Free but Not Equal

The American Male’s Great Delusion

Behold: the American Male

Free? Yes. Equal? No.

Not to God. Not to nature. And certainly not to his wife.

He is free to vote, free to own a house, free to smoke in the garage if the fumes don’t upset her eczema, free to “lead the family” so long as his leadership passes committee review at the evening dinner tribunal chaired by the emotional barometer known as “how it makes me feel.”

He is free to die for her—but not reign a risen King.

He is less equal, subjugated, because equality was a lie forged in the hell-kiln of Enlightenment abstractions, where Frenchmen mistook guillotines for justice and American Founders, though valiant, wrote liberty in ink that would bleed under feminist rain. What we have now is not the Republic of Jefferson, but the Domestic Tribunal of Janet.

The American man is not his own. He belongs to the tale his wife tells. He is the white knight in her Netflix narrative, the misunderstood villain in her prayer journal, the clueless sitcom dad in her book club confessions. He has ceased to possess a first-person voice. He is not the speaker of his life but the narrator of her mood.

He wakes, shaves, and dons the armor of appeasement. Not because he is weak—some of these men deadlift 400 pounds. But because he has believed the greatest lie of the post-Romantic Church: That love means agreement. That leadership means apology. That headship means asking for permission in a deeper voice.

Watch him now in church. He sings songs about “brokenness.” The women beside him raise hands in power while he slouches like an altar-boy under judgment, or imitates them until he is like them: repenting for sins that were hers, and hers that were her mother’s, and hers that were Adam’s— which she assures him are really his.

She calls this humility.

It is abdication in spiritual drag.

You want to find modern man in his native environment? Look for him driving alone, gripping the wheel like a sword, thinking about old glories and strange dreams—because it’s the only place he’s allowed to be king for a moment. The car, the garage, the smoke shop; this is his cathedral. The commute? His crusade.

He turns up the volume not to hear the music, but to drown out the part of him still screaming: This is not what you were born for. You are born for dominion. But you were taught to call that “toxic.” You were born for judgment. But you are told that’s not “love.”

You Were Born to Speak.

But now you quote psycho babble as the gospel truth.

And then you wonder why you’re angry. Distant. Addicted. Don’t want to pray. Feel like that lawnmower that they’ve chained your wild oats to.

You know it—deep in the marrow, beneath the sermons and the sitcoms and the damnable sentiment—your emasculation haunts you, most of all because it is not taken from you by force. You lay it down again and again against a phantom, a ghost, a dancing veneer of spirit that won’t stay put and demands everything of you: vanity.

You’ve been coaxed into wearing it like a second skin.

It does not fit you.

Arrogance suits you better.

Redeemed Pride puts the rest to death.

Make no mistake. No one is the “head” of anything unless he acts like it—not with rage, not with guilt, but with fire and frame and holy laughter. Without these, the house will remain a haunted temple of misplaced ghosts.

So, to the American man: Burn the script. Step out of the arena and up to the hearth. Speak again in your own voice—even if it trembles and they frown.

Because your strength is not in conforming to her story. It is in living your own—under God, with Christ as King, and you as steward of the land, whether she cheers you on as you carry your cross, or not.