I’m not going to soften this. In fact, I think I’ll say it louder.
My doctor, whom I’ll call Jim, warned me recently that some people aren’t going to like the title of my new book: Magnificent Men™: How Men Are Undervalued and How Worshipping and Being Worshipped Can Bring You The Hot and Holy Love You Desire.
For fuck’s sake, Jim. Do you think I’m an idiot? That I’ve written half a million words on this subject and never omce thought, “Gee, people may get their tails feathers rufffled by this?”
Dear, dear Jim.
As unaware of how human brains work as Jim might be, he’s right. Some people are going to hate not only the book title but the book. Let’s get that out of the way now, because I’m not writing this to be liked. I’m writing it because I believe it, and because I’m tired of watching good men get noticed only when something breaks.
So here it is, plainly: men are undervalued. They aren’t ignored; they’re needed constantly and adored rarely. And saying that out loud has become one of the most reliable ways to get yelled at in the comments.
Fine. Yell. I’ll wait.
What’s He Good For?
There’s a question we ask about hammers, interns, and used cars: What’s he good for?
We ask it about men every day, though rarely out loud. It’s there when a dating profile checks height and income before it ever checks for a sense of humor. It’s there in the eulogy that remembers him first as a good provider. It’s there at Thanksgiving, when the brother-in-law is between jobs and everyone gets a little careful around him. What does he earn? What does he fix? What does he provide and protect, and how well?
Ask that question long enough and it stops sounding like a question. It starts to sound like a description of who he is.
Everybody needs men. Almost nobody stops to delight in them. Needing a man and valuing a man are two entirely different things, and we’ve gotten spectacularly good at the first while letting the second starve.
His Dignity Was Never Up for Review
A man’s dignity is not a reward for good behavior. It was his before his first job, his first paycheck, his first time saving the day. It doesn’t rise with his salary. It doesn’t drop when he’s laid off, sick, grieving, impotent, or simply too tired to be anybody’s hero this week. I’ve spent more than twenty years with people at their least productive, and I have never once watched a human being’s worth disappear along with his usefulness. As a mystic, I’ll say it even more plainly: he was made on purpose, by Someone who delights in him, and nothing he fails to accomplish can undo that.
But here’s how we bury it. We praise men for what they do, and praise teaches. When the warmth arrives after the promotion, the repair, the rescue, the performance in bed, a man learns exactly which parts of himself are welcome. The rest doesn’t vanish: his fear, his silliness, his grief, his need to rest, his wish to be held without having done a single thing to deserve it. It goes quiet, because no one seemed to want it. Psychologists call the result contingent self-worth, a sense of value that rises and falls with performance.
And then, God help us, we complain about the result. We call him closed off. We call him a workaholic. We call him emotionally unavailable. He isn’t emotionally unavailable. He’s emotionally unconsulted.
A man loved mainly for his usefulness becomes very useful and very hard to find. He disappears into what he does, and the people closest to him stand in the kitchen wondering where he went. He went exactly where we kept applauding.
You don’t fix that by demanding that men “open up” while you only clap for what they produce. You fix it by becoming fascinated by a man for no reason at all. Ask a man what he does and he’ll answer in a sentence. Ask him what he loves, with no follow-up about whether it’s productive, and watch how long it takes him to believe you mean it.
Now Look at Him
So let’s stop grading men and start looking at them. Because when you actually look at men (not the cartoon, not the headline, not the worst guy in the news this week), what you see is almost ridiculous in its magnificence.
Watch a man explain something he loves. The carburetor. The 1986 Mets. Why the third movie in the trilogy is criminally underrated. His hands come up. His voice speeds up. He forgets to be cool. For a few minutes he is a nine-year-old boy and a tenured scholar at the same time, and if you’re paying attention, it is one of the most charming sights on earth.
Watch how men do tenderness. It comes in sideways, wearing a disguise. It looks like a man checking your tire pressure before your road trip and grumbling the entire time. It looks like him drifting to the street side of the sidewalk without a word. It looks like two friends who haven’t said “I love you” in thirty years, who call each other the filthiest names in the English language, until one of them drives four hundred miles when the other one’s father dies. No speech. He just shows up with a cooler.
Watch the humor. The deadpan delivered at precisely the worst possible moment. The bit committed to for eleven straight years. The husband at the hospital bedside making his wife laugh so hard the nurse comes running. Humor is a delivery system. It carries what would be far too heavy to carry any other way. That isn’t avoidance. It’s craftsmanship.
Watch the courage nobody films. The guy who walks back into work the Monday after his divorce and still coaches Little League that Saturday. The man who quietly sits beside a frightened stranger on a delayed flight. The father who looks his teenage son in the eye and says “I was wrong,” which takes more nerve than skydiving and has a far worse landing.
And for heaven’s sake, watch his body. The forearms. The shoulders that were apparently engineered for the express purpose of being leaned on. The way he sleeps as though tranquilized by the federal government. The way he looks at a woman he wants, with that hungry, slightly stunned, did-I-really-get-this-lucky look, which is not a threat, not a problem to be managed, but one of the most flattering things a human face can do.
Then watch what a man does with love when he means it. The husband forty years in who still brings her coffee exactly the way she likes it, and still thinks she’s the best-looking woman in the room, and is right, because he’s the one looking. That kind of loyalty is so fierce and so quiet you can miss it entirely if you’re waiting for a speech. It doesn’t announce itself. It just keeps showing up.
None of that is a job description. Most of it will never appear on a résumé or earn a single thank-you note. It is simply who men are when you stop asking what they’re good for and start paying attention.
Why This Pisses People Off
Say “I adore men” in public, with no disclaimer attached, and watch the temperature in the room drop. Someone will decide you hate women. Someone will decide you want to go back to 1955. Someone will helpfully send you a list of terrible men, as if you’d somehow forgotten they existed.
I haven’t forgotten. I’m a therapist. I’ve heard more about terrible men than most people ever will. And I still adore men, because I’ve also sat with the good ones, and there are far more of them than anyone gives credit for.
Some of the anger comes from real pain, and I respect it. But delighting in good men does not excuse a single harmful one. Admiration and accountability aren’t rivals. Losing the ability to tell the difference between a man who hurts people and a man who drives four hundred miles with a cooler doesn’t make anyone safer. It just makes us blind.
Some of it is the belief that praise is a pie, so if I hand a slice to men, I must be taking one from women. Love doesn’t work that way. A woman who delights in men doesn’t shrink. She gets bigger: more playful, more generous, more certain of her own appeal. I’m living proof.
Some of it is the habit of judging men by their worst. When the most dangerous men become the reference point, praising male strength sounds like excusing violence, and praising male desire sounds like excusing predation. Apply that logic to any other group of human beings and we’d call it what it is: prejudice. Men don’t lose the right to fairness because they’re men.
And some of it is plain discomfort with what celebration reveals. Tell a man out loud that he’s wonderful, and you’ve implied he may not have been hearing it. That stings, because it raises a tender question for everyone who loves him: when did I last tell him?
The most touching resistance comes from men themselves. Tell a man he’s wonderful for no particular reason and watch him squint at you like a cat being offered a bath. He looks for the catch. He changes the subject to your brake pads. Being cherished without having done something first is so unfamiliar that it registers as a setup.
That squint tells you more about how men have been valued than any argument I could make. When being cherished feels like a trick, the answer isn’t to stop cherishing him. It’s to keep going until he believes it.
Yes, I Said Worship
And yes, I use the word worship. On purpose. I’ve trademarked Dr. Blow Job™, so I’m clearly not going to get shy now.
I don’t mean obedience. I don’t mean a woman disappearing so a man can feel big. I mean the full, wide-awake, unembarrassed delight of looking at a man and treating him as precious: his body, his mind, his jokes, his heart. Most men have never been worshipped a single day in their lives. Some of them are married. That ought to bother us far more than my vocabulary does.
Hot and Holy Love
My mission is to restore men’s dignity and value and to bring them the passionate, sacred love they deserve — what I call Hot and Holy Love™.
Hot, because a man deserves to be desired — his body, his hunger, his heat — without that desire being treated as suspect or something he must apologize for. Holy, because he deserves to be revered — his character, his tenderness, his courage, his ridiculous jokes — without having to prove anything first. Wanted without being used. Honored without being graded. Loved not for what he’s good for, but for the astonishing fact of who he is.
Some people will be pissed off by that. Good. Let them. I’ll be over here admiring the man with the cooler who drove four hundred miles, the one explaining the carburetor with both hands, the one still bringing her coffee forty years in.
Somebody ought to notice him. I fully intend to.
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
P.S. Jim, you were right. Some people didn’t like it. Please go back to worrying about my blood pressure, and leave the provocation and awareness of the human process to me.
Companion Song:
— “The Best,” Tina Turner, 1989
The Erotic Four™, Hot and Holy Love™, The Dignity Shift™, and Magnificent Men™ are trademarks of Randi Fredricks, Ph.D.
Author Bio
Randi Fredricks, Ph.D. is a best-selling author and provocateur whose work explores love, relationships, sexuality, spirituality, and the magnificent complexity of being human. For more than three decades, she has explored what helps people connect more deeply, love more courageously, and create extraordinary relationships. Her writing blends psychology, spirituality, humor, and eroticism, with a particular passion for restoring the dignity and value of men and exploring the possibilities of Hot and Holy Love. At the heart of her work is a simple conviction: all human beings deserve and are capable of extraordinary love — and a beautiful life.
