Ah but, the “ideal” is what everyone should strive for. I certainly strive to be the ideal woman, wife and mother. You may not achieve every article all the time, but to ignore most of those criteria would certainly eliminate you from the “real man” criteria in my book.
I do not expect perfection, but I know what I consider perfection. Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen. I can tell the difference between lip service and action, stumbles and forfeit. That is all I’m saying. If we don’t have a yard stick, how then can we measure? I would apply it to anything and everything in my life. I certainly fall short, but I know what I am striving for. Is that not important?
Sure, I agree we need to have an ideal to strive for, and not enough men nowadays strive for the right ideals. But when you say men who don’t achieve this or that aren’t “real men”, well it smacks of the kind of castrating language that feminists like to weaponize against men, and men are just plain tired of hearing that stuff. Men need encouragement from women to reach these goals, not antagonization.
Our society is very divided on basic moral fundamentals now. So there are moral men and moral women, and amoral men and amoral women. Of course there are plenty of people in the middle that might go one way or the other too. But the amoral men can get whatever they desire from the amoral women with very little effort. The men who would rather be moral aren’t given any easy rewards, they have to put in more effort to begin with, and the moral women they might hope to attract instead can sometimes set what seem to be impossibly high standards. So a lot of those men just give up and say “well I’ll just stop playing the game entirely so at least I don’t lose”. I’m not sure what the answer to that problem is, but nobody is winning in that scenario.