The Unique Burden of Manhood, and Modern Women Not Giving Men Their Due

And some Biblical explanation for why that is...

It starts in the dark, long before the rooster crows or the sun even begins to flirt with the horizon. The alarm punches through the stillness like a starting pistol, and the man—bone-weary and dreamless—lurches into the day. His feet hit the floor like anvils. His back already aches from yesterday’s labor. And there’s no applause. No standing ovation. No one tweets out a thank-you. The children are still asleep, and his wife mumbles something soft and half-conscious as he closes the bedroom door with the slow creak of a man who’s trying not to wake the only ones he’s doing all this for.

And it’s with that thought, I tweeted out before I arose from bed…

“I think the men who get up every day and go to a job they hate without grumbling, to do work they despise without quitting - to provide for their families without wavering - are the unsung heroes we don’t talk enough about.”

In the hours since, it’s been liked and shared tens of thousands of times, apparently resonating with a great many men and the women who appreciate them. But what does the man get for his labor?

His reward? A cup of yesterday’s coffee reheated in the microwave, a commute through a world that barely sees him, and a timeclock that will never love him back. He clocks in with shoulders that carry more than his bodyweight. Every step of his steel-toed boots lands like a confession: I am a man, and this is what men do.

He does not do it because he wants to. He does not do it for fun. He does not do it for purpose, for “passion,” or to chase the glittering idols that populate TED Talks and corporate pep rallies. He does it for the same reason every man with a family does it—because someone has to. Because a mortgage doesn’t care about dreams, and children cannot eat good intentions. Because every sandwich in a lunchbox is a declaration of love sealed with plastic wrap. Because someone has to be the oak tree in a forest of bamboo reeds—someone immovable, unbending, and unapplauded.

This is not the kind of work that gets documentaries made about it. It is not the kind of work that makes your niece repost your LinkedIn promotion with little fire emojis. It is not the sort of labor that wins awards, gets spotlighted in corporate newsletters, or earns hashtags. But it’s the kind of work that keeps the lights on. It’s the kind of work that makes sure the house is warm in the winter, that there’s a van that runs well enough to get to Sunday school, and that the kids never know how close things come to the edge. It’s work done with cracked hands, frayed sleeves, stained jeans, and a quiet resolve forged in the furnace of necessity.

This is manhood with its sleeves rolled up. It’s the dignity of drywall dust in your beard, of coming home too tired to sit down because you know you’ll never get up again. It’s knuckles banged on engine blocks, knees shot from ladders, lungs full of sawdust, and a spine made of deadlines and grit. It is every curse that God gave Adam in Genesis 3, accepted without protest. “By the sweat of your brow, you shall eat,” He said—and men have been taking their medicine ever since.

TAKING THE MEDICINE OF MAN

Because every honest job is a confession that the world is broken. That sin did this. That work was meant to be a joy, and now it’s a cross. But instead of shaking his fist at the sky, the man lowers his head and bears it. He shoulders the thorns. He wears the curse like a second uniform. And in that, he is more righteous than most pastors have dared to preach.

There are men who walk into sweltering warehouses every day just to ensure their daughters can have straight teeth and prom dresses. There are men pouring concrete in August heat, not because they love the feel of sunburn under high-vis neon, but because they want their sons to drive something safer than the deathtrap they drove at sixteen. There are men who live under the buzz of fluorescent lights in places that smell like oil and burnt rubber, so their wives can fill up a grocery cart without checking every price tag. That is not ambition. That is not careerism. That is sacrificial love in steel-toed boots.

And yet, for all of it, they vanish into the background noise of a society that doesn’t just ignore them—it’s forgotten how to even see them. Nobody claps when the electrician restores power to your house at midnight in a snowstorm. Nobody cheers for the man welding beams sixty feet in the air so your Amazon packages can be delivered on time. These men die in obscurity, and they live in it too. Their reward is their children not worrying. Their trophy is a home that doesn’t fall apart. Their prize is a fridge full of leftovers and a driveway with two beat-up vehicles that both start when they’re supposed to.

They are the anti-celebrities of our time. They are not curated. They are not influencers. They are the unphotographed, the unfollowed, the unspoken saints of sacrifice. Their names won’t trend, but their impact runs deeper than a thousand likes ever could. For every psychiatrist’s son and software engineer’s daughter sitting in an overpriced liberal arts class sneering at the patriarchy—there’s a dad somewhere who’s doing shift work to pay for that tuition. He may be laughed at by the very child he’s breaking his body for, but still he works. Because that’s what a man does.

SHUT UP AND WORK

This is a pain women will never fully understand—not because they’re incapable of sacrifice, but because the world treats their sacrifice like a miracle, while it treats a man’s like an obligation. A mother announces she’s going to work, and the culture throws her a ticker-tape parade. She’s empowering herself. She’s breaking barriers. She’s balancing it all. A father announces he’s going to work, and the world shrugs—of course you are, now shut up and be better.

On Mother’s Day, the flowers sell out. On Father’s Day, you get a sermon about absentee dads. When women work, they are lionized. When men work, they are expected. The grind is assumed. The backache is background noise. The labor is invisible. Men are not thanked. They are tolerated.

And yet still they rise. Still they wake. Still they fight the traffic, brave the weather, endure the cold, and sweat through the heat. Still they cut their own dreams into lumber and build a house of provision out of the pieces.

The blue-collar dad who lifts drywall for a living isn’t thinking about fulfillment. He’s thinking about whether the brakes on the minivan need replaced. The plumber crawling under a stranger’s house at 7:00 a.m. isn’t worried about “doing what he loves.” He’s thinking about making rent and still having enough left over for his wife’s birthday. These men are the scaffolding of every stable household, and no one thanks them because they were built to be strong enough to hold the weight—and quiet enough not to ask for applause.

I WILL WORK HARDER

It reminds me of Orwell’s draft horse, from his book, Animal Farm. His constant expression, his endless refrain is “I will work harder.” This is the slogan of every man when the electric bill is unexpectedly high, or the car registration is due. And the horse, if you recall, was eventually euthansized and turned into glue.

This is manhood. This is duty. This is the smell of motor oil and the feeling of socks that never dry and boots that never truly come clean. This is what happens when a man loves his family more than himself, when he crucifies his comfort on the altar of provision, and when he endures the curse of Adam so his children can live like Eden isn’t gone just yet.

The world may never thank you, but heaven sees. And even if you don’t get a statue, or a speech, or a Father’s Day card without a passive-aggressive note from the pulpit, your work is written in a different kind of ink—one that can’t be scrubbed out by the tide of a soft and cynical generation.

Because every man who sweats for his family stands in silent defiance of the Fall. He knows the world is broken—and still he builds.

And that brings us to the next part. Because while men are expected to sweat and shut up, to sacrifice and be invisible, to labor and be lectured—women get applause just for clocking in. Let’s talk about that.

THE BURDEN OF MANHOOD IS DIFFERENT

Listen to (most but not all) women talk about why they work. They’ll tell you quite quickly, with pride and self-adulation, that she works so as to be independent of any man. But with men, it is the opposite; he works so that others may be dependent upon him.

Her goal is autonomy. Freedom. Identity. She has dreams to chase. She has ambitions to fulfill. Her job is not just income—it’s a declaration of selfhood. It is elective. Voluntary. Framed in the warm glow of self-realization. But when a man talks about work, there is none of that glitter. There’s no triumphant tone, no TED Talk vocabulary. There’s just a shrug, a nod, maybe a grunt. Because he knows his work is not about himself; it’s about those who rely on him. A man does not work for independence—he works so others don’t have to. He works so that others can lean on him and not fall.

This is the difference. When woman works, she is brave, courageous, and if she is both a laborer and a mom, watch out. There are heaps of praise on the horizon. But when men work, it’s a given. It’s not celebrated. It’s expected. If a man doesn’t have a job, he’s a disgrace. If he fails to pay the bills, he’s a deadbeat. There is no symmetry here. There is no mutual expectation. One is glorified. The other is taken for granted.

For some women, work isn’t optional. For men, it never is.

FAITHFULNESS, NOT FULFILMENT

That’s the quiet truth nobody says out loud. A woman can choose to work or not work. She may go to college, get a degree, follow a passion, launch a side business, or stay at home and raise children. Whatever she does, society applauds. There are slogans and campaigns for it. There are hashtags. But a man? He has no such range. A man without a job is not just seen as unemployed—he’s seen as unworthy. Less than. Not a “real man.” Because for men, labor is not just provision. It’s identity. At the end of the day, he very much is like that dumb horse from Animal Farm. He’s a bull treading grain. That’s why he exists, and everyone knows it.

And yet, even after he clocks out and drags himself home, the job still isn’t over. He honors his wife and doesn’t treat her as his servant, meaning he chips in with the tasks that need done. And he does it—not begrudgingly, but dutifully. Because that’s what good men do. But notice: while everyone insists the man “help around the house,” no one expects the housewife to pay half the mortgage. Of course, they shouldn’t. That’s not how God designed it. But let’s not preach about housework being a “team effort,” when paying the electric bill isn’t.

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If a man doesn’t work, he will be rightly derided as less than a man. His masculinity will be questioned (and short of a major disability, it should be). Masculinity is tied intrinsically with financial provision. His identity is not permitted to exist apart from a paycheck. But have you ever heard of a woman’s femininity questioned because she doesn’t work? Of course not. Have you ever heard a woman’s femininity be questioned because she’s bad at keeping a home or cooking a meal? In this day and time, you had better not dare.

This is not a complaint. It is a diagnosis. This is not to say women don’t work hard. They do. But it is to say that men carry a different kind of weight—an unspoken expectation to provide, protect, and perform without praise or excuse. They are the scaffolding everyone climbs on, and no one notices until it breaks.

WHAT ABOUT MEEEEEE?

As soon as my tweet praising hard-working men began to go viral—tens of thousands of shares and likes, and comment after comment from men who felt understood, seen, and dignified—there it came. Like clockwork. From the shadows and the selfies and the suburbans. Thousands of women, bubbling up like a Pavlovian geyser of validation hunger, flooding the replies and quote-tweets with the exact same sentiment:

“What about women?”
“I’m a woman and I work too.”
“Don’t forget moms!”
“Single moms work too!”
“Women also go to work!”
“It’s 2025. Women have jobs!”

And on and on.

They couldn’t help themselves. They couldn’t just let it happen. They couldn’t let a man be praised for being a man without swerving across three lanes of traffic to demand equal time. They couldn’t stand still in the presence of masculine affirmation without inserting themselves into it like a pop-up ad in the middle of a funeral. The glory being given to men felt, somehow, like an attack on them.

It’s a sickness. A psychosis. A cultural virus. A disorder of the soul. The inability of modern women to watch men be publicly praised and simply let it happen without frantically reaching for the microphone and yelling, “But what about me?!”

It wasn’t an article about women. It wasn’t a takedown of women. It wasn’t even a comparison. It was a sentence—a single sentence—acknowledging the beauty, dignity, and suffering of working men who do thankless jobs for the sake of their families. But even that...was too much. Even that was intolerable. Even that had to be interrupted by the chorus of self-insertions.

This is what it means to live under the tyranny of female narcissism in the West.

The male sex cannot even be encouraged without female interruption. You cannot even praise a man for fulfilling his created duty without being scolded for not praising a woman for fulfilling hers, too. And let’s be honest—what you’re really being scolded for is the audacity to recognize that some things are uniquely male. That some burdens are uniquely masculine. That some glories, some crosses, and some thorns belong to the sons of Adam alone.

But this is the feminist spell that has bewitched an entire generation of women: the belief that male praise is female erasure. That if he’s being honored, you must be being overlooked. That if he is standing in the spotlight, you must be in the shadows. It’s jealousy. It’s envy. It’s covetousness. And it is ancient.

This is not a new impulse. This is not some recent social trend. This is Genesis 3:16 in action. “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” That verse has been softened and sanitized by modern translators and cowardly commentators, but the traditional and most consistent interpretation is simple: the woman would desire what was her husband’s—his role, his place, his glory, his rule. And God said, plainly, that though she would desire it, she would not have it. He would still rule over her.

The same impulse that made Eve reach for the fruit is the one that still makes women reach for male praise the moment it begins to flow. It’s not the fruit they want now—it’s the honor. The recognition. The dominion. The dignity of being the head. The impulse is the same. “Why can’t I have what he has?” “Why does he get praised and I don’t?” “Why does he get to stand there and be thanked while I just sit here?”

You could see this spiritual pathology dripping off my tweet. The second any male-oriented praise was uttered, the instinctual reply—almost involuntarily—was, “What about me?” Not, “Amen.” Not, “That’s true.” Not, “I’m thankful for men like that.” Just a reflexive redirection. The spotlight must never remain on a man for more than six seconds before a woman climbs into the frame.

The phenomenon is so universal, you can test it almost anywhere—but nowhere does it appear more clearly than the annual liturgy of church life: Mother’s Day and Father’s Day.

On Mother’s Day, the church is a Hallmark commercial. The sermon is a tribute. The pastor is practically weeping at the pulpit, extolling the womb as the cathedral of creation and declaring that the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. He thanks the mothers, honors the mothers, venerates the mothers. The service ends with roses, applause, photo booths, chocolates, and maybe a slideshow of soft piano music over pictures of barefoot toddlers kissing their mamas’ cheeks in golden-hour lighting.

On Father’s Day?

On Father’s Day, the pastor rolls up his sleeves, frowns a bit, and starts cracking the whip. The sermon is about how men need to be better husbands. How they need to step up. How they’ve dropped the ball. How they’re not leading spiritually. How they’ve been passive. How they’re probably addicted to something. And at the end, if you’re lucky, you get a tie. A grilled hot dog in the parking lot. And maybe—if the church budget allows—a thin slice of dry cake served from a folding table next to a banner that says something insulting like “#DadLife.”

Why? Because manhood in our culture is never celebrated—it is corrected. It is managed. It is policed. It is begrudgingly tolerated until it becomes dangerous, and then it is publicly disciplined. Because our culture is allergic to unqualified male praise. It has no mental category for saying, “That’s a good man,” and stopping there.

It’s not that women aren’t worthy of praise. It’s that men are constantly robbed of it. It’s not that women don’t suffer or sacrifice. It’s that men are never allowed to have a moment that isn’t immediately hijacked, re-centered, and turned into a TED Talk about women’s empowerment.

But on this thread—on this one thread—something different happened.

A few women caught it. A few brave women actually said it out loud:

“Why can’t we just let the guys have this one?”
“Why is it so hard for us to let them be appreciated without jumping in?”
“Why can’t we just say, ‘Yes, that’s true,’ and move on?”

These women saw what was happening, and they refused to play along. They refused to join the spiritual mimicry of Eve. They refused to see male honor as female loss. And God bless them for it.

Because here’s the truth: Not everything has to be about you. Not every celebration needs your participation. Not every male achievement requires female footnotes. Sometimes the man just wins the glory—and you can clap or you can sit down, but you don’t get to grab it from his hand.

A man who works to provide for his wife and children deserves honor, period. Not asterisked, not “yes, but,” not with a long thread of caveats about working mothers. Just honor.

And if you can’t handle that—if you can’t let that happen without jumping in and demanding your share—then maybe the serpent’s whisper is still a little too loud in your ears, and you’re being a daughter of Eve.

There’s a seldom sermonized passage in Deuteronomy 25 issuing the harshest of penalties for a woman who, while fighting, grabs a man by his testicles. I feel like, in so many ways, that passage should be expounded upon and preached, because that’s what I saw in that thread today. Women saw a post appreciating man for his labor, and they felt the need to take the biggest (but not only) contribution that men give to this world - that if he didn’t, the world would come apart at the seams - and try to rip away or diminish his praise and replace it with their own.

Let the man be appreciated, just once in a while, and be silent. Just once in a while, is all we ask. When he gets home from his long labor, just let him sit down in the chair. Pour him a glass of tea. Kiss him atop the head. Make the kids give him a hug. And just for once, be quiet.

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