After I published my essay wrestling with femininity, a gay man named Chris (who is a kindred spirit) left a powerful comment that I have not been able to shake. He wrote about the revulsion so many conservative men and self-styled alpha males feel toward gay men, and he named it with a clarity I could not improve on:

“We gay men are a threat to the conservative men’s idea of who they think THEY should be, and we mirror something back to them that they can’t handle. This exposes the fragility of their male egos... The fragile masculine is truly afraid of the strength of the feminine. What they don’t realize is that true strength comes from embracing both the masculine and the feminine that resides in all of us.”

What I am able to talk about, and what I am not

I am a straight man. I think. At times, my sexual preferences are up for debate. But I do not know what it is like to move through this world as a gay man, or a lesbian, or a trans person, or anyone under a banner whose very letters are still argued over. That story belongs to the people living it, and they tell it far better than I could. Chris did, in four sentences, up above.

What I have earned the right to talk about, after thirty years inside the culture that manufactures this fear and six weeks writing about the men it produces, is the frightened man himself. His terror is my subject. I have borne the brunt of it. I watched it propel a hundred pulpits. I know its unhealthy face. So I am going to keep the focus on him, and let the people he fears speak for themselves.

The woman was only the beginning

I have been building toward this for weeks without seeing this step.

I wrote that a powerful woman terrifies the fragile man because she mirrors his own exiled feminine, his anima (Jung’s term) walking around outside his body, sovereign and unafraid. She is the symbol of the soul he was taught to amputate. A soul that is alive and thriving in someone else, and he cannot bear the reminder.

The gay man is that same mirror, moved one devastating step closer.

Because the powerful woman, however threatening, can still be filed under “other.” She is a woman; the feminine belongs to her; the frightened man can tell himself it is okay, there must be women in the world to propagate.

The gay man detonates that story. Here is the feminine living inside a male body. He sees a body like his own but the man carrying it has not died of being feminine, has not been unmanned by it, and is often more at home in himself than his accuser will ever be. The gay man is proof of the one thing the frightened man’s entire identity depends on denying: that a man can hold the feminine and the masculine.

That is why the revulsion runs so hot, and so specifically. It is recognition. He looks at the gay man and does not see a stranger. He sees a possibility, his own buried possibility, and slams the door so hard because some part of him felt it swing open. “I am not like THAT,” he says, the way you say it only about the thing you are most afraid is true of you.

The trans person, and the box itself

If the gay man threatens the frightened man’s belief that the feminine cannot live in a male body, the trans person threatens something deeper still—the box itself.

The whole ranked and bolted-down world I have been describing needs the boxes to be permanent: man here, woman there, no traffic across the border, everyone in an assigned slot and grateful for it. A trans person, simply by existing, says the border can be crossed and that the slot you were placed in at birth is not a life sentence. That the thing the frightened man believed was fixed by God or nature or biology is, in fact, something a human being can examine, question, and change.

I will not presume to narrate what that journey is or costs; that is not my story to tell, and trans people are telling it themselves, often at great danger. I only want to name what the frightened man sees when he looks. He sees the lid come off the box. And a man who has spent his whole life obeying the box, shrinking himself to fit it, amputating everything that would not fit. That man cannot survive the sight of someone walking free of the thing that caged him. Their freedom is an indictment of his castration. He calls it a threat to civilization. In reality, it is a threat to his settlement. He gave up his wholeness to stay in the box, and here is someone who refused the trade, and their life is unbearable.

Even the words are contested

I want to stop and admit something, because it gels with everything I have been writing.

I do not fully know what to call the people this essay is about. LGBTQIA+. Queer, reclaimed with pride by many and still felt as a wound by others who had it screamed at them. The letters are meant to evolve as language and culture change. And it is not my place, as a straight man standing outside, to appoint the right word and hand it down. It IS my place to learn and use the right terms to honor these beautiful, wild, and free human beings.

The fight he will not have

I keep returning to the same tragedy, in a new reflection.

These fearful men will battle anyone different. They will fight a culture war, a pulpit war, a comment-section war. Yet, inexplicably, they will pay to watch two nearly naked men wrestle each other to the ground in a cage. What they will not do, the one fight they flee their whole lives, is turn and face the person in the mirror. Because the son they cannot accept is exposing their own tenderness, the stranger they mock is showing them their own buried freedom. Every person they fear is holding up a reflection, and in it is the self they were too afraid to become.

The mirror, and the way out

Here is what I have come to believe, watching all of it.

The frightened man is not actually fighting gay people, or trans people, or powerful women, or feminists, or any of the enemies the culture keeps naming for him. He is fighting his own emptiness, wherever he encounters it. Every person he fears is simply more free than he has allowed himself to be, and their freedom shows him the size of his own cage.

He thinks he is defending manhood. He is defending a prison, and calling the walls God, or Republican, or Christian.

The way out is the same for him as it was for me, as it is for all of us. Turn toward the mirror instead of smashing it. Meet the exiled self it shows you. Let the gay man, the trans woman, the powerful woman be our teachers instead of our targets, because every one of them has already done the thing we are most afraid to do, they stopped performing a self that was killing them, and they are living life to its fullest…and truest.

I will give the last word to Chris, because it was his to begin with, and because he said it better than I can:

“True strength comes from embracing both the masculine and the feminine that resides in all of us.”

That is the whole of it. The strength these men are chasing has been staring at them the entire time.

Over the past weeks, I set out to examine a trauma that has haunted me my whole life: the frightened, furious man, and the political and religious cultures that keep him afraid…and angry. What began as one essay became seven, and they have been my most popular Substack posts. Here they are in order.

Why Conservative Men Fear Women

RANDY ELROD | BARCELONA

JUN 13

Read full story

I gave the Southern Baptist Convention thirty years of my life. So when I tell you the vote to silence women was never about the Bible, I’m not guessing.

Why This White Man Loves Powerful Women

RANDY ELROD | BARCELONA

JUN 15

Read full story

Last week I wrote about why conservative men fear powerful women. It became one of the most-read things I’ve ever published. So this week, the confession underneath the indictment: why I love them.

She’s a Man: The Last Move of a Frightened One

RANDY ELROD | BARCELONA

JUN 16

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Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?” No. She’s a powerful woman you can’t survive looking at. There’s a difference, and it’s the whole difference.

Who’s Selling These Men Their Rage?

RANDY ELROD | BARCELONA

JUN 19

Read full story

How loneliness gets manufactured into fury, and sold back to men at a profit.

Wrestling with Masculinity

RANDY ELROD | BARCELONA

JUN 29

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Boys are hitting themselves in the face with hammers. They call it bonesmashing, and they believe the bone grows back sharper. I’m sixty-eight, and I fell down this hole for hours. I think most people my age have no idea.

A Man Wrestles with Femininity

RANDY ELROD | BARCELONA

JUL 2

Read full story

I will not tell you what a woman is. I’ve watched too many men do that, and seen what it costs the women they do it to.

Over the past weeks, I set out to examine a trauma that has haunted me my whole life: the frightened, furious man, and the political and religious cultures that keep him afraid…and angry. What began as one essay became seven, and they have been my most popular Substack posts. Here they are in order.

I gave the Southern Baptist Convention thirty years of my life. So when I tell you the vote to silence women was never about the Bible, I'm not guessing.

Last week I wrote about why conservative men fear powerful women. It became one of the most-read things I've ever published. So this week, the confession underneath the indictment: why I love them.

Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?" No. She's a powerful woman you can't survive looking at. There's a difference, and it's the whole difference.

How loneliness gets manufactured into fury, and sold back to men at a profit.

Boys are hitting themselves in the face with hammers. They call it bonesmashing, and they believe the bone grows back sharper. I'm sixty-eight, and I fell down this hole for hours. I think most people my age have no idea.

I will not tell you what a woman is. I’ve watched too many men do that, and seen what it costs the women they do it to.

Coming Next: The Man in the Mirror

He thinks he's defending manhood from people who are queer, transgender, or simply different than him. But he's defending a prison, and calling the walls God, Republican, or Christian.

Read them in order, or start wherever the title pulls you. They all end in the same place: wholeness is the thing the frightened ones are most afraid of, and, ironically, the thing that would set them free.

A friend of mine said something a few weeks ago that I have not been able to quit thinking about.

He is a man in his thirties, raised far from the church and the American scripts I grew up inside. We were talking, and he said, with no hesitation, that my wife Gina is one of the most feminine people he has ever known.

I brought his words home to her like a small gift. I expected her to be pleased. And she was, but then she went quiet, the way she does when an idea is worth thinking about, and she asked me the question that became this essay.

“What makes me feminine? What do you think he is seeing?”

I thought I had an answer. I have known Gina for fifteen years in the Biblical sense and twenty years prior in a platonic friendship, and I could have told you a dozen things I find feminine in her. But the moment she asked, I realized my answer and my friend’s answer might be nothing alike. What he sees when he says that word, formed where he was formed, is almost certainly not what I see, formed where I was formed. And what Gina would say about her own femininity might be a third thing entirely, unlike either of ours.

Three people. One woman. One word. And three completely different meanings hiding inside it.

I have been writing about masculinity and femininity for several weeks now, wrestling with the words and concepts. And a man in his thirties handed me a sentence that piqued my curiosity, and it made me ask a question I had never once asked.

What He Might Be Seeing

Start with my friend, because our backgrounds could not be more different.

He did not get the idea of femininity I was handed. He was not raised inside a religion that taught him a feminine woman is quiet, covered, submissive, and small. He was not formed by the American decades that taught me. Whatever he means by the word, the ideal, he built out of other materials. So when he looks at Gina, seventy-one years old, powerful, comfortable, afraid of no one, and calls her the most feminine person he has known, he is pointing at something my conditioning might never have let me name with that word.

Is he seeing her wholeness? Her warmth that asks nothing back? The way she is so entirely at home in herself that being near her feels like rest? A younger man hungry for that kind of steady, unanxious presence would recognize it instantly, and he might have no word for it but the oldest one he owns. Feminine.

That is my guess. I could be wrong. That is rather the point.

What She Built

Then there is Gina’s own answer, which she has spent a lifetime earning the right to give.

For most of her seventy-one years, the men closest to her treated her as a lesser thing. She was belittled inside her own home, in front of the children, until some of them grew up and learned to do it too. A family member she cared for two decades once told her he was proud of her, and she brightened, then he finished the sentence: because she was so skinny, because she had not gotten fat. She never forgot it. It crushed her.

And inside that machine built to convince her she was nothing, she started her own business, out-earned the man she was married to, led armies of volunteers, and chaired the personnel team of a megachurch with thousands of members and more than a hundred staff. She was powerful while being told daily that she was not. And now, in her eighth decade, she is rewriting the old scripts in real time, catching the triggers as they fire, healing and blossoming.

So if you ask Gina what makes her feminine, I do not think she will point to anything soft or small. I think the truest answer is that she refused every patriarchal definition of femininity that was ever forced on her. The woman she is now, she developed herself in a furnace most men would not survive.

She is not the only woman who showed me the vastness of the feminine. My dearest friend Melissa walks into rooms and transforms the atmosphere, speaks better than any man I have heard in a lifetime of churches, and walked away from a pulpit rather than shrink to fit a frightened boss’s comfort. Michelle Obama stood beside the most powerful man on earth and was never once diminished by him, only multiplied. Sophie Strand writes of a feminine that is fierce and generative and rooted, nothing like the demure servant I was raised to expect.

Every one of these women is large. Every one of them is bold in the way that matters. And every one of them personifies something different by “feminine” than the men who tried to cage them. This fascinating word keeps bending depending on who it describes.

Which sent me asking why. And the questions I found were not out in the culture at all. They were inside the one doing the wrestling.

The Woman Inside the Man

Carl Jung had a name for the feminine that lives inside a man. He called her the anima: the unconscious feminine half of a man’s own psyche, his inner image of the soul. Jung teaches that every man has one. The only question is what he does about her.

He believed a man’s deepest work, especially in the second half of life, is to turn toward this inner feminine and develop a relationship with her. To make the unconscious conscious, to know her, to let her make him whole. A man who does this becomes capable of feeling, of depth, of real relationship and creativity. A man who refuses does not escape her. He gets ruled by her, from below, in her most primitive form.

This helps clarify everything I have been writing about for weeks. Jung described the man who denies his anima as becoming moody, touchy, petty, vindictive, brittle, and above all irrationally reactive. A man possessed by sulking rages he cannot account for. Read that list again. Who comes to mind? A clinical description of the manosphere? Is it the fighter on the White House lawn? Is it the pastor intimidated beside a woman telling the truth? Could it be that the rage these men mistake for strength is the feminine they exiled? Could it be that what they fear is not the powerful woman in front of them? It is the woman locked inside them, fighting to get out.

And it raises Gina’s question better than anything I could have told her. Maybe my friend and I see different femininity in the same woman because each of us is reading our own anima off of her. Maybe the word “feminine” never described the woman at all. Maybe it describes the soul of whoever is doing the looking. That would explain why no two people ever draw the same picture. We are not painting her. We are painting the woman inside us, and using her face as muse and model.

I know this because I spent fifteen years doing exactly that, and did not understand it until one fateful day in my Florida atelier.

The Self-Portraits

For two decades I have painted the female nude. Garment after garment stripped away, canvas after canvas, searching for something I could not name. I used to wonder, idly, why I had no desire to paint men. It never occurred to me to ask what the question meant.

Then one ordinary afternoon painting, it hit me like a ton of bricks. These were not paintings of women.

They were all self-portraits. (See more below)

Like Rembrandt turning to his own face again and again in the mirror, I had been painting the same subject the whole time without knowing it. It was my own buried feminine, the soul-image I had been taught my entire life did not belong in a man. Every nude was me, trying to see the parts of myself the church and the culture had told me to amputate. The women on those canvases were the window. What I was straining to look at was inside the painter.

And it had taken me fifteen years to notice.

A Little Sympathy, and Not One Ounce More

Here is where something I did not expect crept in. A little (very little) sympathy for the men with the swords.

Because I had every advantage. I was raised by a loving mother whose presence gave me a secure foundation to build my life. My whole vocation as musician and artist pried my feminine open and called it a career. I had a song in my heart and a paintbrush in my hand and decades of permission to use them. Yet it still took me until my fifties to see my own anima staring back at me from my own canvases.

So I do the arithmetic, and it humbles me. If it took me that long, with all of that going for me, how unreachably far away is the anima for a man who was taught from birth to fear her? A man with no brush, no permission, no loving and secure beginning, who was handed a sword as a boy and told the feminine was the enemy?

These men love to watch other mostly nude men fight in a cage. They will pay anything to see a man wrestle another man to the ground. But why have they never found the courage to wrestle the woman inside themselves? What if this were the only fight that would set them free?

That is the whole tragedy. The fight they are terrified of is the one that would heal them. So they keep swinging the sword at her shadow in every powerful woman who walks past, and they never once suspect she has been living in their own heart the entire time.

It is sad. It is not an excuse. The weapon is still a weapon, and the people it cuts are still cut.

What I Am Still Wrestling With

I told you at the start that I would not define femininity, and I have kept that promise, mostly because I no longer believe I can. The closer I look, the more the word stops describing the woman and starts describing whoever is looking. So I am going to do something else instead. I am going to ask you to join my wrestling match.

Picture the most feminine person you have ever known. Take a moment with it. See the face, the way they move, the thing about them that made the word rise up in you. Hold the image.

Now ask a friend to do the same. Compare what you see.

The pictures will probably not match. And sit with why. You were not describing a fact out in the world. You were each describing something wrestling inside yourselves, wearing a stranger’s face.

My friend sees one thing in Gina. I see another. Gina, I suspect, sees a third. And after twenty-five years at the easel I still cannot paint my anima the same way twice, because she was never one fixed thing. She was a living relationship with the deepest part of me, and she keeps changing as I do.

That gap, the space between your picture and your friend’s, is the whole thing. It is the most honest result of my wrestling, and it only raises more questions. What if femininity was never a single fact waiting to be defined, and assigned, and bolted into a cage, or wrestled into a corner, or pinned down in one final painting?

What if it was always a mirror? And every one of us has been gazing into it, certain we were finally seeing her, when all along we were only ever beginning to see ourselves.

I am sixty-eight years old, and I am tired of men my age pretending to understand things they do not. I have lived a long time and watched a great deal. Yet a few days ago, I fell down a hole I did not climb back out of for hours. What I found there shocked me.

Boys are hitting themselves in the face with hammers.

I feel compelled to write about this because I think most people my age have no idea, and sadly, most people of any age would rather not know.

The Dictionary of the Wound

There is a practice called looksmaxxing. It is exactly what it sounds like: maximizing your looks, and at first glance, it is harmless. Skincare. Haircuts. The gym. They call that softmaxxing, and there is nothing wrong with a boy wanting to be handsome.

But then there are the other extremes. I had no idea.

Mewing: pressing your tongue against the roof of your mouth for hours, every day, to reshape your jaw. Some boys stay silent through the entire school day to hold the position. Some drink only liquids so they never have to stop.

Bonesmashing: striking your own facial bones, your jaw, your cheekbones, with a hard object. A hammer. Your own fist. The belief is that the bone will grow back stronger and sharper, like a callus. The reality is fractures, nerve damage, deformity, and in some cases, damage to your vision. Boys are taking hammers to their faces. There is a young influencer named Clavicular, barely out of his teens, who sells a monthly course complete with bonesmashing tutorials, and who brags that he has used steroids and crystal meth since the age of fourteen to look the way he looks. His followers are boys who pay him.

There is a whole language for it. To mog someone is to out-look them, to dominate a room by being prettier. To ascend is to climb the ranks toward Chad, the apex male. Underneath sits the blackpill, the belief that women choose men on bone structure alone, that kindness and character are worthless, that if your jaw is wrong your life is over before it starts. Boys as young as twelve are absorbing this as truth.

Doctors have a more somber phrase for what they are seeing. They call it body dysmorphia. They call it an eating disorder, and one in three people with an eating disorder is male, a fact almost no one knows, because many of us thought that starving yourself to fit an unreachable image was a girl’s affliction. The doctors are seeing the depression. They are seeing suicidal thoughts. One clinician put it as cleanly as I have heard it: a looksmaxxing boy is a young man asking whether he is enough, and reaching for the answer in the worst possible place.

That sentence floored me. Because I know that boy, I was that boy. And I think I finally understand what is being done to him.

The Sword Turned Inward

I have written, these past weeks, about the dividing sword. About the men who built their whole selves around dominance. Men who cut the world into winner and loser, man and not-man, above and below, and who must keep cutting, because a sword that stops cutting is just a frightened man alone with himself. The UFC fighter Hokit on the White House lawn, demeaning a woman so that he can feel tall. The pastors of my youth and my career. The manosphere selling rage by the click.

Here is what sent chill bumps up my spine.

They have handed the sword to the children. And they have taught the children to turn it on themselves.

A boy cannot yet swing the sword at a woman, at a culture, at an enemy. He has no power, no platform, no target. So they sell him the only target he has. His own face. His own body. His own unbearable suspicion that he is not enough. Bonesmash your jaw. Starve your cheeks. Maxx yourself into a man. It is the same amputation the “strongmen” performed on themselves—cut away everything soft, everything tender, everything that aches—except now it is sold to a young boy as a hobby, with tutorials, for fifty dollars a month.

I know that amputation in my body. I spent thirty years learning to perform it. Cut off the part that feels too much. Cut off the part that weeps. Cut off the part that wants to be held. Become hard, become invulnerable, become a man. The boys with the hammers are doing to their faces what the church did to my being, and what the manosphere does to grown men’s self-perception. Same blade. Younger flesh.

And the cruelty of it, the part that triggers me, is who they hunt. These “macho men” do not go after the confident boy, the easy boy, the boy who was loved well. It goes after the lonely one. The geek with the glasses. The sensitive one who feels everything and has been told that feeling is the flaw. It finds the boy who is already certain he is not enough, and it hands him a hammer and says here, fix yourself. It is the rage machine’s youth division, and it recruits from the saddest desks in the room.

I was a boy at one of those desks. So was nearly every tender man I have ever loved and respected.

The Thing I am Still Wrestling With

I suppose this is where I should tell you what real masculinity is. That is how these essays are meant to progress. The older, wiser man arrives at his answer and hands it down.

I will not do that, and I want to tell you why.

The men with the hammers and swords, the men with the pulpits, the men with the podcasts—their entire fallacy is that they claim to know what a man is, and they will sell you the answer, and they will cut you to fit it. Every one of them has a definition. Every one of them has a knife.

If I end this by telling you what I think a real man is, I have only handed you a kinder, gentler weapon. I would have joined the long line of authoritarian men who looked at a frightened boy and said, “Be this instead.”

I will not do it. At sixty-eight, married to a strong woman on a Spanish terrace across an ocean from where I was born, I will admit that I am still wrestling with masculinity. That is not a failure on my part or of the essay. That is the truest thing I have to give you.

But I can tell you what I have learned in the wrestling.

I can tell you that everything they tried to cut out of me was the best of me. The sensitivity they shamed. The tenderness they mocked. The tears they called weakness. They wanted me to set down the flowering wand and pick up the dividing sword, and they were certain the wand made me less of a man.

In 2004, two years before I voluntarily resigned from the ministry forever, our executive staff went on a leadership retreat. The conveners handed us a questionnaire—comprehensive, hundreds of questions, every corner of a man’s life. It was the first time most of my peers learned the things I never bragged about: the solo summits of fourteen-thousand-foot peaks, the multiple marathons, the week in Alaskan grizzly country with a raft and a tent.

Then they had us rate one another across a long list of categories. One of them was masculinity. They ranked me dead last. The least masculine man at the table.

I had conquered more wilderness than any of them. I had been alone and survived more dangerous places, by choice, than all of them combined, and the proof was right there in my own life experience. They scored me at the bottom anyway, because I directed the arts. Because my work was beauty instead of dominance. Because I was sensitive.

I said so, out loud, in the feedback session. I was too frustrated to stay quiet. But the words fell on deaf ears.

The leadership evaluation was measuring courage, risk, and strength. I had those in surplus. But the staff members (all male) were measuring by other criteria: how close a man stood to the feminine. I made art. I was gentle, empathic, and kind. So, in their eyes, I lost. This masculine yet feminine man never had a chance.

It took most of my life to understand they had it exactly backward.

The person I was was never a defect. It was the whole point.

What I Would Ask the Boys

I keep thinking of young men I have known. Picture the geeks with the big glasses—too tall, too short, too sensitive, feeling everything, sure they are not enough, certain that if they could just fix their face or harden their heart, they would finally be normal. These young men have no model for any other kind of man. Most of their fathers are swordsmen, untrustworthy with anything tender. The only voices offering them a blueprint of masculinity are the ones selling them a hammer and a sword.

If I could sit with one of those boys at my café, I would not tell him what a man is. I would ask him the questions I think no one has ever asked him.

What do you love? What do you make when no one is watching? When was the last time something moved you to tears—and who taught you that was weakness?

Who told you your face was the problem?

When you picture the man you want to become, is he comfortable in his skin, or is he wearing armor? Does he have friends, or only followers? When he is alone at three in the morning, is he at peace, or is he still afraid?

And then the last question. The one I would most want him to carry home. What if the ache you are trying to fix was never a flaw? What if it is the truest, most alive thing about you, the proof you were built to know and be known, to love and be loved?

What I Would Ask the Rest of Us

These are the questions I keep wrestling with at sixty-eight, and I will not pretend to have finished. The wrestling has taught me to ask better questions, and these I would put to all of us, not only the boys.

What if masculinity was never the cage? What if it was never the sword, and never the hammer? What if it is not a jaw line, or a perfect body, or the number of people you can tower above? What is the full range of being a human being? Why do we let these macho shysters sell us a sliver of it and call everything else weakness?

What if a man can summit a mountain and still weep? What if he can be strong and still tender? What if he can hold a sword’s worth of courage and never once need to cut anyone with it, least of all himself?

The men with the hammers will tell you to put down everything soft and pick up the blade.

I am an older man, and I have wrestled with this my whole life, and here is all I know for certain. Put down the hammer. Put down the sword. What if our true selves were never the thing that needed fixing?

What if we were men the entire time? The fearful “men” just needed us never to find out.

Last week, a fighter named Josh Hokit won the biggest bout of his life on the South Lawn of the White House, and then leaned into Joe Rogan’s microphone and called Michelle Obama a man. Rogan backed away and did not refute it. The crowd half-cheered, half-groaned. And the MAGA people online treated it as the night’s big moment.

But Hokit didn’t originate that line. It’s a years-old smear he reached for like a weapon, because the ammunition was already loaded, already paid for. The fighter was not the creator of that moment. He was the product of it.

This post is not about Hokit. It’s about rage as a lucrative product.

First, to the ones who were wounded

Some of you have been on the receiving end of these men. The bullying. The control. The contempt. Or worse. You don’t need me to describe it; you’ve borne it.

I empathize. So have I. For thirty years I was at the receiving end.

Understand: I was no soft target by their measure. I have run twenty-four marathons. I have lifted weights my entire life. I have solo-summited high and dangerous mountains, and floated Alaskan grizzly country with nothing but a raft and a tent. By every metric they claim to worship, I was a man’s man.

None of it mattered, because I led worship with a tender heart. Because I carried kindness, gentleness, and empathy where they carried rage, contempt, and shame. One of the famous ones had a name for men like me: “effeminate, anatomically male worship leaders.” I held a flowering wand where they demanded a dividing sword—and that, to them, was unforgivable.

I understand now what I could not name then. Their contempt was never really about softness. It was fear. The same fear that made Hokit call Michelle Obama a man. A whole person undoes them. Someone strong and tender at once—who can summit a mountain, stand as an equal to the most powerful man on earth, and still love out loud—exposes how small they have made themselves. The sword always swings at the wholeness it cannot become.

I have a different wound than Michelle and many of you. But it was made by the same weapons.

So hear me clearly: nothing in this post asks you to soften toward these men. Nothing here is for them at your expense. Your trauma is not up for debate, and your anger is not the problem to be solved. I am not writing as a man asking you to pity the kind of man who hurt you. I am writing as someone who was wounded by a similar weapon, who got out, and who finally learned the difference between the men who sell and profit from the rage and the men it spits out. That difference is the whole point of what follows. I do not excuse them. I want to suggest there is a better product.

Rage is a business

Here is the blueprint, in plain words.

A lonely, hurting man is profitable. He clicks. He subscribes. He buys the supplement and the training course. He donates. He tithes. He votes. He fights.

It starts with an ache. The plain human loneliness every one of us knows, the hunger to be wanted and be known. That ache is real, and at first, it is innocent. Then the machine finds it, and goes to work. First it frightens him: you’re losing, they’re coming for you, you’re not man enough. Then it hands the fear back to him as rage, with a target attached: her, them, the culture that is replacing you, anyone who is different. The ache is the wound. The rage is the product. And a wounded man keeps buying.

That’s why the machine needs to keep him afraid. A confident man, comfortable in his own skin, stops coming back. So the rage cure is designed to never quite work. He is told the ache that won’t go away is his fault (he is too soft, too woke, not man enough) and then he is sold a fix. The fix fails. The ache deepens. He buys again. That’s the business model.

And it is run, every time, by the same kind of man.

I have met this man my whole life

I grew up under this man. I can spot him across a room, across a screen, across a pulpit or a podium, because I was raised by one of them.

Watch what he does. He’s always right. He never backs down. He never apologizes. Apology is for the weak. He conjures the threats, “the feminists,” “the gays,” “the transgenders,” “the libtards,” and then offers himself as the strong father who’ll protect you from them, if you’ll just submit, just stay loyal, just keep paying. He demands respect. He punishes dissent.

The first time I watched Donald Trump work a crowd, I did not see a politician. I saw the preachers of my childhood. Same cadence. Same swagger. Same never-wrong, never-sorry, always-the-victim-and-always-the-strongman trick. Trump talking about himself in the third person, virtually every story ending with some big man calling him “sir.” I had seen that spin from a hundred pulpits.

Members of Steven Furtick’s own worship team told me, years ago, that when this new-breed ultra-conservative pastor entered a room, everyone was required to rise. And that he corrected anyone who used his first name. Never Steven. Only Pastor Furtick.

Mark Driscoll built a megachurch preaching macho dominance, called women “penis homes,” and mocked sensitive men like me. Until his elders forced him out in 2014, one board advisor calling it “the most abusive, coercive ministry culture” he had ever seen. So Driscoll built another church in Arizona, this time without elders who could check him, where former staff members say he is “guarded like royalty” and demands “unconditional loyalty.” When it finally caught up with him, he played the victim. The grievance salesman, aggrieved.

Trump. Lindsey Graham. Ted Cruz. Tucker Carlson. Jordan Peterson. Al Mohler. Driscoll. Furtick. Line them up, and they blur together: same mannerisms, same methods, same hunger for power. They aren’t clones because they coordinate. They’re clones because they’re all running the same ancient con.

I’m not writing from the cheap seats. For years I helped build businesses like this. I filled their rooms with music. The worship team that told me about Furtick? I helped them get their record deal. And at sixty-eight and after two decades of freedom, I am only now healing from living in that rage machine. The warning bells I feel when I watch these men are not partisan. They are a human being remembering.

The first one I ever knew

Let me show you a prototype, because the machine is older than the internet, older than Trump, Rogan, and Musk, older than all of it.

My first church was in Keith, Georgia. A tiny poor farming community, dirt and pine. The new pastor was a former Hormel ham salesman named Tom, a domineering, charismatic, never-wrong, never-back-down man, who ruled that church with an iron fist. I came to him at nineteen, and he put me on staff and worked me like a hired hand.

The more I worked for him, the more I saw what he was.

Tom was a master salesman. His product changed from ham and bacon to fear and rage. And he bilked those poor church people for every dollar they had. Love offerings. Tithes. Money they did not have, handed over because they had been told their giving was the measure of their faith. Tom bragged that his tiny church out-gave congregations ten times its size. Evangelists lined up to preach there because nobody raised a love offering like Tom. It was his trophy. His bragging rights.

And the way he raised it was fear. Always fear. Fear of hell, fear of the world, of not being a “real” man, a submissive wife, a soldier in God’s army. Frighten them, then pass the plate. Then pass it again.

That was 1977. A ham salesman in a poor country church, running the exact con the manosphere now runs at scale. Tom had a congregation of a hundred or so. Rogan has tens of millions: same product, same frightened men. Fleeced and kept afraid. Just better distribution.

Name the rest of them, then

So who’s stoking the rage today?

The podcast bros who hand a man like Hokit a microphone and a cheering room, then say nothing when he reaches for the smear—and air it to millions anyway, because the outrage is the content.

The “high-value male” coaches and the pickup artists—the PUA hustlers, they call themselves—who sold a generation of lonely men scripts to manipulate women into bed, then sold them rage when the scripts failed. First they monetized his loneliness. Then they monetized his resentment at being lonely still. Two sales off one wound.

The manosphere influencers farming his clicks with an endless feed of grievance, telling him the reason he’s miserable is her.

None of them deliver what they promise. The man stays lonely. He stays broke. He stays angry. A “victim.” Because a healed man is a lost customer, and they are not in the business of healing him. They are in the business of enraging him.

A few words of hope

I am now selling a different male product. And it is NOT viagra.

Thankfully, there are a growing number of powerful and confident people who refuse to be con artists sowing division. Are we perfect? Hell no! But we are “calm artists” cultivating a different masculinity: equanimity and serenity instead of rage and fear.

Consider the words of Barack Obama yesterday at the opening of his presidential library, a monumental symbol of freedom and strength: “Deep in our gut, we want to find a way to turn toward each other again, not further away.”

Pete Buttigieg said, “Life is short, and we do not have much time to gladden the hearts of those who travel with us; so be quick to love, make haste to be kind, and go in peace to follow the good road of blessing.”

And from a female perspective, the philosophy of Sophie Strand in her book The Flowering Wand. She posits that we mistook the phallic, generative, green, Dionysian masculine, the wand that makes things grow, for the sword that cuts and divides and conquers. The con artists of patriarchy chose the sword and called it the only masculinity. But the older, truer image is the flowering staff: Aaron’s rod that buds, the thyrsus of Dionysus, the green man, the masculine that is fertile rather than dominant, that tends rather than takes.

And fashion designer Simone Rocha told the New York Times this morning that she is turning more of her attention to men’s wear and men’s softer side as the culture reaches its peak “masculinity crisis.” When she began designing menswear seriously, she said, she wanted it to feel “grounded but also quite tender.”

Rocha’s feminine take on men’s wear, which makes up 30 percent of her business, has found a strong consumer base that flies in the face of the masculinist surge exemplified by figures like Mark Zuckerberg, who trains in mixed martial arts; President Trump, who recently hosted a bloody UFC fight on the White House lawn; and members of the manosphere, who discuss He-Man workout routines at length and dress in tight black T-shirts to show off their biceps.

I spent my life being told the wand I was born holding was a defect. Too soft, too tender, too green. They handed every boy a sword and called it manhood, and called everything else weakness.

They had it exactly backward.

The sword only ever divides. It cuts the world into above and below, winner and loser, man and not-man, and it must keep cutting, because a sword that stops cutting is just a man alone with himself. But there is an older image of a man, the one they buried: the staff that flowers. The rod that buds. The hand that makes things grow instead of making them kneel.

The opposite of rage was never calm. It is generativity. To plant instead of conquer. To tend instead of take. To turn toward instead of away.

This part is for those of us who took the worst of the sword: the women who absorbed it, the sensitive men who would not perform it, the children who grew up under it.

You are not broken. You never were.

If you are a woman who spent a childhood, or a marriage, or a whole life under a man like this, told in a thousand ways that you were too much, or not enough, that the coldness you lived in was somehow your doing, please hear me: it was never a verdict on your worth. It was a product, manufactured by frightened men and sold and bought at your expense. The smallness they pressed you into was never the size of you. Your anger is not a flaw in you. It is the healthiest thing about you. You saw the machine for what it was, maybe long before anyone believed you.

I see it in my own life, late: a man on a terrace with a brush in his hand and a powerful woman who holds him when the old rage flares (thankfully, a much rarer event these days), learning at sixty-eight that the life-giving, tender thing in me was never the wound. It was the original gift.

I hope for a world where we put down the dividing sword. And pick up our flowering wands. And watch what our one wild life can still grow.

Talk about timing.

My last two posts were about conservative men and their fear of powerful women. Then, before the ink was dry, a white UFC fighter named Josh Hokit walked onto the South Lawn of the White House and proved my entire thesis in six words, on live television, for me.

He had just won the biggest fight of his life, a TKO over Derrick Lewis at a garish spectacle staged for Donald Trump’s eightieth birthday, sixty million dollars of arena erected onto the President’s front yard. Hokit handed Trump a chain, and praised him. And then, with the microphone still hot and Joe Rogan beside him, he reached for his closer: “And lastly, Michelle Obama is a man. Am I right, America?”

Rogan backed away. He looked flustered, said “Ladies and gentlemen, Josh Hokit,” and let it die. Even Dana White, the UFC owner who put Hokit on the card, condemned it the next morning. The fighter had reached, in the biggest moment of his life, for the smallest thing a man can say.

Let’s think about what that sentence actually does. Because the conservative man’s deepest insult for a powerful woman is to deny she is a woman at all.

Think about who he aimed it at. Michelle Obama, graduate of Princeton and Harvard Law, a self-made woman of towering accomplishment, grace, and beauty, beloved by tens of millions. There is no honest accounting of her that lands on man. So the word is not a description. It is a confession. It says: my idea of what a woman is cannot survive contact with a woman like this. She is too tall, too brilliant, too composed, too free. If that is a woman, then the small thing I need a woman to be is in danger. So I will call her a man, and keep my little world intact.

A whole woman, I wrote three days ago, is a mirror. A frightened man cannot bear the reflection. So he smashes it the only way he knows how. Hokit stood on Trump’s lawn, looked into that mirror, and called what he saw a man.

The Order He Is Defending

Let’s give the frightened man his fair hearing, because the truth is stronger when you do not cheat to reach it.

He is not lying about what he feels. A powerful woman genuinely unsettles him. He was raised, as I was, inside a story where the world has an order to it (men up here, women down there, each in a complementary place), the whole arrangement blessed by a male God. In that story, a man knows who he is by knowing what kneels below him. It is a comfort. It answers the hardest questions before they can be asked. And a powerful woman like Michelle Obama or Brittney Griner, about whom Hokit said the same thing in January, does not fit anywhere in it. She is not below him. She is not serving him. She towers, and she is free, and her existence proves that the story he was handed is not true.

That is a real loss. I will not pretend it isn’t. When the scaffolding of your whole identity turns out to be a lie, the floor drops out. I have felt that floor drop. I have grieved it.

But here is where the fair hearing ends.

The order he is defending was never true, and it was never God-given. It was a false hierarchy with him on top. And you can tell, because of how crassly he has to defend it. A true thing does not require you to erase the people who contradict it. Only a lie needs that. When the only way to preserve your worldview is to delete the woman who will not fit the slot you built for her, to look at one of the most accomplished women alive and call her a man, you have admitted, out loud, that your order cannot survive the truth. The erasure is the confession. The fearful man is not protecting something sacred. He is protecting his place above all.

What It Means That He Aimed It Here

Notice who Hokit chose. Someone he will never meet. Michelle Obama. And in January, Brittney Griner. Both Black women.

This is the part of the story I do not have the standing to narrate, so I will hand it to a man who does. After the fight, the former NFL quarterback Robert Griffin III wrote what needed to be said:

Especially with the history. Read that last sentence, because it carries centuries. The denial of womanhood to Black women is old American machinery: the auction block that treated them as meat instead of human, the long slander that cast them as unfeminine, unbeautiful, unworthy of the protection white womanhood was granted. To call a Black woman a man in America is to reach for a weapon that was forged a long time ago, for an ugly purpose, and Hokit reached for it twice. He may not know the history. But we who know history do. It does its work whether he read his school history book or not.

So the insult is two things at once. It is a frightened man’s defense against any powerful woman. And it is a racial weapon with a horrific American edge. Both are true. Both belong in the same breath.

Three Men

I keep thinking about a different man, married to a different powerful woman.

For more than twenty years, Barack Obama has told anyone who would listen that his wife is smarter than he is, tougher than he is, the better part of him. He says it sincerely. It costs him nothing. It seems, if anything, to make him larger. Here is a man who reached the most powerful office on earth and never once needed to shrink the woman beside him to feel like he filled the chair. Her power is not his threat. It is his strength.

Then there is Hokit, who reached the biggest moment of his small life, fighting like a chicken in a cock fight, and spent it trying to cut a woman he will never meet down to a size he could loom over.

And then, if I am honest, there is me. I spent thirty years inside a religion that taught me the frightened man’s posturing as dogma, and I had to claw my way out of it to learn the truth. I am not writing this from above anyone. I am writing it from the far-away side of a wall I used to live behind.

Three men. One insult. Two of us who learned powerful women make us better men.

The size of a man’s fear is written in the size of his attempt to make a woman smaller. By that measure, the loudest man on the White House lawn that night, the one who had just “won,” and just been blessed by the President himself, told the whole country exactly how frightened and small he is.

“She’s a man,” he said.

No. She is a woman he cannot survive looking at. There is a difference.

That is the whole difference.

Last week I wrote about why conservative men fear powerful women. The piece struck a nerve. Thousands of you read it. A few of you wrote to tell me I had lost my soul. You may be right.

Today, the other side of the coin. The confession underneath the indictment.

I love powerful women. I have built my whole life around them. I married one. I have mentored one for thirty years. I have painted them in watercolor for two decades, the nude female form, again and again, because they symbolize my anima, the feminine living inside me, asking to be seen. And this past year I sat at my desk in Barcelona and conjured two more of them out of thin air, then handed them a city to conquer.

A whole woman, I wrote last week, is a mirror, and frightened men cannot stand what they see in it.

For me, that mirror is the best view in the house.

A conservative man sees a powerful woman and reaches for a weapon of destruction. I see one and reach for a comfy sofa, a dram of whiskey, and the rest of the night. I am a highly sensitive man. I feel everything, always have, and the thing I feel most keenly in this world is the electricity of a woman who knows exactly who she is. It does not diminish me. It wakes me up. And turns me on.

Let me tell you about a few of them.

Gina

In the fifteen years we have been together, we have moved twelve times. Across the American map, homeless to city to suburb to farm to another country and another language. Twelve times. We made every decision together, one in purpose and essence.

The truest test came on fifty-four acres of Appalachian bramble and rocks.

We lived in an RV. I had never held a drill before in my life. She had. We built my atelier first (the Hawk’s Nest) with our own four hands. Then a lodge. Then cabins. We blazed trails across fifty-four acres, laid hardwood floors, stacked stone walls, dug french drains across undulating ground, raised fences, built stables and haylofts, rescued horses, grew our own vegetables, and survived one of the worst winters Smith County had seen on record. Gina was right there with me the whole time—shoulder to shoulder in the mud, a coequal in every blistered, cursing, exhausted, occasionally glorious hour. Never behind me. Never decoration. We turned brambles and stone into a stunning compound, and she swung a hammer for every inch of it.

She had been a champion show jumper as a girl. Try jumping a six-foot fence. When we finally got horses onto that land, I watched a woman in her sixties move a thousand-pound animal with a whisper and a shift of her weight, and I understood power has very little to do with volume…or gender.

And when this fourth-generation Floridian with sand in her shoes said, Let’s leave America, I said yes. We told our friends we were moving to Spain, and they admired our courage, but neither of us fully grasped how much courage it would take until we were standing in the middle of it, in a populous city that did not speak our language, building a life from scratch yet one more time. She has faced every daunting, unfamiliar day of it with a bravery that leaves me in awe.

She is my muse and my anam cara, the Celtic phrase for the soul friend who sees all the way to the bottom of you and stays anyway. “There are no words,” I wrote years ago, “to express what an extraordinarily strong woman she is.” There still are not. I just keep trying to find them.

Melissa

Then there is Melissa.

I have known her since she was a teenager, wowing me in an audition for a solo. Over thirty years ago. Her teenage daughter now dances with her the way she once sang with me. We have spent weekends alone together in solitary mountain cabins, dreaming, laughing, communing, the kind of intimacy that loses track of the hour. She championed me when I was at my lowest.

She commands every room she enters—physical and soulish presence at once, a gravity that turns every head before she has said a word. And she is, flat out, one of the best preachers I have ever heard. And I have heard thousands. I am not exaggerating to land a point.

She has walked away from more achievements than most people are ever handed. She left a successful career in Christian music near the height of it. Then a white male pastor recruited her into ministry with a promise: she would stand as his coequal, share the leadership, share the pulpit. And then she walked in and did the thing she does, filled the room, moved the people, preached rings around him, and he could not bear it.

The promise evaporated. The fear I wrote about last week is not theory to me. I have watched it conquer men in real time. And I watched from afar as a frightened man tried to shrink my dearest friend down to a size he could control. She refused. She left, and she carried her power out the door with her, the way few women do.

Every time a box got too small, she chose courage. Out of the music industry. Out of the institution. Eventually onto public stages that celebrate unconditional love and inclusivity instead of regulating fear into doctrine. She did the bravest thing a person can do: she trusted her own values over everything she was handed, and she kept choosing them even when it cost her salary, the platform, and the ready-made identity.

This is the part of her story that makes me want to stand up and shout. A few weeks ago, Melissa and her former bandmate Michael Passons in the award-winning contemporary Christian group Avalon—Michael was quietly pushed out of that group years ago for being gay—joined with the first openly gay country music star Ty Herndon to re-record Avalon’s old hit “Testify to Love.”

The same song. New meaning. The true meaning. A declaration that love arrives without exception. It shot to number one on the iTunes Christian chart that once would have had no shelf for it, and music superstar Amy Grant herself reached out, undone by what they had made. In a glorious twist of fate, they will sing it together June 24 on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry. The woman a frightened pastor could not stand beside is now helping an entire genre tell the truth.

The church that could not hold her is smaller now. Melissa’s world is exponentially larger.

Chloé and Montse

I spent this past year conjuring two more powerful women out of thin air. In my debut novel, The Mysteries of Barcelona, there is a woman named Chloé Permanyer. She arrives in the story carrying scars left by fearful men—and rather than break beneath them, she learns to take the very tool those men weaponized against her, desire, and forge it into an instrument of justice. She becomes a hunter. And the predators of nineteenth-century Barcelona—the priests and jailers and magistrates who believed their power made them untouchable—discover, one by one, how wrong they were.

Then there is Montse, a Spanish dancer who waited ten patient years to become the woman she was always meant to be, and then became it overnight.

I did not sit down to write a manifesto. I sat down to write a gothic thrill ride through my adopted city—automatons and catacombs and immortals beneath Tibidabo. But two powerful women had minds and lives of their own and took the book away from me, and made it better, the way so many powerful women have enriched my life, in every possible way. By the end, the two of them walk arm in arm through the Gothic Quarter, unowned and undimmed and dangerous and free, while the men of the city stare and quake and make, always, the same mistake.

I think you would like them. The Mysteries of Barcelona is available now. Consider this your invitation to join them.

A Lifetime of Them

The truth is, powerful women run all through my story like a mighty river; some for a moment, and others for a lifetime.

Grammy and Dove-winning songwriters who have held millions of people breathless—Margaret Becker, Amy Grant, Hayley Williams, and more—singing with a control and a supple power most men twice their size will never possess. Miley Cyrus, whom I watched explode onto the scene as a girl, a slip of a thing who walked onto stages built for giants and swallowed them whole.

The reformers and artists I have been lucky enough to sit beside at the table for forty years. Writers such as Simone Beauvoir, George Eliot, Sarah Bakewell, Sophie Strand, and Madeline Miller, to name only a few. The nude female I have painted ten thousand times, who turns out, every time, to be the strongest and most honest part of my unconscious.

I did not choose to love and admire powerful women out of politics or principle. I cherish them because they have gifted me abundant life. My life has been immeasurably enriched by them—made larger, braver, and more alive every time I have stood near, with, or beside one.

The Whole Difference

I am sixty-eight years old. I write this from a terrace in Barcelona where the most powerful woman I know is two rooms away, and where her mind is the most exciting thing in any room she enters, and where her pleasure—with me or without me—is a gift and never a threat.

The Southern Baptist men in Orlando and the Manosphere spend their energy building walls higher to keep women like these out.

I have spent my whole life opening doors to welcome them in.

That is the difference. That is the whole difference.

The news reached my Barcelona terrace on Wednesday, the way bad news always finds you when the coffee is good, and the humidity is low, and you have, for one blissful morning, forgotten the country you came from.

The Southern Baptist Convention met in Orlando this past week. More than ten thousand (led and dominated by men) messengers packed into a cavernous hall. On June 9, they elected a Florida pastor named Willy Rice, a man their own hard right recruited to drag the denomination further from daylight. On June 10, they advanced what Albert Mohler christened the “Truth and Unity Amendment”—a measure to bar women from the office of pastor and, going further than any version before, from preaching to a gathered congregation at all. The vote was 6,028 to 2,026. Three to one.

These are the same men—more than eighty percent of white evangelicals, across three straight elections—who handed the American presidency to a man a civil jury found liable for sexually abusing a woman.

Read that sequence twice. A woman with a Bible and something true to say: forbidden. A man found liable in open court for forcing himself on a woman: anointed.

I gave this institution thirty years of my life. I know exactly what I’m looking at.

It is fear. Strip away the proof-texts and the parliamentary procedure and the syrupy Southern baritones, and what remains is a frightened animal guarding a door.

This week, in The Atlantic, Peter Wehner, an evangelical who has spent his whole life inside this world, named the same thing I felt on my terrace. For half a century, he argued, evangelical engagement with the world has been driven by fear: fear of losing cultural and political power, and with it a whole way of life. That fear hardens into a siege. It breeds suspicion of outsiders, empowers theological enforcers, and draws the doctrinal lines ever narrower and meaner. I lived inside that siege for three decades. I can tell you he is right. Anything other than a heterosexual white male is dangerous.

I Was Inside the Machine

I earned the right to say all this.

I was a golden boy of the conservative resurgence before I knew enough to be ashamed of it. In 1982, I sang in a four-hundred-voice choir at First Baptist Dallas, in W. A. Criswell’s “School of the Prophets,” where the right-wing men of the movement gathered to plan their war on the moderates. That pulpit belongs now to Robert Jeffress, Donald Trump’s most fawning defender, the man who said he wanted “the meanest, toughest SOB I can find to protect this nation.” I stood in that choir loft as an awestruck country boy. I did not yet understand what I was looking at.

I was bear-hugged in front of thousands by Bailey Smith, president of fourteen million Southern Baptists, the man who once told a political rally that God Almighty does not hear the prayer of a Jew. I sat at country-club tables with the men who ran the denomination like a small business.

And the pastor I served as worship leader did more than admire the resurgence. Rick White, of The People’s Church in Franklin, Tennessee, sat on the search committee in early 1993 that unanimously handed the presidency of Southern Seminary to a thirty-three-year-old Baptist journalist named Albert Mohler. White became the first chairman of Mohler’s board of trustees, and the only chairman to serve three terms. He was proud of it. His thrill at making the resurgence happen was something you could taste in the room.

Here is the irony I have carried for two decades.

The same denomination that celebrated Rick White’s seminary work turned on his pulpit. He began to embrace contemporary worship—a new sound, a new style—and I was the one helping usher it into the SBC. The national Baptist newspaper blasted our “worship wars.” They wrote me up. They castigated me. Over a thousand people left, the LifeWay (an educational and publishing arm of the Southern Baptists) power brokers prayed for our transition to fail, and my pastor, the golden boy once groomed for denominational president, watched his standing collapse. He fell into a clinical depression so deep that on some Sundays we showed a video of his first sermon because he could not preach a second time.

The machine eats its own. And this week, the young theologian Rick White’s board installed in 1993 stood at a microphone in Orlando and built the walls a little higher—this time around the women.

I watched it from across an ocean and felt the old nausea and trauma return.

The Ego of the Male Conservative

I realize it is impolite to say what I am about to say. I have never been good at impolite restraint.

These men are compensating.

Watch the iconography. The monster truck jacked so high you need a stepladder to reach the cab. The long rifle held across the chest in the Christmas card. The flag the size of a parking lot. The voice that gets louder, never wiser. Every prop is a billboard advertising a fear its owner would die before naming.

Compensation: the inferiority we cannot admit gets buried under a big performance of superiority. Men who feel diminished, who feel the ground shifting under their status, reach for control. It is the famous “Napoleon complex.” Little men (in body, body parts, and soul) hunt for a bully pulpit.

Vast stretches of the current evangelical world abandoned the carpenter of Nazareth and his Beatitudes for a rugged warrior-protector. They rebranded male dominance as “biblical headship,” the man as warrior and the woman as helpmeet, and sneered at any “feminized” faith that asked a man to be gentle or, god forbid, equal. John Eldredge sold millions of copies of a book telling men that God wired them for a battle to fight and a beauty to rescue. A beauty to rescue. The woman is window dressing, a trophy in the man’s adventure. She does not get to be the hero. She does not get to preach.

Here is what unhinges them. A woman who does not need them.

A woman who can run a company. A woman who can preach a better sermon. A woman who can think past them, see through them, out-argue them at the dinner table. And—God help us all—a woman who can bring herself to sexual pleasure without their permission, their participation, or their applause.

That last one is the wound underneath all the others. Her vote and her pulpit frighten them. Her completeness terrifies them. A whole woman does not require them. A whole woman is a mirror, and they cannot stand the neutered man they see in it.

I wrote about this years ago, in Sex, Lies & Religion, and I’ll stand by every word:

Religious objectification is a consequence of the need for alpha male leadership to demonize and marginalize women to solidify the controlling power of the religious hierarchy. The preachers and other religious heads got together and said, “Let’s eliminate the competition—read: women—by convincing everyone that women are inferior, subservient, and useful only for beauty, labor, and reproduction.”

Southern Baptist men did not amend the Baptist Faith and Message to honor God. They wrote it to eliminate the competition.

The Androcentric Model of Sexuality

There is a name for the engine that drives all of this, and it predates the SBC by centuries. Rachel Maines named it in The Technology of Orgasm: the androcentric model of sexuality.

The idea is brutal in its simplicity. For most of Western history, sex has been defined entirely around the male body and the male climax. Penetration is the event. Male orgasm is the point. Everything else—the clitoris, the slow build, a woman’s own private map of her own private pleasure—gets filed under unnecessary or, worse, disorder.

Maines tracked what happened to women whose bodies refused that script. They were diagnosed with “hysteria,” a word built from the Greek for womb, a catch-all pathology for any woman whose desires would not resolve neatly through a man. (Her book is thin on footnotes, and later historians have argued with her specifics—but the core idea, the androcentric standard itself, is bulletproof and worth the read.)

The Road to Wellville—T. C. Boyle’s novel and the film it spawned—dramatized exactly this era: John Harvey Kellogg’s sanitarium, the medical management of the body, the doctor as the gatekeeper of every sensation a female body might dare to feel.

And when management was not enough, there was the knife.

In 1860s London, the surgeon Isaac Baker Brown performed clitoridectomies—he cut the clitoris out of women—to “cure” them of masturbation and the restlessness it supposedly caused. The procedure crossed the Atlantic and lingered in American medicine into the twentieth century. And a broader practice of mutilating women persists across parts of Africa and the Middle East to this day. Let the meaning land. Men were so threatened by the existence of a pleasure they did not control that they mutilated it. Female pleasure had to arrive by way of the sexual weapon of choice, the male penis, or it would not be permitted to exist at all.

That is the androcentric model with its mask off. The same logic that cut women in 1866 writes amendments in 2026. The instrument changes. The fear is identical.

The Oldest Version of the Fear

I want to name the darkest chapter of this, because it belongs here, and because the men who fear women have always feared other things in the same breath.

In the Jim Crow South, white men lynched Black men for the crime of merely looking at a white woman. The mythology beneath the murder was sexual—the lie that Black men were monstrously endowed, a standing threat to the females the white man believed he owned. The lynchings so often ended in castration. They cut away the manhood that made them feel inferior and small.

Sit with that. The terror was never really about the woman; she was property in the equation. The terror was about a man’s own inadequacy, his own fragile sense of size and worth and standing, vomited outward and washed in blood.

The same insecurity that mutilated a body in Mississippi writes the bylaws in Orlando. It is a continuum. It always was. The fear of a woman’s autonomy and the fear of another man’s body are the same fear wearing different clothes: the terror of not being enough, of not being boss, dressed up as the defense of God and country.

What They Are Actually Afraid Of

So let me address my own title.

Conservative men fear powerful and sensual women because they are strong, and whole, and unowned, and increasingly unwilling to pretend otherwise.

They fear her intellect, which embarrasses theirs.

They fear her beauty, which they can neither purchase nor command.

They fear her pleasure, which proves she was never as dependent on them as their entire theology required her to be.

And so they legislate. They make laws about what she may do with her own body, her own voice, her own pulpit. They call it biblical authority. I served their God for thirty years, and I can tell you plainly: it is not biblical authority. It is small men who are afraid, reaching for a gavel.

I wrote this once, watching the shaming pour across my feed after two Latina women dared to enjoy their own bodies on a Super Bowl stage, and it is the truest sentence I know on the subject:

Religion has taught us to hate our bodies. So we angrily shame ourselves and others when we happen to revel in our sexuality.

The men in Orlando hate their own bodies and body parts. That is the secret underneath the spectacle. They were taught to hate and shame, same as I was. The difference is that some of us climbed out of the pit, and some, like Al Mohler and his ilk, stayed down there and started handing out shovels, and knives, and guns.

A Different Kind of Man

I am sixty-eight years old. I write this from a terrace where Gina and I take our coffee slow and our conversation slower, where her female mind is the most exciting and intelligent thing in the room, where her pleasure, with me or without me, is a gift and never a threat, where no one has reached for a tool of destruction in years.

The body was never the emergency. The walls were. Sound familiar?

The men of the Southern Baptist Convention spent this week setting another course of brick on their wall, and they will tell you it was about truth and about unity and about the unchanging Word of God. I knew those men. I sang in their choirs and sat at their tables and helped install their “kings.” And I will tell you what it is really about.

It is about a frightened white male animal guarding a door, a bed, a pulpit, terrified of the women on the other side, the ones who long ago stopped knocking, and faking, and acquiescing, and simply began to live and orgasm and preach in freedom.

Deconstruction has been a buzzword in evangelical and post-evangelical circles for around ten years.

The podcasts, the memoirs, the support groups, the hashtags — all of them circling the same moment: the moment a person looks at the belief system they inherited and decides they can no longer live inside it. The courage that takes is real. I will not minimize it.

But nobody talks about what comes after.

After the burning, you still have to live somewhere. After the demolition, you are still a person — with a body, a mind, a soul, a spirit — standing in the rubble of everything that used to explain you, trying to figure out what gets rebuilt and what stays ash.

I have been in that rubble for years.

This is my attempt to tell you what I am finding there.

Room One: The Body

The first thing I had to rebuild was my relationship with my body and its parts.

It was 2012, Austin, Texas. Gina and I had been together for over a year. We were not married. We were also, for the first time in both our lives, entirely unleashed — two people coming out of forty years of desert, starving and thirsty, reaching for each other with a hunger that had no bottom.

It was like a movie. Sexier than any movie I had ever seen. A torrid, unending, glorious year of… YES! Oh my God, YES!

And right in the middle of it, guilt would rear its head.

What am I doing? We’re not married. Is this fornication? Is this adultery? Never in a million years could I have pictured myself living in sin with a woman.

The words themselves — fornication, adultery — arrived in my father’s voice, my pastor’s voice, the accumulated screams of a thousand sermons delivered to a boy who learned before he could read that his body and certain of its parts were a problem to be managed.

I began to realize that guilt had nothing to do with Gina. It had nothing to do with what we were doing, which was exactly what two damaged, hungry, fully alive people would do after decades of deprivation.

The guilt was smoke. I had burned the old house, but the smoke kept choking me. Learning that my body and ALL its parts belong to me has been the longest reconstruction project of my life.

It is happening slowly, in increments. A tantric massage in Barcelona at age 66, walking out two hours later having met my own flesh in ways I hadn’t known were possible. Years of nude birthday self-portraits on May 1st, each one a small act of repossession (and yes, a symbolic middle finger to my past). Nude beaches, virtual reality ethical porn shows, full body painting, and guilt-free sex with myself.

Each act is a quiet declaration: these are mine now. We belong together.

Yes, the smoke still appears occasionally. But it no longer chokes off my pleasure.

Room Two: The Mind

In 2010, I read a book that washed through me like an orgasm.

The updated version of Thy Neighbor’s Wife by Gay Talese. A history of sexual freedom in America — the communes, the Sandstone retreat, the slow dismantling of the puritanical structures that had governed American bodies and minds for centuries.

Sandstone. Where nude men and women gathered in the California hills and fucked each other freely, openly, without shame or secrecy. Where a woman named Diane Webber moved through rooms like a goddess from another world entirely.

I found her photographs. One look at her and fifty years of puritanical theology gets very hard to defend.

Diane Webber was one of the most stunningly beautiful women I had ever seen — dark-haired, luminous, entirely at home in her own skin in a way that made everything I had been taught about the body feel like a lie told by withered people. Looking at her, I tried to imagine what Sandstone must have actually felt like, what it meant to be in a room where desire moved freely, where everyone was enjoying life.

The book read me as much as I read it. It unleashed questions that had been censored and squashed my entire life. It was my first introduction to the ideas that would eventually lead me to Sex at Dawn and The Ethical Slut, to the concept of ethical non-monogamy, to the thinking and writing I am doing right now.

Because when the censorship burns, you don’t just get ideas. You get the Holy fuck of everything that was kept from you.

Anaïs Nin. Henry Miller. D.H. Lawrence. John Fowles. Pauline Réage. Jean Genet. Carl Jung. Simone De Beauvoir. Each one was a door I hadn’t known existed, swinging open into a burning mind full of unused oxygen, creating a backdraft that rapidly ignited, releasing the dangerous energy of an uncensored thinker.

Each forbidden book was like the dangerous ignition of oxygen rushing into a room that had been starved of it for fifty years.

In my reconstructed house, I have a new room, a library of forbidden books that feeds my mind. They refute certainties and pat answers, and promote free thinking and open-mindedness. They are creating a mind without barriers, without confinement, without the ability to stop. A brain finally eating what it was always hungry for doesn’t need to be told what to do next. It just keeps eating.

Room Three: The Soul

I did the math for this post. I have attended over 8,400 church services in my life. That means I spent more than a year and a half of my life sitting in a church pew or standing on a church stage.

Forty-eight years of church. Many of those years included multiple services every week — four on Sunday, one Saturday, one Wednesday. I joke that I attended church subliminally in my mother’s womb, nine months before I was born, hearing Pentecostal fervor reverberate through her bones.

The first Sunday morning without it arrived in June 2006.

I sat in the silence of a house with no obligation, no schedule, no audience to dress for. I waited for something — guilt, I think, or lightning, or the alarm of a man who has stepped outside the only framework he has ever known.

Instead, I felt the most exhilarating freedom of my life.

I jumped up. I screamed. Yes. Yes. Yes. No lightning. Safe and secure from all alarm. More peace than I had felt inside any of those 8,400 services. More time. More space. More of my soul was available than the institution had ever left room for.

That first Easter without four services. That first Christmas Eve without seven. I would text a close friend — a man who had resigned from a massive megachurch around the same time I had — and we would ask each other: how does it feel? Would you go back?

His answer, every year, without variation:

There is no fucking way. Not a chance in hell.

Finding a label for what I am now took longer.

Reluctant agnostic first — honest but uncomfortable, a man standing in a doorway refusing to commit to either room. Then the slow reading through the options: atheist, pantheist, gaianist, humanist. Each one tried on like clothes in a store, examined in the mirror, put back on the rack.

Until Humanism fit: a person devoted to human welfare. Grounded in reason and ethics. Oriented toward the value of human life rather than the requirements of a supernatural authority.

I found a new room there.

And then Trump arrived and cemented everything.

Watching the evangelical church — the tradition that shaped me, that owned me, that built the framework I have spent the past two decades burning down — embrace this human being that defies every Christian principle has been the most clarifying experience of my reconstruction. There is no framework in which that embrace is spiritually coherent. There is no God I can construct who would recognize itself in it.

It confirmed what I had been slowly concluding for years.

The whole religious thing was never real. We have one life, and this is it. And that is okay. Everything is okay.

I mean that as a person, a humanist, who is reconstructing my soul, a fragment of assurance at a time. I choose a life of peace and enjoyment, not a life of guilt, anxiety, and fear.

Room Four: The Spirit

The thing I am most proud of building in reconstruction is peace of mind.

Specifically: peace about death.

At 68, that is not an abstract question. I think about death with some regularity now — not with morbidity, but with the honest attention of a man who has done the math on his remaining years and decided to take them seriously.

For most of my life, death arrived wrapped in terror. The evangelical framework around it — heaven, hell, judgment, the accounting of every act and thought — had made death the ultimate consequence, the final exam, the moment everything would be revealed and settled. When everyone at the judgment seat of Christ would watch the giant video screen of my life, aghast as I masturbated in “secret.”

The psychedelics helped most with this reconstruction.

My intention going into my 2019 journey was direct: What is next? What does the future look like? The answer arrived in an experience so complete that it has not left me, seven years later.

It’s okay. Everything is going to be okay.

There was a distinct awareness of what Carl Jung calls the collective unconscious — the sense of being a root, a shoot, in a rhizome that matters in a way that doesn’t require my individual continuation to remain true. I don’t know exactly what that means. I know exactly how it felt.

It felt like release.

The spirit I have rebuilt is not religious. It is not supernatural. It is grounded in the human being — in freedom: a sensual freedom, a curious freedom, a communal freedom, and a spiritual freedom.

It is a new room, a spiritual room that finds and enjoys freedom everywhere.

That is enough. After everything, that freedom, that peace of mind turns out to be more than enough.

The Closer

Deconstruction has a romance to it.

You are tearing something down. That feels like agency, like power, like finally being the one who decides. People write books about it. They start podcasts. They find community in the shared act of demolition.

Reconstruction is messier. It is much easier to tear something down than to build it back. You find yourself in the rubble, the ashes, deciding what to keep. And what to add.

I have been deciding for years.

I have kept the hunger for bodies and body parts, for books, for humanity, for freedom and peace, for the full range of what being human offers. I have kept the questions, which turned out to be worth more than the answers I was handed. I have kept Gina, and the life we are building in a city that feels, more than anywhere I have ever lived, like it was waiting for me to build my house anew.

The house I am building looks nothing like the one I burned.

It is smaller. Less certain. More honest.

But I live in it as myself. My true self. My whole self.

And that, after sixty-eight years, is the whole aim of reconstruction.

I am writing this from a thin place high on a mountain.

Montserrat. Alone. An hour from Barcelona by train, a thousand years and a million miles from the world I was born into. The serrated peaks are outside my window. The tourists descended hours ago. The monks have sung vespers and disappeared into their ancient rhythms. The mountain belongs to me tonight — and to sixty-eight years of a life I am only now beginning to understand fully.

Today is May 1st. May Day. I am sixty-eight years old. A mystical threshold all its own — the ancient celebration of fertility, of spring’s full arrival, of the earth doing what it does naturally when conditions finally allow it.

Alone for the first time in my life on my birthday. Alone by choice. And I want to tell you something, watching the Catalonian dawn break over these surreal rocks:

I don’t know if I have ever been happier in my life.

How did this man — from humble beginnings — arrive at today?

The answer, I’ve come to understand, is magic, mycelium magic.

Planted

I was born in a tiny three-room house in Tennessee, a child of two seventeen-year-olds (children themselves) in 1958. Appalachian poverty. Pentecostal fire. A boy with whirlwinds inside him and no idea what to do with them. The community I was born into handed me a pre-fabricated identity and called it salvation. I wore it because it was the only garment available, and because the boy who wore it was loved, and love — even conditional love — is a powerful thing when you’re young and hungry for it.

The magic was in me from the beginning. I felt it lying naked on my bed at twelve, a spring breeze moving across my skin, the windows wide open, my whole body alive and electric and unashamed. In the shower, at age fifteen, I experienced my first orgasm and thought I had died and gone to heaven. I felt it exploring the Appalachian woods, in the folk music that moved through me before I knew music would change my life, in the forbidden books I devoured because they were the only doors out of a world too small for what I carried inside.

Then the institutions got hold of me.

Church. School. Culture. Ministry at nineteen. Marriage at twenty-one. Three decades of performing a version of myself that fit the container while the real thing waited underground, patient as mycelium, building its network in the dark.

A note about mycelium: it doesn’t die during dormancy. It networks. Invisibly, intelligently, without central control, it builds connections between organisms that appear separate on the surface. A single cubic inch of forest soil contains miles of mycelial threads. The network is more complex than the human brain. It keeps even dead stumps alive by feeding them through the web.

Those thirty years in the pulpit weren’t wasted years. They were mycelial years. Every wounded creative I sat with. Every mentor relationship. Every book I read in secret that the institutions would have burned. Every suppressed longing that went underground rather than dying. My network was growing. Connecting. Preparing.

Fertilized

In 2006, the prescribed container collapsed. I voluntarily resigned from the ministry. The marriage ended. I lost everything in the divorce — one hour with a guard to collect one box of belongings and my Jeep Wrangler. My nuclear family cast me out. Friends ghosted me. The phone went silent. For fifteen years, almost entirely silent.

Fertilizer isn’t pretty. It’s decomposed matter. In Appalachian gardens, it is shit. But it’s exactly what a dormant seed needs to spring open.

Pollinated

Gina. The watercolors. The writing that finally told the truth. The psychotherapy that named what fifty years had done to my true being. The first real encounters with my shadow and the slow, stubborn discovery that what lived in the dark wasn’t something to fear. It was something to embrace, to integrate.

More revelations. My outer body is actively male. My inner life — emotional, spiritual, imaginative — is actively female. I view the world through both. I always have. It took me six decades to say that without apology.

In 2003, during the earliest stirrings of this integration, I painted a watercolor of a nude fairy perched among autumn leaves and on a little brown mushroom — wings spread, face turned away, simultaneously vulnerable and free. My daughter called it obscene. I put it away in shame. I found it this week, writing this post.

It wasn’t obscene. It was the first honest self-portrait I ever made.

Growing

Gina has always said her essential nature is a nurturer. She has a green thumb — she can make anything grow and flourish. She proved it with flora and fauna at Kalien, our fifty-four-acre wilderness property in the Appalachian mountains, where she worked beside me for five years while we built something beautiful from raw land and stubbornness. In Austin, in Lebanon, in Dunedin, through every up and down, and toward a new beginning.

She can make anything flourish.

Including me.

She is my anam cara — my soul friend. She champions my freedom even when it costs her much. She stands behind the camera. She holds the space. She is the master gardener of our second life, and she has made life extraordinary.

Blooming

Barcelona arrived in 2023 like a city of my wildest dreams.

Here, nudity is not illegal. Eroticism is not a pathology. Freedom is not a theological problem requiring management. Strangers kiss you on the cheek. The Mediterranean light falls on ancient stone in a way that has inspired art for millennia. The Gothic Quarter, the Olympic pool at dawn, the terrace with the DeLonghi and the view toward Tibidabo — all of it conspiring daily to remind a man from three rooms in Appalachia that he chose well and arrived burgeoning.

My novel — The Mysteries of Barcelona, the first I’ve ever written — is currently being reviewed by Planeta Editorial, one of the most significant publishers in the Spanish-speaking world. Written in this city. About this city. In the sensuous language, this city speaks naturally.

I am in full bloom.

The Little Brown Mushroom

In 1970 — when I was twelve years old, naked and lying on that bed feeling the spring breeze on my skin — Richard Nixon signed the Controlled Substances Act and made psilocybin mushrooms a federal crime.

The same year the church was tightening its grip and putting clothes on my body, America was criminalizing the medicine that could have freed it.

Both were afraid of the same thing: human beings with direct, unmediated access to mystery—who didn’t need an institution standing between them and the sacred. People who could grow their own medicine, tend their own inner life, and trust their own experience.

I grow my medicine now. Ecuadorian spores, on a Barcelona terrace, not illegal here, tended with the same care Gina gives her spring flowers. Tomorrow I descend this mountain and walk back into the arms of my anam cara. And soon — with her hands holding mine, her presence steady, her green thumb on the soil of my becoming — I will take a full-dose journey with the little brown mushrooms we grew ourselves.

This is not a recreational experience. This is a ceremony, a ritual, a celebration of life.

Shamans in Siberia used sacred mushrooms to free their souls for journeys to the spirit world. America outlawed mushrooms because freedom would rob her of soldiers to willingly die in Vietnam. The mushrooms went underground — like mycelium, like my own suppressed life — and waited for conditions to change.

The mycelium never dies. It networks in the dark.

And when the conditions are finally right, it fruits.

I believe in magic.

I believed it as a boy in those three rooms in Appalachia, before authorities spanked it and churched it and combed it out of me. I believe it more ferociously now, at sixty-eight, on this ancient magic mountain, having survived everything the institutions threw at my wildness.

The magic didn’t die.

It went underground and built a network so vast and complex and alive that no single cutting could kill it. It waited for a Mediterranean city that didn’t require subservience. It waited for a woman with a green thumb. It waited for little brown mushrooms planted, fertilized, pollinated, and grown by their hands.

It waited for this Friday.

I am a magic mushroom.

I always was.

Note: Each birthday, I share a gallery of nude selfies. I have been doing so for several years. It is available exclusively to randyelrod.com subscribers. As I develop my Substack presence, locations are subject to change. To subscribe to randyelrod.com go HERE

I painted those words myself.

Tall skinny letters on handmade paper, watercolor — hung in the great room at our wilderness retreat, Kalien, so I’d see it every morning walking out of the bedroom. A daily reminder. A manifesto of sorts. Five words I desperately wanted to believe.

And then I spent the next five years proving I didn’t.

I’d hurtle up the ridge in the SXS at breakneck speed to fix another broken fence. Another blown pump. Another stretch of dirt road, the rain had eaten overnight. I’d catch myself in a full sprint toward whatever crisis the land had cooked up for the day and mutter aloud, “Randy, there is no hurry.” And then immediately speed up. Cut the fallen tree. Grade the driveway. Feed the horses. Maintain the trails. Repair the fence again.

The wilderness is beautiful and it is ruthless and it does not give a damn about your watercolor philosophy.

That frenzied time was healing in ways I still don’t fully understand. But tranquil it was not. Here is the irony I could not have seen then: we had to sell the farm — exponential profit during COVID, of all the improbable windfalls — in order to finally live the life that painting was pointing toward. The wilderness had to make us enough money to leave it. Sometimes healing costs you the very place that healed you.

So we moved to Barcelona.

And for the first time in my sixty-seven years on this earth, I began to slow down. Actually, slow down. In my body. In my bones.

The Spanish have a word for it. Tranquilo. You hear it everywhere here — from shopkeepers, waiters, strangers on the metro. Calm. Peaceful. Relaxed. But the fuller meaning is something closer to a worldview: it is better to be than to do. Americans live to work. Spaniards work to live. That is not a small difference. That is a completely different cultural philosophy.

And then there is jubilado. Read that word slowly. Savor it the way you’d savor a glass of good Spanish wine. Jubilado. It comes from jubilar — jubilation. This is what they call retirement here. Jubilation. In America, we treated retirement like an ending, something to dread or deny. Here it is announced as joy. As the long-awaited beginning of something.

I am jubilado. How glorious is that?

I heard plenty of people in Florida insist that retirement is the busiest stage of their lives — that they could never slow down and wouldn’t know what to do with themselves. Those people have confused doing with living. But a culture that has been around for 2,000 years knows the difference.

ºººº

There is a whole lexicon of slowness I’m only now becoming fluent in.

Slow food — now a full movement, born when a group of indignant Italians watched a McDonald’s open near the Spanish Steps and decided enough was enough. Their manifesto declares that a firm defense of quiet material pleasure is the only way to oppose the universal folly of fast life. Their logo is a snail. Perfect.

Slow reading — what the brilliant Francine Prose calls close reading: you give a sentence the weight it deserves, and then you stay there a while. You let the words work on you rather than racing to find out what happens next.

Slow walking — Thoreau called it a ramble, which is exactly the right word, because a ramble has no agenda. You set out and see what finds you.

Sobremesa — that gorgeous, untranslatable Spanish word for the unhurried conversation that continues long after the meal is done, when the wine has been drunk, and there is nowhere on earth you need to be. The table is yours. The afternoon is yours. Stay as long as you like. This is not an accident of Spanish temperament; it is a feature, carefully protected, deeply meant.

Slow sex — tantra, which my therapist teaches me with a knowing smile and the same single word: tranquilo. Relax. Enjoy the journey. The destination, the orgasm, is not the point. What a lesson for a control freak who has spent sixty-five years trying to get things done.

Slow coffee — Which deserves a few paragraphs. Every restaurant in Barcelona — every single one, from the hole-in-the-wall tapas bar to the white-tablecloth temple — has a full-on espresso machine. With a frother. There are no sad carafes of burnt coffee sitting on a warmer since seven a.m. There are no Keurigs, God forbid. Even the old gym where Gina and I watch basketball has a proper espresso setup at the snack bar. A snack bar. With a frother.

We have a Starbucks one block from our apartment. We have never been inside.

We splurged on a DeLonghi La Specialista with a built-in grinder when we arrived, and we order fresh-roasted beans from a local roaster. Our morning coffee hour — which Gina and I have protected like sacred ground for years, no planning, no to-do lists, no devices, face to face — has become slower. More deliberate. Frankly, more sensual.

A Spaniard will spend twenty minutes with a two-ounce espresso. An American will slurp a Venti-Trenta-Whatever-the-Hell-They-Call-the-Largest-One in four minutes while driving. We have confused volume with pleasure. Velocity with satisfaction. Coffee here is not a caffeine delivery system. It is an event. It belongs to the sobremesa tradition — a small espresso appearing after the meal as punctuation, not as the point. Slow coffee. Who knew that was a thing? I had to move 5,000 miles to learn it.

Slow Afternoon — Also known as the siesta. The word comes from the Latin hora sexta — the sixth hour from dawn, meaning midday. The Romans knew. The Spanish remembered. The Americans forgot entirely, somewhere between Benjamin Franklin and the sixty-hour work week.

Our first week here, Gina and I made the rookie mistake of trying to find dinner around four in the afternoon. Every restaurant was closed. The streets were vacant. A Tuesday. In a city of two million people. Shuttered, silent, gloriously unashamed. We stood on the sidewalk blinking at each other like the confused tourists we were.

Most of Spain closes from two to five. Every day. To rest.

I grew up in a tradition that treated rest as moral weakness. The Protestant work ethic dressed idleness up as sin, stamped it with scripture, and sent generations of exhausted, guilt-ridden Americans back to their desks. Napping was what the lazy did. The shiftless. In my first life — thirty years of ministry, then entrepreneurship, then building Kalien acre by acre with my own two hands — I don’t think I took a single guilt-free afternoon nap.

Now I take one almost every day.

I pull the metal shades down over our wall of windows — the ones that turn two in the afternoon into what feels like midnight — lie down, and disappear for forty-five minutes into what Tom Hodgkinson rightly calls a twilight nether world where ideas surface, and the body remembers it is not a machine. I wake up a different man than the one who lay down. Softer. Quieter. More willing to let the afternoon be whatever it wants to be.

The siesta is not laziness. The siesta is the opposite of hurry.

ºººº

Which brings me to Hodgkinson’s How to Be Idle: A Loafer’s Manifesto — the quintessential text for all of this, and one I want to press into the hands of every exhausted, overcommitted American I know (which is most of them.)

His central provocation: the idea of the job as the answer to all woes is one of the most pernicious myths of modern society, sold to us by politicians, parents, and productivity gurus from cradle to cubicle. Institutions fear idle people, he argues, because idle people think — and thinking people ask questions — and questions are dangerous. The relentlessly busy American is not a moral achievement. The relentlessly busy American is a managed one.

Hodgkinson is also rapturous on the nap, counting it among life’s perfect pleasures — one that splits the day into two halves, each more livable and more human than one unbroken slog. Barcelona figured this out centuries ago.

And this observation, which landed hard: the less conventional work he has done, the more genuinely productive he has become. All that time doing nothing — staring out windows, wandering without destination, lying in the afternoon quiet — turns out to be where the real ideas live. Where the real self lives.

I think about my watercolor. Those five words I painted and then ignored for five frenzied years in the Tennessee hills.

And yet.

Even here. Even in this city that has been teaching me tranquilo for two years now, I catch myself eating too fast, walking too fast, reading too fast — and yes, fucking too fast. Blowing past the bite, the step, the sentence, the sensation. Racing toward the finish line of an experience I haven’t even fully tasted yet.

Old habits don’t die. They just get quieter. They wait.

So I practice. Some days badly. I put the fork down between bites. I stop on the sidewalk for no reason. I read the same paragraph twice because the first time I was only moving my eyes. I let the moment breathe before I reach for the next one.

Tranquilo, I tell myself.

The painting was right all along. I was just in the wrong place to hear it. And occasionally — more often than before, less often than I’d like — I actually listen.

Author’s Note: I thought a bit of humor may be in order during these crazy times. Brief and fun.

Let me tell you about the sixteen-foot concrete walls.

I was maybe thirteen years old, standing at the edge of the Church of God youth camp pool in my ragged cutoff blue jeans—because we did not own a bathing suit, or swimsuit as the more evolved Pentecostals apparently called them—staring up at these massive, prison-grade concrete block walls that completely encircled the pool. I mean completely. No gaps. No light from the outside world.

I asked my counselor why.

“Because,” he explained with the patient gravity of a man who has rehearsed this answer many times, “we do not allow mixed bathing.”

I nodded slowly, as though this made sense. It did not make sense.

What it did do was confirm my growing suspicion that the body— my body, anyone’s body—was essentially a sinful emergency that required constant supervision. (And you wonder why I feel SO free at Barcelona’s nude beaches.)

ºººº

Now fast-forward two years. Our family made the pilgrimage to Daytona Beach. This was a significant event, you understand, because we had never been out of Tennessee. Dad drove the car directly onto the beach—because apparently you could do that in those days—and kept driving. We boys pressed our noses to the glass like hound dogs watching a squirrel. The Atlantic Ocean. Actual sand. Women in bathing suits. Mixed bathing!

Dad did not stop.

My brother Terry and I begged. Finally, finally, he pulled over and gave us thirty minutes. Thirty minutes at the beach. Mom and my sister walked into the surf in their dresses. Full old-time Pentecostal dresses. Holding them up to the knee, but dresses. Terry and I, still in our rolled-up jeans and buttoned shirts, our skin the approximate color of white paste, made a run for an ice cream stand, where the girl behind the counter had a tiny bathing suit and—God save us—one side of her top came slightly loose, and you could see a hint of her nipple.

Lord have mercy. This was before the world of television (for us) and the Internet, so that brief glimpse of female aureola was like the most pornographic (and sensual) experience of our lives.

We were certain she was flirting with us. In retrospect, she was trying not to burst out laughing at two lily-white Tennessee boys who had apparently time-traveled from 1952 to buy an ice cream.

Then Papa Elrod did it.

Papa Elrod—my Dad’s dad and always the rebel, God love him—took off his shirt. There was an audible gasp from my mother. And then he walked into the ocean and started swimming. Just like that. Like a person who had a body and used it without apologizing. We were stunned. When we asked him later where he learned, he started to mention something about California when he was young, and my father shushed him and would not let him finish the story.

That forbidden story haunted me for decades. To this day, I do not know the details.

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Here’s what growing up that way does to a man: it plants a fear of the water so deep it lives in your bones. My family treated water the way most people treat electrical outlets—something dangerous that you acknowledged existed but certainly did not put yourself into.

And yet the water kept calling me.

At The Wilds camp (Note: I do not recommend this camp to a sane human being) in my senior year, I nearly drowned trying to win a greased watermelon contest in the lake—because of course I did, because I was me, and winning mattered more than breathing. My girlfriend’s mother later tried to teach me to swim on a trip to St. Simons Island, and I am eternally grateful for her patience and baffled by her optimism. Somehow, she taught me to manage my fear, flap my arms and legs at the same time, and miraculously, I managed to stay afloat.

I snorkeled the Caribbean in St. John once. Panicked when a wave clogged my snorkel. Nearly drowned. No one knew because I was too stubborn to call for help.

I snorkeled the Great Barrier Reef in Australia. The most terrifyingly beautiful experience of my life. Panicked when I swam over a 1,000 ft drop. Nearly drowned again. No one knew because I had swum so far from the group that I was essentially alone with God and the coral.

In my fifties, I did a mini triathlon, my first and last. I swam the pool lengths, one enormous held breath at a time—stroke, stroke, stroke, gasp—like a man playing chicken with his own lungs. I finished…alive. That counts.

Gina, who grew up in Florida and swims like she was born in the water, knew all of this with the gentle bewilderment of a woman who cannot quite believe what she married. “You’ve become a good swimmer,” she would say. “You just need to learn to relax and breathe.”

I want you to understand: I have never successfully treaded water. Not once. Not even a little.

ºººº

And then we moved to Barcelona.

Across the street from our apartment is a luxury gym with an Olympic-size pool—fifty-meter lanes, retractable roof for summer, a gorgeous sunning area where I very maturely try not to stare at the topless women while pretending to read. We would go to cool off in the pool, and one afternoon, I noticed a man swimming laps with a snorkel—but not the kind I had nearly died with twice. This one came straight up from the center of his face. Perfectly vertical. No turning sideways, no awkward craning, no water flooding in from the side.

I stopped and stared like I had seen a burning bush.

I told Gina, “Now. Now, if I could breathe like that, I think I might actually try swimming laps.”

We bought two. Gina doesn’t need one, but she humored me. There was trial and error. There was lots of water up the nose. There were some undignified sounds. And then, one morning in the twenty-five-meter lane, something extraordinary happened: I started swimming. Lap after lap after lap. Peaceful. Meditative. Beautiful. The whole underwater world turning blue and quiet around me, nothing but the rhythm of my arms and the strange miracle of breath underwater.

I built up to 500 meters. Then 750. Last week—last week—I swam my first mile. One full mile. In about an hour. Me. The boy in the cutoff jeans trapped behind the sixteen-foot concrete walls.

ºººº

I think about Papa Elrod walking into that ocean a lot these days. I think about the story my father wouldn’t let him tell. I think about all the bodies we were taught to be afraid of, including our own. I think about how many miles of water I could have swum if someone had just handed me a center-mount snorkel and said, it’s okay, breathe, you’re allowed.

From no mixed bathing to mile swims.

From concrete prison walls to a fifty-meter Olympic lane in Barcelona.

From cutoff jeans on the shore to—well, let’s just say the topless sunbathing area, and I have developed a fond relationship. And I now unabashedly wear one of those skimpy European swimsuits.

The body, it turns out, was never the emergency. The walls were.

ºººº

Randy Elrod is an author, watercolor artist, and former evangelical minister living in Barcelona. His first novel, The Mysteries of Barcelona, was released Feb. 14 and debuted at #5 on the Hot New Release Chart on Amazon.