Yet Hawley ignores one of the most exciting things about being a man: the desire to risk everything, including job, marriage, and money, for true greatness. This is powerfully dramatized in the great 2014 film Whiplash . The movie tells the story of a young jazz musician, Andrew Neyman, a drummer studying at an elite music conservatory. His instructor is Terence Fletcher, a man who treats his “studio band” at the school like Marine recruits. To Fletcher, telling someone “good job” is the same as saying they’re average, and that’s worse than death. Fletcher is no family man. Yet it’s impossible to take your eyes off of him. What makes Whiplash indelible is that its ultimate focus, the thing that it always comes back to, is manly greatness — and the required shedding of blood and sweat to realize your destiny. Another man who realized this and let nothing distract him from it was, of course, Jesus.

Too often today, men get beaten up by hard work with low pay, women who are passing them in school, and absent fathers. But the pain does not usher us into a greater cosmic meaning or purpose. Working the fields, playing football, and even raising a family just won’t provide that vision, which for centuries was the work of male tribal elders. As the grim statistics about fatherlessness reveal, those elders are now missing — and all the feminism in the world cannot replace them.

[I spent the weekend with my cousins, whom were as close as siblings to us, and reminiscing about their father/my uncle and this point. It’s not even ‘greatness’ that defines real manhood. It’s the shedding of blood, sweat, and tears for what’s important, especially family. It is that sacrificial servant leadership that has largely blinkered out of existence for a variety of reasons, but certainly among them the shift in culture that utterly devalued it. I wrote about my uncle (also my godfather) when he passed in 2011. — Ed]