What Makes a Man Truly Virile?

On the legend of Zeus McBalls and if he should be your hero

My friend Ben is another three-boy dad, just like me. A few years back, he took his family to Yellowstone as one does here in the West. They got the full experience, with old faithful and animal sightings galore. At one point as if on cue, a herd of buffalo grazed across the road in front of them—hundreds if not thousands in number with nothing to do but roam the open range. One male seemed especially committed to his prod, not moving his asphalt ground. All the cars passed timidly, lest they become his next goring victim.

As Ben, his wife, and minivan of big eyed sons rolled passed the behemoth of a brute, one of his son’s said, “Dad, check out that guy’s balls…They’re huge!” This was nature in its full virile glory. With all eyes now trained on the beast out the side window, another son spoke up, “It’s Zeus McBalls!” Sounds about right. And to this day, Zeus lives on as a legend in their family’s lore.

Photo by Bryce olsen on Unsplash

Bodies—bison, human, and otherwise—are the artwork of God. Just think of the awe inspiring way God made everything work. Muscle on bone wrapped in flexible skin, with eyes and ears and senses, made to run and speak and love and play.  We are made to awe at God’s handiwork, even our own design. Like we discover our own toes and fingers and ears and nose, so too we discover our genitals. This intrigue is natural, coming with the territory of boyhood, given they’re so out there waiting to be found—and then made into an endless stream of boyhood jokes about balls and nuts.

I can remember trips with my friend Matt to our local pool during our middle school summer break. Grown men changed and showered nearby and we often marveled at just how strong and big a man’s body could grow in every way. This awe arose from our anticipation of being men ourselves, the way I wowed at my dad’s muscles and beard and deep voice. It was the hero status we gave them. It harbored the secret hope that one day we might grow that big in body and become men too.

But once you become a man, you realize masculine strength has almost nothing to do with the size of your body and its parts and way more to do with your heart. You learn that life takes grit and braving hard things and learning to love well and keeping your heart alive. Even sex itself is more about the stuff of risk and romance and vulnerability and love than your genital size. In other words on our path to becoming men, this genital focus is something we are meant to outgrow. God forbid you build your sense of masculinity on it. If we don’t outgrow this stuff we don’t mature.

What is Virility?

But male culture as a whole hasn’t outgrow this. We still have a very genital focus to our masculinity. In other words, we live with a very sexualized masculinity. The dominant picture of men in our world still says that men always think about sex, want sex, and are always in the ready to go when it comes to sex. Wanting sex is all good and fine. But we still believe men just want sex and really not much more when it comes to relationship.

We hold up Zeus McBalls as the ideal virile man.

It’s a wildly over sexualized view of men. It reduces men down to only what’s going on in their loins and not their hearts or really any other part of their body. They really only think with their other head, as the saying goes. The male sex addict becomes the dominant picture in our culture of male sexuality.

This image has roots in the other thing men supposedly think about all the time—the Roman empire. The word “Virility” is literally the Latin word for masculinity or manliness. And in Roman times, ideal masculinity was built on sexual domination. It was “phallocentric” as it were. Men wanted to be Zeus McBalls, in the utter worst sense of the word. The story of sex had little connection to love or romance, but focused more on power and violation. It was the penetrator vs the penetrated. “The imperial Roman society venerated machismo. In this social milieu, a free Roman man should be ready, willing, and able to express his dominion over others, male or female, by means of sexual penetration.¹”

Not every male was considered a man. You were only a man to the degree you had virility. It was about your genitals. If you sexually dominated others—slaves, youth, enemies, women, other “lesser” men—you became a man. It’s how they proved their manliness.

This might sound very extreme and outdated. We don’t live this way anymore, right? We’ve outgrown this? And while we do have a justice system that outlaws such practices, men still seek ego strokes via sexual domination. Nearly half of all women will experience some form of sexual harm in their lifetimes. And nearly one in three men will also. Over 90% of sexual abuse is perpetrated by men. These are staggering statistics that make clear sex as power is not a thing of the past.

But to be clear, most men will be not become abusers. Don’t read that 90% stat backwards. Open abuse is still perpetuated by a small percentage of men. But does that mean most men escape this sexualized ego view of men and the mindset that goes along with it?

I still think most men live oppressed with what could be called a pornified view of masculinity. Consider how author Gail Dines, in her book Pornland, describes the dominant picture of men in modern day porn scripts. “Men in porn are depicted as soulless, unfeeling, amoral life support systems for erect penises who are entitled to use women in any way they want.” That quote haunts me so much. As much as porn dehumanizes women, youth, minority races, it also profoundly dehumanizes men—gutting them of any soul or heart or anything else that beats for actual relationship.

You may say, though, that this is still extreme, that men don’t really live like that. Some might argue porn is just the pro-wrestling version of sex created for entertainment, where everything and everyone is embellished and outlandish for effect. And we all know it’s not real life or real men.

But if you think it stays in the confines of porn as harmless entertainment, let me introduce you to two men.

Where Most Men Get Stuck

Last week I had a counseling session with a man, who works in commercial construction. From the cab of his truck on his lunch break, he disclosed to me, “I know as a man I’m supposed to just want sex and always be just ready to go. But that’s just really hard for me. Sure I suppose I can get it up and perform, but what for? I want the warm up. I want the foreplay. I want the love and touch and connection too.” Did you hear it? He feels the pressure in the masculine world to only want sex and hide the fact he wants the rest.

The day after that conversation, another man, a high powered attorney said this to me, “I like sex, don’t get me wrong. But if my wife grabs my face and looks me in the eyes and says, ‘I love you,’ that fires me as much as sex.” Men say this kind of stuff to me all the time. But they often start, “I guess I’m more like the woman in the relationship, because I like the emotional stuff.” What does it say about our pictures of masculinity when grown men have to tell me behind a closed door almost in a whisper that they like the emotional stuff?

Some men might laugh at this and say, “Nah, I really just want sex.” Of course it’s great to love sex in itself. But have you ever considered what it is you love about sex? As therapist Sue Johnson points out,

“Males may be particularly vulnerable to touch hunger. Field points out that right from birth, boys are held for shorter periods and caressed less often than are girls. As adults, men seem to be less responsive to tender touch than are women, but in the men I see, they crave it just as much as do the women. Men do not ask to be held, either because of cultural conditioning (real men don't hug) or lack of skill (they don't know how to ask). I think of this whenever my female clients complain that men are obsessed with sex. I would be, too, I say, if sex were the only place apart from the football field where I ever got touched or held.”

Sex is a beautiful and fun act of loving play and connection. But sometimes asking for sex is just the way men feel manly enough to ask for love and affection and comfort. As much as men may want sex, they need emotional connection and intimacy and love too. And Zeus McBalls as our mascot suffocates that right out of us.

Maybe we got our picture of virile men all wrong. We need a picture that protects the actual human dignity of real men and those around them. One that gives us a fuller picture of men.

Healthy Virility?

Remember with me the moment Adam meets Eve in the garden of Eden. They both stand in full naked glory. No sin or shame or clothing encumbered this moment. He’s taking in her full wild presence as I imagine she is likewise. And what is Adam roused to do immediately? It’s not sex, at least not first. It’s right there on the page for us to see.

He breaks out in poetry.

Or think of the virile Lover in Song of Songs. This couple is madly in love. And no doubt this passion has led to a lot of love making, given how familiar they are with each other’s bodies. And while the depiction of this man’s arousal (ahem, ivory tusk and sapphires 5:14) clearly leads to sex, it also leads again to erotic poetry. Biblical scholar Tremper Longman calls Song of Songs our Erotic Psalms.

So what’s the most virile picture of masculine sexuality in the Bible? The Poet Lover. That’s our hero.

Does that mean every man must become a poet? Man I would love that. It’s not a bad idea. But no, you don’t need to become a poet. Although poet Rainier Rilke once told a military cadet he was mentoring, good sex ought to make you want to become a poet the next morning. “Those who come together in the night time and entwine in swaying delight perform a serious work and gather up sweetness, depth and strength for the song of some poet that is to be, who will rise to tell of unspeakable bliss.”

I think the point is this: The most virile part of any man is his heart. Not his loins. You heard that right. True virility arises from the heart, not the loins. The other word that shares the same root word as Virility is Virtue. I think that gives us such a good picture of this. Virtue is virile.

That’s what we need to grow into from boyhood, to have an initiated heart. In a man’s ache for masculine initiation, to feel loved and blessed as a man, it’s easy to get stuck in phallocentrism, thinking only of getting strokes. It’s a way to feel virile. But its immature, its boyish wonder turned to immature obsession. But a man must be initiated into the virility of his heart, namely how to live with courage and desire. Or in a word, how to love. And not merely in the act of sex, but all the expressions of love.

Your love will always be the most virile thing you do.

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1. Thank you to Rebekah Mui for her scholarship from which I gleaned this quote from Williams (1978:18) and the attending insights on Roman culture.