As I’ve mentioned before after the initial empowerment fades divorced women tend to find themselves excluded from their previous social networks. Married women tend to prefer to socialize with other married women. Since marriage confers status on women (which divorcées lose if they aren’t able to remarry), being dropped from the married social circle and being forced to move to the divorcée social circle is a painful loss.
This simple fact has Ask Amy outraged, as a married mother wrote in explaining that she and her fellow married sister and cousins don’t find they have much in common with her single mother/divorced sister. Ask Amy is of course free to rage against human nature all she likes, but she won’t be able to undo the status hit women take when they divorce.
As an added bonus, the letter writer deftly played the husband card:
She takes it very personally, and last year even came over to my home unannounced crying about it, which upset my children and caused my husband to threaten to call the police if she did not leave.
In the interest of bringing all parties together, I will offer a solution which I think Ask Amy and the letter writer can both get behind. Instead of not inviting the divorced sister, why not promise, no swear, in front of God and everyone they know that they will include her in their outings in the future. Then, when the time comes that honoring this promise would make them unhappy, simply leave her out.
That’s good, but why leave it so informal? Why not require that they make their oaths inside a Church as well while they’re at it?
[D: Excellent idea.]
donalgraeme’s perfected solution conveys the message well, but it doesn’t facilitate the unity that AskAmy is asking. In fact, we probably should promote the divorcee’s social status so that she is a member of the marrieds group and the divorced group, the mothers group (when she has her kids) and the singles group (when she’s free to go out dancing), the young people’s group (to set an example) and the, er, not-so-young people’s group (older men have more money, after all).
“Married sister and cousins don’t find they have much in common with her single mother/divorced sister.”
Of course all married women are wary of a single woman (particularly divorcees) on the prowl, they know their own nature all too well. Once a woman is used to getting an itch scratched she won’t go long before she gets the need to be sated.
Proximity plus divorcees equals infidelity.
The reason why married women shun divorcees is not only because of the status hit, but also for several other very sensible reasons.
1. Divorce is catching. If people in your social circle divorce, it spreads. It sounds cruel, but excising the frivorcees is less cruel than possibly causing your children to end up in a broken home (naturally, divorce shouldn’t be catching if people were honoring their vows).
2. Frivorcee women often have financial problems and can end up inadvertently guilt-tripping their married friends; for example, the divorced sister in this story cannot afford to attend the get-away, so if they invited her, they’d have to pay her way at least partially. We have a Christian duty to make sure such women have enough food to feed their children, but we have no duty to pay for their weekend getaways.
3. They almost always have child care issues; I have babysat for free on a number of occasions for divorced acquaintances. Eventually this can get to a point where enough is enough; you feel bad for them every time you see them and hear about their plight, so eventually you just avoid them altogether.
4. Frivorcee women are often a mess.in other ways; they always need something. Specifically, they always have some sob story about their broken (_fill in the blank_) that comes out whenever your husband is around. Being a heckuva guy, your husband good-naturedly spends his Saturday fixing her problems for her. Once is okay; more than once? Get your own man.
So it’s not just that we are status whores; we have fairly pragmatic reasons for gently trying to distance ourselves from frivorcees. If women don’t like being shunned, they ought not file for divorce, and their problem will be solved. (My remarks are not aimed at any woman whose husband left her and filed for divorce without grounds, of course.)
Perhaps this is something you could ponder from your church pew, because despite your regular attendance, you don’t seem to have learned much.
Painful as it is to say it, Amy might actually have a point here (not that she herself can probably distinguish Scripture from scribbling). Unsavory as “Wendy’s” lifestyle might be, there is a decidedly churchian flavor to her sister’s letter. Frankly, these women sound like they deserve each other’s company.
Because what every party needs is a wet blanket.
Ah, a quick search of Wikipedia helps to explain why Amy Dickinson reacted with such venom:
So, Ms. Dickinson has been the divorcee with a small child; no doubt she still remembers the sting of social rejection she herself must have experienced on occasion over her 18 years as a single mother. No wonder she advises the sad sister as she does.
There is no need to be gleeful in judging one’s divorced acquaintances, of course, but social consequences for poor behavior serve as a warning to other would-be frivorcees. In looking through that old thread Dalrock linked to in his OP, I found a comment that I made then which I believe bears repeating:
As painful as it seems, stigmatizing anti-social behavior (such as frivorce) is beneficial to the wider society even though it is painful to the one experiencing it. We had a long discussion about social stigma on my old blog, if anyone is interested:
Social stigma: it is a good thing or a bad thing?
My hunch is that the letter writer probably left out the following piece of info as to why the invites dried up: the divorced sister, once that immediate post-divorce you-go-grrl afterglow had quickly faded, was posting multiple selfies every day on fb and instagram and generally being a repugnant attention whore of gargantuan proportion. The married sisters did not want to suffer that fool’s company nor her pitiful woe-is-me solipsistic gripes for the duration of their trip.
But that would be even less politically correct and more likely to receive an angry response from Cathedral columnist Amy. But of course, the angry response followed nonetheless.
It is interesting how the power of the blood relationship is still thought to be so strong. Suppose this was a comment about a husband. He did not share their values, he did not like to talk about the same things they did, he did not spend as much on shopping. Who would deny this was a perfectly socially acceptable reason for a divorce? But Wendy is a sister and so she must be included.
The famous cliche about the Western tradition is that it is a move from Status to Contract. It seems that all the social reforms of the recent past have moved us the other way.
Love Dalrock’s suggestion. A good solution. But also agree that if it upsets the sister so much, there is no excuse to be so b!tchy in this underhand way.
As painful as it seems, stigmatizing anti-social behavior (such as frivorce) is beneficial to the wider society even though it is painful to the one experiencing it.
Indeed. Most cultures regard murder as a very anti social behavior, and tend to stigmatize those who engage in it. Many cultures don’t think much of those who urge others to murder, whether in the name of some god or not.
And gosh, that brings us right to you, SunShine. Still keen for your husband and other men who are members of your “tribe of Christ” to go and kill the PUA’s and other men who offend you by their existence? After feminism is defeated, of course, not before.
Well?
@feeriker
What you are describing as “churchian flavor” seems to me like discretion. That letter writer is doing the right thing by excluding the person who divorced, and suffering upheaval in her family and house because of it.
Similarly, I see kind men dismissed when they are kind because they are also (and unfortunately) nice. The observers often do not display the wisdom to tell the difference, and then make foolish criticisms of kindness. The fault lies with the observer.
@ AR
You behave like an obnoxious bitch with the way you twist my words to point where you are actually lying about what I’ve written (which is all still right there for anyone to read and bears no resemblance to what you’ve written at least a dozen times on this website, despite the fact that I’ve been nothing but polite and on-topic and tried to just ignore your repeated lies and insults). No one is discussing me, by the way; we are discussing Dalrock’s essay. Instead of behaving like a silly, gossiping woman and derailing this thread with your pointless issue, how about turning your attention to the topic at hand?
My apologies, Dalrock, for this off-topic comment but if AR is going to lob shit at me over and over again, I will on occassion respond with a correction.
I think we are all taking both the letter and Amy’s response too much at face value. They are women. They are both trying to communicate vaguely coherent emotional feel-states by cohering ‘arguments’ that are meant to attain validation for their eternal victimhood. That’s why I say we need to read between the lines a bit more…
The sisters have so many reasons not to invite their frivorcée sister along that it is hard to communicate. Most people do not want to be as aggressive as it takes to list them all.
“By divorcing, ‘X,’ your husband, you became a threat to my husband and family in nearly every way. You will drain my husband’s time and energy taking care of things that your’s would have, and I have no doubt that you will try your best to drain his sack, as well. Your children will be bad influences on my children, and will teach them all the bad habits from which your husband would have protected them. You will be a money drain on my family, you will be a moral drain on my family, you will be a social drain on my family, and you are a threat to my family. You made your choice, now I am making mine. Be careful about being too critical of me, sister; you threw away your family, and I am doing likewise. Did you think you were immune or exempt?”
The Shadowed Knight
No way was this letter fabricated by Amy herself.
AR,
Hey, I will play. I want to kill them, or to banish them. Care to discuss this civilly, or are you just taking shots at women?
The Shadowed Knight
@ TSK
Your comment is the unvarnished truth of the matter, though I don’t know that the sister needs to be utterly “thrown away”.
The original letter indicates that the sisters husband left her for another woman. Not much you can do when your husband divorces you, except maybe hope your family doesn’t desert you also.
I laughed. Thanks Dalrock, you are the man, as always.
Women know the value of another woman. Whether they will admit it or not, women–particularly professional white collar women–who observe their “best friend for life” go through a frivorce–can be acutely aware that her friend couldn’t keep her shit together. They aren’t going to say it, when they are driving around, taking her home, after that late night coffee, listening to their friend talk about it all nite. But they know, instinctively, she may have had domestication issues (sex, cooking, being bitchy), and that, as others have noted, once the husband goes, the truth of whom the woman actually is, comes out to society (often illustrated by their children’s poor behavior at school, around peers, cousins, etc).
You go girl! eventually becomes “maybe some other time”…because after all, the married woman has normal children (for the most part), a job, and wants to get back to the Friday family night movie. Your issues can wait…or not be heard at all, perhaps. Her BFF turns to other things, makes the rounds on match.com, and seeks continual validation from other similarly situated women (in fact, most dating sites are probably PACKED with unhappy 40-something women).
It may not be fair, but women have a keen sense of smell when it comes to other women’s issues, and for whatever “now happily divorced” BS they hear, they know their friend would rather be happily married and taken care of…in whatever way, versus divorced. The test is, when the two women finally have a spat, how long does it take the married one to “accidentally” insert a comment like “just because you couldn’t keep a man” to which they both cry and hug, having realized their fight went too far, etc…but she meant it when she said it, and the divorced gal won’t forget it…she really feels this way about her, and so does every other married woman.
“Not much you can do when your husband divorces you, except maybe hope your family doesn’t desert you also.”
One weekend every year where 4 girls get together and talk about their pintrest, how great their husbands are, and all the activities they drive their kids to because they aren’t working is not abandoning the sister who can’t stand to talk about anything other than her own problems for 2 days, especially when she can’t afford it anyway.
Hell they are probably doing her a favor because she would probably spend money she should be saving for car repair on herself because “she deserves it”.
Amy needs to chill on out. This woman didn’t say they have cut her out of Christmas, Thanksgiving, etc. She didn’t say they are shunning the niece/nephew. They want one bloody weekend every year where they can sit around and feel good about themselves and this sister craps all over that plan so they don’t invite her.
You will drain my husband’s time and energy taking care of things that your’s would have, and I have no doubt that you will try your best to drain his sack, as well.
Maybe I’m naive, but does this really happen very often? A woman sleeping with her sister’s husband?
@Maeve
Good catch. I had missed that. However, the main points don’t change. The status hit and social network change doesn’t come from having frivorced, but from divorcing and not remarrying. Also, it is noteworthy that her sister seems to think she was at least partially to blame for the husband leaving. Moreover, Amy’s outrage isn’t that the woman was divorced due to no fault of her own, but that the sisters would not include the single mother (something SSM pointed out Amy has direct experience with).
Sorry, but the sisters are correct, and Amy is full of last weeks frijoles. They are not obliged to put their marriages and their kids at risk to help someone who is very trying. That ls like giving woman a divorce from their marital responsibliities but make the men work for them the rest of their lives.
I get to do what I want. You have to do what I want.
I do love Dalrock’s solution. Brilliant.
It’d probably happen more often, but wives instinctively keep a close eye on their husbands in that situation. I’m no Don Juan, and I’ve been flirted with by quite a few sisters-in-law and girlfriends’ sisters and best friends. Most women seem to take an “all’s fair in love and war” attitude about it, especially when they’re newly alone.
To Cail Corishev’s point above – most women presume from the outset that should anything happen, they will have the benefit of the man being seen as primarily at fault, by default. So not only do they operate upon an ‘all’s fair in love and war’ premise – but they operate with covert malevolence (tempting the man in every way except that which is not plausibly deniable) and a quasi-freedom from the burden of guilt should it be discovered (it was his fault, i ‘found myself’ in the wrong place at the wrong time, i tried to say no, but you know how men are…). It’s sickening.
“I’m no Don Juan, and I’ve been flirted with by quite a few sisters-in-law and girlfriends’ sisters and best friends. Most women seem to take an “all’s fair in love and war” attitude about it, especially when they’re newly alone.”
I once spoke to a woman who referred to the first few dates after a divorce or long term relationship break-up as “undress rehearsals”. It’s not an attractive part of womanhood, but divorce seems to unleash the inner slut in a lot of women.
This letter is awfully contrived. It seems as though it was written to push all the indignation buttons of its intended audience, and throws out every cliché of the “uptight judgmental Christian” that all “right-thinking” folks would expect to find. I don’t think this is an actual advice letter; it’s a screed meant to generate more page views and faux-outrage.
I’ve been hit on by tons of friends of gfs. I think it’s a function of female psychological self-worth. “If I can steal my friend’s man, then I’ll be higher in the pecking order than friend…” etc.
Dalrock, thank you.
SSM, yes, she does need to be shunned, until she repents. She chose to destroy her family. Once she does that, she poses a threat to all those families around her. She is a poison in the blood.
The Shadowed Knight
The Shadowed Knight
AR,
Hey, I will play. I want to kill them, or to banish them. Care to discuss this civilly, or are you just taking shots at women?
I’m always ready to discuss things civilly, however the last time you attempted to defend murder you didn’t do very well, plus you showed a definite lack of knowledge of history, so are you sure you want another round?
And I’m not taking shots at women, I’m pointing out exactly what Sunshine Bloody Mary said. She’s free to stamp her feet and have all the tantrums she wants, but this quote stands out:
The minute we have driven off our common enemy, it is my hope that the men of the tribe of Christ will kill your kind
In plain English, once feminism is defeated, SunShine wants her husband and other men like him to seek out and murder PUA’a, and any other men who offend her. So she, and you, Shadowed, want the retired Baptist minister down the block from me to get his shotgun, load it up, and go not too far away to an apartment complex where college men live, find the one who is a PUA, and shoot him dead on the spot. And no, it’s not “spiritual warfare” she was writing about, as the very next text makes clear, where she writes about whether the “men of my tribe have the fortitude for such a purging”. She was clearly referring to deliberate, planned, murder. Not self defense, murder. Not resisting attack, murder.
Oh, and in the name of Jesus. Yes, mustn’t forget that part. Apparently it’s essential.
And I bring this up why? Because it clearly demonstrates her character. Anyone who wishes to read the words of SunShineMary should bear in mind all of her words, not just the ones she may offer here from time to time.
Now, SunShineMary, once again I urge you to retract that call to murder. You can still admit that you were wrong. You can still take back those words that may have been written in anger.
As for you, Shadowed Knight, the ball is in your court. Perhaps you should consult the Bible on the topic of murder prior to answering?
In closing, as someone who has instructed in certain forms of self-defense, I have long found the female property of “Let’s You And Him Fight” to be at best annoying, and often downright despicable. As someone who has been trained in lawful self defense, I am morally and legally required to know the difference between defense and offense, between stopping an attacker, and going on the offensive to become an attacker myself. Ignorant people who don’t know the difference, emotional people who in a fit of anger don’t care about the difference, and moronic blowhards who don’t care, all can be a real burden to serious people. This isn’t a game. This is real life. Prattling about murdering people is moronic.
Maeve
The original letter indicates that the sisters husband left her for another woman. Not much you can do when your husband divorces you, except maybe hope your family doesn’t desert you also.
The original letter hinted that the sister was partly to blame for that. I can’t tell if there was more text that Ask Amy redacted, or if the letter writer was simply choosing to hint around but not tell all, in the interests of discretion. There are a lot of questions I’d like to ask, frankly.
And sometimes, life doesn’t turn out as we want it to. Hard to say if a family rift like that would heal, or not.
Divorce And Social Context (+ contagiousness of divorce)
http://simulacral-legendarium.blogspot.ca/2013/07/re-httpdalrock.html
Divorce Outcomes – Men And Women
http://simulacral-legendarium.blogspot.ca/2013/07/divorce-outcomes-men-and-women.html
@ AR
You are simply a lying bitch – the narrative you’ve written above is your own bizarre fantasy and I will not dignify it with a response, but the neither will I continue to allow you to spread gossip and lies about me without responding, I should have nipped this crap in the bud the first time you pulled this pansy-assed stunt.
Your incessant whining about an off-topic subject derails threads despite the fact that I have continued to be on-topic and polite. You are demonstrating exceptional rudeness to our host. You owe him an apology for your continued lack of manners by stirring up gossip and dissension that has nothing to do with Dalrock, this topic, or anything that anyone has written or said here.
MarcusD also note this paper from 2009, it is interesting that a revision was made Oct. 7, 2013. There is a link at this abstract to the main paper, downloadable as PDF.
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1490708
SSM
You are simply a lying bitch
Always good to put the best foot forward in a discussion, isn’t it? Because nothing says “truth” like a little namecalling right up front. However, I am dealing in truth, and I am not a female dog. Make a note of both facts.
– the narrative you’ve written above is your own bizarre fantasy and I will not dignify it with a response,
What narrative? I copied your words character by character from a screen capture of your web site earlier this year. Your words call for murder, in plain English, and in the name of your religion, your God. That’s reality, and you continue to just make yourself look worse the longer you refuse to retract them.
but the neither will I continue to allow you to spread gossip and lies about me without responding, I should have nipped this crap in the bud the first time you pulled this pansy-assed stunt.
What gossip? What lies? Do you deny writing these words?
The minute we have driven off our common enemy, it is my hope that the men of the tribe of Christ will kill your kind
Also, do you deny writing these words?
Naturally, it remains to be seen whether the men of my tribe have the fortitude required for such a purging.
And shall I go on with the rest of the paragraph of your words? Or is this enough to demonstrate your lust for murder in the name of your God? There is nothing about self defense, or “spiritual warfare” in your words, nor are they ambiguous.
I was frankly shocked and disappointed the first time I read that posting earlier in the year, because it was simply not defensible. Not legally, nor morally. Your refusal to heed my reasoned argumentation on your blog at the time convinced me that you were too angry to think. Subsequently I have chosen to point out your horrible error here, expecting you to re-read your own text calmly and realize how wrong it is.
But now, you have had time to reconsider, and apparently you are too arrogant to do so. That is your problem, not mine.
Your incessant whining about an off-topic subject derails threads despite the fact that I have continued to be on-topic and polite.
I have pointed out the facts about your words a few times, SunShineMary, that is not “incessant”, and calmly observing facts is not whining. It appears that you now have decided to post as “true” things that are clearly and obviously “false”. There is a word for that.
You are demonstrating exceptional rudeness to our host. You owe him an apology for your continued lack of manners by stirring up gossip and dissension that has nothing to do with Dalrock, this topic, or anything that anyone has written or said here.
I see, so since you shut down and ran away from your own blog, now you have decided to tell Dalrock how to moderate his? That’s interesting, in a way, but frankly I don’t think he needs anyone’s advice – not yours, and not mine – on how to run his site.
Your temper tantrum doesn’t change the facts. You called for murder in the name of your religion, your God. You have refused to back down from that immoral and despicable position. And now you appear intent on doubling down on that position, rather than admit an error. That’s really not very intelligent.
People should about your call for murder in the name of your religion, and should know that you refuse to admit you were wrong, in order to properly evaluate statements you choose to make on other issues. Your judgement is shown to be quite faulty in the original posting. Cranking out emotional, fact-free attacks on me does not change anything. In fact, it makes your position worse.
Again, I urge you to reconsider these indefensible statements, SunShineMary.
@AR
I’ve seen that paper before, actually (incidentally, Dalrock referenced it here a while ago: https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2011/06/05/the-contagious-nature-of-divorce/)
It’s a really interesting paper, all told.
I sometimes wonder if, like assortative mating, there’s also the same degree of assortative friendship (on a much deeper level – not just friendship) – that is, for example, people who are more likely to divorce not only tend to marry the same, but also tend to associate with others (as friends) that are like that.
Mauve,
There is something you can do Mauve. You can vote for candidates who vow to make “no-fault-divorce” unlawful. You can do that. Do you want to do that?
If not, why not?
The post is still right there for all to read, AR; anyone who reads it can see that you are simply lying and misrepresenting what was written there. And continuing on and on and on, like some kind of High School Drama Club queen.
Are you a compulsive liar or is this something you have control over? I never told Dalrock how to moderate his blog. I told you that you were being unbelievable rude. Which you are. And I called you a liar. Because that is what we call people who tell lies. I have no wish to tie up Dalrock’s thread with this silly nonsense, and it’s a shame that you are so ill-mannered that you would continue to do so. The record shows that you, as usual, started a completely unprovoked catfight. I don’t think I’ve ever engaged in a catfight with a man before, but I guess there is a first for everything.
I engaged in a polite and on-topic conversation with fellow readers here at Dalrock’s blog about his essay. You launched a bizarre, hysterical attack out of left field. However, if I wish to continue to contribute to discussions here, I will do so as long as our host permits me to; I will not be bullied into silence by a lying coward such as yourself.
Okay, I hit submit too soon:
That would potentially explain a contagiousness of divorce, just like disease, in some cases ( though perhaps on a much larger cultural scale, such as immunity to smallpox (Cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Siege_of_Tenochtitlan)).
Hi Mary,
Sidebar, I miss your blog. I liked reading it. I understand why you shut it down and I support that decision but I still miss it.
There I said it. Dalrock, apologies in advance for the sidebar.
Hm. This involves cross-posting from another thread, but perhaps I can find a sort of middle ground for AR and SSM, or at least make a case for the pointlessness of your difference here.
I posted the link to this piece by Kim du Toit on the “poutyface” thread (which is about the Obamas and the Nigerian girl group kidnap, and, about how Africa is hopeless):
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/924795/posts “Let Africa Sink”
———————————————————————————-
Then, there is this unsettling but highly defensible thought, that the very leadership of this country, STARTING WITH THE OBAMAS, is as hopeless:
http://shoebat.com/2014/05/10/obamas-brother-negotiate-release-nigerian-schoolgirls/
“Obamas Share Boko Haram’s Agenda to Eradicate Christian Education”
———————————————————————————–
Next, here is an essay showing that the bulk of our population, our very nation, or volk, is as bad, as unsalveageable, in their own way:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2958395/posts “Let America Sink”
(Rudyard Kipling’s poem “The Gods of the Copybook Headings” and Yeat’s poem “The Second Coming” do come to mind here as well.)
First of the 3 stanzas of TSC:
“Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
—————————————————————————————————-
Finally, I share the conclusion reached by the author of this essay that it’s all coming down, fairly soon, without anyone opposed to it needing to do anything to speed it up and get it over with.
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2958395/posts
The Misandry Bubble, already read by many here, and the Transcript of the Femocalypse take this position as well.
http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.html
http://owningyourshit.blogspot.ca/2012/03/transcript-of-fempocalypse.html
Leave each other be. You’re both going to get your wish(es), where the soil that nourishes most sexual relationship immorality is about to get washed away.
Argh. The two posts above at freerepublic.com SHOULD have been these two:
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/924795/posts “Let Africa Sink”
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2958395/posts “Let America Sink”
“Maybe I’m naive, but does this really happen very often? A woman sleeping with her sister’s husband?”
I can’t offer stats on the matter but once dated a divorced woman who’s single sister had slept with her husband during her marriage. Rivalry and competition between women is always there and sisters can be vicious cutthroats.
At the risk of prolonging the side discussion, I just want to say that I followed the link to Sunshine Mary’s blog, and read the post that Anonymous Reader is talking about. And for the record: AR is, quite simply, lying about its content. It is impossible to miss the fact that SSM is using a metaphor (or rather, continuing the metaphor started by the person she’s responding to), as will be obvious to any honest person who reads the post.
@Anonymous Reader:
You owe Sunshine Mary an apology for deliberately distorting the meaning of what she wrote. I will grant that when she first wrote that piece, it was possible to miss that she was speaking metaphorically, as at the time she wrote it, it did not have the footnotes that it now has (where she explains in no uncertain terms that she is speaking metaphorically). But now? Now it is impossible to honestly claim that she is calling for anyone’s murder. You know this, and yet you are continuing to make this false claim. You need to apologize, retract your statements, and come back and join those of us who are trying to engage in honest discussion about the screwed-up state of the world. I implore you to examine your conscience, and repent of lying.
If I had your email address, I would have rebuked you privately. Since I do not, and your offense has been public, my rebuke must needs be public as well. But if you wish to continue this discussion in private, Dalrock should be able to retrieve my email address from this comment. I hereby give him permission to share my email address with you if you ask him for it.
Interesting read: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/05/13/canadians-more-likely-to-be-anti-semitic-than-americans-poll-finds/
Dear Luke:
Nice work on the reconciliation. It’s my policy not to join into such things, but I think there’s merit in both positions also.
SSM *is* wishing she could murder guys like me, and it’s better just to get that out in the open (I’ve had more death threats than hot meals, after a few years in the manosphere, so I don’t take it personally, but it is what it is.
As a (technical) historian, though, I don’t find her sentiments any different from many others here, outside of a bit of rhetorical flourish. Most of us long for a more civilized society, which may approach the one that we imagine existed a few decades ago. (The smart peeps call this “retroculture”, and there is debate as to how historical it is, but that’s not the point).
In 1914, in North America, a guy who lived the way I live would probably not be murdered outright, but he would have been run out of town. If he lived in a very large city, he might be able to move to a neighborhood on the other end of the city, but he’d be run out of his own social circle in any event.
It would have nothing to do with the “tribe of Christ” either. If the 1914 me picked up the daughter of the rabbi and convinced her to go carousing, he’d have called around until he found my Catholic boss, my Protestant father, my Mormon uncle, and my landlord who headed up the local Atheist meeting, and they’d have all been immediately unanimous on getting me and my dysfunctional antics away from their civilized community. I’d shortly find myself homeless, with no job, unwelcome in the company of any decent person, and I’d have to hop a train to the next town, and hopefully behave myself wherever I ended up.
Even as temporally close to today as the late 1960s, you can find evidence of a very different society in North America. Jobs were listed as “Married Men Only” for example. An unmarried man was seen as a bad credit risk and someone to be at least suspicious of. People neither divorced, nor did they fight in public, and PUA types running day game got shut down immediately.
In any event, I like everyone in this discussion, and like you, I can sorta see where all sides are coming from.
Regards,
Boxer
I’m assuming Amy, the letter writer, and her sister are all American chicks.
I like Americans (and consider myself one, after living here for a few years). Unfortunately, Americans have some bad traits. One of these is the need to be as flamboyant as possible, loudly shouting their unwanted opinions here, giving unsolicited advice there, and pushing their lifestyles in everyone’s faces.
People are sorta amazed at the social circles I run in. When I’m with family, I can assume the appearance of an observant Mormon guy. I can hang with very religious Muslims and not offend them either.
As an aside: I almost think the whole “in your face” attitude got started with the gay community. It’s as though composure and self-respect are seen as being “repressed” or “in the closet”. I’m not gay, but it wouldn’t surprise me if some gay dude from someplace else found American gays as bizarre as I find them. I don’t really care if you like other guys, but I don’t want to see you having sex with them in the street during the parade, you know? It’s a matter of taste and aesthetics, not morality.
In any event, if the sister actually wanted to hang with her family, she wouldn’t make herself a chronic nuisance. She doesn’t really want to hang with her family members. She likes being excluded, as it gives her the chance to whine about how persecuted she is, etc.
Regards, Boxer
AR, I think you misremember. I faired quite well. Of what part of history was I supposed to have been ignorant? Anyway, I am always ready.
You are creating a ridiculous scenario, one of your own imagining. You then present that scenario to us, and easily defeat it. Trumpeting your victory, you stand above your strawman.
Let us go to a more realistic scenario, one that I will stand behind. Feminists and leftists have been purged from the country. Murdered, if you like. The welfare state is finished between the war and the economic collapse that followed it. The United States have split, with the Northwestern States, Western Canada, Alaska, and Northern California forming a new nation based on shared ethnicity and religion. It is in this world that we shall craft our story.
A young woman is foolish, as young people and women are. She is in love–tingles–with a rake of a man. He does all the nice things, says al the right things, and they have sex. She gets pregnant, because they did not use birth control. The father of the woman in question, along with his brother and his oldest son, pay a visit to the young man and explain his options. One, he marries the woman he deflowered and impregnated. Two, they shoot him. He tells them to go to hell. They shoot him.
The story comes out in court when the shooting is investigated. The father is fined for not protecting his daughter and contributing to bastardy. The daughter is sentenced to public flogging, suspended until after the birth. The father is acquitted of murder charges and the death is ruled a justifiable homicide.
When I begin this purging, it will be with the law on my side, because I will be the law. Then it is not murder. I can call it execution! See, all better.
I was trained to kill people when I was told. Various rules were laid upon it, of course, but in the end, it is about killing people who have committed the crime of living in another country. You do not defend yourself in another man’s land. You go on the offensive and kill him off.
Your training is the result of a disgusting legal system that punishes people for defending themselves or their property. How is it moral to leave the responsibility for dealing with a criminal for the next person? What if it is a woman, a child, or an old man? What if a young man loses his life and all he could have made of it because you did not want to offend a savage? Fuck that, fuck the law, and damn you for being a coward.
The Shadowed Knight
TiMER (2009)
If a clock could count down to the moment you meet your soul mate, would you want to know?
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1179794/
—
The summary is also worth reading.
Do you think that there is a social stigma against divorced males much like you state divorced women have? Everyone is posting that Ask Amy article on FB but no one I know deciphered it like you did Dalrock. Quite impressive.
I would not have mentioned it had Anonymous Reader brought the subject up – and somewhat apposite as she is talking about exclusion – but I have got to say that having re-read SSM’s offending essay, I once again fail to see anything allegorical in her call to arms; her meaning is as clear as could be, and she backs that up with her reliance on The Bible (in response to my attempt to make her see that the murderous intent is entirely of her own making) – or does she see that as allegorical too? – she cannot have it both ways. Perhaps it was also an allegorical pink gun she gave her teenage daughter for Xmas.
As I wrote on her blog (though my comment was rejected) had she written that in England she would almost certainly have been arrested and faced a period of imprisonment. One can only as ever envy your 1st Amendment.
“The reason why married women shun divorcees is not only because of the status hit, but also for several other very sensible reasons.
1. Divorce is catching. If people in your social circle divorce, it spreads.”
Yeah. So married women shun divorcees because they are afraid those divorcees may plant the idea of divorce in their heads. Seems legit. You forgot to mention another reason though: divorcees are likely to try tempt married men to cheat.
“Maybe I’m naive, but does this really happen very often? A woman sleeping with her sister’s husband?”
Pretty much yes, due to preselection.
All the reasons listed here play into it, and most of them are unconscious. It’s not that a woman thinks to herself, “I’d better stay away from her because divorce is catching,” or, “I’d better not leave her alone with Jim or she’ll be sitting in his lap.” She just feels like Betsy is really annoying these days and she doesn’t like having her around so much anymore.
There is a stigma against divorced men as well, but it is not as strong and it is enforced differently and experienced differently.
One of the main differences is that most men are not as socially reliant/needy as women are. That is, typically a woman who is excluded from what she considers to be her rightful social network is in a world of pain, because most women very much rely on this network emotionally/psychologically as an element of their own personal sense of well-being. Being excluded from it is very painful and disturbing to the typical woman. Men tend to be much less social network reliant and more comfortable being lone wolves (not strictly loners without friends, but less reliant on the friend network for a sense of their own personal well-being). So the experience of being cast out from the social sphere of married couples, while irritating, is nowhere near as painful psychologically for the typical man as it is for the typical woman.
Another key difference is that typically the enforcers of the casting out will be the married women in the circle more than the married men (not always, but more typically). I think that the underlying basis for this, whether it is consciously recognized as such or not, is the fear that the single man will “infect” the husband(s) with “single man ways and habits” that the wives do not want (often with some degree of justification, to be honest … the habits of a single person are, of course, very different from those of a married one), including, perhaps, the sense that the grass is greener on the other side of the fence, the stoking of a so-called “midlife crisis” and the like. This is like mate guarding from the other side of the coin – worry that the single men will change the behavior of their husbands. Perhaps encouraging infidelity, or perhaps encouraging other behavior changes that are not wanted, or just encouraging a kind of discontent that they would rather avoid.
It also has to be kept in mind that the degree of stigma varies by social class, with the UMC enforcing a greater de facto stigma, because it tends to have the lowest divorce rates, so is more prone to see divorce as a specific and personal failure than lower social classes where it is more common.
From what I can tell, the letter writer wasn’t shunning her sister at all. She was simply choosing not to invite her on this one particular outing that she and her other sister take every year. Not the same thing as shunning at all.
Given that the woman was left for another woman, frivorce hardly seems like the right word to use, and even still I don’t have a problem with the letter writer and the other sister whom they alluded to choosing to take the trip without her. She is not owed an invitation.
As for married and single women being friends: I found myself on the other end of that after I married. The friend who introduced me to my husband and stood up for me at our wedding made a declaration not long after our first child was born. That our lives were just “too different” and that we had nothing in common anymore.
We’d been acquainted in some was since we were very young children. Our fathers are still very good friends, so I was a little disappointed but I knew she was right. We still see each other about once a year, and send one another Christmas cards, stuff like that. And that’s fine. We really don’t have anything in common anymore. We were very different even when we did spend time together.
The difference in this case is that these women are sisters, and sisters are harder on one another than friends are. This (in my opinion) isn’t so much about women shunning their divorced friends. Most married women live vicariously through their divorced friends, not shun them. At least that’s what I have witnessed.
No, this is about the fact that the letter writer knows her sister well, her sister gets on her nerves with all her madness but she’s stuck with her (they’re family after all), and she wants someone to affirm her in this one time a year when she does something without feeling the need to include her. Divorced or not.
“I think that the underlying basis for this, whether it is consciously recognized as such or not, is the fear that the single man will “infect” the husband(s) with “single man ways and habits” that the wives do not want”
Excuse me, Nova, but this doesn’t sound realistic at all. Divorced men are usually in financial ruin and psychological despair, often suicidal. Getting frivorced – and it’s usually frivorce we’re talking about here, initiated by wives – is a massive DLV. No sane person thinks of the newly-divorced man as some sort of lothario poised to hunt pussy, tempting husbands towards the playboy lifestyle. No sane person thinks a wife is likely to cheat on her husband with his loser fivorced friend.
Speaking as a single male: my married friends appear to envy my independence; their wives dislike me and have a tendency to storm-off – that I told one to her face that she was a whore, and another that she was worse than *&%^*%£%$, presumably did not help – whatever the gods gave women, it was not a sense of humour. One married acquaintance even suggested to her husband that she would divorce him ‘so that you can marry Opus’. I told her privately that I had no intention of marrying her husband and that my only romantic interest as between the pair of them was her, as she allowed my hand to caress her thigh.
Married men imagine that all single-males are alpha-dudes: I can see no reason to make clear their delusion.
It’s not so much lothario as it is having a lot of freedom which the husband no longer has. She isn’t necessarily worried about him getting the idea of running off with his secretary as she is about him becoming less patient with the lack of freedom his married life has in it when compared to his divorced friend. Again, it isn’t necessarily that she is worried about her husband wanting to divorce (that’s not common among men, in terms of being influenced that way), but rather about her husband becoming less content with the status quo in the marriage and his relative lack of freedom. This varies, of course, depending on what the divorced guy is doing. If the divorced guy is leading a pathetic life of a practical shut-in, then, no. If he is making a reasonable go at living life after his divorce, however, it’s quite uncomfortable for the wives to have him around because it can create dissatisfactions in the husbands. Not necessarily sexually-related, but time-related. Stress-related. And so on.
As a divorced guy I can openly say that married guys generally don’t treat m differently *unless* they are around their wives. Often they are curious about what you do with your time, given that they don’t have much time any longer generally (the guys I work with are among the most time-poor men going, between working jobs with very demanding hours and then having the UMC parent/spouse expectations in the evenings … the time they have to themselves is basically limited to the lunch hour in the gym and the time they have alone grinding through the commute in their cars). None of them would “trade places” with me (at least not in a permanent way), but they are interested in the differences in lifestyle.
Now, of course, being divorced is a bad thing, not a good thing. When asked I do emphasize this, and the issues relating to my son and so on and that’s nothing they want any part of, in terms of wanting to trade places with me or anything – that isn’t the issue. The issue can be that the envy the free time you have, which they don’t have. When I am around married guys with their wives (mostly work-related social events), you can literally feel, palpably, the skepticism radiating from the wives towards you as an older divorced guy, and how it literally changes if/when they learn that you are not single, but divorced (lifetime singles are written off in a different way than divorced guys are, and are seen as being less dangerous/threatening). The threat they feel is not, I think, that your presence is going to make their husbands want to divorce them, but rather that it may make them push back on the ever-growing Honey-Do list, and demand more space and time for themselves, which is very much against what most wives want when it comes to their husbands.
A woman’s fears don’t have to be realistic. Nova is right: married women have a general, vague fear that their husband’s single or divorced friends will drag them off to poker nights or talk them into turning the garage into a man cave. That they’ll compete with her for his loyalties, basically.
My experience as a divorced man is that others tend to think, “Couldn’t keep a woman, huh?” They never say it in so many words, of course, but you catch the subtext. When a man and woman split up, no matter who initiated it or who was at fault, the general response is to see the woman as becoming freer, more empowered, moving on to an exciting new stage in her life, while the man failed and “lost” her. That’s just how it is. That’s also why you should never discuss your divorce with a date beyond, “It didn’t work out”: there’s no way to explain it that doesn’t make the man look weak.
@boxer: I like Americans (and consider myself one, after living here for a few years). Unfortunately, Americans have some bad traits. One of these is the need to be as flamboyant as possible, loudly shouting their unwanted opinions here, giving unsolicited advice there, and pushing their lifestyles in everyone’s faces.
As someone with both long historical roots (to the 1600s in the former colonies, which is “long” here in N. America) in my family, and international roots (on the other side, from Spain, N. Africa), who has traveled to other countries and is married to someone of another country (as are two family members), I’ve always been stricken by the perception many non-Americans have of us –opinions I’ve heard of Americans from people from all over the globe, over decades.
You aren’t necessarily wrong, and clearly part of our loud, opinionated, flamboyance as it were is the natural outflow of a society which at least once, was based upon individual rights, liberty and well, “ruggedness”; however, I have noticed that what elevates this perception, is that so many DIFFERENT people (in the US) are doing so, where as, in monolithic cultures (or those that are largely still homogenous), unwanted opinions, advice and lifestyles are pushed every day, onto people who, functionally, have no right of redress or “space” if you will (think Saudi, Nigeria, Russia, etc).
Quite privately, I have been surprised at how “opinionated” Europeans are in particular, about the United States, our people, our culture, freely (and typically arrogantly) criticizing us, often based upon incorrect “facts”, or stereotypes, when if we were in their country, we wouldn’t dream of doing so, particularly to strangers. I am not suggesting you did this or do such a thing, but it seems to be a pattern that both my brother (who has literally been everywhere) and I have discussed before, when we’ve traveled to other nations and observed the protective nature of their culture. My wife (from S. America) has often scratched her head at the strange things, even her own countrymen have said and/or claimed of Americans, that she either knew to not be true, or knew were based upon bizarre logic.
Everyone seems to see what they choose in America and our culture, and their perceptions are a bit of a Rorschach blot than anything.
“lifetime singles are written off in a different way than divorced guys are, and are seen as being less dangerous/threatening”
Hah! Pre-deselection in effect, I suppose.
Everyone seems to see what they choose in America and our culture, and their perceptions are a bit of a Rorschach blot than anything.
True, but it’s also “what America are you looking at”. There’s a lot of variety here, socially and even regionally (still). It seems that people have their images of Americans that are kind of an amalgam of the gun-toting southerner stereotype, the Manhattan sophisticate bankster stereotype, the smarmy LA entertainment/pornosphere stereotype, the Evangelical Christian from the middle of the country stereotype and so on, and kind of smush them together into a gun-toting Manhattan bankster who is an evangelical Christian while being an avid viewer of porn – and just laugh at the contradictions and hypocrisies involved. But of course, that amalgam doesn’t exist (hypocrisy does exist, of course, but not generally in that amalgam). All of the various negatives about our culture tend to get thrown into a pot and brewed up into a stew. Most of it based on films and television.
I do think that foreigners who have lived for a few years in the US, like Opus has, have a different perspective. Again, likely limited to what they experienced in the US, but still a different perspective from people who are more prone to base their views on television and movies.
@hoellenhund2: I think you are right, to a degree, but it depends on the social class the man belonged to, how many kids he had (child support) and what he “lost”. I’ve been that guy to a degree, but found that because I had a high income, I was able to overcome most of the stigma of being wrecked by divorce, and continue to play.
What amazed me, prior to meeting my new wife ten years ago (she was also divorced, and we’ve had three kids and a normal marriage), was how open the field was for me as a divorced father, who was pretty involved with my kids. Most 30-something women oddly, didn’t seem to care at all, or even ask a whole lot. Certainly some did, but many just saw my divorce as a right of passage and my value as intact–including single women who had never married.
I think a lot of this depends on other factors, when it comes to stigma, including social class, education and income (as well as where you live). I live in the DC Metro area, and there are TONS of successful divorced men and women with blended families, kids here, there, everywhere, and yet the fathers and mothers remain professionally successful and not THAT stigmatized.
By the way, I remember Bill Maher saying in one of his stand-up acts that the wives of his friends usually try to separate them from his company because he’s akin to a runaway slave bringing news of freedom to the plantation. It should be added, of course, that Bill Maher isn’t the usual bachelor that women picture in their mind, i.e. the impoverished loser porn addict no woman wants.
Hah! Pre-deselection in effect, I suppose.
It depends. In the American UMC marriage is (still) the norm. So a man who has not married by his 40s is generally considered to fall into one of three categories: (1) cad, (2) gay or (3) not marriageable for other reasons (i.e., personality problem, not attractive enough problem, etc.). The men in category 1 (cads) are seen as definite threats (e.g., they may drag husband off to a club on a boys night out or something like that), but there really are very, very few of them. I know one personally who was a college friend of mine (been a cad since that time), but that’s one. There aren’t very many guys in the UMC who are in their mid 40s because they are cads – a few, but not many. So, most of the guys who are unmarried (never married) by the mid-40s and in the UMC are either category 2 or category 3, which are seen as less threatening — either not interested in other women, or not attractive to other women, and so their impact on husband will likely be less. In other words, husband is not going to envy a gay guy his free time, and if the guy has free time because he is such an obviously problematic person that he could never attract a mate to begin with, he’s less likely to envy that free time as well – seems more like the result of being a messed up person. But a divorced guy who doesn’t become a total basket-case recluse is in a different situation – more on the “normal” side of the equation, so even if the husband doesn’t want to trade places (and he almost never does, that’s just very uncommon among men), he’s still intrigued by the differences in a way that he isn’t when it comes to a gay guy or an incel.
NOVASEEKER said: “When I am around married guys with their wives (mostly work-related social events), you can literally feel, palpably, the skepticism radiating from the wives towards you as an older divorced guy, and how it literally changes if/when they learn that you are not single…”
I also think, having been that divorced guy, that married women realize that you know something their husband, doesn’t–at least that he hasn’t expressed. That is that you see through their BS and have taken another woman head on in a relationship, called her out and opted legally to not “be there for her”. This does not mean the married woman knows all the facts of your divorce (child support, alimony, who initiated), but I always sensed they had the kind of fear one would have around a true mind-reader/psychic; that you know their game, have defeated it and kept on playing.
Their protective nature of other women, instinctively, leads them to naturally dislike you–because they know you probably view them as the naggy, bitchy, sexless woman your wife was.
This perception is particularly true of married women who, in honest moments, know they are naggy, bitchy and sexless with their own husband.
No, Boxer, that is not correct. Just because AR says so does not make it so, and furthermore this is not a difference of opinion: AR is directly lying with the purposeful intention of deceiving people. I’ve let him get away with this harassment long enough now.
Literally no other person there read the post the way AR did. What happened (which I will explain to you because you are decent human being whose sense of humor I adore) was that a Pick Up Artist named Runs On Magic wrote an allegorical post in which he and the other manospherians start a new tribe that rapes, pillages and burns “Rome”; he wrote this post FIRST and linked to me. This is part of what he wrote:
source: http://runsonmagic.com/2014/01/really-want-solution/
Since he linked to me, I responded in the same allegorical vein, writing this:
source: http://sunshinemaryandthedragon.wordpress.com/2014/01/20/ill-dress-up-as-truman-if-youll-dress-up-as-stalin/
It was clearly allegory and I even added a post-script when AR began flipping out half way through the thread (no one else was having AR;s problem; for instance, Rollo laughingly sent me silly tweets about being his tribe of Vikings for days after that). AR had no problem with Runs On Magic saying he was creating a new tribe of men to loot Rome but AR became a hysterical, emotional mess when I responded to ROM by saying that if his tribe was going to rape, pillage and loot my tribe, then I hoped the men in my tribe would drive out, convert, or kill his kind.
Boxer, if someone wrote a post, even allegorically, in which they said they were going to enter your house, beat you up, rob you, rape you, and kill you, would you not say, “Well then, I will defend myself. I will drive you out or kill you if I cannot drive you out.”? That reaction, even though allegorical, would be entirely reasonable.
AR knows all this. He has had it explained to him repeatedly by a number of different people. He continues to rudely disrupt Dalrock’s threads, and while I appreciate you trying to be reasonable and make peace, there will not be peace because he is committed to attacking me with his histrionic slap-fighting, and I’m done with turning the other cheek. I will defend myself every time he pulls this childish stunt from now on.
My preference, however, it to return to discussing Dalrock’s essay and end this strange, obsessive emotional outburst that AR has *once again* subjected everyone to.
@Novaseeker “The threat they feel is not, I think, that your presence is going to make their husbands want to divorce them, but rather that it may make them push back on the ever-growing Honey-Do list, and demand more space and time for themselves, which is very much against what most wives want when it comes to their husbands.”
Very correct. He might go fishing an extra Saturday out from under her watchful eye.
SSM’s listing of practical reasons mostly apply to divorced women, who are indeed sinks of money and time and emotional investment. The only one that might apply also to divorced men is “1. Dicorce is catching.” But does it apply EQUALLY to divorced men and to divorced women?
I think I recall the study I read applied it to a set of couples, so that if one couple divorced then the others were more likely. But if the contagion spreads through the physical presence of the divorced man or woman, which gender is the major carrier? I’m going to guess women, because of women interacting more with women, and women filing more.
Enrique –
I also live in the DC area, and I agree with what you say about remarrying after divorce here. It’s not uncommon. I do think that if you remarry after divorce, a good amount of the stigma is diminished by that – not all of it, but a good amount of it. You’ve kind of rejoined the club by doing that, and are playing by the rules again, even if you had a divorce along the way.
If you are a longer-term divorced and unmarried person – whether a man or a woman – there is a stigma that does attach, although I think it’s much more subtle than the social stigma that existed in general towards divorced people in earlier eras. I think, above all, there is a sense that living like this is “cheating”, as compared with the norms of the professional UMCs in general.
@Novaseeker
Indeed, and one day I will finish my sequel to De Tocqueville probably to be entitled Son of Democracy in America. So here (I know you are all keen to read this) is what I think is most characteristic of Americans: when you tell an American that you have a problem, even though you are a stranger to him, he wants to help, indeed he is sure that he can do so, and will show seemingly genuine concern – consider IBB on the previous thread – no idea where Nigeria might be but he wants to get in there and save the girls – a mixture of goodwill and naivety. America has a can-do attitude which is very appealing. Americans are friendly (big smile; great teeth), though your help is not always seen as helpful.
For those keen to understand the English (and its class system) may I recommend Kate Fox’s book Watching the English. It might be summed-up in the joke which goes as follows: an English man (let’s say someone like Colin Firth) and a woman (let’s say Miss World) are washed up on a desert island: after a year they are rescued and the News reporter (obviously American) asks the man what it was like living alone for a whole year alone on an island with the most beautiful woman in the world. The man replies that he cannot adequately answer the question as they were never introduced. Game is wasted on the English.
Amy gets this one completely right. Moreover, she fully acknowledges the sister’s freedom to exclude her divorced sister, but just tells her that she can’t control how her sister feels about it. The letter writing sister wants Amy to morally validate what she’s chosen to do and Amy refuses. The letter writing sister also wants her choice to not have any emotional consequences for her divorced sister and it does. Choices and consequences–I would have thought that more in these parts would applaud that.
1. Her husband left. All her sister said is that it takes “two to tango.” Sure it does, just like when women choose to leave their husbands. Those men probably “contributed to it” as well, so long as we’re speculating. But it’s explicit that her husband chose to leave her and her child “for another woman.” There’s a lot of eagerness to downplay this so that this woman can fit into some morality tale.
2. Her sister doesn’t raise any moral objections to divorce, only the fact that her sister doesn’t “fit in” with them. The fact that they are churchgoers is neither here nor there given how many accept divorce in general. This woman’s family is not disciplining her spiritually, they are not attempting to teach her a lesson, they simply don’t care, and she’s cramping their style.
3. The outing the other sisters went on involved cousins and no husbands at all and is only once per year. This sister is not going after their men because they aren’t there. Moreover, her sister couldn’t be *that* overburdened by her other sister given the infrequency of their get-togethers.
4. Her husband was going to call the police because the sister was crying and upset? Really? It was that serious? No, it wasn’t. They just don’t care and again, having to actually extend themselves would require too much of them.
So, we have a woman who was abandoned by her husband and left to raise a child on her own. That would be the time that you would need more family support, right? Or should she have expected more from strangers than her own sisters? That seems to be what the sister thinks. “Why can’t she find other friends?” Well, some people are under the impression that family is more significant than friendship and is not based on how much you feel like you have in common. The advice-asking sister has a piss-poor concept of family and the fact that so many others eagerly co-sign her behavior makes me feel sorry for all the people out there with family members like this. Given the state of things, any one of these sisters or cousins could easily find themselves in that woman’s shoes.
That article has been making the social media rounds; my takeaway has been most people are sharing it with an undercurrent of “hur dur, look at these hypocritical Christians.”
NOVA: Probably so. Being remarried and mixing with other professionals in the area, who often tend to be remarried (our social circles), the fact of being prior-divorced is no more stigmatizing than the assumption that everyone had a one-nighter with a fatty due to beer goggles. It’s not mentioned in polite company.
The longer you have been remarried, and have established family ties (children, activities), the less anyone cares or it is even talked about. I recall finding out recently that some friends of ours both had been married before, and like us, had older, nearly adult children. My wife and I have 7 between us (but only three together our oldest four being mid to late teens). We’ve been blessed in that we found each other, joined forces, incomes and created our own relatively normal family. Even our child support wars are largely over (settled) and my oldest kids will be emancipated. Life’s good.
Did I mention my wife is totally cool and thinks like a guy, and is a born South American Catholic turned a right wing Evangelical? Unfortunately, we are stuck in this cesspool of liberalism here in MoCo.
@ Denise:
You raise interesting points. I did note that this woman was not a frivorcee, and the she was left for another woman should not be glossed over. She does need her family’s love and grace right now and more importantly, her child needs them.
I just don’t think this has anything at all to do with the fact that the sister is divorced. It sounds like something that has been festering since childhood and now the letter writer has a convenient excuse to put some distance between herself and her sister.
but just tells her that she can’t control how her sister feels about it.
Very true, but the kind of personality that would show up in someone’s house yelling at them that they are a horrible person for not inviting her goes beyond the way the sister “feels” about being excluded from the trip. It’s a demand that everyone else suffer with her in her hurt.
A simple call saying, “Please explain your reasoning, because my feelings are hurt and I’d like to understand” goes much farther than an outburst, which just serves to solidify in the “offending party’s” mind that they were justified in the decision they made.
This is really not a great example of the dynamic of women as they navigate post-divorce relationships because this is about the fact that you can’t choose your family no matter how much you sometimes wish you could.
No, we don’t know that. But the fact that you take the best possible interpretation of the divorced sister’s claims to heart without a single pinch of salt while discarding the married sister’s claims as exaggerated and uncaring, and that you would encourage the rest of society to do the same, just shows why a married woman in a situation like this has to be proactive in making sure that her family doesn’t get peer-pressured into participating in the sister’s divorcee drama.
@tacomaster2
Thank you. Novaseeker and others have already done better than I could in explaining the differences here. The only observation I would add is that men very often are entirely crushed for several years after divorce, especially if it was against their will (true in the majority of cases). But once the impact of being blindsided and having his family torn apart subsides the tables very often turn. The divorcing woman generally gets a temporary empowerment boost which fades quickly after a year or so if she doesn’t either remarry or appear to be solidly on track to remarry. For men they tend to have an opposite path of taking a hard dive early on and then bouncing back. The man’s individual situation will determine much of this, but if you keep Rollo’s SMV chart in mind as well as the stats on unmarried men’s earnings by age you can get a sense for why this would be the case.
15% of unmarried White men in their 30s have zero earnings, and this jumps to 22% and then 24% when you look at the same group in their early and late 40s. If you add in the percentage of men who earn something but next to nothing, it is even higher*. So a divorced man who is past the totally crushed phase and still has even a moderate income and a respectable career is part of a relatively scarce group. He isn’t disqualified as gay/cad/loser by virtue of having already married, and there is a severe shortage of unmarried men with the kind of minimal income a woman in her 30s or older is going to be seeking now that she is more focused on the status of commitment. This is true even if the man is for all practical purposes broke due to paying child support, etc. It isn’t that he doesn’t take a hit for being broke, but that he is in a different category than a man who is earning nothing or very little. The way to picture this is how a woman would look if she took the man as her date/boyfriend to a wedding. The divorced and poor man with a career has a very different status than the 30 or 40 something man who still doesn’t have his professional act together.
*I haven’t run the numbers for all of the age brackets, but for early thirties unmarried White men the figure nearly doubles to 29% if you look at those earning less than $15k a year.
But the fact that you take the best possible interpretation of the divorced sister’s claims to heart…
It was not the divorced sister’s claim. This point was conceded by the letter writing sister. Even though she clearly doesn’t like her sister very much at all, she thought it was significant enough not to be left out.
That said, I reiterate my point about the type of personality that lashes out i someone’s home with an emotional tirade. Maybe that’s where the “it takes two to tango” stuff came in.
It doesn’t negate the fact that family is supposed to look out for one another. Love isn’t really love unless it’s demonstrated in the face on the unlovable. I just don’t see where inviting a struggling single mother on a weekend shopping trip getaway is tantamount to being unloving.
I guess it depends on how the exclusion was handled.
So a divorced man who is past the totally crushed phase and still has even a moderate income and a respectable career is part of a relatively scarce group. He isn’t disqualified as gay/cad/loser by virtue of having already married, and there is a severe shortage of unmarried men with the kind of minimal income a woman in her 30s or older is going to be seeking now that she is more focused on the status of commitment. This is true even if the man is for all practical purposes broke due to paying child support, etc. It isn’t that he doesn’t take a hit for being broke, but that he is in a different category than a man who is earning nothing or very little. The way to picture this is how a woman would look if she took the man as her date/boyfriend to a wedding. The divorced and poor man with a career has a very different status than the 30 or 40 something man who still doesn’t have his professional act together.
Pretty much exactly right. If a guy like that wants to be remarried, he can be, because he’s a rare-ish thing, and there are plenty of women in the market for marriage at that age who are older than 35.
Dalrock says:
May 13, 2014 at 8:14 pm
Regarding the exclusion of divorced persons from one’s social circle…
Even assuming the divorced sister is thusly situated due to no fault of her own (the husband left), there is prudence in adopting a measured approach in interacting with these individuals, particularly where children are involved, and even in the case of family members. Divorce is indeed contagious as evidenced by the longitudinal Framingham study. Like it or not, interacting with divorced people is at least a little toxic for married people, and it does not matter whose fault the divorce was.
As much as it pains me to say the above given that I’ve received so much support from family and friends post-divorce, those of us who are divorced need to recognize the ill effect our situation very likely has on others and self-segregate to a degree.
Novaseeker says:
May 14, 2014 at 7:48 am
I suspect that one of the worst influences a wife could see brought ot bear on her husband would be a divorced man who has managed to get his life back on track as best he can (there is no getting back to the financial trajectory he would have been on had he remained married, but htat is another topic). It lowers her threatpoint against the husband.
I appreciate your earlier comment about being honest with friends about being divorced as being a bad and not a good thing. I have a standing offer to all men in my cirlce that they may come and wear my moccasins for awhile so as to be able to appreciate the reality of divorce.
Elspeth, the married sister referred to her sister’s “ex-husband who left her for another woman, but everyone knows it takes ‘two to tango’ and she is not without fault.” The commenter I replied to interpreted that as, “abandoned by her husband and left to raise a child on her own.” See why I said she’s putting the best/worst possible interpretation on it? We have no idea how much child support the ex pays, or how much time he spends with the kid, or how much he fought for custody. Since she says “two to tango,” it doesn’t sound like he just “abandoned” her out of the blue. It’s possible that he’s the worst wife-abandoning cad in history, but her story doesn’t support that.
But like you said, this sounds like it goes back a ways; yelling matches over a single event don’t just come out of nowhere. I’ve been around families where everyone’s very pleasant and the members do seem to really love each other and enjoy spending time together, but you can feel the tension lurking under the surface, just waiting for someone to say the wrong thing and cause a blowup that might turn into years of not speaking to each other.
What’s interesting is that this commenter, like Amy and the hundreds of people who “liked” her calling this sister a horrible person based on this one letter, jumped on the worst possible interpretation of the husband’s behavior to make the divorced woman look like as much of a helpless victim as possible. Like I said, that just shows why the married woman has to be careful: a whole lot of people will try to push her into being “nice” to her divorced sister (or friend) regardless of the possible harm to her family. I guess when they’re not beating up on a man, a loyal married woman makes a decent substitute.
I also suspect that “she doesn’t go to church” is I’m-trying-to-be-fair-and-nice-speak for “She’s kind of a slut, so we don’t really like having her around our kids.” Just guessing.
Like others said, I don’t think being a divorced man carries much of a stigma. I’d call it a question mark: people wonder what you did. There’s still the assumption that most divorces are caused by men; so even if they know your ex-wife filed, they wonder if you were mean to her, or cheated, or didn’t make enough money, or whatever.
I don’t think it’s ever kept a woman from being interested in me — no woman has ever said she wouldn’t date me because of it, anyway — but it is something they wonder about until they get to know you enough to form their own opinion about you, at which point they don’t care anymore.
It’s probably better than being never-married in your 40s, because then, unless you’re an obvious cad or incredibly ugly, people will guess that you’re homosexual.
Ask Amy is a pitiful woman dispensing poor advice like so much candy out of a Pez dispenser.
As per SSM, Ask Amy was married in 1986 and divorced in 1990. Four years…….that’s the length of Amy’s commitment. Nicely got their 2 year old daughter out of diapers….maybe.
The long and the short of it is that other women KNOW their own marriage is threatened by the company of divorced women. Misery loves company.
Diversity and inclusiveness will get no traction on this item………as the infighting is between women themselves.
Expand that…….diversity and inclusiveness is a farce in its entirety. People like to spend time with other people like themselves. That is true across all genders, races, creeds, societies, etc.
If we repurposed the energy spent foolishly on feminism, the world could undoubtedly wipe hunger off the face of the earth.
Alas, that is not to be……feminism is doubling down on its follish bets; and pushing more and more men to the margins of society.
I had a great argument with a co-worker yesterday that did not take her husband’s last name. She doesn’t feel she should be forced to take his last name.
In turn, she hates it when people ask if they are divorced, or if they are married, or other logical questions that come from failing to take your husband’s last name.
In turn, I said “Why did you accept an engagement ring from him? Why not throw off that shackle of the patriarchy as well?”
I also told her I am not getting married anytime soon for the exact same reason……the girlfriend can’t tell me outright if she’ll take my last name. That is a deal breaker for me.
You cannot keep moving the goalposts, and changing the yardage on the field……..and expect men to keep running the same old plays.
New playing field; new rules……and men get to call different plays.
“I once spoke to a woman who referred to the first few dates after a divorce or long term relationship break-up as “undress rehearsals”. It’s not an attractive part of womanhood, but divorce seems to unleash the inner slut in a lot of women.”
Pretty much. Many women who divorce are in their 30s on up. They’re getting older, coming up on The Wall or past it, and more socially isolated. The sex is less about pleasure and orgasms than it is about affirmation. Women have an intense, intense need to be validated, to believe they’re attractive to men, to think they’ve still “got what it takes” to attract and keep a man. It’s a way they can have power and control over their lives, after much of that power and control is taken from them after being divorced (status hit) and possibly being ostracized from certain social circles (even bigger status hit). They know the main way they can regain some of that power is through sexuality and granting sexual access. The problem is that as these women get older, “displaying the goods” and giving fast access to easy, pornstar level sex increasingly become the only ways they can get any male attention.
A lot of these women are still physically attractive and CAN still attract men for dates, long term relationships and remarriage.
@Elspeth: I agree that they probably have never been close, otherwise the dynamic would be different. I think that the letter writer is either unwilling to understand why her sister feels the way she does or she has very little emotional intelligence.
@Cail: How much of a victim the divorcee is was actually not my point at all. My point was that she did not frivorce her husband, that her husband left her *for another woman* and that those circumstances mean that the family response should be different than had she simply thrown her marriage away. The letter writer describes her sister as a working mom, which strongly implies that she has primary custody of her child regardless of how the father is helping financially or whether he has visitation. That’s simply what the letter says, and I think that there’s a strong desire to fit this story into a frivorce narrative rather than to read the letter for what it is.
Also, even if she and her husband had problems, we cannot skirt around him leaving for another woman. The letter writer did not say that they divorced and later on he found someone else to marry; she says that he specifically left to be with someone else. That is abandonment. And again, my point about family is that her sister saying “it takes two to tango” has little to do with the sisters’ relationship with one another because pretty much every divorce that happens involves the faults of both spouses to some degree, and that has nothing to do with the married sister’s relationship with her divorced sister. The point is that it happened and now the married sister has to make a decision about how she will respond to her divorced sister. The letter is not about divorce, nor is the letter-writer’s question about how to assign blame for divorce; it’s about sibling relationships and family expectations, which is what I think is being overlooked. The letter writer wants to know how she can lessen her sister’s expectations of her and she wants validation that her response to her sister has been a good one but she has no good reason to expect it.
The only people with a stigma for divorced men are blue pill. I see divorced women just as easy sex. Thy are nothing but booty calls. Even if she was dumped by a Cad she is just a slut for being with a cad and not a good man. That is the way it should be looked at. That is the way I’ll teach my son and what I speak when talking to young men when the topic comes up. Even young women need to hear older men speak to the young men that way. My place in history is to change things not live with misandry. A divorced woman should be shunned Starting at age twelve young girls should get the idea that that will be the case. Young men should all get the message that when you get taken in divorce you are stupid not a victim when enough men feel this way and behave accordingly things will change.
@Denise
She came to their house and threw a fit to try to coerce her sister to invite her to the outing. She was working on the assumption that crazy gives her power, which it did right up until the point where she was thrown out for pulling such a maneuver. It wasn’t callousness on the part of the family being manipulated by a crying fit, it was them refusing to be manipulated.
Perhaps the relevant question here is why do you identify so closely with a grown woman throwing a manipulative fit? Why does that seem perfectly normal to you?
@Denise & Elspeth
Your biases are showing. The only thing you take as fact is what letter writer (LW) says of Wendy’s husband; that he left Wendy for another woman. Everything else LW says you either equivocate about or you dismiss. All your reading between the lines, like Amy’s is done with an eye already cast towards why LW is a horrible person.
All the problems LW reports of Wendy are exactly the sort of problems that would throw a man in the way of a whore-bus like the one Wendy’s husband seems to have found. Wendy’s vague aches and pains would preclude sex. Wendy’s unnamed and psychosomatic neurological disorders would preclude keeping house and cooking. Wendy can’t budget. (same trip in the same city with the same people every year, and she can’t save up enough where she doesn’t become a burden on the others.) Wendy can’t make it to church, but she can make it to her sister’s house to throw a tantrum and she can make it to the vacation to mooch off her family’s husband’s gifts to their wives (remember: they’re SAHMs).
When Wendy doesn’t get her way…let me rephrase that to better reflect the truth: When Wendy’s demand that someone else send her on vacation so she can bitch and complain the whole time goes unheeded, she gives those women who defied her the silent treatment while simultaneously bad-mouthing them to the rest of the family. All previous gifts (they’ve obviously funded Wendy on previous trips), all help and support given Wendy outside of this vacation, and all other familial bonds are defenestrated when someone doesn’t obey Wendy’s demand for a girl’s day vacay.
But LW is the problem child here? Yo azz must be crazy.
Once a year some female family members go on vacation together for a couple days. They don’t invite every female in the family. Big deal.
Great discussion on differences between divorced women and divorced men.
A divorced woman who remains divorced is often viewed by society as being “free” and “empowered”, etc. If you ask her, she will often say the same thing – that she never wanted to remarry. The reality, though, is that if she did not remarry, it is because she was viewed as not attractive enough for an offer of remarriage.
A divorced man who remains divorced is often viewed by society as not attractive enough to remarry. The majority blue-pill thinking is that if he were attractive enough, he should have been able to secure another partner. Most of those divorced men take big hits; mostly to the wallet and not so much to social status.
But my experience is that when a divorced man doesn’t remarry (or doesn’t get back into an exclusive LTR) it is because they have chosen not to for any number of reasons. I’ve not seen a divorced man who wanted to remarry and yet who was unable to find a suitable second, third or even fourth wife. Most of those men are in their 30s on up, when their SMVs are on their long slope upward. Even if they have children or heavy ongoing financial obligations because of their divorces, most are gainfully employed. Most of the women they interact with are themselves divorced and looking to remarry.
Socially, the divorced man is in a much better SMV position than the divorced woman, as Dalrock has said many times.
“When a man and woman split up, no matter who initiated it or who was at fault, the general response is to see the woman as becoming freer, more empowered, moving on to an exciting new stage in her life, while the man failed and “lost” her. That’s just how it is. That’s also why you should never discuss your divorce with a date beyond, “It didn’t work out”: there’s no way to explain it that doesn’t make the man look weak.”
Ethical considerations notwithstanding, the most advantageous (and Macchiavellian) response is this:
“I cheated on her.”
Denise
leaving for another woman when the wife makes trouble is what a “good” man does now days. Women the courts and society in general have no respect but utter contempt for a man that tries to stay married. And nothing fuels the beast more than a loving fool trying to be a family man. That is reality and every man in the manosphere knows it. Blue pill men that believe otherwise are where your suicides and murder suicides come from. They are the drunk homeless types the losers spoken about. In a way they are for believing and fully buying in and living up to a lie. This is how it is done http://heartiste.wordpress.com/2014/04/24/how-to-win-at-divorce/
Dalrock is a very good and civil man and he knows what letting this go leads to. I pray that men like that take over the culture before the gun fire starts. He is just showing women what reality looks like on the other side due to women having the legal and social power at the moment to make marriage for men worth while. It is a futile effort but does lay a solid ground work to base a culture and society on.
Then, there is this unsettling but highly defensible thought, that the very leadership of this country, STARTING WITH THE OBAMAS, is as hopeless
Should be a foregone conclusion to anyone over the age of 10, with an IQ of over 20, and who hasn’t been living on another planet.
Next, here is an essay showing that the bulk of our population, our very nation, or volk, is as bad, as unsalveageable, in their own way
Ditto my previous statement, to the power of four.
The only thing you take as fact is what letter writer (LW) says of Wendy’s husband; that he left Wendy for another woman. Everything else LW says you either equivocate about or you dismiss. All your reading between the lines, like Amy’s is done with an eye already cast towards why LW is a horrible person.
Interesting Mr. Caldo, your interpretation of what I wrote. It is unlike you to use such sloppy reading skills. Besides noting that the letter writing sister mentions that the crazy sister was left for another woman, nothing I wrote indicates that I see the crazy sister as a victim. I even implied that the kind of stunt she pulled was probably no small part of the problems in her marriage.
Given that you are one of the more staunch proponents of the sacredness of marriage in the face of everything a marriage might go through, I am a wee bit surprised at the point of your comments towards me. Now Denise? She’s another matter altogether, being clearly on the side of the crazy sister. Our comments don’t overlap much at all.
I stand behind my assertion that this isn’t about divorce. If two women are close enough (and see themselves like Thelma and Louise) they will stick together no matter what and they’ll let everyone who knows them know that they are tight like that. They’ll side with that woman over their own man. See the Beyonce Knowles/Jay-Z/Solange Knowles mess as a very recent example.
I’ve never been close enough to any woman to know what that feels like, but I’ve seen it up close. A woman will condemn one woman for a legitimate divorce, and then stand shoulder to shoulder with a woman who cheated on and divorced a good husband.
Letter Writer here wasn’t writing about her sister’s divorce. She felt enough family loyalty to grant the sister a bit of relief of blame for the divorce itself. She just doesn’t like her sister because she’s (reading between the lines again) she’s unstable and that doesn’t fit in with the life she’s creating for her kids.
There’s nothing wrong with not wanting your kids around that. I have family members that I shield my kids from.
@Elspeth
I agree in the sense that LW isn’t excluding her divorcée sister on moral grounds. But the status of divorced and not remarried mother and being chaotic aren’t uncorrelated. Either way you point the causal arrow, the two tend to go hand in hand. So on the surface this isn’t about divorce, but in reality it is very much in play. Had the divorcée sister been able to remarry and live a non chaotic life, she would be much more likely to be invited to the married women outing.
@AskAmy: She also complains about her ex-husband who left her for another woman
I find this description interesting as I have a friend whose wife blew up his marriage earlier this past year, and now that he hangs with us and is hooking up with women not much older than his daughter, his “ex” is telling everyone that, “He was having a mid-life crisis and wanted younger women.” Which is unmitigated horse-sh*t. So whenever a woman says anything about a man leaving, I hear the hamster rewriting history to once again make the woman the “victim” of a man, rather than a guy that just realized that at almost 50, he can start another family, or two after his wife divorces him. Of course, it didn’t take her too long for her to realize her days are done and her SMV is about as high as a goat. It’s interesting to see how her tune has changed – in only a couple of months – originally the reason she divorced him was that, “He wasn’t fun any more.” (So she was again the victim of him not being “fun”.) Now that he’s in a band and enjoying the attention of much younger women she has started to rewrite history to again make her the victim. Seems like the reason he may have been unhappy was pretty obvious – being married to her would have made any man miserable – yet he was willing to stick it out. One of the reasons that I brought him into the group with us, is because he used to play when he was younger. That had to stop when he got married as his ex-wife didn’t want him surrounded by women…
The woman talked about in AskAmy is a downer – as most divorced women are. And is toxic in her unhappiness. Her sister, and friends show wisdom in not having anything to do with her. As I’ve gotten older I’ve come to the conclusion that women tend to lose their minds after menopause – can’t really say that I blame them after their main hormone – estrogen – goes the way of the Dodo, and they start to look more and more like a man…
Well, we can’t “skirt around” whether her husband prefers hot dogs or hamburgers either, but it’s equally irrelevant to the issue at hand. The married sister said she’d like to see her divorced sister find some other friends because:
1) They don’t have much in common, and never really have.
2) She skips church, which is important to the family (and presumably sets a bad example for the kids if she’s around the family on weekends).
3) She whines about her problems, some of which everyone else thinks are in her head or inflated for sympathy (the strong implication being that she dominates and brings down conversations).
4) She’s a big ball of crazy just waiting to spill all over anyone who crosses her.
None of those reasons have anything to do with why/how she was divorced or whether her husband was the world’s worst cad. In fact, she could be a widow and all those things could still be true and perfectly good reasons for her sister to prefer that she not come on this one annual outing.
You’re just doing the usual thing we see all the time: “Uh oh, some people are criticizing a woman! Surely there’s a man involved in this situation who hasn’t been criticized enough, so we can shift to beating him up instead, and I can stop being uncomfortable!” Maybe you’re right; maybe the ex-husband is a horrible cad, maybe the husband who called the police is a drama queen. That still has nothing to do with the topic.
And the sister and cousins don’t even really shame or stigmatize Wendy, they just keep some prudent distance. Given that Wendy showed up and threw a fit sufficient to require police involvement, it’s clear that keeping this distance was wise.
But look at the public shaming directed at Sad Sister by other women, even conservative Christian women. Once a long time ago, I noted on my old blog that women could not be counted on to reliably police the female herd; I received enormous pushback from female readers about that. But truthfully, women will not police the female herd because the minute one of them is not fully validating another woman’s every whim and choices, the condemnation comes down on her. Ergo…women cannot reliably be counted on to police the female herd. The pressure never to judge, never to be anything less than fully accepting and affirming of each other regardless of what another woman may have done or is doing, is so great that almost no woman dares go against it. The women who objected on my blog complained that it is the responsibility of women to police the herd and the responsibility of the men in each family to police their women, but isn’t that what is happening in this story? Didn’t Sad Sister’s Husband police the situation by ejecting crazy Wendy from his home? Yet the women are now complaining that it was unfair of him to do so.
So, women won’t police the female herd and men can’t police the female herd (including, apparently, their own women) and this is why things are getting more and more out of control and women’s behavior is becoming worse and worse and no one can or will do much of anything to stop it.
And that is why we can’t have nice things.
Had the divorcée sister been able to remarry and live a non chaotic life, she would be much more likely to be invited to the married women outing.
I agree. I just thought it was worth noting that the divorce was tangential rather than pivotal.
Before I leave for now, a link to that story I alluded to:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2628062/Beyonce-shows-public-support-sister-Solange-Jay-Z-attack.html
If a person, no matter who they are to me, attacked my husband (doesn’t even have to be physical like this was) and I went out of my way to support them, I’d have serious problems in my house.
(In my comment above, Sad Sister = Letter Writer)
Yet the women are now complaining that it was unfair of him to do so.
I was on my way out the door, and saw this. What women are complaining that it was unfair of him to do so?
Hi Elspeth,
As do I. And that is what responsible, protective parents do.
Ha! You’re right, of course. In fact, I think, “I slept with her sister,” might even beat that. Or wait: “I slept with her sister while she was at the hospital having my baby.”
It’s a good thing I’m a nice guy.
1) They don’t have much in common, and never really have.
2) She skips church, which is important to the family (and presumably sets a bad example for the kids if she’s around the family on weekends).
3) She whines about her problems, some of which everyone else thinks are in her head or inflated for sympathy (the strong implication being that she dominates and brings down conversations).
4) She’s a big ball of crazy just waiting to spill all over anyone who crosses her.
Cail
That list is what divorce and being left for another are made of.
@Dalrock: “Perhaps the relevant question here is why do you identify so closely with a grown woman throwing a manipulative fit? Why does that seem perfectly normal to you?”
I’m not sure what you are referring to when you say “identify with”. Is there something specific you can point to? I also can’t see where I said I thought throwing a fit was “perfectly normal.” I did say that threatening to call the *police* crying seemed like an extreme response to what the letter writer says was her sister crying. I think that both of your questions reflect the kind of projection that caused the initial oversight of the plainly stated fact that the husband left the divorcee. I suppose lots of things are easy to miss, but people also tend to read in ways that they skew what is said to fit with what they’ve already decided is true.
@Cane. I accepted everything the letter writer said and still disagree with her attitude toward her sister in general. Mostly because the letter writer emphasizes that they simply don’t have anything in common anymore as her main motivation for not wanting to be around her sister. You’ve weaved a whole narrative as backstory that fills in information that is not presented. At best, that interpretation is no more factually based than one claiming the divorcee is wholly innocent.
I’ll say it again. The letter is not about divorce. The letter is about blood-family relationships and if you pay attention to the question the letter writer is actually asking, all she wants to know is how she can get her sister to go hang out with someone else.
@Elspeth
Feeling froggy today, huh. Wouldn’t you prefer a good game of chess?*
I included you because of this:
Denise said zero that was interesting. It was in fact the same banal threat that we hear everywhere. Give in to the woman’s demands, or everyone’s happiness gets it.
Divorce absolutely does have something to do with it. Before they probably weren’t that close (as LW admits). Now that she is divorced they have almost nothing in common and everything to lose by bringing Wendy along, and so they (prepare yourself for the horror!): Don’t invite and fund her on a short vacation with them.
You linked yourself to Denise’s comments, and supported some of them. This is because you also glommed onto the statement about the husband leaving his wife as the one true thing we can really know about this situation. We can know this not only because you reiterated it, but because you mentioned it first; as if to say, “Before we begin, I’d like to second the motion that the husband is the actual villain in this story.”
Yeah, yeah. We heard you.
*https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ecPeSmF_ikc
@Just Saying
This is funny. My wife and I know a woman who divorced her husband because he was spending them into debt. The woman is uncommonly level headed, but about a year after the divorce she called my wife and told her that her husband had left her for a younger woman. What had actually happened is a woman at the man’s work was in her early 30s and on a husband hunt, and had marched the ex husband down the aisle 3 months after the divorce was final.
What I would say is that it seems unlikely that LW did this kind of retroactive hamstering. It isn’t impossible, but I don’t think it is the case. More likely is that the sister had married a known cad/cheater, or the sister had felt empowered enough by the threatpoint that she overplayed her hand and the husband eventually bolted. Neither of these absolve the man of his sin, but neither puts LW’s sister in a favorable light either.
Here is advice you can take to the bank:
Women want to ‘have their way’. If you get in the way of that, you are an asshole; and will quickly be labelled as such.
Those are the only rules you need to know about feminism.
So men (& women so inclined) need to get used to being called an asshole. That is the ostricizing tactics used by feminism to get men (& other opponents) out of their way.
So…….if I matter (and I do); I must intervene in situations that are bad for me. A woman running amuck is bad for me. I must be an ‘asshole’ if I don’t want situations that are bad for me to run out of control.
Here is your advice guys:
Be an asshole!
I read through the letter and had some sympathy for Wendy up until I read the story about her showing up to Sad Sister’s house and throwing a hissy fit, one that required Sad Sister’s husband to threaten police action.
Clearly, Wendy is an unstable, toxic person. It is best to shun such people rather than include them out of a sense of tolerance or diversity. Because toxic people do not tolerate those who tolerate them.
Elspeth: “I was on my way out the door, and saw this. What women are complaining that it was unfair of him to do so?”
Denise. The husband merely wanted Wendy to leave. When she wouldn’t and was frightening his children, he said he would call the police (it doesn’t appear he actually called them). Denise’s response to the husband’s reasonable insistence that the hysterical sister leave was this:
So apparently the husband has no right to police the behavior of female relatives in his own home. He just has to let Wendy come over – unannounced – and cry and frighten his children.
@Denise
Going to someone’s house crying when they didn’t do what you want is manipulation, plain and simple. You are framing it as if the sister were generically upset (say at losing her job), and needed a shoulder to cry on. This isn’t what LW described at all. She came over uninvited and threw a fit to manipulate them into inviting her to the outing, and only left once the husband threatened to call the police. Your response to this was:
Can you seriously not tell the difference between wanting a shoulder to cry on, and manipulation?
@ Denise:
“The letter is not about divorce. The letter is about blood-family relationships and if you pay attention to the question the letter writer is actually asking, all she wants to know is how she can get her sister to go hang out with someone else.”
Wendy from the OP and the letter to Ask Amy is a complete mess because she’s divorced and because she’s not remarried. The family relationships are the way they are because of Wendy’s divorce and her mess. So Wendy’s toxicity from her divorce is one of the major problems.
What you’re trying to do here is excuse and explain Wendy’s behavior and transform her into a victim by pointing out that Wendy’s husband divorced her. Most men don’t frivorce. If he left her, he had damn good reasons for doing so.
The point is that Wendy is a mess because of her divorce.
@Cane:
I find it “interesting” the way you cherry-picked through my comments.
More later…sir.
Denise:
Or to say it another way:
For the purposes of this discussion, it doesn’t matter who caused Wendy’s divorce. It doesn’t matter if Wendy was more at fault or her ex was.
What matters is that Wendy is divorced and not remarried, suffering from the status hit that accompanies that, and lives in chaos and pain. THAT is the issue.
Whether it’s her fault or not, through various choices she’s made and her life circumstances, Wendy is a tornado that churns through everyone’s lives. LW’s husband can see that. He doesn’t want it. He’s trying to put a stop to it or at least minimize the damage.
THAT’s the dynamic here. THAT’s why the divorce (and nonremarriage) is relevant and important.
Indeed, and this is worth noting from the letter:
“It” in the above quote is referring to being excluded from the yearly weekend shopping trip. Wendy didn’t come over because she is sad about her divorce; she didn’t come over because she was in desperate need of familial help. She didn’t come over to ask her sister to babysit because her kid was sick and needed to stay home from daycare while Wendy was at work.
She came over because she was angry about not being invited on the shopping trip. And then she cried and apparently had enough of a fit that her brother-in-law had to threaten to call the authorities.
Yet Denise is blaming the husband and Sad Sister for Wendy’s behavior because they just “don’t care” about her. As if they had some obligation to pay for her to take a yearly shopping trip with them.
I can personally understand the rejection, or at least suspicion, of a woman who “frivorces”, but it’s worth noting that when a woman is left for another woman by her husband, that is adultery, and the Torah commands that such a man be put to death. It does not ask whether she was a nag, or cold in bed, or anything else. It commands the adulterer and his paramour be put to death.
Likewise, in the New Testament, Jesus does not suggest that we ought to “understand” the adulterer, but rather He commands that the aggrieved spouse can divorce the adulterer–he is dead to her after all–and He commands the woman caught in adultery to go and sin no more.
In other words, in the Bible, adultery–and this includes the fornication that apparently Boxer engages in–is somewhat “nuclear”, and the way the term is used, we are implicitly commanded not to “understand” the adulterer, but to punish him and call him to repentance. It is one of those acts where a line is crossed and one no longer needs to “finesse” the situation or understand “nuances”.
Why so? Simple; the man who commits adultery, perhaps apart from the truly insane, is breaking his promise to his wife in a way that he knows is likely to drive her to depression or worse. It’s like pointing a gun at someone–nobody will fault the other person if he kills his assailant because the murderous motive of the assailant is already known.
@Denise
You’re reading into the text that LW is treating Wendy badly in general. The FACTS of the letter are that she doesn’t think she should have to either invite and fund Wendy’s vacation or suffer family upheaval. This is about a vacation.
Let me repeat that: This is about a vacation.
One more time, with feeling: This is about a vacation.
Wendy, we should presume based on what is presented, still comes to family functions. She is still in communication with the rest of the family (using it to slander LW). LW and family still support her. LW even has some bit of sympathy for her.
And it is about divorce, too. This is ridiculously simple to understand; especially for a clear-thinking woman. Say I was an engineer and I hung out with other engineers; shooting the breeze and buying each other drinks. A lot of them I like, but mostly we have our careers in common and so talk about our career-in-common. Some of them I don’t like, but at least we still can talk shop. If one of the engineers I don’t particularly care for quits being an engineer: We can’t even talk shop together.
Being a wife is shop for a SAHM. It’s hard, and it’s important. Wendy can’t talk shop anymore, isn’t particularly endearing; has trouble with relationships, and can’t participate in shooting the breeze and buying each other drinks. She just wants to talk to people instead of with them, and wants to have drinks bought for her instead of for each other.
What else I said in my initial reply to you was what an one should assume if a person educated in these matters were to read between the lines of the letter. You did not grasp the fullness of my criticism of you; which is that not only did you do a bad job of reading into the letter, but that if you had not engaged in it in the first place, you wouldn’t need surgical intervention to extract your foot from your mouth.
And regarding my first comment; yes, you can switch the sexes and it still applies, IMO. When a woman commits adultery, she’s pointing a gun, in effect, at her husband’s heart, too. There is no need to “understand” such a woman any more than we need to “understand” an adulterous man; both are murderous in their intent, and need to be punished and called to repentance.
“I slept with her sister,” might even beat that. Or wait: “I slept with her sister while she was at the hospital having my baby.”
“I had a threesome with her mother and her sister while she was at the hospital having my baby.”
Good thing I’m a nice guy.
I dunno. Odds are good that if you used the line above on any random first date in today’s SMP, she’d start ripping her clothes off right on the spot.
@Elspeth
I cherry-picked the poor comments, and flattened them. I didn’t uproot your comment, I pruned it.
No need to thank me. I like a good garden.
@Bike Bubba
Across your comments on this thread I count four different times where you use the word “understand” in quotes. However, doing a word search in this discussion I can’t find anyone you might be quoting. Are you quoting someone from a different discussion? Who is saying that we need to “understand” the adulterer? Or is this a preemptive rebuttal in the event that someone ultimately makes such an argument?
I get the irony, but no swearing before G-d.
[D: Fair enough.]
Just Saying says “I find this description interesting as I have a friend whose wife blew up his marriage earlier this past year, and now that he hangs with us and is hooking up with women not much older than his daughter, his “ex” is telling everyone that, “He was having a mid-life crisis and wanted younger women.”
My first wife blew up our marriage in order to have flings but wasn’t very successful at flinging, then blamed me. Our older daughter thinks her mother is nuts (but not unusually so, since so many other women are exactly the same), but unfortunately our younger daughter, who was 5 when we divorced, supports her mother, possibly from being subjected to an extra decade of listening to her at home.
Ok, fine. Let’s all go find Wendy’s ex-husband and stone him to death. I’m in.
Once we’re done with that, are we allowed to discuss Wendy’s sister’s problem, or the wider topic of divorcees being dangerous to have around one’s happy marriage too often? Or are there some other bad men we need to beat up first?
@jf12
I didn’t know you were married twice. I’ll try to keep that in mind.
@Bubba, Dalrock, and Cail
Exactly right. The bad man is already gone from the picture. Can we now all move on and talk about the obligation every husband has to fund his wife’s sister’s Me Time? Where the hell is Oprah when we need her?
Some of this is really funny,
Outstanding work Dalrock.
“Some of this is really funny,
Outstanding work Dalrock.”
In between sets of triceps extensions I am busting out laughing at this thread.
Cail, if you read the whole comment, it does point out that there is a New Testament approach, no? It ought to be noted as well that with depression and STDs being the condition of the aggrieved, adultery can be and often is a lethal combination. Our approach to the adulterer ought therefore to resemble our response to the idiot who carelessly brandishes a firearm.
Dal: you have not been around the manosphere enough to realize that many divorce apologists will call upon people to “understand” the motivations of the adulterer? Really?
There’s also the very real rhetorical tool of using punctuation and font to emphasize the ridiculousness of the notion, which I am also using. (example; she was unhaaapppppy)
Cane; there is a very real point to where the sisters in this case can, and should, deal with their divorced sister’s character. My point is simply that due to the circumstances of the divorce, it’s foolish to point at this as an example. If she was a nag or otherwise a pain in marriage, then that will come out after the marriage ends, too.
Also, the ex is not, thankfully and according to family law, out of the picture. He is, or at least should be, making child support and alimony payments.
@Bike Bubba
Ok. So it was a preemptive rebuttal after all. I don’t doubt that sooner or later someone might have made the argument you were rebutting, nor do I disagree that such an argument (if made) deserves rebuttal. My only criticism is that you didn’t make that clear when you left off the “Just in case someone wants to weigh in telling us we have to ‘understand’ the adulterer, “. It is confusing when you respond to an argument noone present has made (yet), without clarifying that it is a prophylactic rebuttal.
No need; I’m fine with the Old Testament stoning for adultery. Of course, that might make it kind of hard for him to continue paying that child support and alimony that are his clear moral obligation. Maybe we could just half-stone him, or if he has an office job we could stone only his legs, leaving him his arms to do his work.
Again, this isn’t about him. It’s not about any man at all, hard as that might be to believe.
Bike,
Because her husband left her (possibly “frivorced” her) for another woman? Okay. I’m with you on that. Maybe Dalrock should not have used this situation (since it appears it was he who left her) as an example of anything because what he did (to her) excuses her (later) irrational behavior towards her own sister and her husband?
Dalrock?
Where the hell is Oprah when we need her?
Apparently Denise is proxying for her.
@Bike
You, like Denise, are not only including things from outside the letter, but doing so with extreme naivety.
If you can find it in your heart to be thankful that the law and courts have taken his child yet make him pay for it then you can find it in your heart to tell someone like Wendy to shut up when she can’t even take those ill-gotten gains and get some Me Time.
Your argument about child support is a perversion of: “You broke it, you bought it”. If I buy something–broken or not–then it becomes mine. If I broke something–regardless of whether I want it now or not–it becomes mine to do with as I wish. The perverted part is that you seem to think it is just to keep what he bought from him. True justice would be to make him more responsible for the kid; not less. Child support is simply theft.
I owe you some thanks, though. A friend and I have been going back and forth about whether child support is good or evil; a net good or evil; etc. He was/is pretty firm in the “evil” column, but I couldn’t quite jive with his reasons. Your comment–for whatever reason–sparked me to recognize the twisted YBIYBI reasoning. He was right: It’s evil.
AR,
I’m a little late to the party, but…
“In plain English, once feminism is defeated, SunShine wants her husband and other men like him to seek out and murder PUA’a, and any other men who offend her. So she, and you, Shadowed, want the retired Baptist minister down the block from me to get his shotgun, load it up, and go not too far away to an apartment complex where college men live, find the one who is a PUA, and shoot him dead on the spot. And no, it’s not “spiritual warfare” she was writing about, as the very next text makes clear, where she writes about whether the “men of my tribe have the fortitude for such a purging”. She was clearly referring to deliberate, planned, murder. Not self defense, murder. Not resisting attack, murder.”
Exodus 32
32 When the people saw that Moses was so long in coming down from the mountain, they gathered around Aaron and said, “Come, make us gods[a] who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.”
2 Aaron answered them, “Take off the gold earrings that your wives, your sons and your daughters are wearing, and bring them to me.” 3 So all the people took off their earrings and brought them to Aaron. 4 He took what they handed him and made it into an idol cast in the shape of a calf, fashioning it with a tool. Then they said, “These are your gods,[b] Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.”
5 When Aaron saw this, he built an altar in front of the calf and announced, “Tomorrow there will be a festival to the Lord.” 6 So the next day the people rose early and sacrificed burnt offerings and presented fellowship offerings. Afterward they sat down to eat and drink and got up to indulge in revelry.
7 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Go down, because your people, whom you brought up out of Egypt, have become corrupt. 8 They have been quick to turn away from what I commanded them and have made themselves an idol cast in the shape of a calf. They have bowed down to it and sacrificed to it and have said, ‘These are your gods, Israel, who brought you up out of Egypt.’
9 “I have seen these people,” the Lord said to Moses, “and they are a stiff-necked people. 10 Now leave me alone so that my anger may burn against them and that I may destroy them. Then I will make you into a great nation.”
11 But Moses sought the favor of the Lord his God. “Lord,” he said, “why should your anger burn against your people, whom you brought out of Egypt with great power and a mighty hand? 12 Why should the Egyptians say, ‘It was with evil intent that he brought them out, to kill them in the mountains and to wipe them off the face of the earth’? Turn from your fierce anger; relent and do not bring disaster on your people. 13 Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel, to whom you swore by your own self: ‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and I will give your descendants all this land I promised them, and it will be their inheritance forever.’” 14 Then the Lord relented and did not bring on his people the disaster he had threatened.
15 Moses turned and went down the mountain with the two tablets of the covenant law in his hands. They were inscribed on both sides, front and back. 16 The tablets were the work of God; the writing was the writing of God, engraved on the tablets.
17 When Joshua heard the noise of the people shouting, he said to Moses, “There is the sound of war in the camp.”
18 Moses replied:
“It is not the sound of victory,
it is not the sound of defeat;
it is the sound of singing that I hear.”
19 When Moses approached the camp and saw the calf and the dancing, his anger burned and he threw the tablets out of his hands, breaking them to pieces at the foot of the mountain. 20 And he took the calf the people had made and burned it in the fire; then he ground it to powder, scattered it on the water and made the Israelites drink it.
21 He said to Aaron, “What did these people do to you, that you led them into such great sin?”
22 “Do not be angry, my lord,” Aaron answered. “You know how prone these people are to evil. 23 They said to me, ‘Make us gods who will go before us. As for this fellow Moses who brought us up out of Egypt, we don’t know what has happened to him.’ 24 So I told them, ‘Whoever has any gold jewelry, take it off.’ Then they gave me the gold, and I threw it into the fire, and out came this calf!”
25 Moses saw that the people were running wild and that Aaron had let them get out of control and so become a laughingstock to their enemies. 26 So he stood at the entrance to the camp and said, “Whoever is for the Lord, come to me.” And all the Levites rallied to him.
27 Then he said to them, “This is what the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘Each man strap a sword to his side. Go back and forth through the camp from one end to the other, each killing his brother and friend and neighbor.’” 28 The Levites did as Moses commanded, and that day about three thousand of the people died. 29 Then Moses said, “You have been set apart to the Lord today, for you were against your own sons and brothers, and he has blessed you this day.”
So basically, some of the people of God were sinning. Moses called the faithful together to put an end to it. And God blessed them by turning them into his priests.That’s right. God’s priests became priests because they murdered craven idolaters who were their brethren.
Am I saying that we should kill anyone in our midst? No. Has there been precedence for it in scripture to put those who are sinning among God’s people to death? Yes. God is more concerned with righteousness that the simple and idiotic morality of men. So while I don’t take her literally, I agree with the anger that Sunshine Mary has and I honestly believe that I have a scriptural case for why God would agree with her as well.
@IBB
If you reread the OP you will see that this isn’t about frivorce, it is about the status hit and changing social networks divorcées experience if they don’t remarry. Also, the last bit in the OP was aimed at Amy, not Wendy. What would make that last paragraph inappropriate would be if Amy would jump on a frivorcee as hard as she jumps on LW for not wanting her divorcée sister to tag along. If she calls frivolously divorced men and women horrible people then the closing quip would be unfounded. From my brief research on Amy I don’t see her doing that. She doesn’t call a frivolously divorcing father a horrible person in this column, for example. In fact, in that example she scolds the letter writer for calling frivolous divorce “destroying a family”. What I see instead is her championing a very modern sense of sexual morality, where the child of a “lovely” lesbian couple is lucky.
Machiavelli cites Exodus 32 in Discourses III 30: “And whoever reads the Bible judiciously will see that since he wished his laws and his orders to go forwward, Moses was forced to kill infinite men who, moved by nothing other than envy, were opposed to his plans.”
Nice to see the reframe being checked many a churchian has fallen the reframe once again outstanding work Dalrock.
That’s ridiculous. Again, this isn’t about him. It’s not even really about Wendy. It’s about Wendy’s sister, the letter writer, realizing that she doesn’t want to spend her little vacation with a divorced woman who complains all the time. Even more than that, it’s about society, reflected by the likes of Ask Amy, white-knighting for Wendy and saying that because she was done wrong by a man (which, being divorced, she was by definition in their eyes), no one has a right to deny her anything ever.
Again, to repeat the point Cane already repeated thrice: this is about an annual shopping trip. No one’s been cut out of the family here; no one’s been driven to the edge of the village and declared anathema. Wendy’s sister just wishes Wendy would find some compatible friends who enjoy spending time with her, so the sister can take this ONE weekend trip every year without causing a family crisis. Also, note (if you read the whole letter) that this wasn’t one emotional blowup right after the divorce or when Wendy first found out she wasn’t invited. It’s happened multiple years (she doesn’t say how many), and keeps getting worse. That’s a bit much to excuse by saying she’s still reacting to the bad things that bad, bad man did to her.
The Shadowed-White-Knight appears and briefly – I have to say there’s some good blue pill, mangina, misandrist shit right here…
“A young woman is foolish, as young people and women are. She is in love–tingles–with a rake of a man. He does all the nice things, says al the right things, and they have sex. She gets pregnant, because they did not use birth control. “
That’s funny. I know you tried to be equitable using ‘young people’ and ‘they’ not using birth control… but after all she’s young, foolish, ‘in love’ and/or just has ‘tingles’… While he too is young but rakish, deceptive, manipulative, ‘making’ her wet, causing her tingles and basically pathological…
Woman Good/Man Bad. Bravo.
And what’s the difference between a PUA and you… Marriage? Or maybe birth control? Or maybe sincerity … Lalala ~ “The Shadowed White Knight sitting in a tree – k i s s i n gee – First come’s love, Then comes marriage, Then comes baby in the baby carriage”… Or else we shoot you.
Dalrock,
I agree with all of that. This isn’t about frivorce or blame for the divorce. The point you are making in your post about “status.” You and I have gone back and forth about the “status” hit when a formerly married woman is now divorced, there is no need to continue in that mental masturbation.
That said, if I understand what Bike is saying (and please correct me Bike if I misunderstand you) is that given the situation of the divorce (situation = he left her for another woman) that this somehow, someway, gives the divorced woman some kind of irrationality/insanity/BPD/sociopath excuse. I guess that is the best way to put this. Because her marriage was destroyed by an adulterous husband, all bets are off regarding her civilized behavior toward her sister and her sister’s husband….
…after all, her ex-husband made her insane by his actions….
..and you and I are expected to already know that…
…and you Dalrock should not have used her as an example of any kind of “status” hit (to strengthen your blog arguments) because it is all her ex-husband’s fault for cheating on her. The fact that he status has been hit, is moot with respect to your point.
Having said all that, I might totally be misinterpreting Bike.
Bike Bubba?
Machiavelli was an idiot who also believed that the highest form of human good was the consolidation of political power in the state which would supplant all other ethical values and contraints. If you want to take his word over the plain text of scripture, then do so at your own peril.
Damn IBB we need to get you fitted for a brand new suit of armour. Come to medieval times In Dallas and see the wardrobe department and see if they have something in your size. Maybe you can stay at Dalrock’s place.
@Cane Caldo, “I didn’t know you were married twice.”
Yeah, my N = 2. If we go by scientific counting, I nearly have enough for statistics.
http://www.amazon.com/One-Two-Three-Infinity-Speculations/dp/0486256642
greyghost,
Heh, yeah. LOL! I really do not know for sure if that is Bike Bubba’s point, I’m just trying to play Devil’s Advocate really. I don’t have much of a dog in this fight.
I think you missed the point JofJ.
Anyway, he was definitely not an idiot. Also, that was not what he thought was the highest human good. But he certainly was an enemy of religion and he certainly twisted the Bible around for his own purposes. We all still live with the consquences of what he did.
FWIW as a divorced man in the early 1980s, my social circle, especially women friends, immediately set themselves to be inclusive of me, partly to find me a new wife. I don’t recall any stigma (aside from my personal feelings of abject failure), especially from people who knew me before.
“Anyway, he was definitely not an idiot.”
He read the Bible as nothing more than a secular text. Sounds fairly idiotic to me. And yes, he did indeed believe the highest form of good humans could accomplish was the consolidation of all human power once again in the state.
He also believed that the end justifies the means when in the political realm. Tell that to Saul, David, and Solomon.
“The letter writer wants to know how she can lessen her sister’s expectations of her and she wants validation that her response to her sister has been a good one but she has no good reason to expect it.”
The problem is her sister suffers from a mental disorder, and the letter writer didn’t properly convey that information because it is undiagnosed and she cares enough about the sister to not completely dump on her.
Amy recognizing herself in the sister ignored the portion of the letter that clearly demonstrates all is not well with the sister and lashed out at the letter writer.
The letter writer would have been better off asking how to set boundaries with her unstable sister and dispensed with the how the situation was hurting her as a christian.
No, that’s really not what he believed was the highest good. Nor did he believe anything as simplistic as “the end justifies the means.”
I gather you think intelligence is simply incomaptible with disagreement, or that there can be no such thing as an intelligent enemy, but, yes, he did view the Bible as being “secular” in the sense of “not revealed.” I suppose whether he was dumb or not is secondary to the question of influence, about which there can be little doubt.
Anyway, I posted that quote to show how an enemy of Scripture can use Scripture to make it seem as though Scripture supports an anti-Scriptural teaching. Machiavelli was the all time master. His corruption lives on (and on, and on, and on). As a general matter, to defeat someone, it’s best not to underestimate him.
Escoffier,
I am no opposed to reason or logic. God’s ways are higher than our ways and His thought are higher than our thoughts. All their plans and schemes will come to nothing but ash in the end. I am not treating my enemy with respect because he does not deserve respect. God is the only truth we need and our logic should not conform to the logic of this world. That is my point. Yours is that our enemies are very good at manipulating clear Biblical teaching to say something else. That’s like saying “look… water is wet”. It is literally the first thing we see the father of lies do in scripture. He takes God’s Word and turns it around. It’s not a point that even needs to be made.
The man was intelligent by earthly standards. Before God, that’s like saying he was an exceptionally shrewd weed. It may sound fascinating to other plants who are interested in that sort of thing, but I am more concerned with making it through the harvest.
@Deti
“The point is that Wendy is a mess because of her divorce.”
not sure about that, one might just as easily say
“The point is that Wendy is divorced because she was a mess.”
As a divorced man I have always been ‘man’ enough (because it sure as hell is not a female trait) to say that I played a part in the marriage being in difficulty. I am also clear that it was the actions of my wife from that point on that meant that the marriage was irretrievable.
But I know enough of my wife’s actions at the time to know that there is no way in hell that she will have accepted any blame for anything, then or since. (I also know that her immediate family would have backed her in all her lies and evasions. Her Aunt’s family? mmm not sure, they certainly understood from whom she came. But the comments causing my slight trust were only made privately)
I would not take anything that the divorcee claims at face value. There are women I trust with day to day matters, but if my life (or something big) depended on it? there is no way I’d trust the word of a woman. I don’t believe either nature or nurture causes them to believe that their word is their bond. They will never hold themselves publically responsible for anything, and that is what (as far as I am concerned) is what separates men from boys (with women and girls nowhere in the picture).
I don’t say this as a misogynist (I have female friends, acquaintances and relatives that I get along with fine), I say this as a red-pill realist. And I say it sadly because I don’t think that this used to be true, society used to raise better women.
One must wonder, though, if our enemies are so lame and run of the mill, how they have been so successful.
Denise. The husband merely wanted Wendy to leave. When she wouldn’t and was frightening his children, he said he would call the police (it doesn’t appear he actually called them).
Thank you for the clarification. For those who need a pointer on how to get an irate female family member to leave your home, I offer you what my brother-in-law did many years ago when his MIL wouldn’t shut up and leave.
He kept walking up to her, closer and closer as she backed away from him toward the door and over the threshold, he shut it in her face. Problem solved.
@Cane:
Your little quip about pruning my poorly weeded garden of a comment made me laugh so I’ve lost my desire for the debate. But I will say that you are wrong about any attempt on my part to make Wendy’s husband the villain here. As far as I was concerned, Wendy’s behavior was in extremely poor taste at best and borderline mentally unhinged at worst.
Making the point that the woman’s divorce may not have been frivolous doesn’t necessarily imply that her husband is some evil man and she is the blameless victim. I know enough to know better. You read me completely wrong there. I’m just tellin’ ya.
“One must wonder, though, if our enemies are so lame and run of the mill, how they have been so successful.”
Our enemies are neither lame nor run-of-the-mill. Their useful idiots are.
The problem is much bigger than feminism. Feminism is a recent, and relatively minor, branch on the tree of modernity. I would also add that biological determinism is one of the larger branches of modernity, but still not the trunk. “Victory” in the intellectual/philosophic sphere will require cutting through all this chaff and returning to the truth of the idea of the non-mechanistic, non-deterministic soul.
The Bible is very good guide there, but reliance on Scripture alone cannot defeat modernity, at least it hasn’t yet.
@Elspeth
Good! I like to part on a laugh.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/barbara-mcnally/6-things-i-lost-when-i-divorce_b_5324286.html?ncid=txtlnkusaolp00000592 If her husband was more feminist, the married would have worked and she wouldnt have cheated on him. Its a good lauph guys.
@JoJ “Tell that to Saul, David, and Solomon.”
I think all three of those tried to do many things for expediency and for ends justifying means. 2 Sam 12:31 tells of David chopping his enemies into pieces and making charcoal of them. But maybe that was your point.
@Dalrock, liked the figures you posted. That really puts things into perspective. I think that if I were ever unmarried I would lead a very minimalist lifestyle and that would allow me to save a boatload of money.
@Deti, your whole comment at 1030 this morning was spot on. I actually told a woman on Monday that if they don’t get their crap together and go to marriage counseling they’d feel the pain of divorce in the examples you listed above ie, having to put out on first or second dates to keep a man’s attention, decreased SMV post 30 years old, etc
@YaReally, regarding your story on “rewriting history”. I see that happen all the time with my friends who divorce. All of the sudden the husband is listed as “trying to regain his youth”, “going through a midlife crisis”, “a sexual deviant”, and my favorite is “he was abusive” which I believe gets thrown out there way too much. History is indeed rewritten. Good observation.
@dalrock, okay I just woke up and reread your comment back to me several times. I understand what you were saying. It’s interesting that you pointed out this little nugget of truth: “The divorcing woman generally gets a temporary empowerment boost which fades quickly after a year or so if she doesn’t either remarry or appear to be solidly on track to remarry. For men they tend to have an opposite path of taking a hard dive early on and then bouncing back”. I know that is totally subjective and empirical but I’ve observed that in my network circle. My Army buddy whose wife cheated on him while we were in the sandbox took two years off after their divorce and practically lived at the gym, read a ton of books, got a promotion and found himself a 20 year old Starbucks barista after he regained his emotional strength. He was 31 at the time. Oh, and he found out his wife was cheating because the POS guy left his cologne at their house (he moved in and played dad while we were deployed)
AR,
““Victory” in the intellectual/philosophic sphere will require cutting through all this chaff and returning to the truth of the idea of the non-mechanistic, non-deterministic soul.
The Bible is very good guide there, but reliance on Scripture alone cannot defeat modernity, at least it hasn’t yet.”
The Truth is Jesus Christ. Until we give up on everything else, we are just farting in the intellectual wind. Nothing else matters, and nothing else will last.
JF12,
“But maybe that was your point.”
It was indeed.
@Highwasp,
So men can do no wrong and everything is the fault of a woman, right.
====
It may not be “fair” to women who really were divorced through no fault of their own, but we could only change the modern divorce culture by making divorce a bad thing for all women (and men for that matter). Treating it too lightly when one part really was aggrieved will make it likely most/all will claim that, true or not.
It is the same problem you have of giving charity to people who need it, whether coerced through government support or voluntary through charities and such. You have to watch what you support as it is likely to get pulled to create more of what you do not want.
@JoJ,
> “The Truth is Jesus Christ. Until we give up on everything else, we are just farting in the intellectual wind. Nothing else matters, and nothing else will last.”
Exactly. It is why I have been labeled a white knight here in the past. Truth is paramount, whatever the implications.
We have a long way to get to that point, but we will only head that way if men of principles keep repeating the truth.
“I read through the letter and had some sympathy for Wendy up until I read the story about her showing up to Sad Sister’s house and throwing a hissy fit, one that required Sad Sister’s husband to threaten police action.”
You’d think LW would have mentioned that Wendy had a history of going nutso, but she never does, which leads me to believe that this was a one-time thing. Also, the tone of the letter is more like “I don’t really like my sister, and don’t give a crap whether she feels left out or not”, than “my sister is completely crazy”. I would think that AskAmy’s response would have been different as well.
Am I reading more into this letter than the people here reading their biases into it?
A general comment I would add is that I am no longer convinced that a wife is always in the right if a husband leaves her. Is it completely immoral for a husband to leave if the wife is withholding sex or dripping it out very slowly with a lot of strife? I am not longer convinced that is as horrid as I would have thought in the past.
If you think that is bad, take the reverse and think if a woman would be justified in leaving a man who refused to support her with his finances, either by not working or by not giving her any support out of what he earned. I suspect many who fault the man who left in the first case would have no problem with a woman who left in the second one.
Off-topic, but:
http://www.thecollegefix.com/post/17438/
http://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2014/04/traditional-college-debate-white-privilege/360746/
Casey,
I would split with that girlfriend immediately if your end goal is marriage. That seems like the kind of value that may seem changed (if she accepted your last name, but that indicates far deeper values underneath. Catching underlying values is a lot harder even when everything seems right, so you need to take the clues you get.
What you done there…. I seen it.
You’d think LW would have mentioned that Wendy had a history of going nutso, but she never does, which leads me to believe that this was a one-time thing. Also, the tone of the letter is more like “I don’t really like my sister, and don’t give a crap whether she feels left out or not”, than “my sister is completely crazy”. I would think that AskAmy’s response would have been different as well.
Am I reading more into this letter than the people here reading their biases into it?
It is entirely possible that I am reading my own biases into this, as they are admittedly many. I have a quite visceral reaction to women having outbursts of emotion and anger simply because they feel entitled to something that they have no reason to feel entitled to.
More than that, I feel that our culture’s encouragement to “let it out” and release every emotion as somehow healthy in fact makes those who indulge it crazy to a large degree. Surely the massive increase in mental illness and people on all kinds on anti-psychotics points to the fact that something is seriously wrong with us in America.
Many women have expressed their vehement disagreement with me of this but I truly think there is something to be said for sucking it up and getting on with life already.
referencing Cane above here:
All those women in the clique are SAHM’s, right? Where does their spending money come from? Do their husbands have the last word on money matters?
Know a friend and his wife. Wife’s best friend is a basket case. My friend tells me it’s taken a lot of work to get his wife to see the toxicity in her friend. But wife and her friend are still best friends. So he regulates the amount of contact they have, best he can do. Says wife has enough other good points that it is otherwise worth keeping the marriage. I have met the wife’s friend. Will only say I won’t go near her anymore.
Read it again.
That’s not a one-time thing. It’s been escalating, and it sounds like last year was the first time it came to a confrontation in their home, but it’s brought her to tears before. The tone I get from it is that sister is fed up with listening to Wendy’s drama and complaints about everything from her mystical health problems to her ex-husband’s “abandonment,” but that she’s still trying to be nice (she mentions that she’s helped her despite Wendy’s bad-mouthing her to family) and really wants her to find some friends she can be happy with. If that’s the cruelest that anyone ever treats Wendy, she should consider herself the most fortunate human being ever to live.
Dalrock has an excellently dry sense of humor.
Interesting read: http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/05/13/canadians-more-likely-to-be-anti-semitic-than-americans-poll-finds/
MarcusD, i suspect you would discover what Norman Podhoretz said 30 years ago (coincident to a long look at the writings of Anthony Lewis and others) is true: anti-semitism tends in occidental societies to be a surface eruption of a fundamental loss of nerve. There are people who believe in fixed standards, in enforcement of fixed standards (with clubs if necessary), and in self-help and self-defense. Then there are people who favor subcontracting social control to the manipulative wiles of purveyors of the talking cure (the better to relieve themselves of the responsibility of self-defense or making decisions with moral and mental clarity). The purveyors of the talking cure react with revulsion to cops and soldiers; the cops and soldiers are the men they can never be and suggest by their daily labors that the purveyors of the talking cure are dispensable in most circumstances. The people with an affinity for the purveyors of the talking cure believe likewise.
In our time, there is no state and society in the occidental world more likely to proceed with self-confidence, armed and ready to mix it up than the State of Israel. And there is no other occidental society than American with more affinity for Israel and within which the virtues of the soldier or the copper are broadly admired. The Canadian chatterati despise the United States and Canadians are wont to distinguish themselves from Americans by their fancied manners and sensibility (less inclined to forthright statements of what’s what). Canada’s antagonism to the Jews is another manifestation of their reactive Euro-trashiness.
I would not have mentioned it had Anonymous Reader brought the subject up – and somewhat apposite as she is talking about exclusion – but I have got to say that having re-read SSM’s offending essay, I once again fail to see anything allegorical in her call to arms; her meaning is as clear as could be, and she backs that up with her reliance on The Bible (in response to my attempt to make her see that the murderous intent is entirely of her own making) – or does she see that as allegorical too? – she cannot have it both ways. Perhaps it was also an allegorical pink gun she gave her teenage daughter for Xmas.
I don’t doubt it, and nothing is easier than throwing up some asterisks after the fact, but no matter. Once the war begins in earnest in this country there won’t be enough men in her tribe to defend much of anything. The West has ebbed and flowed since it was born at Knossos. There are many scenarios in which the West will endure.
Christianity, however, has a much tougher road to hoe, as the “real” Christians will have to completely undo everything being taught in church currently. They’ll have to resell the ideas of just war, holy war, and headship. They’ll have to explain why African Christians worship so much differently and behave so much differently. They’ll have to explain why Jesus wants them to kill, yet is still different from Mohammed in that regard. And on and on and on.
SSM once stated at Mangan’s that non-Christians lead pointless lives. She’s a fanatic and she’s terrified. She should be.
Bike Bubba says:
May 14, 2014 at 11:51 am
but it’s worth noting that when a woman is left for another woman by her husband, that is adultery, and the Torah commands that such a man be put to death.
Below is a list of reasons that I am aware of that the Torah advocates stoning is called for:
Touching Mount Sinai while God was giving Moses the Ten Commandments (Exodus 19:13)
An ox that gores someone to death should be stoned (Exodus 21:28)
Breaking Sabbath (Numbers 15:32–36)
An engaged virgin and the man who lies with her, together, since she did not cry out (Deuteronomy 22:24)
Giving one’s “seed” (presumably one’s offspring) “to Molech” (Leviticus 20:2–5)
Having a “familiar spirit” (or being a necromancer) or being a “wizard” (Lev. 20:27)
Cursing God (Lev. 24:10–16)
Engaging in idolatry (Deuteronomy 17:2–7) or seducing others to do so (Deut. 13:7–12)
“Rebellion” against parents (Deut. 21,18–21)
Getting married as though a virgin, when not a virgin (Deut. 22:13–21)
Sexual intercourse between a man and a woman engaged to another man (both should be stoned, Deut. 22:23–24)
Can you point out where in the Torah it stipulates that a man must be put to death for leaving his wife for another woman?
Thank you in advance.
I would like to add that I think a man leaving his wife for another woman is appalling and sinful.
One must wonder, though, if our enemies are so lame and run of the mill, how they have been so successful.
But how successful will they be deemed when they stand before the throne?
@Art Deco
But what’s peculiar is that Canada (or rather, its current governing party) is very vocal in its support of Israel, but the US (or rather, its president) is not. Now, the main difference is that Canada is being led by a conservative party (or at least one that aspires to be conservative), and the US is being led by a very liberal/left-wing president (which, one could argue that Canada is more liberal than its ruling party, and the US more conservative than its ruling president). I suspect that conservatism and liberalism (right-wing and left-wing) are what’s behind it all.
JDG, Christ makes it clear in Matthew 5 that the man who looks up on another woman to have her is adulterous, and that divorce is banned for this reason. If you look at Deuteronomy’s provision for divorce, moreover, it states that a man must find some “uncleanness” in her. Now the Pharisees didn’t interpret it this way, but one way of interpreting it is that the man must find some sexual uncleanness in her. Malachi 2 also gives us this idea–it does not at all support the idea that you can “frivorce” your wife, or “cleanly” divorce her for no particular reason but to upgrade to the next model.
In other words, divorce to marry someone else is adultery, Biblically speaking, and therefore falls under those passages, and we understand that–just like idolatry, fornication, and the like–is especially repulsive to God because marriage is a representation of His love for the Church and His people–it blasphemes His nature. Persistent rebellion against parents–Deut. 21–similarly blasphemes His Fatherhood.
The long and short of it is that if indeed I am correct that divorce to marry someone else is adultery–Jesus clearly indicates it is–then we do not judge the woman who is left as if she had somehow deserved it, or as if she’d “frivorced” someone. She is, at least in that respect, a victim. Her counseling, and rebuke, will necessarily differ from the “Jenny Eriksons” of the world.
And to another, yes, I am glad that adulterers are forced to pay for the upkeep of their rightful wife and children through child support and alimony. The Biblical comparison is the “bride-price” and the like. Victims of adultery/”frivorce to get a new model”, not so much, but adulterers, you bet.
@JDG
Good work, JDG!
My social circle is made up almost entirely made up of married moms, and the farther you get into that life the harder it is to relate to single women or enjoy their company. When one tags along with us, they almost always try to steer the conversation away from what we enjoy discussing (kids and family life) and towards something else. It makes the evening less enjoyable and more awkward because we have to spend so much time and energy accomodating them and the fact that they find our lives and topics of conversation boring and unrelatable.
I don’t blame this woman for not wanting Ms. Divorced working mom-of-one to invite herself on an outing with her. It’s not being mean, it’s just acknowledging that they both live in different worlds and have trouble connecting in a meaningful way.
Right Darkheart, Christianity is about to fall apart. You need to study history a lot more. The true Church persists, through a great many issues. Even some who are off center a bit now will align when the situations encourage that. Some will go clearly apostate, but others will more firmly tie to their Lord. I have much more faith in Him than your foolish words.
We have to allow the divorced women, whatever the reason, to have be a less desirable state, or we end up with the mess we have now. That is not “fair” by modern stances, but it is necessary and thus just.
It is the same reason we should let the man who will not work starve. We should not help them out if they refuse to work. Giving support at any level to them encourages more, even if one or two are there through no fault of their own.
The women who was divorced unfairly could seek a solution with much more intent, but I have definitely not seen that as a driving factor in most.
re: “We have to allow the divorced women, whatever the reason, to have be a less desirable state”
We should FORCE divorce to be less desirable.
@Bike
See, that is exactly the “You broke it, you bought it” sort of justice that child support claims and appears to be part of, but its actually an inversion of justice because he’s not allowed to own what he’s bought. Bride-price makes sense because a woman could not divorce. It was given as proof of seriousness.
And I would like to see an actual response to JDG where you show where the Bible says that a man who takes up with another woman (who is not attached) should be stoned.
Below is the definition of adultery as I understand it:
ADULTERY
Sexual intercourse of a married woman with any man other than her husband. The crime can be committed only by and with a married woman; for the unlawful intercourse of a married man with an unmarried woman is not technically Adultery in the Jewish law. Under the Biblical law, the detection of actual sexual intercourse was necessary to establish the crime (Lev. xviii. 20 [A. V. 19]; Num. v. 12, 13, 19); but this rule was so far modified by the Talmudic law, that circumstantial evidence was sufficient to justify legal procedure if the wife had been cautioned by her husband against intimate association with the suspected man (Soṭah, i. 2).
The definition above would seem to line up with Matt 5:27-28 in the NT.
Matt 5:27 “You have heard that it was said, ‘You shall not commit adultery.’ 28 But I say to you that everyone who looks at a woman with lustful intent has already committed adultery with her in his heart.”
The context above appears to be adultery, so I would surmise that the woman in question is one who is qualified to commit adultery in the first place ie: a promised or already married woman.
Matt 5:31 “It was also said, ‘Whoever divorces his wife, let him give her a certificate of divorce.’ 32 But I say to you that everyone who divorces his wife, except on the ground of sexual immorality, makes her commit adultery, and whoever marries a divorced woman commits adultery.”
Matt 5:31 appears to support the above definition of adultery as well.
My wife informs me that not inviting someone who had always previously been invited is a serious “slap in the face.” Girls are weird.
Girls are weird.
Yep!
OT – I’ve been thinking about changing my WordPress name to sexistpig in lue of all the churchian females that have referred to me this way. I’m sure the drive by feminazis I’ve invited to the kitchen for sammich making would find the term suitable as well.
Makes sense considering the recent article that said divorce is contagious
BradA – “Everything is the fault of a woman” – no – “Woman good / Man bad” – don’t get it twisted!
PS – I’d sooner believe an inmate who tells me he’s innocent than I would believe her story that her husband left her for another woman.
While I would have no reason to disbelieve her story (you think husbands don’t frivorce? you haven’t seen my extended family – lol) I would argue that there are no dysfunctional individuals in marriages. Whenever I see marriages where people are acting nutty or divorcing, I find it safe to assume that both parties are screwballs, despite the universal pattern of every single one of these people blaming the other party for everything.
I’m fair in that I hold dudes and chix to the same standards. My bros who complain about their wives being naggy bitches get little sympathy from me. Either these same men let themselves go, failed to maintain hand, or chose a ho’ to marry in the first place. It sounds harsh, but it’s what it is.
Regards, Boxer
Generally, my issue is that there are ways you deal with/relate to family members (*especially siblings*) versus the friend you made from PTA or the person you went to summer camp with; and different people are obviously raised with different values in that respect. Sent this to my sister, and though neither of us would put the other in either Wendy or Letter Writer’s position, at least she agrees with me in principle. : ) But other families may differ. For that reason, I suppose it would be expected that some wouldn’t understand why so many people would have such a viscerally negative reaction to this letter.
_____________________________________
@WillBest
The problem is her sister suffers from a mental disorder, and the letter writer didn’t properly convey that information because it is undiagnosed and she cares enough about the sister to not completely dump on her.”
Well, the letter writer seems to think that her sister has a psychosomatic neurological disease that she uses as an excuse not to go to church. If she’s comfortable pointing that out–that her sister has said she has a real disease but that she doesn’t believe her–it would seem she’d be comfortable saying she thinks she’s bipolar or something like that. And if she were concerned that her sister had a bona fide mental disorder, do you not think her letter wandered from the more important point, which should have been how to get help for a family member with an undiagnosed mental disorder?
“Amy recognizing herself in the sister ignored the portion of the letter that clearly demonstrates all is not well with the sister and lashed out at the letter writer.”
Amy fully acknowledges where she was coming from with this letter in other interviews and admitted that she has been the single mom unable to afford certain things. The letter writer, not Wendy, is the one asking for advice, so the letter writer is the one who got it. All not being well with Wendy doesn’t mean that the letter writer’s response was a good one.
“The letter writer would have been better off asking how to set boundaries with her unstable sister and dispensed with the how the situation was hurting her as a christian.”
Boundaries generally come into play when someone is continually asking too much from you. We’re not given any history of that aside from one incident. As it was pointed out, Wendy used to be a part of this shopping trip but was cut off because she’s a Debbie Downer and her life is not going as well as the others’ lives are. That’s not a boundaries issue, that’s a “kindergarten 101 feelings hurt from being left out” issue. I don’t buy the letter writer’s daftness in acting as if she can’t understand why her sister might be acting desperately clingy and emotionally wacky after her marriage fell apart and learning that her sister feels like she can’t be as close to her anymore. And the latter point is what I think has caused much of the backlash. Wendy’s husband says, “I don’t want you anymore,” and her sister’s response is, “Oh, I guess that means you aren’t like us anymore and really, we don’t want you either.” The Letter Writer’s comments about not having anything in common with Wendy went beyond one trip–this is how she feels about her sister in general. Just a modicum of emotional intuitiveness would help the Letter Writer see that Wendy feeling rejected by her sister and cousins on top of her divorce is probably worsening Wendy’s emotional state. Does that mean that it’s Letter Writer’s job to “fix” her sister? No, as you can’t fix other people. But it does mean that LW either needs to accept that Wendy is hurt and offended by her choice to distance herself, or she needs to dig a bit deeper to find some sisterly affection that is notably absent from her letter.
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@Denise
So, something just occurred to me that might help me understand where you’re coming from: Are you on the rag?
MarcusD: Love that debate among the “niggaz” you linked to. The tenor and rhythm remind me of black preachers, you know, in those really “Christian” black churches, full of deeply religious black people that we always here about (usually from white Conservatives)…with all breathy pauses and disjointed (non)logic. Mmmm…hmm…
If anyone DOESN’T think that in 20 years this country can be successfully invaded and taken over, they aren’t watching two trends: this, that you linked, and national birthrates of non-whites. It starts bit by bit..
.”first they came for the ambassador, and we said/did nothing…”
Wow. Is this blog wacko-ville,or what?
HI Deborah!
Are those antlers on your head?
How about you make us a SAMMICH?
“Then, when the time comes that honoring this promise would make them unhappy, simply leave her out.”
Why are you encouraging the sister to be a back-stabber? Why are you encouraging the sister to be a bully? Why do you have divorced women – were you rejected by one?
JDG says:
May 14, 2014 at 8:50 pm
HI Deborah!
Are those antlers on your head?
How about you make us a SAMMICH?
—-
I’d be happy to. The ingredients my choice, of course – since this blog is filled with “woman’s home is in the kitchen” type of folks.
Cane Caldo says:
May 14, 2014 at 7:58 pm
@Denise
So, something just occurred to me that might help me understand where you’re coming from: Are you on the rag?
—-
Are you?
Are there any American women left that can actually cook and know their way around a kitchen? most American women are completely worthless, which may account for men of all types seeking out foreign women.
@Deborah Vanya
Make mine bacon please.
http://cheezburger.com/7456230912
Just got home and and did a quick read of comments. I’m laughing harder now than I was this morning. Instead of reality TV, we could do a reality blog show. Kinda like the old Barney Miller show.
Why are you encouraging the sister to be a back-stabber? Why are you encouraging the sister to be a bully? Why do you have divorced women – were you rejected by one?
Why do so many Western wives back stab their husbands? Why do so many Western women bully their men and children and then play the victim? Why do feminists ask questions that they don’t want to know the answers to? Why do feminists build straw men to attack?
And where is my SAMMICH!
@Deborah
You said:
&
What I can tell you is that this blog is not one where your display of Hipster, passive-aggressive questioning is respected. I know such things pass for irony among the half-educated and misinformed, but it’s really just the sound of 20s and 30s vinegar rinses sloshing about on the Internet.
The definition of adultery has clearly been isolated here but if anyone intends on putting PUA’s to death by old testament laws you’re going to have to catch them in the act, that means you’ll be putting one harlot to death at the same time.
Deuteronomy 22: 23 If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her; 24 Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour’s wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you.
Exodus 22:16-17 “If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall give the bride price for her and make her his wife. If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the bride price for virgins.”
Stoning harlots is a lot easier, it’s the evidence you see.
Gen 38; 23 About three months later Judah was told, “Your daughter-in-law Tamar is guilty of prostitution, and as a result she is now pregnant.” Judah said, “Bring her out and have her burned to death!”
Deut 22; 20. But if this thing be true, and the tokens of virginity be not found for the damsel:
21. Then they shall bring out the damsel to the door of her father’s house, and the men of her city shall stone her with stones that she die: because she hath wrought folly in Israel, to play the whore in her father’s house: so shalt thou put evil away from among you.
Sorry ladies, it’s up to you, biblically, to keep your knees together. Your brothers in Christ aren’t responsible for running around and killing every silver tongued devil in town before they talk you out of your panties. You’ll just have to learn to say ‘No’.
Are there any American women left that can actually cook and know their way around a kitchen?
None under the age of 70. Then again, it doesn’t really matter. Cooking is something that every man should be able to do for himself anyway and do it well.
“Are you?”
Behold the Moxie. The best part is she thinks this is how people will come to respect her.
I like grilled cheese BTW
I think it would be easier to respect her if she was in the kitchen making sammiches.
One of the penalties for zina (fornicating) in classical Islamic jurisprudence is forcible marriage of the fornicators, complete with the dowries paid by parties to the parents of the others, and the further stipulation that divorce is impossible. While I doubt this is still practiced, it seems to be a fitting punishment. Even the most hardened PUA would pause before banging that ho’ if he thought there was a reasonable chance, however slight, that she’d become his permanent nag, with no escape possible. lol
The funny thing is, s/h/it thinks that s/h/it is doing something here which has, like, never been done before.
I don’t have any divorced women at the moment. They’re beneath my (already dismally low) standards, even for f-n-c.
Anyway: You go girlfriend! Tell us all how it is! You’re in charge on the Dalrock blog now! ;p
Exodus 22:16 “If a man seduces a virgin who is not betrothed and lies with her, he shall give the bride-price for her and make her his wife. 17 If her father utterly refuses to give her to him, he shall pay money equal to the bride-price for virgins.”
I want peanut butter and jelly.
The guy Spauney get made this comment above ” don’t say this as a misogynist (I have female friends, acquaintances and relatives that I get along with fine), I say this as a red-pill realist. And I say it sadly because I don’t think that this used to be true, society used to raise better women.”
What is fascinating is that women are no different but as TFH reminds us feminism has allowed us to see women as they are. It is like the emperor’s new clothes. Women fuck up every thing with out the need to show value they don’t do anything well. They can’t cook clean raise kids even on the job it is about them and not the job itself. More and more people can see it so they just pass more laws or rules that force people to look the other way or ignore it.
Dalrock hit a female home run with this topic because the irrational female and white knight/mangina has come out big time to muddy the water and rebuild this mound. The whole topic just terrifies them. Divorced women are just for sex especially if she has kids. And now days with the laws of misandry and the way women are that is all they have to offer and women are proud of it. It is slap stick comedy but deadly serious for any man or child trapped in it. There is absolutely no hope in talking to women about anything. The best you can do is set up a situation where a woman behaves well out of her natural fucked up nature. A chaste virtuous woman and the cock carousel riding slut with the exact same hypergamy in play and both proud of themselves. The same woman
So I agree with the married chick. “hey divorced bitch you are not invited period.” That is the way it has to be.
http://news.nationalpost.com/2014/05/14/human-rights-complaint-alleged-citys-lifeguard-test-biased-in-favour-of-women/
After a while the exceptions start piling up, it seems…
Anonymous Reader has fled the field. Just as he did last time. Content only with fighting women, he dares not face a man who is willing to disagree politely. If you care to defeat me, AR–if you can–feel free to make the attempt. I am not a woman, though, so you will not be fighting a hobbled opponent. Fair warning, which is all I will give.
SSM said:
Of course you did. Every time men call women to order, they can play the “how are we to preserve order on our own” protests. A simple and fairly effective trick to allow them to infight and snipe amongst each other, while appearing virtuous. Why would women give that up? Now, though, it seems that that particular tactic is losing its ability to keep men from breaking you lot up when you get out of control.
No, because they are moral executors, not agents. Let a husband or father make the decision, then instruct his wife and daughters on the behavior expected of them. Once they have their orders, they can obey and help enact the will of their men. Relying women for guidance is a fool’s errand.
Highwasp, did you not notice that I explicitly called out her rationalizations? How about that I called for her to be flogged in public and that her crime was fornication and bastardy? How easy would it be for a social pariah with a bastard in tow to find a decent husband?
I used the specific type of man I did because a family oriented man would have accepted the marriage. He would be safe from a frivorce, because unless she committed adultery, neither of them would be able to separate from the other, and if she did, she would be sent into the world with a flogging and her clothes. He would have no great reason to tell several angry men to get bent.
The difference between a player and I is that I am not willing to pay the price of marriage for damaged goods, so I abstain from my desire. No sex, no marriage, no children. No family. If a man wants that life, he is welcome to it, no threats necessary. The player takes that which is not his, and that to which he has no right. He will not buy that which he broke, and that makes him a nuisance that must be removed.
Next time, Highwasp, try reading a little bit closer and paying attention to what I write. If you seriously think I am any sort of ignorant of the nature of women, think again. The same goes if you think I am playing the white knight for anyone. Just ask SSM how deferential I am towards women.
The Shadowed Knight
Cheryl is THE most awesome manager ever
When she feels I might be late with a payment
She calls me to make sure everything is Ok
I love public storage Cheryl and her staff
When Southey’s read and Wordsworth understood
I can’t help putting in my claim to praise
The first four lines are Cheryl’s every world
For god sake read take them not for mine
(with apologies to the Lord Byron)
Dan – I meant those lines dear reader are all from Deborah Vanya.
How deferential is Shadowed Knight toward women? Well, let’s put it this way: At one point, I finally banned him from my blog and blocked him on Twitter; outright misogyny would be a step up for him. In other words, the thought of TSK white-knighting for any woman, especially me of all people, is so risible that I nearly spit out my coffee when I read that ridiculous comment. Whatever his reasons are for choosing to engage with AR, those reasons almost assuredly have nothing to do with me.
Deborah:
As opposed to –? What great feminist site – or even majority-female site – will you point us to that displays measured, thoughtful commentary? Have you read any other blog comment sections, Deborah? Do you even internet? Pretty much everyone online is crazy, and most people are also distressingly stupid on top of it.
Regarding the argument that a man can divorce his wife for another woman without committing adultery; tell it to Jesus in Matthew 5:31-32, which notes that the man who divorces his wife forces her to commit adultery. Christ does not recognize the validity of this kind of arrangement. As we would infer from the draconian penalties prescribed in the Torah, and as we would infer from Matthew 5:27-32, and as we would infer from the results of adultery (STDs, depression, murders, etc..), adultery and divorce are deadly serious, and therefore Matthew 5 allows divorce only in cases where the spouse is, figuratively speaking, dead to the other spouse.
By the way, the Torah does give a method for divorce for the woman. She would come up with evidence that her husband had been cheating on her, and with whom, and the whole town would gather to stone him and his paramours. It’s almost as brutal as our court system today, methinks. :^)
And no, she didn’t have to catch him “in the act” with a paramour, though that would be a logical way for it to happen. You simply had to have evidence, witnesses, and the like indicating it happened. For proof of this, look at 2 Samuel 12, where Nathan reassures the guilty David that he will not die–absent the grace of God, David too would have been taken outside the walls of Jerusalem to be stoned because Bathsheba was having a baby that Uriah could not possibly have fathered.
The end conclusion here; if we accept that the woman was left for another woman, that is adultery, and her loss is not to be treated in the same way as a woman who frivorces her husband. It’s simply a very different equation, morally speaking.
Aaaand, as so often happens, an interesting discussion about wives and how their marriages intersect and conflict with their extended family and social lives, and the problems that divorce brings into that, using a story which didn’t even involve men except as background characters, has been steered into yet another nit-picking session over male adultery and divorce.
Which I guess proves Dalrock’s overriding point, but it’s still tiring.
Apologies to Cail, Dalrock, and others, but I really would like to know the answer to my question below.
@BB where in the Torah is this?
By the way, the Torah does give a method for divorce for the woman. She would come up with evidence that her husband had been cheating on her, and with whom, and the whole town would gather to stone him and his paramours. It’s almost as brutal as our court system today, methinks.
@Cail
Yes. And as I pointed out above, this started with Bike Bubba refuting not once, but four times an argument which no one had made. This is a classic reframe to avoid the topic at hand.
Cail
The female aversion to responsibility is so strong that is avoided at all cost not even reality and logic can stand in the way. I going to have to repeat this scenario at a dinner party as a drill for the young men. Why people still think there is an appeal to morality of women. Spend an evening looking at images of abortions and then see the reaction of women when any kind of limits on abortion is proposed. Then imagine telling these women stories of the pain and suffering fathers and children go through in family court. oh but Let some divorced bitch not get invited on a shopping trip and you are a horrible person.
@SSM: How deferential is Shadowed Knight toward women?
Hmmmm…. Let me put it this way…. “How deferential is a baby towards it’s diaper?”
Sorry, I just couldn’t resist… Bad brain… bad…
@Deborah VanyaMake mine bacon please.
Harkening back to the link on the poutyface thread to the story of the Nigerian child bride who poisoned her husband-to-be’s entire family, I don’t think that turning the likes of Deborah into a sammich maker is a smart idea (not to mention that she probably wouldn’t know a kitchen from a kayak, let alone the ingredients for even the simplest of sammiches).
@feeriker
I agree. My sammich suggestion was meant to test the quantity of koolade the reader had absorbed as well as to remind her that yes the woman’s place is in the kitchen (so to speak). She got the message I think and reacted accordingly.
Greyghost, that’s true, but most of the people rebuilding the mound in this thread have been men, as far as I can tell. Men can be just as uncomfortable with anything that even smells like criticism of women, and just as anxious to switch it to a discussion of male ills, as any woman can.
I don’t want to sound too hard on these men. I don’t think they’re intentionally working for feminism or anything; they’re just responding to the natural protective instinct men have toward women that’s a good thing most of the time. They also want to be sure we’re being fair, as if giving equal time to men’s sins will protect us from charges of misogyny when we discuss women’s sins. It won’t. We could have 99 discussions about all the bad things men do, and then turn the 100th to the subject of women and immediately hear, “But-but-but what about men?”
Our protective impulse and desire for fairness will always be used to drag us away from any criticism of women if we allow it. We have to learn not to, and to ignore the inevitable accusations that will bring.
Can someone contact Deborah’s supervising Patriarch? She’s supposed to be chained to the cooker, or the bed. So either she’s incorrectly restrained, or some idiot left a laptop within reach. Both are clear violations of the Patriarchal Code.
Come on guys! We can do better than this.
[D: Yes. We even included this in the agenda of our last secret meeting. It is worth noting that the same men who can’t seem to remember the secret handshake are very often the ones who make this kind of lapse.]
Regarding sammiches; I wouldn’t eat anything that she prepared anyway, I suspect that she’s one of those foam mouthed, spittle speckling types
@Bike Bubba
Bathsheba was married. Look, it–that a man leaving his wife and taking up with another woman who is not married or betrothed is to be stoned–is not in there. Polygyny, in fact, is in there. You’re wrong. You’re not wrong that adultery is a sin. You’re wrong in your self-righteousness which is leading you to say God said things that He did not say. The Bible says plenty about adultery without us having to add to it.
I don’t think an outraged Amy or darling Deborah can become a submissive sammich maker until there is a change in the heart. True love and self sacrifice must be freely given without coercion.
The self obsessed sister, the letter writer, outraged Amy, and the typical drive by feminist all demonstrate the growing acceptance of solipsism and narcissism in American females.
Yet even though the obvious dangers surrounding divorce fall out has become hidden to most people (especially women), even the most ardent supporter of women’s independence from men seems to instinctively know when her status is threatened. To me this is bazaar because they obviously do not see this as an abstract concept.
TSK,
I agree with you. But isn’t it a bit odd whenever I say that women aren’t moral agents (because they aren’t) the whole manosphere at Dalrock’s piles on top of me and calls me out as a white knight? Why single me out on something that is so plainly obvious?
SSM,
Sadly, this is becoming the case more and more.
On top of being stupid, the insane are almost ALWAYS the most envious. It appears, the more in life you think you are entitled to (that you aren’t getting) the more insane you are. The insane read something the sane write (perhaps on their own blog?) The envious insane want to drag the sane down with them into their cesspool of ignorance and filth and they use whatever legal, technical, or social media tools they have in their arsenal to attack the sane. We see this every day. I have nothing but sympathy for sane people like Dalrock who keep up the good fight and even greater sympathy for people like SSM whose family lives have been traumatized by those who she will never meet (but who are envious of her.)
“Greyghost, that’s true, but most of the people rebuilding the mound in this thread have been men, as far as I can tell. Men can be just as uncomfortable with anything that even smells like criticism of women, and just as anxious to switch it to a discussion of male ills, as any woman can.”
The essence of the blue pill white knight/mangina. This is what has carried feminism and what the lie of the war on women is counting on. The marriages that we do have also depend on this tendency. Rebuilding the mound, the feminizing of Christianity (churchianship), laws of misandry and the general culture of man bad woman good is to maintain the tendency to protect women. But protecting women now is akin to protecting their leaches. The manosphere is changing that one man at a time. This guy is a new you tuberhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ScZGha-x0TA&list=PLwwfs0zUhl7THFiyCUkjRoMkz2AB2Yc2e
hey Boxer – you’ll enjoy this – talking about family and how ‘it takes two’ crazies – I’ll go one further:
What’s the N-count for a 16 year old girl who’s mom is a holy rolling, speaking in tongues, Assembly of God, bride of Jesus… but who’s father is an incestuous pedophile?
“It takes two” … but which two – maybe two completely whacked parents who hide in Churchianity? Does having sex with dad have an N-count of an invisible 100 before the age of 16? For an ignorant and gullible Baptist choir boy of 18, like me, the 16 year old Christian girl had it all and then some. I didn’t see an N-count. She was everything I was taught to look for in a prospective young Christian bride – it was a match made in heaven – and that briefly describes my first baby mama.
“It takes two”… God and Satan? Mom and Dad? Church and State? Husband and Bride?
Yes we sinned – we had sex before marriage and therefore God punished us…
And sometimes God needs a little help righteously sabotaging the truly wicked.
maybe mom not only rolled in the aisles but also into her daughter’s birth control pill collection… or maybe the girl just chose not to take them and say she did – and with that – “I got her pregnant”. Simplistic and convenient – based on blame, shame and abandonment. Coincidentally the tools of Misandry as well.
bottom line: One half of the two crazies – The psychobitch wanted a Beta-Bux chump to act as DNA donor, and ATM machine – so she picked the nearest one. And why not – the other half of the two crazies was a good Churchian man: ignorant and gullible, pussy beggin’, people pleasing’, Beta-boy just asking to be used. And for the next 13 years she got her way before she became too pathologically obvious for even the Go-Grrrl State to ignore.
During this time I doubled down on the Beta-Boy routine ‘fighting’ to ‘win her’ and ‘my’ child, but the Alpha-Fux-Boys had it all over on me… and over and over and over… until finally I became Alpha-Fux myself – and morphed into FuckBuddy Rockbanddrummer. A back sliding the likes of which balanced out the Ignorant and Gullible Churchian Beta-Bux-Boy and will also test the “Once saved always saved” meme when we all get to the pearly gates and some old man with a long beard points his finger at us and says one of two things:
“depart from me – I never knew you” or “come on in boy – the water’s fine”.
Lunch sandwich recipe:
Bread. Heavily fermented flavored, heavy weight, thickly cut coarse peasant bread still warm from being home-baked today from sourdough. Polish dark rye, or German pumpernickel fresh from market would be tolerable substitute but not tending towards an A+ effort.
Meat. Heavily smoked flavored, heavy weight, thickly cut yadda yadda. Best if hacked off chunks still hanging warm in the smokehouse. Lebanon bologna a very acceptable substitute, if from Lebanon; otherwise just tolerable.
Cheese. Heavily bacteria flavored, thickly cut, yadda. I don’t expect you to produce homemade funky cheese that is edible, all the time; I’m not a slave driver. Extra sharp cheddar cheese, ancient and gritty (required), that you hand-carried from Wisconsin for me will do fine.
Condiments. Heavily flavored etc. You know the drill. Layers of ketchup and globs of horseradish, for example, and bread-and-butter pickles. I also add a spoonful of freshly ground black pepper.
@Highwasp, just fyi, ever since the AoG women started cutting their hair there ain’t so much holy rolling there no more.
@JF12
“I don’t expect you to produce homemade funky cheese that is edible, all the time; I’m not a slave driver.”
Classic Patriarchy 101 – velvet glove over the patriarchal iron fist. Bravo
Although one must remain ever vigilant against getting too soft.
Warning signs include more than an afternoon off per week (though clearly meal-service is to be maintained 24/7). Sparing the rod. Allowing her to spend the change from the groceries on luxuries for herself (e.g. how to cook for your master magazine, proper willy worship video instruction manuals)
@ SG and jf12
I’m laughing so hard right now. Good humor!
@ jf12
I dislike you less every day.
Can someone contact Deborah’s supervising Patriarch?
I don’t think she has one. I’m guessing, given her avatar picture (assuming that’s her) and the plastic surgery her face appears to reflect, that she’s of an age that signifies that her father is long dead. I seriously doubt that she’s ever been able to interest even the most desperate and self-loathing of beta-minus men in marriage, so she’s without a husband too. Any boyfriends she might have ever had have certainly been doormats without even a hint of any patriarchal power or authority about them. This means she’s one of those “feral” women, not under any form of patriarchal guidance or authority.
Amazing, the knowledge nuggets that one can glean from just a couple of semi-coherent posts and an avatar, no?
jf12 says on May 15, 2014 at 11:32 am
As far as the typical millennial woman is concerned, you might as well have written that in runes and recitation of if might as well be in some sub-dialect of Ubykh.
@feeriker
“Are there any American women left that can actually cook and know their way around a kitchen?
None under the age of 70.”
Bullshit. My wife was already a good cook when we married (she was 22) and she’s only gotten better. After almost 10 years of marriage, she’s outstanding. Now she’s teaching our daughters.
Maybe you need to step away from the internet and meet some actual people for a while.
@ feeriker
“This means she’s one of those “feral” women, not under any form of patriarchal guidance or authority”
I think in this case feral is an understatement
http://www.angelfire.com/dragon2/leavesandtrees/cailleach/deercult.html
@SSM cool 😉
(no way I’m showing you the secret handshake though)
Oscar,
I think we all have to remember that cooking (I mean good cooking) requires a little bit of a touch in the kitchen. Not all women or men have that touch. Many do, but some don’t. For those that do, they are only able to capitalize on that with practice. You just have to keep trying until you master that art, and it is art.
I think in our society where we have so many two-income households, much of that art is lost. Its lost because people don’t have the time to practice to get their touch just right. So dad (still with his tie on) winds up outside grilling burgers while mom (still in her heels and office skirt) is at the stove with the Kraft-mac-n-cheese and a can of green beans and you have your standard, mediocre, inartistic dinner prepared. That isn’t anyone’s fault, it is what it is. And unfortunately the kids miss out on something but it is what it is.
But it also makes the special home cooked meals all that more special. I wait patiently all year for Thanksgiving. I get to cook the turkey. And I get it perfect. All the women (wife, mom and mother-in-law) fussing over everything else (get the potatoes just right, the stuffing, the yams, everything) and you really appreciate it when it happens. There just isn’t the years of practice anymore so everyone (that has to work outside the home) starts to lose that touch.
Shadowed Knight – lately I am twitching every time I read something that a man writes which simply implies Misdandry – so I re-read what you wrote and since I already stepped on it, this is what I was thinking:
“A young woman is foolish, as young people and women are.”
As are young men. I wonder why you didn’t write young “men” instead of young “people”. Don’t equate the two: foolish young women and foolish young men – possibly because to do so would let the young man off the hook to the same extent the foolish young woman is let off. -1
“She is in love–tingles–with a rake of a man.”
Love is one thing – tingles are another and equated with lust – further more, as the Misandrist rules here at Dalrock define: when a woman lusts after a man then that man is necessarily a Rake of man… or an Alpha asshole, PUA, Douche… this condemnation of attractive men as defined by women’s lust never seems to fail. -1
With the Rake so defined you then elaborate on his deception, his manipulations and the resulting depravity: “He does all the nice things, says al the right things, and they have sex.” -1
“She gets pregnant” ~ well, that’s accurate – +1
for a second there I expected to read: [He got her pregnant].
“because they did not use birth control.”
‘They’ don’t have birth control – she does. Oh, but, abstinence and rubbers… -1
@innocentbystanderboston
“I think we all have to remember that cooking (I mean good cooking) requires a little bit of a touch in the kitchen. Not all women or men have that touch.”
I understand all of that, especially after 10 years of marriage. But to state that the number of American women under 70 who have that touch is exactly “none”, as feeriker did, is bullshit.
Yes it is BS. The thing is around here, too many people (sometimes myself included) make way too many sweeping generalizations. I try to watch that, but its difficult sometimes.
Classic Patriarchy 101 – velvet glove over the patriarchal iron fist.
As taught in every women’s studies class in the western world.
Cause Patriarchy is for men you know!
@JDG
I actually live near to the Skimmington Ride Theme Park ™ in Mid Dorset, south United Patriarchal Kingdom. It’s a great educational day out for the local Junior Patriarch Troop. If the Serf Girl Junior Chain Gang have been good (or especially if they have not), we take them to the nearby Scold’s Bridle Museum. After as little as half a dozen encouraging beatings the girls rush to try out the experience…cuts the chatter right down. Everyone’s a winner.
(p.s. Love GirlWritesWhat/Karen)
SSM, you banned me and blocked me? I am touched that you think so highly of my work. It brings a tear to my eye, it does. Worse than a misogynist, too? Oh, stop it; you say the nicest things.
As for my reasons in engaging with AR, I have two. The first is a dislike for intellectual dishonestly, and he drips it and reeks of it. The second is that I really do believe in the purging of cad types as they are a detriment to society.
Just Saying, actually, your diaper analogy is fair. As a man, I use women as they are intended. I respect them for what they are, which is only sensible. Babies do not apologize for using their diaper for its purposes. I do not defer to my lessers.
Highwasp, I wrote all that intentionally. All young people are especially foolish, man or woman. Women become less foolish, but they never grow out of it as men do. Then I point out that her “love” is actually lust and rationalization. Not all attractive men are cads, just most of them. It is a function of the times, when good men are trained to be weak. An asshole has little compunction against manipulating women. It is simple fact that women are easy to manipulate. I worded the pregnancy as I did because she was a willing participant. If he had notionally raped her, then “he got her pregnant” would be more accurate. She went along a path that was likely to result in pregnancy, and she got pregnant. As to birth control, do you think a society that flogs women for sex outside of marriage is going to sell birth control pills to a single young woman? She has no more options than he does.
The Shadowed Knight
Did you watch the video?
The velvet glove over the patriarchal iron fist… I prefer the iron gauntlet over the iron fist. The leather glove is soft enough while offering even more strict consequences for failure, and it provides a valuable example for all the rest. At least those men are not as bad as The Shadowed Knight, right?
IBB, no one accuses me of white knighting because that would be absurd. They know me too well for that. You, on the other hand seem to vacillate between white knight and patriarch, so you have that problem. Just be an asshole like me, and it will go away.
The Shadowed Knight
@JDG
“As taught in every women’s studies class in the western world.”
As a (far) right thinking Patriarch (and who isn’t? How could one not be?) I do approve of teaching the wilful women their proper place in the world, but…do you ever get the feeling that sometimes these lectures come at the cost of their education in (correct feminine) mirth?
I mean, we all know that women aren’t funny (ref too many alleged comidiennes to mention), but I am vaguely unsettled by the fact that I’ve never met a girl studies graduate with any sense of humour. (ref Deborah above – I suspect that she’s not a fun person to be around)
(This guy is funny, but the poet is definitely not)
Highwasp:
I have read your reply several times, and I think I understand the sentiment behind it.
One of the things I like best about the Dalrock blog is its emphasis on becoming a better man. One doesn’t need to become Mr. Fuckbuddyrockbanddrummer and start banging married chicks to be a better man, in fact, one of the greatest parts of the message here (and on related blogs) is the meme that we ought to become better men simply for the sake of self-improvement. The women who tend to show up afterward are secondary to the experience, and are irrelevant to the praxis itself.
Yes, it’s sorta mean for me to point out that if you were married to a ho’, it is your fault. Life is often cruel. It seems like you’ve improved yourself since then. Being Mr. FBRBD is, hopefully, a phase you are going through, on your way to a more authentic destination (assuming you haven’t outgrown it already). Hopefully we learn the lessons we are given and then move on to greater things.
There were times when I was desperately committed to women who toyed with me. There were also times in my life when I was very active (carnally, I mean), acting out a strange sort of revenge. I look back on these times not with pride but with amusement, and while they were necessary to me in that time and that place, I have no real desire to recreate the experiences. Once you realize that you can get women whenever you want them, you eventually come to the conclusion that the goal of attracting lots of women is meaningless. There is no spoon…
The men I see as screwballs are men who are in places where I have been, and my judgment is (as it often is, just ask Freud) a sort of delayed self-judgment of my own youthful silliness.
Regards, Boxer
TSK,
Its not really a problem for me. I just let it go.
Perhaps. But then you wind up creating a whole bunch of other problems that you definitely do not need.
@TSK
“the iron gauntlet over the iron fist.”
Old school…respect
@JDG
Just checking, but I’m pretty sure that I have heard this one before. I left a comment of JFG connected to it
http://www.justfourguys.com/do-not-adjust-your-set/#comment-13693
Happy days (wipes manly tear from eye – it must be smoky in here)
My linked comment has a useful link to an educational talk that Karen gave
http://www.avoiceformen.com/feminism/naomi-wolf-karen-straughan-girl-writes-what-debate/
Thanks for the link. I haven’t seen this one yet. My response to the question is: Bring back the patriarchy! Better that men are horse whipped and ridden backwards on a donkey then what is happening to them now.
Bullshit. My wife was already a good cook when we married (she was 22) and she’s only gotten better. After almost 10 years of marriage, she’s outstanding. Now she’s teaching our daughters.
Maybe you need to step away from the internet and meet some actual people for a while.
Maybe YOU need to 1) go out and buy a sense of humor somewhere
@feeriker
“Maybe YOU need to 1) go out and buy a sense of humor somewhere”
Maybe you need to go out and buy a joke book somewhere, because if that was supposed to be a joke, it failed miserably.
TSKnight : “As to birth control, do you think a society that flogs women for sex outside of marriage is going to sell birth control pills to a single young woman?”
probably not – and by the way – speaking of flogging, I just read details of such a method of control, birth control and otherwise:
White Cargo – the Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America (2007)
Judging from the increasingly harsh deterrents adopted from the
1630s, more and more were running as the seventeenth century
advanced.
As with virtually every servant crime, the first stage of punishment
was a whipping. In Virginia, constables apprehending runaways
were instructed to administer an immediate whipping and every
constable who escorted them on the journey back to the plantation
was told to follow suit: ‘Every constable into whose hands the
captive shall be committed shall . . . whip him severely.’6
Maryland flirted briefly with making ‘desertion’ a capital offence
but instead adopted the Virginia way – slapping an extra stretch of
time on the servants’ indenture period. At first, the formula was
two days’ extra servitude for every day on the run but in Virginia
that escalated to five days for every day absent and in Maryland
to ten days. Other colonies followed the Chesapeake lead but
were generally content with the two-for-one ratio. But all added
something else to the extra time a runaway faced – compensation
for the cost of hunting him or her down.
This harshness reflected the planters’ determination to stamp
out all signs of dissent at a time when the whiff of insurrection
was beginning to spread. Discontent could be scented across the
Chesapeake in a series of mini-rebellions and plots and acts of
violence on the plantations in which black and white servants acted
together. In this atmosphere, escape attempts were viewed as part
of the same movement.
In 1640, the Virginia planter Hugh Gwyn raised a hue and
cry over three servants who had escaped into Maryland. One was
a Scot, one a Dutchman and one, John Punch, was an African.
On hearing the news that they had been caught and detained
in Maryland, their master Gwyn decided to have the three sold
where they had been picked up. That would save him the extra
expense of bringing them back in chains and produce enough cash
to purchase more tractable servants. However, the idea of runaway
servants possibly going unpunished mortified the Virginia court. It
ruled against such a ‘pernicious precedent’ and in June 1640 asked
the Governor of Maryland to have the three returned to Virginia
for ‘such exemplary and condign punishment as the nature of their
offence shall justly deserve’.7
@JDG
Being a patriarch sounds exhausting to me, with very little reward. If we could just get equality before the law and of opportunity, then I’d be fine continuing on my own way. I realise that I have the luxury of not having children, that changes much. I’d like civilisation to return. If it is to do so it will probably come from people like those here. I’ve been mostly lurking for years due to the quality of analysis here. Keep it up.
MarcusD says:
May 14, 2014 at 4:02 pm
The end is indeed near now…
@Boxer re: “There is no spoon…”
I’m thinking this goes over worse when restated somewhat menacingly
“The spoon is inside you …”
SG, I just watched that youtube you posted. That debate forum was ridiculous. The moderator should have only be allowing the three women to talk (not even herself.) And only one person talk at a time. It was obvious that girlgetswhat was the most prepared for the debate. The other two weren’t even ready to have their thoughts scrutinized and challenged at that level. That is why the moderator had to keep rushing in to save the two of them.
I got problems, but… well, you know how it goes.
SSM, I was a bit surprised by your response. I had no idea. I have one question to ask of you:
Would you still allow me to court your daughters if they were of age?
The Shadowed Knight
Oscar don’t take yourself so seriously. And your wife is not normal she is special stop seeing her as women and be proud of her as woman. Women are worthless bitches that can’t cook or clean and are proud of it Woman cooks and cleans and her husband is proud of it.
Annulment: dealing with a nasty rebuttal (I find it interesting that the bitter/angry spouse is assumed to be a man – these people are so predictable…)
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=882916
@MarcusD
It was not as clear as it might have been, but if I have it right; he was married some twenty years ago and now he wants to have his marriage to his second wife – a marriage that seem to have lasted fifteen years – annulled. We are not told the grounds on which he pleads for annulment but there are witnesses (to what?). Annulment would of course enable him to remarry within the Church, but it does read to me, given the ex-wife’s vitriol, as if he is using the church’s annulment procedure as a ‘washes whiter’ divorce. The woman who assumed that the writer was a woman calls herself Xanthippe – how appropriate.
…or perhaps he wants the church to annul the first marriage which lasted just five years until it was ended by the civil courts some fifteen years ago.
MarcusD
I don’t know the whole mechanics of annulment. With everything else about the church today so what. His response to his ex should have been “fuck you bitch’ and the he should tell the church to go ahead and run it with what you have. Then just go out and marry the new woman in his life.
@IBB
yes. the moderator was very poor. Wolf was way out of her depth, the poor quality of moderation partially hid that.
@MarcusD
That is interesting. We can’t know for sure but my guess would be it is a man posting. Otherwise, why take such great pains to obscure the sexes of the poster and the ex? A man posting that openly as a man would almost certainly have been challenged, with someone at the very least pointing out that annulment is (or should be) fairly extraordinary, and that he may need to consider the fact that he has something more to repent of than he had assumed.
I too thought that the writer was male. It is something about the acceptance of reality; the stoicism, the self-effacement, the surprise as to the ex-spouses venom after so long, that marks it out as written by a man: a no nonsense approach by beginning with the expression OK. Very different from the moaning and complaining (and shaming) that certain women bring to this blog.
Cail,
> “But-but-but what about men?”
I am not sure which specific posts you cover, but I tend to post “what about men” replies when some idiot note that AWALT posts that the entire problem is the fault of women. I don’t buy that and never will. This is likely saying abortion is solely driven by women, when men benefit from it greatly as well and often push the issue.
The claim earlier that the comment about “no women know how to cook” was humor doesn’t fit the way that is normally said. We do skirt the edge of hostility to women on a regular basis, not completely surprising given how much men have been cheated by them in the current legal climate, but still not a complete view. Thus what is claimed later as humor, comes off as a serious charge.
I think it was another thread where it was brought up that we shouldn’t always need the disclaimers, but that is a balancing issue. I have certainly found that it is not worth always stating disclaimers with my wife when discussing things, as the disclaimer can take away the impact of the statement, but a disclaimer can have more place in a longer thread that starts down the AWALT theme of insults, or even the claim that women are “special” in that they have no moral agency. Noting men face similar or complementary problems in that case is quite appropriate.
I am not sure that any reply thread is completely safe from the AWALT issue, especially the farther along it gets.
This doesn’t make the replies by some commenters accurate, I just wanted to note a general principle that I see present.
As TSK notes, it is funny being labeled a white knight here at times when no one in real life would ever think that.
Brad, I don’t recall any “woman are the sole cause of this problem” declarations, but I may have missed one. You may have been responding to a particular claim that went too far, but my general point was that we get “but what about men (BWAM)” diversionary tactics whether we’ve earned them or not. They’re as reliable as the dawn. It’s one of the standard mound-rebuilding techniques to get the conversation off the uncomfortable topic of women’s faults and back onto men’s, where we’re all (men and women) more comfortable.
The “NO women can cook” kind of comments bug me too, not because I take them literally — I know they’re exaggerations or jokes from guys who still have some bitterness (and deservedly so) — but because they provide a nice big opening for feminists and manginas to drive their NAWALT and BWAM trucks through and throw mud all over our discussion.
Thing is, a site like this is like a men’s club — except that people walking by can listen in through the windows and shout objections if they don’t like what we’re talking about. So we get familiar with each other and start using shorthand (like typing “women” instead of “most women” or “women in general but definitely not your mom”) and making jokes without the proper PC disclaimers, because we know what we mean and we’re trying to get to the point. We already know that men have a lot of responsibility for the current problems, because we’ve discussed that many times before — sometimes on purpose and sometimes because a mound-rebuilder sidetracked us to it. We know that none of us believes that men are blameless and all women are evil. We don’t need to include that in every discussion, because it’s already in the background.
That would be fine except newbies and passers-by don’t always catch the vibe, so they get offended. That’s just the nature of the beast with public blogs and forums. A certain amount of friction is inevitable, and while you can make some effort to reduce it, if you try to couch every argument so that no one could be offended you’ll never get anywhere. Which again, is kind of the point for the mound-rebuilder.
JDG: look up Leviticus 20:10 to see the death penalty for adultery. Like I said, the Torah is almost as brutal as family court in this regard.
Cane; Christ’s rejection of the idea of easy divorce is in Matthew 5. If one can not Biblically divorce for any grounds save adultery, then there is no such thing as a legitimate marriage after divorce unless the spouse who left you is “dead” to you–had committed adultery, had died, or (Doug Wilson’s contention) possibly had committed another capital crime.
The point about Bathsheba is not that, but rather that an eyewitness was not required for a conviction on grounds of adultery. See what I’m getting at here?
@greyghost says:
“Oscar don’t take yourself so seriously. And your wife is not normal she is special stop seeing her as women and be proud of her as woman.”
I know my wife is special. That’s why I married her. My point is that feeriker’s claim that the number of women like my wife is exactly “none” is, first of all, false, and second, insulting to women like my wife. Third, such comments by older men discourage young men from seeking young women like my wife, which is harmful both to young women like my wife and the young men who appreciate them.
Yes, Proverbs 31 women are rare. They always have been. It says so right in Proverbs 31. But to claim they don’t exist is false, insulting to the ones that do exist and harmful to them and the young men who appreciate them.
Coincidentally, I stumbled onto this video at thetruthaboutknives.com.
http://www.thetruthaboutknives.com/2014/04/question-of-the-day-ladies-of-the-knife/#more-13862
YouTube link:
Now, there’s a lady that knows her way around the kitchen. And a bone saw.
Pingback: Ask Amy outraged that married sisters don&rsquo...
All true. But here’s the thing: in a forum that is populated primarily by men discussing issues important to men, what is more important: making sure we never insult a woman, or giving men like Feeriker some leeway to blow off some steam without feeling like their moms are watching?
Cail Corishev says:
“All true. But here’s the thing: in a forum that is populated primarily by men discussing issues important to men, what is more important: making sure we never insult a woman, or giving men like Feeriker some leeway to blow off some steam without feeling like their moms are watching?”
I’ll tell you what’s more important than both the options you just wrote – the first two words you wrote. “All true”
THAT is what is most important in anyone’s writing. Is it true, or not? Is it accurate, or not?
I’ll take all women can’t cook and live well. Not all women can’t cook doesn’t get it done any more. no man should ever now day days ever assume any woman can cook. Very stupid and something I would never tell any young to do.
Oscar, you might not fit in here.
Cail asked you an excellent question and instead of answering it, you reframed it and changed the narrative. I took a look at what feeriker wrote about women and their cooking and you didn’t have any cause to get all upset with him about it. We do not walk on egg shells here and if you are going to continue to act this way (with a little chip on your should), this forum is probably not for you.
Oscar, I’m sympathetic to the importance of truth; I really am. If you hang around, you may notice that I DO try to be careful not to make blanket statements about ALL women that can be used to distract from my points. (That’s more because I’m a nerd about language than because I care whom I offend.) And my mom is one of those exceptional ladies who cooks and keeps the home (and garden and more) well. I also know a few others, so I know Feeriker’s statement is technically false.
But if you’re going to spend all your time tilting at such windmills, you’re just going to end up tired and frustrated. Did Feeriker’s statement technically insult my mom? Yeah, I suppose so. Did I take umbrage at it for even a second? No, because I know he doesn’t know her and isn’t really talking about her, and I know he’s a guy who’s been burned by the female imperative and is letting off steam. I can sigh, wish he wouldn’t say such things, understand why he does, hope that someday he’ll feel more charitable toward women, and move on. And when a woman says, “All men are pigs,” I also feel no compulsion to argue with her. I know what she MEANS, and she’s not insulting me.
There’s the technical truth of what the words mean grammatically, and then there’s the meaningful truth of what they mean in the context of the discussion and who’s saying them and who’s listening. You have to be able to distinguish the two.
Cail,
You may be right about the general lack of AWALT assertions in this thread, but they all tend to run together at least in my own head, so that can be why I may post something that is not strictly true, though the “no women can cook” seemed a lot more serious, presented without any context.
No easy answer, either way. You have to live with some venting.
Though I would suggest that the disagreements provide more value here. Anything where everyone agrees will quickly die. Few forums make it over the long run without some kind of contention.
Oscar,
> “THAT is what is most important in anyone’s writing. Is it true, or not? Is it accurate, or not?”
I would guess that few strive for “truth” more than I, but even I know that context and situation must also be considered. It is impossible to stand for all truth at all times. You can only say so much in any given situation and you must tailor your message to that situation.
Turning everything into a rant against abortion, for example, might have some truth, but it would be counterproductive and not a good use of your lungs. The same would be true of saying “men do bad things too.” The point is valid, but not always appropriate to stress. My wife already does that enough when I note how many women do fit the AWALT theme….
Brad,
This is an outstanding point. We actually have a celebrity in the media who gets this better than anyone, Rush Limbaugh.
Rush doesn’t spend too much time on the air talking about abortion. And as a result, I never knew he was a passionate about it as he is, he never lets on that he is. But he is. And he did exactly as Brad said once with a caller when they wanted to know why Rush wasn’t supporting Rudy Gulliani in the GOP primary. It went down something like this:
(calm, cool, Rush) “Simply put, there is no possible way to reconcile the murder of the unborn with a civilized society. We simply can not support a GOP candidate that is okay with this. Full stop.” And that is all he had to say on it. He didn’t have to revisit abortion again on his program, he just let it go, didn’t need to turn everything in a rant against it. We all know how he feels about it, its a non-starter. So that is in his platform as a human being. Now he can discuss other things and build from there.
Exactly, precisely right. This goes without saying. We all know this. Oscar doesn’t need to remind us of that by changing the narrative to what is TRUE or not instead of answering a valid question that Cail asked of him.
@greyghost
“no man should ever now day days ever assume any woman can cook.”
Who said anything about assuming anything?
@innocentbystanderboston
“Cail asked you an excellent question and instead of answering it, you reframed it and changed the narrative.”
Actually, Cail responded to a statement I made (feeriker’s statement is false), then used his question to reframe it and change the narrative. I merely brought the narrative back to its original frame (feeriker’s statement is false), so you got that backwards.
@BradA
“It is impossible to stand for all truth at all times.”
How hard is it to add the word “most” in front of the word “women”? That alone would make the statement true. “Most” is a monosyllabic, four-letter-word. Is that too much to ask? If so, why?
@Cail
“I know he’s a guy who’s been burned by the female imperative and is letting off steam.”
Your argument appears to be that I should not refute freeker’s false, inaccurate statement, because freeker’s false inaccurate statement makes him feel better about himself, if only temporarily. So, emotion (“blowing off steam”) is more important than truth. And you don’t see the irony of prioritizing emotion (“blowing off steam”) over truth in the comment section of a “red pill” blog?
Look, gents, it’s not that complicated. If a statement is true and accurate, and that statement makes people feel bad, the statement is still true and accurate. Whether or not it makes someone feel bad is irrelevant to its veracity.
If a statement is false and inaccurate, and that statement makes someone feel better, the statement is still false and inaccurate. Whether or not it makes someone feel better is irrelevant to its veracity.
So, one has to decide for ones self whether one will prioritize truth and accuracy over feeeewings, or the other way around.
@TSK
You would have to ask HHG’ position if I were you. The father after all gives permission.
So it looks like we have a truth Nazi on the team now.
> “How hard is it to add the word “most” in front of the word “women”? That alone would make the statement true. “Most” is a monosyllabic, four-letter-word. Is that too much to ask? If so, why?”
I take it you aren’t married Oscar….
If you leave an easy out, it will be taken. Haven’t you also heard the saying, “the exception that proves the rule?” Some absolutes are absolute, others are really just statements of “almost all” instead of meaning all.
Though my wife doesn’t really like the “most” statement either, so I am not sure you gain much with that. And most would imply 51% or greater, a VERY large range.
@ greyghost
“So it looks like we have a truth Nazi on the team now.”
Does the truth make you feel uncomfortable? In the use of logic and reason is the clarity of language used not essential in order to communicate meaning?
feeriker’s statement was an Argumentum ad populum (aka appeal to popular beliefs) and trying to justify this argument by others due to his personal experiences as “blowing of steam” is an Argumentum ad Misericordiam (aka appeal to emotion). Although I do have sympathy and understanding for feeriker’s current views on women and do not criticize him for making the generalisation I do also believe that Oscar has made his point clear on the importance of word choice.
Now gentlemen the question is this. Do we stay out of an opposing view argument between feeriker and Oscar or do we partake in that discussion by using logic and reason or emotions and feelings?
I choose to stay out.
“If you leave an easy out, it will be taken.”
That’s human nature, women just perfect it. Their offense taking is their method of bullying everybody else into addressing every issue in a way that gives them an out.
Men prefer clear communication of ideas without the obfuscatory ‘not all’, ‘most’, ‘at times’. That’s why we invented men’s spaces, so that we can communicate as men. As mind blowing as this may be to our newby Oscar, men’s spaces exist to cater for men. I’m very happy for those women that can recognise and accept the difference to take part, but part of that acceptance is not trying to police the language used, or concern trolling (which is effectively what Oscar is doing. Maybe unintentionally, but the effect is concern trolling). Women do not have the right to have every space in the world cater for their claimed sensibilities*.
The thing is, Oscar, is that there are very important issues in the world that cannot be addressed without distressing someone. If you cannot address an issue, how can you solve it?
The best thing for all is that delicate souls leave this place alone so that the grown ups can talk like grown ups used to do. And ASD sufferers (my sympathies) recognise that they internally need to add most/not all/some to everything they read, or…don’t read here. They should be the first to appreciate clear communication.
(*the reason I added ‘claimed’ is that I note that in the current Boko Haram furore that these empathic, delicate, sensitive women don’t even bother to mention the boys that are shot, have their throats cut, are burned to death or are press ganged into being child soldiers (at threat of death). I am extremely sceptical about claims that women are the empathic sex (unless the empathy benefits themselves, their family, female community or just women generally). Surely calculated empathy is an oxymoron? I’m sure that the empathic women that do exist will understand that they should accept a little badfeel in order to highlight the shameless uncaring attitudes of the rest – so that attitudes might be changed)
Andddd, “Oscar” the mound rebuilder is successful from diverting you off the topic again. But do carry on.
Well, it is necessary to point out mound rebuilding sometimes, so we can recognize it and respond to it as such. Also, some men may not realize they’re doing it, since it can come from the natural instinct to protect women. (That’s why it’s not trolling; a troll knows what he’s doing and dishonestly attempts to derail the conversation.) As a man absorbs the red pill — and there are far more such men reading than commenting — it helps if he can recognize his own blue-pill behaviors so he can excise them.
Oscar,
Yeah, that uhhh, that is not good enough. Sorry. You are being unreasonable, feeriker didn’t do anything that required any kind of “correction” on your part. We don’t walk on egg shells here. So if you want to continue to post and troll for things like this (in a sensitive manner) be my guest, but you are probably not going to get much interaction from me if you continue this way.
IBB, I don’t need you of all people to defend me. Oscar and I may disagree, and I may think he’s rebuilding the mound, but he hasn’t accused me of sexual deviancy or said anything disrespectful. Stuff your righteous concern.
Cicero
It is the hair splitting thing I’m making light of. I fully understand exactly what is going on and Oscar is hair splitting unnecessarily. Other commenters are also trying to be helpful on this without making it a pissing contest. There is nothing wrong with the guy or with freeriker.
“Women can’t cook or clean worth a damn.”
One more thing. It is not wrong and is a good thing for society to exclude divorced women from gatherings. Regardless of the reason she is divorced.
Infowarrior, I was mocking her. A while back she had a question on ask.fm about letting any of the Androsphere men court her daughters. She answer that they were still very young, but that I and a couple of other neoreactionaries would make good husbands. I have no interest in courting anyone, especially her daughters.
I just wanted to make fun of her description of me. Open misogyny would be an improvement? Oh, yeah! Get it, get it!
The Shadowed Knight
@ greyghost
“It is the hair splitting thing I’m making light of.”
My bad. I did not realise that in society today the word Nazi and unimportant banter are synonymous with one another.
“I fully understand exactly what is going on and Oscar is hair splitting unnecessarily.”
And he is of the view that some are excessively using generalizations. You and others have your view he has his and it seems to me that both have a valid point to argue. That is why I am staying out of it. But like I said it depends on whether you want to argue the points on reason and logic or emotions and feelings.
“Other commenters are also trying to be helpful on this without making it a pissing contest. “
Seems to me that some of the commenters do not exactly see eye to eye on how this is to be done.
“There is nothing wrong with the guy or with freeriker.”
Why would there be anything wrong with either of them?
WOW, did little insignificant me really touch off such a fuss? Must be a slow issues week in the ‘sphere.
@greyghost
“So it looks like we have a truth Nazi on the team now.”
Good to see that truth is of so little value to some “red pill” men.
@BradA
“I take it you aren’t married Oscar….”
I take it you haven’t been paying attention.
@Spawny
“Men prefer clear communication of ideas without the obfuscatory ‘not all’, ‘most’, ‘at times’.”
Truth does not obfuscate, it illuminates. Falsehood obfuscates, and feeriker’s statement was false.
“there are very important issues in the world that cannot be addressed without distressing someone. If you cannot address an issue, how can you solve it?”
Go right ahead, but do so truthfully, because you won’t solve any problem by addressing it falsely.
@Cail Corishev
“it helps if he can recognize his own blue-pill behaviors so he can excise them.”
When you prioritize emotion (“blowing off steam”) over truth and accuracy, is that “blue pill” or “red pill” behavior?
@innocentbystanderboston
“you are probably not going to get much interaction from me”
Stop. You’re breaking my heart.
Asd it is then
That’s not what I’m doing. I couldn’t care less about his emotions (I’ve been accused of having none myself); I care about the conversation. But I recognize that people have emotions, and that means they don’t always dispassionately craft their words with the precision that you and I do. I can chase around correcting every falsehood and exaggeration, or I can shrug them off and stick to the meat of what they’re saying.
Of course, I will contradict a falsehood that’s stark enough or that interferes with the conversation, so it’s not a question of being pro- or anti-truth. It’s just about where you draw the line, between shrugging off everything at one extreme and being apsie about accuracy at the other.
For me, it’s purely a practical matter: does inserting NAWALT after a commenter says AWALT actually accomplish anything?
Women are shorter than men. This is a fact.
Oh, then what about Peter Dinklage? He is short. It is important to be precise, because truth is important.
The fact that Peter Dinklage is an extreme outlier that is shorter than most every woman does not invalidate the rule.
Can we end this pointless semantic debate. No one cares that an individual woman can cook. Create a composite woman who is totally average, she is going to be lost in a kitchen. This is the point.
The Shadowed Knight
Cail Corishev
“I will contradict a falsehood that’s stark enough or that interferes with the conversation, so it’s not a question of being pro- or anti-truth. It’s just about where you draw the line…
does inserting NAWALT after a commenter says AWALT actually accomplish anything?”
Apparently, we disagree on where to draw the line. Fair enough. Why do I draw the line where I do? Let’s go back to an issue we discussed earlier. Comments that paint all women as bad marriage prospects discourage young men who are looking for good wives. Is it true that MOST women are bad marriage prospects? Yes! As I pointed out before, the Bible has been telling us that for 4,000 years. But it’s also been teaching us – for 4,000 years – how to identify the good ones.
Isn’t that part of the reason why we’re here? To share ideas on how to be better men? Do we really want to give younger, less experienced men than ourselves the idea that they should just give up on marriage and family? I could be wrong, but I didn’t think this was that kind of blog. If it isn’t, there are plenty of blogs out there pushing the idea that marriage and family are for suckers. Do we really need to take up that banner as well?
On a lighter note:
“Oscar and I may disagree, and I may think he’s rebuilding the mound, but he hasn’t accused me of sexual deviancy or said anything disrespectful.”
Give it time. I haven’t been here very long.
Cail,
> “I’ve been accused of having none myself” (re: emotion)
Same here. I am very matter-of-fact and my wife regularly complains that I see things in black and white, thus complaints that I don’t are rather humorous. I do believe I am right or I would believe differently, but I have also been around long enough that I know that it is not worth wigging out over every little point.
Oscar, AWALT is a necessary part of the understanding of what marriage entails for men nowadays. AWALT, because even if she is not now, she can go from NAWALT to AWALT in a snap. It may be ten years down the road, it may be never, or it may be tomorrow. There is no way to tell.
Simply saying that most women have been less than ideal marriage partners is deceptive. The culture that constrained women’s ability to show just how terrible they can be has been shredded. As a result, we see just how miserable a match they really are.
I think it is something like 25% of women are virgins when they graduate school. Immediately, that is three quarters of the women in the country disqualified, before they reach the age of majority. Three quarters, which you have no way to identify. Then you have to sift through all the rest of the issues a modern woman has, like feminism, leftism, atheism, and a host of mental disorders. All so that you have a chance–a chance, mind you, not a sure thing–at getting married.
Men have the right to know just how bad the game is before they deal in. Their efforts would be better spent stepping away from the game, not buying in.
The Shadowed Knight
Are you certain it is that high TSK? It may be, but that could also be a lot of talk. It is possible many still are chaste, not necessarily because of their own convictions.
Brad, it looks like that number is for college. Just over half of high school age women are virgins. However, by the end of college, it looks like it is closer to four out of five are no longer virgins. Then you have to take reporting error into account. The numbers are probably slightly higher.
So, yes, things are that bad. By the time they have finished college, four fifths of women are disqualified for marriage, though you still have to sift through the many singles to find one of the one in five. After that, you can get into whether or not she is a good candidate for marriage.
Speaking personally, it is not worth the effort. I do not need sex for immediate personal survival, and the desire wanes the longer I go without. Dealing with women is a tedious chore for me. I will be able to do more without women dragging me down.
The Shadowed Knight
Well, TSK, the issue is always children. How does a man have children without the participation of a woman? How does a man create a real living legacy that carries on. Yes, you may accomplish more without having to deal with women, but when you die, it ends. This is the dilemma for men today. I don’t have an answer…
Bradford, you do not. The only way around that would be surrogacy, and I think that God would consider that an end run around His commandments. I will likely have no progeny to follow up my work. My legacy will be what I can do in my lifetime, and nothing more.
Everyone dies sometime, children or not. I solved the dilemma myself. I chose to forsake the chance of a family for other goals. I know what I have to do. Simple, but by no means easy.
The Shadowed Knight
Funny, but what I took from this was narcissistic behavior of the married sister. Blaming the divorced sister for having a reaction to being treated like crap is typical narcissist manipulation.
I’ve been dealing with a narcissistic DIL for four years who has done a multitude of unforgivable, hurtful things to me and my husband and no matter how undeniably cruel the acts are, our son supports her and blames us for not liking it. The only was they will “forgive us” is for us to take blame for our reaction to the treatment. Our “reaction” has never been more than I us telling our son about how it made us feel.
For example: Screaming at me in front of the grandkids and me leaving their house turned into my fault because I should have stayed and talked it out. I said I would not be a part of my grandkids seeing their mother out of control to the point of screaming. I was told it was none of my business how they raised their kids and if they thought it was okay for the kids to hear their mother scream at me I was to stay and hear it. I know that sounds absurd but it’s the God’s truth.
I felt some vindication reading what Amy wrote when she said the divorced sister was justified in being upset and the married sister would have to live with it and not blame her sister for not liking it.
Sorry, this post was low-class. The divorced sister’s husband LEFT HER for another woman. You write as if she left her husband. She’s the woman’s sister. It’s not good to abandon your sister and stop hanging out with her if her husband leaves her with a child to raise.
These things aren’t ALWAYS the woman’s fault.
LH
It has nothing to do with fault it was about female status and the effect divorce has on it. That was the point.
Well, this blog makes me think a society and gender is ruled by economy. In my country (a poor country), the woman is not seen freer when she divorces, but seen in a destitute situation and in big trouble. It means her husband has left her or he is an alcoholic or degenerate gambler. So when a woman divorces she becomes a big danger to other women. Because she will be looking for a man. And the good men are already married, so she will be seducing from the married men to get a new one. That is why divorced women are chased out like the plague by their female “friends”.
The divorced men usually have another woman (who forced them to leave their wife), or are really addicts of some sort, so do not belong to the society anyway. Reading this blog makes me perceive the USA as a paradise for women. God bless America, unfortunately I do not live there.
Statistically, divorced men and women marry other divorce people so they are not a danger to married people who irrationally believe that they’ll try to “get their itch sated” via some poor married woman’s man. How sick and backward you pathetic excuses for men really are on this page. I love the way you call them “frivorcees” as if leaving someone who is beating you, for instance, is frivolous–or that all or most of divorce is frivolous. Controlling men like yourselves are a major cause of divorce and leaving those kind of limp biscuits is good for society. Hell, if the only way you can feel like a man is to bash women for everything under the sun and encourage people to essentially shun single mothers (not fathers? lol), then you are no men of God or courage or decency anyway. Take your wives who obviously wanted a daddy versus a real husband and stay the hell away from politics and the law and let decent intelligent men and women work for a fair society.
Per vio: “…divorced men usually have another women (who forced them to leave their wife…” Wow, so when a married man has an affair and leaves his wife, it is the “other woman” (i.e., naturally a WOMAN is at fault in the Dalrock world lol) who “forced” them to leave their wife?! Unbelievable. How divorced from reality you must be to write that. Gosh, that poor married man was pressured and “forced” to leave his family by some evil selfish bitch…I mean female. As for the other garbage on this site: “No fault divorce punishes men” Sorry, but the stats show that the majority of divorced women’s income and lifestyle plummets to poverty levels (they must really want to get away to pursue that!) while the man’s goes up. Also, men and women file first in no-fault divorce at the same rate. As for custody? It’s true that often women get the YOUNG children because studies have shown that there is a need for children under five to be w/mothers primarily. Aside from that, judges in California at least strive for sharing custody. The myth that most men “never” see their children again is a canard; any divorced father w/o a criminal record can and does get shared and even sole custody every day in the good ole USA. The only parents who were routinely denied ANY custody at all for centuries up until the mid 20th century was WOMEN…not men.
The only parents who were routinely denied ANY custody at all for centuries up until the mid 20th century was WOMEN…not men.
Having seen the results of women getting custody of children I think we can safely say the sooner we go back to default male custody the better.
Sad Grandma,
Why do you keep visiting their house? You are pretty stupid to do that. I would have long since cut off contact if your story happened to me, whatever my wife felt about it. I know how it feels to lose or never have contact with grandchildren, but being in a situation like that only happens because you let it continue.
Get rid of the strife, even if the cost is horridly high. Let them blame you or your husband (who I assume is there, but that is not clear). That is ultimately their problem. They have already decided to harm their own children by destroying you.
So how many marriages end because the husband beats the wife? You are so much into statistics earlier in your reply that you should know. It is frivorce because most marriages end because the woman got unhappy. She may then generate some abuse claims, but those are just falsifications to justify herself at that point.
That last paragraph was aimed at Julie. Not sure how that line got clipped.