I started this as a comment in the discussion of my previous post. However, given the difficulty many had spotting the problem with Walsh’s framing I think this is worth pulling out as a separate post.
There is a sort of blank slatism on display here and in Stanton’s writing where the female child is perfect and the only source of sin comes from the culture. Stanton explains how parents should address raising girls in his book on parenting (emphasis mine):
As parents guide their girls into the complex and wonderful world of healthy womanhood, what do they need to be aware of?
What are the essential qualities that transform our daughters into mature, secure women?
As you read through the qualities described below, please keep in mind that much of this is innate, but because our culture seems to fight so hard to suppress certain natural tendencies, it’s our privilege and responsibility as parents to watch out for opportunities to nurture and guide in these areas.
Fortunately Stanton doesn’t make the same mistake with boys, who he explains need continuous direction to become good men (emphasis mine):
Who will help your little boy become a man? How will this be achieved?
These are profound parenting questions that demand great and long reflection. Note that I wasn’t entirely correct earlier. Each conveyor belt leads not necessarily to manhood but to male aging, because that’s what the mere passage of time produces. But good men don’t just happen. Good men are most often created in good families, and great intention needs to be put into the process. Fathers and other men play a key role!
In his letter to his daughter post, Walsh writes with the same blank slatist frame Stanton does about daughters (emphasis mine):
I hope you always stay exactly as you are right now. Innocent, carefree, unencumbered, pure.
But these could only be the hopes of a foolish idealist like your Dad. I can rub the genie lamp and make a thousand stupid wishes, but you will grow. You will start to learn about the culture that surrounds you. You will form opinions about yourself. Your vivacious, bubbly happiness will give way to more complex emotions. You will develop new dimensions.
In these times, here in your very early life, you only cry because you’re hungry or tired or you want me to hold you. One day, though, your tears will come from a deeper place.
Note how she goes from pure to wretched, and the agent of change is the culture. This is really no different than Marx, etc wanting to make the New Socialist Man, or what feminists are trying to do. The idea is that people don’t have a nature (and certainly not a sin nature), and therefore you can solve humanity’s problems by fixing the culture. Just to be clear, I don’t deny the profound impact of the culture, as this is an area I focus on a great deal. But as Christians we err greatly if we ignore the true source of our fallen nature, pretending instead that it comes from the culture.
This may seem subtle, but there is a huge difference between pointing out the problem of the culture reinforcing the worst aspects of our nature, and claiming the culture is the source of the worst aspects of our nature. This is the problem with Walsh’s piece, and it isn’t found in just one segment, but throughout the piece. Closely related is his baffling obsession with making sure the young girl always knows she is beautiful. Whether this means strictly her physical appearance, knowing that she is inherently good, or is about her self esteem seems to be under debate here. My personal read is he is talking about all three, but obsessing about any of these isn’t remotely Christian, which I’m surprised isn’t more easily spotted. I pray this truly isn’t the “advanced class”, but either way we have a truckload of modern cultural baggage to unpack. We may as well start right here, right now.
Moderator’s Note: The same rules apply to this post as the last one. Keep the focus on general advice and protection of a Christian girl. Any references to Walsh’s children or anyone else’s children will be removed.
There are two types of people in church: Women and sinners.
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Dalrock,
When the wife and I watched an episode of 19 Kids and Counting, and we are introduced to one of Jim Duggar’s daughters who was engaged, we found out that she not only has not ever been alone with her husband to be, she hasn’t even kissed him yet. I find that amazing (really unbelievable) given the culture that we all live in. Perhaps at one time, this type of behavior was normal given culture the but it isn’t the norm today. Perhaps this is what Stanton and Walsh are talking about?
@IBB
I don’t have access to either of their thoughts, so I’m limited to responding to what they actually wrote. What they wrote is quite different from what you are describing. I would be delighted if one or both were to clarify the issue though to help their readers understand that the culture isn’t the root source of the problem, but is reinforcing our sinful natures.
This isn’t actually blank slatism, its worse.
A blank slate would mean its blank originally. That everything is defined by the environment the child (woman) finds herself in. They are neither good nor bad.
But in these examples, women are not “blank slates” they are in fact beautiful, perfect, holy creatures without sin at birth and are corrupted (by men and culture) and this idea has been a stain of American thought long before feminism. it was an idea of “natural law” that came out of our particular brand of Christianity: God made women to be mothers and helpmates and they are naturally mothers and therefore “Good.”
Feminism springs from Christianity and this type of thought, it did not grow up out of Marxism alone. That’s why it is so easy for the churches to embrace these ideas, they’ve been selling them long before the feminist showed up. The idea that this thought is invading the churches is wrong, it came from the churches first.
They are in more ways blank slaters with the men. Men aren’t inherently good, they must be molded that way.
It would be in fact BETTER if they were blank slaters with women because there wouldn’t be an intrinsic view that they are good, but that they are mallable, and that would be closer to the truth than what they are selling.
@TFH
Stanton at least is clearly selective in his blank slatism view, limiting this only to girls/women. This is good in the sense that at least he doesn’t get both sexes wrong. This also shows that he doesn’t view gender as a social construct. I don’t know if Walsh would make the same mistake with boys/men that he has with girls/women. My guess (and only a guess) is that like Stanton he would not.
I want to reiterate that this isn’t giving girls a helping hand. It wouldn’t be better if we started saying the same wrong things to and about boys and men.
one of the remarkable things that has occurred along these lines is the removal of “Woman as Temptress” from the hero’s journey here:
http://www.artofmanliness.com/2013/07/11/heros-journey/
the “men” who run the blog dutifully bastardized Joseph Campbell’s treatment, which represents the past 5,000 years of mythology from around the world:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monomyth
2.1 Separation
2.1.1 The Call to Adventure
2.1.2 Refusal of the Call
2.1.3 Supernatural Aid
2.1.4 Crossing the Threshold
2.1.5 Belly of the Whale
2.2 Initiation
2.2.1 The Road of Trials
2.2.2 The Meeting with the Goddess
2.2.3 Woman as Temptress (WOMAN AS TEMPTRESS IS “DISAPPEARED”)
2.2.4 Atonement with the Father
2.2.5 Apotheosis
2.2.6 The Ultimate Boon
2.3 Return
2.3.1 Refusal of the Return
2.3.2 The Magic Flight
2.3.3 Rescue from Without
2.3.4 The Crossing of the Return Threshold
2.3.5 Master of Two Worlds
2.3.6 Freedom to Live
It’s fun to note that the secrtive taper of Buttehxtxtxt Tucker MAcchz rhymes iwth Godldm Saxz endorses the author’s bookz. Of course he does. 🙂
lzozozozozozoozlzoozoz
I have yet to witness Stanton or Walsh quoting Genesis–the Law they claim to serve, which Jeuss stated he Came to Fulfill (even though many dalrockian frankfartianz fatherless fanboyz falsely preach that Jesus came to abolish the Law of Moses and Old Testament):
Genesis:
“I will make your pains in childbearing very severe;
with painful labor you will give birth to children.
Your desire will be for your husband,
and he will rule over you.”
You beat me to it with this one; blank slate thinking — which permeates pretty much everyone and everything today — is a big part of it.
For instance, I recently heard a normal-sized 12-year-old girl complaining about how she’s getting fat. Now most people hearing that will assume that she’s being indoctrinated into thinking that, by the media, clothing and diet industries, mean boys, whomever. It can’t be something she came up with herself, because it’s not true, so it didn’t come from looking in the mirror or from comparing her sizes to other girls or anything like that. It had to come from outside influences.
So the decent, blank-slate-believing parent or teacher sees her worrying about this false belief and thinks that’s not right. She shouldn’t have to feel bad about something that’s not even true, and she could damage her health trying to be skinny, and if she weren’t worrying about that she could put that energy into winning an Olympic medal or something. So he combats those external voices with the opposite: telling her she’s not fat, she’s exactly the right size, she’s beautiful just as she is, etc. He may also try to shut down those external forces who have been writing this fatty stuff on her blank slate. If he can outweigh (heh) the badtalk with goodtalk, she’ll be happy and healthy and do great things.
But what if “I feel fat” doesn’t come from outside influences at all, or at least not primarily? What if it’s a worry that’s programmed into females, by God or by evolution, because being fat is so harmful to their well-being and their chance of a good marriage and happy life? What if worrying about that — as long as it doesn’t go to the extreme of anorexia — is actually a good thing because it helps her avoid the habits and foods that get obesity started? This possibility will never occur to the blank-slatist, and if presented with it, he’ll find it ridiculous and offensive.
The same thing applies to the girl who wants to dress slutty, or get a tattoo, or blow up her marriage for reasons she can’t explain. She can’t have come to these desires via reason, so the solution is to find out where they came from and block them, and in the meantime shower her with compliments and affection to help her resist the bad influences. But if the impulse is coming from within her and she doesn’t want to resist, then all the affection and self-esteem boosting will be redirected somewhere else — perhaps into confirming her commitment to her own desires that you were trying to combat.
It’s interesting, though, that blank slate thinking isn’t applied equally to male and female. A girl’s blank slate is seen as a pure surface which can produce nothing ugly unless outside forces write it there. A boy’s blank slate, on the other hand, though blank, is seen as a fertile soil for badness. So blank-slatists try to block bad influences on boys as well as on girls; but when boys succumb to bad influences that’s seen as inevitable, while when it happens to girls it’s seen as contrary to their pure natures and much less palatable.
Church is a business these days, and women are its primary customers. Namely, women who like being told how beautiful and perfect they are and how nothing bad that they do is ever their fault, but is always the fault of men or ‘society’.
No one goes broke by telling women what they want to hear. Telling women want they want to hear ensures that your pews and coffers are always full – and that your books make the best seller lists.
Follow the money. Always, ALWAYS, follow the money.
This seems to be simple: Our friends (especially our Focus on the Family friends) need to read James 2 about favoritism and partiality.
Of course, they could always just say they don’t think women are in full communion, but I don’t see them striking women from church voting membership.
“This is really no different than Marx, etc wanting to make the New Socialist Man, or what feminists are trying to do. The idea is that people don’t have a nature (and certainly not a sin nature), and therefore you can solve humanity’s problems by fixing the culture.” ~ Dalrock
This kind of thinking has always perplexed me. If “culture” – or “society” – is evil and turns people evil, what made “culture” or “society” evil?
Cultures and societies consist of people. If people are inherently good – or blank slates – then cultures and societies should also be inherently good – or blank slates – and therefore incapable of corrupting inherently good – or blank slate – people.
This is nothing more than humanism (specifically romanticism) infecting the Church, just as Francis Shaeffer explained decades ago.
The reality is that cultures are fundamentally wicked and corrupt because their basic unit is the individual, and we individuals are fundamentally wicked and corrupt due to our sinful nature.
As John McArthur states, the most important thing a parent can do for his/her child is to always keep in mind that your beautiful, bouncing baby boy or girl is a rotten little sinner, and the only way to deal with their sin nature is to introduce them to Christ.
Norwegian Television has not exactly achieved world domination, yet there is a series of seven shows presented by their Comedian (and Psychology Graduate) Harald Eia – a man with a face for Radio according to one American woman who comments in one of the sections – entitled Hjernevask (Brainwashing) and which the last time I looked was up on You Tube (with English Captions, yet a lot of it is in Spoken English – when Eia visits England and America for the correct science) where Eia looks into the question of Nurture or Nature. Despite being (of course) a 7-0 victory for Eia and the Naturists (but despite being Scandinavia there is no nudity) I was less than convinced about two of the segments where (although they lost) I felt the Nurturists had the better of the argument over the Naturists. I scored it 5-2.
Everyone believes in female purity especially the Judiciary who wash sluts whiter than Daz (do you have Daz?).
Slightly off topic, I think one of the chief problems a parent deals with is finding the right balance between two parenting extremes, the one being “here is this lump of clay we have to mold into the creature it ought to be” and the other being “here is this strange creature that will be whatever it wants to be, and we need to love it and help it and generally get out of the its way as it blossoms.”
Walsh seems to have more of the latter — i.e., innocent little girls would naturally become wonderful creatures if it weren’t for the horrible influence of culture.
Dalrock,
Slight typo in the OP’s title: it should be “Christian blank *slatism*, not “slatisim” as it is spelled. Carry on Sir
[D: Thank you. Fixed.]
Re: Marxist teleology, the classical viewpoint includes things like commodity fetishism. It’s a fancy term that describes the process of people substituting consumer goods for relationships. One has a relationship with his Mercedes or his ipod, these days. People (who he should be having a relationship with) are seen as generators of wealth or objects of use, precisely the inverse of reality.
This is a false-consciousness critique which was rather brilliant when it was formulated. There’s a lot about Marxist thought that is provably wrong, though. The rosy view of human nature is one of the most obvious. Marxists, ironically, are themselves prone to the reification of their own anti-reification critique, believing (without any cause) that if they only achieve the realization of their ideas, people will suddenly morph into perfectly logical operators.
That’s mainly the problem I had with the Roissy lifestyle. The idea that “well I can’t change society, so I’ll lounge poolside and have sex with hot strange women” is fundamentally irresponsible. The learned helplessness promoted by the playa lifestyle is a hindrance to social improvement. So, this is a widespread response to social forces that seem overwhelming, and isn’t just limited to Christianity, Marxism, or any other individual school. It’s ubiquitous in the PUA/playa/MGTOW community too.
Best, Boxer
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> Closely related is his baffling obsession with making sure the young girl always knows she is beautiful.
That is because they have bought the idea that beauty is the same as value. Kind of ironic that they go with the underlying theme even while claiming to oppose it.
Value and beauty are not the same, but we can only objectively see the latter, so we tend to focus on that.
Blank slate principle is nothing more than the repackaged and ludicrous idea of the noble savage.
And advocates for the blank slate face the same major problem as the other moral sense theorists.
There is no evidence that the noble savage ever existed.
Ipso facto… the blank slate does not hold water.
Dalrock, it does not appear to be pure blank slatism to me, there is definitely an element of “girls are born good and corrupted by the world” as well. Look again at Walsh’s discussion of his daughter, it’s almost as if he’s contemplating a butterfly that has just emerged from a cocoon; flawless perfection, tragically destined to be polluted or corrupted.
Back when I used to argue with Marxists I would ask how it can be that the New Man (Soviet, Kampuchean, Cuban, whatever) could be created in his glorious perfection by the actions of manifestly imperfect human beings leading/ teaching / commanding /etc. Much smoke-blowing always ensued, but basically they were really arguing that old baby-abandoner Rousseau’s bogus “noble savage” claim.
(Taking the side of “nurture is all” has advantages if one is in the business of creating a panopticon, all powerful state, the rest of us might just Question that Authority. )
Like the anti-scientific absurdity that “men and women are exactly the same except women can have babies”, the blank-slate notion is pretty much in the water we drink and the air we breathe. It’s a source of much cognitive dissonance, too: I know people who talk that talk, but routinely point out how a child clearly is just like an ancestor, “Oh, she’s a lot like her aunt Margie”. There’s clearly cognitive dissonance at work here, too; it is not logically possible for boys to be born to be bad, and girls to be innocent butterfly-blank-slates, given the fact that both are human.
But no one has ever demonstrated that pedestalization of female humans has any logic to it.
It is rather ironic to read such twaddle from someone claiming the Bible as having authority – those who are far better schooled in the Bible please correct me, but isn’t it true that or Walsh’s notion to be correct, original sin only applies to men? I’m sure he’d argue long and loud that I’m misquoting or misunderstanding him. To which I have one reply: actions vs. words. Watching what he does vs. what he says reveals what he believes.
And that is:
He believes his daughter was born without any bad behaviors, or in Bible terms “without sin” and is doomed to be corrupted by the world. Where in the Bible, old or new testament, is this supported?
BradA
> Closely related is his baffling obsession with making sure the young girl always knows she is beautiful.
That is because they have bought the idea that beauty is the same as value. Kind of ironic that they go with the underlying theme even while claiming to oppose it.
When I was a boy my mother undertook to improve my handwriting by having me copy sentences for an entire page. One of them was: “Beauty is only skin deep”.
Apparently this commonplace notion is now forgotten.
re: beauty is truth, etc. Girls *must* be gooder than boys, because they’re prettier.
Tabula Rasa is an age old debate over nature vs. nurture. While Walsh seems to fall with Locke and St Thomas Aquinas, I think Hobbes is closer to the truth, also known as The Word. One doesn’t need to go further than Genesis 3 and the Garden of Eden to see that all of mankind is flawed. But you can go further if you like:
For all have sinned, and come short of the glory of God;
Roman 3:23
But we are all as an unclean thing, and all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags; and we all do fade as a leaf; and our iniquities, like the wind, have taken us away.
Isaiah 64:6
I don’t see any caveats leaving women out, no matter how beautiful.
> Where in the Bible, old or new testament, is this supported?
It is not.
Pretty much what I’ve been saying on this blog for months. I could only be a member of a church with lay pastors (not paid a dime.) Only in those circumstances are the pastors free to preach the truth.
“Innocent, carefree, unencumbered, pure.”
The only person who can describe a young girl that way is one who has not seen young girls fiendishly pushing buttons and manipulating their parents, and engaging in mean-girl cruelty with their friends.
Just as with adult women and men, young girls are just as beastly as little boys, just in a different way.
Joey,
That reminds me of my son and daughter-in-law’s insistence that children are inately good, when it is clear that their daughter has some horrid tendencies they are training up to explode when she is a teen.
> Only in those circumstances are the pastors free to preach the truth.
That is a naive thought. The saying “Where God guides, He provides” has some merit and some really do believe that. “A workman is worthy of his hire” and “You shall not muzzle the ox as it treads the grain” both apply as well.
Thinking that those doing it for “free” would be ideal is not realistic. They would be just as subject to the whims of the age, perhaps even more so since it is a sideline job to them.
Cail, that was an excellent comment.
Brand Matt Walsh comes through a group that’s figured out how to make concepts and ideas ‘famous’ rapidly. It’s based in the deep South.
“Girls *must* be gooder than boys, because they’re prettier.”
This might be the key. In the movie industry, there is what I call the “camera worldview”. The idea is that only what the camera sees is real. Very useful when you’re making a movie (forced perspective makes the building look big) but not when you carry that worldview home (forced perspective made marriage to her look good).
Considering how much audiovisual entertainment is consumed in America, it isn’t hard to believe that people are subconsciously adopting a camera worldview. If you’re a loser in life but look good on Facebook then you’re not REALLY a loser, right? And Mr. Walsh is trying to keep his daughter beautiful as a proxy for actual virtue. (Not saying she isn’t virtuous, just that the letter we’re discussing has this motivation.)
cicero says:
July 21, 2014 at 2:25 pm
“Blank slate principle is nothing more than the repackaged and ludicrous idea of the noble savage.”
Bingo! It’s Rousseau’s Romanticism given a good Christian white washing.
‘Rousseau holds that “uncorrupted morals” prevail in the “state of nature” and he especially praised the admirable moderation of the Caribbeans in expressing the sexual urge[20] despite the fact that they live in a hot climate, which “always seems to inflame the passions”.’
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rousseau#Theory_of_Natural_Human
The thing about the blank slate theory is that it’s so at odds with reality that no sane person can really believe in it all the time. It’s like believing that gravity doesn’t exist and people can fly at will. You could claim to believe that, and go about your daily life believing it. You could write academic papers explaining with big words how it’s the truth. You could even design the political and educational systems around it. But if you find yourself at the top of a tall building and want to get to the street, you’re going to take the elevator instead of taking the shortcut through the air.
So you can really only believe in the blank slate partially. As someone pointed out, if girls start with a pure blank slate, then someone has to interfere with that or there would be no tramp stamps. Someone has to create the slutty clothes and the unrealistic Barbie dimensions and all the rest. Saying it’s the “environment” just avoids the question; someone created that environment. Ultimately, if you’ve decided girls are good by nature, it comes down to blaming men: if women have a clean blank slate, then men must have a dirty one.
It comes down to, “Girls are made of sugar and spice and everything nice; boys are made of snips and snails and puppy dog tails.” Which was cute as a nursery rhyme, but it makes a poor basis for a system of mores and laws.
I believe this sex spreadsheet comment is still topical.
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2014/07/17/commitment-issues/#comment-132091
The basic idea is that the man is at fault, both for wanting sex more than his wife does, and for point it out. The wife’s refusals are a noble response to her husband’s asking amiss, and her reposting of his private emails were motivated by the pure-as-driven-snow desire to improve her relationship (bymaking himact better …).
I don’t know about any of the other women here, but what my father (lifelong Christian, Catholic convert) taught me about my looks was very, very simple:
Your character, not your looks, is what defines you as a human being, and don’t let me ever catch you behaving otherwise.
I understand that fathers want the best for their daughters and love them unconditionally, and that’s one of those essential relationships that every little girl deserves to have in her life, but the focus is on all the wrong things. My dad taught me to be moral, not pretty. Those lessons have gotten me through some horrible things.
No wonder girls are so feral these days.
Don’s Johnson says:
July 21, 2014 at 2:42 pm
“Tabula Rasa is an age old debate over nature vs. nurture. While Walsh seems to fall with Locke and St Thomas Aquinas”
Don’t blame Aquinas for the pedestalization of women. He erred in the opposite direction.
“As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active power of the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of a woman comes from defect in the active power.” ~ St Thomas Aquinas
Retrenched says:
July 21, 2014 at 12:56 pm
“No one goes broke by telling women what they want to hear. Telling women want they want to hear ensures that your pews and coffers are always full – and that your books make the best seller lists.
Follow the money. Always, ALWAYS, follow the money.”
I agree, but there is a little more to it than just the money. The dangerous precedent set by the protestant churches by allowing a woman to divorce her husband, has them bound in chains. Check out Once Married Always Married:
http://oncemarried.net
Note: I’ve pulled (removed) a few comments which referenced Walsh as a father. I don’t want to have that conversation here, just like I don’t want discussion of his children. I don’t want to criticize Walsh as a father, or open his kids up to cheap shots. I want to discuss the larger issue. Please be careful about this because I would very much prefer not to pull any further comments. If need be I will put individual commenters in either the mod list or the blacklist, but I hope that won’t be required.
@ oscar
I must admit that I have only read a bit of Summa, and I lack broad enough knowledge on Aquinas to lump him in with Locke. Apologies.
I often think that small family size is one of the factors in this stuff. If you grow up with two or more sisters, it’ll be hard for you to avoid learning these truths:
1) While girls are wonderful in many ways, they are most definitely not made entirely of sugar and spice.
2) Their less desirable traits emerge far too soon to be blamed on media conglomerates, or to be anything but innate.
3) Enough differences in personality between individuals show up at a very young age, even among those raised in the same environment, to show that they were born with them.
But with middle-class Americans averaging fewer than two children per family, many (most?) boys will grow up with 0-1 sisters, so they may have little experience with the true nature of females until the first time they live with one (married or not) for a period of time. By that point, the pedestal may be so tall and shiny that they can’t see anything else.
The fault in not in our marketers, but in ourselves, that we are betas.
http://www.genetics.org/content/197/3/795.full.pdf+html
1.A. S. Wilkins, R. W. Wrangham, W. T. Fitch. The “Domestication Syndrome” in Mammals: A Unified Explanation Based on Neural Crest Cell Behavior and Genetics. Genetics, 2014; 197 (3): 795 -808.
We men are just plain too domesticated.
BradA:
While it is true that a pastor does not magically become wiser and less corrupt in thought simply because he is unpaid, you seem to be quite naive yourself. The ever-present pressure to pay salaries and mortgage and other expenses cannot help but affect the priorities of the leader of any organization. I’m certain you would never hire a CEO who didn’t take allow such considerations to affect company strategy.
I have first-hand experience in typical churches (large paid staff, big mortgage, “what can we do to get more butts in the pews”), as well as a small country church with no paid staff and no mortgage, where 85% of church income directly supports missionaries. An unpaid pastor is no less subject to theological error, but his priorities are very different, and he is, in fact, less subject to a whole category of temptations. That is axiomatic.
Your comment about “sideline job” is hilarious. And pitifully ignorant.
Cail Corishev says:
July 21, 2014 at 4:16 pm
“I often think that small family size is one of the factors in this stuff. If you grow up with two or more sisters, it’ll be hard for you to avoid learning these truths:
1) While girls are wonderful in many ways, they are most definitely not made entirely of sugar and spice.
2) Their less desirable traits emerge far too soon to be blamed on media conglomerates, or to be anything but innate.
3) Enough differences in personality between individuals show up at a very young age, even among those raised in the same environment, to show that they were born with them.”
I have five girls and three boys (two sets of twins), and I can confirm this is all true.
Cail, I was going to mention the same thing. Adding to the problem is the fact that, thanks to school and extracurricular activities, even if a sister exists, a brother will spend very little time interacting with her.
I’m one of eight children, including five girls. (And no, my family was not Catholic or Mormon. 🙂 ) In the semi-rural area I live in, there are many large families — i.e., 6+ children. Some good friends of ours have 12, with another on the way, and they’re all homeschooled. Ask the five sons about “sugar and spice”, and they’ll laugh in your face.
Heh, Oscar, you mentioned you’ve got five girls and three boys, which is exactly the same as in my family growing up. No, Dalrock readers, I’m not one of Oscar’s three boys. 🙂
Anyway, I’m glad to hear you’re being fruitful and multiplying. I’ve only got six so far, but looking forward to more. To borrow a line from Braveheart, “If we can’t kick them out, we’ll breed them out.” And a line from Mark Steyn: “The future belongs to those who show up.”
Splashman,
> you seem to be quite naive yourself
Yeah, right. I have been in this thing we call Christianity for over 40 years now. I have more than enough experience with a wide range of support arrangements. A mega church, or one aspiring to that, may aim at purely “butts in seats”, but that is not the only kind of church. I have seen far more ignorance than I have willful misleading. And I have been on both the “inside” and “outside”.
> Your comment about “sideline job” is hilarious. And pitifully ignorant.
You say that without a shred of truth backing it up. Someone who has to work a full time “day job” will not have the same amount of time to focus on study, etc. Note that the apostles said they should not be “waiting tables,” but focused on study and preaching. They could not do that without support. Paul was willing to work when needed, but that was not his primary method.
I presented Scriptures (without the exact reference of course) and you made accusations. Is that the strength of your argument? What Scriptures indicate a part-time pastor is better? Or are your thoughts and feelings above what is written?
Anonymous Reader brought up original sin. It is indeed very heretical to claim that women’s natures are less sinful than men’s.
About the time my first daughter turned two, my wife remarked that it was convenient to see our faith concepts such as original sin lived out so personally in our little girl’s self-sulliedness in her behavior. Although apparently this enlightenment didn’t stick since she repudiated our faith only a half dozen years later, and original sin was one of the concepts she decided to disagree with the most.
ooo da GBFM, you’re on something. I can tell.
Remember, kids, just say no.
In his OP, Dalrock wrote:
One of the problems with any sort of mass communication (i.e., one-to-many), is the fact the communication only goes one direction — there isn’t an opportunity for immediate back-and-forth chit-chat to resolve a misunderstanding. It is possible (however unlikely) that Walsh and Stanton believe that girls are just as inherently corrupt as boys, but an objective reader of the posts which Dalrock references, would not get that impression. Later comments by the authors may “clarify” (i.e., CYA), but the original post would still stand, along with all the (possibly misguided) reactions.
That is why an effective writer would consider it absolutely necessary to anticipate likely misunderstandings and objections, and deal with those in the OP. In other words, if Stanton and Walsh truly believe that boys and girls are equally corrupt, they are abysmally incompetent writers.
This points to a limitation of short-form writing (such as blog posts). In a longer form (such as an essay, or book), one can cover all the bases (more or less). In this tl;dr blog culture, shortcuts lead to a lot of misunderstandings, which lead to a lot of comments, which lead to a lot of pageviews. And that’s what’s important, after all. 😉
BradA: Your reasoning is absolutely pitiful. I started counting fallacies and ran out of fingers and toes. I’m not going to waste any further time with you.
That would only be a big deal if you actually supported your assertions with the Scriptures. Good strategy to quit when you can only use bald assertions.
Great Books For Men GreatBooksForMen GBFM (TM) GB4M (TM) GR8BOOKS4MEN (TM) lzozozozozlzo (TM) says:
July 21, 2014 at 12:20 pm
That’s the GBFM I remember. Welcome back. Though I was never crazy about the butt references, I’ve always liked when you referenced and/or listed great books for reading.
Carry on good sir, carry on.
Splashman says:
July 21, 2014 at 4:48 pm
“No, Dalrock readers, I’m not one of Oscar’s three boys.”
If you were, I’d have a lot of ‘splainin’ to do!
“To borrow a line from Braveheart, ‘If we can’t kick them out, we’ll breed them out.’ And a line from Mark Steyn: ‘The future belongs to those who show up’.”
Mark Steyn rocks! No one else can make the end of civilization so hilarious!
@Dalrock
By the way what is your email?
This seems to be simple: Our friends (especially our Focus on the Family friends) need to read James 2 about favoritism and partiality.
Focus on the
FemaleFamily was cut off from scripture some years ago. Once upon a time they seasoned the scriptures with psychology, they have long since reached the point were they season psychology with… more psychology… and other popular notions of human invention.Now this is finding the silver lining taken to extreme. I love the new positive focus!
No, Splashman….I get your point about dealing with ambiguities in advance, men who write in these spaces generally are versed in dispensing these up front, but that’s just not the case here. This isnt a one post phenom. Its in the corpus of work from all of these Christian male writers.
Cynthia, teaching girls that their character is more than their looks is not the point here. I am certain these men would agree loudly, despite the title of the piece from Walsh. For one thing, there is a (self induced) epidemic of low self esteem in American women, Christian and non, and dads, rather than tacking the issue just pander to the insecurity because they buy the fact that its men causing the insecurity. See Russell Moore’s “Women, Stop Submitting”….where he writes that they are in submission to ALL men by worrying over their looks.
The point you make, Cynthia, actually is the driving force behind the problem Dalrock describes. In teaching character the women are not bluntly told that they have sin proclivities and what those are.
Empath whats up with your blog?
I think I see what the issue is with Walsh and other fathers of young daughters: in past generations there used to be strong social restrictions on women’s sexuality. On men’s too, but much more so on women for the obvious reason that women cannot be cuckolded like men can. No one in the history of mankind has ever said “he’s the father but we don’t know who the mother is”. The behavior resulting from those culturally imposed restrictions were romantically but incorrectly interpreted as women’s “higher nature”. Well, those restrictions have been all but completely removed. And it has become apparent that when all restraints on female sexuality are removed, it can get just as ugly as unrestrained male sexuality. Yet most men – even ostensibly red pill men like Walsh, cannot bring themselves to recognize it. They still, understandably, want to hold onto the “higher nature” paradigm.
“Innocent, carefree, unencumbered, pure.”
The only person who can describe a young girl that way is one who has not seen young girls fiendishly pushing buttons and manipulating their parents, and engaging in mean-girl cruelty with their friends.
That stood out to me too. Has he ever met a girl? Even little kids, before the ‘culture’ has presumably had so much time to do its work, can be astonishingly vicious. Boys will usually just have a scrum and that’s that, but girls can be downright baroque in the viciousness of their social fights.
@empath:
Just to clarify, I’m not defending the writers (I can’t stomach their ilk). I’m pointing out those who defend the writers (by saying the writers didn’t mean that, they meant this), don’t have a leg to stand on.
I would love to give a single item questionnaire to a thousand random high school-aged kids–1/2 boys and 1/2 girls.
“List some innate things about your sex that you need to combat daily in order to be a better person.”
I would be willing to bet the boys lists would be longer and more insightful. They would write about fighting off their aggressive tendencies, sexual desires, desires to control…”
The girls would put stuff like “I love too much.”
@Matt:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be stating that girls are generally more vicious than boys. Seriously?
Come on. Both males and females can be vicious in their own ways. Males are usually more physically vicious (does “war of aggression” ring a bell?), while females generally use their mouths to accomplish their goals. But if you think females are inherently more vicious, either (a) you haven’t spent enough time around males or history books, or (b) female viciousness seems worse because it’s less familiar.
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to be stating that girls are generally more vicious than boys. Seriously?
No indeed. Of course both boys and girls are human beings, with all the cruelty that can entail. As you mention, the list of genocidal dictators doesn’t exactly have a lot of chicks on it.
The point is that in the context of children, while it’s pretty clear that Mr. Walsh is aware of the classic “shove into the locker and steal your lunch money” bullying of boys, he doesn’t recognize that the more malice-aforethought social scorched-earth warfare of Mean Girls is no less genuine.
Maybe this is a theological tangent, but I want to point out that even if you don’t believe in “original sin” interpretation of scripture, Dalrock’s overarching point still stands. I do not believe in original sin, I don’t think it is a biblical concept. So in my understanding, children are born pure & without sin. But in my understanding, it is all the more condemnation because it is the individual that chooses sin over righteousness when tempted. The original point still stands, it is not the “devil made me do it”, it is not “culture made me do it”, it is not “I was born this way”… but instead, I chose this death.
@Splashman
I disagree about the weakness of the format. This is in my view a strength of blogging as a medium. As a blogger I get immediate feedback from my readers in the comments. Anticipating this when writing keeps me on my toes, and if I get something wrong I can correct it right away. If for some reason my own readers aren’t able to spot/correct something, another blogger can post a critique, and I can then respond. So the beauty of the medium is Walsh can at any moment clarify what he meant, or otherwise explain why he thinks I’m wrong. If he chooses not to do either, it isn’t because of a limitation of the medium.
I’ll also note that what I quoted from Stanton is in the form of a book. He has also made the same basic claim elsewhere:
His error is more problematic in my opinion because unlike Walsh he isn’t a young blogger. He is Director of Family Formation Studies for FotF. This isn’t him getting a blog post wrong, it is one of his books, and it is in his direct area of study. And he didn’t write it once in the book, he has since repeated it.
The cruelty of boys tends to be overt; atomic wedgies are pretty hard to misinterpret. The cruelty of girls is much more subtle, and can be completely missed by those who aren’t intimately familiar with it themselves and haven’t studied it. Nowadays, I can spot when one woman gives another a backhanded compliment, for instance; but when I was younger I never would have caught that. Those men we talked about who didn’t grow up with sisters tend to be oblivious to all the pecking order stuff that goes on constantly with girls and women.
Thing is, girls do display these traits on occasion, and that’s a joy to behold. Ditto when boys do. The mistake is in thinking that they’re always that way, or that that’s their natural state to which they’ll conform if you can just keep bad influences away from them and pump them up with enough confidence to make their own choices. A girl/woman making all her own choices is a basket-case in the making.
jf12 says:
July 21, 2014 at 5:29 pm
“About the time my first daughter turned two, my wife remarked that it was convenient to see our faith concepts such as original sin lived out so personally in our little girl’s self-sulliedness in her behavior.”
I taught a class on the essentials of Christianity a few years back. During the section on Original Sin, one of my students asked what example I’d use to best illustrate it. I offered my then-2-year-old daughter as an example.
My little daughter didn’t like corn bread, but every time she saw her siblings eating corn bread, she demanded a piece. She’d then take a little nibble and refuse to eat the rest.
I asked my student what that was called, and she correctly identified it as “covetousness”. I pointed out that, even though it seemed like a small thing, my little daughter’s sin was the same sin that led Cain to murder his brother, and left unchecked it could grow to such monstrous proportions.
The best examples of sin nature are not the most depraved among us (Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, etc.), but the most innocent of us.
“The behavior resulting from those culturally imposed restrictions were romantically but incorrectly interpreted as women’s “higher nature”.”
You don’t know how right you are. But this isn’t new.
From: Shall Women Vote: A Book for Men (1913) – Conway Whittle Sams, Esq.
https://archive.org/details/shallwomenvotea00samsgoog
“From the days of Mother Eve down to those of our own times the works of the evil one have been made sadly manifest in the case of poor sister woman as well as in that of her brother man. The assumed attitude of superiority now observable on the part of some women toward men is a poor return for the consideration and the generally indulgent and flattering attitude with which the men of the western hemisphere have treated their women. This element among the women has misunderstood and abused this consideration shown them, and has enlarged the “better half” idea into thinking that they are intellectually and morally man’s superiors. They have listened to words of flattery so long that it has spoiled them, and has given them an unduly enlarged idea of their real position in the scheme of creation. Viewed as a class, women are not showing off
particularly well under the new order of things. They are losing their accomplishments together with the softer and sweeter graces which were formerly their own, in short, the femininity which made them so much admired and beloved, and are substituting for it self-assertion and Amazonian qualities, which may finally cause to perish from the earth the regard in which they were formerly held and all the dear associations clustering around the ideas of wife and mother and home. It is fair for men, in considering these things, to ask themselves whether they will further encourage a movement which will deprive them of the domestic happiness which once was found in the home, and substitute for it the disgraceful scenes of strife and disorder which so often are pictured on the stage, in the movingpicture shows, in the police courts and the papers.” (P.133)
“Stevenson, after some very severe observations intended to show that women may be at heart very different from what their fair exteriors and ordinary habits would indicate, concludes by saying that the doctrine “of the excellence of women, however chivalrous, is cowardly as well as false. It is better to face the fact, and know, when you marry, that you take into your life a creature of equal, if of unlike frailties; whose weak human heart beats no more tunefully than yours.” History abundantly proves the truth of this conclusion. Along with the host of bright and shining women, whose characters have adorned the annals of the race, and who have been an inspiration to the generations which followed them, there has been a vast number of other women, who have been as bad, as unwise, and as dangerous political leaders as any one could be. Now, the men have to live with the one class as well as with the other. The laws should therefore be so conceived as to ensure a reasonable modus vivendi as to all. They are now apparently drawn on the theory that the men are all bad and the women all good.” (P. 126)
A lot of good stuff in this book. Well worth the read.
@Splashman
Girls are more vicious than boys. Anyone with eyes knows it. I asked my 19 and 16 year old girls and they both immediately said girls. They know it. My wife beat them both to the punch in decrying their common sex. She knows it.
The explosions of male violence are bright and brutal, but few. Meanwhile, every home is frequently singed and smoke-choked by the female desire to gleefully inflict and observe the pain of others; especially their enemies, who are mostly made on a whim, for the least of reasons.
Dalrock, as I mentioned in my reply to @empathologism, I wasn’t defending the writers; I was condemning their lack of competence as writers and preempting their sycophantic defenders. Capiche?
As for the blogging/commenting feedback mechanism, of course it is an advantage to be able to crowd-source. I suspect, however, that you would agree with the point I was trying to make; to wit, that it would generally be better to get the OP right in the first place, rather than be forced to correct it after the fact.
CaneCaldo:
Hmm. If I replied by stating that my experience, as the father of 4 girls and 2 boys (so far) and acquaintance of many friends’ daughters, was different than yours, I suspect you’d dismiss it as anecdotal evidence, and you’d be justified in doing so. So I and others should impute credibility to your generalization because . . . ?
Oh, right. Because “anyone with eyes knows it.” Silly me.
My unscientific observations line up with what Cane has described.
The “blank slate” argument extends through Christian thought regarding the conversion of women as well.
The former party girl/ prostitute/ porn star becomes a “new creation” due to conversion. Christian men are therefore not allowed to take I to account he liabilities of marrying such a woman: possible inability to bond. Reduced fertility. Drug history, both legal and illegal. Debt.
Before any Christian says that “in Christ, they are a new creation” – to which I agree, I will ask if Christian women extend the same courtesy to men who have lost jobs, failed businesses or battled alcoholism and drug abuse, possibly in combination. Drug history usually isn’t a problem, but regarding the others, Christian women are not that different to their secular counterparts:
“If you ain’t got no money, take your broke ass home”!
Before any Christian says that “in Christ, [fallen women who have been saved] are a new creation” – to which I agree, I will ask if Christian women extend the same courtesy to men who have lost jobs, failed businesses or battled alcoholism and drug abuse, possibly in combination. Drug history usually isn’t a problem, but regarding the others, Christian women are not that different to their secular counterparts:
“If you ain’t got no money, take your broke ass home”!
Yes, indeed. In my experience, whenever asked to explain why women should be given a free pass and a clean slate but men are held to standards and account for past behavior that the blood of Christ has supposedly washed them of, the typical churchiofeminist response is something along the lines of “God has given men more responsibility than women. Therefore, men must be held to higher standards.”
Don’t even bother pointing out to them how this contradicts everything else they claim to be true about the differences between the sexes (it’s obviously a case of the FI in action, where men pay all the bills while women enjoy all the bennies), to say nothing of how it is completely unscriptural. It will only start an argument that no one will walk away from unscathed.
Hmm. If I replied by stating that my experience, as the father of 4 girls and 2 boys (so far) and acquaintance of many friends’ daughters, was different than yours, I suspect you’d dismiss it as anecdotal evidence, and you’d be justified in doing so. So I and others should impute credibility to your generalization because . . . ?
Oh, right. Because “anyone with eyes knows it.” Silly me.
There’s some broad heuristics you could use. Most murders are committed by men. In the US, there’s about 4 murders per 100,000 people per year, though it varies wildly by demographic group. “Bright and brutal, but few” as the other commenter said.
Conversely, most divorces are initiated by women, mostly in no-fault contexts. There are about 400 divorces per 100,000 marriages per year, which eventually leads to nearly half of marriages being terminated (as Dalrock has recently done numerics on). “Every home is frequently singed and smoke-choked”, as the other commentator said.
So while I’m not myself sure I’d stake my flag entirely on the “women are more cruel” hill, it’s not preposterous on its face.
Yeeahh, women definitely take the cake as the crueler, more viscous sex, in every day life.
@Empath
I get the humor you find in this, and you made me chuckle. But I am serious. It isn’t kindness to claim that women/girls are innately good.
I don’t think it’s comparable unless you speak in very broad generalities. Men get loud and break stuff, and women rely on catty insults and sabotage. We’re all pretty jerky, in our own ways.
“Note how she goes from pure to wretched, and the agent of change is the culture. This is really no different than Marx, etc wanting to make the New Socialist Man, or what feminists are trying to do. The idea is that people don’t have a nature (and certainly not a sin nature), and therefore you can solve humanity’s problems by fixing the culture.”
Exactly. Their (eternally) perfect daughters have no moral agency. No fixing necessary b/c no willful sin-nature acknowledged in their daughters, by those responsible for pointing it out, and often. All moral agency is absolved at the beginning of these girls’ lives, and punishment conveniently is transferred to Somebody Else’s boys and men. Take a load off Annie.
I went to the Walsh blog and it’s full of women praising him and his ‘beautiful’ letter . . . his romanticist, self-serving feminism dressed up as a Christianity. We see all this reflected in education as Rape Cultures (which don’t actually exist), in legal gender-apartheid, and in the general rule of America by feminism.
U.S. churches largely are run, if indirectly, by the Walshes and Stantons, their wives, and their daughters, and are a superficial ‘religious’ expression of their psycho-social and political wills. They worship themselves (and apparently their daughters! lol) in buildings sufficiently fancified to be classed ‘churches’, and appoint one another pastors and ministers.
Everything but the groves.
“but either way we have a truckload of modern cultural baggage to unpack. We may as well start right here, right now.”
A good start. These mines are full of gold.
@Splashman
Because I’m right.
Commentor Matt noted divorce the frequent fires of divorce. He could have mentioned abortion; which–in accordance with our other modern sensibilities–has become an exclusively female decision. Even if it happens to be that most abortionists are men they are still only the bright and brutal few. The women that come to them are the cinder-ellas.
Walk into a group of men not at a bar or drinking party and tell them that their crude jokes offend and intimidate the women nearby. Many will apologize, and most will immediately shut up; even those who did not make rude jests. Do the same to a group of women, but say instead that their clothes are tempting men to lust and many will say that’s not fair to say, or that the men had better keep custody of their own eyes, or outright reject any right for anyone to pronounce on their dress behavior.
This, your keen eyes will note, is not a scientific or statistical representation of the truth, either. He who has eyes let him see.
It is not an “especially bad” indictment of women to recognize that they (as a group) must fight some particular faults more than other faults, or more of a type than men (as a group), or in different ways than men.
@Boxer
Stuff that belonged to someone else, and with the intent to hurt that other person?
Frequency matters too. When was the last time you, out of spite, purposefully broke something belonging to another, or hit them, or even threatened them? When was the last time you know of an incident of this by a man you actually know in the flesh? It happens, but it’s not frequent. Yet a woman wishing ill on the object of her ire is a regular occurrence, and not only wishing, but laughing and cheering if ill comes to pass.
I was going to ask which is worse, but male and female violence tend to be different, though my youngest daughter was quite nasty in her “play” with my oldest son when they were teens. Not nice at all and illustrative of the nastiness that lies below the surface in many.
I think I would focus on women being nastier since they tend to hide it more, but still weave it into many things. That is worse in my eyes than outright hostility.
Can you think of a group of men who don’t like each other much working together as a squad in war? Yes. What about the same for a group of women? The latter is a harder mental stretch.\
Men can put things aside for the task. Women can, but I would guess more often won’t. Purely subjective feeling of course.
Dear Brother Cane:
Please see below…
First Boxer sez:
Then Cane ripostes:
Of course, I’ve never, ever, done anything like that in my life. I’ve also never smoked pot, dropped acid, been stopped by the police for running a red light, and I’m a virgin to boot.
All that aside, the getting loud and smashing shit is largely a menz phenomenon. I point the audience to Ronald Flowers, who will expound on such esoterica in detail.
http://tinyurl.com/mfqqsba
Well, the people I associate with (men and women both) are something of a select bunch. I’ll give you the fact that this sort of thing is not unusual. World Star Hip Hop will suggest that much.
We’re not really disagreeing, though. Women, as I said in my original response, do like to make threats, backbite, sabotage, and individual wimminz will generally “wish ill” on the object of her ire with astonishing frequency. The fact that the pink team behaves badly doesn’t exonerate the blue team. I think you religious fellas call it “fallen” nature, which is a pretty good way to describe it, I believe. We’re all a cruel, petty bunch, in our state of nature (to paraphrase Hobbes). Men and women express their “war of all against all” in different ways, but I don’t see much of a qualitative difference.
Boxer
@Boxer
Yes. I understand and agree.
I think it would be instructive if you actually answered these questions about the menz phenomenon:
“When was the last time you, out of spite, purposefully broke something belonging to another, or hit them, or even threatened them? When was the last time you know of an incident of this by a man you actually know in the flesh?”
And then compare it to the instances of the womenz.
I genuinely cannot understand a perspective that equates female viciousness–the desire for another’s pain and suffering–with males’. I could as easily defend the sky as blue; obvious and yet impossible to prove.
It’s the arrow of causation – does the culture produce sinners or do sinners produce the culture. I suspect that it’s the latter (given the commonalities throughout all cultures, it’s apparent to me that human nature is at the root).
On that note, I should mention the etymology of the word “utopia”: 1551, from Modern Latin Utopia, literally “nowhere,” coined by Thomas More (and used as title of his book, 1516, about an imaginary island enjoying the utmost perfection in legal, social, and political systems), from Greek ou “not” + topos “place”. Extended to any perfect place by 1610s. Commonly, but incorrectly, taken as from Greek eu- “good” an error reinforced by the introduction of dystopia.
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=utopia&allowed_in_frame=0
re: women’s cruelties. Pecking orders are a female thing.
@Oscar re: “The best examples of sin nature are … the most innocent of us.”
One might say they are the purest examples.
Patheos recently published a brief article about this topic:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/faithonthecouch/2014/07/study-says-men-arent-dogs-after-all/
Dalrock,
Long-time lurker, first-time commenter, here.
Thanks for drawing this out. It never ceases to amaze me how Christians who reject the doctrine of Original Sin then decide men are naturally broken and have to be fixed and constantly maintained, and how Calvinists forget OS when it comes to women (OS being a cornerstone of the Calvinist systematic). Truly, we’re a double-minded bunch.
With regard to the Duggars, they are long-time members of Bill Gothard’s ATI cult, which alternates b/w saying on the one hand “dress code so you don’t tempt men”, and “no touching or alone time in courtship so you’re protected from men’s lustful tendencies” on the other. The latter is what’s at play in the reference in question.
A link at The Speahead lead to this study:
http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/marianne.bertrand/research/papers/the%20trouble%20with%20boys.pdf
Bertrand and Pan find that boy’s non-cognitive skills are severely impacted by their mothers’ neglect. Specifically, by exhaustively running the numbers, they find that single mothers deliberately raise their sons worse than girls, withholding time and resources, and that this worse-raising is the cause of boys’ disruptive behaviors. I speculate that the women are punishing the boys for being male.
Boxer, “I don’t think it’s comparable unless you speak in very broad generalities. Men get loud and break stuff, and women rely on catty insults and sabotage. We’re all pretty jerky, in our own ways.”
Hahahah, yeah right. See, there’s a key difference here. A man gets loud and breaks stuff–you can call the cops on him, he’s officially abusive, you can probably shoot him, etc. A woman is catty and bitter/threatens divorce or whatever over something petty? That’s just her being a woman.
Men being jerky is officially condemned/outlawed. Women are encouraged to do their “grrrlll power!” thing.
Here’s something fun:
Paris Hilton: I can’t trust men after sex tape leak
This is “fish in a barrel” type stuff for this place, so it shouldn’t be too hard for most to see what’s going on here.
@jf12
“One might say they are the purest examples.”
They are, because one can’t logically claim that “society” somehow taught a 2-year-old to envy, or to be selfish or intentionally cruel. Yet, 2-year-olds are perfectly capable of all of that and more.
“by exhaustively running the numbers, they find that single mothers deliberately raise their sons worse than girls, withholding time and resources, and that this worse-raising is the cause of boys’ disruptive behaviors. I speculate that the women are punishing the boys for being male.”
I also read that article at The Spearhead. I think Price makes a good point when he blames the deficit between investment in boys vs. investment in girls on the perverse incentives created by the welfare state.
Does anyone remember the everyone loves Raymond episode when he discovered his daughter was being a bully? He realized that she was not morally pure, and also that her mother was enabling her behavior. I wonder to what extent older female enablers are ignored as corrupting influences.
A few years?! Why, that’s practically forever! If you can’t trust someone who’s willing to bang a hot heiress for a few years during her prime, whom can you trust?
Beta Revolutionary, did you put that exact same post on alphagameplan.com, “Female advice and the Sex-22”?
It’s not just Maxism/blank-slatism. From a Christian standpoint, it’s Pelagianism exclusively for the female sex.
Dear Cane:
It has been a couple of years for me. The id is strong at times, though; and these masculine reactions are lurking, just under the surface.
Again, the aggression that wimminz and menz use, down in the trailer park, are often not comparable without a homogenizing generality. I’d argue that it would be more coherent to compare society’s repression of menz aggressiveness with the repression of wimminz sexual power.
For men (as opposed to menz), social norms and aesthetic sensibilities have been internalized to the extent that we don’t abuse our repressed physical power. That doesn’t mean that the power has disappeared. If the right set of circumstances presented themselves, I’d likely go all Alexander DeLarge, get loud and break shit, etc.
Dear Oscar/Cicero:
This is a much older idea than Rousseau.
“Human nature is good, just as water seeks earth. There is no one who is not good. There is no water that does not flow toward earth. … Now, by splashing, one may make water rise very high, but this is circumstantial. That man can be made to do evil is no different” (Mencius: Analects VI, around 300 BCE)
When in doubt, just blame Origen for bring Platonic thinking into Christian Theology. We’re always fighting that problem. Not that, mind you, the Apostle Paul wasn’t by 55 AD already dealing with most of this stupidity in the early Church. Something we should probably keep in mind.
For anyone who thinks women are in ANY way better than men, kinder, more pure, more humane, we don’t even need to look to things like how American women have killed off 50 million of their own offspring since Roe V Wade–literally the population of Spain. We can look to Scripture.
“while I was still searching but not finding– I found one upright man among a thousand, but not one upright woman among them all.” Ecclesiastes 7:28
Boxer says:
July 22, 2014 at 12:54 pm
‘This is a much older idea than Rousseau.
“Human nature is good, just as water seeks earth. There is no one who is not good. There is no water that does not flow toward earth. … Now, by splashing, one may make water rise very high, but this is circumstantial. That man can be made to do evil is no different” (Mencius: Analects VI, around 300 BCE)’
It’s much older than that. It dates to the Garden of Eden. The goal of every humanist philosophy is to make man his own god. As Solomon said, there is nothing new under the sun. I cited Rousseau because he is the most recognizable Western proponent of that philosophy.
“This is a much older idea than Rousseau.”
Dear Boxer
Oh goody Philosopher trumps. So our categories are *date* and *natural state of man*.
Yours
“Human nature is good, just as water seeks earth. There is no one who is not good. There is no water that does not flow toward earth. … Now, by splashing, one may make water rise very high, but this is circumstantial. That man can be made to do evil is no different Mencius: Analects VI, around 300 BCE”
Here is mine
“Reason is man’s true nature, but it has to be nurtured from childhood by irrational means.” (Laws, bk. 2, 653),
Plato (427-348 B.C.E.)
@Gunner Q
Thanks for the heads up. It had a strong whiff of troll to it along the lines of trolls trying to comment under the name (or similar) of the nutjob loser in San Diego. This confirms that no matter which kind of troll BR is, he is a troll.
re: women screaming and throwing dishes (i.e. being loud and breaking things). It’s a caricature because it is a *female* thing to do histrionics.
Dear Oscar:
Thanks. You got my point, I think. This sort of narcissism is an inborn feature of humanity. It’s not the fault of Christians, Marxists, humanists, or others.
It’s a very appealing idea, at least to me. Everyone wants to blame his environment for his own bad behavior; but, doing so robs us of the process of improvement, and, ultimately, of individuation.
Boxer
Boxer says:
July 22, 2014 at 2:54 pm
Dear Oscar:
“You got my point, I think. This sort of narcissism is an inborn feature of humanity. It’s not the fault of Christians, Marxists, humanists, or others.”
Yes. “The Devil’s Advocate” is a terrible movie, but it has a line I think carries a lot of truth. The Satan character says something like, “Vanity is my favorite sin. Self love. It’s the all-natural opiate”.
Of course, vanity (narcisim, whatever you want to call it) was Satan’s original sin (“I will ascend to heaven; I will raise my throne above the stars of God, And I will sit on the mount of assembly In the recesses of the north”), and it’s the same sin with which he tempted Eve (“you will be like God”).
If the culture were fixed girls couldn’t be corrupted but boys could, so it is men who must have created the culture that corrupts. Basically he’s a RadFem.
@Splashman,
Hmm. If I replied by stating that my experience, as the father of 4 girls and 2 boys (so far) and acquaintance of many friends’ daughters, was different than yours, I suspect you’d dismiss it as anecdotal evidence, and you’d be justified in doing so. So I and others should impute credibility to your generalization because . . . ?
No our shared tradition supports it. Also, science supports it. Say initiation of violence in studies tends towards women, but by all means look it up. Or for that matter, go see “Mean Girls” and realize _why_ Tina Fey wrote what she wrote.
@Dalrock,
Again, I think a bit of Calvinism may be showing here. The Orthodox and most of the Catholic world hold that little girls and boys are mostly sin free but that our Adversary’s control is too strong to make this permanent.
What’s distressing about this is that it’s another Christian apostolate gone sour and an indication that the succeeding generations of Catholic and Evangelical publicists and institutional administrators manifests a significant regression in quality. Dr. James Dobson is now persona non grata at the agency he founded and led for 26 years in favor of the chap you quote. Exodus International was turned over to the direction of a goofy community college dropout who ran it right into the ground. The Institute on Religion and Public Life has flailed around for a decade and is now under the leadership of a man who seems determined to make its publications as soporific as possible (just like the issue of the theological academy) and commissions an indordinate number of pieces from queers. The current director of the Ethics and Religious Liberty commission of the Southern Baptist Convention provides evidence that the gravitas cops are asleep at the switch, and so forth. Is the Prison Fellowship in good health without Charles Colson?
Before feminism, close to the opposite of what Stanton said was likely held true. Good men made themselves by making it through a gauntlet of trials and competition with other men. Nature separated the men from the boys. A young man might have guidance, but above all he had to prove himself in a tough world. Thus good men “just happened.” Girls meanwhile were carefully raised to be good wives and mothers. Good women did not “just happen.” It was not “innate” for women to marry, work in the home a lot, and not complain about it. Virtue did not come naturally for women.
@Annonymous Reader; 7-21; 2:27: “… it is not logically possible for boys to be born to be bad, and girls to be innocent butterfly-blank-slates, given the fact that both are human.” (Notice that you said “born to BE bad”, not “born bad”. It is your actual statement that I am addressing here.)
1. Boys are born to be “badder” than girls – because of how “bad” is defined. Since that definition is subjective, not objective, and since boys are different from girls, then your statement can be proven to be false.
2. Plus there is this. Boys are born to produce multiple times more testosterone than girls are born to produce. Many of the effects of testosterone are labled “bad”. There are exceptions to every rule. But, generally, testosterone corrupts (as “corruption” is currently defined). Girls have a minor amount of the testosterone that boys have, so they are less prone to corruption.
Consider this mind game: Imagine a boy and a girl growing up alone in a deep wood (not together; just both are isolated from society). Experience suggests that the boy would grow up to be more rambunctious than the girl – even when isolated from the effects of society. The explanation is testosterone and nothing else. Experiments on animals where eleminating testosterone from the male makes him become more nurturing, and introducing high volumes of testosterone to the female makes her become more beligerent, bear this out.
At a fundamental level, boys are born to be different from girls, because testosterone. Because testosterone, you don’t have to manage girls in the same way you must manage boys. Young girls are perceived to be more “innocent” than young boys for a reason, and that reason is testosterone.
Which is an issue completely separate from the fact that both sexes are born with an innate desire to please self rather than God.
If large amounts of testosterone lead to more aggressive and rambunctious behavior, it makes perfect sense that grown boys would be much more aggressive and rambunctious (therefore more visible) in their sinning than grown women would be. At least until the effects of society encourage women to be more aggressive and rambunctious in their sinning than they would be if left to themselves in the middle of the deep wood. Group-think and crowd psychology are real. That is why many families separate themselves from the world by moving deep into the forest in Canada (as some of my in-laws have done) or by home-schooling their children (as many folks around these parts do). Such parents recognize what seems to denied here: society CAN help you sin way worse than you would if you were not exposed to society. Either that, or the go-it-aloners and the home-schoolers are all wrong. Both positions cannot be true at the same time.
@RichardP: “Both positions cannot be true at the same time.” By that I mean the idea that society does not corrupt the already-corrupted-at-birth versus what drives the go-it-aloners and the home-schoolers. If society actually has the little effect that seems to be argued for in this thread, then the go-it-aloners and home-schoolers are wrong in what they think. And vice a versa.
Both nature and nurture play a role RichardP. Our adopted children followed the path of their birth family when they became adults, thus showing nature had a lot more influence than we had thought, but some habits were changed, due to our nurture. Too few were changed for me to call it a success, but nurture did impact them.
A society can help or hinder sinful behaviors as well. Each of us must fight our own war against sin, with the Lord’s help, but society can be a help or limit in that, so you are making a false choice.
@Annonymous Reader; 7-21; 2:27: “… it is not logically possible for boys to be born to be bad, and girls to be innocent butterfly-blank-slates, given the fact that both are human.” (Notice that you said “born to BE bad”, not “born bad”. It is your actual statement that I am addressing here.)
Poor writing on my part. I apologize for not being clear. “Born bad” is more accurate.
I have made quite clear on this site over the years the difference between men and women is inherent, and that both testosterone and estrogen are very potent compounds with a wide range of effects.
It never ceases to amaze me how Christians who reject the doctrine of Original Sin then decide men are naturally broken and have to be fixed and constantly maintained
How on earth does a Christian reject the doctrine of original sin? The very notion of being a Christian hangs on the person and redeeming work of Jesus Christ.
“Closely related is his baffling obsession with making sure the young girl always knows she is beautiful.”
Convincing all young girls they are “beautiful” is a the cultural, likely feminist rooted, preoccupation of those concerned about the self esteem of girls/women who are in reality *not beautiful*. More pretty lies like ‘everyones a winner’ or ‘everyone is equal’. Everyone who’s honest knows that beauty in a young girl/woman translates into power (often wasted) for her and has a very real value simply because female youth and beauty is valuable to nearly all heterosexual men. This is innate and will never be defeated by pretty lies. It’s the way it is, everybody who’s honest knows it. Jacob gave away 14 years of his labor undoubtedly motivated by sexual desire brought on by the beauty of Rachel. The bible tells us that Jacob loved Leah less, she was not beautiful. Men’s desire for female beauty very nearly drives this ridiculous world. Doesn’t mean unattractive or even fat women are necessarily less deserving, they just have less value/power as potential sexual partners or wives among men with better options. We all know it.
Truly beautiful women (8’s, 9’s, 10’s) know only to well about their high rank with men and therefore status among the women around them and if anything inflate their real value in their own minds. Such women often wield men that are significantly wealthier, smarter, of higher character, more powerful etc. The obsession of boosting self esteem with “you’re beautiful” is for average or below average girls and is nothing more than an attempt to protect them from reality, they have less power to wield men, they have fewer options and only with average or lower ranking men. It works on some girls for awhile but they all know the truth deep down even if they deny it consciously. The obesity epidemic dramatically exaggerates this because a society where most women in the mating pool would be basically attractive to men have become basically unattractive.
-It’s okay Shelly, You don’t need to ride a bike to race those skinny girls. We’ll push you over the finish line in a wheel barrel, you’re just as much of a winner…
Imagine how much the power of attractive women is artificially exaggerated as a result of most of their competition not even showing up for the race!
I submit instead “the power of attractive women is artificially _magnified_ as a result of most of their competition not even showing up for the race!
I would guess that most people don’t want to really face the fact of how deep the sin problem is and thus their need for God’s active ongoing change is JDG. Denying reality doesn’t make it go away, but we sure are trying.
JDG says:
July 22, 2014 at 11:57 pm
“How on earth does a Christian reject the doctrine of original sin? The very notion of being a Christian hangs on the person and redeeming work of Jesus Christ.”
Good one.
@JDG
The doctrine of Original Sin states that people are sinners from birth. There are Christians who, in the heretical tradition of Pelagius, say that people are born innocent and then corrupted by evil influences. They still say we need Jesus for salvation, but claim that we don’t start out evil.
There are non-Calvinists who believe in Original Sin, but still has a “good, uncorrupted part” that can seek God. This is known as Semi-Pelagianism, and is part of Arminian soteriology.
Calvinists, of course, believe that mankind is corrupt at his core (see for example David’s statements in Ps. 51 about being shaped in iniquity and conceived in sin, and Paul’s argument in Rom. 5 for the righteousness of Christ being imputed to Christians in the New Birth, which he predicates on Adam’s guilt being imputed to mankind in natural birth), and thus unable to come to God without the miracle of Regeneration.
But, oddly enough, all too often that whole idea goes out the window in Calvinist/Reformed circles when it comes to talking about women’s behavior. Not all the time, but definitely among the more popular speakers, like Mark Driscoll and Tim Keller.
@AD1984,
That’s a bit of a reduction of Pelaginism. It is not only that men are born sinless but they have the ability to chose good. The heresy therefore proposes Christ as a model and not a redeemer. However, the Calvinist view of a man without agency is also a violation of the Traditional Christian view.
The Orthodox believe that we are born to death but are otherwise innately good doomed by the Spirit of the Air. That is Satan’s dominion of our world is inescapable but we are granted a way out with Christ.
The Western position (till The heretic Calvin) posited that both death and moral defect were inherited at birth. However, the defect still allowed choice and allowed the person to choose for or against God. After such point supernatural help was available.
For thousands of years then Christians have been semi-Pelagian of some variety.
@GK Chesterton
My understanding has always been that Pelagius saw people as in need of a Redeemer. I’ll research it more, though.
As for Calvinism, it does not deny agency. Man is still responsible for his sinful choices. He’s just incapable of loving God or choosing to repent and believe until God gives him a new heart via the New Birth (Regeneration). He then repents and believes, and is thus saved. This is what we mean when we say “Regeneration precedes faith”.
Also, Calvinism ascribes to what is known as Common Grace: that God partially restrains the evil in the heart of unregenerate people so that they can choose to do good in general, making civilization possible even without people necessarily being Christian. Different amounts of Common Grace determine the difference between degrees of evil in people.
The life of Christ expresses itself in a regenerated child of God as “the ability to chose good”, “to choose for or against God”, and any other virtue. It is true that God restrains evil and all people choose good for their own reasons, such as to gain a benefit or avoid harm. But this is not the same as the life of Christ manifesting itself as faith and love in a regenerated sinner. The Apostle Paul expressed it in his letter to the Galatian church: “nevertheless I live; yet not I, but
Christ liveth in me”. Sin contaminates all of the works of man; even if they appear good in men’s eyes, they are evil in the eyes of God. The death of Christ is imparted to His people to remove sin, and His life in them produces works that are good in the sight of God.
I think Walsh may enjoy this –
When did Eve decide that there were benefits to be had from disobeying God: before the fall, or after it?
When did Eve move physically (not intellectually or emotionally) to disobey God: before the fall, or after it?
We are all children of Adam and Eve. I assume that we all are as they were made to be.
And yet … In the story of the exodus from Egypt, all whom God rescued from Egypt were caused to die in the wilderness because of their unbelief. Except – those younger than twenty years of age were spared, because “they had no knowledge between good and evil”. Numbers 14:26-30; Numbers 32:10-13; Deuteronomy 1:34-39.
When Moses was taking the census, numbering the children of Israel, he was to collect atonement money from everyone except those under the age of twenty years. Atonement money was payment for sins. Those under twenty years did not have to pay for their sins. They were not held accountable. Exodus 30:11-16.
Josiah, the child king of Israel, did not begin to seek God until he was sixteen years of age. And he did not begin to act on his growing understanding of what God expected from him until he was twenty years. 2 Chronicles 34:1-3.
In the verses referenced above – as children approach the age of twenty, they are expected to become increasingly aware of the difference between wrong and right, to become increasingly aware of the knowledge of good and evil, to become increasingly aware of God’s claim on their lives. (It makes sense to presume a gradual awakening; it makes no sense to assume there is no awareness of the knowledge of good and evil one day, and the next day there is total awareness.) Those twenty years and over were assumed to know the difference between good and evil and so were held accountable. We see in one case that those 20 years and older were required to pay atonement money, and in another case they were condemned to die in the wilderness because of their unbelief. Those younger than twenty had no such accountability placed on them. And so far as I can determine, this applied to females equally as much as to males.
Note that God said “in the day that you eat”, not “in the day that you think about eating”, or not “in the day you move toward the fruit”. The punishment was not promised for thinking about or moving toward. The punishment was promised for the actual doing. Therefore, the sin was in the actual doing, not in the thinking about.
So I ask again (rhetorically), when did Eve decide there were benefits to be had from disobeying God: before the fall? or after the fall? When did Eve let her thoughts lead her to a forbidden action: before the fall? or after the fall?
I guess the answer you give will depend upon whether you think the fall happened when Eve thought about it, or whether it happened when she actually did it. I come down on the side of looking at where in the process, and for what, God imposed punishment
re: when fall.
1 Tim 2:14 And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.
Eve evidently transgressed when she allowed herself to be deceived instead of holding onto what she already knew to be correct. My vote: when she decided to do it.
Eve transgressed in eating the fruit, not in being tempted to eat it because it looked good. Christ was tempted, and yet without sin. Eve was deceived by the serpent into believing that it would not harm her. The death she suffered was spiritual: shame and fear, and hiding herself from God. The children of Israel were chosen by God, and delivered from bondage to serve Him and enjoy the benefits of Canaan. They did not deserve these blessings; they were bestowed by God’s grace. When some refused to obey, they were, in effect, refusing His grace, so they forfeited the benefits of living in Canaan.
(http://daughterbydesign.wordpress.com/2014/07/24/a-letter-from-the-heart/)
“…It comes from seeing too many broken girls and boys walking through the doors of my church classroom and into my life.
Too many boys who deal with anger and mistrust and too many girls who deal with insecurity and hurt….
…Teach your sons how to treat a girl right so that when the time comes for him to be a man and pursue one to be his wife he’ll treat her like the treasure that she is.
Tell your daughters that they are beautiful and made in God’s image so that they won’t turn to boys or a magazine for affirmation of their beauty and worth…”
Isn’t Christianity itself responsible for both blank-slatism (creation ex-nihilo) and the myth of noble savage (fall of man/original sin)? Both Steven Pinker and Fredrich Nietzsche have pointed out this connection. Its funny how many Christians critize (post)modernity yet fail to see how their religion is responsible for creating it lmao.
Try your logic again Kn83. Major failure here.