New commenter Rachel attempted in several comments to redirect the topic in the discussion of Why won’t he hurry up and die already? beginning with:
Hi, I know this blog is about the destructive and weak behavior of women in their relationships with men. However, I was wondering if you can think of any comparable examples of behavior exhibited by men in their relationships with women. I know that’s not the focus of this blog, though.
There are several problems with the framing of her question. The first is that the post she was responding to was in fact an explanation of how men are failing women, and part of an extended series I’ve done on the topic. Men are failing women terribly by refusing to speak the truth about bad behavior of women. Calling out bad behavior of women is difficult and feels uncomfortable, and men are taking the easy feel good path. This hurts the very women men are refusing to speak the truth about.
But there is another way that men’s failure here is hurting women. Not all women are protective of a push to debauch the culture. While all women (just like all men) face temptation to sin, some women are actively trying to push for better standards of behavior by women. In a properly functioning society, much if not most of the day to day policing of female behavior is done by women, and this is a biblical role.
3 Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. 4 Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, 5 to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.
The woman in the previous post* was not only unrepentant in her adultery and terrible treatment of her cancer stricken husband, she was announcing her intent to fight against the sanctity of marriage:
When my outing happens, I suppose I might as well take a stand for those who are trapped in bad marriages. Many of us are doing the best we can, trying in our own imperfect way to cope with alienation, lovelessness, and physical deprivation.
Some women read the quote above in the original post and didn’t feel a desire to protect the woman who wanted to destroy marriage; they felt under attack by her. For these women, my post wasn’t an assault, but protection. What I would ask the women reading is to go back and consider your own reaction to my last post. Which way did my criticism of the unrepentant adulteress strike you? Did you feel that I was attacking you or being unkind when I called the unrepentant adulteress out, or did you perceive the adulteress as the threat and my calling her out as protection? Which side did you identify with? Likewise, I would ask the men reading how they perceived my criticism of the unrepentant adulteress. Did you perceive it as an attack against women, or protection of women?
*The woman may be real, or a literary device the blogger is using to try to debauch the culture. Either way, the purpose of “her” words are the same.
It often strikes me that women who defend the notion of female imperative free from worldly consequence do so with the same sort of attitude that parents who call for universal t-ball trophies. The short-sighted focus on individual pain misses the point of what causes the pain and the effect the “easy” solution has on others. Just as you’re not really doing Johnny any favors by handing him the same generic trophy everybody else got (or applying any discipline at all), you’re not helping women by letting them off the hook for their moral failures.
On a related note, my monthly copy of Relevant Magazine arrived (I consider forcing myself to read it a form of Penance). An article on divorce by Ruth Moon (not yet available on the site) featured in the rear.
Italics mine
Removing the feminine lace to see the true form under the words, she wanted to corroborate and to dictate. She wished to aid wives in their effort to avoid the natural and correct experience of shame and isolation that comes from breaking the high oath of matrimony and she wanted to further hamstring churches in their attempts to uphold the Biblical view of marriage.
*I forgot WP indents and italicizes for block quotes. The last sentence with the tags I wished to emphasize appears in block script
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“What I would ask the women reading is to go back and consider your own reaction to my last post”
I applaud the intention, but I think by inviting women to step back and consider the reason they reacted the way they did to a situation, you’re asking them to do something the overwhelming majority simply cannot do. They lack the emotional intelligence and self-analytical mindset.
“If I feel it, then it is real” is about as far as most of them ever get.
Likewise, I would ask the men reading how they perceived my criticism of the unrepentant adulteress. Did you perceive it as an attack against women, or protection of women?
Neither. I perceived it as a critique of a particular argument (or bundle of sentiments).
Carol Gilligan has her critics on methodological and substantive grounds (Joseph Adelson has said her work is so bad it’s hardly worth the trouble to refute), but I suspect she’s on to something when she says that men and women tend to approach moral reasoning differently (with exceptions on either side). Articulating principles and applying them (however well you argue the point) is atypical. Normative questions are adjudicated with reference to one’s set of palpable human relations and the degree of emotional comfort or discomfort one experiences within them while adhering to a particular judgment on a particular matter. One may acknowledge under pressure, an ethical principle, but it’s not one’s preference or default tendency to reason deductively in this way. One is never willingly impartial or disinterested. One is never free, in one’s own mind, of convention or the table talk of those around one.
You’ll have a minority of women who will look at whatshername’s kvetch-and-excuse festival and recognize it for what it is. You will have another bloc of women who will do that, but their articulation of principle is more brittle because it’s derived from the situation described being perfectly abstract to them and not present in their social circle. You will find a third category for whom their judgment will be stewed through what’s comfortable and convenient to them or those they care about. You will find a fourth crew who will react very negatively, because they’ve seen something analogous to it engaged in by a women they thought an irritant or rival. (e.g. the 1st wife or their sister-in-law).
Dalrock, while you are of course correct that men need to be reminded that they can correct women, I think it’s incorrect to think it isn’t happening at all.
Also – your point about a well functioning society is of course correct, but some context to the compromises we’ve made, particularly under pressure from the political right, to the social organizing hegemony of capitalist economics may turn out to be relevant, particularly the natural effect of rules of economics that place the community in the service of profit rather than vice versa, to atomize us from one another. In an already highly regulated economy it doesn’t help much either to have so-called libertarians pop up any time corrective regulation is discussed, to tell us that this regulation is anti-capitalist or socialist. The term “useful idiot” comes to mind.
Lastly, MGTOW can be understood as a form of collective male corrective on female behavior, and a natural and justifiable one, although most MGTOW don’t seem interested in applying its force to taking society back to traditional arrangements. Nevertheless – I know a case of a recent issue at a large company that directly relates the relative treatment of women versus men that is highly controversial with the rank and file even though executive staff is adamant that it is policy and will be executed. Large-scale argument and push back from the rank and file doesn’t suggest to me that men were being silent, but the bottom line is: when official discussion is over, their voices are deemed to not matter. They are told this is the way it is, move on.
There is a way of dealing with such intransigence, civilly – it is through strike and/or separation. But – we are atomized: if we separate from the compromised public body, we are left to our own, there is no counterpart, uncompromised community to which to turn and into which to invest our collective energies, returning us again to capitalism – and the compromises that have been made, and the specific terms of the compromise. Capitalism is an excellent economic system, when it is imposed in the service of the community and when its deleterious effects to the community are deemed less tolerable than the pitiably small sacrifices the wealthy are sometimes asked to endure so that the community continues to thrive.
Dalrock, you were protecting women.
“Did you perceive it as an attack against women, or protection of women?”
At the time, I saw it as neither. Rather, I thought you were merely pointing out her true motives, the irony of her heartlessness, and warning men to be wary of a woman’s victim complex. Now that you’ve framed it in terms of protection, it makes a lot more sense to me. A lot of men white knight for women because they think they are helping them. But in the long run, they are encouraging infidelity, divorce, loneliness, unhappiness, and emptiness in women. Women had happier, more fulfilling lives in patriarchal society. By pointing out that bending over backwards to excuse a woman’s destructive behaviors actually hurts them, it’s much easier to appeal to a man’s sense of duty. Sometimes I wondered if I was being selfish by holding my girlfriend to a high standard, but this helped remind me that it’s the right thing to do. And if I have ever have daughters, I should teach them to act in a way that would give them the best chance of finding a good husband and keeping their families happy and intact. Thanks Dalrock.
@Bluedog
That’s a hell of a good insight
Thanks rugby.
I am a woman and I wholeheartedly agree with your post regarding the adulterous woman. Most modern women want to behave badly and then avoid the natural consequences of their bad behavior. I speak from the humbled position of having had my marriage ended by my husband shortly after the birth of our twins. I feel shame, and rightly so. He may be the one that left, but I bear part of the blame for not keeping my husband happy enough to want to stay. The lack of respect for marriage vows in this culture has practically rendered the institution meaningless. And I feel shame and guilt at the failure of my marriage and I certainly don’t want or need anyone to tell me pretty lies to make me feel better and reframe my failure into some sort of grotesque triumph. Women, as a class, are exempt from criticism and correction in our culture…and honestly I find men’s reluctance to speak out against the harmful, destructive behaviors of women to be terrifying. Your blog is a breath of fresh air and I applaud your courage to say what needs to be said, despite its unpopularity.
The very fact that this woman’s first reaction was to attempt to derail and immediately blame shift (BUT WHUT ABOUT TEH MINZ!?) is pretty telling.
Upholding the sanctity of marriage is protecting women. It’s astonishing that people believe otherwise in the face of feminism’s disastrous outcomes.
As far as “feelings” go, I feel absolutely no sympathy for the hypocritical adulteress who is running around on her sick husband. Maybe her marriage wouldn’t have become so “loveless” if she’d focused on her husband rather than herself–in other words, honored her marriage vows. Poor man.
Yeah, it’s like the demand that Rush Limbaugh take time out of his radio program to balance his opinions with equal time for the other side. As Rush said, “I don’t need to be balanced by equal time, I am the equal time.”
“Upholding the sanctity of marriage is protecting women. It’s astonishing that people believe otherwise in the face of feminism’s disastrous outcomes. ”
It protects a great many women in specified circumstances. Women whose dispositions lead them to unilateral divorce on demand are not protected. The thing is, in a well ordered society, that disposition is discouraged.
@Dalrock………..Nice Post!
“”Men are failing women terribly by refusing to speak the truth about bad behavior of women.””
Your going to catch hell with this post!……..The men who call out the wimminz bad behavior might end up in jail……I won’t be one of them….L*
For as long as I’ve been writing in the ‘sphere the first retort of and uninitiated woman is always “ooh ooh men do it too” or some appeal to compare the behaviors of men with those of the women being assessed.
The idea of course is to misdirect the focus from women’s to men’s similar behavior, or at least perceived as similar. Men are already easier to vilify because of the normalized idea that men are in the position of power (apex fallacy) and women’s ‘like’ behavior is merely an expected reaction to that perceived power imbalance; and therefore an extension of blame is passed to men for it.
Once the concession of male fallibility is made, any accountability for the behavior of women becomes lessened or transferred to men. All of this is presumed under a default condition of equalism – what’s good for the goose,…– so therefore, what serves men’s imperatives should also serve women’s and vice versa. If “men do it too”, and in a christo-Red Pill sense women can fall back on ‘removing the plank from men’s eyes before worrying about the mote in their own’ well this basically amounts to STFU, you’re hurting women.
Dalrock,
This may be presumptious of me…afterall, I don’t face (yet) the health issues the woman in the last post faced. ‘There but for the Grace of God go I’ comes to mind here…
But nonetheless, I must say that one of the reasons I participate in your blog is that elements of uncertainty are best dealt with when one has the opportunity to thrash out issues ‘in advance’ so to speak. This is one reason I find your posts insightful and thought-provoking.
Having said that, what can be said of the woman’s behaviour?
In many ways, I suppose it doesn’t matter what I or someone (presumably) younger than her thinks. I am not (yet) in a ‘place’ to be of any use to her, where corrective advice is concerned. But of course, you being a man means you are in a different ‘place’ in this regard, compared to me.
Thinking aloud, I believe that we Catholic ladies have a unique role model to follow. As such, we don’t really need an Earthly one, but of course we are grateful whenever we can have a ‘flesh and blood’ person give advice when needed.
When I was unmarried, I looked to Our Lady as the embodiment of the perfect woman. I especially loved (and was focussed on) her ‘maidenness’, as indeed it pertained to me.
Now that I am married, I am shifting my focus to her wifely status, and I know she must have been a wonderful wife to St. Joseph.
As my husband and I look forward to parenthood, I am acutely tuned to Our Lady as ‘Mother’, and nowadays, I notice more the stautes of her carrying Baby Jesus than ever before. 🙂
I guess one day, I will shift again my focus towards Our Lady as ‘Matron’ or ‘Matriarch’ when I am at that age…in which case I will hopefully be a good mentor to those younger than me, when I have acquired good knowledge myself.
I KNOW that with St. Joseph being so much older than Our Lady, he most likely fell ill and died much earlier than her (well, she didn’t die of course – she was ‘assumed’ into heaven in what we Catholics celebrate every 15th August as ‘Maria Himmelfahrt’ – a national holiday in many Catholic countries…).
In his final days, I defintely know that she wouldn’t have been thinking of having it off with another man, that’s for sure.
So if I ask myself, in this and every situation that I am faced with, ‘what would Our Lady do?’ I have the answer instantaneously in every case.
Whether I DO what I think Our Lady would do is a different matter of course. But at least I would know what SHE would do. Which is good enough for me.
To this end, the woman did not do what we all believe Our Lady would do, which is to give selfless support to her ill/dying husband (to whom she had made vows). So it is fair to say she did not do what we believe is right.
She of course is not privy to this conversation of ours (if indeed she does exist). But to any others who are, it would be good to dissuade them from doing what is wrong.
So yes, it is protection for them/us/women.
(Not that they/us need to hear this from a third party, of course. We all have an innate morality compass, irrespective of our background and era).
In response to Rachel’s question, I am sure she knows that the same rules pertain to men when it comes to marital support for a dying spouse. As indeed many commenters pointed out that when a male politician abandoned his sick/dying spouse, he was reprimanded for doing so.
I cannot think of an example of a Biblical man who is known for caring for a sick wife, but I am sure there must be one…
St. Joseph himself is known for having been a great husband, so if it was the case that Our Lady was seriously sick I can almost certainly deduce that he would have been an excellent carer for her.
Eve said: “The lack of respect for marriage vows in this culture has practically rendered the institution meaningless.”
Yep. (See, eg, homosexuals’ attitudes toward monogamy in marriage.)
I for one am tired of subsidizing 21st century marriage. End “married filing jointly”!
I perceived your criticism of the adulteress as a defense of marriage. My wife saw it as an attack on women. She says that she is considering the post in the overall context of your blog and that there were very few women on AM but tens of millions of men.
takimag.com/article/the_war_on_women_is_real-gavin_mcinnes
I perceived your criticism of the adulteress as a defense of marriage. My wife saw it as an attack on women.
For the sake of those whom agree with your wife I say:
We need more attacks like these on women. May the “war on women” commence and be victorious. The sooner the vanquished females return to their kitchens and resume sammich making the better for all concerned. They’ll be better off and so will we.
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Speaking of everyone’s favorite “insanity” I was amused:
http://therationalmale.com/2015/08/28/the-best-of-the-rational-male-year-4/#comment-116210
Going off of what Rollo Tomasi said, her question is rather ironic. She asked the question because examples of men doing this aren’t easy to find. If it were common she wouldn’t have to make inquiries. She would have posted the link to the story.
But let us suppose that a man did in fact write a piece like this. How would it be received? One can only speculate, but if bets were to be made, my money would be on an outcome in which the author would be absolutely lambasted and castigated by both men and women for his appalling selfishness. “What kind of man cheats on his dying wife, resents her for not understanding his desire to cheat, and looks for pity when he might get caught?” would be the most common response. Any man who defended him or showed him any kind of sympathy would be looked upon with suspicious as a possible adulterer.
The truth is no man in his right mind would write or publish such an article because even if his dying wife had been difficult throughout the marriage and/or denied him sex, societal expectations dictate that he honor his vows and remain faithful “in sickness and in health.” I’m obviously not defending any man who engaged in this behavior, merely highlighting the difference in people’s reactions to the same scenario when the genders are switched.
The most problematic question posed at this site has come from another woman, Dragonfly.
” …from a man’s point of view, what would that 22 year old woman need to be like to snag a man out of her league? Please list physical/relational/educational/vocational I think some of the women here (in denial) need to see it spelled out from a man.”
I didn’t see if anyone addressed the utter ridiculousness and entitlement attitude of this question. Why are these women hellbent on “snagging a man out of their league” instead of a man IN their own league?
Not all women are protective of a push to debauch the culture. While all women (just like all men) face temptation to sin, some women are actively trying to push for better standards of behavior by women. In a properly functioning society, much if not most of the day to day policing of female behavior is done by women, and this is a biblical role. “3 Likewise, teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live, not to be slanderers or addicted to much wine, but to teach what is good. 4 Then they can urge the younger women to love their husbands and children, 5 to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God.
Women should be protective, but policing each other is not what that verse is talking about, Dalrock. It says to teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live. What does reverent mean? Respectful, to regard as having value, to treat respectfully both in manner and in speech. I’ve seen women who thought they were “policing” go about it with mocking and derision, allowing their own egos and vanity to get involved and thereby destroying the power of the discernment (judgment).
You don’t let your ego get into your posts.
When you criticize a woman’s behavior, it doesn’t sound the same as mocking, deriding, or running them into the ground. There is a huge difference, and it can easily be spot, as one comes from great pride & enjoyment in elevating oneself over another, and the other comes from humility (because it’s absent of ego) paired with strength of goodness and righteousness in calling out what is wrong and destructive. You do the latter. Many baby Christians do the former, treating the subject without respect, living their life by judging from their ego, and therefore, they’re completely unaffective as culture changers. No listens to them, especially people who may change, because they can clearly see where they’re coming from – a place with an impure heart.
The woman in the previous post* was not only unrepentant in her adultery and terrible treatment of her cancer stricken husband, she was announcing her intent to fight against the sanctity of marriage:
When my outing happens, I suppose I might as well take a stand for those who are trapped in bad marriages. Many of us are doing the best we can, trying in our own imperfect way to cope with alienation, lovelessness, and physical deprivation.
Some women read the quote above in the original post and didn’t feel a desire to protect the woman who wanted to destroy marriage; they felt under attack by her. For these women, my post wasn’t an assault, but protection. What I would ask the women reading is to go back and consider your own reaction to my last post. Which way did my criticism of the unrepentant adulteress strike you? Did you feel that I was attacking you or being unkind when I called the unrepentant adulteress out, or did you perceive the adulteress as the threat and my calling her out as protection? Which side did you identify with?
To me, it’s not a matter of “wanting to protect her,” because what you were doing wasn’t wrong towards her. You aren’t some psycho, Dalrock. You separate your ego from your posts. You weren’t mocking or deriding her, you weren’t calling her names like I’ve seen some men do, you weren’t abusive towards her in anyway. You are more mature than that spiritually. You were simply pointing out the Truth as you see it in her actions. I try to do that a lot in my posts regarding how women mistreat their husbands, because its extremely useful for those looking on and learning from what I point out. I don’t do so in a sinful way. I don’t get pleasure from mocking or deriding people, that would be sadistic and sinful and would pollute the Truth in my message.
What she was and is doing is horrible, her wanting to continue to defend her actions against her marriage, husband and children are extremely offensive because it is so wrong. Calling all of that out is not wrong. Mocking her… degrading her… saying she deserves horrible things, calling her horrible names, yes, those would be morally wrong. You don’t do any of this.
I personally didn’t feel under attack by her, only offended at her vast mistreatment of her husband, marriage, and children. But I did feel under attack by the woman who showed up who had several posts on marriage and family being “not that important.” She was attacking the very foundation of what makes up a biblical society (that of course, we’re losing), trying to pass it off under her self-pitying singleness as being biblical. That was more of a personal attack because I am one of the married couples in a church with children, trying to raise them right, and gaining astronomically from the teachings we hear at church (our church is so wonderful in its teachings on family and children). Singles honestly need to either be busy in the dating market, or busy in God’s kingdom. Not sitting at home feeling sorry for themselves. As per Paul, the only great use for singleness, is when they are going out and ministering. Not staying at home being self-pitying sitting ducks for the sin of envy or bitterness.
Dragonfly I address a question of yours above the post you just posted. Can you please explain where the hell women get off targetting men out of their league? Pretty damn pompous if you ask me. Bring it down a notch!
My husband was definitely “out of my league” when I met him. He was extremely handsome, older than me, more athletic, way more outgoing way more friends than me on campus (he was actually an orientation leader for my age while I was just a freshman coming in to college… he wasn’t supposed to have a relationship with the freshmen coming in lol). Catching someone “out of your league” for a girl is exciting and thrilling and makes for a good bond (the gamers usually say anyway that there should be 1 or 2 points difference in your SMV, the MALE’S always being HIGHER because of the increased attraction and bonding it creates). I believe that every woman (almost every woman?) can do it. It’s very easy to raise your SMV, and that’s what TFH’s answer showed really well! A lot of it is simple easy to do beauty care and attitude of sweetness, kindness, gentleness, and faithfulness.
Most girls have NO idea how to make themselves more beautiful growing up… I was an extremely late bloomer lol. Seriously… I had no clue what I was doing, and even though my mom taught me a lot of head knowledge about men, she let me “mature” into beauty on my own… something I will probably do differently lol if I ever have a daughter. I think girls/young women, need more help in the beauty department, I was quite frankly, ugly 😦 and even bullied a little in middle school. Growing into my own beauty (raising my SMV) was a powerful and wonderful journey that opened many doors that would have stayed closed.
To underestimate that change in a woman’s SMV in order to attract more higher value mates, is ridiculous.
Not sure if you’ve seen this yet, but the Pope is now supporting the authors of a gay children’s book: http://www.newsmax.com/Newsfront/pope-francis-gay-childrens-book-praise/2015/08/28/id/672391/
Rollo, as with Dalrock I’m going to take you on the meta, the intent of which is that while I agree with enough of what is said here, I think we are off base so far on the substrate that when it gets to “what to do about it”, we either get no where, or we get it all wrong.
Much of your critique and assessment, here in post August 29, 2015 at 4:01 pm, and on your site, operates by succinctly articulating the tribal behaviors women engage in, as well as the tribal cognitive dialectics women are prone to embrace; but what isn’t in your assessment is that especially in the latter case of the dialectics these are embraced in lieu of many things:
1) in lieu of training in critical thinking
2) in lieu of the development of a habit of critical thinking (i.e.: one college course in logic isn’t going to do it … notice for example the difference between every college grad with one course in logic, and all college grads with 12-15 credit hours in statistics and research methods)
3) in lieu of training and a habit of fair minded thinking (such as one finds across several traditions, to name a few: English common law, the Jesuit tradition, and the Talmudic tradition)
4) in lieu of all of the above (which in times past have often been limited in distribution to the upper classes anyway), then in lieu also of significant social proscription of adopting these behaviors or embracing those critiques.
In other words on #4: women always did this stuff – we just had cultural and social mechanisms to shut it down.
So – while your assessment and articulation of tribal behaviors and dialectics and narratives is superb – really it is top notch and you deserve a lot of credit for that – I’m going to part with you one a few points of nuance.
1) I think there is an 80/20 or 90/10 rule going on, where the tribalism you are getting at is something you are attributing nearly universally to “female” nature, but in fact it is a tribal, human nature … yes – sometimes it is uniquely female, though few there are some differences to account on the 23rd gene pair, but expect manospherians to stop listening when we really get scientific separating wheat from chaff on that point
2) The reason for the ascent of female tribalism is less (by a factor of 4 or 5) a matter of female nature per se, as it is the collapse of social mechanisms that empowered female socialization to the common tribe of males and female
3) Another way of saying #2 is: we used to take active, collective steps to align the interests of men and women as far as social standing and advancement – we no longer do; it is considered a right of employers to take steps to align their employees interests with the corporate interest and to demand separation when that is impossible … that idea of alignment of interest towards some end of the common good, is largely lost on modern conversation
4) The collapse of those social mechanisms left a vacuum, into which the next common denominator was “gender”, so the tribal firmware picked up there where socialization dropped the ball, nearly all of your analysis falls into this space where unchecked – human and not specifically female – tribal defaults are ascendant – but I think we are dangerously mis-attributing the tribal behaviors here to call them “female nature”, they are: human, tribal nature
5) You are generally correct on the firmware/software analogy but not necessarily right on in where you take it. The corrective isn’t game even if game is an important insight into what heterosexual women find to be sexually attractive. Game is like aspirin for cancer. If a community of humans composed of both free men, and free women, is the end we want – we need to restore the cultural software to bond women to the tribe (the latter is only “so to speak” – I’d prefer community and humanism over tribalism – but tribe is the firmware we have so I use the word).
We have to ask ourselves if the end outcome we want is a community of both free men and women. If it is, then we need to find a way to restore bonding of both men and women to the tribe and, so to speak: use the software of culture to re-channel the tribal firmware into alignment of interests to the community/tribe, rather than the next lowest common denominator: gender. Besides bonding to the tribe – there needs to be a ethic of the tribe, i.e.: a return to all the “in lieu ofs” listed above: critical thinking, training therein, an almost religious instruction in ancient traditions of fair-mindedness, etc – all brought to bear with a mind to the good of the community, and not the primacy of individual wealth accumulation, or in other words: cherishing wealth accumulation but subordinating it to community thriving. That is how tribes, communities, work and thrive, so far in history, at least.
Another alternative would be to take aim at the firmware – that, I think, is either far off, or dangerous, or both.
@ Dragonfly
~ Optimize her physical appearance to be beautiful and feminine. Workout. Eat well. Take care of skin, hair, hair length, etc. Wear feminine clothing such as dresses and skirts. Keep the makeup light and fresh. Surprise: men like young, beautiful, feminine women.
Overall: develop a personality that respects, admires, and encourages all men well and is easy going and submits to authority with a good attitude.
Beyond that it varies depending on the man. In this case, it’s best to say become the ideal spouse of your ideal spouse. If a girl wants a masculine man that takes care of you and all the money and job work, then it would be best to cultivate your personality and skillset toward homemaking, cooking, taking care of children, and all of those things. He leads then learn how to follow well.
Is this a trick question? So, to summarize, the question is whom do I side with from the choices below?
A. The wife who likes to screw other women’s husbands,
OR
B. the man who says, “It is wrong for you to screw other women’s husbands.”
Garsh, I really have to think hard about this one. OK, I thought about it. I’m on the B team here.
I don’t see any problem with saying that the woman is committing adultery and therefore is sinning. By her own admission, she is unrepentant. What are we supposed to do, applaud for her and bake her a Congratulations on your adulterous affair! cake?
I guess the one thing I would say to you, Dalrock, is this: is your goal to call women out or call them to repentance? I think there is a difference there and it might be an important one.
I know my last comment was ridiculously long. Executive summary is:
1) Human cognitive firmware is tribal – that is universal of men and women
2) Gender was never “designed”, so to speak, to be a tribe, it’s just a reproductive function
3) Culture is an advanced form of the social software that bonds people to this tribe, and not that tribe, what makes culture advanced is that it needn’t have a real enemy tribe to work – a fake enemy will do, or an enemy “in opposition” will do too, i.e.: Yankees/Red Sox, Suns/Wildcats, in Rome: Colosseum Greens and Blues (in other words on the latter: cultures have been manipulating tribe to the ends of the super-culture for a long, long time)
4) Tribal bonding in culture is in a state of collapse. Free market philistines mis-interpret this as “creative destruction” and reallocation of resources to more efficient forms … I guess let’s hope they’re right but I doubt it
5) Since we aren’t bonding anyone to the tribe anymore – people are completely naturally seeking other collectives to which to bond themselves, it should come as no surprise that when such seeking people are female, the “female” tribe is a favored “go-to”. The outcome of that will be an aggravation of sexual economy, where a tribe and culture would have regulated the economy to the collective greater interest, subordinating both genders as reproductive functions … now, with the tribe gone, the reproductive function is ascendant as the tribal form.
You can analyze the reproductive function then to the nth degree, but you won’t change anything unless you return to some form of primacy of community and bonding/aligning of all people/participants to the interests of the community.
@bluedog
You are entirely discounting the fact the role that leftism or progressivism played in the atomization of people especially cultural marxism like feminism and the like and their goals and success in breaking down families. As well as west european marital patterns that weakens kinship ties:
http://evoandproud.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/the-origins-of-northwest-european-guilt.html
Repeating the lie that capitalism is the root of all kinds of evil including the breakdown of family.
Oh and the prioritization of material over spiritual and community values even in a pre-capitalist society always occur when the society is in a downswing and declining like ancient rome and the like.
So blaming capitalism is confusing correlation with causation.
You didn’t answer the question, though?
More information on the atomization of the extended family in the medieval era:
https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2011/04/04/whatever-happened-to-european-tribes/
I suppose I might as well take a stand for those who are trapped in bad marriages.
Trying to deflect and reframe her situation into a more noble light, as if what she did was actually helping and supportive of those who are in what she considers to be quote terrible unquote situations. Attempting to deny being a selfish adulteress who got caught in the act.
Keep calling them out. Keep it real.
@infowarrior,
I’m not discounting it at all. I just think that the leftists could never have succeeded if the upper classes, who have no interest in capitalism as an ideological matter, were not so determined to advance their interests that they succeeded at creating three generations of useful idiots who think they know Adam Smith was “right” and “right” about what they are told to believe because they know the words “invisible hand” and from time to time a few of them read a book by Ayn Rand or Hazlitt, or they heard of someone who heard of someone who said something about “Austrian economics”.
Re-read what I wrote if you mean to reply again. I didn’t “[repeat] the lie that capitalism is the root of all kinds of evil including the breakdown of the family” nor did I make a correlation/causality error.
What I said was effective, thriving communities (and societies and nations and empires) subordinate capitalism to the community, and that our error isn’t in being capitalist, it is in reversing this order of primacy.
@bluedog
Oh ok. My mistake.
“I would ask the men reading how they perceived my criticism of the unrepentant adulteress. Did you perceive it as an attack against women, or protection of women?”
I perceived it as an attack on the behavior of adultery which happened to be of an adulterous. a few men but almost know women at all would have an ounce of sympathy for a man committing adultery under these circumstances. Women who can’t se that need to see through their own blatant sexism.
Yes, this kind of correction is good for women, families, children, society but lets not forget hapless men who have the misfortune to be married to selfish, manipulative, horrible shrews. These men are the truly oppressed and downtrodden in our culture and they need all the help they can be given. It’s not just feminist in power or heroic their white knight, phony traditionalists who oppress these men or the women who use the laws to unfair advantage. Average chumps who are entrenched in their blue pill brainwashing will watch their blue pill brothers thrown under the bus and not flinch.
(*No* women at all would have an ounce of sympathy at all for a man committing adultery…)
@bluedog
Well here is Austrian economics if you are interested:
mises.org
What are we supposed to do, applaud for her and bake her a Congratulations on your adulterous affair! cake?
PLEASE, don’t give them any ideas.
@infowarrior, Totally cool. Thanks for taking the minute to get the spirit of what I was saying. You would only be like the 50-100th to point me to mises.org, BTW. 😉
@Sunshine
She is dumping toxic waste into our culture, and explaining her plans to do more of this, and you want to know if my motives for challenging her are pure. Do I want to stop her from dumping toxic waste into the culture, or do I want her to repent?
Yes.
But more importantly, my primary goal is to address the problem of men (especially Christian men) coddling bad behavior in women and pretending this is noble. To do this I have to lead by example, and doing so provides plenty of examples of why men are so hesitant to do this (and why coddling women isn’t really the heroic choice so many want to claim). This of course only helps my point, whether it is InsanityBytes and a white knight squealing in defense of an unrepentant child murderer, or your passive aggressive/snarky response above.
We live in a world where men not failing in this way, or even trying not to fail in this way, is extremely difficult to imagine. Our leaders make careers out of failing in this way. Fighting this is hard, but it isn’t impossible, and it isn’t something we have the option of overlooking. So I will keep calling this out, and a never ending flow of volunteers will continue to show up proving my point.
@Geary
Yes, in fact I did. She wanted to know if I took men to task for their destructive and weak behavior in their relationship with women. I pointed out that this was the topic of the post; men are harming women by being weak in their relationship with women.
Infowarrior, re: European tribes – I tend to be skeptical that the early medieval and pre-national European tribes are good models for preparing us for where we need to go, though I do think the referenced history you connected to is fascinating and almost can’t suck up enough of it.
I haven’t systematized it in my own thinking but there are some filters I work towards, i.e.: what has worked?, what didn’t work?, what isn’t working?
Tribe is a repository for culture and culture besides being traditions and rules of collective obligation, is also a depository of historical and pre-historical lessons that a people can draw upon to be resilient and survive the personal and collective challenges life throws at us. With that in mind, I look at examples and ask which cultures have proven particularly resilient and which haven’t.
The trouble with the state of tribes in early medieval Europe is that we can make a fairly strong generalization that none was possessed of the depth and/or structure necessary to retain sufficient resiliency to make it to the modern era intact.
I think we do better if we go back further to the Indo-European split – doing that we collect a lot of superb examples along the way that we can adopt. A great deal of hope can be drawn, I think, from a restoration of Greek and Latin classical traditions – there is a reason we still know about Epictetus and Seneca, but we’re hard pressed to recall where we’ve been taught any good Edetani mythos . Good too would be revitalization of English and northern European common law traditions – and on those, I think part of the problem is calling them “law”. That makes people think that it’s only for lawyers. These are traditions of culture, thought, fairness, out of which law comes. The culture is for the masses, because the masses ascent to the culture, they submitted to the law.
In all of these it would be good to see schools of tradition built that are tied to the culture, not to academies/universities, and then argument/debate/cross-pollination. These are all examples of things that survived and proved to be rich sources of tradition that have kept the cultures that kept them. Modern Germany has a lot to thank the Latins and Hellenics for. Tribe is ethos, humanity is logos, I prefer logos – but along the civilizing lines of the effects of the Roman Colosseum where Romans could faction Green or Blue, but all still Roman, a “re-tribalization” that restores schools of thought and traditions and bonding of people to those traditions and elevation of the traditions over the individual as a condition of ascent to the membership – all of these pave the way towards a re-foundation in community and a creation of conditions outside the limits of capitalism where everyone participating can still thrive.
I wasn’t meaning it to be snarky at all. I meant it as more of a way of laughing incredulously that we’ve gotten to the point in our culture where it would even be considered poor form to rebuke a woman who is unrepentantly cheating on her ill husband. It wasn’t a criticism – I meant it as support for your post – but I think I must have made it sound the opposite of what I meant or something. I’m sorry.
I only want you to consider that, while your post was certainly fine, it could be even better if it points the lost toward repentance, that’s all.
“What I would ask the women reading is to go back and consider your own reaction to my last post. Which way did my criticism of the unrepentant adulteress strike you? Did you feel that I was attacking you or being unkind when I called the unrepentant adulteress out, or did you perceive the adulteress as the threat and my calling her out as protection?”
Neither. She is wrong and utterly distasteful, but I didn’t *feel* protected by your criticism of her–intellectually, sure, I can see how you make that argument, but I was mostly just *feeling* irritation toward her. (The story merits something stronger than irritation, but after seeing enough news concerning awful people in a given day, it’s hard to muster up much emotion about it. Plus, honestly, I have to set aside most of my *feelings* when I click into the Manosphere, because otherwise I wouldn’t get anything out of the posts.)
Dragonfly,
“Women should be protective, but policing each other is not what that verse is talking about, Dalrock. It says to teach the older women to be reverent in the way they live. What does reverent mean? Respectful, to regard as having value, to treat respectfully both in manner and in speech. I’ve seen women who thought they were “policing” go about it with mocking and derision, allowing their own egos and vanity to get involved and thereby destroying the power of the discernment (judgment). “
Actually, correction is a huge part of older women teaching the younger women. The fact that Paul saw fit to say that the younger women would need to be taught “to love their husbands and children, 5 to be self-controlled and pure, to be busy at home, to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands, so that no one will malign the word of God” shows us that these things don’t come naturally to women – they will need instruction and correction in them.
I know sometimes it hurts to be corrected, especially if that correction seems to be coming from someone who doesn’t have it all together themselves. You might feel like to accept such correction would be to defer to that person. But I think the wiser course of action, is to carefully consider all correction, no matter who it comes from. God can (and often does) use weak people to speak his words.
“Whoever heeds discipline shows the way to life, but whoever ignores correction leads others astray.” Proverbs 10:17
@The Question
But let us suppose that a man did in fact write a piece like this. How would it be received?
One can only speculate, but if bets were to be made, my money would be on an outcome in which the author would be absolutely lambasted and castigated by both men and women for his appalling selfishness.
“What kind of man cheats on his dying wife, resents her for not understanding his desire to cheat, and looks for pity when he might get caught?” would be the most common response.
Any man who defended him or showed him any kind of sympathy would be looked upon with suspicious as a possible adulterer.
The truth is no man in his right mind would write or publish such an article because even if his dying wife had been difficult throughout the marriage and/or denied him sex, societal expectations dictate that he honor his vows and remain faithful “in sickness and in health.”
But we *did* see this play out in real life, in spectacular fashion, with the Rise and Fall of John Edwards.
http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/john-edwards-mistress-breakdown-americas-sensational-scandals/story?id=20854336
http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/john-edwards-daughter-reveals-confessed-affair-cancer-stricken-wife-nearby-article-1.1835650
@ DT,
John Edwards… and Newt Gingrich. In fact, the author of the very article that sought to deflect criticism of the adulteress (on the grounds that nobody should ever criticize what happens in a marriage because one cannot have perfect knowledge of the circumstances) HIMSELF severely criticized Newt Gingrich for doing essentially the same thing when his wife had cancer, despite his own imperfect knowledge of the Gingrich marriage.
That’s why Rachel’s comment was so silly: examples of men being slammed for behaviors that women get away with are everywhere. One would have to have spent one’s entire life in a cave to miss all the times that men get eviscerated for being selfish to the detriment of others… and equally out-of-touch to miss the instances of women’s similar failures being excused (including – ironically – by “Equity Feminists”). And here we prove, once again, that we denizens of the manosphere are more honest than feminists are, since we condemn the behaviors of Newt the conservative man, and Edwards the liberal man, and the woman in the article.
I assume that Rachel has not spent her entire life in a cave, so the next question is, “How does she (and many others like her) not see that? The only answer I can envision is that everyone subconsciously assumes that women are naturally weaker than men are. Gee… I wonder why that is?
@Rollo: Did you just invent the phrase: “In a Christo-Red Pill Sense.”
@Spacetraveler: “‘what would Our Lady do?’”
Indeed the WWWJD meme is useful but how much more so her example in light of modern yougogirl conventions.
@Mickey: “Can you please explain where the hell women get off targetting men out of their league?”
The goal is reasonable and ubiquitous and the question was valuable, comprehensive and succinct. Your criticism of @Dragonfly is none of those.
@Lyn87: ” One would have to have spent one’s entire life in a cave to miss all the times that men get eviscerated for being selfish to the detriment of others… and equally out-of-touch to miss the instances of women’s similar failures being excused”
Welcome back but that is the whole meaning of the Matrix analogy and where they have been is far, far worse than a cave. In Platos cave at least they could see shadows. In the Matrix you only see what they let you see- and the Matrix is everywhere. It is all around us.
@Lyn87
Several things have become clear over time:
1) Marriage is not what people think it is.
2) With no comprehensive sex education as a matter of public policy, people grow up with no idea of actual gender differences, and are therefore much more susceptible to accepting myth and error.
3) The only cure is Truth, as Truth is the only thing that makes free.
…..So unless and until we actively get Truth back into mainstream thought, things aren’t going to get any better.
On second thoughts, let me expand on this statement that I made in my last post, “One would have to have spent one’s entire life in a cave to miss all the times that men get eviscerated for being selfish to the detriment of others…”
The expectation that men are to be criticized for being selfish to the detriment of others actually extends to a generally-understood expectation that a man is unworthy if he does not proactively sacrifice himself for others, especially women and children, no matter the circumstances. Feminists are no less eager to offer such criticism as anyone else, proving that they don’t really believe in equality at all. I saw a video yesterday wherein a white-trash couple was fighting over something in a store parking lot (they’re both morbidly obese, so it probably involved cake), and three white knights jumped in and attacked the guy because the woman was (surprise!) getting the worst of it. Frankly, the white knights were lucky they didn’t get shot, but the guy was unarmed and would have been justified to shoot them in self defense if he had been. This is considered to be normal… a standing obligation on the part of random men to put themselves in harm’s way for women they don’t know, in situations where they have no knowledge of what led up to it (the woman had been hitting the man with a metal brace before the video recording began).
So the excusing of women’s behavior and the condemnation of men for the same behavior is part of a larger societal expectation that men are always to excuse and protect women no matter how much they are at fault. As Dalrock and others have noted, that does women no favors. Either grown women are full adults or they are not. If they are, then they need to shoulder the same responsibilities as men (they already have equal or superior rights). If they are unwilling or unable to shoulder equal responsibilities and expectations, then we need to rethink equal rights as well.
And since we all know that women are the weaker vessel (even “Equity Feminists” understand that intrinsically), a sane society would take that FACT into consideration when it comes to things like family law. But since grown women are still adults capable of moral judgement, it is not in anyone’s interest to shield them from moral judgement. As it is, we have the worst of both worlds: we give immense power to the sex least able to use it wisely, and then treat them as children when they screw up.
@ Deep Strength
“Overall: develop a personality that respects, admires, and encourages all men well and is easy going and submits to authority with a good attitude.”
I discussed this elsewhere. Its not an American cultural ethos to submit to authority. Yes, Americans do it. But their “American values” propaganda which they export all over the world tells us Americans value “rugged individualism” not “authority submission”. Unless of course you are a foreign power submitting to Uncle Sam. That they accept as okay.
@ Dragonfly
“Catching someone “out of your league” for a girl is exciting and thrilling ”
And you don’t see the problem in this for men? Figures.
Seriously Serving, I think you’re generally right! But what I said was that the verse Dalrock mentioned says that older women need to be taught to be reverent in the way they live. It says “then …” they can teach younger women.
You do not want older, bitter, ugly women with impure hearts trying to teach younger women. They first do need to have learned all the lessons of having the fruit of the spirit, otherwise, they simply are not fit to teach. The Bible has many many verses about teachers and mentors being judged harsher because of how they have so much more power to lead others astray. You have to be extremely careful who you let pour into you.
If they are not of the Spirit of God, and about His business, they have no business instructing you on how to live your life as a young wife or young mother. That is typically what the ugly-hearted feminists try to do – instruct young women who are in marriages or creating and raising families on how to do their job. Meanwhile the feminists themselves are old, crusty, bitter, man-hating women that have NO IDEA how to keep a marriage together, or even how to “endure” children (most hate raising children and call them great burdens).
Some older women in the church are not supposed to be there, quite frankly, the Bible talked A LOT about this too. They are busybodies, slanderers, gossips, distracting people from their actual work or ministry duties. They are older women that NEED TO BE INSTRUCTED OR TAUGHT like Paul said, to “be reverent.” It all goes back to what I was first referring to that I think you didn’t quite understand.
But I think the wiser course of action, is to carefully consider all correction, no matter who it comes from. God can (and often does) use weak people to speak his words.
“Whoever heeds discipline shows the way to life, but whoever ignores correction leads others astray.” Proverbs 10:17
Yes, in general, that is wise, http://girlwithadragonflytattoo.com/2014/04/07/good-advice-when-faced-with-criticism/
But again, you do not have to accept everyone into your life, a large part of becoming a mature Christian woman, is understanding who to outright reject because they’re immersed in Satanic strongholds and love doing evil. Why would you take instruction from an evil woman? You’re called (multiple times in Proverbs) to outright REJECT the woman who fits the description of the gossiper/slanderer, busybody woman who distracts people, and regularly choose to do the wrong thing (and will not listen to correction on this herself). You are called to reject such women… not give them a hold over your life to try to manipulate you passive aggressively.
http://girlwithadragonflytattoo.com/2015/07/09/sweet-christian-you-do-not-have-to-embrace-everyone/
Anyway, that’s why you generally need to surround yourself with real life mentors and friends who can lovingly call you out when you’re wrong on something… who you let into your private life. That verse was in general talking about mentorship, not mere correction – which is actually held to different biblical rules like going to them in private, then taking it a step up from there and up the chain of command in “rebuke” culminating in their church leadership deciding what to do.
That verse Dalrock quoted was about older women literally instructing by the way they lived the own lives (and being instructed THEMSELVES to live “reverently”), it was about the older ones teaching through their lives – through example and mentoring – the younger ones how to do all those things. That is a mentorship its talking about, not mere one time rebuking or speaking truth. Older bitter women are not fit to mentor. Older “Christian” women who love wallowing in gossip and slander are not fit to mentor.
It’s one thing to speak truth to someone, God even used an Ass to do that. But you don’t see an Ass being a leader, teaching other women how to be a wife, mother, godly woman.
Dragonfly,
The Hindu Chihuahua (THC) is nipping at your heels because of your assertion that, “Catching someone “out of your league” for a girl is exciting and thrilling ” I would consider that self-evident, but then again, I don’t come from a culture that worships cattle. So for the benefit of all and sundry, I will offer an explanation of what you’re talking about.
There are two terms to be learned: BATNA and ZOPA. BATNA is Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement and ZOPA is Zone Of Possible Agreement. In a negotiation both parties seek to get as much value as they can while giving up as little as they can. The BATNA is the “walk-away” price. For the buyer it is the maximum amount he’ll spend, and for the seller it’s the least amount he’ll accept. If they overlap, there is a ZOPA, which means that a deal is possible since the buyer is willing to spend at least as much as the seller is willing to take.
But BATNA represents the start of a range: if I’m the buyer and am willing to spend no more than $30,000 for a particular car, I will certainly will be willing to pay any amount less than that, too (all the way down to $0.) Likewise if I’m selling and willing to take no less than $25,000, I am certainly willing to take any amount more than that, up to an infinite amount. (In this case the ZOPA is large – between $25,000 and $30,000 – so a deal is likely.)
Now let’s transfer that principle to Marriage Market Value (MMV). Using whatever attributes a man seeks in a wife (beauty, faith, fertility, whatever), there is a certain floor that he will not go below. He will, however, gladly go higher, and wants to get as much MMV as he can. Likewise for women. The attributes she seeks will be different than his, but she also has a floor below which she will not go, although she’ll gladly go higher. In the marriage market both are buyers and sellers, and their currency is their own MMV. So every man will want the “prize” woman and every woman will want the “prize” man. In a rational market the man with the highest MMV will typically hold out for a woman with high MMV herself, and vice-versa. The end result is that most everyone who pairs off does so with someone with roughly similar MMV (a type of “assortative pairing”). That would be fine in a rational market, but feminism has rendered the market irrational. Most men understand their place in the male pecking order, but most women do not: with fat, tattooed, purple-haired, bitchy, women’s studies graduates thinking that they are entitled to tall, sensitive-yet-assertive body-builders… and the only reason they aren’t getting them is because those men haven’t sufficiently checked their “male privilege” and “society” tells them to select “skinny bitches” rather than “real women” like them. I wish I could say that was parody, but a few million “Tumblr” posts suggests that I’m probably understating the matter.
Back to BATNA and ZOPA. Everyone loves a bargain, and in the MMV, “getting a bargain” means landing someone who could have done better than you. As a buyer I’ll take the car for $10, of course, if the seller is foolish enough to sell it at that price. Likewise, as a seller I’ll take $1,000,000 for it if the buyer is foolish enough to bring the money. But for the most part such deals are rarely struck in the commercial world. Neither do they occur often in the marriage market, because there usually is no ZOPA when one person has far more MMV than the other.
“Catching someone “out of your league” for a girl is exciting and thrilling and makes for a good bond … I believe that every woman (almost every woman?) can do it. ”
This is mathematically impossible. Assuming an even distribution (from 1 to 10), only about 80% of women could accomplish 2 points, *if* there is perfect sorting. However, attractiveness does reasonably conform to a bell curve, so the likely maximum is probably closer to 30%-40% (It’s late and I’m not breaking out the z-curves for this) For most of the female population, there are fewer men 1-2 points higher than them than there would be women to match them up with. There would be a large proportion of average men/women that could not get partners under that scheme. For the average men, there wouldn’t be enough women below them and for the average women, not enough men above.
Besides, if almost every woman could do it, it wouldn’t be satisfying/thrilling/exciting, as it would become the new normal. Hypergamy would kick in and push for an even more extreme discrepancy. ‘As every girl has 1-2 points higher, I want 3!’
The bottom line is that a woman cannot hunt out of her league with a good chance of success (short of resorting to deception). If she could, then by definition she would not be out of her league. This is also a female egocentric thought process. Why should any man have to slum it for your happiness?
Why an Ass isn’t fit to be a Mentor:
Again on why it’s a mentorship illustrated here talking about older women FIRST receiving instruction on living reverent, peaceful lives, teaching what is good. This calls for that older woman to first and foremost, be humble, and adhere to correction first herself. Not very many older women are good at receiving instruction and capable of “being taught.” Not many older women in the church lived and are living a good model of a Christian life. You have to be picky which ones you let disciple you on things. I remember one time being in a Bible study with a group of women, and one of the MUCH older ones challenged my interpretation of biblical situation. She didn’t just challenge me, she lacked self-control and got angry, completely disregarded the verse I was trying to explain, and tried to “rebuke” me for interpreting it wrong. All the other women (some older as well), told her she was actually wrong, and rebuked her for behaving badly. They all agreed with my interpretation, it was not wrong. She was just a baby Christian even though she was my elder, and I brushed it off because it was obvious she had no idea what she was talking about. If I had let her brash rebuke get to me, that would have damaged my spiritual growth and caused me to maybe interpret that situation wrongly (like she did). We later found out from her that she had lived a very messed up life, was STILL living in various sins that she felt very little conviction for, and yet acted like she was some leader of the group because of her age. Everyone there understood her arrogance because it was obvious to see, as a result, we deliberately didn’t take to heart anything else she really had to say. Even if she had some little tidbit of correction or truth later on, she clearly was in no position to take me on as someone to teach how to live life. She was like a car careening out of control in her own spiritual life, how could she teach me how to drive properly then?
So…
Before a woman tries to disciple and mentor another younger women, she first is admonished to “be taught” herself. THEN, after being humble, after receiving good instruction, after learning how to live life peaceably and reverently, THEN she is to go on to teach younger women a list of qualities.
How can the older women be expected to teach what they themselves haven’t mastered?
How can an older woman teach a younger one how to “to love their husbands and children,” if that older woman herself hasn’t mastered how to love them well, or is divorced and never learned from her mistakes (or can’t admit she made mistakes)? How can you trust a woman that you don’t even SEE how she lives her life (again, the importance of actually knowing someone who is mentoring you, what they look like, how they serve the Kingdom, how they serve their church, how they actually live in real life)? How can you trust her correction or instruction on how to love your husband and children when you have no idea if she’s equipped with the right advice herself. If you can’t see the fruit she’s producing in her own family, if she’s not teaching from it for you to learn from… or worse, you actually see bad fruit coming from her?
How can an older woman teach a younger one how to “to be self-controlled and pure,” if she obviously displays lack of self-control? How can she teach “to be self-controlled” when she can’t even control her own emotions or ego, and instead, allow her ego and emotions to control her? Or if she is full of impurity of the heart (envy, arrogance, jealousy, passive aggression, hatred, animosity, angst, slander, gossip). You don’t want someone like that trying to teach someone younger how to be “pure and self-controlled.” It just don’t work.
How can she teach her “to be busy at home,” if she herself is a busy-body and slanderer… loving gossip more than truth? If she is never “home” and “minding her own business” like the Bible instructs, and instead is going out to seek drama for herself in places she knows she can stir up some? If she’s obviously never at peace in her own mind, how can she teach a younger one what peace even is?
How can an older woman teach a younger one “to be kind, and to be subject to their husbands,” if she has displayed that she herself, is not kind, but enjoys being cruel? How can you know if she is actually subject to her husband or if she treats him horribly if you don’t even know their relationship, if you don’t see her ever talk about him, their experiences, etc.?
This is why you need to know your mentor or the older women who try to teach you, instruct you. They may rarely get something right (like the Ass being used once to speak truth), but they aren’t ready to mentor or instruct you well like they should be.
And that is a major character flaw, because at that age, they have no excuse
Why are there so many more guys than girls at catholic youth events?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=976008
It’s just getting harder.
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=976005
Dalrock,
I find your question very thought provoking. Because I didn’t think about your motive for posting, or about your position really at all, and that reveals a blind spot and a (rather embarrassing) lack of perspective. I reacted to the story, not to the storyteller, at least not within my perception of my reaction. I felt terribly sad for the husband, and depressed that a wife and mother would hold her views and feel her feelings and choose her actions, and just tired, thinking about the hypocrisy, secrecy, lies, deceptions, betrayals. I didn’t consider why you were posting, and I failed to place it in the larger context of your blog, and of your overall mission and messages. Which shows me that I’m not learning nearly as much as I could from your blog, which disappoints me in myself. Thank you for explaining, and for providing this greater level of insight.
Infowarrior….
That blog post that you cited was more speculation than information.
It took just one aspect of Christianity’s influence – the ban on consanguineous marriage – and totally ignored other doctrines, particularly that which ascribes common faith (common core values ) as being far more important than common blood.
Tribalism is based on the natural inclination to associate with those who are more like us than otherwise, whether in values, beliefs, geography, appearance or economic interest. Christianity asserted that Jew and Gentile, Slave and Free, Rich and Poor were all equal in the sight of God.
There were prohibitions on cross-religious marriages as well as teaching (however imperfectly followed) against regarding fellow-Christians from different groups as “lesser”.
In effect, Christianity acted as a tribe based on faith rather than blood or geography.
I notice that the author of that post also attempts to link the freedoms of the Reformation to marriage patterns, thereby ignoring the things that motivated the Reformers – Christian doctrines based on the teaching of Christ and the Apostles.
Dragonfly,
Wow, four replies! I can tell this is a subject you’ve thought a lot about, and are passionate about. I certainly appreciated your recent post on finding a mentor (and I’ve narrowed it down to two women in the church, who I am praying about asking to be mentors!).
But I don’t think Titus 2 is necessarily about mentorship, as much as it is about relationships in the church in general. It’s talking about the right ordering of these relationships. I think it might be imposing a modern reading to say that it is about mentoring relationships, at least in the formal sense.
You initially said: “policing each other is not what that verse is talking about”. I was simply stating that I think it is right (even necessary) for some “policing” to happen in the relationships between women in the church.
I absolutely agree that we should be selective about who we choose to listen to on a regular basis – who we invite into our lives. As either mentors or close friends (peers).
But it’s not wise to totally disregard everything someone says just because you don’t personally respect them. If we do this, we miss opportunities to receive corrections from God, especially if what needs correcting is our pride. It is certainly humbling to receive rebuke from someone you thought was “beneath” you.
I remember a time this happened for me as a teen. The Pandora music service had just come out, but they didn’t have licensing in Australia. So I looked up a US postcode, and popped that in so I could use the service. An atheist friend of mine rebuked me on this when he commented that it was immoral to do so, as it was essentially stealing music. I could have been indignant that an atheist thought he could correct me. But I accepted his rebuke, and also the Lord’s silent rebuke that I needed some humbling.
Seriouslyserving wrote: “I certainly appreciated your recent post on finding a mentor (and I’ve narrowed it down to two women in the church, who I am praying about asking to be mentors!).”
There is no need to limit yourself to one or two, as long as the people you habitually seek counsel from are solid, as Dragonfly noted. Anyway, why so much contemplation? You already have your marching orders:
Proverbs 11:14 says, “Where no counsel is, the people fall: but in the multitude of counsellors there is safety.”
Proverbs 15:22 says, “Without counsel purposes are disappointed: but in the multitude of counsellors they are established.”
And Proverbs 24:6 says, “For by wise guidance you can wage your war, and in abundance of counselors there is victory.”
You’re not taking orders from them: you’re asking for counsel so YOU can weigh their words, and then compare them to scripture and seek God’s will. And obviously one’s husband has veto authority over the advice of one’s counselors.
Since military analogies occur throughout the Bible, I’ll offer one of my own. When I used to be an officer I would solicit input from all my soldiers, from the most junior to the most senior. If I thought somebody had a good idea I had to ensure it did not conflict with military doctrine (yes, we even call it doctrine), and then made my own decision – but my commander had veto authority.
Thanks Lyn,
Those are helpful verses to consider. I feel like I already have many solid Christian women I ask for counsel on various issues. But I think there would be value in finding one or two women to enter a more formal (but not too formal) relationship with. The kind where they keep me accountable in things like spending time with the Lord, loving my husband well and being a good Mum. Maybe these kind of relationships should form more organically in the church, but for whatever reason, they haven’t. And I feel I (and my family) would greatly benefit from this kind of thing.
I know, right? And the fools are stooped in middle age when they could have saved their lumbar vertebrae from the compression caused by toting Atlas shrugged around campus for show.
At least that’s over, soon to be washed away by the passing of generations.
So much more efficient these days. No one need feign having read anything. The Cliff notes are the concise assertions found in bluedog comments. Soon, replacing Austrian School and Invisible Hand and the rest will be newer better terms.
For anyone still citing those pedestrian thinkers (besides, we all know that its not whether they actually read or not, its that they did not read anything passing the sufficiently obscure test) we need to Capone’em. “Nuthin but a lotta talk and a badge…now get outta here”
If you’re standing up for truth and what’s right, then you’re protecting men, women, and children. There’s a quote I heard from Thomas Sowell that goes, “When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.”
Unfortunately, apparently, not all people in positions of influence speak truth and instead tell people what they want to hear or at least omit certain parts of the truth. I thought about visiting this church today, because it seems to have a very large and active singles group, but after watching some of the “Part 3: Ask Andy” video below—I stopped at around minute 41, as I didn’t see any reason to keep going—I’m just really discouraged and disappointed by where some of the church is heading, due to people being afraid or unwilling to speak out regarding true morality.
Starting at about 22:15 in the video, Pastor (for lack of a better word) Stanley is asked about when a relationship should get physical. Unfortunately, Stanley never states that sex is reserved for marriage only. He had stated earlier at around 18:00 or 19:00 that couples who live together before getting married are statistically more likely to cheat and / or divorce, but he didn’t tie that reasoning into scripture or sexual morality. Likewise, he later mentions some practical advice concerning how far physically we would like our spouses to have gone with other people before they married us after being asked a question regarding “how far is too far” at 37:26, but again, he doesn’t connect his answer to biblical sexual morality. Of course sin is more likely to lead to negative earthly outcomes, as we reap what we sow. I kept wanting him to make that connection, but he never did in what I saw.
I’m looking to get married, and as we know, tone at the top is very important in any organization, whether it be in business, government, or places of worship, so I would have to wonder about the standards kept by the single women in a place like this church. I guess I’ll have to pass this one by and keep searching.”
http://npmsingles.org/series/dateable/?campus=northpoint
(I guess I accidentally bumped a quotation mark key at the end of my post.)
Oh, I forgot to mention that it’s funny to note the way Stanley answers the question regarding “how far is too far” at 37:26. He only mentions what he does regarding the man’s sexual background coming into a marriage. He conveniently doesn’t mention a woman’s sexual background coming into the marriage, and I’m sure some would say, “Well, what he’s saying applies to both sexes.” OK, fine, so why not mention the woman’s sexual background, too? Is it just too uncomfortable and politically incorrect to specifically mention that women’s sexual backgrounds matter, too and maybe even more, since women seem to value chastity in men less than men do in women?
I’m not so sure, SS, and I’ll tell you why. (I’ll preface this with the admission that I have no direct scriptural reference, since “mentors” in the sense that you’re using the word, are not found in scripture for women. The closest example I can think of is Ruth and Naomi (and that’s not very close at all: Naomi was more mother than mentor). But even then, Naomi originally gave Ruth some VERY bad advice when she told her to go back to her own (pagan) people when they were both widowed… and Ruth was unmarried and the two women were related.
I assume that you’re married (if not, this won’t apply as much). If so, your husband is your mentor (Eph 5:26 makes that abundantly clear, along with other passages in the New Testament). Seeking counsel from mature Christian women is a good thing, otherwise Paul would not have written what he wrote about older women teaching younger women, but to seek out one or two specific women who hold the (informal) title of “Mentor” introduces the risk of having two “authority figures” in the life of a married woman. That’s dangerous, especially if “The Mentor” (as opposed to one counselor among many) gives counsel contrary to the will of the husband as head of the household. Then it can become a “two-versus-one” scenario… but marriage is not a democracy.
Like I said, I don’t have any direct scriptural references, since the Bible doesn’t contemplate such relationships, but it says what it says about a multitude of counselors, and trying to “improve” on Scripture is risky business. There is nothing new under the Sun, and if that was such a good idea one would expect it to be mentioned somewhere in Scripture.
There: I offered counsel as one among many. Take it for what it’s worth.
Lyn,
You’re right that it would be dangerous to have two authority figures, especially where they disagree.
But I don’t see a mentor as having any real authority. As in, I choose to ask them into my life in that way and welcome their criticisms and encouragements. The only “authority” they have is that afforded to them by me. In that way, I guess it’s less “authority” I’m after, and more wisdom.
Whereas, my husband’s authority comes from God. I have a choice whether to submit or not, but his authority exists regardless.
In any case, this does highlight the importance of choosing mentors well. The two women I am considering in this light both have good relationships with God and a Biblical view of marriage.
Also – your point about a well functioning society is of course correct, but some context to the compromises we’ve made, particularly under pressure from the political right, to the social organizing hegemony of capitalist economics may turn out to be relevant, particularly the natural effect of rules of economics that place the community in the service of profit rather than vice versa, to atomize us from one another.
More bullshit from Bluedog — is it ever anything else? You need to choose — your left wing bullshit, or the truth, and frankly, I doubt you will choose correctly, given your posting history.
The problem, Bluedog, is that the “community” is inevitably tutored by the left wing jackasses in the academy, the media and Hollywood. There is no “community” apart from that highly peddled and pressed “community of values”. The collective is already here. Certainly the solution to our problems is not an increased emphasis on community under the current circumstances — all that would do is solidify the status quo, because most of the community embraces the imposed value system to a large degree. Without a purge of the intelligentsia, this kind of communitarian revival would simply result in a social justice lynch mob of the kind we currently see on the internet.
SS, happy to chime in. Be advised that a woman with a strict Biblical view of marriage would be likely to decline your request for mentoring, though, since that is your husband’s role except insofar as what it says in Titus 2, which is not mentoring in the way you’re using the term. That said, I’ve given my unasked-for counsel… just be careful about ending up in a situation where you’re conflicted about who to follow: always remember that “Submit to Husband” trumps “follow advice of mentor” if they are ever in conflict.
Novaseeker,
Yep: Bluedog is peddling a return to communitarianism, which is a pseudo-academic phrase that means “three-quarters of the way back to tribalism.” Having lived in a few tribal-oriented places (I am living in one right now), I prefer advanced civilization with those things dreamed up by us “useful idiots” and “Invisible Handers” like The Rule of Law, Private Property, the Electrical Power Grid, and Indoor Plumbing.
Camille Paglia famously said that, ” If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.” The same is true of leftists.
Taking correction or truth (rebuke) from someone you “view as beneath you” means you need to alter your view of that person, though, you shouldn’t be looking down on people really, that’s just asking to be taken down a notch in your pride with someone “you look down upon” correcting you. 😦 It speaks more of pride than what that verse was talking about at all. Again, it wasn’t about someone you look down upon correcting you, it was about good women who are clearly living right and receiving instruction themselves, then going on to teach and help other women. I was saying (and I really think you’d agree) that evil or bad women who are clearly not living right should not be “policing” younger women at all in the church.
And Lyn is very right about that kind of female relationship being very dangerous IF its the wrong woman (again, this shows the verse is not at all what you’re talking about, someone evil or non-Christian (since you bring up the atheist) policing younger women). I’ve seen that happen where a mentor was not herself living scripturally in submission to her own husband, and then tried to get a younger mentor to feel badly about the way her husband was treating her (which actually wasn’t bad at all). She planted seeds of doubt in this woman’s mind, drove a wedge between her and her husband, and messed the younger one up spiritually.
“The Hindu Chihuahua (THC) is nipping at your heels because of your assertion that, “Catching someone “out of your league” for a girl is exciting and thrilling ” I would consider that self-evident, but then again, I don’t come from a culture that worships cattle. So for the benefit of all and sundry, I will offer an explanation of what you’re talking about.”
Um what? I’m Sikh, not Hindu. Sikhs don’t worship cattle but even if we did, I don’t see what that would have to do with the worship of female hypergamy which appears to be Lyn87’s religion.
“Overall: develop a personality that respects, admires, and encourages all men ”
ALL men? Rather collectivist.
Sikh… Hindu… like it matters.
Christianity worships female hypergamy? You make yourself look more ignorant every time you hit the “Post Comment” button.
So by all means… please keep posting.
yes, yes, yeas! hosea hosanna!!!!
dalrock hits the nail on the head by stating that women are leaidng the charge to enforce better behavior of women!!! soon, the family shall reunite, and lasting marriage shall rule the land, with women leading the virtuous charge, and men learning game.
here’re teh women dalorck is talking about:
learn some agme brothers! learn how serve da butt and gina tingelelsosolz, and all will be well, with women standing at the pulpits and teaching virtue, as dalrock teaches!!!
lzozozolzollzz
Not exactly, I’m not really nit picking you Lyn, Im using your comment as a jump off to say that Bluedog will not own peddling anything that can be pinned down. There is the political ideological point….whatever it may be….but far more the motive is to never ever ever let anyone seem to have figured out the …………um…….FRACTALS OF NUANCE……that is being splashed out like Spirograph art in the hands of someone who is on the exclusionary segment of spectrum.
” You make yourself look more ignorant every time you hit the “Post Comment” button.”
More ignorant than, “Sikh… Hindu… like it matters.” ?
Yep… and I meant that literally, because both are false. When you’re wrong about the redemptive work of Christ It doesn’t matter which particular type of wrong you are. He gave Himself for all of us – including you and me. I urge you to embrace that and turn to Him while you still draw breath, keeping in mind that not one of us is even promised tomorrow.
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Jason K has it 100% correct. Few of us rejected the gynocentric framing in Dragonfly’s question, and in failing to do so we were feeding the hamster pellets straight from our hand, rather than firmly putting our hand on the wheel and declaring “Sweetheart, that Fairy Tale ain’t happening”.
The biggest problem facing women seeking marriage today is that their expectations vastly depart from reality. Not just today’s reality, but any reality, as Jason proves for us mathematically. Everything else is tertiary to this problem. Remember, Alpha chasing (seeking men 2-3 SMV points higher for marriage) is a very high-risk strategy, even in today’s marriage market where beta men are priced at an all-time low. Encouraging the hamster to “time the market” to snag Alpha is exactly what it wants to hear, and the exact opposite of what it needs to hear, which should be something like:
a) Don’t actively seek out Alpha for marriage. Or at minimum, accept that doing so carries a significant risk of failure. Mathematically, you will not get one, but worse still, 5-10 years from now you may be lucky to have ANY husband, let alone a high SMV one. Do keep the idea of cats and Lori Gottlieb firmly in your mind if you choose this route.
b) Do seek beta provider types around your SMV that you feel some attraction to. Diligently work on improving that attraction through things like practicing traditional gender roles and biblical submission, avoiding “female” porn, etc.
c)Don’t marry if you can’t accomplish a) or b)
Any Christian woman seeking marriage today should be first directed to blogs like this one, or to the occasional Lori Gottlieb-type article, before dispensing with any other “red-pill” type advice. The Elephant in the room is that women seeking marriage today need to undergo a massive collective “de-spoiling”, in much the same way a 2-year old brat does. That a woman is fixated on locking down a man 2-3 SMV points above her is only evidence she is still way, way too spoiled. If she thinks that’s difficult now, remember that the worst is still yet to come.
Bluedog @ August 29, 2015 at 7:18 pm:
“Re-read what I wrote if you mean to reply again. I didn’t “[repeat] the lie that capitalism is the root of all kinds of evil including the breakdown of the family” nor did I make a correlation/causality error.
What I said was effective, thriving communities (and societies and nations and empires) subordinate capitalism to the community, and that our error isn’t in being capitalist, it is in reversing this order of primacy.”
You contradict yourself, Bluedog. It’s logically impossible to believe both “thriving communities subordinate capitalism to the community” and “capitalism is not the root of all kinds of evil”. Why else would it need to be subordinated?
Well, unless you’re a Chinese Communist. They’ve been trying to make capitalism work as a “servant to the community”. They are failing badly because in the end, either the capitalist owns his wealth or the community does. There is no “this wealth belongs to me but I am required to spend it on behalf of others”.
This is what America is living proof of: a healthy, prosperous society can exist without any controlling authority. It’s okay for men to be free and independent. In a grim irony, America isn’t working anymore because the Elites have succeeded in re-imposing tribalism upon us… race politics, class warfare… and you think the solution is more tribalism because it’s been working for them.
GunnrQ wrote, “There is no “this wealth belongs to me but I am required to spend it on behalf of others”.”
As I’m sure you know, several countries tried to do just that in the first half of the 20th Century. That system is known as Fascism, and at the time everyone properly understood that fascism was a philosophy of the political left. Hitler’s Germany and Mussolini’s Italy were both fascist, and both men identified themselves as men of the radical left. For the uninitiated: when it comes to the means of production:
Private ownership and private control = Capitalism.
Public ownership and public control = Communism.
Private Ownership and public control = Fascism.
Obviously the two versions of leftist state control (communism and fascism) are mirages. Public means government, and in leftist regimes that means “The Party.” We can see how well that turns out just by opening a history book. It won’t work out any better for China, which is still a leftist regime, as they try to edge their way from one form of leftist state control (communism) to the other form of leftist state control (fascism). What people generally don’t understand is that those are political / economic systems. That’s why I put “Private Property” on my list above… only the political right respects it, and without it both political liberty and economic prosperity are impossible in the long run.
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Rachel need only to look at the extremely common feminist websites, well patronised by women whose common bond is they all secretly hate men. The Manosphere, including sites like this one, exist simply to address the balance.
This website is also filled with the poor choices in life women make. Those choices are almost always their bad judgement in men. No one here respects “Harley McRockbandrummer” or “Chad Thundercock”. We know from interacting with men of this archetype that they are no good. We avoid them. Women don’t.
The standard “go to” rebuttal by any one of these SJW types is “yeah, but what about men…”.
They don’t really read the article (as in digest it and think it through). They’ll read the title, a few words here and there (because they are guilty of the act itself) and then, as usual, they’ll pull out one of the standard responses (what about men – being the most popular one).
The treatment of another human being doesn’t even come into question (I guess it would if it were another woman or a minority). It’s usually based on the SJW’s “pyramid of victims” or hierarchy .
DragonFly
>How can an older woman teach a younger one how to “to be self-controlled and pure,” if she obviously displays lack of self-control?
Your examples are basically Romans 2:17-24. And you are correct. I think it is funny, but also sad, to see churches attempt to give marriage training, when the leading couples themselves are obviously not in obedience to God. A husband who fails to provide food and clothing (Deut) or a wife who refuses to be feminine (Deut 22:5, 1 cor 11:14-16, etc.).
SeriouslyServing
>But I don’t think Titus 2 is necessarily about mentorship
That is surprising. For three of the groups, Paul specifically says, “teach/train the to …”. For the fourth group, he says, “Encourage the young men to be …”. I agree that this passage shows an ordering; the groups are different in roles and expectations. But I also see in what they are to be trained.
@Sunshine: “while your post was certainly fine, it could be even better if it points the lost toward repentance, that’s all.”
The first step of repentance is acknowledging and confessing your sin and Dalrock’s post provides ample opportunity and justification for contrition. He can’t even get that from the Godly women on this blog so just how do you think a call for repentance would improve the post? Perhaps an offering at the end of each post where we all sing “Just As I am Sweet Jesus?”
@Lyn87: Are you sure we are allowed to evangelize in public? Won’t that send the Hate speech stormtroopers kicking down your door?
BPP asks (tongue-in-cheekily), @Lyn87: Are you sure we are allowed to evangelize in public? Won’t that send the Hate speech stormtroopers kicking down your door?
Funny you should ask that, as I am not in the US at the moment. In my current location that would, indeed, earn me a very rapid trip to the nearest international airport… with my stuff being sent to me after I was gone.
Dalrock,
I realize this is going to get buried, but I think something I’ve been through might apply here.
I recently broke up with my boyfriend. He was my first serious relationship. I loved him, and I was looking forward to marrying him. However, we began dating long distance (we knew each other from college) and when I moved to his state to be closer to him, things changed.
Initially, he wanted to move in with me, which I shut down right away. Besides not wanting to get an earful from my parents about it, I knew that was no way to start out with things. He also immediately started pestering me for sex, when he previously had been alright with respecting my boundaries. I’m Catholic, and I wish I could tell you that I held to that line of chastity, but sadly, I didn’t. I regret that deeply at this point, but I had hoped that a) it would be enough for him and b) he could still be my first because I was sure I was marrying him. We had been talking about marriage but when I reminded him that we would have to do classes through church before tying the knot, he got upset about it because he didn’t think a priest could offer us anything of value. And this was a man who assured me he was Catholic.
Other than that, he basically started acting like the Skittles Man from that infamous post over on Roissy’s blog. Came and went as he pleased, never told me when he was going to show up, barely ever texted me and never once called, refused to let me come down to his house, got me a shower head for Christmas, and continually pushed for sex acts I was very uncomfortable with performing (and refused to do). He was always touching me, which was a huge turn-off but I allowed because he said he needed it, but never wanted to talk about anything that mattered to me. Let me be clear; I wasn’t nagging constantly or wanting to have a six hour discussion every weekend about our feelings. I just wanted him to tell me what time he’d be down so I could have dinner ready for him, or have somebody to talk to when things were hard. He would let me cry on his shoulder, but anything more than that and he’d leave the room. I cooked for him, made sure I always looked good for him, did my best to take care of his needs, told him how much I loved him, and encouraged him to take the lead role in our relationship.
Through this whole thing, he insisted that he loved me, wanted to marry me, and I’d like to think that he’s trying to return a ring right now. I truly believe he meant it. But obviously, my hamster was spinning its tiny little wheel off its axle for the better part of eight months. I’d like to tell you he was a good man who was in over his head with a real, long-term, monogamous relationship and didn’t have a healthy male role model in his life (his mother is divorced and highly sexually dysfunctional). I’d like to think his behavior was the result of dysfunctional masculinity, not any intention cruelty on his part. Maybe that’s my hamster talking too.
As it was, the last time I saw him, he was walking out on me after a round of utterly emotionless sex that left me in tears. I wish I didn’t have those memories, and they certainly illuminate the wisdom of Christianity’s stance on pre-marital sex. I’m almost 30, and part of me is scared that I won’t find anybody else, or that no decent Catholic man is going to want me now. I know that’s ridiculous, given the current sexual climate, but that’s not much comfort. I’m also terribly angry at him for the way he treated me, but at the same time, I let it happen.
Like I said, I feel ashamed of myself for how I handled it. I know the manosphere believes many of those behaviors are attractive to women, but all it did for me was leave me feeling isolated and used. It was a terrible experience of falling out of love for someone. There are many female Catholic saints who bore the burden of abusive or loveless relationships, and if we were married now, I would do my best to follow that example. I’m a little relieved that I won’t be put to that test, but on the other hand, I did already fail it. I abdicated my morality for a man who likely never intended to honor me, and I’m at a loss now as to how to recover from that. I pray for him, but I’m not sure how to pray for myself. It’s hard to go to Mass, and I can’t talk to my family about it.
I’m sorry for the length of this, but I feel like some guys around here want to say that men never do anything wrong, or that asserting complete control in a relationship is the way to a woman’s heart. For me, I think those behaviors destroyed what could have been a good relationship. What we needed wasn’t more male control, but a little bit of openness and honest communication. A lot of women want to bitch about what men aren’t doing for them, while ignoring what is there; with my ex-boyfriend, all he could do was complain that I wasn’t giving him anal, while failing to even acknowlege the love I was freely giving him in every other way I knew how.
Welcome Liz,
That sounds like a very painful experience. I don’t think from what you shared that you won’t still be able to find a husband and start a family, but it does strike me that you haven’t learned the right lessons from all of it.
When I read this I initially assumed you were in your early twenties. However, later you write:
You frame all of this as the bad choices he made, and you “letting it happen”.
You really need to rethink this. You didn’t end up almost thirty and unmarried because of the choices other people made, nor did this almost eight month relationship steal your youth. If you are honest with yourself, you will remember that starting over a decade ago you had other priorities you wanted to focus on before marriage. Almost certainly it was getting a degree, and very likely there was a consideration of career as well. You acknowledge that you should have preserved your chastity, but your focus was (and still is) on waiting, not marrying.
You also blame his sexual desire for your own choice to have sex out of wedlock. Either you had no sexual desire for him, or you are lying about your own temptation to sin. If you didn’t burn with passion for him, why did you want to marry him? Moreover, you describe “falling out of love with him”, and complain that the last time you had sex with him it was emotionless. So the tingle would seem to have been there at some point and then gone away.
The point is, you did exactly what you wanted to do. You see a long list of things your ex boyfriend did wrong and are assigning your own choices first to your ex boyfriend, and then to men in general. This is why after doing it all wrong, you wrote in not to ask for advice, but to offer men advice on how to do it right so that women (like you) won’t be disappointed when they do it all wrong:
If you don’t come to terms with this, you will take this resentment and transferred blame into your marriage, and blame your husband for all of the sins and bad choices you made before you ever met him. This is a prescription for misery not just for him, but for you and your children.
I urge you to repent of this so you can be free of it, and so you don’t wrong your future husband. Then I urge you to find a man you can fall head over heels in love with, a man you are prepared to submit to, and marry him and not hold any of this against him. I pray that you will have a blessed marriage and beautiful happy and healthy children.
Liz is like a textbook example of the modern day churchian woman.
He made me do it, waaaahhh!
Well no, he didn’t rape you, he was exactly honest with you. He wanted sex and got it. If you were serious about your religion, you would have said ‘no’ and broken up with him and got on with the real search of finding a husband. The problem is you don’t listen to men, this guy clearly articulated his needs to you and you gave in. He didn’t trick you, you tricked yourself into believing what you wanted to believe.
It is a common story: two people meet at College, but after graduation they return to their home counties (or State); then one of them (usually, it seems, the female) decides to move closer to the man. I knew a girl who did just that, but as soon as she arrived and found a place to live, the man did not want to know. What was the poor woman, who had doubtless in her own mind exaggerated the seriousness of their acquaintanceship, to do: return where she came from acknowledging her stupidity?
College romances are like holiday romances: proximity is everything.
@liz:
Dalrock nailed all of the major points, but you’re a bit further along than most of the people that respond to threads late. You can sense the need for repentance, but your sin (pride) is still winning out. This isn’t your ex-boyfriend’s fault. And the “Game” tactics most definitely worked, as you confirmed.
But the issue you’ll have the most problems accepting is this: you wanted it. You were a more than willing participant. So now you have to look in the mirror and understand it was your sin that put you in this situation. You were getting what you wanted by the way you acted, but the part of your soul that is God’s was revolting against you. You just, however, weren’t listening.
If you repent, change your ways and grow within the Lord, you can do much for his Kingdom and for His glory. If you don’t, you’ll just join the legions of the bitter & resentful. Those unwilling to accept responsibility.
“I’m at a loss now as to how to recover from that.”
Liz, you go into “no contact” with this person and start over. When he contacts you, (and he will, likely within three months) you may make short, cordial replies, but do not initiate any contact with him. None! Moving closer to him, as you noted, shifted the relationship dynamic out of your “favor,” so to speak. A retreat, at this stage, is your only option. If/when he comes back, you want to be in a position to resist falling into the same bad pattern. Men often want to recapture the “one that got away,” but it is important not to look back. Busy yourself with activities, interests, and good people.
Going forward, you must put yourself on guard for having “broken the seal.” Do not mistakenly assume that since you’ve had one sexual relationship it doesn’t matter if you have casual sex or additional pre-marital sex. Each failed relationship (particularly if it becomes sexual) will leave you with damage to your health and virtue. (Guard your innocence with your life; guard your life with your innocence.) Get that chastity belt back on and keep it there 🙂 Lock yourself away in a tower, if necessary!
It is easier to marry younger when one has parents who help lay down the boundaries for suitors, but it can be much harder to enforce Border Patrol when you are having to do it all on your own. Also, because of your age, I think there is an expectation that you’ll have sex. But, becoming sexual is not a function of age; it’s a function of commitment (marriage). If someone has a problem with that, then too darn bad. I’m not sure how you got to this age and stage as a virgin, but you are probably aware time is running down on your opportunities to have children with a man who does want to be married to you. You don’t have time to grieve this guy who wasn’t what he said he was. NEXT!
I recommend you read some dating books like “Dating Without Drama,” (pleasant) and “The Rules” (very rigid, but helpful for women who don’t know how to protect themselves by having boundaries). Above all, do not believe that because a man talks about marriage or religion that he is serious about either.
I could say a lot more, but I’ll stop there. Good luck to you, liz.