One thing I love about my conversion to Orthodox Judaism after my upbringing in Seventh-Day Adventism is that OJ is a safe place for men.
Outside of pockets of left-wing Modern Orthodoxy, there’s not much of a need in traditional Judaism to display contempt for men.
Since at least the 19th century, the church has been largely anti-male, seeing men as the author of family dysfunction and pain. As British academic Callum Brown noted, “Nowhere did evangelical literature have such a powerful influence in the public domain, including in ‘secular’ fiction, as in its demonization of men.” Newsletter #3 was dedicated to exploring some of this history.
In 2020, the feminist scholar Valerie Hobbs published a peer reviewed study on the way conservative pastors talk about divorce in their sermons. She found:
“In summary, despite the fact that femaleness was, as mentioned earlier, a significant semantic concept in the divorce corpus, women are framed primarily as receivers of divorce rather than initiators. Although in most cases of divorce in the United States, women initiate divorce, pastors in the corpus in this way represented divorce as a largely male action.”
It’s one of the most widely known statistics in social science that women initiate the vast majority of divorces – around 70% of them. But this is rarely ever mentioned by evangelical pastors. I have never once seen this fact in an evangelical book on marriage, even ones that are otherwise full of statistics.
The church isn’t even acknowledging the reality of who initiates divorce, much less reckoning with the new cultural messages that it’s a great thing to dump even a wonderful husband and father in order to explore something new.
The unfortunate reality is that American church leaders largely do not understand the cultural dynamics of today America – and certainly don’t refer to or tailor their prescriptions to men to take account of them.
The entire reason that I started writing this newsletter several years back was because I saw so many men turning to online influencers and the manosphere instead of the church looking for life direction. I wanted the church to get in the game and become more competitive.
Unfortunately, if anything that gap has only gotten bigger. Online influencers like Jordan Peterson, Joe Rogan, the noxious Andrew Tate and many others ate the church’s lunch. That’s embarrassing.
One reason is that they are attuned to these cultural dynamics men see all around them. They might not have the right prescriptions – or indeed, even often have bad ones – but they at least are acknowledging in some fashion today’s realities.
The American church needs to update its software, and start confronting today’s culture. This is a lot harder to do than screaming “Man up!” at the men in the pews, but it has to be done. Quite apart from from effectiveness, it’s about being willing to speak the truth.
As one example of how the secular world has more compelling answers – indeed, any answer – read this piece about July from Freddie deBoer. DeBoer is an atheist so far as I know, and basically a leftist political writer rather than a men’s influencer. But people from a range of perspectives read him because he delivers the goods. He writes:
As I wrote recently, what media sells in 2025 is permission; that is our product. Apparently a lot of women were waiting for a particular kind of permission that Miranda July has provided. What’s remarkable about all of this cheering on of July in our most elite publications is not just its sheer volume, but also how untouched it is by skepticism or pushback. It’s not just that a certain kind of person at a certain kind of publication wants this story told; they also don’t want to hear anyone object to it. And I think this is the “Can women have it all?” phenomenon again, where saying that a particular kind of happiness for women is genuinely unattainable is too easily represented as saying that you don’t want them to attain it.
Well, the news is good: they already had permission. Most of the Western, educated, liberal women who are devouring this #content have in fact had the ability to avoid or escape monogamy for their entire lives.
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But, again, is/ought. The question is not whether women have permission to forego longstanding marriages and relationships to pursue a regular churn of sexual and romantic partners, in an effort to achieve real satisfaction and happiness. The answer to that was already yes. The more relevant question is, will the women who attempt this actually achieve satisfaction and happiness? And I’m profoundly skeptical. Because life doesn’t work that way. We live mundane lives in a boring existence on a finite planet. We negotiate little bits of happiness where we can find them. We never, ever get everything that we want, and we are remarkably consistent in no longer wanting what we want once we get it. For those of us who are lucky enough not to face poverty or disability or abuse or addiction, a vague-but-tolerable disappointment is something like the most common state of human life. And I think Miranda July and all of these ruling class thinkpiece peddlers are selling a lot of impressionable women on a fantasy, no different from the kid hawking crypto to gullible people eager to believe that they can get rich quick. What comes next, sooner or later, is the rug pull.
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When you read these endless essays, you’re not hearing women say “It’s true that the guys I’ll be able to bag in twenty years are going to have aging spots and balls that hang down to their knees, but girl, I’ll be liberated!” All of this is part of a far broader denial of aging and death in our culture; it’s incredible, the degree to which generally functional and successful people have completely cut off the inevitability of their advancing age from their conscious minds.
There are all manner of lifestyles that are built around the pursuit of endless novelty, such as those centered on drug use, sadomasochism, extreme sports, endless travel…. And what happens, very very very often, is that the pursuit of new experiences becomes in and of itself the boring slog that all of the rest of us experience too.
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The romantic ideal is good. It’s deeply imperfect but worth fighting for. There’s a reason people come back to it, again and again, despite all the frustration. I suspect a lot of people who consider lifelong serial partnering are doing so while quietly wanting the romantic ideal, one person for life, but the pain of looking for it has driven them into rejecting it as a form of self-defense, rationalizing unhappiness.
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So, here’s the question I’d ask Miranda July and her many middle-aged women acolytes: do you honestly think that the last decades of your life are going to consist of moving on from f—ing one hunky pool boy to the other, without trouble, disappointment, or a slowly and inevitably draining sense of satisfaction with it all? Do you think that, even if you can always reliably find a new partner who you’re attracted to and who is attracted to you, life will prove to be reliably satisfying, given that ultimately it’s just another attempt to ring permanent pleasure out of transitory experience? I’m biased, yes, I’m a romantic, I believe in love, one person. Acknowledging that bias, I just have to tell you – this all looks like the definition of being trapped in samsara to me, trading one form of attachment for an equal and opposite form of attachment. I know what you want it to be true, that you can simply choose to live a life of permanent novelty and support without commitment. I’m asking what you actually believe will be true, in the most jaundiced, hard-hearted, and self-critical way possible. We make big decisions from the cradle to the grave, but I’ve learned this about middle age: the bad ones matter more when we’re all always running out of time.