If you don’t think manhood is under attack in America, just turn on the TV. These days, you can’t even buy a razor without seeing how the left is trying to emasculate our culture.
Gillette is the latest company to alienate customers with a new transgender ad that only applies to about 0.06% of the population—and offends a great deal more than that.
The ad shows a dad at the sink with his “son,” a biological female who’s trying to shave for the first time.
“Growing up I was always trying to figure out what man I wanted to become and I’m still trying to find out what kind of man I want to become,” says Samson Brown, who identifies as a male.
“Now, don’t be scared, don’t be scared. Shaving is about being confident,” Brown’s father advises.
“I’m at the point in my manhood where I’m actually happy. It’s not just myself transitioning, it’s everybody around me transitioning,” Brown says at the end of the ad.
Late last week, he shared the commercial on social media, where it exploded with shares—and criticism. After all, the company’s tagline was always, “The Best a Man Can Be.” Now it can’t even decide what a man is.
Parents are trying to raise their boys into men worthy of respect, and this is just part of the onslaught they’re facing in our upside-down world where science, biology, and history no longer count.
It’s a challenge we discussed on Thursday morning at the Family Research Council’s “Watchmen on the Wall” conference with our own Lt. General Jerry Boykin, scholar Dr. Pat Fagan, and “Duck Dynasty’s” Al Robertson on a special panel called “What’s America’s Condition? Manhood, the Family, and the Church.”
As I said to the pastors in the room, I believe in this hour we need men to be strong because without them, we’re not going to have strong families. And when we have weak men, our children are not protected.
In the times we’re living, there is an all-out assault on masculinity. It started years ago, as Fagan explained in depth (video below), with the cultural revolution.
“The man is the target. The father in the family is the target. Take him out and the family collapses, society collapses. We can see that happening. This is by design … “
“What we need now,” he said, “are fathers who will take over the sexual education and formation of their sons, and they’ll have to take it over themselves in the home, because everything else out there is toxic, in the schools and all the rest. So they’ve got to step up to the plate. Their wives will follow them with the daughters, but the man has to go out front. We need warriors.”
The “beardless bro,” Robertson, had an interesting perspective coming from a more traditional family.
I grew up in a home that [doesn’t get] any more patriarchal … When he spoke at CPAC, a guy leaned over and said, ‘Your dad looks like he just walked off the pages of the Old Testament.’ And he did … But you know, I was mentored and so were my four brothers mentored in every other way by our dad. Biblically, morally, he taught us. And guess what? We’re all married to the same woman, and now we’re all having our own grandchildren … [Now] we’re teaching our children and our grandchildren and mentoring them about the way it should be … That’s what I live for.
He and the rest of our panelists are hoping more fathers grasp on to that same vision, the weight of that same responsibility.
The most important thing any dad can do is get involved. To find out how, take the time to watch this panel. It will change how you look at your marriage, your family, even your approach to other young men in your life.
And if there’s anything we need right now, it’s more men reevaluating this toxic environment and what they can do to help men, and soon to be men, on the path to biblical manhood.
Originally published in Tony Perkins’ Washington Update, which is written with the aid of Family Research Council senior writers.
