On the New Books table of a Barnes and Noble the other day, I came across a new volume entitled 50 Things Every Guy Should Know How to Do.The book promises to be a compendium of expert advice on “living large.” Some of the chapters, each written by an “expert” in the given field, are about what you’d expect: how to buy a car, how to balance work and family, how to survive Army boot camp. Richard Simmons offers a chapter on how to lose weight (get this: eat less and exercise).
The book also includes chapters on how to get a divorce (by an attorney, of course), how to cheat on your wife, how to have a “threesome,” how to get on a reality show, how to handle being arrested, and how to “pimp your ride.” The chapter on how to get a date with a woman is written by an “adult film star.”
The question that came to mind is, for whom is this book being written? Does this publisher really think that American men are this shallow and helpless that they need a book of short, pithy, how-to statements on how to be even more vapid and vain?
There are, of course, all kinds of things that men need to know. There was a time when they learned these things from their fathers. The Lord Christ speaks of this pattern: “As My Father hath taught Me, I speak these things” (John 8:28). We have, after all, a book of more than fifty things every man really needs to know (how to withstand the wiles of a prostitute, how to overcome laziness, how to care for a wife and children, how to cultivate a good name). This ancient volume, however, isn’t pieced together by celebrity experts. It is written to a son from a father who pleads with his offspring to “hear the instruction of thy father, and forsake not the law of thy mother” (Prov 1:8). But Proverbs isn’t on the New Books table of Barnes and Noble.
The publishers of this book, I suspect, are banking on the fact that a new generation of men (excuse me, guys) don’t have fathers they can call to learn how to dress to a job interview. They’re probably also banking on another group of guys who know their fathers would have the same reaction my father would have were they to be asked how to negotiate a “threesome” or how to pimp one’s ride.
