i have a question.... is it just me or is it fairly confusing to be a man in our culture?

i grew up in a home with no "father" and it has pretty much marked me for life so to speak. The really confusing part about that is if i had relied on current culture alone to sort of "father" me, man what a mess i'd truly be (well... i 'm a mess anyway but that's a subject for another blog). Why does our culture continue to send what can only be seen as conflicting messages about this issue?

Does anyone know what i mean by this?

On the one hand we see and hear messages in poular culture that i believe glorify "never growing up" from hip hop culture to just about anything coming out of Hollywood and the entertainment world. i just don't get it. We rarely hear about what it means to be a man, to think as a man, to pass on manhood to other men....why?

Perhaps i am not thinking clearly about this but the one thing i would have loved to know about growing up was what it meant to be ready for manhood. It wasn't ever really a topic of discussion in our home, so that meant that i had to try and find that information from other sources... often not real good sources either. Ultimately i think that led to serious problems in my pre-teen and early teen years.

The message from our culture is confusing, we don't spend a lot (or any) time talking about this in our homes so what do we, what can we do about this issue?