The question before men today is this: Who am I, as a man, if I don’t dominate others with money and sex?

By: Michele Woodward – Confluence Daily is your daily news source for women in the know.

It was at a party. I was chatting with a man about this and that, when he said, “At the end of my life, all that will matter is how much sex I’ve had and how much money I’ve made.” He raised his glass to me in that universal “cheers” motion and I got very still. I may have cocked my head to the side and said, “huh” but then extricated myself and found a quiet spot to reflect.

What matters to this man, and to many men, is sex and money. Watch any movie, many TV shows, Reddit sub-threads, and you see the same explicit or tacit message: Men’s lives are defined by sex and money. The more they have, the better they are.

And, in fact, as I have observed and loved men for nearly 59 years, I have to say that it seems like the focus on “how much sex and money” is more about impressing other men than it is about impressing oneself.

It’s often struck me how many times men in a room try to jostle for dominance with the other men in the room. The women in the room? If there are any women (and I have been the only woman in so many rooms that I’ve lost count), they almost don’t matter. It’s as if the men have to sort out the pecking order between them before any work can really get done.

Recently, the Gillette commercial and the boys in MAGA hats have ignited controversy about The State of Men. The Washington Post has a piece today by Andrew L. Yarrow which says that 20 million men have abandoned work, and that the male civilian labor force participation rate has fallen to 69%. In the mid-1950s, it was 85%.

Men who used to work with their backs and their hands and could use that brawn to provide for their families have found that the old path is closed off now.

There was a day when I was in first or second grade, riding in my family car and somebody pointed to the car next to us and said, “That man must hate his wife.” I don’t recall who said it. Maybe my older brother, maybe my mom. But I asked, “How do you know?” and the response was, “Because he’s making her drive. Good husbands don’t make their wives drive.” Sure enough, when I looked, the man was in the passenger seat and the woman was driving. I catalogued this observation into my Idea of Gender Roles.

That was probably 1965 or 1966. Back then, gender roles were pretty clear cut. Men did the outside-the-home work and women did the inside-the-home work. Men brought home the money and women provided sex. Sometimes the wife as well as other women provided the sex. (We all know those stories. And we know the women who put up with infidelity because they had no choice.)

Sex. Money.

Since women who worked outside the home reflected badly on the man (society would shake its head and sadly say, “Look, he can’t provide for his family”), those many, many women who stayed at home were financially dependent on their men and often provided sex as a trade for economic safety and security.

When women shook off this financial dependency by getting education and their own financial means, and taking control of their own fertility with small yellow pills, what it meant to be a man changed. The old trade-offs no longer worked.

Although we can see that some men are holding fast to the male-centric, sex/money/worth ideas of the past, the question before men today is this: Who am I, as a man, if I don’t dominate others with money and sex?

Of course, you know I have an answer.

If I could speak to those boys in MAGA hats – those boys jostling to impress each other that day – if I could teach them, I would say that rather than expecting to live the life of an entitled king among men, where your worth is based on how much money and how much sex and how much power, they need to expect to live a life of service. Just like Jesus did, which should be what’s taught at their church-affiliated school.

The men who objected to the Gillette ad need to start asking the question, “How can I help?” rather than “How can you say that about me?”

Men who serve others, who ask how they can help, who count their worth in lives touched rather than dollars and notches on the belt – these are the men for whom the future will open. They will be men of towering success. The men who are already living this way are living lives that matter.

We just need more of them.

So much has changed in my lifetime. So much. And so much will be changed by the end of my life. If men hold fast to outdated ideas and ways of being, the result will be even more unhappy, lonely, unfufilled men. Which would be such a tragedy for all of us. If more men can grow, evolve and serve, then there’s a chance it will be a much better world than the one I was born into, where everyone was forced into strict roles, responsibilities and limitations. We can live in a world of authenticity, freedom and openness – for all of us.

I will definitely raise my glass to that.