Here are some manly bears doing a little prayer for you. . .

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Lp3s4ygDw0

Most of us grew up with the values that you are talking about. But things are different at the schoolyard. We’ve all known schoolmates who were absolute pricks, but were as pleasant as pie when they meet your parents, etc. Somehow, despite our values, school ends up being what Jennings described, except to a lesser degree. And while some people were able to handle the bullies with measured responses, others just kept on getting their asses kicked, with increased humiliation. Some, like me, were weaklings that managed to avoid the bullies, probably by making subtle alliances.

The question is, when becoming adults, which values won out. The one taught by your parents, or the one learned at the schoolyard.

Ashpenaz, I thought Adam, Hoss, and Little Joe were cool gentlemen, but there was plenty of amorality and immorality on that show as well. The Cartwright’s had to deal with a lot of sh&t.

Plutosdad, you make a good point. But I find it hard to believe that the women who do go after jerks preferred them because they were at least assertive. In fact, my observations have been that as soon as the nice guy showed any sign of assertiveness, it was back to the jerks. I think many times, it has to do more with wanting something that you can’t have. And no longer wanting something you are able to get.

The More You Know. . . .

Sticking to Hollywood, Jimmy Cagney was a Golden Gloves boxer and a dancer. Gentle Jimmy Stewart was a bomber pilot. Ronald Reagan opposed a no-gays-in-education law in 1976. Only in Kevin Jennings’ mad imagination do we forget these shining examples.

BTW, Daniel, I’m looking you up on FB, if you don’t mind.

Some people get the wrong idea that being assertive means to be a jerk. Its why “nice guys” think women want jerks, they don’t want jerks, they just want assertive men who don’t act like boys.

Some guys become adults and never learn that, and think the world is full of unfair bullies who get rewarded for being mean.

Sounds like Jennings has a lot of pent up issues, and is projecting them on the entire populace.

I think he should go read No More Mr. Nice guy by Robert Glover. It’s for straight men, but it’s exactly what he is talking about, and something anyone who feels like him, like always victimized because you’re too nice or not a masculine stereotype, can really be helped by reading.

I wish more gays were attracted to MEN.

Actually, no. Jennings is correct in the sense of fellow indoctrinated gay leftists, who were all taught that maleness was evil, that men were inherently violent and awful, that the male gender identity was the source of all of society’s problems, and that men need to be “put in their place”.

GPW is absolutely correct. The Western masculine ideal is of strength and power tempered with the strong sense of responsibility. In the Bible, even as it tells wives to be subject to their husbands, it makes it clear that husbands should love their wives as Christ did the church — which means they should willingly die in their place — and as they do their own body, cherishing and nourishing it.

As for “elite”, I would hardly call my childhood that. However, my parents and community did make their values clear and did hold people responsible, which tends to do wonders for managing out-of-control behavior. Apparently that was beyond the liberal enclaves in which Tano was raised.

“Real men” don’t show their feelings, and those men who do are faggots—which is the last thing any real man would want to be. It’s a lesson I have spent nearly three decades trying to unlearn.

This tells me three things:
1) Yes, Jennings has subscribed that jaundiced view of culture.
2) He realized it is wrong, and has tried to self-correct.
3) His experience of our culture is much the same as mine was when I was very young.

To another point from your post:

You see, Jennings seems to believe that an adolescent older brother was capable of “passing down the code of masculinity he’d been taught“

Why would an older brother be incapable of passing along such a thing?

Have you been reading other material from Jennings which reveals what he thinks of the western masculine ideal?

beyond that, i think you miss jennings’ point. i don’t think he’s expressing a personal opinion when he states that killing someone in retaliation for being called a faggot is aberrant. in the context of the whole article, he’s talking about how extreme forms of violence have become normalized by their frequency. this article should also be read in the context of the time in which it was written; in spring of 1998, there was a series of school shootings (e.g. columbine) committed by bullied students. far from aberrant or isolated, these shootings were practically en vogue.

I find Dan’s points to be absurd. Jennings is talking about what real kids in the real world are exposed to, not what the lessons found in Greek classics are. And Jennings is obviously correct, except maybe for certain elite circles where some of you apparantly were raised. I know in my neighborhood, when I was growing up in the fifties and sixties, the climate was exactly as Jennings describes. I didn’t read Homer till high school.

And there was nothing “left wing” about the environment I grew up in, to the contrary – more Archie Bunker right wing world.

I think from this short passage, Jennings is just relating the fact that boys were taught to -man up- through beatings and to beat up on folk.
Boys taunted about being a fag were told to beat up the bully.

I really don’t think Jennings is advocating violence, but rather expressing an idea of what some gay folk have had to endur, just to fit in.

you know, resistance is futile.