The Good Men Manifesto

What I’ve learned Doing Men’s Work for 70 years

 By Jed Diamond, PhD, LCSW
There’s a lot of focus on men these days, much of it negative. Many are
concerned about the harm men cause to women, children, and other men. Others are
concerned about the problems men cause to themselves. My work over the years has
been to help men answer three questions that we all need to address before we die:
1. Did I live a fully authentic life?
2. Did I love deeply and well?
3. Did I make a positive difference in the world?
In order to answer “yes” to these questions, I believe we have to understand why
men are the way they are. We have to understand the roots of our maleness. I believe
this will not only help men, but also will help women better understand men and also
better understand themselves.
Understanding the biological and evolutionary basis of our maleness in no way
discounts the fact that there are also psychological, social, and cultural differences that
are important as well. Nature and nurture can never be separated. They are now, and
forever, united.
For those who want to explore these issues in more depth and get support
to put them into practice in your own life, I’m starting a Diamond-Tribe
Community. I’ll send you more information when it begins. Just drop me a note to
Jed@MenAlive.com and put “Diamond Tribe” in the subject line.
My introduction to men’s work began when I was four years old. I announced that
I was tired of my white baby shoes and I wanted “big boy shoes.” My mother dutifully
took me to a shoe store and I was entranced by the colors and variety available. It was
like going from a world of black and white and discovering technicolor. I wandered past
all the shoes looking at each pair until my eyes lit up.
“Mommy, mommy, I want those.” I was jumping up and down and pointing to the
most beautiful shoes I had ever seen. They were red Keds. I waited for the salesman to
bring out my shoes from the back, but when he opened the box, they were blue, not red.
“Red is for girls,” he told me and smiled at my mother. “Blue is for boys.” That
seemed to settle things in his mind. I thought about that for a second and a half. I had
never heard of colors being assigned by sex. I had thought all shoes were white until
recently. But even as a small child, I knew what I liked.
In my first act of gender rebellion, I insisted on the red Keds and my mother
backed me up. Ever since that time I’ve been interested in issues of sex and gender
and what it means to be male.
 A manifesto, according to the dictionary, is a public declaration of
intentions, opinions, objectives, or motives. As I approach my 76th birthday in
December, 2019, I realize that I’m in the 4th quarter of my productive life and if I’m
going to make a public declaration, the time is now.
I’ve added endnotes so you can see where my assertions come from. You may
agree or disagree with my perspective, but I want you to know where I have gotten the
information. You may want to consult these sources as well.
Let me be clear. What I will share about males and females are
generalizations. A generalization, by definition, applies to the majority within a
population, allowing plenty of room for individual exceptions. If I told you that men are
taller than women, you would recognize that this is not true of all men. As a 5’5’’ guy,
I’m very aware that this is a generalization--though I still wish I could magically become
an undersized 6’5” basketball player.
Yet, the generalizations can tell us a lot about who we are and why we evolved
the thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that make us who we are. Because men tend to
be a certain way does not mean that men are better than women or that these qualities
are fixed and can’t change. They just tell the truth about the nature of male and female.
As you’ll learn, some generalizations apply to a larger segment of the population
than others. The generalization that males have an XY pair of chromosomes while
females have an XX pair applies to more of the population than the generalization that
males are taller than females. This manifesto won’t offer absolutes, but will offer
helpful guidance to better understand who we are.
The Promise I Made to My Son
It was a cold night in November. My wife and I were expecting our first child and
we were in Kaiser hospital in Vallejo, California. After coaching my wife through the
breathing techniques, we had learned in our Lamaze child-birth classes, the time was
close. “Mrs. Diamond, it’s time to take you into the delivery room,” the nurse said to my
wife who was definitely relieved after 12 hours of labor. “Mr. Diamond, it’s time for you
to wait in the waiting-room. We’ll let you know when the baby arrives.
I knew the rules and talked towards the waiting-room doors. But something
stopped me. I felt I was hearing the sound of my un-born son whispering in my ear. “I
don’t want a waiting-room father. Your place is here with us.” I turned around and
marched into the delivery room. There was no question of being asked to leave. My son
had called and I was there.
Soon after, Jemal was born. He was handed to me and amid tears of relief and
joy, I made a promise that I would be a different kind of father than my father was able
to be for me and I would do everything I could to bring about a world where fathers were
fully involved with their families throughout their lives.
My Wife’s Challenge to Write a Book About The Gift of Maleness
Beginning in 1983 with publication of Inside Out: Becoming My Own Man, writing
has been my way of making sense of my world. When my 15th book, My Distant Dad:
Healing the Family Father Wound was published in 2018 I thought I had completed my
writing career. I wanted to do more mentoring, teaching, training, and travelling. I told
my wife, Carlin, and thought she’d be pleased that I wasn’t going to start working on
another book.
But her response surprised me. “I think you have at least one more book you
need to write,” she said. “You’ve devoted your life to helping men and their families, but
things are so confused and conflicted these days, I think you need to write a book about
the gift of maleness to let men and women know what’s good about men underneath
the armoring society demands that you wear.”
I’ve just completed writing that book--12 Rules for Good Men.1 It brings together
the best of what I’ve learned over the last 50 years. The book will be available on
November, 21, 2019, Jemal’s 50th birthday. Here are the Rules:
Rule #1: Join a Men’s Group.
Rule #2: Break Free From the Man Box.
Rule #3: Accept the Gift of Maleness.
Rule #4: Embrace Your Billion-Year History of Maleness.
Rule #5: Understand Your Anger and Fear Towards Women.
Rule #6: Learn The Secrets of Real Lasting Love.
Rule #7: Undergo Meaningful Rites of Passage from Youth to
Adulthood and from Adulthood to Super Adulthood.

Rule #8: Celebrate Your True Warrior Spirit and Learn Why Males Duel
and Females Duet.

Rule #9: Understand and Heal Your Adverse Childhood Experiences and Male
Attachment Disorders.

Rule #10: Heal Your Father Wound and Become the Father You Were
Meant to Be.
 Rule #11: Treat the Irritable Male Syndrome and Male-Type Depression.
Rule #12: Find Your Mission in Life and Do Your Part to Save Humanity.

About Sex: The Evolutionary Impotance of Males and Females

There is a lot of confusion about what it means to be male or female these days.
Masculinity today is maligned and misunderstood. Some believe maleness itself is
inherently destructive and should be eliminated. Others view males as superfluous. This
idea is reflected in the witticism, "A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle."
Some view men as being unsuited for today’s world. In her book, The End of
Men and The Rise of Women, Hanna Rosin says, “The feminist revolution is here.
Women are on the rise and men are on the decline. Earlier this year, women became
the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now
women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will
do the same.”2
Finally, some believe that traditional masculinity itself should be eliminated and
we’d be better off just seeing ourselves as human beings.
I have a different view. Evolutionary science tells us that the division of life into
male and female is very old and males and females have been interacting ever since. I
can’t imagine wolves, lions, gorillas, or chimpanzees having arguments over what it
means to be male or female. One of the glories of being human is that we have greater
choice about our gender roles. Yet, within that diversity of choice, science tells us that
there are important differences between males and females.
In their book, Gender Gap: The Biology of Male-Female Differences, evolutionary
psychologist David P. Barash, PhD. and his wife, Dr. Judith Eve Lipton, who is a
medical doctor and psychiatrist say, “When it comes to human nature, the differences
between males and females must be acknowledged as real, important, and downright
fascinating. Moreover, when it comes to understanding those differences, there is no
better guide than evolution.”3
Marianne J. Legato M.D is Professor Emerita of Clinical Medicine at Columbia
University and is an internationally known academic physician, author, lecturer, and
founder of The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine.4 In her book, Eve’s Rib: The
New Science of Gender-Specific Medicine and How It Can Save Your Life she says,
“Everywhere we look, the two sexes are startlingly and unexpectedly different not only
in their internal function but in the way they experience illness.”5
David C. Page, M.D., is professor of biology at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology (MIT) and director of the Whitehead Institute, where he has a laboratory
devoted to the study of the Y-chromosome.6 He says, “There are 10 trillion cells in the
human body and every one of them is sex specific.”7
 It has been said that our genomes are 99.9% identical from one person to the
next. “It turns out that this assertion is correct,” says Dr. Page, “as long as the two
individuals being compared are both men. It’s also correct if the two individuals being
compared are both women. However, if you compare the genome of a man with the
genome of a woman, you’ll find that they are only 98.5% identical. In other words, the
genetic difference between a man and a woman are 15 times greater [the difference
between .1 and 1.5] than the genetic difference between two men or between two
women.”8
Men can’t be fully alive to themselves, to the women they love, to their
families and friends, unless they understand and embrace their maleness.
Today, good men are needed more than ever. It is time for men to come together
at this time of peril to help bring about “the more beautiful world our hearts know is
possible,”9 as my colleague Charles Eisenstein poetically describes it. In order to do so,
we have to understand the following findings of evolutionary science that are the basis
for this manifesto.
The 16 Elements of My Good Men Manifesto
1. Recognize that our male lineage is ancient.
The evolution of males and females is not a recent phenomenon. Evolutionary
science tells us that the division of life into male and female began one billion years
ago.10 Drs. Barash and Lipton say, “The world is divided into males and females. Nearly
all animals, as well as most plants, have two recognizable sexes: male and female.
Every once in a while, one encounters a person whose gender is difficult to determine
by casual examination. Most of the time, however, there is little doubt about an
individual’s sexual identity.11
2. Understand the key elements of sexual psychology and evolution.
According to Evolutionary Psychologist David M. Buss, author of the textbook
Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind, “Human sexual psychology
evolved over millions of years to cope with ancestral adaptive problems, before the
advent of modern contraceptive technology. Humans still possess this underlying sexual
psychology, even though the current environment has changed.”12
Evolutionary biologist, Robert Trivers, offers two profound predictions that help
us understand male and female sexual psychology:
1. The sex that invests more in offspring, typically, but not always, the female, will
be more discriminating or selective about mating.
2. The sex that invests less in offspring will be more competitive for sexual access
to the high-investing sex.13
“What competing is to males,” say Barash and Lipton, choosing is to
females.”14
 “In the human case,” says David Buss, “it is clear that women have greater
obligatory parental investment. To produce a single child, women must endure a nine-
month pregnancy, whereas men can produce that same child with as little as a few
minutes of investment.”
Yet, both males and females want to pick the best mate so that their offspring
survive and thrive. “When it comes to long-term mating or marriage,” says Buss, “it is
equally clear that both men and women invest heavily in children, and so the theory of
parental investment predicts that both sexes should be very choosy and
discriminating.”15
3. Appreciate the biological basis of males and females.
Biologists have a very simple and useful definition of what is male and what is
female, whether we are fish, ferns, or human beings. An individual can either make
many small gametes (sex cells) or fewer but larger gametes. The individuals that
produce smaller gametes are called "males" and the ones that produce larger gametes
are called "females."16
An article in the journal, Science, asks “Why Two Sexes Are Better Than One.”
The author says, “Step into a singles bar and it's pretty clear that having humanity
divided up into two sexes can be frustrating--it cuts the potential mating pool in half.
Biologists have long puzzled over why this should be. After all, with only one sex,
everybody can be a potential mate, so why bother with two?”17
The answer has puzzled scientists, but new studies point to the fact that having
two sexes allows for genetic variation that isn’t possible with only one sex, two sexes
seem to be more efficient than three or more.18
4. Accept the fact that, with few exceptions, all humans are either XX (female) or
XY (male).

It’s good that we recognize that not all humans are either XX or XY, but we
shouldn’t forget that the exceptions are few. According to the World Health
Organization, humans are born with 46 chromosomes in 23 pairs. The X and Y
chromosomes determine a person’s sex. Most women are 46XX and most men are
46XY.

Research suggests, however, that in a few births per thousand some individuals
will be born with a single sex chromosome (45X or 45Y, sex monosomies) and some
with three or more sex chromosomes (47XXX, 47XYY or 47XXY, etc., sex polysomies).
In addition, some males are born 46XX due to the translocation of a tiny section of the
sex determining region of the Y chromosome. Similarly, some females are also born
46XY due to mutations in the Y chromosome.19
 In our desire to support people who may not feel they fit the binary of male or
female, we shouldn’t forget the fact that male and female apply to the vast majority of
living beings in the last billion years of evolutionary history.

Dr. Michael Gurian is the New York Times bestselling author of thirty-two books
published in twenty-three languages. In his book, Saving Our Sons, A New Path for
Raising Healthy and Resilient Boys he says, “Ensuring gender equality for girls and
women does not require gender sameness. In the new millennium, neuroscience shows
us that males and females are not the same, though their brains overlap a great deal
across a wide gender spectrum. We can now build equality without the false premise of
sameness, and we must do so in order to help all children.”20

In an article in Psychology Today, “She, He, X, They: The Amazing Minds of

Boys and Girls,” he says, “As people come to believe ‘female’ and ‘male’ don’t exist,
medical science, educational programs, effective parenting, successful mental health
counseling--all miss getting necessary support and knowledge, and the bodies, minds,
and hearts of girls and boys are under-served and under-nurtured.”21

5. Celebrate the reality that males and females differ significantly in every cell of
our bodies.

I previously quoted David C. Page, M.D. that “There are 10 trillion cells in the
human body and every one of them is sex specific.” Dr. Page goes on address the
implications of this one fact.

“We’ve had a unisex vision of the human genome,” says Dr. Page. “Men and
women are not equal in our genome and men and women are not equal in the face of
disease. Already at my institute we have discovered that XX cells and XY cells go about
their business, of making proteins for instance, in slightly different ways.”

Dr. Page concludes, “We need to build a better tool kit for researchers that is XX
and XY informed rather than our current gender-neutral stance. We need a tool kit that
recognizes the fundamental difference on a cellular, organ, system, and person level
between XY and XX. I believe that if we do this, we will arrive at a fundamentally new
paradigm for understanding and treating human disease.”22

On her informative website, www.GenderMed.org, Marianne Legato, M.D. shares

the current research about male/female differences in our hearts, lungs, immune
systems, digestive systems, skeletal systems, how medications affect us, how long we
live, and how our brains function.23

6. Understand that male and female differences are evident in brain studies.

Among the differences described by Dr. Legato are the following:

• Men have larger brains; women have more brain cells.

 • Men and women use different parts of their brains while thinking.
• There are significant differences in the brain activity of men and women.24

Louanne Brizendine, M.D. is a neuropsychiatrist at the University of California,

San Francisco, and founder of the Women’s and Teen Girl’s Mood and Hormone Clinic.
In her authoritative books, The Female Brain and The Male Brain, she details
differences in brain structure and function and how they affect behavior. A few of the
differences she describes include the following: 25

• Medial Preoptic Area (MPOA): This is the area for sexual pursuit, found in the
hypothalamus, and it is 2.5 times larger in the male.

• Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC): It weighs options and makes decisions. It’s the
worry-wort center, and it’s larger in women than in men.

• Dorsal Premammillary Nucleus (DPN): The defend-your-turf area, it lives deep

inside the hypothalamus and contains the circuitry for male’s instinctive one-
upmanship, territorial defense, fear, and aggression. It’s larger in males than in
females and contains special circuits to detect territorial challenges by other
males, making men more sensitive to potential turf threats.

Dr. Michael Gurian has compiled more than one thousand brain-based gender
studies, which you can access from his website, www.MichaelGurian.com.26

7. Recognize that male and female differences manifest in politics.

In his book Sex, Power, and Partisanship: How Evolutionary Science Makes
Sense of Our Political Divide, Dr. Hector A. Garcia introduces the topic with these
provocative words:

“A nation’s sinew begins to tear. Triumph in one group is met with fear and
bewilderment in another. Old prejudices are reanimated and new ones are invented.
The masses succumb to irrational forces, prodded to frenzy by politicians and the
media. The nation is poised to devour itself.”27

Dr. Garcia goes on to detail the ways in which evolutionary science can help us
understand the political divide and how it can be healed. “The difficulties we face
forming cohesive societies in the modern era reflect the psychological adaptations with
a simple, ancient purpose—keeping our ancestors alive in a savagely dangerous
environment.”

Republicans on the right tend to focus on one set of survival strategies while
Democrats on the left focus on others. These different approaches tend to be influenced
by gender. For instance, American political commentator Chris Mathews once described
Republicans as the “Daddy Party” and Democrats at the “Mommy Party.”
 Writes Mathews, “Republicans protect us with strong national defense;
Democrats nourish us with Social Security and Medicare. Republicans worry about our
business affairs; Democrats look after our health, nutrition and welfare…’Daddy’ locks
the door at night and brings home the bacon. ‘Mommy’ worries when the kids are sick
and makes sure each one gets treated fairly. The partition of authority and duty may
seem an anachronism from the Leave It to Beaver era, but it’s an apt model for today’s
political household.”28

Ann Coulter boasted on Fox news, “I am more of a man than any liberal.”29

Dr. Garcia concludes, “As it happens, these observations are far more empirically
accurate than we might have imagined.”

8. Imagine the beauty of life beginning when a successful sperm gains access to
a valuable egg.

Most men know that size matters. Yet most of us are not aware of the difference
in size and number between a sperm and an egg. A human egg is 85,000 times larger
than a sperm. Each man produces 100 to 300 million sperm per ejaculate.30

Dr. Stephen Emlen is Professor of Behavioral Ecology at Cornell University and a

world authority on the social behavior of animals. He says, “Because of all the
resources a female will put into each egg, it makes sense, in most cases, for her to be
choosy about whose genes she allows to combine with it, and to continue to invest in its
growth and survival after fertilization. For the male, it usually pays best to compete with
other males for access to as many eggs as possible. This tends to give rise to the more
traditional male/female sex roles.”31

9. Realize that this cellular reality has an impact on the behavior of males and
females.
Dr. Steve Jones is professor of genetics and head of the prestigious Galton
Laboratory, University College of London. “The cellular imbalance is at the center of
maleness. It confers on males a simpler sex life than their partners, together with a host
of incidental idiosyncrasies, from more suicide, cancer, and billionaires to rather less
hair on the top of the head.”32
Generally, it is easier to move the smaller sperm to the larger egg than vice
versa, and so it is the male that seeks out the female and the female who makes the
selection from those males that come courting. Dr. Jones concludes, “From the
greenest of algae to the most blue-blooded of aristocrats their restless state hints at an
endless race in which males pursue but females escape.”33
 Of course, if females escaped completely, there wouldn’t be babies and that
would be the end of that species. Yet, it does help us to recognize the different
challenges males and females face in the mating process.
10. Monogamy is not natural for men and women.
Most people still get married and make marriage vows that promise each other
that we will love our partner and be sexually faithful only to our partner and we will stay
married until “death do we part.” Most of us fail to keep that promise, though most of us
try. As a marriage and family counselor I see a great deal of grief that comes to most
couples because we believe in the myth that monogamy is natural. We believe that if we
have found the right partner it will be easy to stay in love and have a satisfying sex life
forever and ever.
The problem is that evolutionary science tells us that despite our hopes and
desires, humans are fighting an uphill battle to practice monogamy. According to
evolutionary biologist David P. Barash in his book, Through a Glass Brightly: Using
Science to See Our Species as We Really Are, “Polygamy is the default human
system.”34
We see evidence throughout the animal kingdom and when studying human
societies. “Looking at the situation among traditional societies when they were first
contacted by Western traders, missionaries, explorers, and colonists,” says Barash,
“only about 16 percent were officially monogamous. Of the rest fewer than 1% were
polyandrous [where a woman mates with multiple men], and 83% were avowedly
polygynous [where a man mates with multiple women].”35
I can already hear a lot of guys jumping up and down and using this information
to justify their extra-marital sexual relationships and to convince their wives and partners
that they are just “doing what comes naturally.” Before getting too carried away, there
are a few additional things you need to know:
• Just because something is natural doesn’t mean it’s good for us (think
hurricanes, earthquakes, poisonous snakes, etc.).

• Men aren’t the only ones who have a natural desire to have sex with others.
“Substantial evidence points towards polyandry as a female propensity,” says
Barash, “albeit not quite as flagrant as the male preference for polygyny.” 36
(Remember what’s good for the gander is also good for the goose.)

• We may dream of being a harem master and having lots of women attracted to
us, but most men if left to their own devises in the making game would come up
short. Most men are better off being monogamous.

• Children are better off when moms and dads stay together.
 Monogamy may not be natural, but it’s a good way to be. We just need to accept
that it takes hard work to achieve and we should be a bit more understanding when
we’re not able to always be successful in keeping our vows, whether we are males or
females.

11. Evolutionary success is really about the children.

Our modern view of success can be summarized as “he who dies with the most
toys wins.” We strive for more and more money so we can buy more and more stuff.
There is economic value in getting people to want more things. If we can convince
people that they will be happier if only they owned the latest…fill in the blank, then our
consumption-based economic system will thrive.
However, real success is all about the children. Are we raising good kids who
value life, care about themselves and others, can express their full range of emotions,
and can they think clearly and analytically to solve life’s many problems?
We often think of evolution as being about “the survival of the fittest,” but it’s
really about the survival of the sexiest. From an evolutionary perspective success is
about doing what it takes to find a mate who trusts us enough to have sex and make
babies and to raise those babies to adulthood so they can find a mate to have sex,
make babies, and continue the cycle.
Says anthropologist Melvin Konner in his book Women After All: Sex, Evolution
and the End of Male Supremacy, “Evolution is a struggle for reproduction, not existence,
and the sole goal of survival is to get to reproduce (or help close relatives do the same).
Life is the handmaid, procreation is the queen.”37 This process has been going on
for a billion years.
Think of it, none of your direct ancestors died childless. Whatever they did or
didn’t do, they were successful at this one important job. Your parents had at least one
child. So did their parents, and so did their parents, all the way back in time a billion
years to the first male and female. And what’s the essential reason having two sexes
has been so successful? It creates a division of labor. Each sex does certain things that
the other sex isn’t as good at doing.
We know that female mammals, of which all humans are members, are able to
feed the young with nourishing milk from their bodies. They do many other important
things as well, but that is a basic function. What do men do? I’ll suggest that the male’s
primary job is to protect the females and their children from other males who might harm
them.
For humans it means that women must take care of themselves and the children
and men must be prepared to fight other men. For those of us who live in relative
peace, we forget that through most of human history men were required to fight other
men.
 12. Children are best served when parents embrace different roles.
Cross-cultural studies demonstrate that children, throughout evolutionary time,
must be assured of two kinds of nurturance:
• The provision of physical security.
• The provision of emotional security.
According to social scientist, David Gutmann, “The fact of gender captures and
memorializes the processes of evolutionary selection whereby the necessary capacities
were assorted by sex, so as to assure the provision, to children, of physical and
emotional security.”38
Gutmann is not saying that all women must stay at home and all men must go
out and “bring home the bacon.” What he is saying is that someone must take primary
responsibility for meeting children’s needs for physical and emotional security.
Social scientist Dr. Joyce F. Benenson, author of Warriors and Worriers: The
Survival of the Sexes, says, “Every one of the ancestors of people alive today managed
to avoid an early death and to pass their genes to their children. Behavior that helps to
prevent early death therefore must be programmed into our genetic material.” 39
Benenson has conducted research on the different roles of men and women over
the last thirty years. She has concluded the following:
“For thousands of years, human females and males have faced different sorts of
major problems and found different types of solutions. Women have taken primary
responsibility for long-term survival of vulnerable children. In contrast, men have taken
primary responsibility for fighting wars. Males are programmed to develop traits that are
associated with becoming a warrior, and that human females are programmed to
develop characteristics that are related to become a worrier.”40
Women needed to worry about their own health and the health and well-being of
the children. Men needed to protect women and children by “bringing home the bacon”
and being alert to outside threats. Times have changed and our roles are more flexible.
Yet, the children still need the basic support they have gotten from their parents.
13. Children need the active involvement of mothers and fathers during their
formative years.
Not all children grow up in homes with a father and a mother. Some grow up in
homes with two fathers or two mothers or with grandparents, or other parental figures.
All children were born of a mother and a father and most children would like the active
involvement of both parents throughout their lives.
As a marriage and family counselor helping men and women for fifty years now, I
have to say that parents are working their butts off to care for their kids. But as a society
we are failing. More kids are anxious and depressed. More are dropping out of school.
More are joining gangs. More are having children before they are able to fully care for
them. More married couples are getting divorced while the children are still young. More
parents are forced to work and children are left in the care of well-meaning strangers
who do their best but can’t replace the loving support of parents and extended families.
Like me, too many boys and girls grow up in a family where a father is absent
physically or emotionally. Father absence is becoming so common, we do the best we
can and hope things will turn out O.K. Children are resilient and may seem to be fine,
but in my own life and in most of the clients I see, I believe that the father wound is deep
and long-lasting.
Likewise, too many of us grow up being raised by a single mom. She does what
she can, tries to make the best of a bad thing, and may even come to believe that a
single loving parent is all a child needs to grow up to be strong and healthy. I can
understand the desire to believe that its true, but my experience working with 25,000
men and women over the last 50 years is that it isn’t. Children do much better when
they are raised by a mother and a father.
Over the years I’ve seen a dangerous and destructive dynamic in families. When
a man and woman fall in love and get married, they no longer feel confident that they
will stay together “until death do we part,” or even “until the kids grow up.” Usually,
subconsciously at first, the woman begins preparing to have to take over when the man
leaves. The man begins pulling away, feeling the mom and kids are a unit and he feels
left out. Once this dynamic gets started, things may seem OK on the surface, but the
family is in trouble. These beliefs act like emotional acid that gradually eats away at the
foundation of the relationship.
Raising children is the most important job humans have, but it has become
increasingly difficult in today’s world. I tell couples that the minimum requirement to
raise healthy children are two adults for each child. So, if you’re a married couple with
two kids, you are already feeling stressed.
Unlike other mammals, human children are born immature. It’s the only way our
big-brained babies could get through the birth canal. They need a lot of care for a lot of
years from both parents. Having both parents working outside the home may be good
for the economy, but it isn’t good for the kids. Children need at least one and preferably
two full time adults who are there for the kids during the first five years of their lives. It
doesn’t always have to be the mother, though she has been the primary caregiver
through most of human history. Dads can be good primary parents, but they have to
learn to do it well.
We need to change the cultural dynamic that makes it difficult for two parents to
split the parental duties so that there is at least one primary caregiver at home during a
child’s formative years. Men and women have to learn that they can’t always have it all
at the same time—raise healthy children and work full-time jobs outside the home. We
can have it all, but it may require that we put off our major contributions to work in the
outside world until after the children are grown. It may not be “women’s liberation” or
“men’s liberation,” in the way that many believe it should be, but it may, in fact, be what
our children desperately need.
14. Know that throughout human history 80% of women had children, but only 40%
of men did.
In our modern world where it seems that everyone is having sex, we forget that
through most of human history some men were having a lot of sex and some men were
involuntarily celebate. For example, Genghis Khan, the fearsome Mongol warrior of the
13th century may have done more than rule the largest empire in the world.
According to recent genetic studies, he populated it as well. An international
group of geneticists studying Y-chromosome data have found that nearly 8 percent of
the men living in the region of the former Mongol empire carry Y-chromosomes that
were likely passed on by Khan and his descendants.41
Imagine for a moment being an average man living during that time. You might
have been killed by Genghis Khan’s army or you might have been afraid to have sex
with any pretty woman because Genghis Khan and his top lieutenants took them all for
themselves and you risked death even looking at a woman. If you were a woman at the
time, would you choose to be married to a poor Mongol herdsman or be part of Genghis
Khan’s harem and be married to the alpha male?
The fact that some males dominate and have more sex and others have less is
present in many specifies of mammals, including humans. Dr. Roy F. Baumeister is one
of the world’s leading social scientists. He has written more than 400 scientific papers
and 21 books. In his book, Is There Anything Good About Men? How Cultures Flourish
By Exploiting Men, he says, “Of all the people who ever reached adulthood, maybe 80%
of the women but only 40% of the men reproduced.” He goes on to say, “That’s a
stunning difference. Of all humans ever born, most women became mothers, but most
men did not become fathers. You wouldn’t realize this by walking through an American
suburb today with its tidy couples.” Baumeister says, “I consider it the single most
underappreciated fact about men.”42
A lot of men’s feelings, fears, and sexual behavior, can be understood when we
recognize that all men are afraid of being part of the 60% who are left out of the genetic
lottery. Even alpha males who are having lots of sex are worried that they will be
displaced and become sexual losers.
15. Become aware that men put women on pedestals and also pull them down.
Most men will recognize that in the hidden recesses of our psyches and often in
our active adult minds, we look up to women and see them as superior to men and we
also look down on them. We are conflicted by love and longing and also by fear and
anger. The #MeToo movement has come forward and encouraged women to tell the
truth about sexual violence.43 Men need to listen closely to what women are saying with
open minds and hearts.
In The Little #MeToo Book for Men, Mark Greene addresses male fear and
resistance. “As women take up the banner of #MeToo by the millions, many men are
feeling conflicted, alarmed, angry, and even disheartened. How is it that men are
challenged by a movement which says, ‘Don’t rape, sexually harass or abuse other
human beings’? These are ideas we can all get behind, right? But it’s not playing out
that way.” Mark’s book helps us all to understand the movement and our reactions to it.
Check it out.44
The words of psychologist and author Sam Keen resonate deeply with me and
many men in understanding our conflicted feelings towards women. In his best-selling
book, Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man he says, “It was slow in dawning on me that
WOMAN had an overwhelming influence on my life and on the lives of all the men I
knew,” Keen says. “I’m not talking about women, the actual flesh-and-blood creatures,
but about WOMEN, those larger-than-life shadowy female figures who inhabit our
imaginations, inform our emotions, and indirectly give shape to many of our actions.”45
He goes on to share his own experiences with women. “But if the text of my life
was ‘successful independent man,’ the subtext was ‘engulfed by WOMAN.’ All the while
I was advancing in my profession, I was engaged in an endless struggle to find the
‘right’ woman, to make my relationship ‘work,’ to create a good marriage. I agonized
over sex—was I good enough? Did she ‘come’? Why wasn’t I always potent? What
should I do about my desires for other women? The more troubled my marriage
became, the harder I tried to get it right. I worked at communication, sex, and everything
else until I became self-obsessed. Divorce finally broke the symbiotic mother-son,
father-daughter, pattern of my first marriage.”46
We will always have a fear of being “engulfed by WOMAN,” until we recognize
and accept the basic realities of being male, including the first reality of coming into the
world out of the body of a woman. A wise woman, Anais Nin, said, “If a person
continues to see only giants, it means he is still looking at the world through the eyes of
a child. I have a feeling that man’s fear of woman comes from having first seen her as
the mother, creator of men.”47
16. Embrace the truth that males learn to be men in men’s groups.
It feels appropriate that I end this manifesto with men’s groups. It is the first rule
in my book, 12 Rules for Good Men, where I share what I’ve learned to help men
become the best they can be in life.
Although being male is built into our billion-year evolutionary history, we learn to
be men in men’s groups. The first male connection we are meant to have is with our
father and his group of men. In indigenous cultures throughout the world, there are birth
rituals where the men in the tribe support the father and welcome the new-born child
into the tribe.
I’ve been in a men’s group that has been meeting now for forty years. I still
remember the group meeting when Tony brought his new born son, Noah, to the group.
We all held him and welcomed him into the group of men. The poet, Robert Bly, said, “A
young man needs to be in the presence of older men in order to hear the sound that
male cells sing.”48
Think what it means that we each have a male choir inside us that is 10 trillion
strong. Imagine what it means to be a young boy growing up listening to that symphony,
awakening his own voice as he resonates with the sound that male cells sing.
I remember during the men’s group having my son, Jemal, and daughter Angela,
come with me to the group that met at Tom’s house. He had a bunk bed in his small
home and my son and daughter were lulled to sleep hearing the men talk about things
that matter in our lives. They heard the joy and sadness in our voices, the laughter and
the tears.
My son will turn 50 on November 21, 2019. My daughter just turned 47 on March
22, 2019. They still talk about their time with the men’s group.
Like many, I grew up in a home without a father. I wrote about the impact of his
absence had on my life and what it meant to me to reconnect with him before he died.
At the beginning of the memoir, My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound, I
offered the following quotes that captured the impact of a father’s loss on our lives: 49
• “A father may be physically present, but absent in spirit. His absence may
be literal through death, divorce or dysfunction, but more often it is a
symbolic absence through silence and the inability to transmit what he
also may not have acquired.” James Hollis.

• “Kids have a hole in their soul in the shape of their dad. And if a father is
unwilling or unable to fill that role, it can leave a wound that is not easily
healed.” Roland Warren.

• “You will begin to forgive the world when you forgive your father.”
Tennessee Williams’ psychiatrist.
It’s taken me 70 years to fully heal my father wound. My men’s group not only
helped me heal, they became the brothers I never had. They also continue to teach me
how to live fully, love deeply, and make a difference in the world. It’s not an accident
that the first rule for good men in my new book is to join a men’s group.
If you resonate with my Good Men Manifesto, come visit me at
www.MenAlive.com. Drop me a note to Jed@MenAlive.com. Put “Good Men Manifesto”
in the subject line and be sure and respond to my spamarrest filter when writing for the
first time. Feel free to share this manifesto with others you think would be interested. I
consider it a work in progress, so if you have suggestions of things to be added, feel
free to share them.

Endnotes:

1
Jed Diamond. 12 Rules for Good Men. Waterside Productions, 2019.
2
Hanna Rosin. “The End of Men.” The Atlantic Magazine, July/August, 2010.
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/07/the-end-of-men/308135/
3
David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton. Gender Gap: The Biology of Male-Female Differences. Transaction
Publishers, 2004, p. viii.
4
The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine, https://gendermed.org/.
5
Marianne J. Legato, M.D. Eve’s Rib: The New Science of Gender-Specific Medicine and How it Can Save Your Life.
Harmony Books, 2002, p. 15.
6
The Whitehead Institute, http://wi.mit.edu/people/faculty/page.
7
David Page, M.D. “Why Sex Really Matters.” TEDXBeaconStreet,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQcgD5DpVlQ.
8
Page, Ibid.
9
Charles Eisenstein, The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible. North Atlantic Books, 2013.
10
Brian Swimme and Thomas Berry. The Universe Story. HarperSanFrancisco, 1992, p. 270.
11
David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton. Gender Gap: The Biology of Male-Female Differences. Transaction
Publishers, 2004, pp. 18-19.
12
David M. Buss. Evolutionary Psychology: The New Science of the Mind. Pearson Education, Inc., 2004, p. 107.
13
Robert Trivers. “Parental investment and sexual selection.” In B. Campbell (ED.) Sexual Selection and the Descent
of Man. Aldine, 1972, pp. 136-179.
14
Barash and Lipton, Ibid. p. 31.
15
Buss, Ibid. p. 107.
16
Nature Publishing Group. https://www.nature.com/scitable/definition/gamete-gametes-311.
17
“Why are two sexes better than one?”
https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2004/10/why-two-sexes-are-better-one,
18
Pas de Deux. Why are there only two sexes?
https://slate.com/human-interest/2007/09/why-are-there-only-two-sexes.html
19
The World Health Organization, Gender and Genetics. https://www.who.int/genomics/gender/en/index1.html
20
Gurian Institute. https://gurianinstitute.com/. Saving Our Sons: A New Path for Raising Healthy and Resilient
Boys. The Gurian Institute, 2017.
21
Michael Gurian. The Minds of Boys and Girls. Psychology Today, March 6, 2018.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-minds-boys-and-girls/201803/she-he-x-they.
22
David Page, M.D. “Why Sex Really Matters.” TEDXBeaconStreet,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nQcgD5DpVlQ.
23
The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine. Just the Facts. https://gendermed.org/just-the-facts/.
24
The Foundation for Gender-Specific Medicine. Just the Facts. https://gendermed.org/just-the-facts/.
25
Dr. Louann Brizendine, M.D. http://www.drlouannbrizendine.com/. The Female Brain. Morgan Road Books,
2006. The Male Brain. Broadway Books, 2010.
26
Michael Gurian, MichaelGurian.com. https://www.michaelgurian.com/about/research-reference-list/.
27
Hector A. Garcia. Sex, Power, and Partisanship: How Evolutionary Science Makes Sense of Our Political Divide.
Prometheus Books, 2019, p. 11.
28
Christopher Mathews. “Mommy’s Love and Daddy’s Protection.” Baltimore Sun, May 14, 1991.
29
“Ann Coulter on Her Feud with Elizabeth Edwards,” Fox News, June 29, 2007.
30
Joe Quirk. Sperm Are From Men. Eggs Are From Women: The Real Reason Men and Women Are Different.
Running Press Book Publishers, 2006.
31
PBS, Evolution Library. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/evolution/library/01/6/l_016_04.html.
32
Steve Jones. Y: The Descent of Men. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
33
Steve Jones. Y: The Descent of Men. Houghton Mifflin, 2003.
34
David P. Barash. Through a Glass Brightly: Using Science to See Our Species as We Really Are. Oxford University
Press, 2018, p. 135.
35
Barash, Ibid. p. 137.
36
Barash, Ibid. p. 138.
37
Melvin Konner, M.D. Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy. W.W. Norton, 2015,
p. 71.
38
David Gutmann, Reclaimed Power: Toward a New Psychology of Men and Women in Later Life, Basic Books,
1987, p. 190.
39
Joyce F. Benenson with Henry Markovits. Warriors and Worriers: The Survival of the Sexes. Oxford University
Press, 2014, pps 11-14.
40
Benenson, Ibid.
41
National Geographic, “Genghis Kahn a Prolific Lover, DNA implies.”
https://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2003/02/mongolia-genghis-khan-dna/
42
Roy Baumeister. Is There Anything Good About Men: How Cultures Flourish by Exploiting Men. Oxford University
Press, 2010. http://www.roybaumeister.com/.
43
Me Too. You are not alone. Join the movement. https://metoomvmt.org/.
44
Mark Greene. The Little #MeToo Book for Men. ThinkPlay Partners, 2018.
https://mantalks.com/mark-greene-metoo-masculinity/.
45
Sam Keen. Fire in the Belly: On Being a Man. Bantam Books, 1991, pp. 13-16.
46
Keen. Ibid.
47
Anais Nin. Diary, 1931-1934. The Swallow Press, 1966, p. 53.
48
Robert Bly, personal communication.
49
Jed Diamond. My Distant Dad: Healing the Family Father Wound. Lasting Impact Press, 2018.