Thank God for men

I’ve discovered that the secret to enjoying life is thankfulness (“be thankful”—Colossians 3:15). It really works. There’s always something to be thankful for, and finding it transforms your whole perspective. Isn’t it just like God to make His command to be thankful simultaneously His means of deliverance?

This year I particularly want to focus on one kind of thanksgiving—being thankful for men. I choose this because it is open season on men as much as on turkeys, which I feel sorry about. So here is my list of reasons to be thankful for men:

First of all, men are stronger than women. I know that’s a sexist, microaggressive, triggering, fascist, nonprogressive thing to say. But in my experience, most men can lift more weight than most women, which is convenient when buying a sofa that needs to be brought upstairs.

Secondly, men don’t complain about lifting those heavy things for women. They rather seem to enjoy it.

The techy gadgets women use to broadcast hate for men were mostly made by men.

Men die by the millions in wars defending women, and don’t complain about that either. One sees no street demonstrations of males donning missile-shaped knit caps protesting the lack of women in combat. In fact, one sees men marching in women’s marches, even when those women are marching against men. One cannot imagine it the other way around.

Which leads to another cause for gratitude: Men do most of the inventing of neat stuff that exists in the world, whether for international defense or for comfort. A good exercise for women would be to look around their neighborhoods and imagine that female were the only gender God created. We would all be living in caves because there would be no houses, certainly no roofers. The techy gadgets women use to broadcast hate for men were mostly made by men. All of which means that women have to sit on men’s laps to spit in their faces.

The greeting cards at pharmacies have jokes at the expense of men, and never vice versa. They make the wife look smart and the husband look stupid. Yet the big card companies are owned by men (I checked), which either shows that men are gracious and able to poke fun at themselves, or that they have succumbed to the Stockholm syndrome.

The best musical composers are men. The best art in our local Philadelphia Art Museum and Barnes Foundation is by men. The best writers are men. The best chefs are men. And to be honest, who wouldn’t rather watch men’s hockey than women’s hockey? In other words, everything that lifts the dreariness of life is by and large a man’s idea.

Men are more courageous than women. When it sounds like someone is breaking into our house in the middle of the night, it’s my husband who goes downstairs with the baseball bat, not me. Men brave Arctic cold on deep sea rigs to pump oil out of the ground to warm our homes. They disappear into ink-black caves for months at a time, never seeing the sun all winter, to coax coal from stubborn veins embedded deep in the earth. “Man goes out to his work and to his labor until the evening” (Psalm 104:23).

Men say cooler things to each other in private than women do. I like this exchange between Ben-hadad king of Syria and Ahab king of Israel when they were breathing threats at each other: “Let not him who straps on his armor boast himself as he who takes it off” (1 Kings 20:11).

Men cut to the chase. (Except William Faulkner, who was wordy.)

Twelve out of 12 of the apostles were men, so Jesus must have seen something good in them.

Men are simple creatures for all that. I find, as a wife, that all you have to do is love them and they are content.

I changed a flat tire once. It was back in the day when cars had metal bumpers and the jacks for lifting them weren’t flimsy and went in the front. Nowadays I phone my husband and he does the job. I do not understand the woman who said, “Women need a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” She mustn’t own a car.