragraph and can see myself ‘bargaining’ in my flesh that I’m ‘leading my family’ because I’m doing similar things to what you mentioned, but at the same time I am failing to lead as a man in areas that I don’t want to lead. Thank you again for your post.
I hope the post helps - both pastors who think the cause is lost and for men such as myself who either don’t know or don’t care that they have embraced effeminacy. The depths of my sin of effeminacy reached further than I divulged in that post - I gave an overview of the in- and outbound trajectories but glossed over the trough of it. I expect that I will have more to say on my personal experience with effeminacy on other occasions.
What I hope readers glean is first that not properly translating and preaching on 1 Cor. 6:9 has tangible consequences and second that effeminacy is not camp - it leads to it, but only after a capitulation. Camp, or effeminate affectation, is put on to signal the role you occupy in a relationship (romantic or otherwise). A man has not avoided effeminacy if he is physically strong, bearded, or ostensibly positioned as the patriarch of his own family; effeminacy must be battled at its root.
The root of effeminacy is a man’s refusal to take on the mantle (read: his responsibilities) of his sex. It is, to reference a famous woman of fiction, a desire to be unsexed: probably not (usually) consciously, given its prevalence, but I would argue that my generation’s widespread decline in marriage rates, in fertility rates, in its precipitous drop-off in net worth (i.e.; not owning a home, especially) is because men have abdicated their responsibility to be men. I did.
What’s more is that our society’s egalitarian mandate has preached the negative consequences of men ceding their manhood - that is, men need to give up rights for the sake of women’s equality - but men seem to only o along with it since intuiting that if we don’t have those rights, we needn’t shoulder the attendant responsibilities that grant them! All of the feminist head-scratching about how a woman might “have it all,” and it seems to have dawned on few that this was the tradeoff. Rights are bought with responsibilities. The effeminate man is glad to see his rights go if only you’ll take some responsibility with you.
This may be true for the individual case of @krk88, but I would strongly argue that the principal cause of the decline in net worth is not effeminacy but rather deliberate policy choice. Preceding generations – and especially the Baby Boomers – have decided not to pay forward the material and social wealth they inherited from prior generations. Fifty years ago when the Baby Boomers came of age, states subsidized college to keep tuition cheap, companies trained their own workers, jobs paid better, and a lot of housing was built. Recent generations have faced high college tuition, companies that expect workers to pay for their own training, jobs with lousy pay, and expensive housing due to zoning restrictions. Previous generations – and especially the Baby Boomers – have also run up a gigantic national debt so they can enjoy more now and leave the bill for later generations to pay.
Deliberate policy choice also plays a role in lack of family formation – being in a worse economic situation than preceding generations discourages marriage and childbearing. For example, the house I am currently renting was built sixty years ago and owned by a working class man with a state-at-home wife and six children. Now the same house is affordable only for a dual-income professional couple – is that a situation which is going to encourage marriage and childbearing?
I am not absolving effeminate men in the younger generation from the need to repent of their effeminacy, but I think we need to acknowledge that they are receiving a trashed inheritance.
I saw somewhere a statistic which showed that compared with sixty years ago, real wages for the upper quintile of the workforce had increased by 70 percent; but for the fifth quintile, no more than 20 percent, and very little since the 1980s. This is from all sorts of things; globalisation, a drying-up in the number of unskilled jobs, especially in manufacturing; and the shift in economic structure from manufacturing to services. This has particularly affected the men in the fourth and fifth quintiles of the income structure, so it is not necessarily the case that more women in the workforce has crowded the men out of better-paying jobs. It may not be deliberate policy choice as much as the law of unintended conseqences.
Your point about the Baby Boomers is a challenging one - (I’m at the top end of Generation X) - but has been made elsewhere.
I think it’s appropriate to look to the Boomers as a factor when asking where all these Millennial problems came from, but the next logical question is: Why did the Boomers suddenly lose the moral vision of paying wealth forward? In other words, where this analysis falls short (not yours specifically @Joel, but where others often take it) is that the choices of Millennials are attributed to the result of systemic forces created by Boomers, but the Boomer’s choices were entirely spontaneous and individual.
Now, ultimately we can draw a straight line back to Adam and his sin which caused all these problems, which is theologically air-tight, but not especially useful for analysis. I’m not arguing that we always need to regress all the way back, only that we recognize that the Boomers themselves came from somewhere, and likely didn’t pay things forward because something went wrong before that. I imagine the emotional and spiritual scars their fathers brought home from the War had something to do with it.
I agree with what you’re saying about policy choices causing many of these things. A couple things I would add is income and payroll taxes.
Income taxes are not (at present) too high in my estimation, but the legal environment and reporting requirements they create make it difficult to pass down whole assets from generation to generation. It’s not hard for those who can afford the attorney and accountant’s fees (most middle-class folks are fine here), but forget about doing a cash-only side-hustle without being in constant fear of the IRS. In my estimation, a lot of folks do the cash-only thing because they’re snakes who want to cheat their way out of taxes. But others are just simple people trying to get by. They have an idea to make some money, but if they can’t comply with the reporting requirements, they have to keep it underground.
Payroll taxes are where things get crazy. In 1970, payroll tax rates were 4.8% on both employer and employee, for 9.6% total. Self-employed persons were actually treated more favorably, only paying 6.9% total. But this was only on the first $7800 of earnings (about $51,500 in 2019 dollars). Today payroll taxes are 7.65% from employee and employer (15.3% total), 15.3% for the self-employed, and the wage base is $132,900 – more than double what it was 50 years ago after adjusting for inflation. Oh, and by the way, if you’re self-employed, there is no limit, so you pay 15.3% tax on all your earnings, in addition to whatever your normal income tax rate is.
Though I agree with the structural and policy issues you cited, I think the argument could be made that these policy decisions were implemented by effeminate men because they were effeminate. Or at least because the men in leadership were not leading righteously.
I do not disagree that the economic outlook for folks from my generation and beyond is bleaker for those of us who occupy the middle class (and lower), but I want to push back at two points:
My point on net worth was as much a comment about net worth in the general sense (we don’t own houses) as it was about the collective inclination to fall back into comfort, using the economy as an excuse to avoid building it. How many of us moved back in with our parents rather than scraping and saving on our own? How many of us are buying $5.00 lattes (or $2.50 coffees!) every morning without batting an eye? How many of us are turning to wicket politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren in a desperate attempt to “reclaim what ought to be ours?” How many of us aren’t getting married because we conveniently believe we “ought to be settled” before we move into that part of our lives? All of that is effeminacy, in this case excused in our own minds by the actions of others.
Along this line, if Jesus’ parable of the talents is a functional allegory, then none of us are excused for being given 1 talent when Gen X got 5 and the Baby Boomers were given 10. To bury our talent in the ground is to embrace effeminacy.
My point is that I am a 30 year old man with a wife, two children, and hope for another to come next year. I work with many members of my own generational cohort, some of whom are committed believers. I am the only one with a spouse. I am the only one with children. My wife and I are the youngest family at a still-relatively-young suburban church. The economy has not favored me - last year, our attempt to buy our first house fell through. My own actions, detailed in my prior testimony, screwed us by failing to lead us into prudent financial decisions in the earlier years of my marriage that would have almost certainly prevented the home purchase from falling through.
And yet, those decisions were makeable. They were there to be made. It was my own effeminacy, my own put-upon-ness, that told me I could excuse car buying and credit card-style borrowing because the economy stinks and I deserved the life I wanted. The reason the pokes and prods about “avocado toast” are valid is because we want to eat like kings on a budget of paupers and refuse to take responsibility for the fact that we live in the one economic system known in human history that affords us the ability to climb from impoverishment to wealth and have decided we want the right to that feast without the responsibility of bringing it to the table.
I do not say all of this to grand stand or to beat my own chest. I say all this because I think this is the point at which challenging men to shed their societal invitation to be effeminate is strongest. If we let the younger millennials believe they have an excuse to be effeminate and are also not calling effeminacy for what it is, then we are failing each other.
We should not let the economy be an excuse to avoid wisdom or to shed our mantles of manhood.
Yes, you are right that the Boomer choices were not entirely spontaneous and individual. Rather, I’d say the Boomer generation was the first in which the ethos of self-gratification came into full flower. This ethos was subsequently adopted by their older peers in the Silent Generation and of course carried down by the succeeding generations. What distinguishes the Boomers is that they received the most material and social wealth and passed on the least.
Well, there have been wars throughout history, but sons didn’t turn out like the Boomers. I would instead attribute it to the psychological theories of the time that greatly influenced child-raising (and still do). The Boomers nonetheless had the benefit of continuation of older practices by inertia, intact families, and a mother at home. The following Gen-X generation that I am part of was the first to experience widespread parental divorce, absence of a father, and mothers away at work.
Of course, the primary reason for this is that the Boomers by and large decided to have few (or no) children.
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Certainly.
In my metro area, the median price home costs $600K but the median household income is only $77K (and note that many households are dual-earner, so the typical man earns less than this). One rule of thumb is that one shouldn’t spend more than three times annual income on a house, but in my area it would take a year and a half of household income merely to build up a 20% down payment. Foregoing a daily $5 latte over a whole year would knock off less than 1/60th of that downpayment. Yes, one should scrape and save on one’s own, but let’s not kid ourselves that “avocado toast” is what is preventing Millennials from buying houses. It doesn’t have to be this way, and it didn’t used to be this way.
I completely agree, and I honor you for growing in manhood in the presence of adverse circumstances. You were wrong to spend beyond your means, and I rejoice that you have repented of that. And yes, it is still true that our current economic system affords us the opportunity to climb from poverty to wealth, but that is less true than it was decades ago.
Great post from our friend KR. I am almost exactly your age, and have dealt with very similar problems.
I agree with Joel that the economy is poorer for us than it was for previous generations. I believe this to be a corporate judgment of God on our country. God deals with us as individuals and also as families and nations. Even though all are not equally guilty, all suffer.
We have moral agency to work for change, and I have no hard principle against public policy helping. Yet men are still responsible and it is unseemly to complain.