This post is for MEN ONLY!

It started life as a hashtag hoax, but
picked up some real agreement.

That’s right, ladies: I’m going to talk directly to men about man stuff. So I suggest you go read one of my friends (see my blogroll down in the right-hand column near the bottom). Or read Catholic Stand, or New Evangelist Monthly. If you do read this post, and you’re offended by anything I say — well, like the Piano Man said in the song "Big Shot", “Go and cry in your coffee, but don’t come b****in’ to me.”

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Okay, gents, listen up: We have a problem, and it’s mostly a problem of our making. What’s the problem? Let me work up to it slowly:

I know some of you call yourselves “dogs”. Why? Because dogs can’t say “no” to sex. Dogs don’t want to say “no” to sex. A dog doesn’t care how he gets laid, when he gets laid, by whom he gets laid, or what happens after he gets laid. He gets a whiff of pheromones, and he’s going for it. A dog thinks with his gonads … if he thinks at all.

A man can say “no” to sex. In fact, there are times when he says “Hell, no!” to sex. He cares about the how and the when and the by whom and the what happens after; he thinks about these things; he thinks about what’s right, about whether the rewards are worth the risks, and what the consequences may be.

A dog is not a man. If you’re a man, you can’t be a dog about sex. If you’re gonna be a dog, don’t pretend you’re a man. Sex doesn’t make you a man. You can f**k? Congratulations; you’ve got something in common with every mammal on the planet.

You bought into lies. The first lie is that there’s something wrong with you, or you’re gonna turn into some twisted monster, if you don’t get laid every so often. It was bulls**t sixty-plus years ago, when Alfred Kinsey released his first pseudoscientific report, and it’s still bulls**t now; there’s absolutely nothing “scientific” about it.

The second lie is that sexual freedom means getting laid whenever you want, saying “yes” whenever you have a chance. The fact is, you’re only free so far as you can say “no”; and there are many times when the most intelligent, most pragmatic thing you can do is say “no” regardless of what you want. If you can’t say “no”, you’re not really free — you’re a slave. Dogs aren’t really free; they’re slaves to their instincts.

The third lie is that you’re entitled to sex with certain women or at certain times. I’m gonna say this once, and you’d better tattoo it on your brain: When it comes to women, you’re not entitled to jack s**t.

It doesn’t matter what you paid for the whole date. It doesn’t matter how she’s dressed, or whether she has a reputation for putting out, or whether she’s drunk or stoned or whatever. It doesn’t even matter if she’s a pro. You’re not entitled to jack s**t. If you act like a man, like a full-grown, intelligent and responsible man, you may earn her respect, and even possibly her love. But you don’t deserve or have a right to have sex with her, no matter what you’ve done or said.

The fourth lie is that you’re somehow not responsible for the conception of children. That’s a dog’s response, not a man’s.

I know some of you are sitting out there thinking that contraceptives have changed everything. They didn’t change human biology, me buckos. When you get horny, that’s the oldest, most primitive part of your brain telling you it’s time to make copies of yourself. Your body is trying to get the woman pregnant! It wants reproduction to happen! Rubbers didn’t change that; drugs didn’t change that; gadgets didn’t change that. It’s only because the whole process of getting the gametes together is so inefficient that every sex act doesn’t result in fertilization.

And it’s only because we reproduce this way that we’re able to have sex at all. Like Robin Williams once said: “If you were an amoeba, you’d split in two and say, ‘Was it good for me? Who knows?’” The female angel fish lays her eggs on a rock, the male ejaculates over them, and they swim off, never having made any contact that could be considered sex. Reproduction is a design feature of sex, not an after-market add-on.

Male dogs are sperm donors, and that’s about it — that’s as far as fatherhood goes for them. Men assume responsibility for their children, and for taking care of the mothers of their children. A recent post I saw had the title, “Why are more men than women for abortion?” Every pro-life man I know had the answer to that one: “Duh! They’re for abortion so they don’t have to pay child support!”

Even dogs don’t kill their kids — or make their women kill their kids — to save money. If you’re not ready for kids, you’re not ready for sex. Grow up and take ownership of your actions.

Sixty-eight to seventy-two percent of you watch porn at least once a week; tens of thousands of you watch at least five hours of it a night. Porn feeds the lies. Porn isn’t about love, or healthy sexual relationships; it’s about men and women using each other as masturbation tools. In many of them, the men treat the women like s**t; a disturbingly growing number of them cater to rape fantasies, or to the falsehood that teenage girls simply pant for older men to “break them in”.

Do you begin to get the picture? Are the dots connecting?

I’ve read and heard quite a bit about men needing to become real men. I’ve read and heard quite a bit about men needing to “wear the pants” again. But I haven’t read or heard squat about men keeping those pants zipped. We’ve done more than gone to the dogs; we’ve become dogs. To become real men, we first have to become men. Which means we have to stop being dogs.

It’s time to “man up”. It’s time to get rid of the bulls**t myths, pseudoscience and psychobabble we’ve been using to give cover to our bad behavior. It’s time to stop masturbating and turn off the porn. It’s time to stop treating women like rubber sex dolls, and to start cherishing, protecting and respecting them, as St. Paul taught (Ephesians 5:25-33).

We’ve been blaming women for our own screw-ups ever since Adam pointed the finger at Eve for offering him the forbidden fruit (Genesis 3:12). We need to stop blaming women for sexual violence, stop condoning sexual violence, stop committing sexual violence. We need to take ownership of the problem, and do something about it ourselves.

This isn’t about being “sensitive” or “politically correct”. This is about becoming men that women can respect. We can set the terms of our manhood ourselves, and we can set them in a way that lets us be masculine — not emasculated, not feminized, not drones and sperm donors — without being creatures women must distrust and fear for their own safety.

It’s time we grow up and be men. Not dogs.