Nowadays, especially via TV and Hollywood, men are seen as despicable, cruel, pusillanimous, selfish, ineffectual oafs, veritable bumbling idiots who need women or some gay guy with a Queer Eye ? to help us through our primal fog towards metrosexual healing. 

If you?re a guy who wants to keep his guy-ness and not trade it in for the androgynous pomosexual image of the 21st century, then you will receive more scorn than Michael Moore at a NRA luncheon.  From the college classroom to the corporate boardroom, men have been meeting with man-hatred for quite some time now.  

Look ? I?m sure men need some retooling, and I confess we do egregious things for which we need to take responsibility.  Y?know, just the other day while I was on a hunting trip without my wife during our anniversary, after not bathing for 5 days, while eating cold refried beans out of a can, chasing the beans with a hot Budweiser and belching so loudly that a Bull Elk came to our cabin looking for a fight, I was thinking that maybe I need to take some etiquette classes. 

However, the little tweaking that I?ll admit to needing with respect to balancing out my mannish weirdness will not be coming from our current culture of castration but from the scripture and from classical masculine values of days gone by (not from a re-run of Friends).

What are the basic elements of the masculine spirit?  Well, from Homer to Gomer, from Abraham to the Apostle Paul, there are three primary traits that men, if properly raised and allowed to express their biology, will and should naturally exhibit. 

They are the following: 
· Competition
· Independence
· Responsibility

Let?s look at number one, competition.  Guys will fight over anything ? and you know what?  We?re supposed to.  Probably the thing that separates the men from the ladies more than the Austin Power-like hair on our backs is man?s innate combative nature. 

Take the animal kingdom, for instance.  While on one of my glorious and many hunting trips, I had two bucks feeding in front of my stand about 75 yards away.  To my right, out of a thick stand of trees, comes a doe in to feed with the grass-munchin? boys, and the next thing you know ? it?s a WWE match in a South Florida palmetto patch.  The two young bucks commenced to smashing their heads together over Bambi?s cute sister.   The kicker is ? while Frick and Frack are locked up vying for dominance ? a more mature buck appears and begins to walk off with the doe ? that is, until I shot him! 

Male animals will fight over who gets to breed, who gets to eat, and who owns a particular piece of turf, and aside from our cell phones ? we bipods are no different.  Men clash over women, ideas, politics, business, war, and if that does not suffice, we will make up stuff to wrangle over. 

Nowadays, men are reviled and harangued for this traditionally esteemed and essential, God-wired, gung-ho spirit.  It is this positive bellicose behavior that causes men to rightly protect, even to the point of death, women and kids from whatever threatens them. This is what men have been classically known for, and this is what should be re-tabled for men in this Age of Wussification.

In addition to and closely connected with this confrontational role, is the classic male mission of fetching vittles and acquiring a killer crib.  Men looked for the new castle in a safer hamlet.  Men sought increased opportunity for their kids and a greater slice of the bliss pie for the entire family. Continued...