Dr. Bradley, this article makes a strong case for the necessity of leaving. I chose to go to Clemson precisely because I knew almost no one there, and wanted the adventure of going out of state. As we think about forming men, I can see two reasons why boys want to set out on adventure: rebellion or exploration. A rebellious boy wants to kick the dust of his hometown off his feet and venture out into new settings, but he lacks the tools necessary to grow adequately as part of that experience. A boy fueled by love (anchored in secure attachment) feels the freedom to explore and return after experiencing the growth his hard-earned resilience will foster. Millennial parents (like me) struggle to know the difference between keeping our kids safe (which fuels rebellion) and secure (which fuels exploration). Perhaps this will spark an idea for a future article. I think parents today are struggling to know what formative love looks like.
Such a good point: "Millennial parents (like me) struggle to know the difference between keeping our kids safe (which fuels rebellion) and secure (which fuels exploration). . . I think parents today are struggling to know what formative love looks like." This most certainly is article-worthy! Well said! And, #GoTigers
This is an awesome article. I am a soon to be 71 yr old …… grandmother to 8 young adult men. This is valuable insight and instruction. I believe this holds true in every life. I did not begin to mature in my walk with Christ until I had been through my own wilderness experiences. God had to prepare me for some truly hard and difficult life situations. I will share this article with my own sons who parent these 8 grandsons. Thank you !
As the mom of five boys, with the oldest entering adulthood, this was both terrifying and convicting. But in my gut I know it's true. We as moms have to beg God for the courage to do what you're recommending. Thank you.
I wholeheartedly agree that young men need to spread their wings and I (anxiously) look forward to the day our son follows in his dad's and grandpa's footsteps to explore an unknown* place. (My would-be husband moved across the country for a job before we met and my dad moved us [legally] to the U.S., where we later became naturalized citizens.)
*Though I'll admit I wouldn't mind having our kids stay closer to home so we can watch our future grandkids.
But I'll disagree with you on the point about the Mormons because while they do go away to preach stuff** elsewhere, they always return to Mommy and Daddy. Back when I was in Corporate America in Utah, most of the men my age (Millennials) would tell me where they did their mission. Some of those missions were, funnily, simply in another state or English-speaking country. Few were from another state; they always just came back home.
**I call it "stuff" because it's not even Christian anything. At least Protestants have that advantage.
Thanks so much, but you may misunderstood. "The path to manhood has never changed: separation, struggle, vulnerability, and return." A rite of passage into manhood includes return. Returning back is the whole point. Returning is great!! We need more of that. Here are the three stages of the rite-of-passage into manhood: separation, transition, and return. Returning back to mom and dad is fantastic. What matters is that they are not returning the same person!
And thank YOU for responding; it’s always so neat to see Substack authors personally respond to comments. I definitely misunderstood as I wasn’t aware that those steps outlined such a rite of passage. I appreciate you teaching me something new!
Re:Mormons, I think I get why missionary work isn’t required from Protestants and even Catholics, and that may be that most of the world’s population knows about Christianity, so “what’s the point” of spreading the good news even more? (As a Catholic, I disagree w/the sentiment.) Mormons, OTOH, have a completely novel concept of God to teach others, so the spread of their beliefs and the multiplication of their buildings depend largely on these spry, young individuals telling others about it.
Back to the rite of passage.. I admit my experience with the men in my life, who uprooted their old lives to re-start elsewhere (and have only visited their original home locales but would never move back/return permanently), has influenced my understanding of it.
In that case, I’m interested in what the equivalent for women would be (are they more likely to stay and settle down where they grew up?) and how it relates to a man’s.
Speaking as a very successful 55 year old who moved to the opposite side of the country when I was 17 to attend college, then moved overseas, and then changed job and city from inland to one coast to the other and or job every 10 years, I’d say the following. It comes down to the cost of failure and especially how well the economy supports new opportunities. In an environment with abundance of opportunity, you can always learn from experience and move on. In the current environment, I do think a more careful exploration pattern is simply wiser.
Historically most ordinary people didn't travel far from where they were born. Were they perpetual adolescents, or did the fact they were also mostly peasants and subject to unpleasant material conditions, hard physical labor, etc. compensate?
Exactly. This whole notion that your kids must be sent off to a distant locale to be edumucated and grow up is part of the problem, a modern divide-and-conquer strategy which has been incredibly effective at destroying family unity as kids are corrupted by the brainwashing of college professors and other forces to reject the values their family taught in favor of nihilism, hedonism, and self-centered self-pursuit.
We need strong, centralized, coherent families, like in the Before Times. When you here so-called conservatives wax about how We Must Preserve The Nuclear Family you know they've already lost. The "Nuclear Family" itself is part of the divide-and-conquer strategy, leading to the conditions of the 50s and 60s that led to the Sexual Revolution and its disastrous fruit. The tight-knit Irish Catholic neighborhood of the 1930s where extended families lived in close proximity is much more what we might want to return to, than 1950s WASP white-bread suburbia. The latter is nothing more than the seeds that grew into the present miserable state.
Although the author's points about the necessity of coming-of-age rituals and such for young men is certainly on point, criticizing boys for not going off to college with strangers is bizarre. There is a loneliness and friendlessness epidemic amongst grown up men, so it sounds like boys, if they're really doing this, have the right idea in trying to preserve existing connections. On top of that, modern youth are subject to historically unprecedented stimulations and traumas, from instant-access porn to the social media rat race to overstimulating games, music, and consumeristic avenues. We are in totally uncharted territory here, so telling boys to Toughen Up and Pull Yourself Up By The Bootstraps is, I'm quite certain, only adding fuel to the fire.
What you're describing is even worse -- it's stunting and controlling. Why do you suppose people rebelled against the everybody-is-in-everybody's-business ethnic neighborhood? Just because "modern" society is often dysfunctional doesn't mean the good old days were so good either.
(And the reason I brought up women is because many so-called Reformed seem to think girls in particular need to be under the control of -- oh, sorry -- "be protected by" men. I wanted to see what the OP's position was.)
Maybe, it's just an off-the-cuff example of a different sort of familial/community structure. But that's more like how it's always been in most places in the world, up until very recent times. Not to say there's no problems with a more communal model, but the fact that it was so ubiquitous until Five Minutes Ago suggests that maybe that's a better place to start from than... how things were in the 50s, or whatever we've got now.
I know the second part was directed toward the OP, but I'm an Orthodox Christian, a tradition where we love and venerate our female saints, who are as numerous as male ones. Thus the way we think about women and their roles is often significantly different from Reformed, or Feminists, or the usual factions in mainstream culture.
This is of course not to disrespect the extended family -- my own life and that of my parents has been enriched by having grandparents, cousins, etc. living relatively close by.
I remember a preschool book about a boy's first airplane flight -- it was to visit his grandparents elsewhere -- and only later realizing how blessed I was that this wasn't necessary for me.
Not to mention a friend from HS said people went to a particular college to preserve their high-school social cliques. She ended up going somewhere entirely new.
I think this boils down to the problem of modernity. We have everything we want but nothing we need. Because of this, people don't grow up, they just grow old.
We definitely suffer from a lack of meaningful rites-of-passage for young men. We don't even have the outward trappings of transitions anymore, as my grandparents had. Little boys wore short pants; young men did not. Even my parents' generation: watch a movie like "Diner" and notice how young men wore suits, even to go play pool. Look at a photo of a baseball stadium in the 1950s or early 60s and you'll see the same thing.
I'm not advocating for going back to suits! But it's true that men in their 20s and 30s dress no differently than they did in their teens. They play video games just like they did in their teens. We do very little to help them feel like they've moved on to a new phase in life (and in traditional societies, that moving-on is marked in a way that allows no backsliding). We talk a good line, but we don't show them. We don't help them feel it in their bones.
If you're going to talk about religious groups and biblical examples, BTW, don't leave out the example of the Bar (and Bat) Mitzvah for Jewish youth. In places where the study and the work still matter (and it's not just a big party), there is something to be said for showing 13-year-olds that they can do a hard thing over a long period of time and then stand in front of a crowd and demonstrate their knowledge. My two kids both talked about the effect of that process on their self-image and self-esteem. Once you've proved you can chant Torah in front of a crowd, what can't you do?
What changed is that with the sexual revolution/youth culture revolution of the 50s and 60s, the ideal to aspire toward was no longer mature adulthood, but adolescence. Culture glorified being a rowdy teenager, rather than praising the adult, and subsequently, perpetual immaturity was enshrined. Unfortunately there's no easy answer to fixing this since it's a systemic, culture-wide problem pervading virtually everything, but especially entertainment.
Concur. As a 3 decade US military guy who spent several years in both SW and SE Asia, while in the no conflict areas I saw young people from mostly west European/Australian/NZ countries doing what the Aussies called "walkabout." A year-ish period of time spent in Cambodia hosteling, stopping in a Lao or Indonesian village to help with planting or harvesting, essentially seeing a slice of life different from the one they would return to.
I then came home to observe youngsters very firmly believed of the thesis that the US was the worst, most fundamentally flawed country in the world. No other data points in their observations. They had never seen little kids in a sweatshop, a young girl on her bike killed by a motorist who clipped her and then just drove on, or any of the thousand other things the people in a developing nation (which I believe is the PC vernacular these days) suffer to live their lives that certainly Americans, and until recently most western European cultures, do not.
While I was away, something happened to a large slice of American youth. Something happened to disabuse them of the idea that the US, warts and all, was still as good a place to be as the world has to provide.
It is a shame. Give junior a loaded backpack, a satphone with 10 prepaid minutes (just in case something actually hits the fan, at which point you can get more minutes), and put him on a plane to a developing nation with a paid return a year later. You will always be thankful you did. We will be thankful you did.
56 year-old Gen Xer here, and I couldn’t agree more with this article. Economics forced me to stay close to home for college, but when I finally got the chance, I packed up my car and moved a couple thousand miles away from home, where I had one cousin I wasn’t particularly close to, and nobody else. It was the best thing I ever did in my life. At least one of the best. It was serious struggle, self-doubt, soul-searching, etc….everything that I needed as of than 25-year-old. As a pastor now, I recently told our graduating seniors something that I knew their parents wouldn’t like, and that was that they needed to get out of our small town. That doesn’t mean forever, but if they really wanted to do themselves a favor, they had to leave the comfort of family and friends and test their mettle. There would be struggle and pain and loneliness and all these various difficulties, and they may question what they were doing in the moment, but as they got older, they would look back on that time and realize it was one of the best things they could’ve ever done for themselves. But only a few in this generation seem to want to listen to that. I know that’s a big blanket statement, but what I’m seeing doesn’t give me a lot of hope.
Your post makes some good points but does not call out the only people who can make a difference: Parents.
“We” are not responsible for more than our own children. If you want better humans, you need better parents. This requires parents to do much more than they are currently doing.
My wife and I are both 60-years old. Two are our three children have graduated from college. Both live many states away from us. Our daughter has one year of college left. All three attend/attended schools no one has heard of because they think for themselves and never wonder or care what anyone else is doing.
Is this being “selfish”? Absolutely. The first word in the statement, “I can do it”, is “I”.
I have literally and metaphorically walked through the desert by myself. I graduated from high school and never went back home. I joined the Army at 17. I am a graduate of NYU and law school. I own my own business. “We” or “society” gets no credit for my accomplishments.
If parents want better lives for their children—better outcomes—they must teach them to be self-reliant and self-responsible. Society is made up of many individuals—make your children responsible individuals.
In case anyone is wondering, the desert I walked was the Mojave, through Death Valley. I was 20-years old.
Great article. Thanks for taking the time to write it. I agree with you about Mormons. I have a lot of respect for how they raise their children.
Another benefit to forcing your children "into the wilderness" is they learn how to connect with other people from the sole point of dignity–not from some socially subscribed entry point that was created while drifting from comfort to comfort in homogenous settings.
I tell my boys that the only places I've seen true barriers break down is in places of worship and military service. Is it a coincidence that we've been steadily eroding these entities over the past sixty years? Probably not.
Very true, and unfortunate that a 5-day camping trip won't suffice. 5 years on the mission field, and still going, has shaped me in ways I could never have been, whilst staying in my hometown. I need more ideas on how to establish those seasons of suffering for my future children. Sports is a great way to dip your toes in, but it's nothing in comparison to jumping in the deep-end without knowing how to swim in a foreign culture.
Dr. Bradley, this article makes a strong case for the necessity of leaving. I chose to go to Clemson precisely because I knew almost no one there, and wanted the adventure of going out of state. As we think about forming men, I can see two reasons why boys want to set out on adventure: rebellion or exploration. A rebellious boy wants to kick the dust of his hometown off his feet and venture out into new settings, but he lacks the tools necessary to grow adequately as part of that experience. A boy fueled by love (anchored in secure attachment) feels the freedom to explore and return after experiencing the growth his hard-earned resilience will foster. Millennial parents (like me) struggle to know the difference between keeping our kids safe (which fuels rebellion) and secure (which fuels exploration). Perhaps this will spark an idea for a future article. I think parents today are struggling to know what formative love looks like.
Such a good point: "Millennial parents (like me) struggle to know the difference between keeping our kids safe (which fuels rebellion) and secure (which fuels exploration). . . I think parents today are struggling to know what formative love looks like." This most certainly is article-worthy! Well said! And, #GoTigers
This is an awesome article. I am a soon to be 71 yr old …… grandmother to 8 young adult men. This is valuable insight and instruction. I believe this holds true in every life. I did not begin to mature in my walk with Christ until I had been through my own wilderness experiences. God had to prepare me for some truly hard and difficult life situations. I will share this article with my own sons who parent these 8 grandsons. Thank you !
Outstanding! Thanks for sharing!
As the mom of five boys, with the oldest entering adulthood, this was both terrifying and convicting. But in my gut I know it's true. We as moms have to beg God for the courage to do what you're recommending. Thank you.
I wholeheartedly agree that young men need to spread their wings and I (anxiously) look forward to the day our son follows in his dad's and grandpa's footsteps to explore an unknown* place. (My would-be husband moved across the country for a job before we met and my dad moved us [legally] to the U.S., where we later became naturalized citizens.)
*Though I'll admit I wouldn't mind having our kids stay closer to home so we can watch our future grandkids.
But I'll disagree with you on the point about the Mormons because while they do go away to preach stuff** elsewhere, they always return to Mommy and Daddy. Back when I was in Corporate America in Utah, most of the men my age (Millennials) would tell me where they did their mission. Some of those missions were, funnily, simply in another state or English-speaking country. Few were from another state; they always just came back home.
**I call it "stuff" because it's not even Christian anything. At least Protestants have that advantage.
Thanks so much, but you may misunderstood. "The path to manhood has never changed: separation, struggle, vulnerability, and return." A rite of passage into manhood includes return. Returning back is the whole point. Returning is great!! We need more of that. Here are the three stages of the rite-of-passage into manhood: separation, transition, and return. Returning back to mom and dad is fantastic. What matters is that they are not returning the same person!
And thank YOU for responding; it’s always so neat to see Substack authors personally respond to comments. I definitely misunderstood as I wasn’t aware that those steps outlined such a rite of passage. I appreciate you teaching me something new!
Re:Mormons, I think I get why missionary work isn’t required from Protestants and even Catholics, and that may be that most of the world’s population knows about Christianity, so “what’s the point” of spreading the good news even more? (As a Catholic, I disagree w/the sentiment.) Mormons, OTOH, have a completely novel concept of God to teach others, so the spread of their beliefs and the multiplication of their buildings depend largely on these spry, young individuals telling others about it.
Back to the rite of passage.. I admit my experience with the men in my life, who uprooted their old lives to re-start elsewhere (and have only visited their original home locales but would never move back/return permanently), has influenced my understanding of it.
In that case, I’m interested in what the equivalent for women would be (are they more likely to stay and settle down where they grew up?) and how it relates to a man’s.
You're making bildungsroman look good. I'm not a romantic, so I try to avoid them, but I agree with what you're saying.
Speaking as a very successful 55 year old who moved to the opposite side of the country when I was 17 to attend college, then moved overseas, and then changed job and city from inland to one coast to the other and or job every 10 years, I’d say the following. It comes down to the cost of failure and especially how well the economy supports new opportunities. In an environment with abundance of opportunity, you can always learn from experience and move on. In the current environment, I do think a more careful exploration pattern is simply wiser.
Historically most ordinary people didn't travel far from where they were born. Were they perpetual adolescents, or did the fact they were also mostly peasants and subject to unpleasant material conditions, hard physical labor, etc. compensate?
And how do your ideas apply to women?
Interesting idea about Mormons though.
Exactly. This whole notion that your kids must be sent off to a distant locale to be edumucated and grow up is part of the problem, a modern divide-and-conquer strategy which has been incredibly effective at destroying family unity as kids are corrupted by the brainwashing of college professors and other forces to reject the values their family taught in favor of nihilism, hedonism, and self-centered self-pursuit.
We need strong, centralized, coherent families, like in the Before Times. When you here so-called conservatives wax about how We Must Preserve The Nuclear Family you know they've already lost. The "Nuclear Family" itself is part of the divide-and-conquer strategy, leading to the conditions of the 50s and 60s that led to the Sexual Revolution and its disastrous fruit. The tight-knit Irish Catholic neighborhood of the 1930s where extended families lived in close proximity is much more what we might want to return to, than 1950s WASP white-bread suburbia. The latter is nothing more than the seeds that grew into the present miserable state.
Although the author's points about the necessity of coming-of-age rituals and such for young men is certainly on point, criticizing boys for not going off to college with strangers is bizarre. There is a loneliness and friendlessness epidemic amongst grown up men, so it sounds like boys, if they're really doing this, have the right idea in trying to preserve existing connections. On top of that, modern youth are subject to historically unprecedented stimulations and traumas, from instant-access porn to the social media rat race to overstimulating games, music, and consumeristic avenues. We are in totally uncharted territory here, so telling boys to Toughen Up and Pull Yourself Up By The Bootstraps is, I'm quite certain, only adding fuel to the fire.
What you're describing is even worse -- it's stunting and controlling. Why do you suppose people rebelled against the everybody-is-in-everybody's-business ethnic neighborhood? Just because "modern" society is often dysfunctional doesn't mean the good old days were so good either.
(And the reason I brought up women is because many so-called Reformed seem to think girls in particular need to be under the control of -- oh, sorry -- "be protected by" men. I wanted to see what the OP's position was.)
Maybe, it's just an off-the-cuff example of a different sort of familial/community structure. But that's more like how it's always been in most places in the world, up until very recent times. Not to say there's no problems with a more communal model, but the fact that it was so ubiquitous until Five Minutes Ago suggests that maybe that's a better place to start from than... how things were in the 50s, or whatever we've got now.
I know the second part was directed toward the OP, but I'm an Orthodox Christian, a tradition where we love and venerate our female saints, who are as numerous as male ones. Thus the way we think about women and their roles is often significantly different from Reformed, or Feminists, or the usual factions in mainstream culture.
This is of course not to disrespect the extended family -- my own life and that of my parents has been enriched by having grandparents, cousins, etc. living relatively close by.
I remember a preschool book about a boy's first airplane flight -- it was to visit his grandparents elsewhere -- and only later realizing how blessed I was that this wasn't necessary for me.
Not to mention a friend from HS said people went to a particular college to preserve their high-school social cliques. She ended up going somewhere entirely new.
I think this boils down to the problem of modernity. We have everything we want but nothing we need. Because of this, people don't grow up, they just grow old.
https://www.whitenoise.email/p/the-pings-we-carry
We definitely suffer from a lack of meaningful rites-of-passage for young men. We don't even have the outward trappings of transitions anymore, as my grandparents had. Little boys wore short pants; young men did not. Even my parents' generation: watch a movie like "Diner" and notice how young men wore suits, even to go play pool. Look at a photo of a baseball stadium in the 1950s or early 60s and you'll see the same thing.
I'm not advocating for going back to suits! But it's true that men in their 20s and 30s dress no differently than they did in their teens. They play video games just like they did in their teens. We do very little to help them feel like they've moved on to a new phase in life (and in traditional societies, that moving-on is marked in a way that allows no backsliding). We talk a good line, but we don't show them. We don't help them feel it in their bones.
If you're going to talk about religious groups and biblical examples, BTW, don't leave out the example of the Bar (and Bat) Mitzvah for Jewish youth. In places where the study and the work still matter (and it's not just a big party), there is something to be said for showing 13-year-olds that they can do a hard thing over a long period of time and then stand in front of a crowd and demonstrate their knowledge. My two kids both talked about the effect of that process on their self-image and self-esteem. Once you've proved you can chant Torah in front of a crowd, what can't you do?
What changed is that with the sexual revolution/youth culture revolution of the 50s and 60s, the ideal to aspire toward was no longer mature adulthood, but adolescence. Culture glorified being a rowdy teenager, rather than praising the adult, and subsequently, perpetual immaturity was enshrined. Unfortunately there's no easy answer to fixing this since it's a systemic, culture-wide problem pervading virtually everything, but especially entertainment.
Concur. As a 3 decade US military guy who spent several years in both SW and SE Asia, while in the no conflict areas I saw young people from mostly west European/Australian/NZ countries doing what the Aussies called "walkabout." A year-ish period of time spent in Cambodia hosteling, stopping in a Lao or Indonesian village to help with planting or harvesting, essentially seeing a slice of life different from the one they would return to.
I then came home to observe youngsters very firmly believed of the thesis that the US was the worst, most fundamentally flawed country in the world. No other data points in their observations. They had never seen little kids in a sweatshop, a young girl on her bike killed by a motorist who clipped her and then just drove on, or any of the thousand other things the people in a developing nation (which I believe is the PC vernacular these days) suffer to live their lives that certainly Americans, and until recently most western European cultures, do not.
While I was away, something happened to a large slice of American youth. Something happened to disabuse them of the idea that the US, warts and all, was still as good a place to be as the world has to provide.
It is a shame. Give junior a loaded backpack, a satphone with 10 prepaid minutes (just in case something actually hits the fan, at which point you can get more minutes), and put him on a plane to a developing nation with a paid return a year later. You will always be thankful you did. We will be thankful you did.
56 year-old Gen Xer here, and I couldn’t agree more with this article. Economics forced me to stay close to home for college, but when I finally got the chance, I packed up my car and moved a couple thousand miles away from home, where I had one cousin I wasn’t particularly close to, and nobody else. It was the best thing I ever did in my life. At least one of the best. It was serious struggle, self-doubt, soul-searching, etc….everything that I needed as of than 25-year-old. As a pastor now, I recently told our graduating seniors something that I knew their parents wouldn’t like, and that was that they needed to get out of our small town. That doesn’t mean forever, but if they really wanted to do themselves a favor, they had to leave the comfort of family and friends and test their mettle. There would be struggle and pain and loneliness and all these various difficulties, and they may question what they were doing in the moment, but as they got older, they would look back on that time and realize it was one of the best things they could’ve ever done for themselves. But only a few in this generation seem to want to listen to that. I know that’s a big blanket statement, but what I’m seeing doesn’t give me a lot of hope.
Your post makes some good points but does not call out the only people who can make a difference: Parents.
“We” are not responsible for more than our own children. If you want better humans, you need better parents. This requires parents to do much more than they are currently doing.
My wife and I are both 60-years old. Two are our three children have graduated from college. Both live many states away from us. Our daughter has one year of college left. All three attend/attended schools no one has heard of because they think for themselves and never wonder or care what anyone else is doing.
Is this being “selfish”? Absolutely. The first word in the statement, “I can do it”, is “I”.
I have literally and metaphorically walked through the desert by myself. I graduated from high school and never went back home. I joined the Army at 17. I am a graduate of NYU and law school. I own my own business. “We” or “society” gets no credit for my accomplishments.
If parents want better lives for their children—better outcomes—they must teach them to be self-reliant and self-responsible. Society is made up of many individuals—make your children responsible individuals.
In case anyone is wondering, the desert I walked was the Mojave, through Death Valley. I was 20-years old.
Great article. Thanks for taking the time to write it. I agree with you about Mormons. I have a lot of respect for how they raise their children.
Another benefit to forcing your children "into the wilderness" is they learn how to connect with other people from the sole point of dignity–not from some socially subscribed entry point that was created while drifting from comfort to comfort in homogenous settings.
I tell my boys that the only places I've seen true barriers break down is in places of worship and military service. Is it a coincidence that we've been steadily eroding these entities over the past sixty years? Probably not.
Very true, and unfortunate that a 5-day camping trip won't suffice. 5 years on the mission field, and still going, has shaped me in ways I could never have been, whilst staying in my hometown. I need more ideas on how to establish those seasons of suffering for my future children. Sports is a great way to dip your toes in, but it's nothing in comparison to jumping in the deep-end without knowing how to swim in a foreign culture.
Great article, thank you! *saving this one*
Very well articulated; and spot on in terms of essentials needed for maturity. Thanks for sharing this here.
This is great—more men would be prepared if they had more character building experiences when younger, and had mentors, aside from their fathers, who showed them the way. https://getbettersoon.substack.com/p/what-we-should-do-to-help-men