On a trip to London recently I had the misfortune to sit close to four young men who passed the time drinking beer (before noon), shouting and singing loudly, and talking incessantly about sex and girls they knew in the crudest and most disrespectful manner, to the point that one of them phoned their girlfriend and asked her to if she would sleep with one of his friends for £10. I assume (well, I hope) this was a joke. I also hope she told him to take a jump off the nearest cliff the next time she saw him. But who knows, maybe girls find this sort of talk entertaining these days?
Nobody on the train made any comment to the boys about their behaviour, although we all exchanged exasperated looks. There seems to be a general consensus that this is a "stage" most boys go through. And yet, as individuals these boys acted in a very different fashion. They said "please" and "thank you" to people, they took their rubbish with them off the train and one of them phoned his mother and told her he loved her. So how come when you get them in a group they regress to an animal state?
In her book "Authentic Beauty" Leslie Ludy includes some sections on manhood by her husband. This is what he writes:
"young men in my generation have been shaped by a warped pattern of manhood. It's no wonder that men today are so often referred to as jerks - the foundation of their manly behaviour is self-serving and self-gratifying.
Being a man, I'm well acquainted with the perversion process. You see, we as young men desire to be "normal". Whatever our culture defines as normal behaviour can very quickly become our manly pursuit. I was told somewhere in my junior-high years that having sex on the brain was a normal boyhood-to-manhood issue. I was told, even by women, that I, as a man, had only one thing on my mind...a fixation with the female body. Well, if we as young men are interested in being normal, just hazard a guess as to what we are going to think about."
And the solution?
Men need someone to believe in them. They need someone to tell them that they can rise above this mediocrity. They need someone to tell them that they can have a lot more than "one thing" on their minds. They need someone to raise the expectations of their manhood.









