Between Milk-Bloods and Chest Thumpers: Counterfeit Masculinity and the Sin of Dishonoring Your Wife
For more than a century, men have been systematically bludgeoned by a feministic gynocracy that treats masculinity as a defect and male strength as a public liability. Men—born immutably male—have been told, explicitly and relentlessly, that something inside them is broken, that their instincts are dangerous, their ambition pathological, their authority suspect, and their confidence something that must be publicly apologized for. Through bureaucratic institutions, cultural propaganda, and social systems openly hostile to fathers and masculine responsibility, the modern world has attempted what tyrannies have always attempted: not merely to rule men, but to unmake them.
And men are tired of it.
They are tired of being told that courage is toxic, that leadership is oppressive, that discipline is dangerous, and that the very traits required to build and preserve civilizations are incompatible with human flourishing. They are tired of watching Hollywood sneer at manhood, liberal institutions hollow it out, and rainbow-draped politicians moralize from behind protections masculine sacrifice quietly provides. Biblical men are done being socially castrated. They are done kneeling to a culture that despises them for the unthinkable crime of being male.
But here is the problem—and it is deadly.
When men go looking for their backbone after decades of humiliation, the voices most readily available to them are rarely wise. They are usually grotesque overcorrections: men who replace submission to God with submission to impulse, who confuse domination with dominion and appetite with authority. Men who pornify women while calling it the recovery of manhood, who reduce masculinity to aggression and lust, and who promise power while rendering men louder, angrier, and spiritually impotent.
Tragically, this overcorrection is not just bubbling up among the pagans. It has seeped into the tanks of christendom like dripping sewage in the water supply. A distortion has taken root—usually quieter, more pious, and even more dangerous. Under the banner of “biblical patriarchy,” some men (even pastors) speak as though women are subtly, yet ontologically, inferior to men. And while they would never say it this way, they end up creating a system where women are looked at as nothing more than sperm receptacles, destined to be barefoot, pregnant, and perpetually incapable of an independent thought. Women are praised in theory, as matriarchs, queens, or builders of culture, but distrusted in practice. They are celebrated as “equal” while treated with suspicion as intellectually unreliable, spiritually secondary, and useful mainly for reproduction and domestic management.
That mentality is not biblical Christianity. It has far more in common with Greek dualism and Platonic hierarchy than with the Scriptures of Moses and Paul. The Bible never treats women as subpar humans, flattened merely into an engine running a domestic machine. From the beginning, woman is presented as man’s equal in dignity, his corresponding glory, distinct in role but never diminished in worth or value. Scripture honors women without feminizing men, and it calls men to a kind of strength that does not pummel but purifies the women in his life.
And this is precisely where God’s law, specifically the Fifth Commandment, dares to speak.
When Exodus 20:12 says “Honor your father and your mother” it is not offering up to us a myopic commandment meant for children alone. It is communicating something glorious and magnificent, the moral architecture governing all God-ordained authority. For instance, in our Reformed confessional documents on the fifth commandment, especially the Westminster Larger Catechism, the Puritan divines explicitly taught that “father and mother” are a kind of microcosmic category including all superiors in age, gifts, or office. This is especially true of those whom God has placed in positions of authority within the family, the church, and the civil order. Which means that, at least according to the Westminster Standards, the Fifth Commandment is not limited childhood obedience; it is about how all honoring of any power is meant to function under God.
But, here is where things get interesting. Especially for any noisy, gongy, snarky, patriarchy types reading this. The Catechism does not merely stop with defining how an inferior owes honor to a superior. It turns the question around and asks what authority itself owes. Superiors, it insists, are bound by the law of God to love, pray for, bless, instruct, protect, provide for, and commend those who under their charge lest they break the fifth commandment. What they are saying is that parents can break the fifth commandment when they lead their children into sin, and husbands, even while called to be the spiritual authority in the home, sin when they dishonor and disrespect their wives. What this means is that authority is never generic, ipso facto, or innate simply because you have an outie instead of an innie. Authority, even from a superior to an inferior, comes with heavy covenantal weight, obligations, and accountability.
And when this framework is applied to marriage, cage-stage, manosphere-influenced toxic headship can no longer survive on the borrowed oxygen of ignorance.
A husband is a superior within the household by covenantal appointment, yes and amen! He is called to be a faithful and holy patriarch, you can bet your bottom dollar. But, even in his role, he is not accounted as ontologically superior to his bride. His authority is delegated, derivative, and temporary. It exists for a time period, a lifetime of faithful covenant marriage, before both male and female are presented equally and totally to their true head, Jesus Christ. Remember, male headship does not transfer into eternity. It is a temporary feature, for the good of the marriage, the blessing of the family, meant to present a family well cared for unto the Almighty. Masculinity, therefore, is not for self-expression, not for ego, not for dominance, but for stewardship. Man is given a heavy weight to bear, not to use it to press a woman down, but so that he may bear her up. Every time a man mistreats his wife—whether through passivity, harshness, contempt, neglect, sarcasm, belittling, physical intimidation, or emotional abandonment—he is not merely being a bad husband. He is breaking the Fifth Commandment. He is sinning against his wife and his God.
Scripture makes this uncomfortably explicit. Husbands are commanded to show honor to their wives as fellow heirs of the grace of life, with the warning that failure here shuts heaven’s ear to their prayers. They are commanded to love their wives according to the blood-soaked pattern of Christ Himself, who did not assert His authority over the Church by barking orders or flexing power, but by laying His life down for her and washing her tenderly in the water of His Word.
And that is what marriage is designed to be: a living icon of the gospel on earth. A husband does not merely lead; he represents the Leader. He acts out the part of the Lord Jesus Christ to his wife, and that reality multiplies responsibility rather than diminishing it. Patriarchy does not lighten the moral load so that a man may bark orders, demand another beer, and belch his entitlement like a swamp creature mistaking sloth for sovereignty. Authority does not shield a man from judgment; it accelerates it.
This is the moment when many men begin to feel the temperature change, even if they cannot yet explain why, because dishonor almost never announces itself with open-handed violence or cinematic cruelty. Far more often, it slips in quietly and learns the rhythms of a household—through sarcasm that corrodes rather than strengthens, through silence that leaves a woman spiritually exposed, through passivity that disguises itself as calm, and through aggression that confuses volume with virtue. Some men sin by collapsing inward, becoming milk-bloods—fearful of responsibility, evasive in leadership, emotionally absent, spiritually mute, calling their retreat “peace” while their wives shoulder the weight alone. Other men sin by swelling outward into chest-thumpers—loud, brittle, domineering, ruling their homes like petty tyrants, barking commands and quoting Ephesians 5 with clenched teeth, as though Scripture were a club rather than a cross. Different postures, same rebellion, identical guilt before God.
Scripture condemns both. And if we were left to our own devises all of us men would gravitate to one of these sinful poles. All of us would either be passive Adams or angry Lamechs. And for this reason, all of us need repentance and Christ.
Remember, Christ does not rule His bride with overt demonstrations of brute force. He does not guard His authority with emotional withdrawal, nor does He compel obedience through fear. He enters her weakness, bears her guilt, covers her shame, speaks tenderly and affectionately to her, and leads her into the glory God has prepared for her. His authority is unquestioned and unrivaled, yet it is always exercised through sacrificial love and tender care. And this is the pattern imposed upon husbands—not as an aspirational ideal, but as a covenantal norm.
Think about it, a man who dishonors his wife is catechizing his own household according to his ruin and corruption. He trains his sons to see power as a demonstration of control and his daughters to lose their voice, becoming defunct and unhelpful help meets. And most tragic, He preaches a distorted Christ to the woman (and family) God has placed under his care and then wonders why his prayers ricochet off the ceiling tiles.
The only faithful response for all of us men who have gravitated into either of these two poles is to repent. We need repentantance for our saccharine rhetoric to passify or the sarcasm we used to wound, for the stonewalling out of fear and the silence used as a weapon, for the inability to make a decision to lead her or the aggression you used to intimidate her, and for your insecurities that have suffocated her as well as your overcorrections that have exhausted her. Repentance confessed before God and spoken plainly to your wife will not make you weak or forfeit your leadership, in fact, it will only strengthen it.
And having repented, do yourself a favor and stop listening to reactionary gurus, chest-thumping bravado, and all other counterfeit visions of strength. And instead, spend your days implementing and imitating the true Man, Jesus Christ. Your effort in that endeavor will go miles farther than whatever some angry hot head on the internet is currently bloviating about.
