Margaret Sanger is long gone, but her life’s work of fomenting feminist rebellion remains alive and well. We don’t need Sanger, because we have (collectively) taken up the mantle of her and her pioneering colleagues. Feminist rebellion is now a core value in the West, and as I’ve discussed previously it shows up in the most unexpected places.
Much of the problem comes from our extreme difficulty in spotting feminist rebellion in the first place. As feminist thought has taken hold across our culture, instead of becoming more vigilant to feminist rebellion we have become desensitized to it. We can now reliably spot it only in its most outlandish forms. If a woman isn’t carrying a sign in a slutwalk or doing something similar, we can’t spot the sin.
This played out recently after Donald McClarey at The American Catholic was kind enough to link to and quote one of my recent posts on Margaret Sanger. As is quite common, pretty quickly in the discussion a woman showed up reframing the absurd rebellious wife into a sympathetic character. To do this, she began by inventing an entire backstory on behalf of Sanger’s rebellious housewife:
If we can leave Margaret Sanger out of it for a moment and just focus on what this anonymous housewife reportedly said, it is quite plausible. I would think that her husband, in writing letters home, would probably leave out most of the gory details, not wanting to burden her or make her worry about his safety, and would try to focus on the positive. Plus, his letters were almost certainly censored by the military and any details that could reveal where he was fighting or the number or type of casualties his unit was suffering, or inflicting on the enemy, would have to be left out. So all that he COULD talk about, perhaps, would be stuff that would make it sound as if he were on a great adventure of some kind, and even if she knew intellectually that his job was not all “fun” she probably couldn’t help but feel a bit envious. Bear in mind, also, that gasoline rationing and car ownership not being as prevalent at that time probably meant she didn’t get out of her house or neighborhood very often. Also, we are not told why she was on the train or where she was going. It may not have been a “pleasure” trip; perhaps she was on her way to visit an ill or distressed or difficult relative.
But she was just warming up. Next she introduced a new character into the discussion, an exemplary Catholic wife who couldn’t help but feel the same way Sanger’s character did when her own husband went overseas in the military:
About 20 years ago I met a very exemplary Catholic wife, whose husband was in the military over in, I believe, Bosnia, who admitted to similar feelings of jealousy toward him at times — “you get to see the world and I’m stuck at home wiping the kids’ noses all day!” This woman was NOT naive or spoiled, she knew her husband’s job was dangerous, but she admitted to feeling that way at times.
Expertly done, but creating a feeling of sympathy and understanding for wives mired in envy of their husbands was only preparation for her next step, to propose a feminist solution for the problem of feminist rebellion. The logical solution, she explained, is for husbands with envious and rebellious wives to take over more of the child care duties:
All that said, the solution to the bored/trapped housewife’s problem was not for her to divorce her husband or abort her children, but simply for someone to give her an occasional break by offering to babysit or take her kids to the park, etc. while she did something else. If her husband were not willing to do it, a friend, relative or neighbor could have.
Note the lack of repentance here. The solution to the sin of feminist rebellion is not for the wife to repent, but for the husband to become more egalitarian. This important part tends to get lost in the emotion of the situation, as what husband doesn’t love his wife enough to help her out from time to time? But in this specific context the husband helping out with childcare isn’t about helping out a busy wife (a normal and loving thing), but catering to a rebellious wife.
After I responded pointing out the problem with her recasting the rebellious wife in the most sympathetic light possible while proposing more feminism and not repentance as the solution, she initially changed her stance. She claimed she was aware of the feminist rebellion in the wives under discussion all along. She explained that she only mentioned the Catholic housewife because it was an example of how even a very devout woman would need to resist this kind of temptation (emphasis mine):
I never said these women were right or justified in how they felt, only that I tended to believe the woman-on-the-train story COULD have actually happened, in contrast to those who suggested that Sanger probably just made it up to advance her point. The second woman I described as an “exemplary Catholic” not because her OCCASIONAL twinges of jealousy were worthy of emulation, but because she was a committed, orthodox Catholic, very involved in her parish and in the pro-life movement, and also homeschooled her older children. In other words, she was one of the last people on earth I would have suspected of being guilty of the “sin of feminist rebellion”.
But this new tack was short lived. After I challenged her a bit further and some local white knights galloped in to her defense, she doubled down on the need for more feminism, not repentance. If wives in feminist rebellion don’t have their demands met, she explained, bad things are in store for their children and husband. Focusing on repentance will only lead women to divorce, have abortions, commit child abuse, have nervous breakdowns, and develop addictions:
So giving a stay at home mom an occasional break from taking care of her kids is sinful in your book? If she’s going bananas cooped up at home, she should just “repent” of her “rebellion” and push all thoughts of having even a couple of hours to herself out of her mind? That way of thinking, sorry to say, feeds right into Sanger’s argument — that divorce, contraception and abortion are the ONLY alternative to a life of unrelieved drudgery and isolation for women.
Call it a “feminist solution” but I would think that if asking one’s husband or a friend or relative to watch the kids so you can get an occasional afternoon or evening out keeps you from having a nervous breakdown, developing an addiction, or taking out your frustrations on your kids via verbal or physical abuse, I see nothing wrong with that. If Sanger “would have approved” of this idea, well, a stopped clock is right twice a day, and a good idea doesn’t become evil just because an evil person happens to approve of it. If that were the case, we should denounce interstate highways and Volkswagens as evil because they were Hitler’s ideas.
It is important to remember that the example we are discussing is a woman with a single child who was complaining to strangers on a train about all of the “fun” her husband was having fighting in the European theater. This was a few weeks after the Normandy landings and prior to the Normandy breakout. No matter how absurd and outrageous the example of feminist envy, the lure and emotional power of rebellion can quickly carry all reason away.
Note: Donald McClarey has been a gracious host to me, and my strong preference is to keep further discussion of this here on my blog unless he indicates a desire to host it on his blog as well. I have no power to enforce this, but I ask this as a personal favor of my readers.
My other request, and something I can and will enforce, is to refrain from personal attacks against anyone participating in the discussion at The American Catholic. Disagreement is of course fine, as is pointing out what you believe is their error (and agreement is of course fine as well).
As Rollo likes to point out, it is the FI all the way down….
I do want to salute you, Dalrock, for calling her out. Too often those women who pull these stunts are allowed to get away with it.
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“The solution to the sin of feminist rebellion is not for the wife to repent, but for the husband to become more egalitarian.”
And this is why plenty of men and women are on the path to hell. Instead of telling people repent from the sin (while it may hurt their feelings)…they spare their feelings by covering it up in the name of equality.
So your solution to the “bored/trapped” housewife problem is for the woman to stop being bored and feeling trapped? Is this true always or is your main issue here the context of wartime?
@donalgraeme – what does “FI” mean?
“If wives in feminist rebellion don’t have their demands met, she explained, bad things are in store for their children and husband.”
Yeah, yeah see. Fogetaboutit. You better do this see or somethin’s bad liables to happens to you see. We wouldn’t want you’s to get hurt after all see.
Sincerely,
FI
The thing that baffles me is the implicit idea that no husband ever DOES acknowledge the fact that his wife is human, fallible, and not an inexhaustible font of energy. I can’t speak to that from experience, but I don’t think I’ve ever envisioned married life as consisting of me getting to do whatever I want, while the little wifey is chained to the stove, caring for half a dozen kids.
At the end of the day, though, you’re reading this wrong, Dalrock. There were two conversations going on at AC, the way I read the thread. In one, you were addressing the fact that these women (both Sanger’s putative woman on a train, and the “exemplary Catholic”) are in rebellion. I agree with you, incidentally.
In the other, whatsername was using those anecdotes to derail it from the issue of rebellion, and to refocus it on the issue of women needing a break occasionally. I agree with her in her conclusion, but she WAS derailing it, because of the lack of empathy that women so easily display in the abstract.
I think that confronting her was absolutely the right thing to do, but I don’t think you were confronting her about the right thing. She was trying to change the basis of the argument, onto something that is manifestly obvious. To wit – women need a break occasionally. Duh. True, but that has nothing to do with the lack of empathy displayed by the woman on a train or the exemplary Catholic, and allowed her to refocus the discussion into an argument where the two of you spend the entire time talking past each other, and she gets all the sympathy from the white knights. You let her move the goalposts.
[quote]
Moreover, why not ever acknowledge the sin, and why did you propose as the solution to said sin not repentance, but the feminist solution of the husband taking over more of the childcare?
[/quote]
Here’s the important thing – she never proposed a solution to the issue of feminist rebellion. She proposed a solution to the issue of the bored housewife.
[D: Welcome ersatzstranger.]
“This woman was NOT naive or spoiled, she knew her husband’s job was dangerous, but she admitted to feeling that way at times.”
Ergo a lot of times a woman’s feelings is their reality. This is why they are easily deceived and if a man follows along based on her feelings instead of logic and reasoning…he is doomed.
It’s things like this that make me so incredibly glad that the girls I knew when I was a teenager and the women I knew in my twenties either treated me like dirt or ignored me, as I have never married nor fathered children. I cannot fathom wanting to bring children into the misery of this matriarchal, man-hating cesspool where immorality and misandric injustice rans rampant, that the Western world has turned into. The only comfort that I have is knowing that it cannot last, because it will run out of men’s money sooner or later.
VIVA MGTOW!!
“If wives in feminist rebellion don’t have their demands met, she explained, bad things are in store for their children and husband. Focusing on repentance will only lead women to divorce, have abortions, commit child abuse, have nervous breakdowns, and develop addictions:”
Reality: Women’s demands are being met and as a result divorce, abortions, child abuse, nervous breakdowns, and drug addictions are all up since the 60s.
So focusing on repentance can’t be any worse.
“So your solution to the “bored/trapped” housewife problem is for the woman to stop being bored and feeling trapped? Is this true always or is your main issue here the context of wartime?”
We will get to work on that bored housewife problem after we solve the husband hates his job but still goes anyway problem and the husband risks his life and limb going to war but still goes anyway problem.
I’m pretty sure we told the kids when they complained of being bored, that their boredom was their problem and they needed to find something to do else we would put them to work.
As far as trapped goes, that’s again the complaint of a child. Adults understand that if you don’t work, you don’t eat.
In fact, men are the ones who are trapped. If every day, you don’t climb into your shiny metal box and head off to work in what is for many bland beige boxes, well, the odds are your wife is going to play thermonuclear war on your ass in divorce court.
But wait, it gets better. If he was trapped before the divorce, he’s doubly trapped after. If he’s behind on child support for whatever reason, no hunting license, no fishing license, if you owe more than $2500 in unpaid child support, no passport for you, and in plenty of states, you’ll get your driver’s license revoked too.
Yeah, my heart is bleeding for poor little Suzie soon to be frivorcee. #firstworldproblems
So your solution to the “bored/trapped” housewife problem is for the woman to stop being bored and feeling trapped?
In a word, yes. To a large extent, people can decide how to feel about things. In the meantime, they can keep their vows and do their duty regardless of how they feel.
As Bango Tango said, if a man feels “bored and trapped” in his job, no one suggests that he should blow it up and leave his family destitute while he lies around the house in despair.
The way I see this, social isolation and sole childcare responsibilities are an VERY taxing situation for a woman to endure. Women are not built to endure this modern phenomenon. Caring for children in a group of relatives is how women throughout history raised children. They got periodic breaks, and they had plenty of social interaction.
An isolated woman without any assistance actually experiences physiological alarm bells, so to speak; her body responds as if she is in a crisis situation, because until very modern times, she would have been. The difficulty with using one’s mind to overcome the challenge and pain of this experience cannot be overstated.
I do not think it is appropriate to cast this experience as rebellion anymore than it would be to cast someone trying to escape a burning building as rebellious.
The bored thing was fixed easily for me at a young age.
My boss asked me that one time…I said yes, he give me more work to do. SInce then I haven’t been bored.
“So your solution to the “bored/trapped” housewife problem is for the woman to stop being bored and feeling trapped? Is this true always or is your main issue here the context of wartime?”
BangoTango nailed it; you don’t often hear anyone trying to “solve” the problem of men not wanting to be providers, not wanting to work hard, not wanting to move up the ladder so their family has enough money. When it’s a man’s problem he’s expected to “man up” and do it. That’s the solution.
When women have a problem everyone in the world is implicated and they are expected to step in somehow and solve that problem for those women. This has been called “the tyranny of hypoagency,” the idea that because women are unable to solve their own problems through their own efforts, and others want to help them, by saying they have a problem they can force others to take action on their behalf that they won’t take for themselves, and which costs them little or nothing.
I often wonder what it is about working that women think makes life so much more interesting. I myself, though I have gotten to do interesting things for work, generally only learn things that make me more able to do my job. I can’t think of much I’ve learned from doing the job of programming that enriched my inner life. In that sense I’ve gained far more from the commute to work than from working. It also makes me wonder why, being bored and having so much time, these poor and desperate women never seem to take it upon themselves to read classic literature or get more involved in their faith, that is if they are lacking in meaning why they don’t make an effort to do the things that are understood by most people to bring meaning to their lives. As a man, when I have a problem, I try to solve it by myself for myself.
Dalrock must have hit some sort of nerve because she invoked Godwin’s Law. You just know Eva never gave Adolph even a night off from minding Blondi, Adolph’s German Shepherd – so you can hardly blame him for going postal all over Europe – such a bad Catholic.
It’s funny to read Paul Zummo providing an actual example for what ad hominem is.
I don’t know if Dalrock’s comments create the impression of being angry, not being an armchair psychologist myself, but what is the cutoff age for no longer being too young to be addressed seriously?
As for the social situation, feminism has destroyed the network of stay-at-home mothers that would have supported this. The home-schooling community serves this purpose for some people. But this feeling of boredom supposedly existed and inspired the feminist movement in the 50’s, when these networks still existed commonly. So it’s no use blaming the results of feminism for feminism’s rise.
As Cail said, feelings are to some degree under our control, or at least our attitude towards them. You’re speaking from the assumption that women do not, and are under no obligation to, control their emotions and reactions to the things that happen to them, i.e. that because an impulse comes unbidden that going along with it is not sin. This could not be further from the truth.
Does it occur that lifting heavy things or working long hours to the edge of endurance sets off alarm bells for men, some of whom must do it day after day to feed their families? That their bodies might resist them, might tell them something is wrong? The average farmer in medieval times pushed his body hard, first to plant, then to harvest all his crop so that his family and others could live. They pushed through the pain and difficulty, and were expected to.
Certainly there’s no fault in seeking to make an impulse we must fight weaker. There would be no sin in recognizing its evil and trying to alleviate it as well as fight it. How many husbands would object to piano lessons? Buying the occasional great book? More time spent at church being more involved with faith? I’ve never heard any of these types of women say that they tried everything they could think of and it didn’t work. They tend to say that the problem existed and was not solved for them, so they took extreme action.
“The way I see this, social isolation and sole childcare responsibilities are an VERY taxing situation for a woman to endure.”
Considering every day I go to a coffee shop I see different groups of women with babies and young kids sitting around drinking coffee, chatting, having a muffin for an hour plus I call complete B.S. on this one.
We’re not talking about women out on the homestead on the prairie where it takes an hour to see your neighbor and the guy is off working.
The streets in the summer are filled with women and their children while the men are working, perusing the stores with child in tow, going to lunch, going to gatherings, and play dates and hanging out with the other moms, or the parks, and hanging out with other women.
It is endless.
Most of human responsibilities are boring. It used to be HARD and boring.
It’s funny to read Paul Zummo providing an actual example for what ad hominem is.
Well I’m happy to have provided one (kind of), as Dalrock clearly didn’t seem to understand what an actual ad hominem is.
With women like this, who needs enemies. Lol, Dalrock, you meany! It was you that caused women to seek out the snake and eat that fruit. It was your way of thinking that draws her to Sanger! You’re the problem… see, or more acutely, men who think like you do..
@Eidolon – 1940’s and 1950’s marked massive moves to the suburbs, dispersing families across the country without their extended families. Moving away from extended family is part of the modern world, but it had disruptive consequences, namely extreme feminism (caused by depression and isolation in women). It also continues to make it challenging to be a parent to this day, even if you eschew feminism (although the internet is making it easier for modern moms to find and meet each other regularly, whether in home school networks or in playgroups, which is a great thing).
I agree that everyone is responsible for managing their feelings and keeping their commitments despite emotional difficulty. Obviously extremely difficult situations (a man having to work multiple shifts of hard labor with no sleep or a woman having no family to speak of and being completely alone with children, as examples) are more difficult to just “push through.”
I simply take issue with this post because it is trivializing something that I consider to be a serious problem as “rebellion.”
myrealitie (nice solipsistic name, there) is also changing the subject.
The common thread is misunderstanding the nature of sin and the reason for pointing it out. Envy of the husband is a sin. Recognition of the sin (either via someone pointing it out or the reflection that occurs during true confession) is required for repentance. During repentance the woman very well may realize that she needs more social interaction to prevent the recurrence of that sin.
Problem solved. By herself, for herself.
The doctrine of nonjudgmentalism (for women or gay men) both short circuits that process and often engenders remedial action elsewhere (i.e. on the part of straight men) where it is unwarranted – false negatives in the former case, false positives in the latter.
Rebellion is as trivial as a brain aneurysm.
@Myrealitie
Fair point. From a feminist perspective this is Betty Friedan’s “Problem with no name”, the problem which launched second wave feminism and resulted in Friedan creating the National Organization of Women. But from a Christian perspective this kind of envy and cultivated discontent is sin.
What does she consider a serious problem? Boredom from doing house work and caring for children? Oh the horrors! Cue the bad music!
How can “rebellion” be called “trivial?” Because its “trivial” as opposed to “feelings?”
In other words, multiply the rebellion against God by the husband engaging in the sin of Adam, who listened to his wife instead of God.
This is sheer feminism, as it has been from the beginning. It’s never the woman’s fault, it’s always the man’s fault, and regardless, it’s the man’s responsibility to perform in the will of the woman. It’s never her fault or her responsibility. Ever.
And on the topic of boredom, this is just an excuse for rebellion if anyone uses it. Idle hands are the devil’s playthings.
“what does “FI” mean?” It’s a cutsie moniker (Feminine Imperative) that was invented to deny the impact of traditional feminism within society. To rebrand basic feminism under another name gives one license to then say that it’s something natural and innate and therefore not something that can be acted upon. In other words, it’s just something hard-wired in women so it’s nothing that can be addressed. It eliminates the responsibility within the mind of the adoptee to act against the facets of traditional feminism that they address.
Paul Zummo
Well I’m happy to have provided one (kind of), as Dalrock clearly didn’t seem to understand what an actual ad hominem is.
Well, sure, nobody expects an angry young man on the internet to be up to speed on logical fallacies….
Er, no, ballista74, the existence of the Female Imperative in women does not change the fact that one way or another they are responsible for their own actions. I will point to Elspeth and some of the women who post at her site: she and they are aware to some degree of their own nature, and work against it.
The fact that women’s whims are enshrined in law doesn’t mean the FI doesn’t exist. That thread referrred to in the OP is chock full of the FI – can haz cake and eat it, too? World revolves around me? Female solipsism and selfishness makes sense within the context of hunter-gatherer child rearing, you know.
Paging Rollo, paging Rollo Tomassi.
@ersatzstranger
Of course she did. The topic of discussion was a woman who nursed great envy and discontent against her husband for “having fun” fighting WW II. This is as I explained at The American Catholic (TAC hereafter), a sin we are warned of in Genesis. Sanger’s rebellious housewife said (or is alleged to have said):
This specific quote was included in the OP at TAC. The commenter responded to the post which included that quote, explaining that the solution to the wife’s envy and rebellion was for the husband to offer to take over more child care.
External:
Yeah, I noticed Paul Zummo’s weird comment also, lecturing (incorrectly) Dalrock on what an ad hominem is – and then dropping an ad hominem. Not much self awareness there I guess.
The thread at American Catholic demonstrates once again something I have been saying for a few years now: in the West we all swim in feminism. It’s all around us. Many of our unexamined premises are feminist; the blank-slate premise is a prime example, it leads inevitably to egalitarian assumptions for marriage and the whole men-and-women-are-interchangeable falsehood. Pedestalization of women, the whole “man bad women good”, “women are spiritual, men are carnal”, suite of nonsense is another pillar of feminism that we have in the air we breath and the water we drink.
Challenging the premises of people’s thinking often stirs up a lot of emotions, even without the usual passive-aggressiveness followed by Don’t Hit Me I’m A Girl that is so extremely common in online discourse. White knights are especiallly difficult to get through to on this topic, possibly due to the large emotional investment they have in being groveling worms before The Pedestal.
“it’s just something hard-wired in women so it’s nothing that can be addressed”
False inference.
Sin is hard-wired too. That’s why it must be addressed. Civilization largely consists of patches for hard-wired flaws.
“Not much self awareness there I guess.”
The doctrine of nonjudgmentalism ultimately eliminates all self-awareness.
“Problem with no name”
Radical antinominalism begets radical antinomianism…
Conversely, Adam the name-giver begat Moses the law-giver.
Ballista, what you’re describing (the innate tendency for women to act badly on the freedoms feminism has given them), is hypergamy. The female imperative (FI) is something different: the society-wide insistence on doing whatever it takes to give females what they want, and to protect them from every harm, including the consequences of their own actions. To treat them as both goddesses and infants, basically.
So the FI doesn’t necessarily even come from women; it sometimes comes most strongly from white-knighting men. Hypergamy describes a tendency in women that has always been there, which civilized societies do their best to control. The FI removes all restrictions on hypergamy — because restricting a woman’s behavior is mean — and then builds an entire structure of laws and conventions to try to protect her from the damage she does.
I suppose most people here have never been to one of those cemeteries in Northern France where the graves are laid out in neat rows marked by crosses as far as the eye can see. Some things you never forget.
“The way I see this, social isolation and sole childcare responsibilities are an VERY taxing situation for a woman to endure.”
“Considering every day I go to a coffee shop I see different groups of women with babies and young kids sitting around drinking coffee, chatting, having a muffin for an hour plus I call complete B.S. on this one.”
+1000. I posted a similar comment on another blog. I see women in the morning on weekdays with their girlfriends smiling, laughing and yucking it up while sipping lattes, walking their dogs and pushing baby strollers. Isolated and depressed my ass. How they feel about their husbands and the commitment they made to him has nothing to do with not enough social support structure. It really has to do with mass marketing to women that being a housewife is uncool and low status, and there are all these women out there leading exciting Bond girl lives while your stuck at home changing diapers ewwww. Jamie Lee Curtis’s role in True Lies (haha!) encapsulated that. From the early marketing of Hollywood glam queens to soap operas and gossip media, the modern woman’s hamster is fried. She has been told she can have it all and further more she is entitled to it all. So there Mr.Man.
Dalrock;
That’s exactly my point about there being two discussions going on – you’re taking her posts as though she’s talking about how to deal with rebellion, but she’s dodging that question entirely. This is why I say you’re reading it wrong – you shouldn’t have been confronting her on the subject of feminist rebellion, you should have been confronting her on her unwillingness to confront feminist rebellion. She kept trying to make the question about boredom and ennui, NOT about the original quote.
A parable;
A man and his wife were shopping for a truck. The man was a construction worker, the foreman of a crew, and so needed a large truck with space for four men and lots of tools and materials. They were modest people, however, who lived within their means, so they only ever owned one vehicle at a time.
When they arrived at the lot, the first truck that they looked at was gray. There were red trucks, and green trucks, and blue trucks, but the one that they were examining was gray.
“I don’t want a gray truck”, said the man’s wife.
“I need a truck that is capable of handling the work I do” replied the man.
“I just don’t want a gray truck,” said his wife.
“Look, this truck has the space I need, and is capable of towing the loads that I need it to tow. We’re getting this truck, and that’s final!” the man barked.
YES, her objection is stupid, trivial, and self-centered. YES, she is missing the meat of the problem. But like so many things, the correct response is the moderate, not the extreme. Even if you assume that her statement which specifies that she’s only offering a solution for boredom –
…the solution to the bored/trapped housewife’s problem was not for her to divorce her husband or abort her children, but simply for someone to give her an occasional break…
– is merely a smokescreen for a defense of rebellion (a point about which I’m not more than slightly convinced, obviously), the proper solution is to bring the discussion back to the relevant issues, not to discuss them as though her objections had any relevance.
There is another aspect to this that makes the wife’s comments all that much more of a slap in the face.
Yes, men fighting overseas would leave out things like what they were doing, where they were, etc. because they were not allowed to disclose those details or those details were censored. They also left out those details because they would not want burden their loved ones with the horrors they were witnessing, and the ordeals they were suffering.
How is this met at home? Handwringing over his “adventures” dodging bullets, and seeing his comrades slaughtered.
The solution? He should give her a night out once in awhile.
Perhaps the men of the time could have expounded further on the joy of being a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III. Would that make feminists long for the thrill of adventure in a combat zone? How about seeing your comrads with their faces, arms or legs blown off?
The abominable treatment of POWs by the Nazis should at least give pause to women as they contemplate and reflect on the terrible suffering men endured while having their little adventure in Europe.
A visit to the cemetaries in Flanders and Normandy should put any foolish thoughts of adventure to rest.
“1940’s and 1950’s marked massive moves to the suburbs, dispersing families across the country without their extended families. ”
True, but I grew up in one of those suburbs and there were people to help out with children there, too. If Jones needed a break from her kids she’d send them to Smith’s yard for a while, and vice versa. So feminism isn’t needed.
@Ersatz
That is how I started:
This was somewhat effective for a brief time, and she claimed to be concerned about the sin all along. But when pressed further, and specifically when I reinforced the need for repentance, this is when she melted down and threatened that expecting repentance would lead to women doing all sorts of harm to children and families (murder, divorce, addiction, child abuse, etc). The whole exchange was very much about sin.
TFH aks,
Another question : Weren’t civilians also required to do important work to support the war effort?
The short answer is, “No.” It was highly encouraged and socially-enforced, but civilians had no duties to speak of. To the extent that people were expected to do things (as opposed to refrain from doing things that wasted war material) those expectations fell much more heavily on men… as they always have, wartime or peacetime. The number of women who entered the U.S. workforce during all of WW2 was around 6 million, and not one of them was drafted to do so. In fact, the woman who was the model for the iconic “We Can Do It!” poster was a woman named Geraldine Doyle, who was quite the little hottie in the early 1940’s. She was working in a factory in Michigan when a photographer took her picture, which served as the basis for the poster. She only worked there a couple of weeks before she quit for fear of injury (she was a cellist and feared for her hands around the machinery). Since it was a drawing rather than her actual picture, she didn’t even know that she was the model until the1980’s.
Even kids had to go around and collect up all the scrap metal and aluminum foil. Women had to work in factories.
No again. Women were not required to do anything. Many of them did out of patriotism, or from economic necessity, or for fun. But there was nothing even remotely similar to the draft for women in the U.S..
Why isn’t this pampered woman put to work as ‘Rosie the Riveter’?
Funny you should mention that. This article from 2013 is about a 93-year-old woman who became a riveter in 1942 and decided to continue doing it… even now. From the article:
Or did she inadvertantly bust another ‘feminist’ myth, that women did a lot of work to support the war? Why did she have time to be bored?
There was plenty for women on the home front to do to support the war effort… if they wanted to.
“The problem with no name”
Sure lots of women were unsatisfied back then…but so were lots of men. Too bad society focused on the problems of some rather than all.
@myrealitie
“An isolated woman without any assistance actually experiences physiological alarm bells, so to speak; her body responds as if she is in a crisis situation, because until very modern times, she would have been. The difficulty with using one’s mind to overcome the challenge and pain of this experience cannot be overstated.
I do not think it is appropriate to cast this experience as rebellion anymore than it would be to cast someone trying to escape a burning building as rebellious.”
You are blowing my mind. That is what taking care of kids is like for women? It cannot be overstated?
I don’t know about the women you know, but raising kids on a farm in the middle of nowhere where while the husband is off seems a pretty common theme in literature and history. I think the modern women has just been so pampered that she has really become pathetic in the full meaning of the word. I bet women would be happier without dishwashers, vacuums, and washing machines because they would not have this horrible boredom and wonderlust.
Dalrock;
I think I’m going to respectfully bow out of this conversation. You obviously read her comment at 9:31 very differently than I do, and I’m not sure that we will be able to reconcile our viewpoints. Since, overall, the only thing that I disagree with you on is interpretation, it’s simply not worth fighting about.
myrealitie, have you ever read the Little House on the Prarie series of books?
Just curious.
Cail Corishev
Ballista, what you’re describing (the innate tendency for women to act badly on the freedoms feminism has given them), is hypergamy.
Disagree, strongly. Hypergamy is an inborn desire for the best genes and best provision a woman can get, even if that means abandoning a current source of genes and provision for a man perceived to be better. It is the root of Plan B, of men’s-fault divorce. Hypergamy is part of the Female Imperative but not the only part. Historically hypergamy has been controlled by societies in various ways, and when it’s gotten out of control bad things have resulted.
IMO, YMMV, shake well before using.
Some thoughts:
Dissatisfaction or “disappointment” are not the same as rebellion. And the sin may not be one of rebellion so much as envy – If the husband was writing he was stressing out, almost killed, only saw nondescript forest or the inside of his cold tent – she might complain that he is depressing her. The question is the approach and the spiritual dimension.
When I was growing up, we lived down the street from my grandparents and about 1/3 of a mile from my Aunt. There were some easy “drop the kids off…” alternatives available. Today there are rarely relatives nearby, and daycare is expensive. For complimentary situations, the feminists say to husbands to “man-up”. If that is wrong, is it different to ask wives to “woman-up” and take care of the kids, handle the house and everything and not burn out and not feel exhausted, and just keep smiling and be happy? The command says for husbands to love their wives more than their lives, not take them for granted.
Also note elsewhere St. Paul said to become a “living sacrifice”. It is easy to give your life when a criminal breaks into your home or a bear attacks while out camping. That is dying. Living and doing small, constant, daily sacrifices is much harder. Sacrificing your temper, frustrations, disappointments. Peter denied Jesus with an oath – yet Jesus forgave him.
“Perhaps the men of the time could have expounded further on the joy of being a prisoner of war in Stalag Luft III. Would that make feminists long for the thrill of adventure in a combat zone? How about seeing your comrads with their faces, arms or legs blown off?
The abominable treatment of POWs by the Nazis should at least give pause to women as they contemplate and reflect on the terrible suffering men endured while having their little adventure in Europe.”
There were some women who didn’t miss out on the excitement though. Consider the Club Med like facilities of Unit 731. Those lucky girls! While I’m stuck with the kids!
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731
@Anonymous Reader
What people are calling the “Feminine Imperative” around here is feminism, pure and simple. I’m arguing that rebranding feminism is an excuse for primarily men to deny what traditional feminism truly is and persist in it. It causes them to not recognize the feminism, normalizes feminist behavior (it’s just a woman’s own nature or her hard-wired flaws), and consequently apologizes for it (as @desiderian illustrates), giving the feminist behavior acceptance.
@cail corishev chimes in with the perfect example. He provides a pitch perfect description of feminism (female authority & entitlement to male provision). Bringing up hypergamy is in itself apologism for traditional feminism in this sense: Is a man not exhibiting hypergamy himself by holding out for a job that pays the most? Given unconditional feminist entitlement to a husband (read pack mule), a woman will only behave in a similar manner. Cail then apologizes away this aspect of feminism right here:
Parallel argument: Let’s restrict the natural hypergamy of the bank robbers. As long as they don’t care how much money they get away with, their behavior is acceptable. After all, civilized societies do their best to control the amount of money that’s robbed from banks.
Nevermind, the mere act of robbery is wrong. And nevermind the feminist pack mule mentality towards men is wrong, too. Oh wait, in the context of marriage, it’s perfectly okay for a man to be a work slave to his wife…
Interesting that the responses just served to prove me right…the whole thing just serves as a blinder to the existence of feminist thought.
I suspect I’m like the rest of the men here: since the age of 16 I’ve been at work, in school, or both, with no significant breaks. Nobody ever gave me the option of just stopping. Sure, I got time off, and I wasn’t always in “balls-to-the-wall” mode, but when stuff needed doing, my feelings on the matter were among the last things considered, in the rare cases when they were considered at all. And it didn’t matter if those things were boring, or technically demanding, or dangerous, or unpleasant… and it didn’t much matter if I was tired, or bored, or in pain, or afraid… they just had to get done, and a man pulls his own weight or he loses the respect of his fellow men and receives the scorn of women. And if he doesn’t do it for long enough, he can lose a lot more than that.
Being a suburban housewife is not exactly the most difficult job on the planet.
What people are calling the “Feminine Imperative” around here is feminism, pure and simple.
Please provide some examples.
I’m arguing that rebranding feminism is an excuse for primarily men to deny what traditional feminism truly is and persist in it.
Sorry, I can’t see your point. The Female Imperative constantly seeks to mold any society from the family on up to provide maximal resources to women. Part of this includes the female tendency to seek to control an environment indirectly by controlling men who control an environment directly. To put it in a different way, the Female Imperative causes women to desire to rule men. There is a Bible quote on that very point.
I believe you can find the Bible quote in question. Are you prepared to argue that Eve was a feminist?
When multiple jobs are presented a man, he’s going to select the one that pays the most, according to his own criteria. Where a husband represents an unconditional access of his resources (feminism) when multiple marriage possibilities are presented a woman, she is going to select a husband with the most resources. No one here would label anything wrong with the first, yet sees the second as part of feminism itself. Both are truthfully cold logical thought for the person’s best interest. This should indicate a logical fallacy in play that both are seen differently.
Ultimately, the feminist concept of husband as unconditional provider of resources eliminates any headship he has over himself and his resources, and puts her in charge of him, because his resources (and him) becomes hers to control. This is the essence of traditional feminism – yet the concept of the feminine imperative normalizes this state.
To address @Anonymous Reader’s second comment, since no-fault divorce has become common, it enables women to get out of their commitments (traditional feminism again, her word is law, or she’s a child and her word is meaningless – feminist apologists play it both ways). This is the root of the issue – if her marriage isn’t for life, she can collect multiple husbands and assume control of his resources. Again this is rational self-interest. The ability to get out of the commitment unconditionally is the feminist wrong here, not a woman thinking that she can upgrade, given the other feminist wrong of Hers being Hers and His being Hers.
Bringing up hypergamy is in itself apologism for traditional feminism in this sense: Is a man not exhibiting hypergamy himself by holding out for a job that pays the most?
No, for the obvious reason that men and women are not the same. A man who has no children and does not want any may hold out for a job that pays the most in order to have the most toys.
Hypergamy is simply a part of female psychology that proceeds from the biological reality of eggs vs. sperm. If you are going to argue that any attempt to discuss the psychology of women is de facto feminism, then you need to start ripping some pages out of your Bible because they are “feminist” as well.
Parallel argument: Let’s restrict the natural hypergamy of the bank robbers.
Non sequitur.
Bank robbers don’t spend 9 months of increasing helplessness in order to rob a bank, nor do they undergo huge hormonal changes in the course of planning and carrying out a bank robbery that changes their personality, nor do they spend 3 years afterwards with a helpless and demanding bundle of loot that they must protect at all costs – even of their own life.
This line of debate is really not up to your usual standards.
@Anonymous Reader You provide another pitch perfect description of feminism. In the simplest terms, feminism is female supremacism. As for Eve, it’s well known that she was the original feminist. It’s no coincidence that I keep referring to men who supplicate to women as engaging in the sin of Adam for that very reason.
“A visit to the cemeteries in Flanders and Normandy should put any foolish thoughts of adventure to rest.”
But no, the Hamster is surprisingly agile.
All I got was a tearful jeremiad on teh eevulz of men(spit). Much violent, so fighting.
It would all be different, butterflies and handholding under a rainbow fountain of Skittles if wimminz ruled the world, apparently. Because, naturally, they would all Agree, you see …
This was put to me straight-faced the other month, after yet another chilly soaked-to-the-skin gumbooted trudge through the lashing rain and limey mud of some random Belgian or French field (different War) among the slag-heaps, site of the selfish, sudden and inconvenient disappearance of yet another typically unreliable male relative from one or the other side of our kin, and a less dreary trek through aforesaid cemeteries (with Dutch and I think Hungarian? flowers, from a German supermarket).
All those lazy skiving losers, letting Women down, everywhere, all the time, just stretched out having a kip, for eternity. How very dare they!!
Thank heaven the Belgians are undisputed masters of the brewing-copper, price their liquid gold very keenly, and keep civilised licensed hours with decent cigars and proper food on hand. Bless them.
Otherwise I very much fear I would certainly have punched her in the face. Overhand.
A man has the capability to do a job. let’s label it A. He’s out applying for work doing A, and he gets three job offers. What criteria will he use to determine which one to accept? The best one, according to his criteria, which most certainly will involve salary.
All I’m doing is merely pointing out that holding out for the best deal is human nature common to both men and women. The fundamental thought processes are no different. The error is assuming that “looking for the best deal” is a psychological characteristic of just women. After all, fornicating men will go home with the hottest woman that they can pull. No one faults him for that.
Irrelevant. Child-birth is not a prerequisite for the assumption of a man’s resources within marriage. What’s his is hers on the marriage date in the feminist realm. Many men who have paid spousal support will attest to that, not to mention married men who have had their wives spend them into the poor house (and no recourse besides!).
Ballista, you make a good point, which is more important than any quibbling over terms: there’s a definite effort (you see it often from tradcons) to frame bad behavior from women as simply natural to them, and therefore something they can’t be expected to stop. That puts the onus back on men (where everyone’s more comfortable with it) to adapt to it, make allowances for it, and ultimately to save women from it.
I do think women have an innate tendency to pursue a strategy of serial monogamy, always looking to trade up to a more dominant man. Call it hypergamy, Original Sin, fitness testing for strong genes, whatever — it does exist. The problem is that nearly everyone, infected with feminism in one form or another, excuses it instead of telling them to cut it out. The Marxist-type feminist excuses it because woman-good-man-bad. The tradcon feminist excuses it because woman-closer-to-God. Either way, instead of identifying it as woman’s predominant sin and fighting against it, they excuse it and end up cheering it on.
Men may have an equal innate tendency to screw everything that moves and spend as many hours as possible on the couch eating chips and watching football, but we don’t celebrate that (outside of TV commercials). We don’t make excuses for the guy who loses his job because he keeps oversleeping after Monday Night Football and a session with a prostitute; we shame him and send him to jail if he can’t pay his bills. We haven’t built an entire societal structure around making him feel okay about himself — quite the opposite — but that’s exactly what we’re doing with women and specifically female sinful tendencies.
To add to my last point: it ought to be possible to say that some behavior comes naturally to us, like the desire to screw like bunnies, yet also say that we shouldn’t do it and can be held responsible for doing it. But in a post-Christian and Churchian world, we find that increasingly difficult to do. We still do it with adult male behavior to some extent, but we’ve pretty much thrown it out for women and children. When you’re dealing with someone who is the center of his universe, any criticism of his behavior is a criticism of his entire self, so that just won’t do.
FWIW, in my earlier post I mentioned two “Rosie the Riveter”-type women.
One was Geraldine Doyle, the 19-year-old beauty who was the unwitting model for the wartime “We Can Do It” poster that later came to represent 2nd Wave feminism. The other was Elinor Otto, who really was a riveter during WW2. She took the job when she was a single mother (in 1942!) and continued to dabble in marriages and jobs all her life.
Doyle was “girly” and quit her job at the factory after only a few weeks. She married a dentist at the age of 20 and stayed married to the same man until he died in 2010. She died the same year and left behind five children, 18 grandchildren, and 25 great-grandchildren so far. Otto was a lifelong career girl who went through a series of husbands and left behind a much smaller genetic legacy (the articles about her only mention one grandchild).
There might be a lesson in there somewhere.
Can a trapped housewife say something? Well, I’ll respond to something instead:
there’s a definite effort (you see it often from tradcons) to frame bad behavior from women as simply natural to them, and therefore something they can’t be expected to stop. That puts the onus back on men (where everyone’s more comfortable with it) to adapt to it, make allowances for it, and ultimately to save women from it.
Yes, yes, yes! Thank you for this, Cail and Ballista who sparked it. The notion that women are incapable of behaving righteously (because FI) is damaging, most especially to the women who read around these parts long enough. It does nothing to inspire better, more righteous behavior. Either every human being can be redeemed and walk the journey toward being better, or not.
As for the original post, the notion of women “trapped” and “bored” at home is overblown. Even today, while I have few opportunities for socialization that don’t include my children’s company, I have two dates on tap in the next week. One this week with just a girlfriend and I (whose husband has arranged his schedule so that we can have lunch without the kiddos), and one next week with a mother and our kids will be there. I really, truly, don’t get out much. These are anomalous for me, but that’s because I tend to live fairly isolated by choice, and no small amount of pride with regard to the way I view other women. I’m working on that.
Your average woman who thinks women can do no wrong has plenty of friends usually and often plenty of opportunity to get out. If she doesn’t get out, then the house should be near spotless and how many men with housewives would say their homes are consistently clean?
I am attesting to my experience in 2014, so I imagine that in the 1940’s-50’s when only lower class women worked outside of the home, there was possibly plenty of opportunities to engage with other mothers, generationally as well as laterally. The isolated housewife meme was not in full swing back then, was it?
The bottom line is that we are prone to dissatisfaction, discontentment, and envy. Even of our own husbands, and even when there is no logical reason to feel that way. Only a deluded person would think of a man at war as off having a “glamorous” time, regardless of what he put in or left out of his letters.
And with one baby? Puhleeze.
It seems to me that Ersatz is doing a version of what Elaine did, and what Dalrock pointed out in his posts. Why doesn’t Ersatz tell Elaine about what she is doing wrong instead of berating Dalrock for what Elaine is doing? If Elaine were Dalrock’s wife or daughter it would make sense to me, but here it strikes me as intentionally bad judgment; in which Ersatz applies real weight against Dalrock’s comments, and false weights against Elaine’s.
@tz2026
Are you truly arguing that Sanger’s (perhaps fictitious) housewife was not in feminist rebellion? This is nonsense. Sanger was selling rebellion, which is why she told that story (true or not). Yet even here, when Margaret Sanger is selling rebellion, you can’t spot the rebellion. This is the whole point of the post.
@Anonymous Reader You provide another pitch perfect description of feminism. In the simplest terms, feminism is female supremacism.
If you want to communicate with people, you have to use definitions for words that other people use. By your definition, all women are born feminists. The problem with that is, there’s this political / social movement / organization that dates back a century or three called “feminism”.
Your definition is not useful. It is like calling people in the 10th century Communists or people in the ancient Greek city-states “Fascists”. You can’t use a political term to refer to people who it doesn’t fit.
As for Eve, it’s well known that she was the original feminist. It’s no coincidence that I keep referring to men who supplicate to women as engaging in the sin of Adam for that very reason.
Ok, so if you are not interested in actual communication and the exchange of ideas, that works for you. It’s like calling a jet airplane a “steamboat”, so most people won’t find your position even comprehensible, let alone useful.
Cail Corishev @ 4:08 pm:
“To add to my last point: it ought to be possible to say that some behavior comes naturally to us, like the desire to screw like bunnies, yet also say that we shouldn’t do it and can be held responsible for doing it.”
This is a big blind spot in evolutionary psychology. Women are observably prone to hypergamy, therefore the Evolution Imperative says hypergamy must be a good thing and should not be denied. To the atheist, restraining hypergamy is less important than taking selfish advantage of it. The inevitable result is feral everybody, the proverbial tribe of apes.
…
Anonymous Reader @ 5:41 pm:
“your definition, all women are born feminists.”
Yes, women are born feminist… in other words, evil. We all are. Confronting the existence of evil, making peace with God and putting to death the evil inside us is the entire point of Christianity.
Like good men, good women are made, not born.
Elspeth:
“It does nothing to inspire better, more righteous behavior. Either every human being can be redeemed and walk the journey toward being better, or not.”
This is correct. I knew a woman that became aware of the term “Hypergamy” and proceeded to use it to justify her rotten behavior of cheating and trading in boyfriends/husbands.
If you have no standards of behavior, you will get behavior without standards. If you justify bad behavior or excuse it, it will only beget more of it.
it is one thing to understand why behavior occurs, and use that as a way to curb destructive behavior or to channel the drives toward productive behavior. It is another thing to understand or label a behavior and then shrug and accept that because people behave badly they will always behave badly.
Protecting people from the consequences of there bad behavior via welfare and assorted other actions by white knights everywhere is horrendously evil
The sin is envy. The proposed feminist solution is to reward her sin with a break. This is the direction society has been traveling for decades. Housewives can’t break anymore than they already are, there just isn’t anymore break they can take. The entire feminist argument rests on this idea that American housewives are overworked. That is demonstrably not true. Particularly so when you compare it to a man in combat. With modern appliances, conveniences, and paid services, that work is half of what it was in the 40s. And still housewives need more help? It doesn’t end until they repent their envy, and accept their workload.
My wife has been going back through our lineages. The number of children our ancestors used to have is… amazing. We have 5 home schoolers ourselves, and are pretty happy and stress-free. We’ve got pretty much everything down to a system and assigned and delegated so that we can enjoy time together about every single day. Yet women with one or two kids cry and complain about how hard it is. Heck, when we had 2 we complained too! Thank God we grew up a little more.
Morgan, you nailed it! The sin is envy, and, as with any sin, the answer should be to repent of one’s sin and amend one’s life. The wrong answer is to whine about it, ad nauseum, and expect someone else to amend his life and “repent” of your sin.
@Balista,
Feminism is the current operative social paradigm of the Feminine Imperative. It is the social construct within which the FI enacts and enforces a feminine-primary social order.
In an earlier era Chivalry (as bastardized by the FI) and the rules of ‘courtly love’ were the operative social paradigm – and we still see holdovers of ‘chivalric’ social expectations from then – but with the advent of a unilaterally feminine form of birth control, the sexual revolution and unrestrained hypergamy as a result, feminism is a much more effective form of social control for the FI.
Incidentally, I’ve watched this exact strategy make things worse. A friend’s wife was tired and depressed and “overworked” and acting increasingly insane (at least they have several kids, not just one, but it still wasn’t really about that). Her counselors and friends got together and planned out a schedule of helping her: people to help with the kids, people to help with housework, people to socialize with her, and so on. At the same time, her husband took on even more household duties. She said she was stressed and needed a break, so they gave her one. After a while, she was sleeping 12 or more hours a day and doing zero housework, and still complaining of stress and unhappiness. When the friends came to spend time with her, she tried to get them to do things she wasn’t supposed to do, like going shopping for things they couldn’t afford.
If anything, the increase in free time made her worse. It wasn’t about being overworked; it was straightforward rebellion. At one point they had a party. She didn’t have to do any cooking or make any preparations or keep an eye on the kids at the party; others took care of all that. She had one responsibility: take care of the baby. Within a couple hours, she was trying to pass the baby off to her husband or anyone else who would take it. He was stretched thin doing everything else, and she had that one job, but she very simple did not want to do what she was supposed to do. If he’d taken the baby and told her to prepare the food, then that would have been too much for her.
Things didn’t get better until most of the friends got fed up and refused to keep pampering her, and her husband told her he’d had enough and started giving her things to do again. She’s still got a ways to go, but she’s noticeably better simply from not having so much time on her hands.
I’ve written before about the massive amount of housework women had to do before electricity and running water, when many of them also had more kids. Somehow they managed without Valium or vacations. It’s not about the work, and it’s not about needing a break. It’s about rebellion — the sinful refusal to meet the requirements of one’s state in life.
@AR
By your definition, all women are born feminists. The problem with that is, there’s this political / social movement / organization that dates back a century or three called “feminism”.
I very seldom have a disagreement with what you’ve written, but I have to take exception to this. All women are born feminists, per Genesis 3:16.
Biblically, the curse of Genesis 3:16 is still in effect and it didn’t go away just because got saved. ‘Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’ The word that’s translated as desire is only used in two other places in the Bible. In Genesis 4:7, ‘sin is crouching at the door and its desire is for you, but you must master it.’ In the Song of Songs 7:10, ‘I am my beloved’s, and his desire is for me.’ Bible scholars have long argued about how the word desire in Genesis 3:16 should be understood- as a desire to control such as used in Genesis 4:7, or as a possessive sexual desire as in the Song of Songs. I think the answer is that it isn’t an either/or proposition, it’s both. I think the meaning of Genesis 3:16 should be understood in this way:
‘You will test your husband to confirm his mastery of you and your desire to usurp his authority is a test to see if he rules you. He must consciously dominate you and never show weakness because as a woman you are incapable of empathy for him. He will not give in to your manipulation or pay attention to your arguing, whining and crying. After he dominates you your desire for him will be sexual.’
Further, the whole feminist thing dates (within the church, anyway) as far back as the Romanization of the church. It was 300-500 AD that the church began invading the family with pagan gynocentric rules and regulations of the marital bed. This was a usurpation of the husbands authority which empowered the wife and placed the church in the position of being the “judge” of his conduct.
James Brundage is another historian and author that’s substantially in agreement with MacDonald. Feminism was a tool used by the early church to usurp the husband’s authority but later lost control of it with the Protestant Reformation. The end result is what we see today. This has been going on for a long, long time.
@Cail Corishev
I’ve written before about the massive amount of housework women had to do before electricity and running water, when many of them also had more kids. Somehow they managed without Valium or vacations. It’s not about the work, and it’s not about needing a break. It’s about rebellion — the sinful refusal to meet the requirements of one’s state in life.
I lived in the middle of an Amish community for years. Across the river was a huge conservative Mennonite community and on the ridge above us was a Beachy Amish community (black bumper Amish- they don’t believe they’ll go to hell for driving cars or using electricity). The Amish around me allowed a kerosene stove on the porch for canning, otherwise it was a wood-burning stove inside. No phones, no electric, if one had a business one could have a diesel motor. No refrigeration. No appliances. The women were fertile and by 40 had typically cranked out 8-12 kids.
Divorce is almost unheard of unless the *husband* leaves. In that case the church takes care of the wife, excommunicates the husband and typically moves her to another community and gets her re-married.
@Eidolon
The corollary is: “As a woman, when I have a problem, I try to solve it with other people’s time and energy for myself.”
@Artisanal Toad
My pastor was preaching on Genesis 3:16 a couple of Sundays ago. He didn’t go quite so far as you did, but he definitely preached that ‘desire’ meant a desire for control and possession. It doesn’t take much of a leap of logic to see that the reason for the first desire is to protect and foster the second.
A link to the sermon for anyone interested: http://www.sermonaudio.com/sermoninfo.asp?SID=921141428561
How is that husband at war in Bosnia supposed to offer to babysit or take the kids to the park? Is he supposed to commute home from the front lines in the evenings?
Because this attitude is total nonsense, Tom.Never mind Bosnia, this is about WII. Total idiocy.
GunnerQ,
“Yes, women are born feminist… in other words, evil. We all are.”
No, we are all born human, that is with the capacity for good or evil, which we retain as long as we remain human. As a (Christian) humanist, I claim that state is eternal. Those who seek to dehumanize others – many feminists, for instance – would disagree.
Created in God’s image, humans cannot be essentially evil at any point. Potentially evil, yes, as Jesus was tempted, but not essentially. On the other hand, to deny the existence of evil is to deny free will, which also contradicts the creation in God’s image.
“Confronting the existence of evil, making peace with God and putting to death the evil inside us is the entire point of Christianity.”
It is the beginning of life in Christ, not the end.
@Elspeth
These are anomalous for me, but that’s because I tend to live fairly isolated by choice, and no small amount of pride with regard to the way I view other women. I’m working on that.
How do you view other women?
Elspeth,
Our standard is Christ, not our neighbors.
We need you to see us with clear eyes, not clouded by self-regard, pro or con, to partake of your wisdom.
OK everyone, I’m the original TAC commenter that Dalrock is criticizing here, and I’d like to apologize for any scandal I caused. I focused too narrowly on a minor side point made by someone over at TAC, and apparently the whole thread has taken on a life of its own and snowballed into something I never intended (since I am NOT and never have been any fan of Sanger or her philosophy), so I apologize/repent for having said any of it and would like to just take it all back. Thank you.
[D: I’m sorry this has distressed you as it has. I wish God’s blessing for you and your family. I’ve rolled out some new posts to get the conversation moving elsewhere.]
I am a northern Baptist, who follows the New Testament by its’ word. In every church I go to, all of the women are fallen, and just this side of whores, and they know it. If I were not a child of Christ, I would be a child of Satan with these harlots. Oh my, did I just give myself away? Women, I am the man you think you dream of, but I am not the man you want think you want to ravage you in a biker bar. Enjoy your cats and poverty in retirement, it is coming sooner than you think.
My pleasure, TFH, I picked up a lot from your “Misandry Bubble” article several years ago, and continue to learn from you now. In addition to my career as a military officer, I have an advanced degree in Military History, so this topic is near and dear to my heart. There’s an enormous amount of misinformation about the role of women in wartime. I remember running across one buffoon who was convinced that the Soviet Union didn’t use women in combat at all – which is simply false. The “Night Witch” squadrons did fairly well against the Germans, for example, and some female snipers did as well. But in both cases the women were used in limited roles and circumstances where their weaknesses weren’t as important. But women can perform all sorts of militarily-useful roles, such as nursing, clerical work, intelligence analysis, ferrying airplanes, etc. I think we had things about right during WW2 – women were put into positions that played to their strengths while keeping them out of jobs they were unsuited for, and where their physical shortcomings would not get men killed. By the same token, they were in separate services where they did not have command authority over fighting men.
I’m not suggesting that’s the best answer now. Frankly I know far more about this subject than anyone I know, and I don’t feel even a little bit qualified to have an opinion of how to fix this mess. I know one thing, though… if men are going to bear the life-and-death burdens of protecting society, the law needs to take that into account somehow.
“Frankly I know far more about this subject than anyone I know, and I don’t feel even a little bit qualified to have an opinion of how to fix this mess”
Its time to put your feelings aside and manfully look at the facts at hand.
@Eidolon
But this feeling of boredom supposedly existed and inspired the feminist movement in the 50’s, when these networks still existed commonly.
I believe that was Friedan who suggested that. She was, of course, wrong. Research that I’ve found about happiness and life satisfaction of men and women in the 40’s and 50’s suggests that the sexes differed little in either measure.
(It shouldn’t be surprising to know that a feminist ignored the research of the time and made false, contradictory (but empirically-testable) claims anyway.)
“How I Failed My Medical Career and Found My Love of Motherhood.” A Woman’s Account
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=912465
First comment on the above post:
I can’t imagine having six young kids and going to school full-time…who could possibly juggle all that?!!! I wouldn’t have even attempted it.
I don’t understand why she says she “found” her love of motherhood in conjunction with failing her classes. She loved being a stay-at-home mom from the start, she says.
It’s more a story about…having the confidence to make your own choices and decisions and not listening to what others want you to do and tell you to do. You must do what your own heart says is right for you.
She was doing as her father commanded and not following her own desire.
I think that’s a trap many women often fall into to please others. Once she decided to do what she wanted, she was fine.
@Anonymous Reader (October 1, 2014 at 5:41 pm)
Gunner Q and Artisinal Toad deal with this adequately. All women are born feminist per Genesis 3:16. The problem is that you have to use correct and non-confusing terminology to be within the truth. Your choice to use incorrect and confusing terms represents the divide here. You are right in that you don’t call a jet airplane a steamboat – in fact this is my exact matter of contention.
The fact that people are going around calling themselves feminist (hey it’s good, truth in advertising!) is irrelevant to the matter, besides the fact that their beliefs are consistent with all the instances of female domination through history. Winter points this out in terms of the Roman Empire – it’s amazing how similar this description is to today. The people calling themselves feminists will even point this stuff out.
The concept of the Feminine Imperative suggests at the truth of feminism, but denies several facets of it, and then apologizes them away. The invention of the concept only serves to confuse matters at best and rendering it unnecessary, and serves to give cover to the base elements of feminism at worst. My argument of confusion based on the right-left divide is equally applicable. People, by and large, do not have a single definition in mind of what feminism is, so it only serves to sow confusion.
The people calling themselves feminist aren’t the ones you have to worry about, it’s the feminists who are actively denying that they are feminist. So in the end, you have many anti-feminist feminists out there punching at the air in the name of fighting the progressive form of feminism, while leaving the other forms intact and actively defending them. In the end, nothing is done.
Any bitch who feels jealous about her husband serving downrange hasn’t been shot at or mortared (I have) or getting blown up by an IED and seeing parts of yourself and friends blown off (I haven’t). A couple bullets whizzing by the earhole or sitting there getting shelled with not a whole lot that can be done, or (as far as I know) getting blown up by a VBIED, changes a mother***er’s mind about the glamour of combat right quick.
Not saying there’s not a bit of excitement to it, but very few women and not all men appreciate being in a fight. If you’re the kind of person who kinda *likes* being punched in the face in a fight because it winds you up to hit the other guy harder and because it makes ultimate victory sweeter (providing of course, you know, you actually get to live) , well, congratulations, you are having fun and seeing the world and worthy of envy. Maybe 20% of soldiers in the volunteer age are this kind of guy (that’s a scientific wild ass guess BTW) and perhaps 3-5% of guys *really* like it (and you had better keep an eye on those sick puppies). Guys who dig being in a good fight tend to be drawn to the military but there’s still a lot of people who just kind of do their job and be glad they survived, and that is *fine*. I don’t think as a group we are wired to try to kill other humans, it’s a subset that is capable of it and an even much smaller subset that does it without qualms or with relish.
I have to ask though, do these wives imagine that it’s about a damsel waving her kerchief as brave men on horses go off to joust? Because it ain’t. It’s about blowing other people into little pieces, or maybe on a good day, shooting or beating their asses damn near to death then taking them prisoner. In between – 99.5% of the time even for the pointiest guys on the pointy end of the stick – it’s about carrying heavy stuff up and down hills, digging holes, sweating balls in some place you wouldn’t send your enemies to visit, and being surrounded by filthy, violent primitive people who haven’t bathed in months (and that’s just the dudes in your unit, nevermind the natives). Then there’s your friends dying, a guy in another unit you knew about, senseless accidental deaths, disease, shortened life span, and all the other romantic, glamorous aspects of it…
If you don’t know what it’s about, you have no rational basis for envy; you don’t even have a rational basis for speculation. And honestly, if you haven’t been there, you don’t really know, and even if you have been there, if you haven’t literally been next to the person you’re talking to when it all went down for him then you don’t *really* know what that other guy has been through. Suffice to say, it was the Suck. Guys joke about how changing a destroyed baby’s diaper was harder than combat or talk about the good time they had sightseeing on two day’s leaving during a six month tour and as usual, women misdiagnose that as the guys having a great time downrange. It ain’t. Even if you liike being downrange in bad places, it’s a heavy frickin’ experience that will stay with you forever and, again, even if you like those fun good times it’s a way of venting out the pressure and heaviness of it, making like of a fairly incredible and unexplainable burden, and doing so in a way that doesn’t scare the women and the horses. Why do we do that? Because women, and everybody else is completely full of shit. “Oh, let your feelings out. Go ahead, cry if you want to. You can share your feelings with me.”
Bullshit. That’s a ticket out of relationships, how to bore friends and horrify casual acquaintences.
Per Colonel Jessup in a Few Good Men, you can’t handle the truth. There is a cost to keeping our little nice corner of society free and relatively safe, and some of us pay that cost. But I’d go him one further. You do not *want* to know the truth of what our men do on your behalf to keep you safe because a lot of you would probably feel all guilty and self-hating and shit, and maybe even try to stop us from doing what we have to do to keep our little corner safe. Sheep do not like sheep dogs any more than they like wolves. Leave it to the sheep dogs to kill the wolves, folks. But don’t tell us we were eating filets while we were out there doing it. It was wolf flesh we ate, and we’re down with that because it’s what we sheep dogs do, but it tasted a lot like like stinky wet dog that had been eating too much mutton.
@ RPSMF and Desiderian:
I’ve actually gone over this all in great detail in various posts on my blog, but make no mistake about a couple of things. The first is that I have come under plenty of conviction about my attitude and have improved greatly, mainly as I have come to grips with the depths of my own sinfulness. Hence my closing remark, “I am working on that.” I know that I am not the standard. Besides that I was sort of raised to be wary of girls and how they can be from a fairly early age (see my post Women and Community, pt. 1)
To answer Red Pill’s question more specifically, I have issues with feeling judgmental toward women who speak badly about their husbands, who are openly dismissive of their husband’s preferences about everything from the clothes they wore, to cutting their hair: “Well, HE isn’t the one who has to deal with it every day!”
But it seemed as if every wife I encountered acted this way to one degree or another. And I became prideful. However, I am getting better, primarily because I have figured out that most women are just like I used to be; they don’t really see things from their husbands point of view because they have never been taught or conditioned to see things from the husband’s point of view in the same way that husbands are so often taught to be sympathetic to a wife’s point of view.
A few months ago I had the experience of seeing the light turn on when I was speaking with a lovely Christian wife and I realized how sinful and judgmental I had been- again. We were discussing homemaking in general and without giving it any real thought I mentioned that my husband doesn’t do laundry. To me it was just the way the conversation went but she was quite offended on my behalf. She wondered if I understood that a husband is supposed to lead like Jesus, and she used the example of His washing the disciples’ feet. That the Son of Man came to serve, not be served. That husbands are to love like Christ loved the church, not be served as kings.
I’d heard it all before, and was about to shut down and write her off, but I didn’t. I simply responded very gently with, “My husband worked over 60 hours last week. If he isn’t serving me and our children out there –right now- while I sit here having lunch with you, what is he doing?”
It was like she’d never thought about it that way before. I could almost see the change come over her. So I am hopeful and open and facing down the sin in me that causes me to be standoffish. I posted a little about it here.
But thank you Desiderian, for the reminder. It can never really get old, can it? Being reminded that Christ is the standard.
“Ergo a lot of times a woman’s feelings is their reality. This is why they are easily deceived and if a man follows along based on her feelings instead of logic and reasoning…he is doomed.”
The story of Adam and Eve over and over again
For the issue of the stay at home mother (because honestly, she’s that, not merely a childless “housewife”), its right in calling it out as sin, but one has to be careful in the gentleness in how they point it out. Some people, even Christians, aren’t really ready to see painful truths about themselves (maybe its pride blocking it or self-preserving behavior)… so confronting, if not done in the right way and at the right time, most likely won’t work because she’ll go into the thinking that she deserves a break, and “how dare you think that!”
Exhaustion is one thing (and I think a great husband/dad wouldn’t mind helping his wife if exhaustion was really it)… but I think what Dalrock may be trying to point out is this horrible and degrading attitude women in America have now (thanks to giving in so long to FI, or being surrounded in an FI environment all their lives…) of hating to deal with their children (hating this role as a mother – or viewing it as really unpleasant). I read an article recently comparing American wives/mothers to French wives/mothers (and fathers) that mentioned a study done (2009) that revealed that American women found it 2X more unpleasant to deal with their kids, & in a different study by the same people, Texas working moms actually favored doing housework more than parenting their children… parenting (for American women) is hard and difficult and not “fun” so of course they would feel like they DESERVE a break from this horrible, daunting task that they so often love to call “drudgery.”
Anyway, the article was this one (http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970204740904577196931457473816) and it basically explained how French mothers approach parenting differently – they ENJOY it for one thing, but they and the father exert a lot more Authority over their children than typical American parents do. Its a good read.
Back to the point of why this attitude is so sinful… it damages children. Children need to feel *Treasured* NOT *Tolerated.* So a woman that goes about her day feeling the victim of having to deal solely with her children for hours at a time, is focusing on the wrong thing… and unknowingly, letting her children experience her feelings, and taking them into their self-worth.
Do we have it harder now since we don’t live in a community of extended family that can alleviate the exhaustion of a mother dealing with young children? Yes, I think we have it harder in that way. But many things suggest we have it easier (kitchen appliances that help immensely with workload, washers and dryers, air-conditioning… etc.) there are so many things to be grateful for, and when a woman focuses on GRATITUDE she is much less likely to fall into this self-pitying thought of being a victim because she’s getting to stay at home and be with her children while her husband goes out and faces various trials and difficulty in work. The problem is that this only comes from her own spirit being convicted of this… she has to be 1) a Christian… and 2) reading the Bible every day (in the morning before her children wake up is the best time… in order to be that sensitive to the Holy Spirit inside her showing her how selfish and wrong those feelings and hating to deal with her children are. 3) then praying for the Holy Spirit to work in her heart for change – for more optimism and joy and gratitude for the gifts in her life.
Without Christ, I don’t think this kind of unnatural behavior is possible.
Elspeth,
“I know that I am not the standard.”
No, my point was that others are not your standard, so that pride and one’s perception of others’ behavior are separate issues.
The former is taken care of by maintaining Christ as the standard, assured by the Gospel; the latter by keeping it separate from the former.
The accuracy of that perception is crucial to others, because we cannot so clearly see ourselves.
“So I am hopeful and open and facing down the sin in me that causes me to be standoffish.”
Heh. Convicted. Hadn’t seen it in that light for awhile…
“Yes, women are born feminist… in other words, evil. We all are. Confronting the existence of evil, making peace with God and putting to death the evil inside us is the entire point of Christianity.”
Feminism is but one evil, among many. Yes, we are all born sinners, not feminists.
“My wife has been going back through our lineages. The number of children our ancestors used to have is… amazing. We have 5 home schoolers ourselves, and are pretty happy and stress-free. We’ve got pretty much everything down to a system and assigned and delegated so that we can enjoy time together about every single day. Yet women with one or two kids cry and complain about how hard it is. Heck, when we had 2 we complained too! Thank God we grew up a little more.”
I don’t have children so this is just my observations. I’ve heard parents say once you get past 3 kids, parenting gets easier. Many people don’t have more than 2 kids. I’ve also heard that mothers of 3 kids are the most stressed out. I think it’s largely due to doubting one’s parenting skills. With more children, one gets more confident in this area.
Cail Corishev says:
October 1, 2014 at 7:36 pm
If you reward bad behavior you get more bad behavior.
Bitch about childcare duties. Get party!
I see the terms ‘female imperative’ and ‘feminine imperative’ used frequently and they appear to be used interchangeably. But I had previously concluded that these were two different imperatives. My understanding was:
Female Imperative: biologically programmed strategies for propagation of the species. Acquire the best genes and receive resources from the father while the child is young.
Feminine (or Feminist) Imperative: transfer of resources and status from men to women creating a sex-based caste system.
Is this incorrect?
desiderian says:
October 2, 2014 at 1:16 am
“Frankly I know far more about this subject than anyone I know, and I don’t feel even a little bit qualified to have an opinion of how to fix this mess”
Its time to put your feelings aside and manfully look at the facts at hand. [Emphasis added]
Okay… I’ll bite. I have made the military my life’s work (rising through the ranks to become a field-grade officer – with a combat tour), and earned an advanced degree in Military History while I was doing it. I’ve been in all-male units and mixed-sex units. I’ve been in charge of both men and women. I ran a program where even some of my subordinates outranked me – both male and female – but answered to me because it was my program from concept to execution, and if they wanted to be involved they had to accept my positional authority. I’ve lived it, and studied it, and discussed it with other military professionals, both commissioned and enlisted. In what way is my analysis so lacking in “manliness” that it’s apparent to you that I haven’t put my feelings aside? What’s your solution? No matter what it is, I can almost guarantee I could give you multiple reasons to reject it – just as I could think of objections to anything I might propose myself. Why? Because there’s no easy way to fix what has become of the military in our fem-centric society, and all the proposed solutions are bad, and only someone with a civilian mind-set would think otherwise.
I would think that my statement would earn me some credit for intellectual honesty – an anonymous guy on the internet who says, “Even after a lifetime of study and observation, I don’t know the best solution.” Contrast that to all the people who make sweeping statements based on a line or two of text… which happens even here. If I come off as opinionated (and I realize that I do), it is only because I don’t make definitive statements unless I am highly confident that I’m right. I freely admit when I’m wrong when someone points it out – I’m not perfect either – but I rarely have to because if I’m not certain that I know a black-and-white answer then I either shut up, or ask a question, or give a limited opinion with a lot of qualifiers or conditionals. In fact, a goodly portion of the time when someone picks a fight with me it is because they took one of my conditional statements and interpreted it as an absolute.
Im afraid the way things are going , islam doesnt sound so bad , more and more man are going to start thinking that
Joey, I read your comment with much interest. The best book that I’ve personally read on the subject is “On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society” by David Grossman.
It’s been a while since I read it and I no longer have my copy, but as I recall he estimated that the number of people who genuinely like killing to be around 1-2%. That group is where we get both great heroes (sheepdogs) and violent sociopaths (wolves).
I’ve had thoughts similar to yours, and I define the categories as wolves, sheep, sheepdogs, and rams. The rams are the people who aren’t part of that 1-2%, but are capable of using their horns when the wolves come by. You mentioned that maybe 20% of guys are capable of liking a good scrap… the ones who don’t relish killing, but won’t readily back down. Those are the rams in my construct. I won’t pretend to know the percentage of each type in the general populace, but I’m sure the percentage of wolves, sheepdogs, and rams is much higher among men than women. Almost all of them are sheep.
Grossman posits that the incredibly high rate of PTSD since Vietnam is related to the fact that after Korea the military finally figured out how to train men to kill. It’s a little-known fact that the vast majority of soldiers in Korea and before never even tried to kill the enemy, sometimes even at the risk of their own lives. In the 19th Century you’d have lines of soldiers with muskets blasting away at each other at close range with only a few hits, because a lot of men would deliberately miss rather than kill a fellow human being. Artillery worked because the crews were working the guns, not aiming and shooting at individual people. For the infantry the solution was frighteningly simple: once we switched from bulls-eye targets to silhouette targets for training, guys got used to shooting at things that look like people. So when the SHTF and they reverted to their training, the enemy soldiers weren’t people anymore – they were just targets. It worked – the percentage of soldiers who deliberately shot at the enemy skyrocketed, and once the adrenaline wore off, they were faced with the knowledge that they had deliberately killed. Day after day of that took a terrible toll on many of them in the form of PTSD and its aftermath.
Women (and men) who envy soldiers their experiences are naive at best.
It seems we’re all agreed. The natural state of women is hypergamy, which includes the desire to rule over husband. Marriage 1.0, as designed by God, restrains said hypergamy. Feminism, facilitated by the Feminine Imperative, and subsequently Marriage 2.0, removes “all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality”. Anything more to add?
I see the terms ‘female imperative’ and ‘feminine imperative’ used frequently and they appear to be used interchangeably. But I had previously concluded that these were two different imperatives. My understanding was:
Female Imperative: biologically programmed strategies for propagation of the species. Acquire the best genes and receive resources from the father while the child is young.
Feminine (or Feminist) Imperative: transfer of resources and status from men to women creating a sex-based caste system.
Is this incorrect?
Feminine Imperative was the term first used by Rollo Tomassi to describe the overall societal tilt toward women in society in general, which is furthered by both women and many (most?) men (that’s a key point — it isn’t just about what women are furthering for themselves, but a system which most men collaborate in some way to create and sustain with most women). According to the original theory, the FI is a constant throughout human societies. Essentially the tilt comes from the baseline of furthering the female reproductive needs and prerogatives, and tilting the human social system in that direction, and not in the direction of the male reproductive needs and priorities.
The original theory sees feminism (defined as it conventionally is, as the movement for the liberation of women socially/legally/sexually/economically which is conventionally dated to the 18th Century, although some mention is sometimes made of “protofeminist” writers from the middle ages as well) as the most recent *manifestation* of the underlying FI, but not as synonomous with it. It is seen as the current manifestation of the underlying FI. The original theory also sees chivalry and the courtly love tradition as an earlier manifestation of the FI. In both cases, medieval chvalry and feminism are not the FI itself, but how the underlying FI is manifest in different eras.
So, it’s close to what you have described as “Feminine Imperative”, but a bit broader, because the social tilt is not just about resource transfer, but about disposability of each sex and so on. It’s an overall societal tilt in favor of women’s reproductive needs and prerogatives — and how they get best served in any given era will be different given the circumstances in that era (i.e., contemporary feminism is the manifestation of the FI in the current era, because technological advances have created a situation where widespread female economic independence from specific men is made possible, hence that is path that the FI pursues in this context).
What you have described as “Female Imperative” is probably more commonly described as the “ultimate sexual strategy” of females, as contrasted to the “ultimate sexual strategy” of males. Any social system accommodates both of these to some degree, but according to the FI theory, is always fundamentally designed around the FI at its base rather than the “ultimate sexual strategy” of males (which, in an ultimate sense, runs counter to the FI and therefore has been rejected by most human societies).
****
There are some who argue (examples in this thread), that the FI theory is not helpful, because it tends to attribute things to an unchanging nature of women, and that it is therefore more helpful to characterize the historical tip towards women’s reproductive interests in the society as a whole as “feminism”, even if that term is stretched to be used in an unconventional way. I think this criticism, while understandable when articulated in its own terms, misunderstands what the FI theory actually says. The FI theory itself doesn’t say that “none of this is changeable”. What it does say is that the main issue isn’t feminism itself (at least not the modern manifestation of it), but rather the underlying tilt of which feminism is the contemporary manifestation. In this way, I think the ideas that (1) feminism is the contemporary manifestation of the FI, which is a historical tilt in favor of women’s reproductive prerogatives in most human societies and (2) feminism is something that has always been expressed over time in history in different ways and forms, regardless of whether the earlier ones were called “feminism” — are actually not antagonistic and are quite compatible, provided a terminological rigidity is avoided.
As for hypergamy itself, I think it is important to recognize that hypergamy is different from “optimization”, in that hypergamy has a high floor. Optimization is simply “the best I can get under the circumstances”, whereas hypergamy is “only over level “x”, and then the best over level “x” that I can get”, where level “x” is over/above/greater than one’s own self-perceived level “y”. Everyone — men and women — seeks to optimize in mating. However, only women are hypergamous in the sense that they have a “floor” which is higher than their own level, and seek to optimize above that floor. In the case of women, because they tend to seek out both genes and material resources for fecund mating, there are really dual hypergamies at play — a hypergamy of genes and a hypergamy of resources, both of which have to be over her level “y” in order to even make the cut at which she starts to optimize. It is devilishly hard for women to find a single man who is even over the hypergamy in floor in both genes and resources who will even entertain the idea of committing to her, so this gives rise to a dual strategy of AF/BB, or, rather, locating hypergamously satisfactory mates in different men when it comes to genes and resources, or, as is commonly done today, compromising one or the other hypergamy when selecting a fecund mate, with varying degrees of lingering dissatisfaction as a result.
Men, by contrast, are not hypergamous because the “floor” over which they will seek to optimize is below them and not above them. So they may get someone who is above them, if they are very good at optimizing, but they may also get someone who is below them, and that is satisfactory for most men provided that she is over the floor. For women, since the floor is above them, they will always get someone who is above them, because everyone who is their same level or below is excluded — that is the essence of hypergamy, and why it is different from mere optimization, and also therefore different from what men are doing when they are seeking optimal mates. It all has to do with where the “floor” is relative to the person doing the optimizing.
“once we switched from bulls-eye targets to silhouette targets for training, guys got used to shooting at things that look like people.”
Was it really that simple? I always thought the spike in PTSD was because Korea was about when soldiers began to be hated by certain, vocal fifth-column elements in American society. Nothing like a hero’s welcome to handle traumatic events… nothing like unappreciation to double the consequences.
…
Ace @ 9:24 am:
“Im afraid the way things are going , islam doesnt sound so bad , more and more man are going to start thinking that”
Notice how our elites give Islam the same respect and legal support they give feminism. That alone says everything you need to know about that religion.
The greatest danger for us modern men is following women into rebellion instead of sticking to principles.
Notice how our elites give Islam the same respect and legal support they give feminism. That alone says everything you need to know about that religion.
They’re trying to follow the same playbook that atheistic liberals (classical onward) followed with Christianity in places which were recalcitrant about letting it fall away completely (i.e., the US, as compared with Europe): support a moderate/liberal wing (e.g., liberal/mainline Prots), isolate the traditional or resistant wing socio-culturally (what has been done with Catholicism and conservative Prots), and de-fang the whole thing culturally in the process. They’re trying to replicate this with Islam, and are at the stage of trying to identify and support a moderate/liberal wing which will become “acceptable Islam” a la the ECUSA, and then demonize the rest of it as “crazies” a la Catholics and “fundies”. It’s the same gameplan.
@Lyn87
“Men Against Fire” by S.L.A. Marshall was on the reading list when I was in the Corps. He was able to go in after the island battles in the Pacific and study what had happened. He found that as many as 25% of the men didn’t even fire their rifles. Cases of men found bayoneted to death in fighting positions with full loads of ammo and unfired weapons. Likewise, they estimated that only about 20% to 25% of the men were effectively using their weapons. Marshall attributed it to what he called “the mothers milk of kindness” and claimed the solution was to get the troops comfortable with the idea of killing someone.
I don’t know what kind of doctrinal changes were made in terms of training in the Army, but the Marines put a heavy focus on desensitization of the troops. It wasn’t so much the adoption of different targets as it was the combination of the constant chanting and screaming. The instructor says “Kill” and all the recruits scream at the top of their lungs “KILL! BLOOD MAKES THE GRASS GROW GREEN! KILL!” I’d actually thought the silhouette targets were to make it easier for the troops to qualify, but it’s been many years since I read the book.
While the Marines may preselect for sociopathy, running around for months singing things like “Napalm, napalm, sticks like glue, sticks to babies, mommies too. I eat burned babies” has a tremendous impact in terms of desensitization. I can still recall the commentary about the HALO generation going to war, effectively already desensitized to killing.
Could it be that a large part of the PTSD has to do with (like Vietnam) the constant stress and unpredictability of the situation they were in, combined with the lack of a moral compass that says being a soldier in war is NOT a bad thing; and killing the other guy before he kills you or one of your buddies is a good thing? I think of the left-handed kid with the sniper rifle in Saving Private Ryan, who was reciting scripture from memory as he killed Germans. You have to be strong in order to put the cross-hairs on them and pull the trigger.
That brings up another development that perhaps also influences the level of PTSD if it’s really about killing another person, and that’s the significant increase in the deployment of optical sights that allow a much clearer view of the person you’re shooting. With iron sights the focus has to be on the front sight and the target is out of focus. The object of modern combat sights is to get the sights and the target on the same sight-plane, in focus.
@Novaseeker,
Thanks for the thorough reply.
The feminine imperative as described by Rollo is logical. I can imagine that keeping the women alive and well–producing babies–would be the deciding factor in the growth or collapse of a prehistoric tribe, and the men would fight and die to ensure this. I can also see how this imperative would carry into larger civilizations that would still require women to produce babies and men to facilitate this.
Feminism, the latest manifestation of FI, has proven toxic to our civilization. As men we are able to fight encroaching tribes but we are not so prepared to fight an enemy within and an enemy of the mind. There’s a lot of buzz about men being on marriage strike but there is a more critical strike occurring: the baby strike. The failure to produce babies is a civilization-collapsing event. The “women’s reproductive interests” are no interest in reproducing at the replacement rate.
Hypergamy is almost cruel to a woman who’s a 10/10. Almost.
If wives in feminist rebellion don’t have their demands met, she explained, bad things are in store for their children and husband. Focusing on repentance will only lead women to divorce, have abortions, commit child abuse, have nervous breakdowns, and develop addictions
Yet another woman demonstrating that most women who call themselves “Christian” 1) almost certainly never pray to ask God for strength, guidance, and blessings in carrying out their duties as wives and mothers; 2).couldn’t care less about sinning, and 3) defy God to punish them for sinning (if the punishment isn’t immediate and palpable, it isn’t punishment, since women seldom have any concept of the “long term”).
Nothing new under the sun here, although this woman is somewhat rare in that she at least expresses the selfish rebellion overtly, if perhaps not being fully and consciously aware of it.
Hypergamy is almost cruel to a woman who’s a 10/10. Almost.
In the sense that she can’t get someone who is “above” her, yes. Them’s the breaks, I guess, when you’re apex yourself (at least when young as TFH points out).
The real issue for the 10/10 women, though, is that they benefited more from the ancien regime, where hypergamy was constrained in various ways, because these constraints also acted as de facto constraints in terms of *pairing*, when it came to men of similar status. Of course, these high status men typically had mistresses and so on, but in general they would marry the highest value women. In an open system like today, the high status men are having a ball with the women in the 2-4 tiers below, delaying marriage (if they marry at all), and then cherry-picking high value women in their early 20s when they themselves are in their 30s.
This is why it is more or less accurate to say that the “losers” under the current system are most men, and the highest value women, while under the old system the losers were most mid-range 5-8) women, and the highest value men. The current system is therefore plausibly described as a coalition of interests between the highest value men and the 5-8 women, at the expense of most men and the highest women. (The truly low-ranked lose in any system due to their rank — that’s life.)
TFH:
“Frankly, any woman who is an 8 or higher at age 23 is a failure if she cannot manage to secure a man of good character who also earns an upper-class income before her youth slips away.”
I agree with this. It’s not that difficult, I think, for a woman to pull this off, particularly if she’s an 8 and is prepared for marriage and the duties of a wife, and wants to do it.
Said it before and will keep saying it: Any woman who wants to be married in this society can do it. I’ve seen ugly women married. I’ve seen pretty women married. I’ve seen fat women married. I’ve seen stupid women married.
I have absolutely zero patience for women’s claim that it is so difficult for a woman to find a man willing to marry her. If what she wants is to get married, she can do that. Only exception I’ve seen are very religious Christian women and who insist on remaining virgins until marriage. Once these girls announce they won’t give it up before marriage, most men run – even Christian men. (The exception to this rule seems to be the Duggar kids.)
The problem is that all women want to marry George Clooney, and that’s simply not going to happen. There never have been and never will be enough of those top men to go around to all the women who want them.
GunnerQ (and AT), it really was that simple to get more soldiers to shoot at the enemy. As AT noted, even Marines island-hopping across the Pacific against the VERY MUCH HATED Japanese frequently failed to fire their weapons even when they were in mortal peril. As for it being that simple to explain PTSD… no, you are both certainly correct. The way the Vietnam War was fought, and the way vets were treated, were contributing factors. But the fact that so many men had engaged in one-on-one killing (who might not have done so in earlier wars), ramped it up a lot.
Armies have always done the sort of things AT talks about with regard to inspiring blood-lust (why not call it what it is?) but there are multiple factors in play. One that was mentioned is optical sights. Most personal weapons were not equipped with those until the GWOT, and even then the standard-issue CCO has no magnification, but you’re both onto something anyway. There’s a huge difference between firing a missile at a target you cannot even see and sticking a bayonet into someone’s throat. You can go from inter-continental range, to… strategic range, rifle range, pistol range, spear range, all the way to sexual range, where you and your opponent are grappling for a killing blow with limbs entwined. The closer the range, the more traumatic it generally is.
The way the military used to teach marksmanship was with bulls-eye targets. It’s easy to see how close you’re getting to the center of the ring, and thus gauge your sight picture and steadiness. But while it’s easy to teach marksmanship that way, it doesn’t help soldiers develop the habit of shooting at things that look like people, which is what the military needs them to do. In the gravest extreme people tend to revert to learned habits or, in the absence of such fully-ingrained habits: instinct. For most people, the instinctive thing to do when someone is trying to kill you is hide or flee, but that won’t do in combat… so soldiers have to be trained to kill the enemy first, which means that the training needs to instill the habit of shooting at people-shaped objects on command… “BLOOD MAKES THE GRASS GROW… KILL! KILL! KILL!” is useful but often not sufficient when a man is faced with the here-and-now prospect of taking the life of another man who is shooting at him.
Feminists ought to learn something from that. A large percentage of men won’t even kill an enemy soldier who is trying to kill them, even after extensive training and being faced with his own death. The male instinct to protect women is FAR stronger than the one to protect men – especially enemies. Yet idiot feminists still think that average men are just one beer or one touchdown from committing acts of horrendous violence against the women in their lives.
How absurd.
I’m sorry, have to jump in here. Female beauty has not traditionally been a major factor in marriage. Family status/property has been the major factor.
Also, 10/10 women have it difficult for a few reasons. One is that men are terrified of them and preemptively treat them badly, anticipating rejection. Women also treat them badly.
myrealitie:
10/10s have it difficult now. Yes, women treat them badly. Most of the women who treat them badly are less attractive, because the 10 sucks up all the attention in the room.
But men aren’t terrified of 10s. They just know they will be rejected if they approach (perhaps in a nuke), so they ignore them and avoid them. The only attention 10s get are from male 9s and 10s who want to have sex with them. In the likely event she blows out those male 9s and 10s, there is a deep, deep backbench of HB 7s and 8s literally lined up around the block to service those men.
Yes, I agree. And it has been my observation that very high status men prefer 7’s or 8’s to 9’s and 10’s for marriage, as they are typically less of a pain in the ass. I’ve seen this lots of times, but these are just my personal observations.
I’m sorry, have to jump in here. Female beauty has not traditionally been a major factor in marriage. Family status/property has been the major factor.
In terms of MMV, yes. And under the old regime, 10s in MMV married other 10s in MMV.
Under the new regime, the 10s in MMV are not favored, because the SMP has been liberalized and detached from the MMP, and so the women who were 10s in the MMP under the ancien regime are not favored under the current regime.
This important part tends to get lost in the emotion of the situation, as what husband doesn’t love his wife enough to help her out from time to time?
This is an important point to make, as there are two uses of the term husband helps wife out with housework (HHWOWH) employed in these sorts of discussions, and equivocating between the two uses is a means (albeit oftentimes unwittingly) of camouflaging problematic feminist assumptions present, and therefore avoiding the confrontation with these feminist assumptions that needs to take place.
The first use of the term HHWOWH is the feminist one: men (a/k/a holders of unfair privileges that need leveling) NEVER, as a matter of (socially conditioned) male principle, help a wife with housework, no matter how much she is in need of it, unless they are coerced somehow into doing it (and they should be coerced in order to make everybody “equal,” decent human beings who treat each other with “respect”). The second use of the term HHWOWH is the same general help that any basically decent person (be he a husband, be she a wife, be it anyone) gives to another person who is in need. As regards housework, it covers the help that most husbands have been giving to wives since the time when wives had been performing most of the housework until now. Inasmuch as society was made up of basically decent persons, if a wife was truly in need of help with housework, a husband who was able would help her out.
There is really no need to talk about HHWOWH in the second use, as a society in which people are generally unwilling to help another person truly in need has problems that surpass the particularity of an able husband refusing to help a wife truly in need of help with housework. However, whenever the first use of HHWOWH is employed by someone who wishes not to be associated with feminism, but is called out on the feminist usage of HHWOWH, she (or he as is often the case) quickly equivocates, and appeals to the idea of common decency inherent in the second HHWOWH, against which no one could be opposed (unless he is a misogynist, of course, who doesn’t want to extend even the most basic human decency toward women).
Deti,
“I have absolutely zero patience for women’s claim that it is so difficult for a woman to find a man willing to marry her. If what she wants is to get married, she can do that. Only exception I’ve seen are very religious Christian women and who insist on remaining virgins until marriage. Once these girls announce they won’t give it up before marriage, most men run – even Christian men.”
I do agree with you, Deti.
It is hard for these women, but by the infinite Grace of God, even they manage it, somehow.
As indeed do their counterparts, virginal men (who are admittedly, a very small group).
As my mother says, God looks after his own.
The message is, always trust God. He is kinder than we think.
What Bucky Yinky said.
It is almost always the first usage that women employ in these instances, at least in my experience. As if they really believe it possible that my husband wouldn’t help me if I truly needed it. The truth is that when I’m doing what I’m supposed to be doing, managing my time well, and staying on top of my job the way he is expected to stay on top of his at his place of employment, I very rarely need a lot of help.
But it’s somehow forbidden to talk about that. It’s “attacking” mothers or something or other.
Novaseeker says:
Yes, that’s the sense I was referring to. She has to land an NFL player or successful hedge fund manager just to break even. But those men might be fine with an 8 who’s less high-maintenance (as myrealitie points out).
@ Spacetraveler
A couple of points-
1) Based on the stats I’ve seen, those men are not so rare as virginal women. In fact, the last study I saw indicated there were at least twice as many such men as women in the Church.
2) The problems that those men experience in marrying are different than virginal women for the most part. In some cases they are very different. Often for men the problem is not finding women who will marry them, but finding women worth marrying who will marry them. That dilemma- the lack of marriageable women, is the principal problem such men face.
3) Because of what I’ve alluded to above, it simply isn’t possible for all those virginal Christian men to marry well. There just aren’t enough marriageable women to support that.
There is nothing wrong with this. But it is incomplete, because unless God starts creating women out of whole cloth (or men’s ribs), the numbers just aren’t there for men.
Youre right ofcoarse, just see how the left an EU treats islam it says something
Lyn87,
“For the infantry the solution was frighteningly simple: once we switched from bulls-eye targets to silhouette targets for training, guys got used to shooting at things that look like people.”
See also.
Lyn87,
“In what way is my analysis so lacking in “manliness” that it’s apparent to you that I haven’t put my feelings aside? What’s your solution? No matter what it is, I can almost guarantee I could give you multiple reasons to reject it – just as I could think of objections to anything I might propose myself.”
What analysis? By your own account, you were throwing up your hands because of your feelings. That’s unmanly.
The fact that you have a conceptual grasp of so many objections is an indication that you are likely thebest positioned to recommend a course of action despite the (inevitable) uncertainty and complexity of the situation.
That’s what men do. When we fail in that duty, the alternative isn’t perfect beings making perfect decisions, its the (often smugly) ignorant stepping in to make worse ones.
BTW, thanks for the Grossman link. That comment may be the most valuable I’ve read this year.
Nova,
“atheistic liberals (classical onward) followed with Christianity in places which were recalcitrant about letting it fall away completely (i.e., the US, as compared with Europe): support a moderate/liberal wing (e.g., liberal/mainline Prots)”
As a liberal/mainline Protestant, I’m sad to say you’ve got the tail and the dog backwards. It was the mainline itself driving that train.
Most of their offspring have now become atheistic liberals (or worse) – a bitter, deserved, harvest – but they weren’t atheistic back then. We, to our great discredit, rendered unto Caesar what was rightfully God’s.
Des writes,
“What analysis? By your own account, you were throwing up your hands because of your feelings. That’s unmanly.”
Okay… I see what you’re saying. I’m not offended, but you’re wrong. I wasn’t throwing up my hands because of my feelings – I’m throwing up my hands because of my analysis. I have analyzed this PLENTY. It’s like an engineer working through a complex equation about something he’s trying to design, and no matter how many times he crunches the numbers he keeps coming up with The square root of -1 as the required value for a critical measurement. Sometimes there is no answer that’s going to work… feelings or not.
In truth, the only fix that would work would require radically transforming the society from which the military comes and would take a generation or three. Anything done to fix the military without that would be like putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound unless the underlying society went through a radical change as well. That’s all I was saying.
@ Donalgraeme,
I agree with you. I was addressing Deti’s point about virginal women, (and I included virginal men in my response to him because I know they exist!) but let’s focus on virginal men for now…
Of course it is always going to be harder for a virginal man in today’s SMP, even harder than for a virginal wman, for well-known biological reasons.
All the more respect for virginal men.
And yes, I can see that a virginal man could probably be more ‘prudish’ than a virginal woman, when it comes to selecting a woman for marriage, because I imagine it is more difficult for a man to remain virginal in an age where sex is so ubiquitous compared to his father’s era. He may not get sex often, but for sure, once or twice if the opportunity arises…and that includes him paying, etc.
So yes, I can totally understand why a virginal man would insist on a virginal woman as a wife. (in fact I think he should).
I totally get it.
Virginal women only rarely insist on virginal men for marriage, (being realistic) and are more accepting of a man with a (lowish) ‘number’ than the other way round, I suspect.
So yes, there needs to be more virginal women for these men. They should be marrying each other. I think Lyn87(?) mentioned that he and his wife are such a pair. Assortive mating at its best.
It takes a lot of courage for this kind of ‘waiting game’ though…And yes, the Good Guy upstairs can help…if people help themselves first…of course.
“it is more difficult for a man to remain virginal in an age where sex is so ubiquitous compared to his father’s era. He may not get sex often, but for sure, once or twice if the opportunity arises…and that includes him paying, etc.”
No, actually it’s very easy for a male virgin to remain a virgin in today’s society. Male virgins are so undesirable that most of them can’t relieve themselves of it without paying a hooker. Most are incels, to be honest. So for most men, virginity is exquisitely painful.
Now if a man actually wants to remain a virgin and has opportunities, then yes, it is difficult for him to remain a virgin. Most, however, don’t have opportunities.
It is very, very difficult for a man to get sex. It is very, very easy for a woman to get sex. Any woman at a 4 or above in attractiveness can get sex anytime she wants it, 24/7/365. All she has to do is walk into the nearest bar, say “Who in here is DTF right now?” and then watch the candidates line up for selection. All she has to do is select the most attractive man who presents himself.
Lyn87,
I’ve got to go, but here’s what you said:
“Frankly I know far more about this subject than anyone I know, and I don’t feel even a little bit qualified to have an opinion of how to fix this mess”
Who do you imagine is more qualified?
“Anything done to fix the military without that would be like putting a band-aid on a sucking chest wound unless the underlying society went through a radical change as well.”
“When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.”
– Sherlock Holmes
Those who feel qualified to enact radical change are the least likely to be fit for achieving it in a way that does not make things worse. Therefore, the job is left for those who feel otherwise. Like yourself. Be not afraid.
deti, I had that discussion with my wife just a few days ago. She was in the 8.5 – 9 range when I met her, and she had a hard time believing that men couldn’t get sex as readily as women. I suppose it was a combination of two things – as an attractive woman she got (sometimes still gets) hit on all the time, and so many of the girls she grew up with were sluts, and they were giving it up to somebody.
I used that same example. I told her to imagine us as we were when we met, transported to today. I told her she could walk into any bar and announce that she would go home with someone, and the guys would line up for her. If I did that, not only would I get no takers, but the bouncers would toss me out.
And yes, Spacetraveller, that was us you were remembering. Like I wrote a few days ago, when we were dating my wife asked if I was a virgin, and if I had said, No” she would have dropped me like a handful of live eels.
@Deti
While it certainly is harder now than in the past for a woman who wants to remain a virgin until marriage to find a husband, what I’ve personally seen is the women themselves make it much harder by looking for a celibate boyfriend, not a husband. The expectation is “if you love me, you will wait” and wait… and wait… and wait. The whole focus is on waiting, not on marriage. This tends to scare off both the players and the men who want to marry.
Dalrock says about virginal women playing the waiting game: “The whole focus is on waiting, not on marriage. This tends to scare off both the players and the men who want to marry.”
Great point, Dalrock. My experience is that my wife and I got engaged eight weeks after we met, and married 10 weeks after that. If she had not wanted to get married for years I imagine I would have tried to talk her out of it. Failing that, I almost certainly would have put myself back on the market. Since at that point I had a good MMV (and was fishing in a small but well-stocked pond – the nice lady that ran the dating service was sort-of pimping for me, I think), I was generating interest like I had never known before, and I probably would have ended up with someone else.
Dalrock:
Oh yeah. It’s coming back to me now….
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2012/06/12/the-folly-of-the-celibate-boyfriend/
“The whole focus is on waiting, not on marriage. This tends to scare off both the players and the men who want to marry.”
This is probably a result of modern thought that “you need to know each other for at least a year before you even think about marriage. Then once you get married there needs to be a long engagement period because that’s what you need to get ready for the big extravaganza, plus it’ll be at least 6 months before you can get the church, because SHE wants a June wedding.”
You don’t need a couple of years to “know each other well enough” to get married. You need a couple of weeks, maybe a month, to determine if it’s going anywhere. If it is, then think about whether s/he is a marriage candidate. If s/he is a marriage candidate, then maybe another couple or three months to explore that. After that, if you’re not getting married, you cut each other loose.
Great point. That’s what happens when you try to combine Christian morality and feminism. She wants to save sex for marriage, because she really is a good Christian girl. But she’s fully absorbed (and so have her parents) the idea that she needs to delay marriage until 28+ so she can protect her future with a good career, explore her interests, do some missionary work, etc. Put those two together, and any boyfriend she meets when she’s younger has to commit himself to several years of staying celibate while spending lots of time with a woman who turns him on — in hopes that he’ll eventually get to marry her, which is by no means certain.
Of course, a man who’s alpha enough could probably make the marriage-delaying 22-year-old change her mind with a quickness about that. If his SMV is well above hers, and she can tell he’s not going to accept the “celibate boyfriend” position for long, she’ll change something to keep him — she’ll give up her chastity or decide she’s ready for marriage after all. But most men aren’t that high value and aware of it, so most guys won’t be able to trigger that change of heart. Most will admire her for her virtue and feel bad about pushing her to move up the sexy date — licitly or otherwise.
@Lyn87
My primary MOS was 0311. I earned additional MOS’s during my period of service, but the most difficult was 8541 (scout sniper) I think now it’s 0317. Shooting someone when you can see them through the scope makes it very, very personal. Some can *reliably* handle that, most can’t. In fact, just getting a guy ready to be shot at is a difficult proposition.
I got into IPSC shooting and had a bunch of my kids interested as well. To this day I hate beancounters because the beginning of the end was when somebody noticed that my platoon had more personal weapons in the armory than the rest of the battalion combined and over half of us owned motorcycles. There was a range we could use and as a PMI I could sign out a range, so we made our own pop-up targets and “enhanced” the experience with roman candles. Using model rocketry fuzes to remotely light the roman candles I could put somebody under serious pressure to fire with a dozen roman candles spitting flaming balls of fire at him while he tried to complete the course of fire against pop-up targets. It was instructive. Later we added in firecrackers and flash-bangs to liven things up and it got interesting.
What could be done today in terms of getting men prepared to be shot at (given wireless tech) is amazing, but I don’t see it being done.
You would be amazed at what a few roman candles can do to add to your stress level when they’re coming straight at you, even though you’re wrapped up well and have your face and eyes protected. Personally I find it’s worse than being shot at because you can see them coming. I found that initially only about 30% of the guys could handle that range with any effectiveness at all with a pistol. With a rifle the percentage jumped to about 60% (hiding behind the carrying handle, LOL) but for most of the guys it took at least a half-dozen times before they calmed down and started tuning out the noise and focusing on their mission- which was to hit the targets. That paid dividends later in Iraq.
Then, one day, a couple of lieutenants “just happened to be driving by” while things were going full-blast. Naturally they stopped. They watched. They asked questions. They took names. End of realistic training, even though it was on our own time at a range I’d legitimately signed for (The command cited base regulations prohibiting fireworks, a possible fire hazard, possibly unsafe conditions- even though every shooter was always backed up by two men when on the line). It was just like when the boxing program got the kibosh after they found out we were using civilians in hillbilly bars as training aids, but back in the day that was par for the course.
Right on cue, I see that the DHS is treading the Same Ground in terms of using lifelike targets for their training. The goal is desensitization.
@ Spacetraveller
Not exactly sure what you mean by this. Could you explain please?
On the contrary, it isn’t that difficult at all. For many men it is quite easy- you simply do what you are told in Church to do to attract women, and that tends to accomplish it quite nicely.
No, I don’t think you do you get it. In the past it was considered quite normal and acceptable for men, even Christian men, to visit prostitutes before they married. Yes, even here in the US. If anything, a man who didn’t visit them was likely to be considered odd (and possibly homosexual).
Really, if a man actually commits to chastity, and makes sure to avoid placing himself in a risky situation, it isn’t all that hard to keep it. After all, women aren’t “hunters” in the way that men are. A chaste man will simply be ignored.
You are wrong here. Virginal women not insisting on virginal men has nothing to do with realism. There are more virgin men than women. Period. The difference is even greater in the Church. Understand that if all the virgin women in the country of eligible age married all the virgin men, there would still be a huge number of virgin men who would not have wives, and would never have a chance to marry a virgin. They either need to accept damaged goods, or be celibate for the rest of their lives. Going back to the beginning of this paragraph, women not insisting on virginal men has to do with relatively few women caring about a man’s sexual history. Or at least, caring about it to the degree that men do. For some women it does matter. But only for a few. And certainly not enough of them do for the virgin men out there.
@ Dalrock
I know a young Christian woman who was looking to do exactly that. I think she might have been hoping for me to step in be that celibate boyfriend, although I’m not positive as she was Protestant. I never found out because I wanted nothing to do with that kind of arrangement (which for her would have been almost a decade in length).
“The whole focus is on waiting, not on marriage.”
Well then the man should state that his focus is towards marriage…if that scares her off at least he won’t be waiting anymore.
And even for them, it’s unlikely that they’ll be willing to take a “lesser” man for the sake of his virginity. All other things being equal, she might prefer that a man be pure. But if it’s a choice between a hunky alpha with several notches on his bedpost, or a nerdy virgin who leaves her tingle-less….well, that’s what the hamster is for. It won’t take her long to determine, maybe through prayer, that God is calling her to minister to the sinner.
GunnerQ
This is a big blind spot in evolutionary psychology. Women are observably prone to hypergamy, therefore the Evolution Imperative says hypergamy must be a good thing and should not be denied.
Strawman argumentation, a logical fallacy.
Ballista
@Anonymous Reader You provide another pitch perfect description of feminism. In the simplest terms, feminism is female supremacism.
Then you should use the term “female supremacism” or “gynocentrism”, if you want to communicate.
As for Eve, it’s well known that she was the original feminist.
Then to you, “feminist” and “woman” are semantically the same. Too bad that there are women who are not feminists, and men who are, therefore your definition does not match reality, and thus it is junk.
GunnerQ
Yes, women are born feminist… in other words, evil.
Ok, so now you are defining “feminist” as “evil”. Then use the word “evil”. Because evil predates the 18th and 19th century by a wide margin, and therefore if you want to communicate, an accurate term will serve better than a a wrong term.
Ra’s al Ghul
I knew a woman that became aware of the term “Hypergamy” and proceeded to use it to justify her rotten behavior of cheating and trading in boyfriends/husbands.
You appear to be superstitious or confused. I knew a woman who became aware of the term “grace” and insisted that no matter what she did, she was saved and bound for Heaven because of the term “grace”, it’s in the Bible so it must be true. The fact that foolish people misuse words or tools or ideas does not mean that those words or tools or ideas are necessarily bad things.
Blaming the word for a persons actions is a form of superstition.
A. Toad
All women are born feminists, per Genesis 3:16.
I see, so all women throughout history were followers of Elizabeth Cady Standon, or perhaps Mary Woolstonecraft, and their ideological descendents? How did this happen? Time travel? Stanton et al lived for thousands of years and no one knew it? Or you are misusing a word for your own purpoese? Which is more likely?
Biblically, the curse of Genesis 3:16 is still in effect and it didn’t go away just because got saved. ‘Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.’
So you choose to define “feminism” as “female”? Then just use the term “female”, or perhaps …ahem…Female Imperative. Because “feminism” has a definition that is bound to certain times and places, while female psychology (driven by female biology) is present in all women to varying degrees.
Further, the whole feminist thing dates (within the church, anyway) as far back as the Romanization of the church. It was 300-500 AD that the church began invading the family with pagan gynocentric rules and regulations of the marital bed
and
Feminism was a tool used by the early church to usurp the husband’s authority but later lost control of it with the Protestant Reformation.
I challenge you to produce writings from that time that use the word “feminism”, and predict that you cannot do so. I doubt that the word even existed in the Latin or Greek of the time, for the obvious rason that the word wasn’t even coined until the 19th century. You are, perhaps deliberately, confusing the sociopolitical movement called “feminism” with certain gynocentric tendencies that are present in women. Your own curious readings of the Bible aside, you have demonstrated exactly nothing save that you aren’t fond of accurate definitions of words.
Ballista74 again
Gunner Q and Artisinal Toad deal with this adequately.
No, they have demonstrated logical fallacies and poor thinking.
All women are born feminist per Genesis 3:16.
Impossible, as I have shown repeatedly. You might as well claim that Sparta was Fascist – since the term “Fascist” did not exist until after World War One, the claim is risible and false.
The problem is that you have to use correct and non-confusing terminology to be within the truth.
Yes, exaclty, that is my point.
Your choice to use incorrect and confusing terms represents the divide here. You are right in that you don’t call a jet airplane a steamboat – in fact this is my exact matter of contention.
This is hugely ironic. You are using the word “feminist” in a totally false manner, obfuscating issues that are clear or ought to be, and now you claim the exact opposite.
This all reminds me of the arugment I had back about 15 years ago with some aging useful idiots (Lenin’s term) who were die hard followers of Liberation Theology. They claimed that because the early Christians had held all property in common, that Christianity was a form of Communism. The fact that many cultures in history have been communal, yet none of them practiced the Dictatorship of the Proletariat that is a feature of Marxist/Leninist dogma [Hi, Boxer!] made no dent in their faith. The fact that Communism as an ideology did not exist until the 19th century, or more than 1,700 years after the communal Christains in question made no dent either. They were true believers in Communism and they wanted to put lipstick on the pig.
Your proelm is not the same, but it is similar. IN your zeal to oppose feminism, you wish to claim that a 19th and 20th century political movement has been present in women for thousands of years. YOu are claiming that a subset is actually a superset, and that’s just a logical fail.
All female humans have some degree of hypergamy. All female humans have some degree of the Female Imperative. Some humans are femnists, not all.
“Some” and “all” are not the same word.
There’s more I could write, but Novaseeker has covered it quite well and I don’t wish to be redundant.
Cail,
“That’s what happens when you try to combine Christian morality and feminism. She wants to save sex for marriage, because she really is a good Christian girl. But she’s fully absorbed (and so have her parents) the idea that she needs to delay marriage until 28+ so she can protect her future with a good career, explore her interests, do some missionary work, etc.”
Some protection.
Something’s got to give. The equivalent arrangement for sons would be encouraging them to take 6-10 years out of their marriages in their 30’s to go on a celibate pilgrimage to the Holy Land (and to turn a blind eye when many took advantage of their peak SMV to pursue their basest sexual instincts – i.e. polygamy for males instead of serial monogamy for females), then expect their wives to “woman-up” and take them back with no complaints.
Plus, the affirmative action necessary to protect those pretty futures guarantees that there will be far less suitable men for her to marry when the appointed hour rolls around.
My guess is that age of marriage goes back down, and with some speed.
The FI is baked into the cake of the species.
The irony is the extent to which feminism (inducing the conservative version that dare not speak it’s name) thwarts it, in fact if not intent.
+1 desiderian
I think there is great utility in recognizing the feminine imperative and how it has always existed in human societies. This allows us to analyze where feminism comes from and how come so many women buy into its premises hook line and sinker. It also is great for rebutting the feminist patriarchy fable that women have been oppressed and virtual slaves of men for millennium so anything women do to men now is hunky dory, and just payback.
The part that I have actually got women in my family (six sisters and many nieces all left wing democrats and feminists) to actually listen to is the original basis of the social contract:
For most of human existence women got pregnant, gave birth, and took care of small children. Men did everything else. In return for doing their part women got the bulk of the society’s resources devoted to them, as this was equivalent to ensuring the next generation which was essential to the survival of the society. But this was a fair division of labor and resources as women spent the bulk of their lives doing their part and child birth was dangerous as hell. This division of labor and resources made sense in those days, but not in modern times where a woman spends only a few years of her life in pregnancy, child birth, and raising small children, and because child birth is relatively safe now. We need to readjust our society’s priorities to match modern conditions.
I almost lose then at the beginning, but once I say that child birth was dangerous and that this made the contract fair, they stick around for the rest with a semi-open mind. The feminine imperative was essential for the species to survive when funneling all resources to women was the same as funneling all resources to children. No man has a hard spot with devoting all his time and effort to making his children’s life better than his. What chaps our asses now is that all our resources are going to cupcake with no way to control how much benefits our children (if any).
Anonymous Reader @ October 2, 2014 at 11:33 pm:
“GunnerQ
This is a big blind spot in evolutionary psychology. Women are observably prone to hypergamy, therefore the Evolution Imperative says hypergamy must be a good thing and should not be denied.
Strawman argumentation, a logical fallacy.”
How is it a strawman argument when I’m not disagreeing with Cail?
The central mechanic of natural selection is singling out good genes/behaviors for reproduction while eliminating bad genes/behaviors. A major implication of this is , that we today are the result of a billion years’ aggregation of good genes/behaviors. Therefore, the proper thing to do (what I called the “Evolution Imperative”) is allow people to follow their well-tested natural instincts instead of unpopular, artificial constructions like, say, monogamy.
Women evolved to be hypergamous, therefore hypergamy must be the result of millions of years’ worth of good-trait selection. The observable result, however, is that hypergamy is in fact dangerously maladaptive. Women, their mates and their children all suffer as a direct result of hypergamous behavior. Therefore, hypergamy disproves evolution by counterexample.
^
Hahaha. All else being equal, it would prove it. However, nothing forbids that what is adaptive in one set of conditions might be maladaptive in another. Conditions clearly have changed since the hunter-gatherer times.
A prison inmate of today might be a successful warlord in another time.
^
Following the ‘might makes right’ strategy in both cases.
“Therefore, hypergamy disproves evolution by counterexample.”
Don’t be daft. Conditions have changed. Their environment is substantially, almost unimaginably different (in industrial societies). But their behaviour hasn’t. They have not adapted.
They have failed to evolve in general, although luckily there are always a few outliers (mutants).
As you say, the lack of hipness-to-the-tripness negatively impacts their offspring. Leading to … fewer and eventually, if the behavioural pattern is persisted in, no descendants. Game Over.
Tough titty, that’s the engine of selection. Otherwise we’d still be up to our armpits in giant dragonflies, and warty newt-things the size of a bus. It’s not a progressive history of inevitable advancement, manifest destiny style. Just change, and a staggering amount of good ol’ Death. Because it has to, or else.
“Conditions have changed. Their environment is substantially, almost unimaginably different (in industrial societies).”
Would this imply divorce is bad for children because the Industrial Revolution happened? Or that hypergamy would be healthy if we rid ourselves of civilization? We’ll probably find out, the way our society is headed.
The larger the gene pool, the more ‘lag’ it experiences.
^ Sorry, gamer slang. Inertia.
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“Or that hypergamy would be healthy if we rid ourselves of civilization?”
Guess so. Since the incredibly painfully, incrementally evolved hardwired hypergamy which used to be the only way to bring home the species’ bacon in the long term is, under modern conditions of ludicrous abundance and effortless communication and travel, a dangerous and berserk indulgence.
Not for those fortunate individuals mindlessly exploiting it temporarily, of course. Just their (sadly, entirely hypothetical) progeny. And obviously, being instinctive, it’s not going to go away any time soon. It can only be inhibited. By actions, events and facts. Which would naturally be resented, fiercely.
What a miserable old Hector I am.
Deti,
“…Now if a actually wants to remain a virgin and has opportunities, then yes, it is difficult for him to remain a virgin.”
Well, the original context was religious virginal women and their male counterparts, i.e. religious male virgins.
Indeed I was only referring to the small group of men who *could* get sex, but choose not to, for moral or religious reasons. Hence my respect for them. I don’t include ‘incels’ in this group. The temptation must be greater for this group (well, for any man) if the cohort of young women they grow up with is more lax with their morals than is the norm, as happens to be the general conscensus of this current era.
I am aware that it is easier for women to get sex than it is for men. I think I got that from you, actually, via this blog or Danny’s.
Lyn,
Yes, I thought it was you …
I think highly of yours and your wife’s story…
I don’t think I could ever have been as ‘strict’ as your wife in this particular category. In my case, it was not expected. Desired, yes, just not expected. I don’t think I ever ‘dropped’ a man because he wasn’t a virgin! But good on your wife for sticking to her guns 😛
Desiderian,
“Not exactly sure what you mean by this. Could you explain please?”
A virginal man who has deliberately remained virginal by dint of his own ‘hard work’ keeping away from temptation has had it harder than any woman in the same position, given that he is inondated with the biological drive to have sex because of testosterone, no? So if HE has managed this feat, why can’t a woman? Because women don’t have as much testosterone so it should be biologically easier for her to be virginal. This is what I mean by ‘he is going to be much more prudish than a man who is not a virgin when he arrives at the point in his life where he selects a wife’.
Lyn87 says:
October 2, 2014 at 3:46 pm
Then you need to advocate for that change in society not throw up your hands because it is difficult. It has to start somewhere and why not by someone who is knowledgeable and can be persuasive?
All she has to do is walk into the nearest bar, say “Who in here is DTF right now?” and then watch the candidates line up for selection. All she has to do is select the most attractive man who presents himself.
I respectfully disagree with the above . . . many men will reject her because she is perceived flawed and thus more of a risk than a woman whom is more selective. Yes, she will get what she wants eventually but I have seen a woman go from group to group of men looking to be taken home but was rejected. She was of average looks and of child bearing age. It took her a while but finally a guy did. Point is they will not line up because of risk involved.
New here, and realize this is an old post, but in general I think that women do suffer from femanism in the sense that when I grew up, there was a “village” to raise the kids. Kids were out on the streets, or at the neighbors, and not in the house all day. It’s different these days with so many women working.
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