Pastor Doug Wilson tackles the very real problem of delayed marriage in: 7 Reasons Young Men Should Marry Before Their 23rd Birthday.
We do have a pressing problem. According to The Atlantic, right now the average age for a first marriage is 27 for women, and 29 for men. In 1990, it was 23 for women and 26 for men. In 1960, it was 20 for women and 22 for men. This is a grease fire disaster.
Wilson accurately describes the problem delayed marriage creates with regard to temptation to sin:
1. There is no such thing as gift of singleness. That is not a Bible thing. Paul does teach that there is a gift of celibacy. “For I would that all men were even as I myself. But every man hath his proper gift of God, one after this manner, and another after that” (1 Cor. 7:7).
For someone who is gifted with celibacy, marriage would constitute a distraction (1 Cor. 7:33). But for someone without that gift, the absence of marriage would be the distraction. Burning with passion does have a way of distracting.
If someone is single (who very much wants to be married), that condition is only a gift in the sense that every affliction is a gift.
Where Wilson goes terribly wrong however is in understanding the social changes which are driving delayed marriage. Wilson believes that men are driving the change, through a combination of a desire to sow their wild oats and excessive pickiness (emphasis mine):
An unmarried person should have high standards for their future spouse when it comes to Christian commitments, basic responsibility, compatible personalities, and sexual attractiveness. But this needs to be balanced against the temptation (which comes very easily to men) of not having any awareness of what league they are actually in. “For I say, through the grace given unto me, to every man that is among you, not to think of himself more highly than he ought to think; but to think soberly, according as God hath dealt to every man the measure of faith” (Rom. 12:3).
In a follow up post Wilson reiterates that the problem is Christian men being unwilling to marry the large number of unmarried Christian women who want nothing more than to be godly wives (emphasis mine):
3. I am a pastor, and this is a pressing pastoral problem. And I have talked to many other pastors who agree that it is a pressing pastoral problem. The nature of the pastoral problem is that of a large and growing population of unmarried women who would love to be married, and who would make good and godly wives. In the conservative church, it would not be unusual to find this cohort of women outnumbering the men in the same station of life by a factor of about 5 to 1. Some of this is caused by the church’s hostility to masculinity, resulting in men being made to feel unwelcome in the church, and some of it is caused by the men who remain being encouraged to perpetuate their teen years by a decade or so. Singleness is a gift, the teaching goes.
In short, Wilson has the problem exactly backwards. He overlooks the fact that women are very open about their desire to ride the carousel for as long as possible before marriage. He also clearly doesn’t understand the realities of the sexual marketplace (SMP) and marriage marketplace (MMP). Young women are the rockstars of the SMP, while young men are near the bottom. Since young women have the power, they set the terms. And what women want* is years, if not a decade or more, of sex with a small subset of the most attractive men before settling for a boring loyal dude. It makes no sense that men would prefer to marry just when their SMP stock is on the rise, and just when the SMP stock of their soon to be bride is rapidly declining.
Rollo has done an excellent job of mapping out the respective SMP power positions as men and women age, and of course dating sites like OK Cupid can easily see the same structure. We can also see women’s understanding of their changing SMP/MMP power with age reflected in the dramatic drop in divorce rates as the wife ages. The data is clear, but the problem is calling out women’s sins, including sexual sins, is difficult and extremely uncomfortable. For this reason modern Christians will continue to deny what young women are very open about, just as they deny women’s culpability when they have abortions.
*Obviously not all women choose to ride the carousel prior to seeking a husband, but Wilson is writing about the issue in general, and I am responding in that same frame.
The irony is worse, really.
Most ‘conservatives’ and/or Christians often push young women to complete college and/or grad school, get a job, and take a few years to get established prior to marriage instead of telling them to get married earlier. Magically, this marriage is supposed to come to you after you do all of these things.
Such women are not prepared for marriage in the slightest, and in reality they have actually been told all of their life to aspire to a man’s job of providing for their family.
Then pastors wonder why men don’t want to marry such masculinized women.
It’s mainly women and families telling women to delay marriage, and to focus on the man’s roles and responsibilities in marriage so they are not prepared for wifely roles and responsibilities.
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From my experience, there are women other than the ones you’ve described here. My church is full of young women who would love to be married, and would make good, Christian wives. But they’ve swung the other direction and have neglected their own sexual value because they can get away with it. In short, the church is full of young, unattractive, professional women who know that the competition is pretty weak.
What Wilson seems to be describing here is MGTOW, Men who don’t want to commit their sexual exclusivity to an entitled fatty. And pastors across America, having discounted the value of sex in marriage, are giving men a hard time for not compromising with one of these women on the basis of their “spiritual measure of value” alone.
This is one of the most infuriating aspects of chuchianity culture that I can’t stomach. On the one hand, they apply incredible pressure for young men to marry as soon as possible because that is what defines you as a true man.
Nobody ever says this directly but it is a value conveyed through a combination of words, actions, and behavior.
Yet, they also turn around turn to a complete blind eye to what the young women are taught about delaying marriage to have a career first. They apply zero pressure on the young women to marry or question why they are single. Meanwhile, all the values women should be taught to have as a mother and wife they are taught to be as employees to a corporation.
Any attempt to point this out will solicit nothing except a variation of “So you think women should just be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?”
Or, they engage in what I call rhetorical hostage taking. https://anarchistnotebook.com/2016/04/05/rhetorical-hostage-taking/
This is where they bring up an actual person known to both you and them and say, “Well, (so and so) is like (problematic behavior described). Are you saying (logical conclusion) about them?” The only way to win the argument is by insulting an un-involved party; then the discussion becomes how you’re judging them or saying bad things about other people. So in this way they are saying, “The only way to win this argument is to hurt them first.”
As Aaron Clarey said about Dennis Prager, Wilson is just another British general sipping on wine in Paris while ignoring the front line reports from soldiers in the trenches.
Do you notice a pattern with these man-up articles and columns? Not one will ever feature statements or quotes from one of these single young men they love to speak ill of. Not one of them attempts to reach out and understand why they are doing what they are doing or that they might be acting rationally. It presumed true and rightly observed that young men don’t marry only because they are immature and young women don’t marry only because they can’t find a mature man.
It’s sad that a flamboyant libertine homosexual like Milo Yiannopoulos has a better grasp of the troubles afflicting young single Christian men in our modern culture than pastors who are supposed to be shepherds of the flock.
A big lie among pastors is, ” large and growing population of unmarried women who would love to be married, and who would make good and godly wives.” As the large population of unmarried women in churches want to be leaders, both inside the Church and inside the home.
Pastors (AMOGs doncha know) love this group of women b/c they follow his lead at church, but not so much in the home. And they encourage strife in the home by calling women to continue their service to him (well his church of course, which is really serving Jesus) and not to serve their husbands and family.
Read the Hermeneutics column at Christianity Today, or those authors’ other works and you see it clearly. Some openly label themselves as “Christian feminists”. Ugh, aside from validating Steve Sailer’s comment about feminists, their words demonstrate that they are ugly on the inside, completely disregarding 1 Peter 3:4.
I would also add that Wilson’s “eat whatever we serve you” mentality when it comes to marriage absolves them of any moral responsibility to provide any incentives for men to marry.
If a landlord knows that the tenant has to live in a residence regardless of the house’s condition there’s no incentive to repair it when someone is causing damage to the infrastructure.
I can tell you from personal experience that the notion of marriage benefiting the man is a foreign concept to all elements of our society. I’ve asked people why, and they’re not even angry or indignant. It’s as though it never occurred to them that men would marry for any other reason than it’s his obligation and duty to do so. Or, the reasons they give are ones which appeal to the feminine, not the masculine.
I can also testify from personal experience that the pro-marriage crowd cannot grant that a mature man genuinely doesn’t want to get married or sees no reason to do so. Because once they’ve accepted he is both mature and uninterested they can’t resort to shaming. So the discussion then has to address what would motivate a mature man to marry in our modern culture. This puts the man in the position of authority of deciding whether or not the benefits are worth marrying.
It forces the pro-marriage crowd to provide specific reasons why it benefits him. And that will take them places they do not want to go.
Hey Dalrock, I wonder if Doug Wilson might be close to the kingdom. He seems to acknowledge that the church is in many instances hostile to masculinity — an encouraging contrast to Pastor AMOG. And in his conservative (which I take to mean theologically conservative) congregation, the women in his church might be as virtuous as he believes they are. Such women are rare, but they do exist. If so, he may not be aware of the larger cohort of carousel connoisseurs.
It would be interesting to see his reaction to the critique offered here. I have seen a change in teaching emphasis when one pastor I know came face to face with the prevalence of wife-initiated divorce. Perhaps Doug could experience a similar epiphany.
As a practical matter, it would probably be better received if you contacted Wilson than if one of your readers sent him a link. $0.02.
Yet, they also turn around turn to a complete blind eye to what the young women are taught about delaying marriage to have a career first. They apply zero pressure on the young women to marry or question why they are single
Even worse, they encourage it, if the women are “serving the Lord.” We were looking for a church after moving, and one we visited held a celebration ceremony and annointing for a young woman who got a nursing degree and was headed to Haiti as a medical “missionary”. No mention that she was already 25, and getting past her prime fertility years and peak SMV; not to mention she was becoming more independent and less willing to submit to a husband. No thought at all to 1 Tim 2:15.
“I can tell you from personal experience that the notion of marriage benefiting the man is a foreign concept to all elements of our society. I’ve asked people why, and they’re not even angry or indignant. It’s as though it never occurred to them that men would marry for any other reason than it’s his obligation and duty to do so. Or, the reasons they give are ones which appeal to the feminine, not the masculine.”
If a man gives the real reasons, essentially boiling down to offspring and sex, he’s a pig according to feminists and the cucks who enable them.
How much of this problem is economic? I married at 27 because that’s when I could afford to. My parents married at 19, but then you could graduate high school and earn a decent living.
The Question,
Kudos. This entire concept is a… functional non-starter for the pro-marriage crowd. This discussion is never allowed to happen. Ever.
Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO addressed the marriage drop succinctly. The question she said is not why aren’t men marrying. The question is why should they marry? She asked that and no one could answer that. At this time and place in western civilization (and what feminism has done to marriage) there simply isn’t a valid reason anymore why men should marry.
This is key.
It’s not as simple as this within conservative churches. There, it is fathers who have the power and the mothers are calling the shots he fires. In those instances within conservative churches where a young woman (or young women) have the power they are, basically, bad girls.
I would agree with a statement like “The board is set, in every way, for young women’s preferences.” The (perhaps subtle) difference is that young women don’t actually get to set the terms so much as the terms have been decidedly set in their favor.
As an example: In a conservative church, a young women is (almost universally) not allowed the idea of foregoing college. And (again, almost universally) no young woman wants to skip college. Whether she wants to go for the boys, books, avoid work, or to tick a mark on the accomplishment list: All young women want to go to college.
@ innocentbystanderboston
You’d be amazed at some of the circular reasoning discussions I’ve had with people on this. By their logic I don’t want to get married because I have beliefs that will ensure I never get married but that’s a problem because I really do want to get married…..
The hamsters practically fall out of the wheels.
It’s not that I don’t want to get married. It’s that there aren’t any inherent incentives for me to marry. Pro-marriage people operate from a premise that men innately want to marry no matter what marriage as an institution actually works and functions.
This allows them to say, “Well, if you’re going to ever get married you have to……..” and they can set the bar and burden of performance. This ensures compliance with the preferred behavior they want.
Not wanting to get married by default removes their moral authority in the matter and places the burden on them instead.
Man I keep leaving things out. Forgive me for bogarting the comments.
To continue: The reason Dad wants her to go to college is so that she has yet another lever over her husband; in case that bad man makes Daddy’s princess unhappy…and his wife unhappy. The reason Mom wants her to go to college is to vicariously be chased by men (cock) and to “prove” that women are just as good as men. Sometimes the order is reversed.
These are all young women’s preferences with only a minuscule number of exceptions, but the fathers and mothers set the terms.
Matt Davis
My church is full of young women who would love to be married, and would make good, Christian wives.
Hmm. What’s your definition of “good, Christian wives”? And how do you know what those women would do, given that you seem to admit they are sexually promiscuous? DId you marry one?
Since young women have the power, they set the terms.
and somehow telling these girls to stop being sluts & get married & have children before it’s too late, is now considered the worst possible thing. despite the carousel being glorified, girls still complain about “slut-shaming,” but they should be ashamed.
So many excellent comments already. I want to jump over Wilson, but one commenter is right, Wilson may just be ignorant. No wonder he and his type of church is so discouraging, it’s because they get a lot right. Good topic, good use of God’s Word, yet his error pulls his followers into superficiality and pushes believers like me into discouragement.
Regarding the comment that all women want to go to College. Even though you used the word all, I agree. What the hell is wrong with the church when that becomes an article of truth?
Wilson would probably say that’s not true, but he’d end up being a dick quibbling over the use of the word all and never address the argument.
Not to keep throwing my two cents out there but another unspoken part of this is that if you’re in an affluent area like mine the single women come from wealthy homes and it is near a mortal sin for her to marry anyone whose socioeconomic standing is less than her father’s. I know some who have done otherwise, but their fathers were vocal about their concerns.
The church refuses to accept the fact that a lot Christian women want husbands who will provide the same or higher living standard as their father does at that precise moment. A 22 year old cannot compete with someone who has had a career for 20 plus years. If they do marry below that there is a terrible temptation for them to feel like they settled or married below their value.
Again, I’ve seen exceptions to this but there were obvious reasons for why.
The worst demographic to be in those situations is a single, poor, morally upright but good looking Christian man. Your options within biblical morality is severely limited.
Question
Do you notice a pattern with these man-up articles and columns? Not one will ever feature statements or quotes from one of these single young men they love to speak ill of. Not one of them attempts to reach out and understand why they are doing what they are doing or that they might be acting rationally
That’s because the various writers, preachers, etc. are talking at men rather than with them and for sure they are not listening. Fingerpointing is much easier than listening.
The question is why should they marry?
You will be told that this is exactly the problem; that these men are proving their selfishness and thus they are the problem.
“Christian” marriage counseling today is a repeated admonishment for men to lay down any “rights” they think they have, and to get past the “entitlement” mentality they demonstrate by having expectations. Thus, you can expect that “Christian” pre-marital counseling is to start hounding men early to give up expectations re: marriage, and to be prepared to submit as part of your servant leadership.
In the end, even if these counselors were correct, it’s an is/ought fallacy, b/c the reality is that if marriage offers literally nothing to men, they will forego it. It’s basic economics.
I also recall an episode of FOTF, one heard often b/c it was on Dobson’s list of favorites and was re-aired frequently. Joni Erickson Tada was talking of her marriage, and Dobson jokingly says “if marriage is so hard, why bother?” Oops, way to pull back the curtain there James. Anyway, Tada (who I’m not knocking) gushes “it’s worth it,” although the question is never really answered. In retrospect, I’m not sure Dobson ever answered that question in his entire ministry.
@TheRealGeoBooth
It is certainly true that Wilson is better than most. But essentially this boils down to Wilson arguing that water is running uphill, and your defense is “Maybe it does in Idaho”. He isn’t saying that men are refusing to marry at all, and he isn’t complaining about a growing age gap between husbands and wives. He is complaining that men are delaying marriage, and as a result women have to wait until they are less young and hot in order to find a husband. He also claims that men have excessive expectations when it comes to hotness, resulting in men insisting on marrying older, less hot women. It doesn’t compute, even if his church is different.
But another problem is that I don’t think his church really is that different. Again, Wilson is better than most, and I’ve written about some of his positive writing. But Wilson is also surprisingly hostile to headship, claiming men who assert it are really just misogynists (emphasis mine).
Wilson continues, echoing Dr. Mohler’s concern that porn will weaken the power of the wakeup call in the form of denied sex:
Swanny RIver
I want to jump over Wilson, but one commenter is right, Wilson may just be ignorant.
The cynic in me wishes to point out that Wilson’s livelihood depends on him not understanding certain things.
@AR
I think you’re misunderstanding Matt. He’s saying that the young women in his church are chaste, pious, etc., ….but unattractive. Their competition is attractive women who are not chaste, pious, etc. The unattractive women believe this makes the unchaste women weak candidates for marriage. IOW: His church has a lot of “beta” females who believe their inner beauty makes them a catch.
The Question
The thing is, this type of honest discussion on marriage 2.0 has never really been had in real life (except here at Dalrock’s.) Its only in a movie on a shuttle from an airport to a hotel lobby does the modern world even entertain this discussion. At no time would a pro-marriage-2.0 person ever play the cheap parlor games of having to “sell marriage” to a man. That is a non-starter. They are not even going to dignify that question. Instead, what they would do is verbally and personally attack the person who asked them sell it. That is what would happen. Either that or shunning.
Welcome Matt
This still speaks to:
1) SMP power position and where the shortage really lies. They know there is almost no competition from other young women for a large number of young men interested in marriage.
2) Their focus to date has been on education/professional advancement. Marriage wasn’t a priority, but an afterthought.
@Cane
At a basic level I think we are making the same argument. That the parents are openly pushing young women to delayed marriage only reinforces that Wilson is taking great care to overlook the obvious.
I think your description of the mechanics of mom and dad pushing the young woman to do what she wants is accurate, but I don’t think this means that she would do an about face if suddenly her parents stopped pushing her to delay marriage, or even if they suddenly started encourage her to marry young. The feminism is in the water, and a young woman steeped in it her entire life is going to be very difficult to turn around. While her parents and other leaders are giving her moral cover to do as she wishes, they aren’t forcing her to do it.
“Rollo has done an excellent job of mapping out the respective SMP power positions as men and women age, and of course dating sites like OK Cupid can easily see the same structure. We can also see women’s understanding of their changing SMP/MMP power with age reflected in the dramatic drop in divorce rates as the wife ages. The data is clear, but the problem is calling out women’s sins, including sexual sins, is difficult and extremely uncomfortable.”
I’ve pondered sometimes why pastors don’t get this stuff, why they don’t understand it.
This is exactly why. First, pastors and most of society don’t understand the data. They don’t understand what is really going on. They get their information from young women (current carouselers) and their mothers (former carouselers). And they don’t understand how attraction works. Again, they’re hearing from women, who keep saying they just want nice men who will treat them right, leaving out the “hawt” and “attractive” parts. They aren’t talking to men.
The few pastors who do “get it” won’t say anything. If they ever said anything about this stuff, or called women out on their sexual sins, the hue and cry would be deafening. Those pastors would lose their jobs, be brought up on denominational disciplinary charges, and attract press attention. Those pastors who didn’t lose their jobs/appointments would see their congregations gutted literally overnight, and their offerings dwindle to nothing.
Women absolutely refuse to accept any challenges to their conduct. They absolutely will not ever be called out on their sexual sin. They will not hear it — not even Christian women. They especially will not hear it from male pastors who “just don’t understand” and “don’t get it” and are “mean and cruel”.
That’s why this problem continues.
All can be whittled down to ‘Man up and marry that slut!’
Correct.
I have no issues stating why I won’t marry. It’s an open and shut case. There is no end to the post 28 year women looking to marry a guy like me, except they can’t. I spent my 20s single, hoping to get married to a proper Christian woman, no bites. Now… post 30 years of age, I no longer care to give these single ladies the time of day. They have nothing to offer me, nothing.
(which comes very easily to men)
Note how gratuitously he puts that in there. The main sentence was neutral, but then he adds the ‘it is men’s fault ya’know’ element in.
So how come no one here is ramming this into Pastor Wilson’s face, which will cause him to go full retard and double down?
He never even hears that he is wrong. If he did, he would cause a valuable Streisand effect.
Good point, Anon.
But this needs to be balanced against the temptation (which comes very easily to men) of not having any awareness of what league they are actually in
Who is it that talks about men trying to get women “out of their league”? Do men talk that way or do women talk that way? In my experience, women talk that way. Why is Wilson talking like a woman? Yes, this is a rhetorical question.
IBB,
Kathryn Jean Lopez at NRO addressed the marriage drop succinctly. The question she said is not why aren’t men marrying. The question is why should they marry?
Yet another woman goes where the cuckservative pastors and commentators will not…
@Anon
I would not encourage my readers to be confrontational with Pastor Wilson. From what I have seen we do have mutual readers/commenters, and he has received polite pushback in related areas.
it’s interesting that the first article was published on April 11. Pastor Wilson apparently got some pushback, and that’s why he published the second article linked in Dalrock’s OP, on April 13.
The second article responds to the complaints/observations in the comments from the first. The second article says, roughly paraphrasing:
1. Christian marriage is normal, but people are trying to say it’s “abnormal” or aberrational.
2. The whole “when are you ready for marriage argument is tiring – there’s degrees of “ready for marriage”, and there comes a time when men are as ready as they’re ever going to be.
3. Lots of women want to get married, and it’s a “pressing pastoral problem” (translation — women in my church are complaining — LOUDLY — that they can’t find men to marry them when they’re ready at age 29 after carouseling; and they are making those complaints AT ME and TO ME, and I’m tired of hearing it, so you guys need to get on the ball here, dammit). It’s not the girls’ fault, it’s because of Peter Pan manboys who wont’ grow up and because of societal and cultural “hostility to masculinity.
4. Porn is bad, mmmmkay? And I didn’t say these guys need to get married so they will avoid porn.
5. Men are dominant, but they’re “on a marriage strike”, and it’s because there’s some legal discrimination against men. We need to do something to support the masculine role , but I’m not sure what to do or how to help. It’s mostly nonChristian men who are “striking” and Christian men are just following along.
6. Men are supposed to be initiating and courting, so they need to know their league and their value. But women need to know their leagues too. There’s a middle ground between fedora wearing neckbeard fatties, and Clooney/Pitt/Tatum; and women need to accept that they won’t all get to marry George, Brad or Channing.
7. Have faith in Christ, but that faith requires action and doing things. We’re supposed to marry and have kids and work jobs.
About the only bone he was willing to throw men is that maybe, just maybe, the girls are being a wee bit unrealistic in their hopes for Christian Supermen.
All can be whittled down to ‘Man up and marry that slut!’
Not at all.
You also have the option of ‘Man up and marry that frumpy old shrew!’ At which point a sexless marriage makes much more sense.
Among Wilson’s many assumptions is that marriage is a source of sex. I wonder if Churchians think marriage is some kind of spiritual gelding for men, for them to think it ends male “distractions” forever regardless of wifey’s behavior.
“1. There is no such thing as gift of singleness. That is not a Bible thing.”
Correct. Singleness is a choice per Christ’s comment in Matt. 19:12 and an honorable choice per 1 Cor. 7. I have no problem with Churchians encouraging bachelors to marry provided only they take the bachelor’s desires into account. Which they don’t, as evidenced by Pastor Wilson’s attempt to equate (male) singleness with immorality. If Churchians truly wanted to help men avoid temptation, they’d teach the wives to be her husband’s enthusiastic, exclusive love toy.
It is BETTER to marry than burn, not MANDATORY, and if a man is going to burn anyway then the “Bible thing” says marriage will only be a source of many hardships.
“So you think women should just be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen?”
Looking back, I would have preferred this to what I did.
I for one can speak from experience of the perils of marrying a woman in her thirties after she has had her fill of the carousel.
PM,
You could have married earlier. “Waiting until you can afford it” is almost always an excuse. Though you would likely have had a much harder time finding a woman who wants to work through the early years as they did in the more distant past.
I do wonder how you stayed completely chaste during that time. This is a major flaw of expecting young men to be completely financially stable before they marry. Sexual release should only be within marriage according to Christian doctrine, but waiting until you are stable means that is pushed a long ways off. 10 years after puberty, or more, is far too long.
DrTorch,
Dobson has a new show now, so he is still at it not really addressing the point. (Family Talk)
Joni would stretch the “why” question as she is a quadriplegic, so her husband may not get much in the way of sex out of the deal, but does get a log of care responsibilities. I have no idea if her attitude helps temper that, since so many women today are toxic to their husbands, but that is all I can see.
Cane,
That would be an interesting question. How attractive are the women he mentions. Are any not extra large, for example? Most men aren’t going to hold out for a beauty queen, but they do want some basic standards, as has been spoken about here. The fact that so many in the church are below even that level is a serious problem.
Attitude is important too, but harder to discern up front, at least it is if you are not really looking for it.
Anon,
How would anyone get a message to him? I find that most “famous” preachers have people prescreening their contacts and those that don’t can still ignore email they do read it. Some would respond by doubling down, but many would simply ignore it because they think it is not an important issue.
I am convinced few really see male-female relations as a serious issue today, to the detriment of many. Many would be unlikely to agree with all the comments here, especially since everyone here does not agree, but they could at least adjust to better match reality. Some of this may be intentional, but I would still argue that most of it better fits with the MPAI idea that most people don’t really think things through.
Re: “Out of your League”
I was sitting by the lobby window waiting for my daughter to finish a dance class last night and a middle school girl, pretty overweight, walked by the window with that quote on her shirt.
Set up for a life of many challenges, I hope she turns out okay.
BillyS
You could have married earlier. “Waiting until you can afford it” is almost always an excuse. Though you would likely have had a much harder time finding a woman who wants to work through the early years as they did in the more distant past.
I do wonder how you stayed completely chaste during that time. This is a major flaw of expecting young men to be completely financially stable before they marry. Sexual release should only be within marriage according to Christian doctrine, but waiting until you are stable means that is pushed a long ways off. 10 years after puberty, or more, is far too long.
Most fathers are not going to send their daughters off to live in poverty. If you marry a girl who is willing to defy her parents and marry against their wishes then she probably isn’t the submissive wife type.
@Deti
He is right here, although I think he overlooks the degree to which acceptance of no fault divorce drives this. A man who marries young, especially to a young wife, is generally considered to be foolhardy in embracing such a high risk of divorce. This fits with the wakeup call narrative, where wives are doing God’s will by divorcing (or threatening divorce) if a husband doesn’t earn enough. Provision is outsized ultimately not because men insist on providing so much, but because conservatives and feminists alike have excessive expectations for provision in marriage, especially with regard to young marriage.
He is right in this regard, although once the man marries Pastor Wilson will explain that his wife will stop denying him sex if he is good enough and nice enough to her, as per the quote I offered up thread.
He is right on the culpability of men, but he is blaming the wrong men. The men we need to focus on are the ones who are encouraging women’s sins out of fear of confronting them. The focus here should be on Christian men in leadership roles (Pastors, fathers, other Christian leaders). Young men have a part to play, but focusing on them instead of the men who are truly failing to lead is a mistake.
Also, he is wrong about the marriage strike. As I pointed out six years ago, there is no such thing. What we see is delayed marriage and the resulting consequences. Men aren’t refusing to marry young hot women and only marrying when they can find an older ex carousel rider. What is happening is women are (as a group) pushing the age they look for a husband later and later in life. Men are responding to the weakened signal by (on the margins) working less hard to signal provider status. By the time the carousel riders suddenly want their loyal beta, they find that not all of their male peers knocked themselves out on education/career while they were devoting their sexual prime to alphas. This is something very different from a marriage strike.
@ Dalrock
One thing to point out on the whole marriage strike that often gets overlooked is that while most women still marry how many of them do so not because they love the man but because they realized they waited too long and don’t have better prospects? In other words, he’s the best they could do but they’d prefer something better.
It’s ironic that people love to blast previous eras where marriage had little to do with love. But isn’t that what these women do when they marry someone they don’t love because they held onto their SMV stock well after it started to crash? They don’t want to marry young because they’re afraid of settling but like you say that’s when they’re the rock stars. But by 32 the concert tour is over, the label company doesn’t renew the album contract, and they’re forced to perform at gambling casinos and mom and pop diners to pay the bills.
In short, women can still marry if they delay until their 30s but usually they will end up with something far less than what they were offered at 24-25.
Just as Rollo Tomassi says that marriage is no isolation from the sexual marketplace, getting married is not an indication of success in the marriage market.
So maybe the strike isn’t about marriage but the quality of the marriages being offered.
As I was outlining on Donalgraeme’s latest post, the contemporary church begins from a position of women’s forgiven blamelessness and men’s qualifying for those women’s gracious attentions.
Wilson is just one voice among a throng of ‘relevant’ pastors who are not only out of touch with the social structures and culture that leads to his belief in the church’s “problem”, but he’s been conditioned in a church culture that makes him unaware that he’s a wet fish in water. He’s simply one more oblivious pastor coming to the conclusions that obliviousness leads him to.
@ Rollo Tomassi
I wonder how much of it is unintentional ignorance or wilful ignorance on their part.
Churchianity all but pretends the manopshere doesn’t exist except to create a collection of strawmen in the form of libertine PUAs and fratboys a la Old School. At a certain point when someone ignores you it’s not because they’re oblivious but because it’s deliberate.
My aunt told me about a program at her Catholic church teaching young men to be good husbands. “That’s a waste of time,” I replied, “unless they’re going to charter a plane to the Philippines so these men can find good wives.” She has four sons but only one is married, and his wife is Filipina.
Feminists have already capped fiancee visas at two per lifetime and will eventually abolish them entirely. Spouse visas take over a year to process. So the only real alternative for American men is emigration, assuming they can still get passports.
Pastor Wilson wrote, “The nature of the pastoral problem is that of a large and growing population of unmarried women who would love to be married, and who would make good and godly wives. ”
I’d say the way Pastor Wilson paints today’s available women as “good and godly” marriage material exposes his pro-female bias. Does he realize the Christian wives are usually the spouses who end their marriages?
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“He is right on the culpability of men, but he is blaming the wrong men. The men we need to focus on are the ones who are encouraging women’s sins out of fear of confronting them.”
If your remark on the culpability of men refers to men who are having extramarital sex and refusing marriage, I agree with you (mostly). I can see calling out men on the sin of having extramarital sex, but not because they are refusing marriage.
And yes, men have to call women out on their sin. I cannot remember if you have done a post on this. It’s very difficult for men to call women out on their sin, bad behavior, etc. All of society, culture, laws, workplaces, etc. are arrayed against men in doing this. The entire cultural, legal, societal and religious apparatuses fall like a megaton of bricks on any man who dares say anything about a woman behaving badly. The moment any man meekly suggests that, uh, you know, maybe what she did was sort of wrong, the machinery is set in motion to destroy that man.
That’s a big part of the problem here. That, and the women saying the man is a bitter small dicked loser who can’t get laid.
There is no looking fondly on the “wife of your youth” for the modern Christian man. Only looking at a women rode hard and put away wet, just in time for you to attach the yoke around your neck under some delusion that this is a fair deal. Unfortunately, the line of willing betas to take on the yoke in exchange for a 33 year old harpy is never ending.
In order to ensure their sexual strategy of going full circle, they had to be sure lots of thirsty, desperate men would be waiting at the end of the line due to the lack of trickle down promiscuity. They have succeeded.
These pastors never seem to place any blame on the female. Like most, they assume all men are evil alphas, while ignoring the vast majority of average betas in their congregation. The apex fallacy is strong with most pastors. This is probably due to self-selection of pastors, who in majority, are seeking a position of forced social status after a lifetime of being billy bible boy.
What women desire and what they do are on contrary tracks. That’s why marriage doesn’t happen. It’s one thing to say many women are on a carousel. I do think some are, but many aren’t. The fact that many women are in school and career tracks is what’s delaying marriage. In the Christian community, you also find women in church service track. All these distractions leave few women available to settle down for a relationship, marriage, kids, and family. Women need to pare down their expectations and realize relationships are rewarding and the price is their own independence.
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@Deti
This isn’t who I had in mind with that statement. The men I had in mind are the ones I described in the very next line:
You also wrote:
Yes. It is very difficult, not to mention uncomfortable. It feels bad. On the other hand, calling out men is easy, and it feels heroic. I have a tag by the same name, but someone who wanted to see my arguments on this could start with the post Turning a blind eye.
As a father of three daughters, I can say I am sending them to college since completing their degree lowers their chance of divorce. However, a graduate degree lowers their chance of marrying.
I’m been peppering the comment section too much but might as well add some more frontline dispatches from a humble gunny sergeant in this culture war.
Another problem is that Wilson is basing his entire argument off of the feedback he gets – and it’s probably entirely from the women.
My own personal experience is that women my age are very, very vocal about what they think in church and how they think things should be. If they do not like a sermon or felt it was too long they will go straight to the pastor afterwards and tell him in a not-so-tactful manner that would mortify men like myself. If they don’t like the way a Bible study is set up they will march straight to the elder managing it and complain. It’s as though they are trying to prove to themselves they’re not a doormat. They do not seem to grasp the concept of hierarchy.
Meanwhile, the men who have been taught to do everything without complaining say nothing even when they’re suffering and will defer to church authority even those leaders speak foolishness out of a sense of loyalty and obedience.
So Wilson is hearing from the women but not from the men. However, he’s not seeking them out to get their perspective, either.
Just had an experience last weekend very relevant to this. Got invited to hang out at a bar with a few married friends and one of the wives’ single girl friends. We’re all believers in the same church. It was a setup. I’m 28 and single girl is 27. Single girl is actually attractive, believe it or not. Works out a ton and it shows. But we just didn’t click on a personal level at all. Afterwards, as I decided that despite her body, she is too weird and we don’t connect at all, I felt guilty. I thought “are my standards too high? Do I need to be humbled into accepting my league?” I also felt bad for her. This girl’s 27 and she’s single. How is she going to find somebody? I don’t click with her, but she’s attractive! What’s the deal?
Then I thought back over the night and noticed some key details. Single girl went away to graduate school and did who-knows-what for most of her twenties (I’m in the same church as her and I JUST met her- meaning she’s been MIA, possibly CC riding for the past 5 years). She wouldn’t shut up, especially about her job. There is just no ‘male-female’ dynamic with her. If we were together she would want to be the man in the relationship. The worst part was, as we were talking about a mutual friend who remarried after divorcing his adulterous first wife, she minimized the actions of the adulterous wife by saying, “but if it was JUST ONE MISTAKE, couldn’t they work through it?”
I must respond to other commenters here in agreement with the idea that economics is also a major driving factor. The fact of the matter is that most women would be fine with taking a lesser role and marrying earlier if they were assured of finding a higher earning man. Most women, though, don’t seem to want to build a life with men anymore and also do not seem willing to take a risk with a high potential man. So, they get their masters or do whatever for several years while no doubt engaging in the hedonistic single-girl lifestyle. Or she could be one of the rare ones. According to recent polls, 80% of evangelicals are not virginal into their 20s so don’t count on it. Combine the losing of virginity with a feeling of being unpure and they may just throw caution to the wind since 2 and 10 partners are both “unpure”.
The truth is, the dual income household is now almost required in the minds of most women due to lower earning power of men (most middle/upper middle households require 100k+ in cities with those jobs and the men just are not cutting it for a variety of reasons.) and materialism for the american dream. Also, they have been sold the lie that a career will be totally fulfilling to them. Interestingly, the point at which they become disillusioned with the pretty career lies they were told is usually around the same time their looks begin the downhill or they hit the wall and start the desperate grab for the beta to save them from the drudgery of work or simply take on the liability of her student loans.
I almost pity the modern Christian woman because her father, mother, teachers, and liberal media all tell her nearly the same things. Most 30 year old woman are hardened and jaded because the career was not the dream they thought it would be and hookup sex with local celebrities did not end up satisfying them. The average chump then has the honor of saving this hardened, jaded woman. Of course, she will place her history of frustration and resentment on this man who is also not the Mr. Right she envisioned.
@a1988 “Do I need to be humbled into accepting my league?”
This is a bizarre question for a setup. Evidently, your wing people thought you’re good enough. She is not your problem. It was a date despite having no warning. You don’t need to care about her. She is not a charity case. You should follow your instincts by not considering her again. It was a failed blind date. Don’t call her. Too many red flags to ignore.
@The Question regarding poor single Christian BUT of interest to all…
An extra fun skewing is that the actually awesome, decent Christian girls now have the option of marrying frivorced decent older men who made their money before the Great Recession. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame my elder brothers in Christ for remarrying younger women at all; I do however blame their ex wives and the people who encouraged them.
No details, but this actually happened to me. Finest Christian young woman I ever dated, almost married, laid off in the recession, we break up… She winds up married to a well off divorced engineer at least 15 years her senior. Look I can’t blame a woman for not wanting to marry an unemployed man, it doesn’t make biological sense to have babies with someone with no resources (once you’re married it’s a different story). Unfortunately young men today are the victims of a number of social and economic market bubbles that coalesce hard.
Some of us are doing okay, but a lot of us aren’t. For the sort of women you would actually want to marry, not only are they perishing few in number, but you’re in direct competition with men who seriously outclass you. It’s like a significantly less intense version of the Lost Boys of Mormon fundamentalism.
mike:
I’ve discussed this at length with other men before. Here’s a link to a discussion on it.
https://cailcorishev.wordpress.com/2014/02/12/navigating-the-murky-sexual-marketplace-good-girl-edition/comment-page-1/#comments
Points:
— young women want to get married, but not yet.
— if a young woman before age 25 gets married, things have to be absolutely PERFECT before she is willing to even consider marriage. Educations must be finished. Careers must be in place firmly, or at least on the road there, for both of them. They have to be living where they both want to live. They have to have the living arrangements they both want. They have to have enough money so that there aren’t any foreseeable hardships. Any debt must be foreseen and manageable.
— the man must be absolutely PERFECT. He has to be 2-4 years older. He must have a good job making very good money. He must be perfect in physical appearance in every way.
IN general, women are willing to marry young, but the conditions for marriage (the man, the money, the timing, the place, the lifestyle) must all be in place FIRST.
And women are signaling very clearly to men. the signal is
“I want to get married… someday. I will get married. Just NOT YET.”
Deti paraphrases Wilson
4. Porn is bad, mmmmkay? And I didn’t say these guys need to get married so they will avoid porn.
Dalrock
He is right in this regard, although once the man marries Pastor Wilson will explain that his wife will stop denying him sex if he is good enough and nice enough to her, as per the quote I offered up thread.
Both of you missed something. Probably a blind spot on Wilson’s part. Look at the text, he is defining porn solely in terms of “something men do”. Like Queen Victoria who allegedly couldn’t imagine what lesbians would do, Wilson cannot imagine that women can, and do, use porn – it just isn’t in the same form as the porn men use.
Given the lower sex drive that women have, not only could the good, churchgoing wife be denying sex to her husband as a means of control (“Weaponizing” sex, in other words) she could be seeing to her own satisfaction via the chain bookstore “romance” section, or via fanfic off the web, or her e-reader could be stuffed full of vampire/werewolf porn from Goodreads. So while the standard trope we read and hear from conservative feminists is all about “men who fap to porn while the noble wife lays sobbing in the marriage bed”, I am coming to the conclusion that is pure projection in a lot of cases. Possibly most, in fact.
Women, being more verbal, prefer their porn in textual or aural form. This isn’t even debatable, it’s an observable fact. As I wrote some years back, go into any church library in the US and start looking, see how long it takes to find romance fiction that has a little tittliation in it. Granted, most fiction written since the 1980’s has some tittilation in it, that’s the modern world (I have a relation who won’t read anything written after 1960 unless someone else reads it first specifically to check for “smut”. Every single page, and don’t miss anything “smutty” or else).
In this one line, Wilson shows how little he understands women, and how much of a pedestalizing, white knight he really is. He doesn’t know, or won’t admit, that women use porn, that women under 40 use it a heck of a lot – SOMEONE is buying all those werewolf/wereseal/vampire porn novels and it isn’t men, so…who could it be?
Wilson writes like an old man who is living in the distant past. As such he is simply not equipped to give advice to any man in 2016. I would tell him that to his face, if I could.
Anon,
Well of course. Unlike so many pastors and commentators, K-Lo is…. lonely.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kathryn_Jean_Lopez
Marriage 2.0 is only great for women that can actually catch a man and can invoke threatpoint. For those that can’t catch one (like K-Lo) its pretty much an epic nightmare. This gift of singleness is a curse for her. And she correctly blames feminism.
wiliam
As a father of three daughters, I can say I am sending them to college since completing their degree lowers their chance of divorce.
I believe that you are confusing correlation with causation. Anyone who has the diligence and future-time orientation to complete a 4 year degree in anything real (*) is less likely to blow up a marriage over unhaaaapiness. But that same future-time oriented person could also just apprentice right out of high school to a skilled trade or get a 2 year degree in a skill such as any of several medical fields and be just as successful, plus have job flexibility.
It’s the mindset that matters, not the piece of paper.
(*) There are college degrees that are negative investments. Anything that ends with “studies” is a degree that inculcates resentment, entitlement, and leads only to ‘work’ in government or some non-govermental institution that mainly lobbies. Degrees in “communications studies” are also nearly worthless. Foreign language, philosophy, art…these cost money and time, and teach nothing that can’t be learned by other means, plus they expose the students to tenured radical Boomers.
A lot of people are living in the past regarding college. It’s not 19** anymore.
Philosophical statement: the future may well be more “artisan” oriented than “degree” oriented.
@TomG I knew it was of a setup beforehand and agreed to it anyways. The problem is not that I was caught off guard by a surprise date. And I know my friends thought I was good enough for her. That’s not what I meant by the league bit. I’m saying there is a nagging feeling that, since I passed on that chick, my standards may be too high. If I was a little more realistic about what league I’m in, maybe I wouldn’t have passed (or so Pastor Wilson would say to a guy in my situation). But my overall point is that Dalrock is right. The girl I was set up with:
1. Delayed marriage- she’s 27 and attractive. If she is not married by now, that’s because she chose that.
2. Focused on career and academics over everything else and still seems to be all about prestige with her job- not the makings of a submissive wife.
3. Probably has a “past.” Girls with good bodies who go away to grad school don’t exactly stay “single” even if they are unmarried.
4. Has strange opinions on marriage (in addition to the infidelity conversation, she also talked a lot about how weird it was that her sister was married to her man less than a year after meeting him instead of keeping him on the hook for a long “relationship” and then a long engagement).
5. Is clearly desperate due to delaying marriage and approaching the wall. She went on about how great it was talking to me despite a total lack of chemistry, acted like she really liked me despite her not knowing anything about me (I didn’t get to talk much).
How many “Christian” girls ignored me while futzing around with bad-boys trying to “bring them to God”?
How many “Christian” girls blew me off because I didn’t prescribe to their version of Curchianity?
How many times I was invited to an older person’s house for the subversive attempt to introduce me to female offspring, who I may have actually have been interested in had they put down their phone at the table?
And then when I became 27, all these late twenties/early thirties girls started paying attention to me. No thanks.
I went overseas, met and married a 19 year old Ukrainian girl who treats me like a king and gave up everything she had to attach her life to mine. That’s a woman who deserves my loyalty and lifelong commitment. Her actions are more biblical even though she is not a believer, because she understands her nature and the nature of man.
“Waiting till I could afford it” meant the multiple trips to Eastern Europe to find her, heh.
1988, I agree that points 2 and 4 are red flags. Given her age, 5 is of significance.
Here’s something else to ponder: how much student loan debt is she carrying? Something that old men like Wilson don’t even bother with is the effect of $10K to $30K or even more of student loan debt many college-degreed women carry. It’s actually a reverse dowry: marry this woman and *poof* see your net worth plummet. A man cannot afford to take on the equivalent of a car loan, maybe a pretty luxury car loan, too casually. He has to be ready to service that debt, because if she decides to stay home, what’s he gonna do?
Returning to point 2: years ago I looked at some of the Framingham heart study dataset. This is the longitudinal study that started back in the 50’s or 60’s, they tried to list every single risk factor for heart attack in men that they could, because men were dropping from heart attacks in their 50’s were terrible regularity. I recall that the risk due to high cholesterol and the risk due to “married to woman with college degree” (this was much less common then) were the same. Yes, there was a time when marriage to a potentially contentious woman was considered a health risk.
Now, it’s supposed to be a good thing…
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. For the record, we are in complete agreement regarding the disincentives and their root causes. I believe that I may have failed to communicate clearly. We agree that Wilson is far from the worst; therefore might he be responsive to the red pill?
An honest man — particularly a pastor — should be open to truth, and since Wilson sees some of the situation clearly I wonder if it is worth the effort to speak redemptively to a brother regarding his error.
Nothing about water flowing uphill in Idaho. I am giving him the benefit of the doubt that he is sincere and sincerely mistaken. I only know of Doug Wilson through your blog, FWIW, but as a church elder I favor Matthew 18 attempts at correcting and rescuing a brother in a position of influence. Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see pastors teaching an authentic masculinity? How will they ever do this if no one approaches them as a brother?
@ Dalrock
I think the response could use its own term, since (as you’ve described before) it takes a number of years, depending on the guy, before he stops trying so hard. Bachelor capitulation?
@ ayatollah1988
This is a normal thing. When someone talks a lot and shares with you even if you don’t talk much they will feel closer to you. In general, the more a woman opens up, especially emotionally, the more she will feel close to someone.
As someone else said.. 2 and 4 are questionable.
My church, which is in an urban area, has a number of young, married couples. I’m talking people 23 or 24 who met in college and either married then or immediately after. And some couples in that range moving towards marriage. I also know a number of young women in their early to mid 20s who are single and would like to be married – or so they say. Whether they are actually living life in accordance with that desire and making it a priority is another thing.
I should mention that the men in all these relationships are completely beta. I don’t know one married man in my church who appears to be even co-equal in the way he and his wife relate. The others are all upstaged by their wife in public.
I’ve also had multiple men try to fix me up with Christian girls. I sense that they might be hearing it from these women.
Isn’t Kathryn Jean Lopez single?
NEguy
I should mention that the men in all these relationships are completely beta. I don’t know one married man in my church who appears to be even co-equal in the way he and his wife relate. The others are all upstaged by their wife in public.
I dunno, it for sure is common in the men over 35, some of them are hopelessly betaized. A few 20-somethings I know that are (a) married (b) churchgoing seem to be better off, in that the men are not too beta, and their wives don’t act up in public. Then again, they’ve all been married for at most a couple of years, so…too early to tell. But it surely does seem that churchgoing men today are very much betaized.
The feminization of church probably acts as a filter for this. The whole “Jesus is my BFF who luvs me as I am no matter what I do” doesn’t really appeal to male thinking, from my point of view, although women lurv it. That’s one strike.
It’s interesting to me that sometimes churchgoing people slip from talking about “church as the bride of Christ” to “church people are the bride of Christ” to “churchgoing individuals are the bride of Christ”. That’s awkward for heterosexual men, to say the least, and another strike.
Isn’t Kathryn Jean Lopez single?
Yes, she is.
I am a pastor, and this is a pressing pastoral problem. And I have talked to many other pastors who agree that it is a pressing pastoral problem. The nature of the pastoral problem is that of a large and growing population of unmarried women who would love to be married, and who would make good and godly wives. In the conservative church, it would not be unusual to find this cohort of women outnumbering the men in the same station of life by a factor of about 5 to 1.
I see claims similar to this made by a lot of other American pastors, but at this point in my life I’m stuck reaching one inescapable conclusion: They’re all blowing smoke out of their collective asses.
I spent the whole of my twenties in a fairly conservative church as an unmarried, gainfully employed young man who didn’t live with his parents. That pretty much gets you Dalit status in modern American evangelicalism. They are not happy to see you come in, because as an unattached bachelor they view you first and foremost as a “wolf” who has come in to steal their daughters away from a bright and promising future, whether by getting her pregnant or worse, marrying her before she has a chance to finish her graduate degree. And don’t even think about mentioning — however offhandedly — that you’d like to find a wife, because the likely response you’re going to get will be, “We’re not running a dating service here, son!”
If there really are so many eligible women wanting marriage, why aren’t the pastors who know them putting a call out to single men telling them that they know where to find them? Isn’t that kind of what you do when you’re trying to reach a certain target demographic? I’ve heard a lot of pastors insult and excoriate single men for being unmarried past a certain age, but I don’t recall hearing even one saying something along the lines of: “Are you a single Christian man who would like to have a wife? Someone of godly character, who you’d be attracted to, and treated you with respect? Come see me! I know women like this, and I’d like to help both of you attain your goal.”
. . . Except that if they did that, then they might have to worry about being exposed for offering something they either don’t have, or don’t want to give away.
“That’s awkward for heterosexual men, to say the least, and another strike.”
That has always made me uncomfortable. The church, as a whole, makes much more sense.
Love that George Clooney clip: her voice is soooo annoying – and then George went and ruined it all by marrying anorexic Anal Anadingdong of Counsel. A man needs a wife not a woman with a brief for tomorrow in the Tower Bridge Magistrates Court (or is that beneath her). Anyway, George is waaay out of that actresses league: I think I’d go gay just to marry him myself; because, face-it guys: wouldn’t you want a wife who is as cool and self-controlled as George.
Maybe a bit OT, but if we’re on the subject of the marriage market for a godly wife, I wondered if anyone had seen this . . . .
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2016/mar/8/christianity-today-apologizes-after-running-dads-c/
To sum it up, an apparent church elder with a single daughter in her twenties placed an ad in the classifieds section of Christianity Today magazine seeking to fill a “Son-in-law” position. Apparently the internet noticed, and the magazine removed the ad and apologized, saying it was “in poor taste” and did not “reflect beautiful orthodoxy.”
I saw the ad (and you can too at the link), but I’m still really not sure what they thought they were apologizing for. There’s no Biblical rule against a father seeking a groom for his daughter that I remember, is there? Come to think of it, didn’t we just see yet another pastor lamenting how many single Christian women he knows that just can’t find a husband? This might be the first example I can think of where the father and/or pastor took the novel step of informing prospective husbands exactly where and how they could find her.
Or maybe the church is just more interested in griping about and assigning blame for a problem than actually doing a damn thing to solve it. Your thoughts?
AR, re: college degree lowering risk of divorce.
Thank you for addressing that nonsense. Saved me the trouble.
My daughters will not be going to college. They are homeschooled, extremely intelligent, and well on their way to serious hotness. They already do all the cooking and cleaning in our house, and enjoy learning new recipes to surprise Dad with. They spend plenty of time mowing the yard, gardening, tending chickens, and playing musical instruments. Most importantly, they are aware that their life’s occupation will be wife, so they are constantly learning about a wife’s role — the wife is to husband as Christian is to Christ — and preparing for that role. My goal is to get them married as soon after 18th birthday as possible, to men at least 5 years older.
Sending your girls to college (even a “Christian” college), is a disservice of mammoth proportions. Not to mention a ridiculous waste of money.
Darwinian Arminian, “Your thoughts?”
My first thought was, “That magazine is staffed by wimps crapping their pants in fear of the feminist crowd.”
My second thought was, “Does that dad really believe that the descriptors ‘educated’ and ‘careered’ will make his daughter sound more attractive to men?”
My third thought was, “Does that dad really believe that labeling a potential husband as ‘unworthy’ is going to attract a man possessing functioning testicles?”
My third thought was, “Hmmm, a classified ad. Not a bad idea. Gotta get husbands for my daughters one way or another.”
Oops, I had 2 third thoughts!
A lot of young Christian women have bought into the idea that there should be no thinking about marriage until college – or grad school – is over. And they are encouraged by their parents in this, I think. But marriage in college or during grad school is workable, even nowadays.
Our church is in a college town, and at any time we have 8 – 10 grad students as members, both male and female. About half are married when they arrive, and during their time in the church (5-7 years for a PhD), each couple that has none when they arrive will usually have 2 – 3 children (one couple was on track for three, but the third became triplets). There’s a lot of support for young families.
Interestingly, out of a couple dozen single students, only two of them have ever married each other – all the rest have gone outside. The more interesting cases were a guy near the end of his PhD marrying a 19 year old, a guy finishing his 3rd PhD finding a woman from Asia with 2 (whose parents had given up on her ever marrying), and a Law graduate just starting out who the pastor and his wife matched with a friend’s daughter who had a medical degree. In the last case, two good jobs went a long way in paying off the joint $100K+ of college debt. Most of the couples, years later, seem to be doing OK.
But as near as I can tell, there’s no pressure brought to bear to marry – although there are often introductions for those who have indicated interest. This is one of the delights of the pastor’s wife.
The real telling thing will be this: for a long time, other than the grad students, we had only younger children, no teens (a missing half-generation, due mainly to the church’s size). It will be interesting to see what will happen now as that younger group is entering high school and college. Most of them come from parents who married young.
mike @ 4:28 pm:
“Most women, though, don’t seem to want to build a life with men anymore and also do not seem willing to take a risk with a high potential man.”
Quoted for truth.
…
TheRealGeoBooth says:
April 22, 2016 at 5:32 pm
“Wouldn’t it be refreshing to see pastors teaching an authentic masculinity? How will they ever do this if no one approaches them as a brother?”
By reading Dalrock’s blog or asking us men why we won’t marry. By asking himself if he would prefer an old woman to a young chick then asking himself why he’s pushing the opposite. Teaching authentic masculinity requires nothing more of Wilson than telling those women the truth, that it’s their fault men don’t find them attractive and they need to improve themselves.
Mike, you said something about women getting unhappy with their careers. I hear the bitching from my female coworkers but it’s hamster logs. I know of several with very unfulfilling jobs, young children, church goers, and husbands with $65k to $90k jobs, but they keep their kids in daycare, and bitch about their shitty jobs. That’s what is the norm. Part of that is getting use from their effing degree, but I think it’s mostly materialism, and a pussy culture that is terrified of making a judgment. Shoot, I just realised that I’m running a foul of what Wilson and TGC and CBMW thinks is the proper tone and attitude of a biblical man is.
The message I got as a young man in churches,seem to sound like this: “Our churches are just packed with WONDERFUL young women desperate to meet a godly man”. What I observed: the women were not so numerous, not particularly wonderful, and their taste in men was not very different than rock groupies.
Now I believe the agenda is/was being set by Mothers Of Ugly Daughters. MOUD
@Galloper6
Love it – MOUD
@GQ And pastor Wilson is to gain this knowledge how? He needs a brother who will approach him as a brother and not an adversary. It’s easier to clock somebody than it is to confront him in Christian charity.
If we believe the church is the hope of the world (I do), we need to quit writing each other off. It’s a poor advertisement for life in Christ, and we are going to need allies. Some differences are irreconcilable, granted, but I don’t see much of an effort to win leaders who teach otherwise over to a biblical view of manhood.
We all agree there’s plenty wrong in the church — what I suggest is corresponding with these flawed teachers, showing respect, and offering what we know.
@TheRealGeoBooth
Pastor Wilson has been blogging for some time, so he has to know this is how blogging is done. Blogging is more of a conversation that traditional publishing. Not only do you get immediate feedback in the comments, but other bloggers will write posts in response. This then gives the original blogger the opportunity to write a response.
What I personally hope for is the responding blogger:
1) Links to my post.
2) Quotes the part he disagrees with.
3) Explains his disagreement, offering links to facts if applicable.
4) Bonus points if they keep the disagreement focused on my arguments/statements and not me as a person.
This wasn’t a fisking, and I didn’t call him an idiot (nor do I think he is). I quoted his argument and explained where he went wrong.
What I personally hope for is the responding blogger:
1) Links to my post.
2) Quotes the part he disagrees with.
3) Explains his disagreement, offering links to facts if applicable.
4) Bonus points if they keep the disagreement focused on my arguments/statements and not me as a person.
This wasn’t a fisking, and I didn’t call him an idiot (nor do I think he is). I quoted his argument and explained where he went wrong.
I like this and its a great template. The truth is, I am still trying to get the hang of it. I end up writing some pretty stupid $*&% and then wonder if I should take it down.
Thanks for this.
Pingback: Reference: Women, Not Men, Are Driving The Delay In Christian Marriage | Donal Graeme
@Dalrock You are the model for how this should be done, and if it isn’t clear I hold you in the highest esteem, I’m saying so now. My point is not that you are doing anything wrong — only that I’m curious whether some errant leaders could be convinced of their error if confronted in a less public way.
I have my own blog site, and I’m the last man to argue in favor of shutting down conversation. I think, however, that the mechanics of blogging as conversation are not always obvious, and pastors vary in how well they hear when the flock speaks back.
TheRealGeoBooth @ 9:27 pm :
“@GQ And pastor Wilson is to gain this knowledge how? He needs a brother who will approach him as a brother and not an adversary.”
Reread my suggestions. He can read guys like Dalrock… not adversarial. He can ask us why we don’t want his church’s women… not adversarial. He can recognize his own hypocrisy… adversarial but not our fault.
Besides, I’ve tried the brotherly approach and it doesn’t work. They smile and nod and understand my concerns and nothing changes. Remember these people have a Cult of Nice: if everybody is polite and cooperative then “God” is happy with the way things are. Playing gotcha games like “would you prefer an old bride or a young one?” at least force the Churchian to confront his own hypocrisy. Christ Himself used that tactic on false teachers as an alternative to denouncing them. Luke 7:36-47 & 20:1-8 for examples.
If you prefer the brotherly approach then by all means, contact him yourself. Show me how it’s done.
It’s my perception that many young people today think that when they get married they should have a standard of living similar to what their parents have today. They don’t understand, or maybe even know, that their parents often started their marriage in a tiny house with old furniture and one rundown car. Of course, the parents may think their own children deserve so much better than they had themselves. So, whether it’s the parents or the children, I wonder how much impact these expectations have on being financially ready to marry.
GeoBooth, Wilson’s blog uses DISQUS for comments, a system that seems to make it pretty easy to police comments. I spent some time on his second posting today in the comment stream and some commenters were complaining of comments being deleted. DISQUS itself is somewhat flaky, though, and comments can disappear then reappear.
Wilson’s second posting pretty explicitly makes clear he at least skimmed the comment stream of his first posting. So he’s familiar with the concept. Perhaps he’s not all that interested in critics outside of his domain.
People who spend time in one-way communication, such as teachers/professors, journalists and apparently preachers are generally not well prepared when someone…talks back to them. It appears that Wilson is one such man.
@AR Noted! Thanks.
@GQ The Teacher said to be cunning as serpents, gentle as doves, so I have no issue with what you refer to as “gotcha” questions. Horses for courses, rather than a fixed approach.
Dalrock’s post got me thinking about how to fix what looks like an intractable problem. My belief is that, for a leader, being called out in public will not yield the desired outcome. So I asked a question.
Somehow I still believe that most of us don’t change because we read a book or a post, or because we (occasionally) lost an argument. That only leaves the relational approach or fatalism. Personally, I can’t go there.
Anonymous Reader says Wilson doesn’t seem to be a two-way communicator, so it would appear he would react according to the pattern you’ve experienced. That’s a shame. And it’s a shame you’ve seen it enough to regard it as normative.
The problem is the women. Yeah, boys grow up thinking that it’s men who don’t want to be responsible, but when you grow up, you realize that it’s girls that don’t want to grow up. When their ticket’s suddenly not free, some suddenly start thinking it might be time to grow up, but even then, most don’t want to grow up, they just think it might be time to.
I do get the impression though, that at least right now, younger women are a little more grown up than their mothers were at their age… anyways, all those people wringing their hands about marriage, should do so with the sex that has the most responsibility in the matter.
w/r/t the expectations of daughters. I notice many fathers provide so much lifestyle for their daughters. It seems to me that it is much better to provide minimal lifestyle, to allow a daughter’s material expectations to be met by a broader range of potential provider mates, such as any men are interested in being any more. I believe the gentleman above raising his daughters to expect to become good wives is likely to have daughters with more overall life satisfaction than my two from my family v1. I ‘woke up’ to much of this dynamic too late to save them from the surrounding culture. We’ll see how well I do guiding the fruits of family v2 (yes, with a Filipina) given the acceleration of the surrounding narrative. w/r/t what preachers write or say – most are not independently wealthy, and along with most of the rest of us must pander to the source of their material well being. Of course this circular echo chamber pandering concept applies to any number of effectively crowdfunded content providers in the femosphere, the manosphere, the churchosphere or the m-s-m-osphere. This makes the publications of those like Dalrock who appear to not require audience participation for their daily bread all the more potentially prophetic. Given my awareness of the various destructive forces in play these days, I only request that some energy may be shifted from detailing the problems to proposing potential paths forward through the minefields before us all. The seemingly endless litany of faults and flaws is sometimes draining. Are there really so few examples of the righteous?
>>>”It’s as though they are trying to prove to themselves they’re not a doormat. They do not seem to grasp the concept of hierarchy…. meanwhile, the men who have been taught to do everything without complaining say nothing even when they’re suffering and will defer to church authority”
Bingo! The squeaky bitch gets the anointing oil in this pastor’s church. The loud mouth single moms complain and Beta Godman mouths the lies like a puppet.
@ayatollah1988: Your story is interesting. The girl may have been nervous and chattered to much because she genuinely “liked” you especially since you mention her apparent desperation. The problem is you say you didn’t talk much. Did you at least try to take control of the conversation? Did you tell her the truth that you want a submissive woman who is interested in a family, not her career? You had a GOLDEN opportunity to NEG the living crap out of her by telling her to stop being a chatterbox or whatever. Had you done even this basic PUA technique- teasing her in a light hearted and fun way, or had you displayed even a scintilla of game, I am taking bets your “date” might have gone differently.
“7 Reasons Young Men Should Marry Before Their 23rd Birthday.”
My response was to laugh. I DID try to do this. Had the weekly Bible study group at church praying for me in this regard.
@Matt Davis
>My church is full of young women who would love to be married, and would make good, Christian wives. But they’ve swung the other direction and have neglected their own sexual value because they can get away with it. In short, the church is full of young, unattractive, professional women who know that the competition is pretty weak
The second half of your comment seems wise, but the attitude you demonstrated in the portion above is an example of the problem.
Unless that part was sarcasm.
You wrote “[the] young women … would make good, Christian wives”.
But these women, by your admission, are “unattractive, professional women”.
A good, Christian wife will be:
– busy at home. Titus 2:3-5. So a professional woman is highly unlikely to be suitable for becoming a “Christian” wife. She is deliberately training for, and pursuing, the wrong path.
– a woman who dresses like a woman (Deut 22:5), has long hair like a woman (1 Cor 11) and has self-control (Titus 2:3-5) and thus not fat. This kind of woman would be attractive. Thus, the unattractive, fat, short-haired, pants-wearing woman is not suitable for becoming a “Christian” wife.
Just as my choices have consequences, so do hers. Living in rebellion to God’s word is not appealing to the man who declares, “but as for me AND my house, we WILL serve the Lord” (Josh 24:14-15)
I do like your comment on valuing the “women on the basis of their “spiritual measure of value” alone.” Matt 21:28-32 shows that actions are more important than words. A woman’s actions of preparing herself for full-time work outside the home, choosing to be obese, choosing to cut her hair and choosing to wear men’s clothing are all more important than the words coming out of her mouth, when evaluating her “spiritual measure of value”.
@The Question
>pressure for young men to marry … Nobody ever says this directly but it is a value conveyed through a combination of words, actions, and behavior.
In my experience it is pretty direct. A lead pastor’s openly-disobedient wife (Deut 22:5, 1 Cor 11) indicated I had failed to marry due to the attitude I revealed by a comment I made on a woman’s behaviour (in my impression, she was indicating I was a failure). My father suggested I should marry a similarly openly-disobedient woman (who was also another man’s wife! Matt 5:31-32).
I am pretty patient and tolerant. But I sometimes am puzzled as to what is the proper response, when someone openly treats me with contempt, such as suggesting I should take a woman who refuses to try to live up to her obligations. How about, “No, I am not a worthless piece of garbage, thank you very much.”
@TheDeti
>Women absolutely refuse to accept any challenges to their conduct.
+1
@Gunner Q
> If Churchians truly wanted to help men avoid temptation, they’d teach the wives to be her husband’s enthusiastic, exclusive love toy.
Holy batman! I foresee either a huge number of complaints by the many lazy, rebellious women, or some lightbulbs going on over the heads of the women who were ignorant but actually trying. I wonder whether this type of sermon could be beneficial? I have been thinking about giving this exact kind of teaching. In addition to the obvious 1 Cor 7, Prov 5 would be valuable, as would several dozen verses from Song of Songs.
I suspect this teaching has never been done in a denominational church. Anyone?
@Mychael
>Looking back, I would have preferred this to what I did.
Thanks for the comment. It is encouraging to see a woman exhibit self-awareness.
@E
>I went overseas, met and married a 19 year old Ukrainian girl who treats me like a king and gave up everything she had to attach her life to mine. That’s a woman who deserves my loyalty and lifelong commitment. Her actions are more biblical even though she is not a believer, because she understands her nature and the nature of man.
That’s great. I hope God keeps your marriage strong.
I also have thought much about how some Eastern European women ACT in a more Biblical manner than the women who say they are Christians. Again, Matt 21:28-32 applies.
@Splashman
>Most importantly, they are aware that their life’s occupation will be wife, so they are constantly learning about a wife’s role
Wow, that is great. You are being an unusually wise father. Titus 2:1-5. I wish you the best.
@TheRealGeoBooth
Good to see you around 🙂 I agree with your thoughts about trying to rescue teachers who are “sincere and sincerely wrong”. “If your brother sins, go and point out their fault, just between the two of you. If they listen to you, you have won them over.”
From a perspective of laziness/cowardice (take your pick), I will say it is easier to commend right teaching when I see it, pointing out differences with the evil that is so common. I actually need to write a letter to the pastor’s wife tomorrow. In the prep for service last Sunday, she softly directed (you know how women speak) another woman to dress in women’s clothing when she will be up on stage during a service. (Deut 22:5).
I have less frequently tried to correct men. Of the two pastors I recall trying to correct, neither attempt was successful. Now, the perceived success is irrelevant to whether I should obey God by trying. As a human with emotions and an intellectual desire to limit my endeavours to those where I have a reasonable chance of being useful and successful, this is discouraging however. But again, not a valid excuse.
God bless.
And again, thanks to Dalrock for your service, and for your efforts to focus on useful facts and teaching, rather than descending to name calling or insults. 2 Tim 2:22-26 says in part, “and the Lord’s servant must not quarrel. He must be kind to everyone, able to teach, not resentful. Those who oppose him, he must gently instruct, in the hope that God will grant them repentance, leading them to a knowledge of the truth, and that they will come to their senses and escape from the trap of the devil, who has taken them captive to do his will.”
I am sure I am not the only one who prays that God will bless you.
Wilson continues, echoing Dr. Mohler’s concern that porn will weaken the power of the wakeup call in the form of denied sex:
If the divine, flawless women that Wilson worships cannot even complete with Internet porn, then they are useless. Note that it is still men who have to accept this substandard product…
If Internet porn is already beating out women, according to him, then he REALLY won’t like VR Porn on the Oculus Rift and HTC Vive..
I do get the impression though, that at least right now, younger women are a little more grown up than their mothers were at their age…
If by ‘grown up’, you mean N, then you are right.
Today’s women have an N that rivals their age (in years).
Their mothers had an N that was only 2-5 before marriage.
Of course, N should not be used as a metric of maturity. Not by any stretch…
Interesting. The bottom line is a man getting married to a “good wife” is a fool. Bare foot and pregnant is a stupid move by law, culture and now church. She is going to divorce you, she is going to play the no sex for you, she is going to find a reason to be unhappy. Some family law judge is going to fix it. Take his children from him. And because she was a “good wife” he will take his future income as spousal support. There is no work around. It is the law and she votes and she has no place in setting working policing and long term structuring of society and civilization. And she votes.
I have two daughters and I plan on them going to college and try to give as much guidance as possible to avoid the sexy carousel rider path. I have spoken to the older daughter about marriage and tried to get her to think of the type of man she will be attracted to. Rock solid man or the cool sexy guy. Her mother makes it real hard due to her behavior.
Next option is for her to be prepared to live self sufficient due to the message I give my son. Over all it is a real shitty place in history to have children, so it is play the hand you are dealt. So first play is no lies all red pill truth to start with.
Will be interesting to converse with some fellas here with early ten children on how they are with red pill eyes preparing their children for the world we have today.
@TheRealGeoBooth
And pastor Wilson is to gain this knowledge how? He needs a brother who will approach him as a brother and not an adversary. It’s easier to clock somebody than it is to confront him in Christian charity.
That knife cuts two ways. Yes, it might be better if we could deal with Wilson as a brother in error who could be taken aside for correction in private, rather than as an adversary who needs to be taken down in public before the crowd. But if that’s true, then Wilson also owes the unmarried men of the church the same courtesy. He runs a big church, and I’d be willing to bet that he personally knows a few young men faithful to Christ who for whatever reason haven’t managed to gain a wife yet (which by the way, isn’t even a sin). He just insulted their status both as believers and as men because it would launch a discussion that he wanted to have; why should they not take that as a massive slap in the face?
When you’ve just finished tossing a grenade to the other party, a call for peace and civility tends to ring a bit hollow.
One of the really bad parts of this is that it will probably only make Wilson’s problem of single women without prospects worse in the long run. The other day I found a tweet that apparently traced back to a young Christian blogger:
I can’t disagree with him on this, and a piece like Wilson’s only goes to show why he’s right.The Pastor in Idaho (and many others along with him, cough, Chandler) will attack the single men of the church for the sake of comforting the single women of the church. The single women will be encouraged to think more poorly of their single brothers, which in turn will mean they’re unlikely to see them as possibilities for marriage. The single men will grow frustrated with this, as they also likely lose patience with pastors who continue to use them as a target for their best insults. In the end, many will simply leave out of disgust, resulting in even fewer single men in the church as potential husbands for the remaining women.
And then the church leaders can find a way to pin all of the blame for this on the remaining single men, and the cycle will begin once more.
ayatollah1988
Then I thought back over the night and noticed some key details. Single girl went away to graduate school and did who-knows-what for most of her twenties (I’m in the same church as her and I JUST met her- meaning she’s been MIA, possibly CC riding for the past 5 years). She wouldn’t shut up, especially about her job. There is just no ‘male-female’ dynamic with her. If we were together she would want to be the man in the relationship. The worst part was, as we were talking about a mutual friend who remarried after divorcing his adulterous first wife, she minimized the actions of the adulterous wife by saying, “but if it was JUST ONE MISTAKE, couldn’t they work through it?”
Could you send her over to me? I won’t make assumptions about her or my future with her based on one conversation, and if she did turn out to have the wrong attitudes and behavior, then at least I would have gotten some dating experience, and other women would be able to see that I capable of getting an attractive female interested in me.
Seriously, though, man, I wouldn’t count someone out yet until they give you a concrete reason to do so. One thing I hate about female behavior is how women prejudge men by saying “he’s boring” or “he’s creepy” before they even really know anything about him. Also, pre-selection is a real thing, unfortunately, so if it didn’t work out with her based on genuine reasons (e.g. she’s proven to be a feminist carousel rider who seeks to dominate a man), then at least other women would be able to see you have options. Of course, maybe you have plenty of options, anyway, but if friends are trying to set you up, and you’re also concerned about your league, then it sounds like maybe your options are limited, and you need to get the ball rolling (if you’re interested in dating and marriage at all, of course, and it seems you are).
PM: Most fathers are not going to send their daughters off to live in poverty.
What does this mean? There’s a difference between marrying …
1. A young man who’s slovenly dressed, often drunk, often late to work or unemployed, and unable to deal politely with customers, clients, and co-workers, vs. …
2. A young man who’s honest, sober, loyal, and hardworking, but will require 20 years before he’s able to provide his wife the upper-middle class lifestyle she grew up in.
There’s nothing wrong with daddy’s little princess leaving daddy’s castle to marry Young Man No. 2, and struggling alongside him for 20 years before they re-attain an upper middle class lifestyle.
Daddy’s little princess is supposed to leave the castle and share in her husband’s struggle — while being a faithful, pleasant, and devoted helpmate to him throughout that struggle. Only then will she be entitled to have him wear wife googles for the remainder of their days.
This is the goal. To bad the husband by law is considered worthless sap unworthy of any consideration.
@ayatollah1988,
I agree with bluepillprofessor and Hank Flanders on this; give her two more dates and then evaluate. Anytime you meet a single person of a similar age in a “blind date” situation it is bound to be very high pressure for both of you. Her babbling about her job could have been her method of dealing with the pressure. Women have been taught not to come on strong about marriage and family on the first date, it appears desperate and clingy.
I met my wife at church. Our first meeting left me with a negative impression of her. Later I bumped into her outside of church and we had a nice conversation. We have been happily married for 23 years.
On a third date you could ask her why isn’t she married yet? Does she want to have kids and stay home with them? What does she believe about what Ephesians 5 teaches about marriage and submission? Should a wife submit if the husband is not leading correctly? Keep those topics light and short, don’t make them long and somber. Deep Strength has some good suggestions at his blog.
@Deti,
“I’ve pondered sometimes why pastors don’t get this stuff, why they don’t understand it.”
Many pastors and priests don’t get this because it was easy for them to find a good woman who has not frivorced them. They don’t realize all the attraction factors that their job and position as AMOG of the church group gave them. Just speaking confidently in public without reading notes makes a powerful, attractive impression on most women. College professor’s refer to this as the “podium effect”. Also if a woman marries the head pastor or priest she gets social status for herself, she becomes the Queen Bee of the church.
I know two families with very attractive daughers, one a 9 and the other an 8 or 8.5. Both girls married their high school youth pastor. The youth pastors were several years older. The 9 married as soon as she graduated from high school, and the other married one year after high school. That was 15 or 20 years ago and those women each have multiple kids and appear to be happy, stay at home moms. Both of those pastors would have a hard time understanding what the problem is for the guys who have full time secular jobs and are still single.
Discussions about men and marriage always leave me with ambivalent feelings. I didn’t marry until 30 (even though I could have afforded it much sooner) after years of some of the same ambivalence that still haunts me after 32 years of marriage. On the one hand, I feel completely sold on the idea of marriage. Civilizational health depends on a wholesome marriage culture; hence, marriage “strikes” only contribute to the already advanced decay of our civilization and to selfishness in individuals. But on the other hand I have to concede that, in our current society, the deck is stacked against men: public opinion obstinately continues to view women as victims even in cases when they are clearly the winners, and our legal system obliges by writing that opinion into stone. It’s hard to be an advocate for marriage in such an environment. But some good things in life cannot be obtained without facing daunting odds.
>My church is full of young women who would love to be married, and would make good, Christian wives.
Is it? Is it really?
What’s your definition of “young”? 21? Or 29?
How many men have these future “good Christian wives” been through while waiting to get married?
Doug Wilson needs to read and reflect on the large impact Mandy Hale is having on young Christian women. Hale claims to be a Christian and has a large following among Christian women. She has written four books and has 26,700 Twitter followers. Hey Doug, she has more Twitter followers than you do!
Mandy Hale is 37, single, and never married. She encourages Christian women to “never settle.” She spent many, many years in a relationship with a guy who would not commit, but she persisted instead of wisely breaking it off after a year. She encourage travel, travel, and feelings. Many view her as a positive role model. Is Doug aware of her influence and teachings?
http://www.amazon.com/Mandy-Hale/e/B007A8Q3II/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1
Somewhat OT a recent posting from Keoni Galt
http://hawaiianlibertarian.blogspot.com/2016/04/genx-vision-2020.html
A commenter led me to post the link here
….I hate the ridiculous smartphone consent apps, it makes me feel like …. and back in lol high school. My female experience is, that good men are around, but they are only available to nice women
ayatollah1988 up the thread sketched out a matchmaking attempt. One of the lures rolled out was the woman’s graduate degree. This is pretty standard fare, men are supposed to be attracted to women with more education, maybe more than they have. Why does this matter in this thread?
Because it’s foolish to conflate male attractors with female attractors, due to the underlying assumption that men and women are exactly the same except women can have babies. It’s foolish because it’s false, demonstrably false. There’s more than enough research out there from the brain on out to explode this. Yet it is an assumption underlying much of modern life.
Women like men who lead. Leaders are not always “nice”. The modern churches in some ways are, as on commenter up the thread remarked a “cult of nice”. So men are taught not just in the k-12 system and uni’s, but especially in churches to be “nice”.
Women don’t find nice men attractive; they want the man they are attracted to, to be nice to them in various ways. Men do not find obnoxious women attractive.
“Where have all the good men gone?” is the wail? You drove them away, dearie, with that obnoxious, sarcastic, snarky, mouth of yours. There are plenty of good men out there, but only for the nice women, to return to the top of my comment.
Postscript: when was the last time anyone heard or read an exhortation from a church to women, “Ladies, be Nice to your man”? I frankly can’t recall ever hearing or seeing that. Perhaps that’s part of the problem Wilson is facing, with the “man shortage” in his church? There’s also a shortage of women whom men find worth wifing up?
2. A young man who’s honest, sober, loyal, and hardworking, but will require 20 years before he’s able to provide his wife the upper-middle class lifestyle she grew up in.
There’s nothing wrong with daddy’s little princess leaving daddy’s castle to marry Young Man No. 2, and struggling alongside him for 20 years before they re-attain an upper middle class lifestyle.
Daddy’s little princess is supposed to leave the castle and share in her husband’s struggle — while being a faithful, pleasant, and devoted helpmate to him throughout that struggle. Only then will she be entitled to have him wear wife googles for the remainder of their days.
From a male perspective, this looks like a reasonable compromise which offers desirable long-term results for both parties involved. It worked in an era when young women had no other options, unless you count becoming a nun or a prostitute. But today, no woman will put up with it. There is one simple reason for that. Female hypergamy takes no chances, accepts no risks, accepts no sacrifice for any potental long-term result. Women are the perishable sex with a small window of time for mating and reproduction, and hypergamy functions accordingly. The young man in question can only *promise to become* the fully formed male partner she wants *now*. He may become a lout, suffer some serious accident, lose his job, get stuck in a shitty job, become ill etc. or leave her after 5 or 10 years. In that case, she wasted 5-10 years, her peak fertility and attractiveness, on a mating opportunity that turned out to be worthless to her, whether she ended up having children with him or not. (Both options have drawbacks if she ends up being single again.) This is not a risk any woman is willing to take. She’d rather roll the dice pining for an established, wealthier man, or delay marriage altogether.
Another problem with your scenario is that it pretty much assumes the delay of parenthood. If the young man is to establish himself in a cozy upper-class or middle-class carrier, and if she is to get herself a couple of years of job experience, which helps with their finances and gives her better chances of re-entering the job market later, they will have to delay having children for a couple of years.
This is actually the sort of possible long-term compromise I described on this blog and other sites a couple of time ago: say, for example, a 20-year-old middle-class guy meets 18-year-old middle-class girl at college. Let’s assume there’s sufficient mutual attraction, and also future time orientation. They start practising sexually exclusive long-term monogamy. They move to the same apartment after graduation, and find jobs in the same town. They get married. 3-5 years later they have their first child. By that time, the husband is mostly stable in his position at his job, and has good career prospects, and the wife has some job experience, and can re-enter the job market later if necessary. They may have 1-2 more children later. By the time they are in their forties, they have a stable family living in some suburban home, with 2-3 children. Everyone involved ends up getting what they wanted. The guy doesn’t end up as some sleazy player or incel single beta. He gets enough ass, and also reproduces. The woman doesn’t end up being some alcoholic childless cat-owning spinster, or some trashy single mother living in some ghetto or trailer park, or some bitter divorced woman. She finds the best husband she was ever going to get, a man with wife goggles.
But, generally speaking, no woman wants that. In her mind, it’s an arrangement that has lopsided benefits for the man, which is kind of true. For a couple of years, he gets to enjoy all the potential advantages of marriage while avoiding the disadvantages. The culture has changed a lot, but young married couples are still kinda sorta expected to have regular sex. So he gets to have the regular sex that he’d have more trouble getting if he were single, with the full sanction of society and his flock if he’s a church member, without having to suffer the difficulties of being a young father. Meanwhile she’s spending years of her peak attractiveness cohabiting with, and getting regularly fucked by, a man who’s not as hot as the ones she could be spending funny time with, her mating options having basically vanished, unless she cheats. Generally speaking, women feel “stiffed”, used and discontent if they’re in a long-term sexual relationship which isn’t steadily progressing in the way they expect, i.e. the man isn’t making regular and clear declarations of commitment (visiting her parents, introducing her to his parents, marrying her, cohabiting with her, siring children and investing in them etc.). When a woman gets married, she pretty much expects to have children ASAP. It’s basically part of the “payment” she expects in exchange for getting married, and it’s a way of tying her husband to herself.
Bee
Doug Wilson needs to read and reflect on the large impact Mandy Hale is having on young Christian women.
I’ve never heard of her, but I have heard of other Christian feminist authors and bloggers, which is to say that there’s certainly no shortage of them or their influence on Christian women, so even if one hasn’t heard of a particular one, she’s likely heard and possibly admires another one. This influence is obvious in some of the comments from women who are offended by Wilson’s post, and they’re actually kind of comical to read. Those women act like they’re surprised that a pastor could still have views that don’t conform to the feminine imperative. Did those women not read, understand, or care that he specifically stated he pastors a conservative church?
By the way, I get that Wilson is doing like most of the bloggers and pastors we discuss on this board who largely ignore women’s sin and suitability for marriage, so I’m not saying he’s as aware and as forthcoming about the delay in marriage as he could be, only that he offends feminists by stating feminism is toxic and that women are there to help their husbands.
@greyghost “I have two daughters and I plan on them going to college and try to give as much guidance as possible to avoid the sexy carousel rider path. I have spoken to the older daughter about marriage and tried to get her to think of the type of man she will be attracted to. Rock solid man or the cool sexy guy. Her mother makes it real hard due to her behavior.
Next option is for her to be prepared to live self sufficient due to the message I give my son. Over all it is a real shitty place in history to have children, so it is play the hand you are dealt. So first play is no lies all red pill truth to start with.
Will be interesting to converse with some fellas here with early ten children on how they are with red pill eyes preparing their children for the world we have today.”
Sounds about like what I’m doing with my kids.
@RPL “There’s nothing wrong with daddy’s little princess leaving daddy’s castle to marry Young Man No. 2, and struggling alongside him for 20 years before they re-attain an upper middle class lifestyle.”
I’m not sure that’s been the historic UMC path, but I could be wrong since I didn’t grow up in that world. However, the story I received(by osmosis apparently) was that UMC kids went off to college, married, and then he moved into a career at a firm run by one of his dad’s friends or golf buddies. Mom and dad put up a down payment for a house nearby so that the grandkids would be close etc.
I always thought the tiny apartment with one car was a working class/middle class thing. Shrug.
Hank Flanders
I’m not saying he’s as aware and as forthcoming about the delay in marriage as he could be, only that he offends feminists by stating feminism is toxic and that women are there to help their husbands.
Yeah, and Wilson thinks that’s a hot fire. Now, imagine what he would get blowing back in his face if he got real. Say, hmm, he preached that Ephesians 5 means what it says, because men and women are not interchangeable, full stop. What then? Blast furnace time. Yet it’s true, and needs to be said over and over again, because the first step to wisdom is to call things by their right names. I can refer to my dog as a “cat” all I want, it’s still a dog.
Hell’s Hound, very perceptive comment, good discussion on the effects of hypergamy. The implication is pretty obvious: someone has to make the 20-something woman who is either riding, or watching, the carousel to step away from the Sexual Market and put herself into the Marriage Market. Generally that will be an outside force – either other people, or time itself (see: Rollo Tomassi’s “Epiphany Phase”).
It’s worth noting that a woman who gives up access to the alphas in her early 20’s by marrying and being faithful to a man will most likely still be married to that man in her late 30’s, when other women of her cohort are going all Eat, Betray, Love – and so she won’t find herself back on the market at 45, wailing “Where are all the good men?”, rather she will still have her man. However that is a whole lotta future-time orientation to expect.
@Dalrock (our herald and voice in the wilderness)
This is loosely related to your comment about turning a blind eye, but Marcus of Groundwork For The Metaphysics of MGTOW is speaking to this in regard to the sins of women, and how the lack of holding them accountable for such is, or has lead to the apotheosis of their depravity.
Of course, he’s using abortion as a fulcrum for his experimental post, but it is good nonetheless.
Oh…and I forgot to mention that of course…in long form…he’s really talking about hypoagency. I’ve never heard of the term apotheosis before..which is why it was fascinating to me.
Anonymous Reader
There are small things to do to make marriage attractive to young women. Take advantage of solipsism, status marking and rather than try to have women morally suppress hypergamy direct it.
I always remind women that girl friends are just girl friends. (basically pieces of ass he’s fucking that’s it better wording for teenage daughters) The point is to get their slut defense up and then direct them to the idea that a proper lady worth a mans respect is a wife of a happy man. ” there is no such thing as cheating on a girl friend if you are all that you would be a wife” I also show them you tube videos of ratchet behavior and openly laugh and ridicule it. (this is very effective beyond what I thought. I could write a full page on this about subtle personal observation) picking up the pieces and making palatable outcomes for little princess only enables bad behavior. Openly and truthfully in advance letting them know that is not going to happen will help in directing the wicked selfishness of the young women.
A pastor that was serious about marriage and family would do well to advise his single men openly to choose to marry and appreciate well behaved women. He should openly speak ill of carousel riders and see no shame in young couples marrying early with a young wife going to school while pregnant. ( that is what mine did) Open praise should be given for wives that are pleasing to their husbands. He could and should back up with statistics on children of single mothers. (we do here all of the time) The beta male chump should always be seen and spoken of as the highest honor of all church members. (All single men’s classes should be red pill classes including game and family law with the bible sitting open and referenced to as is done here) This will remove the chump from beta male chump ( It will be the pastor’s gift to the ladies)
Overall a sound civil structure of society cannot depend on women’s agency from within. The characteristics of woman is. A strong society and church understands and accepts it.
I wonder how this fits into the grand scheme of things:
http://www.zerohedge.com/news/2016-04-22/us-suicide-rate-soars-21st-century-80-middle-aged-white-women
@pastors: “pastors vary in how well they hear when the flock speaks back.”
He who has ears let them hear. This is hardly a good excuse or valid justification for this preacher’s gynocentric view which is clearly and demonstrably false.
For those decrying the public nature of blogging, this is why Dalrock himself can hardly be expected to contact the pastor and challenge him to a public debate. If you want to make a difference, contact this pastor yourself and YOU attempt to explain as a brother in Christ where he is in the wrong. As it is written:
>>>When Peter came to Antioch, I opposed him to his face, because he stood condemned.
I bet Paul’s arguments would have been even more persuasive if he had Dalrock’s analysis at his back.
I googled Mandy Hale’s name along with Jen Wilkin and others frequently mentioned here. She appears to be unconnected with that particular Evangelical tribe, for what it’s worth, though she has written for Christianity Today.
Postscript: when was the last time anyone heard or read an exhortation from a church to women, “Ladies, be Nice to your man”? I frankly can’t recall ever hearing or seeing that. Perhaps that’s part of the problem Wilson is facing, with the “man shortage” in his church? There’s also a shortage of women whom men find worth wifing up?
That exhortation will never be heard from the mouth if any preacher in today’s church because it inevitably leads to an instruction to submit to their husbands, as Scriptuee commands. Of course we know that this is an absolute non-starter in any of today’s modernist churches.
@ Booth
Somehow I still believe that most of us don’t change because we read a book or a post, or because we (occasionally) lost an argument. That only leaves the relational approach or fatalism.
Well, there’s always Game. Sales. Create the need using irrational means and use that to get the prospect interested in your product.
The carousal riders want to get married, to the alpha guy, but have no idea how to, even when he proposes to them. (And yes I had two of them turn me down, with some fantasy that I would realize what they wanted from me).
I agree with bluepillprofessor and Hank Flanders on this; give her two more dates and then evaluate. Anytime you meet a single person of a similar age in a “blind date” situation it is bound to be very high pressure for both of you. Her babbling about her job could have been her method of dealing with the pressure.
Maybe tell some fun stories from her life and a few jokes? Maybe give her some playful feedback that she needs to be more charming?
feeriker
He should exhort any way. Not from the frame of instructing the women. he should speak as a loving preacher from the frame of informing women of where the men they say they want stand. No mention should be made of submission to anything. In the same breath he needs to inform men to shun unpleasant women and why.
we need to stop fighting female nature and let it work for us.
I do get the impression though, that at least right now, younger women are a little more grown up than their mothers were at their age…
I think exactly the opposite is true – depending on how many generations back you look. Life was harder all around, for everyone, and women had no illusions that they were going to be pedestalized Disney princesses, so they made the best of the life they had been given. They either “womaned up,” carried their share of the burden (whether as part of a committed relationship or in taking care of themselves), or they became wards of their fathers or their churches or existed on the fringes of society. No such pressure exists today for young girls to grow up. This is why we see forty-something women stuck in perpetual adultolescence, never having progressed beyond a mental age of sixteen.
BPP to Ayatollah1988
You had a GOLDEN opportunity to NEG the living crap out of her by telling her to stop being a chatterbox or whatever. Had you done even this basic PUA technique- teasing her in a light hearted and fun way, or had you displayed even a scintilla of game, I am taking bets your “date” might have gone differently.
C’mon now, lighten up. Based on Ayatollah’s description of this woman, it’s pretty obvious that she was a stereotypical self-centered carousel rider (the “churchgoing” factor notwithstanding). Sure, Ayatollah could probably have “gamed” her, but it’s difficult to imagine why he would have wanted to. He also mentioned that there just wasn’t any chemistry between the two of them and THAT is key. You generally know after the first few minutes of meeting a woman whether or not there is “anything there” or not. If there is no spark, there is generally no point in wasting any more time or effort.
A lead pastor’s openly-disobedient wife (Deut 22:5, 1 Cor 11) indicated I had failed to marry due to the attitude I revealed by a comment I made on a woman’s behaviour (in my impression, she was indicating I was a failure).
Quite eye-opening. Any pastor who can’t even lead his own wife in living a biblical life has ZE-RO business preaching that subject to anyone else.
My father suggested I should marry a similarly openly-disobedient woman (who was also another man’s wife! Matt 5:31-32).
If your father is like my father was, or for that matter most people who call(ed) themselves Christians, they have certain blind spots that they refuse to acknowledge and fix with Scripture because too much of themselves is invested in the worldly view. It’s an uphill and generally losing battle to try to get them to see the light.
I am pretty patient and tolerant. But I sometimes am puzzled as to what is the proper response, when someone openly treats me with contempt, such as suggesting I should take a woman who refuses to try to live up to her obligations. How about, “No, I am not a worthless piece of garbage, thank you very much.”
Usually reminding people of what Scripture says on the matter is a good response. Their reaction to such a response is the real key. If they openly mock you, or try to dance around your answer, then your response should be something to the effect of “I’m sorry, I was under the impression that you were a Bible-believing Christ follower. How foolishly mistaken of me.”
You then know that any further words to come out of their mouth are the words of a fool, to be disregarded as such.
@Hank Flanders,
“I’ve never heard of her, but I have heard of other Christian feminist authors and bloggers, which is to say that there’s certainly no shortage of them or their influence on Christian women, so even if one hasn’t heard of a particular one, she’s likely heard and possibly admires another one.”
You are correct, there are lots of feminist churchian voices for women to listen to. I was trying to think of ones that specifically were encouraging Christian women to delay marriage. In addition to Mandy Hale there is Steve Arterburn. In one of his Christian books he brags about forcefully discouraging his daughter from getting serious with her boyfriend because she was too young and she had not dated enough other guys. He strongly recommended that Christian women not think seriously about marriage until the age of 28. In addition to writing books he also holds and promotes Christian Women’s Conferences.
feeriker
He also mentioned that there just wasn’t any chemistry between the two of them and THAT is key. You generally know after the first few minutes of meeting a woman whether or not there is “anything there” or not. If there is no spark, there is generally no point in wasting any more time or effort.
I’m surprised to hear you say this. Isn’t the kind of thing women say? Ayatollah’s certainly welcome to “next her” if he wants and let another man have a shot with her, but I thought women were the ones who were typically concerned about having that instant chemistry and spark.
There have been so many times when all I could do was roll my eyes when I’ve read women shamelessly declare things like that they “know within 30 seconds if there’s anything there with a guy” or that they’ll “make snap judgments about a guy based on the shoes he’s wearing,” as if these are perfectly wise and prudent practices. These types of feelings women can have can be deceptive and detrimental to them in the long-run. Even some women recognize this. Did you ever hear of Lori Gottlieb and the flak she’s taken from feminists?
Nevertheless, it’s not like ayatollah88’s acquaintance is ugly or even that she actually disqualified herself as a dating prospect yet based just on what he told us. Besides all of that, would it really be so bad for other women to see him with an attractive woman?
Steve Arterburn….He strongly recommended that Christian women not think seriously about marriage until the age of 28.
So he suggests that churchgoing women be just like their secular sisters, in other words.
Sheesh. That’s like running into the street, jumping in front of a slutwalk then claiming, “Look! Look! They’re all following ME!”
Try having a conversation, not even a ‘date’ just a convo with women at church today over coffee before Sunday school starts……..at a pot luck / fellowship or some smaller group “Bible study”
For the most part, the single Christian women my age (mid forties) already have a teenage son(s) / daughter(s) now. Some divorced for very un-Biblical reasons (but only God can judge 😉 ). Some were living in sin, and came “back” to Christ and the church (like I did). Most believe that they outright deserve a husband who will “re-daddy” her children and make them strong Christians (because that’s the man’s job). He should be a provider to her (because he is supposed to provide an upper-middle class American-Christian lifestyle, or he’s not a real man). He needs to be sensitive to all her needs, her whims, her hurts, her triggers, and also he needs to take on ALL of her debt and past poor choices because men are supposed to “fix things”. He also cannot judge her on her appearance on any level. It doesn’t matter if she is 150 pounds overweight; her “heart” and what she is doing “now” that only matter. She will expect her husband to cause envy with the other women in the church as well. She will not bow to godly headship in a home if she doesn’t “feel” it’s right.
It forces “the hand” in a proverbial card game so to speak. Do you “fold” as man as you push into your forties? Do you ante up for another round and “wait on God” to see if attitudes change……or the arrival of the Holy Ghost in some attitudes / personalities of women and she falls into real repentance and Godly sorrow that can not only be witnessed in words…but in attitude, lifestyle, outlook and personal sin (known in the church or not)?
I will not rule it out all men……but most single Christian men by the time they hit my age really don’t have a choice. You can try you hand at or with a younger woman…..and many of them are single mom’s as well……but for the most part a man doesn’t have choice unless he wants to be made a proverbial whipping boy to his wife and the church.
@Bee, can you give me a reference to where Arteburn says that? He’s written a lot of books. I’m not doubting you, I just want to go download it and collect the ref as I’m building a volume of material on this stuff. Alas, it’s almost impossible to keep up with.
Looking for something else I ran across the “Guttentag – Secord” ratio. Turns out there’s a book.
http://www.amazon.com/Too-Many-Women-Ratio-Question/dp/0803919190
The tl;dr is simple: the slightest imbalance in sex ratio will drive women to compete the more fiercely for the remaining men. This in part explains what’s going on at uni’s now, where 55 / 45, 60/40 and worse female/male ratios are found, thanks to feminism. Sure, this is all about the secular world, but…women are women. All the more important for churchgoing college women to find an on campus religious affinity group.
Mulling this question over it occured to me that Wilson also has no idea about the effects of social media on women. He has no idea what a “beta orbiter” is. He’s so far behind the curve. He’s in a state of unconscious incompetence.
Cripes, here’s a posting from 2011 where Bastiat blogger lays a lot of this out in detail in Marriage Market terms.
http://bastiatblogger.blogspot.com/2011/10/marriage-supermarkets-guttentag-secord.html
Bee:
Regarding Mandy Hale: I haven’t read any of her offerings or reviewed any of her books. She is an attractive 37 year old woman from the links you gave. It’d be interesting to see how she addresses sex, the context in which sex is to occur from a Christian perspective, and whether she herself has remained chaste. I find it very, very, VERY hard to believe a woman who is as attractive as she is, is still a virgin, particularly when she was in a long term relationship and stayed with him despite his disinterest in marriage. I also find it hard to believe a woman of Hale’s physical attractiveness is a virgin, particularly in this day and age, and when at least 80 to 85% of single, never married Christian women have had sex.
@Neguy,
“…can you give me a reference to where Arteburn says that?”
This book:
https://www.overdrive.com/media/492876/10-dates-before-i-do#sthash.NH58R2ky.dpuf
Advertising blurb for the book:
10 Dates Before I Do
They agreed, reluctantly, but they agreed. Over dinner a few weeks ago my daughter casually told me of a new plan she had devised for her life. Here was her plan: school, travel, job, car, and then no sooner than 26, perhaps think about marriage. The ten dates process helped her think through her long-term plans, which clarified short term decisions — like getting married at 20. If couples would go through this process, partnering decisions will be more wisely considered, marriages will be stronger, and consequent commitments will more likely be kept. Now, that will push down the rate of divorce. This concept can impact marriages as no other book has. It is practical, and it provides a plan to work, rather than a concept to understand. – See more at: http://search.overdrive.com/ti/751009f3-2b7d-4f31-995f-0a907dd64617-425-1-1-1-1/10-dates-before-steve-arterburn-audiobook#sthash.NH58R2ky.dpuf
I remember Arterburn stressing age 28, but my memory could be faulty and wrong, maybe he said age 26. Or he could have stressed age 28 and his daughter, who was much younger, compromised and went for age 26.
Here is a quote from another book where he stresses mutual submission and pedestalizing the wife:
Following this turnaround, as I talked with more husbands and wives, I heard them say that their marriages improved when the husband sought to do things to please his wife—when he began to allow her personality and convictions to find a place with his in the marriage. This is what mutual sub-mission is all about, and that’s the profound, life-changing theme Fred and I will be exploring with you in this book.
Every Man’s Marriage by Steve Arterburn & Fred Stoeker
Arterburn got divorced after writing this book. That was his second divorce. He is now married to a third woman. His divorces may have been Biblically valid, I do not know the details.
IMHO Arterburn was wrong to bring a public lawsuit against another Christian:
Steve Arterburn filed suit against Frank Minirth in the Superior Court of the State of California in Orange County. The case is listed as follows: 95 CV 00330, Stephen Arterburn v. Frank B. Minirth. In his action against Minirth, Arterburn was seeking damages in excess of $550,000. The file on the case indicates that Arterburn’s complaint was for defamation, “slander per se,” and that “a jury trial [is] demanded.”
Arterburn based this on Matthew 18 but neglected 1 Corinthians 5.
Deti is familiar with some of Arterburn’s books and he has left some good comments about Arterburn on earlier posts by Dalrock.
Arterburn seems to take a hard line against men, porn, and lust. For a more relaxed view check out some of what Larry writes:
https://biblicalgenderroles.com/category/lust/
Not saying I agree with it all but it is food for thought.
@thedeti,
I agree, she is a good looking woman. If she really wanted to be married and have children it should have happened already. Maybe she likes travel and fun more than having children. Having and raising children is hard work. Maybe she insists on dating way above her SMV and those guys won’t comit to her. Vox Day refers to this as “outkicking your coverage.”
I have not read any of her books, I don’t know what she says about sex and chastity.
She has some interviews on youtube:
My main concern is she is encouraging younger women to emulate her very delayed marriage lifestyle.
This is a shame, Pastor Doug seems like a cool guy, but the groveling to women is so repulsive.
I will not rule it out all men……but most single Christian men by the time they hit my age really don’t have a choice. You can try you hand at or with a younger woman…..and many of them are single mom’s as well……but for the most part a man doesn’t have choice unless he wants to be made a proverbial whipping boy to his wife and the church.
As I keep repeating, and will continue to repeat until I either drop dead from exhaustion, American men finally catch on and make further repetition unnecessary, or the Second Coming renders it OBE:
1. Get a passport
2. Learn one or more foreign languages to at lesst a functional level of competence, if not native fluency.
3. Plan to do some international traveling in the future as soon as you’re able to do it.
Seriously, what does a single American Christian man serious about marriage have to lose? Looking at the slow-motion civilizational catastrophe unfolding around him on his native soil (the scene at church you describe is one of the more sordid aspects of this, one easily able to lead men of weak faith to the point of utter despair), would it not be a worthwhile investment to seek options in more spiritually and culturally fertile soil? Contrary to what most Americans have been conditioned to think (and what their nationalist churchian “pastors” preach), the USSA is not the second Israel/Promised Land.
@Bee
You are correct, there are lots of feminist churchian voices for women to listen to. I was trying to think of ones that specifically were encouraging Christian women to delay marriage. In addition to Mandy Hale there is Steve Arterburn. In one of his Christian books he brags about forcefully discouraging his daughter from getting serious with her boyfriend because she was too young and she had not dated enough other guys. He strongly recommended that Christian women not think seriously about marriage until the age of 28. In addition to writing books he also holds and promotes Christian Women’s Conferences.
Funny you should bring up Arterburn, because he’s actually a great example of why the advice men get in churches on how to deal with women is so bad. He too likes to speak about higher standards of responsibility being demanded from husbands, fathers and men in dating relationships, while absolving women from any blame when they fall into sin. Maybe that’s because when they do, they’ve been known to fall into it with him.
Here’s an excerpt from a post Al Mohler wrote a while back; he’s since buried this in a hidden corner on his site, but a few other bloggers caught it and it can still be found at various spots on the web. Mohler had found an April 2006 issue of GQ magazine where the writer Walter Kirn interviewed Arterburn for an article on the “abstinence movement” in churches. Arterburn turned out to be not quite what he sold himself as being . . .
Link for the piece is here: http://michaeldavidestes.blogspot.com/2006/06/mohler-on-divorce.html
Arterburn is yet another pastor who had a sordid and messy history on his way to the altar, but now wants to enforce a new standard of purity and circumspection on today’s young men — one that he never followed himself, or would if he had to take the path today. He’s far from being an outlier in this. More often than not, the pastors I’ve known have had by default a ” situational alpha” status in the church; many others have had that ranking before they even wound up in the pulpit (and often, it was what helped them get there). For them, getting a woman (or two or three) has always been second nature, and it’s probably one reason why they often think the best move they could make is to saddle the men with more responsibilities and duties in the courtship game. It also explains why they always tend to be a bit baffled when they see men who can’t get a date, or a girlfriend or a wife. It will never occur to them that some men have never heard of and are not playing with the cheat codes that they allowed themselves to use.
@Bee, thanks for the Arterburn info.
That’s a pretty good video too. Reading between the lines, it sounds like she’s been dating alpha guys wouldn’t commit to her. It also appeared like her interviewer also was not wearing a wedding ring.
Yep, the interviewer admitted from the start that she was single. And that her producers thought that there was something wrong with her because she IS still single. They both got a good chuckle out of it.
After much Googling, I couldn’t find anything concerning Mandy Hale’s stance on sex before marriage, which is surprising for someone who apparently writes so much about dating. The only thing I could find was a Twitter post in which she stated something about casual sex means being treated casually by men, which naturally, infuriated the feminist advocates of the carousel.
On another note, I listened to an interesting youtube clip (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KRlQkP84v1g&index=20&list=PLevesaai932QeCR6HRCNrPPxuO2Cd65rH) on the way to and from work this past week. In it, the youtuber, a woman, initially discusses finding her husband after years of coming to Christ and waiting on (another) husband. Later, she includes an earlier interview she had with another woman who also discussed finding her husband. The host is big into End Times doctrine and is annoyingly redundant with some other things she said. Also, both women, from what I could tell, were both sketchy on the details of how they were able to discern between their desires from God’s will. Nevertheless, the host did state something I’ve given a lot of thought to, lately, which is that we have get ourselves ready before being ready for marriage. The host goes so far as to say that God “can’t” bring you someone when you’re not ready yet, but God certainly can. Often, he just won’t.
Of course, the need for one to be prepared for marriage before one can attract the kind of mate one truly desires is common sense, but it’s good to think about when you’re like me or I guess this Mandy Hale lady and wonder why you’re still single at our ages and would like to be married. I’d say that for me, it’s mostly financial and having problems with confidence, due to not reaching goals.
Another youtuber I listen to sometimes has a video that has reinforced my thinking regarding goals and the confidence it brings: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wzi8EfODpyE. Tyrone’s video makes so much sense, as men constantly hear that confidence is what attracts women. What men don’t typically hear about confidence, though, is that we need actual reasons to be confident, since just pretending to be confident isn’t enough. A confident man is going to be confident because he’ll know that if it doesn’t work out with one woman, there will be others. However, a man with my disposition hasn’t accomplished enough goals in life to feel confident about who he is yet, so historically, I’ve tended to develop oneitis for a particular woman, due to not having the confidence that I’d be able to attract another easily, and each case of oneitis would last from months to years.
Anyway, I think I’m going to need to achieve some real goals before I’m going to be able to attract the type of woman I’d be interested in. Now, Tyrone in his video, talks about being confident with women by picking women up, and I can’t rightly do that as a believer and nor would doing so likely lead to the happy and stable marriage I would like to have someday, but I believe that as followers of Christ, we can still be confident with women by having achieved other goals in life, yes? Does anyone have any thoughts or experiences to share on achieving goals and the confidence it brings to approach and do well with women?
@Neguy,
“…I just want to go download it and collect the ref as I’m building a volume of material on this stuff.”
Glad to help. Just curious, are you writing a book, or a seminar, or a blog?
@Hank Flanders – “Now, Tyrone in his video, talks about being confident with women by picking women up, and I can’t rightly do that as a believer and nor would doing so likely lead to the happy and stable marriage I would like to have someday, but I believe that as followers of Christ, we can still be confident with women by having achieved other goals in life, yes? ”
Here is one random internet guy’s B.S. opinion on the matter.
When your self-worth is unmoved by the opinion of attractive women regardless of whether that opinion is positive or negative, then you’ll have all the confidence with women you’ll ever need.
The number of men with accomplishments in this world who yet rank themselves of less worth than an attractive woman are legion. A buddy of mine used to work the door at a local bar, a nicer place. There he met a couple of guys who were oil company salesmen. They were all worth millions. They flew around in a private jet. They had no confidence around women.
It’s all in your head and has nothing to do with accomplishments.
Like I said, it’s one guy’s B.S. opinion.
Women obtained the power to defer motherhood and marriage and they have used it. Women obtained the power to prevent and terminate pregnancies and they have used it. Women obtained the power to walk away from marriage vows and get rewarded for it, and they have used it.
The plummeting marriage and birth rates is a female driven phenomenon. All the talk about ‘marriage strikes’ is just that..talk.
Men cannot fix a problem without the power to fix it, nor do men have any incentive to fix it. So there no point in asking or shaming.
@Bee, I’m systematizing the Christian red pill material, plus creating rigorous, comprehensive analyses of the teachings of various of these folks. My Keller analysis is done (19,000 words worth). I’m planning Chandler next. My plan is to go direct to some of these guys and try to open their eyes to this. I likely won’t do a comprehensive review of Wilson and Arterburn, but it helps to have a ton of supporting material. It’s just too easy to deflect this stuff by saying it’s anecdotal or cherry picking, so I plan to have overwhelming evidence in the form of both thorough critical assessments of full bodies of work as well as as much supporting material as I can find.
I am actually meeting with my own pastor on Monday about some initial material I sent him (related only to the feminist slant in church teaching, not the red pill proper) to see if he thinks there’s anything there. Any prayers anyone could spare about that would be much appreciated.
“The data is clear, but the problem is calling out women’s sins, including sexual sins, is difficult and extremely uncomfortable. For this reason modern Christians will continue to deny what young women are very open about, just as they deny women’s culpability when they have abortions.”
^ Bingo! We have a winner. Dalrock, please proceed to the winner’s table and choose a prize. Our pretty female assistant will even gift wrap it for you if you like.
and who would make good and godly wives.
This creates the inversion.
There are 5:1 women to men who want to be married.
But for ever 5 men, there may be one woman (and usually not in proximity) who would make a good and godly wife.
You have multiple problems:
Used and sometimes abused merchandise. Minimally “experienced” so the problems are emotional, but at the other extreme, “My STD is under control…”.
No, really, I’m Christian. They convert. Sort-of. Lets not take Ephesians literally.
Baggage. Oh, you will need to take care of my two bastards.
Staleness. My bioclock is ticking too loudly.
The pastor needs to realize that good and godly wives are constructed starting prior to puberty. Men aren’t stupid and can recognize a woman who wants to enjoy being the helpmeet in the full traditional family, and one who just wants to exploit him. Watching dozens of others be burned more than once makes the current crop more than twice shy.
I don’t know what to do about the broken, fallen women. But all need to realize their value is much lower than docile women with intact hymens. Repentance seems to require being on one’s knees. Women might need to do so before men in the same way as before Christ, since Men are to image Christ.
For however much Christ is merciful, he will throw the arrogant into hell. Ought not men follow soot? Broken, fallen women would wash Jesus’ feet with their tears and wipe his feet with their hair. I cannot imagine a similarly fallen women these days, even when desperate for a husband, even being submissive to him.
I might pay serious attention to a woman abasing herself in my presence. I think anyone watching in public would do so as it would be so unusual. Instead, men are forced to find and compete for the few holy women who are naturally so.
@Hank: “Tyrone in his video, talks about being confident with women by picking women up, and I can’t rightly do that as a believer and nor would doing so likely lead to the happy and stable marriage ”
Let me be the Devil’s Advocate here and point out that game attracts women and I am unaware of how that is a sin. If you choose to fornicate with those women you may sin, but that is a choice.
I think you are using your religion like body armor in the same was stoners don their pot armor in order to avoid the hard task of learning how to game women. As to your allegation that it is not likely to lead to a happy marriage…HAHAHAHAHAHAhah! You could not be more wrong. Game is the ONLY way you can stay happily married. Even your uber religious, submissive little snowflake is not going to juice up for a simpering mangina churchian with no game. So what are you going to do then, f-ck you way through it?
We have an entire Subredit devoted to using game in marriage called “Married Red Pill” and I assure you that game and self improvement works to dampen the panties of girls, including wives. If you don’t think the continually damp panties of a submissive and respectful wife is the basis for a stable, happy marriage then I can’t help you.
@Darwinian
At some later point, those same pastors will from the pulpit say “If we get the girls in, the boys will follow!”
@Anon
>If the divine, flawless women that Wilson worships cannot even complete with Internet porn, then they are useless.
I also am puzzled why this is not a regular talking point. Surely a live, responding woman SHOULD be vastly superior to a non-responsive woman acting out some script with another man. And even more so if we are considering a picture. How useless these pastors must think their “Godly women” to be, if he thinks she could not win the contest for her husband, assuming she were to try.
@Bee and Neguy
>Steve Arterburn. In one of his Christian books he brags about forcefully discouraging his daughter from getting serious with her boyfriend because she was too young and she had not dated enough other guys
>Every Man’s Marriage by Steve Arterburn & Fred Stoeker
>Arterburn got divorced after writing this book.
Surely Arterburn subsequently canceled all sales of his book, as he has been shown to be unqualified.
If you are compiling stuff, send me an e-mail address or fax number. I wrote out a bunch of obvious errors in his book, “Every Man’s Battle”. I can send it to you.
Dalrock,
“And yes, men have to call women out on their sin. I cannot remember if you have done a post on this. It’s very difficult for men to call women out on their sin, bad behavior, etc.
Yes. It is very difficult, not to mention uncomfortable. It feels bad. On the other hand, calling out men is easy, and it feels heroic.”
If that is the case, then the problem is bad soteriology.
Sin is akin to infection or disease in medicine. If a doctor “felt bad” about doing his job, one would say he misunderstands his profession. Such is our calling to help one another identify (and root out) sin.
Now, there are some Christian preachers who don’t have a very firm grasp of soteriology, especially the more liberal one, but as you note the more conservative ones don’t have any problem at all calling out male sin. It’s more likely that they don’t see what women are doing as a sin at all.
That means of course that they’re not seeing the egregious stuff, but often even the decision to delay marriage and the lifestyles that go with that (including ones that have nothing to do with promiscuity) involve a great deal of sin, both in the promotion of that decision (often involving idolatry on the part of a father who wants her to be the son he didn’t have/just like him) and the way it plays out in the young girl’s life – neglecting the proper preparation for marriage and family/denying Godly young men the opportunity to start their own.
@Dale:
I was thinking about non-Redpill terms to use, and I finally landed on a way to frame it for those that are pretty blind.
Wifes are to be assets to their Husbands. In the current culture & legal environment, nearly all Women are a massive Liability. The “prime marriage candidates” would still be an Asset, but they have to bring an insanely large amount to the table to truly be above marginally Neutral.
I’m curious the arguments the steam from their heads would respond with if the blind heard this one. I’m honestly not sure how they’d respond. They’d have to rationalize something, as they know very well it’s a true statement.
Yeah, and Wilson thinks that’s a hot fire. Now, imagine what he would get blowing back in his face if he got real. Say, hmm, he preached that Ephesians 5 means what it says, because men and women are not interchangeable, full stop. What then? Blast furnace time. Yet it’s true, and needs to be said over and over again, because the first step to wisdom is to call things by their right names. I can refer to my dog as a “cat” all I want, it’s still a dog.
Imagine any male public figure saying “it’s possible for a woman to acquire certain traits throughout her youth that make her unlikely to get married and be a worthy wife”. His home would probably get firebombed that night by angry cunts and manginas.
Hell’s Hound, very perceptive comment, good discussion on the effects of hypergamy. The implication is pretty obvious: someone has to make the 20-something woman who is either riding, or watching, the carousel to step away from the Sexual Market and put herself into the Marriage Market. Generally that will be an outside force – either other people, or time itself (see: Rollo Tomassi’s “Epiphany Phase”).
I don’t think people should try *make* them do anything, because a) that’s like, you know, work, and who wants that? b) it would just give them yet another excuse to paint themselves as victims c) they’d obviously resist. What can be done is for middle-aged, content, married women to teach the younger ones by example.
” but I believe that as followers of Christ, we can still be confident with women by having achieved other goals in life, yes?” Yes Hank.
“I’ve tended to develop oneitis for a particular woman, due to not having the confidence that I’d be able to attract another easily, and each case of oneitis would last from months to years. Anyway, I think I’m going to need to achieve some real goals before I’m going to be able to attract the type of woman I’d be interested in.”
That’s very good self-evaluation for such a young man; you’re way ahead of me at similar age, in these areas. I also had the oneitis before really becoming accomplished and fully mature, at which point those insecurities gradually lessened.
If not already, then get busy on some achievements/accomplishments — these take time if they are to have the desired effect of raising your confidence, and female interest. Study of the Lord’s Scripture also will bolster confidence. For me, the OT works. Anyway, let God lead you into the potential areas of accomplishment; that always worked best for me, and sometimes I ended up being good at things I hadn’t taken into account previously.
I think your ability to explore and criticize your lacks and needs will stand you well. I know you’re interested in attracting a suitable women, and I think you will, but remember that, always, our first goal in any undertaking is seeking to please God. Make that your priority, and he will bring you into accomplishments that glorify himself, and strengthen you.
“I think you are using your religion like body armor in the same was stoners don their pot armor in order to avoid the hard task of learning how to game women”
I don’t think he’s doing that at all.
“Game is the ONLY way you can stay happily married”
Neither of my grand-dads knew or used Game, and their had productive, intimate, happy and lifelong marriages.
bluepillprofessor, I was referring to fornication, not game.
@Darwinian Arminian,
“I saw the ad (and you can too at the link), but I’m still really not sure what they thought they were apologizing for. There’s no Biblical rule against a father seeking a groom for his daughter that I remember, is there?”
Christianity Today went extreme feminist years ago. Just read several of the Her-meunitics essays and you will see it clearly, and sadly.
More and more I think Vaughn Ohlman is correct, fathers need to take an active role in finding spouses for their children:
http://letthemmarry.org/basic-beliefs-1/
How a dad arranged a marriage:
http://letthemmarry.org/articles/2016/1/7/i-kissed-courtship-goodbye-repost
@Darwinian Arminian,
Cool name.
“Arterburn is yet another pastor who had a sordid and messy history on his way to the altar, but now wants to enforce a new standard of purity and circumspection on today’s young men — one that he never followed himself,”
It is curious that Arterburn takes such a strict, hard line against men, porn, and masturbation. Deti has commented that Arterburn does not allow for the fact that men’s sex drive is natural and God given; God made men visual, God wants men to seek out and marry young women who are healthy and can make healthy babies.
Catering to women has been good for Arterburn’s finances, he has sold over 60 books and now owns homes in two different locales.
@Neguy,
“I’m systematizing the Christian red pill material, plus creating rigorous, comprehensive analyses of the teachings of various of these folks. My Keller analysis is done (19,000 words worth). I’m planning Chandler next. ”
Good idea. I hope you are successful. I will pray for you.
Unfortunately, some of these guys are financially incentivized not to listen to you. Being a full time Christian speaker is much easier and less sweaty than pulling wire through conduit, swinging a hammer, or driving a truck.
@Dale,
“Surely Arterburn subsequently canceled all sales of his book, as he has been shown to be unqualified.”
Yes, Arterburn and his publisher should have refunded everyone who purchased this book.
“If you are compiling stuff, send me an e-mail address or fax number. I wrote out a bunch of obvious errors in his book, “Every Man’s Battle”. I can send it to you.”
I would like your compilation of the errors in Every Man’s Battle. Email it to me
beework at comcast dot net
Thank you.
“The plummeting marriage and birth rates is a female driven phenomenon. All the talk about ‘marriage strikes’ is just that..talk.”
Yes I would agree with that. If young women actually wanted to get married, then they could do so very easily – although they might have to lower their standards a bit.
Though regarding falling birth rates… I know in many developed nations fertility levels are under replacement level, and I maybe agree they could be raised up a bit. But many commentators here want fertility to return to much higher than replacement level – 3, 4 or 5 children per average woman. Would this really be a good thing?
@Dale, @Bee,
Anyone who wants to email me can do so at newhack@yahoo.com
Yes, there are many reasons to think these guys won’t change their ways. But you never know until you try. Ultimately it’s not up to me, however, but God. In any event, while technically they haven’t sinned against me personally and so Matthew 18 doesn’t apply, I do think the idea of approaching someone privately about any concerns first is a good thing to do. If they reject that, then I can take other action.
Freeriker,
I know your frustration and you’re not alone in your exasperation towards how the homeboys in America have NO IDEA of what’s out there in the world.
“I don’t know what to do about the broken, fallen women. But all need to realize their value is much lower than docile women with intact hymens. Repentance seems to require being on one’s knees. Women might need to do so before men in the same way as before Christ, since Men are to image Christ.
For however much Christ is merciful, he will throw the arrogant into hell. Ought not men follow soot? Broken, fallen women would wash Jesus’ feet with their tears and wipe his feet with their hair. I cannot imagine a similarly fallen women these days, even when desperate for a husband, even being submissive to him.
I might pay serious attention to a woman abasing herself in my presence.”
Good stuff.
For a high N count woman and/or an Alpha Widow, there are physical exercises that a woman could do with her fiance or new spouse to “beak her” of her promiscuous past. Much better do some physical and humiliating exercises than to be plagued and tormented with Alpha Widow thoughts for the rest of her life. But the woman would have to be submissive and repentant and the guy would have to be firm and dominant to follow through.
@CSI,
“But many commentators here want fertility to return to much higher than replacement level – 3, 4 or 5 children per average woman. Would this really be a good thing?”
Yes, it would be a good thing for the Kingdom of God and for a nation. Large families are a neglected tactic for church growth.
In the multitude of people is the king’s honour: but in the want of people is the destruction of the prince. Proverbs 14:28
@Dalrock
Freudian choice of location for gravity defying H2O? I da ho…
@The ?
Your basic fundamental Lift dynamic.
You go on to tell about women being vocal about the things of the church. One of the guys that works for me left the church he and his wife as well as my family were (still are attending). Seems the wife couldn’t convince them they needed to have women serving communion. The thing is, There are locations scattered around the smallish sanctuary and if she’d have put her head on the swivel so to speak she’d have seen there are women at some stations. Its a church of 250-300 split into two services.
Id say she went off half cocked but I fear that may passive aggressively insult the husband who is a friend.
I might pay serious attention to a woman abasing herself in my presence.”
*sigh* Would indeed that such women existed in today’s cesspool culture.
No, there are too many Mark Driscolls and Matt Chandlers out there today to reassure them that Jesus was being a “bully” by making them confront, repent of, and abase themselves because of their slutty pasts, that God loves them as they are no matter what, that grace is free, no strings attached, no painful acts of contrition needed. She’s just as good as any (theoretical) woman who has kept her legs shut and her hymen intact.
For a high N count woman and/or an Alpha Widow, there are physical exercises that a woman could do with her fiance or new spouse to “beak her” of her promiscuous past. Much better do some physical and humiliating exercises than to be plagued and tormented with Alpha Widow thoughts for the rest of her life. But the woman would have to be submissive and repentant and the guy would have to be firm and dominant to follow through.
Again, I’m struggling to imagine the existence of a Western woman humbled enough to even consider such a thing. There are simply ZE-RO pressures or incentives, socially or spiritually, for her to do it. If you did ever come across such a woman who sincerely desired to demonstrate or prove repentence in such a manner, she would indeed be a potential keeper. However, you stand a better chance of stumbling across an entire herd of unicorns than of ever meeting one of these.
Let’s not play dumb. At this point in time and the law and cultural structure we have the statement is absolutely on track.
Doug Wilson seems a clever fellow. therefore to see his words intentionally bent into fractal shaped pretzels is always a small surprise. For the record, there are no longer any big surprises regarding the hoops a Lift chaser will jump through.
(hope my haste doesn’t ruin the accuracy of the few format tags)
Does he think the men that comprise his subject set are doing this? This remark is basis for myriad hypothesis to be made. It is not so much contradictory as it is utterly out of place in his argument. He normally structures his arguments with relevant and easy to follow points….even if I disagree.
Yes, and therefore? I picture Doug Wilson completely disconnected from reality is social sexual dynamics in and out of the church. This quote is something you’d expect to be a realistic imperative in an Amish or Mennonite type setting. I wonder is Wilson’s youth was spent, not as Amish or Mennonite, but in a community where it didn’t sound so tinny to tell men to quick like, go get married. I didn’t check his age because he (human life span precludes it) cannot be old enough for that remark to seem actionable in his lifetime.
.
He has parroted a common female anti-porn argument perfectly. Especially Christian women. It is ridiculously simplistic and begs and begs for answers to other questions that complete the picture.
From the point he makes we can surmise that men don’t want anything relational whatsoever from women. Men want to be alone or with buddies. Oddly he later mentions that men need help and women were made to fill the role. God made some comments about men being alone as well.
Wilson, as above when he says men ought to get cracking on marriage right away, That his sexual needs will also be met along with the fundamental need of not being alone.
In reality the men have likely had humiliating nuclear rejections as well as experienced the dynamic that defines dating longevity…..date the beta till she has an alpha offer….and are rightly not eager to do that over and again in hopes of finding a unicorn or a woman whose butt hurts from those rigid plastic horses on the carousel.
.
No, A wonderful way of dealing with the idea of self is to not dwell on the idea of self. But if you gotta gaze into your own navel a bit at least make the explanation of self as an evolving thing be related to a bunch of mumbo jumbo. Because mumbo jumbo is better than saying self is necessarily defined by our marriage or our spouse. This subtle “woman is better, more pure, and your-self will be similarly better and more pure once she takes her holy ghost brillo to ya.
Pastor Doug, meet a celebrity from around these parts……Hawt Seventy Year Old. She may bring humor to the point, but do take it seriously. The problem of self perception belongs with the gender who defines the intersection of solipsism and narcissism. yes, there are megalomaniac men who live delusional lives. But the majority have been put in their place…so to speak…by one of these pasty women with high self opinion. Read some dating profiles friend.
Ok, even if I go with men finding one early as a preventative….how does the supp,lication that is not so subtly in the rest of this advice do anything but support a form of evangelical feminism that includes a sense of entitlement greater than that of the average slut walker.
To Cane:
The evangelical church I attend in a large southern city has a SINGLE ADULT MINISTRY (age 30 to 65). Ours is the only SINGLES MINISTRY around, and several drive quite a distance to attend.
We are 70% female and only 30% male. You would think we’d have more single men attending since this is where the available Christian females are found. Nope.
*****************************************************************
I invite you to visit and join AMBEC, a brand new resource on facebook for Christian men!
https://www.facebook.com/groups/reportAMBEC/
@Hank Flanders,
Confidence is important but it is a secondary virtue, not the primary. I believe the primary virtue you should be concentrating on building is “Attraction”. Confidence supports Attraction. Confidence is one of many facets of Attraction. Consider all the loser bad boys; guys without a steady job, no college, no savings and yet they get lots of attractive girls even though they don’t have any accomplishments! They have confidence but it does not come from any accomplishments. They have lots of other facets of Attraction; they ooze masculinity, they can do physical violence (they can protect a woman), they are cocky funny (a good sense of humor, sometimes sexual, sometime with a hard edge), they are exciting and will take risks, they dominate and take charge (not over-analyzing and agonizing over decisions), they believe they should lead and direct their girlfriends.
I don’t know you; so ignore any of my suggestions that you are already doing or have done.
Stop being a Christian nice guy. Churches raise guys to be wimps. I was like this. Be firm, be in control, be in charge, not nice. Deep Strength has some good essays about this.
Cultivate masculinity. Lift weights. Learn to fight. I joined a boxing club and got punched in the face – that was a good thing. Take boxing, MMA, or Krav Mag classes.
Buy a gun. Learn to shoot.
Practice being cocky funny. Learn to banter with strangers. Learn Agree & Amplify. It is fun, it brightens your day and their day. I initiate fun conversations with clerks stocking the shelves at the grocery store, with the cashiers, and with the baggers. I have had two different produce guys at the grocery store pull out their phones and show me pictures; one of his 3 year old son, the other of his vacation to NYC. Be cocky funny but also be respectful. Have you read the post by “Dave from Hawaii (Keoni Galt)” about Agree and Amplify?
Can you transform normal events into a story?
https://psmag.com/tell-a-good-tale-find-a-great-mate-c2a0273bf805#.xjk8d4fdm
This video is Debbie Pearl (married to Baptist leader Michael Pearl) with Kirsten, probably one of her granddaughters. Notice at about the 0:26 second mark Kirsten reacts very negatively to the thought of marrying a boring, steady guy. Some of this is immaturity on Kirsten’s part. But, even Christian girls don’t want to marry an indecisive wimp, and they don’t want to spend the next 50 years being hitched to a serious, somber guy that never jokes around and never gives them relief from their need for drama.
Game is a toolbox. As a Christian man whom is married I have never used Dread Game* on my wife or Dark Triad. I have never tried to cheat on my wife or spin plates. But, I have used cocky funny, Agree and Amplify, masculine posing, sexual escalation throughout the day (slapping her on the butt as I walk by, forcibly grabbing the back of her head and kissing her passionately as soon as I walk in the door, reminding her that we are going to make love later tonight, telling her that she belongs to me, that I own her, that she is my girl, etc.)
* My wife has never hinted at or threatened me with divorce. If a Christian man was threatened with divorce I would support the use of Dread Game to try to save the marriage. ASD Gamer writes about this.
Poon Commandment XV has been very helpful to my marriage, “Be the oak tree…”
https://heartiste.wordpress.com/the-sixteen-commandments-of-poon/
On at least 3 occasions I have raised my voice and stomped my foot on the floor and told my wife that God put me in charge and we are going to do X and she needs to submit. She got mad for a few hours but then she forgot about it and we moved on with X.
Dominate your personal life. Bring order to your personal life. Get on a schedule; go to bed and get up at the same time. Exercise regularly. Track your spending with Excel, Quicken, or MS Money. Balance your check book once a month. Clean your home once a week, on the same time each week.
Have you seen Joseph of Jackson’s essay on “Order”? Excellent essay. Unfortunately his blog is now private. Email me if you want a pdf of it; beework at comcast dot net
Save money. When you get engaged you will need several thousand for a diamond ring. Do you have that saved yet? You will also need money for the honeymoon. Do you already own a home? If not, save up for 10% down. What do average starter homes cost in your neighborhood?
Confidence. Accomplishments are not the only way to build confidence. You should also be confident because God made you a man! Reject masculine guilt. Reject criticism of the Patriarchy. Men are supposed to dominate and rule (Genesis 1 – 3, I Corinthians 11 – meditate on these Scriptures, speak them out loud). God designed and made women to be submissive – feminists rebel against this. Don’t marry a feminist.) Start by dominating your own personal life, and your own home or apartment; practical discipline.
There is a woman out there that God wants you to lead and direct, and love, and make babies with. That woman will not fully mature in Christ until she learns to humble herself and submit to you. There are children with that woman that God wants you to guide, direct, and discipline. God has made you to be the leader of your wife and your home. Dalrock has pointed out that many Christian leaders today hate the idea of fathers leading their own families – but these leaders are wrong on this important point.
http://letthemmarry.org/authority-of-the-father-historical-commentaries/
All the best to you. I hope and pray you find a good woman soon.
PM,
You are right that many father’s would not have accepted you either, as Cane and Dalrock noted. I was just noting the flawed premise of being ready. I don’t hold you personally accountable for that, it is the false message of the day.
CSI @ 7:19 am:
“But many commentators here want fertility to return to much higher than replacement level – 3, 4 or 5 children per average woman. Would this really be a good thing?”
Not until the current situation ends. The problem with fatherless children being raised by feminist governments in a maliciously immoral society is not that there aren’t enough of them.
Sin is not genetic, therefore having large families does nothing to spread Christianity anyway.
Clarification. My first sentence in my comment above suggests that I am accusing Dalrock and others of twisting Wilson’s words. Actually I meant to accuse Wilson of twisting truth into fractal shapes with his flawed logic.
Dalrock rightly points out Wilson’s missing cohort, rebellious women. That made me think at church today, where are the older women who did marry young and raise a bunch of kids? In my church, there is only one of those women whose kids are older. Maybe ina few years,maybe those women will stand up for their way and teach the younger ones to follow. However, I think its just as likely they start running as hard as possible to catch up on worldly success, and by their actions, apologize for ever being barefoot and pregnant. We have about a dozen women that will be making their emptier nest decisions in about 5 years. Do you see women in your church or women writers standing up for their biblical choices?
Greyghost,
Let’s not play dumb. At this point in time and the law and cultural structure we have the statement is absolutely on track.
Indeed, that was pretty foolish from ray. He hasn’t grasped the first lesson of the ‘sphere, which is how the cultural/legal structures that created illusions of the past, are now gone.
My grandfathers and father too had/have lifelong marriages, while having zero knowledge of how female attraction works, and no curiosity about it either. They didn’t need to – the culture had all the structures in the background to create the illusion.
The reason there are so many whiteknights is because that used to be a productive strategy in the old days, where women were paired off to someone who demonstrated he was ‘good’ by being a whiteknight…
I almost feel sorry for women who had to marry a whiteknight in the old days. Unfortunately, women failed to elevate society with their new freedom….
Just looked up Doug Wilson’s bio. He was born in 1953, so mid-range Boomer. Hence the cluelessness about anything in the Marriage Market that has happened since 1980, the utter ignorance of women’s porn use, etc. and so forth and so on.
It’s not an accident that Keller, Piper, Wilson and others are woefully ignorant, they are in their 60’s and clearly haven’t had to learn anything new for the last 30 years. Frankly I suspect that they haven’t had an original thought since seminary school, the way they seem to just recycle the same, old, tired, junk verbiage. Truly these men are aging generals fighting the last war, or maybe the war before that.
Having written all of that, there’s no excuse for them to mutilate Bible quotes into feminist origami.
We have about a dozen women that will be making their emptier nest decisions in about 5 years. Do you see women in your church or women writers standing up for their biblical choices?
I think the reason you don’t see more of this is that the older women who made different choices, a good chunk of them at least, either somewhat regret their choices or, if they don’t exactly regret decisions they made under different conditions, nevertheless envy the freedom younger women enjoy, and therefore are reluctant to undermine it by suggesting that the younger women follow what they themselves did.
That video @Bee posted above is an older woman making the case for picking a higher quality guy over the exciting guy. Back in the day, young women would have been channeled by older ones into good long term decisions. Today, that’s less the case.
In my experience the young women in church have limited interest in mentoring from older women. Dittos for the men, for that matter. Our culture is youth-centric. The values of the Millennials are regularly elevated above those of previous generations, for example. The older are now supposed to learn from the younger, about tech, about how not to be *-phobic, etc.
I think the reason you don’t see more of this is that the older women who made different choices, a good chunk of them at least, either somewhat regret their choices or, if they don’t exactly regret decisions they made under different conditions, nevertheless envy the freedom younger women enjoy, and therefore are reluctant to undermine it by suggesting that the younger women follow what they themselves did.
THIS.
I do wonder, however, if some of these older “empty nest” women have taken a long, hard look at their peers who decided to crazyglue themselves to the carousel in their 20s, or who consecrated their lives to their “careers” and who now have nothing but cats and a lonely dotage to look forward to.
Just a rhetorical question, mind you, as this involves borderline introspection, which is definitely NOT women’s territory.
In my experience the young women in church have limited interest in mentoring from older women. Dittos for the men, for that matter. Our culture is youth-centric. The values of the Millennials are regularly elevated above those of previous generations, for example. The older are now supposed to learn from the younger, about tech, about how not to be *-phobic, etc.
What you describe is a small part of the problem, but the real problem, as I’ve repeatedly hammered home, is this: there ARE NO “older, wiser” women (i.e., “Titus 2 wives” to give any counsel to the younger women.
Remember: we are nearly three generations into the Great Egalitarian Society represented by 2WF and its descendants. The “older women” of today came of age during 2WF’s ascendance in the late 60s/early 70s and drank deeply of the polluted waters, which leeched into their very psychological and spiritual DNA. The VERY few Western Christian women who managed to avoid this are too few in number and too small an influence to have any wide-ranging effect whatsoever on a preponderance of today’s young Christian women. Worse still, the few that do exist and who try to make a difference amongst younger women are undermined in their efforts at every turn not only by the broader churchian-modernist culture, but by their churches’ own “leadership” as well – to say nothing of the rest of their age cohort who either despise everything they stand for, or who “just can’t be bothered” to mentor or set an example.
Novaseeker
I think the reason you don’t see more of this is that the older women who made different choices, a good chunk of them at least, either somewhat regret their choices …
Older women as carousel watchers? Hmm. Requires thought.
Good advice you gave Bee, with the exception of a diamond engagement ring. aka “Bitches Crystal”. DeBeers started that diamond ring engagement stuff after WW2 and unfortunately it is so ingrained in the wedding industry. Diamonds are not all that rare. Just enough are released on the market to keep the price artificially high. Rubies, sapphires, IMO would be a better choice and you have lots of extra cash to buy gold or silver, or a down payment on a house.
FeeRiker and Kaminsky commented on looking outside of the US and Canada. I also will say that women in the 2nd world country to which I went were massively superior. And many actually wanted to be with me. Wow, imagine that. I actually had to pick which woman to pursue for marriage, out of 3 at the same time.
And no, not because I was spending money on them. Mostly we would just go for a walk and talk, engage in a cheap, fun activity that we came across, or go to a cafe or tea.
Young men: If you can wait, do not buy a home right away. The mortgage will make you a slave to the bank, and you will not have the ability to choose to stop working for 2 or 3 months so you can go pursue a decent women from another culture. (Wow, it’s almost like God knows what he is doing… Prob 22:7 – The rich rule over the poor, and the borrower is slave to the lender.)
Bee: I also will thank you for taking the time to write out your advice. I also will question the wisdom of spending large sums on the wedding, honey moon and engagement ring. You certainly did not advocate this, but many / most / virtually all women from this culture expect a 20k$ one-day party for their wedding. It seems a foolish precedent to start the marriage by kissing her ass and blowing my house down-payment for her party.
Similarly, buying an expensive bauble for her to wear does not seem necessary. Is she marrying for the one-day party, or for life? Is she marrying me for my character and virtue, or for only my resources? A refusal to go over a certain budgeted amount for wedding party and ring may help determine the answers to those questions.
Overall though, great ideas Bee.
Oh, also: A friend of mine gave his wife an engagement ring with another gem in it, as Jack Russell Terrorist advised. He chose the “official” gem for the month that they started dating. She really likes it, although she also was not raised in North America.
Dale, Jack Russell, Bee, et al: again I must point out that any vetting a man does of one or more women for marriage must, must include any debt she’s carrying. Future time orientation is crucial. A 20-something woman with a lot of debt is a risk. If she can’t pay off credit cards in a timely fashion or use a debit card instead, watch out. If she’s carrying a lot of student debt, watch out (student debt cannot be erased via bankruptcy. It’s there until paid off).
Debt is a reverse dowry. It is a burden from the start.
Women lurkers, pay attention. If you have debt, start paying it down. Better still, don’t go there. For your own good now and in the future.
@Jack Russell Terrorist
with the exception of a diamond engagement ring. aka “Bitches Crystal”
I always wondered what that Emerson, Lake and Palmer song was about.
Jack Russell, I second your comment about diamonds, and will go one step further: an expensive ring (of any material) is a waste of money, as is an expensive wedding. Get a $100 ring, then have a small, private ceremony without any of the typical nonsense (invitations, professional flowers & photog & music). On a later date, have a barbecue for a larger reception. You’ll save tons of time, money and stress, and you won’t be focusing a lot of energy on the least important aspects of marriage.
Money for a ring is better spent on a car seat, breast pump and tools to make home repairs (plunger) Those things for a young family starting out are a BIG deal and set the mood for the long run.
It’s difficult to discuss anything at all at my church because my church keeps adding more music each month. I feel extremely over entertained inside and outside of church.
greyghost — “Let’s not play dumb.”
Say what boy?
I used to think that Mormons were the only “Christian” marriage mania religion, but after seeing the attitudes of a lot of Calvinists and other Protestant and often self-styled nondenominational pastors, it’s looking more and more like there are very few religions that don’t turn marriage into a false idol. It seems to me that it’s often just another way to ridicule sexually unsuccessful men, the same way the worldly irreligious do, but from a more insidious angle of morality. In other words, the secular world runs a guy down for being incel, and at least they are honest about it; much of Christian Protestantism and Orthodoxy run a guy down for being unmarried, which amounts to the same thing, but it’s more clever.
If marriages were more or less arranged, as they were in the days these pastors long for, then maybe you could hold a man’s prolonged singleness against him (not that you should, but it would at least make slightly more sense). What they don’t realize is that getting married these days is not as easy as going down and getting a car registered like it once was. If a guy is not attractive enough, he is shut out, and it depends on how unattractive he is. Depending on how many factors are working against him, he may be shut out clear up into his 30s, 40s or indefinitely.
And then they wonder why the pews are emptying out all the men… Count me out as well, if you’re talking about any “church” that preaches that kind of double-bind from the pulpit.
Ray
That was rather nasty on my part. I hate to see the guys here falling back on conservative views that add to the problem. Men before us had men better than the so called conservative leaders set up a society that allowed men to be kind and chivalrous towards women. That society doesn’t exist men now have to truly know and place into action red pill knowledge. Individual men are the check now. Romance is over.
Smokin crack …
“the problem is Christian men being unwilling to marry the large number of unmarried Christian women who want nothing more than to be godly wives (emphasis mine)”
Ray
Referencing your grandfather’s gamelessness is not only an isolated case in a meta discussion but also several decades deep into insignificance. Look at US in 1964; dress, pop culture, language, music , sexuality, mores demeanor. Then look at the US in 1969. Look at the change in 5 years. Your grandfather’s hormonal heyday might be as much as 70 years ago. Greyghost was fair with you.
Over the last few years I have come to both like and admire those who comment at this avowedly Christian blog. I am thus not anti-American, nor anti-Christian but I cannot remain silent: although I doubt it was front page news stateside. Over the weekend your Head of State was in England visiting our Head of State (her 90th birthday) which also conveniently coincided with the 400th anniversary of the death of a certain playwright. We are however in the middle of something perhaps even more important than a general election namely that rarity a Referendum. It is I believe common practice for Heads of State to keep out of other countries elections, but that did not stop your Head of State from issuing a thinly-veiled threat to his hosts as to the consequences should Britain leave Europe. Whether one is Brexit or a Remainer the absolute gall of your Head of State has left a lot of people on both sides very angry at the impertinence. TNB?
If you want to have some idea how it feels to me: ask yourself how you would feel if your Supreme Court’s decisions could be appealed to a court in say Ottowa or how legislation enacted in Congress and the Senate was limited by what Acapulco or Tijuana would permit. The Kenyan has always been anti-British and in a way that I cannot recall that from any prior American President. Tell him from me to GTFO out of what does is no concern of America.
I bought up the issue of birth rate before because if the Total Fertility Rate is raised significantly above replacement level (even as low as 3 children per woman), you’d see the population double every few decades just from natural increase alone. Although I suppose Christians would have arguments to refute such Malthusian logic.
@Opus:
If you want to send him back to Kenya, they’re be a lot of people here that would be more than glad to help pay his way. It’s very much the aloof, “thinks he’s smarter than he is”-type. We’ve had 8 years of dealing with the fool.
And, as for his views of the UK, it really probably is because his father (who abandoned him) was from Kenya. Added on top of his pretty clear anti-colonialism views that have driven his foreign policy.
Opus —
It did get some attention here, but it’s vintage Obama. He can’t help himself. He’s the pedant-in-chief, always wagging his condescending finger at those with whom he differs. He is constitutionally incapable of working with people, at home or abroad, with whom he disagrees. It’s kind of a fatal flaw in a politician in a democratic system. What he said in the UK was totally out of bounds, but he doesn’t see it that way — he sees himself as the lone voice of reason in the world, and if everyone would just listen to him, instead of being stupid, everything would be better off. He’s just insufferable, really.
I think the reason you don’t see more of this is that the older women who made different choices, a good chunk of them at least, either somewhat regret their choices or, if they don’t exactly regret decisions they made under different conditions, nevertheless envy the freedom younger women enjoy, and therefore are reluctant to undermine it by suggesting that the younger women follow what they themselves did.
So even Christian women in long-term, stable, productive marriages have a tendency to regret getting married?
Meh. I think Obummer was simply making a politically calculated move to contribute to the defeat Brexit, which is an idea absolutely hated by his political base.
So even Christian women in long-term, stable, productive marriages have a tendency to regret getting married?
Like I said, regret may be too strong a word — I think they don’t all regret decisions they made under different social conditions. But a good number of them do envy that their daughters or grand-daughters have “opportunities” they did not feel they had when they were younger, and therefore aren’t interested in advising the young women to follow in their footsteps. The mindset is this: “things were different when I was that age, but if I were that age now, I wouldn’t do what I did then, at least not exactly the same way and in the same sequence and at the same time. I’d have some fun, try out different guys, make my own money, and then get married later on after I’d enjoyed life a little.” This is a main reason why we don’t see more older women counseling younger women against what they are doing — the older women would be doing a lot of it themselves if they had been born at a different time with different social rules and expectations. It’s hard for the older generation to mentor the younger one at all times, but it’s impossible to do so when the older generation thinks that the younger generation has it better than the older generation did, and therefore is not advocating what the older generation did. That’s what’s happening.
It’s also happening on the male side, too. Most fathers and grandfathers, even when still permitted to be present in the lives of their younger male relatives, are too confused about the current expectations to simply download older generation values onto the younger generation. This is a main reason why so many young men are so confused about masculinity — their fathers and grandfathers were either absent (divorce, etc) or were confused as to what to tell them, having realized that expectations are different now, and yet blurry. You can decide to instill older values anyway, which is what I have tried to do, but you have to be willing to have your son be a bit of an outlier as a result, with all that entails. It seems lots of fathers are fearful of the implications of that. Another factor is that if the guy has sons and daughters, there is a tendency to homogenize them, such that they all get raised in a more androgynous way in that both are encouraged to be independent, competitive, successful, ambitious, achieving, and so on, and so at the end of the day the father has helped raise a masculinized girl, and a boy who is confused about what the difference between himself and females is other than genitalia. It’s a mess.
“But this needs to be balanced against the temptation (which comes very easily to men) of not having any awareness of what league they are actually in”
*SNORT* What a load of bullshit.
I have a watchful eye these days when I’m out & about, and I see a disturbing trend of men who are in the 6 – 8 range paired off with some fat woman in the 3 – 5 range. It really is quite glaring.
I assume for the most part that they are married/have children and that he is trapped, for lack of a better word; OR alternatively, he feels ‘lucky’ to have any woman at all (low self-esteem).
The pastor is right about this much, the churches (and society in general) are openly hostile to men; and so it would make sense for any blue pill man to suffer damage to his self-esteem if he gives one ounce of merit to such wanton bullshit.
I find a lot of men UNDER-estimate the league in which they are in. Until men demand better, we will get the terrible ‘Sophie’s Choice’ selection of women that are currently on offer.
@Novaseeker Excellent insights. I see the same lack of fathering/mentoring and the same effects you do. That’s the what and the why of my blog — to offer those virtues and values, and encouragement, to those young men. (That’s also why I rarely comment here — I’m busy aiming at the younger cohort. I read here regularly, however, and I appreciate the exchanges here.)
Sorry to self-promote on your comment thread, @Dalrock.
Thanks Looking Glass and Novaseeker. I feel rather guilty – now – for venting my anger. You may notice that I never when the subject of American Politics – as such – comes up, voice an opinion – It is not my concern, I am both largely ignorant thereof and not part of your electorate. When I spent a year in America I also then avoided any temptation to be partisan as between Democrats and Republicans: I was your guest and thought I should behave as one, though I have to confess that I did attend the anti-Inauguration Ball to which I had been invited (the later Gil Scott Heron providing the music ) on a very cold D.C. night – being English I had walked to the venue – but then I had not been invited to the real thing.
“policies delayed are policies denied”
It’s women that are doing the delaying (often encouraged by church and family). Men lose enthusiasm for marriage after a certain age (in my case around 26…was very pro marriage prior to my mid twenties).
@NovaSeeker – You can decide to instill older values anyway, which is what I have tried to do, but you have to be willing to have your son be a bit of an outlier as a result, with all that entails.
Ditto.
Of course, my stepdad is only second generation in the US, grew up in a mining town, worked as a miner, carpenter, and electrician. So, I got a much older set of values as the modern SJW ideals don’t play so well outside the cubical world. Well, that’s my impression anyway.
@Ray: “Neither of my grand-dads knew or used Game, and their had productive, intimate, happy and lifelong marriages.”
Married Game is merely asserting your rugged masculinity and holding frame. In the past this was MUCH easier for men raised by masculine fathers and married to sweet, submissive women. Nevertheless, even the sweetest, most Godly woman will shit test and push and push until she reaches a hard boundary. Even the most Godly woman will attempt to push back the sex to nothing in order to gain control- IF you let her. Your claim that Gramps did not have game is simply wrong. Gramps held frame, stayed strong and stoic, set reasonable boundaries, seduced his wife, and probably had sex on demand. New flash: ALL of that is “game.”
@Neguy: Please be careful and God be with you. You have the courage of the 300 Spartans- except it would do well to recall how that ended for Leonidus. Perhaps your violent, hideous death will serve as the inspiration for men everywhere to stand their ground in the face of the hordes of White Knights, Manginas, bra burning churchians, and eager CC riders. Perhaps married men everywhere will take your stunning act of sacrifice as the call to action and begin either fixing or nullifying marriages to battle axe sex denying harpies everywhere. ..but I wouldn’t hold my breath.
More likely all the unmarried men will look upon the crushed and bloody shell that was once your body and be inspired to MGTOW.
Good luck, and remember, come back with your shield- or on it.
>>>”I might pay serious attention to a woman abasing herself in my presence.”
HAHAHAHHA! Then, after returning from a parallel dimension in a galaxy far, far away where Rey was a strong young man and “Daddy’s Home” was a horror film….
Only 21% of students at Evangelical Christian colleges have sex. (Link: http://purefreedom.org/wp-content/uploads/2015/03/SEX-ON-CAMPUS-2.png ) I attended one of these colleges in the North East, and there were plenty of virgins absolutely pining for marriage and motherhood. I was one of them. I now live in the South, and our Wilson-like church has a dozen of healthy (i.e. not overweight) chaste young women — including several stay at home daughters. We also have two dozen employed single men between 20 and 50, and it’s a mystery to me why none of them are asking the women out. In my observation (and we have hosted several singles gatherings at our home) the men have extremely limited social skills, poor personal hygiene, and few/no interests beyond watching SportsCenter. Still, many of them would make steady, dependable husbands and the women I talk to are interested (there’s an art of sitting near enough in the pews for a guy to notice you!), but simply don’t get asked out by the men.
As for why men today should get married, the services I provide my husband including doing all of the cooking/cleaning/laundry/packing and many outdoor chores, acting as a personal assistant, and bearing and raising our children. I’m a built-in-date, a guaranteed lay, and give terrific foot and back rubs in addition to being a partner for 2-person activities like sailing (yes, I have stayed thin and fit and kept my hair long). Proverbs 31 has a great deal to say about the value an industrious wife contributes, and the only reference to sex or looks is a warning that “charm is deceitful and beauty is fleeting, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.”
@Bee: “My wife has never hinted at or threatened me with divorce. If a Christian man was threatened with divorce I would support the use of Dread Game to try to save the marriage. ”
By the time unhappy harpy/wife files for divorce, Dread Game is not nearly as effective. Remember, women rarely branch swing until their little monkey paws are firmly on the next branch.
Therefore, I advocate the use of Advanced Dread Game with ANY woman who is in violation of her marriage vows. Hopefully you are aware that the marriage vows are to “Have and to hold” which means….sex. Thus ANY sex denying harpy, ANY woman who uses sexual denial to seize control of the relationship, as well as ANY woman who actually exercises the threatpoint is fair game for advanced dread game. ANY woman who is continually unsubmissive and unpleasant is fair game for advanced dread game after you have tried to assert strong positive leadership for about a year without significant improvement. IMHO, I know Dalrock disagrees.
https://bluepillprofessor.wordpress.com/2015/05/22/hello-world/
You don’t actually have to cheat but for Dread game to work with a disobedient, spiteful wife, who plays the sexual denial game and shit tests you into oblivion, but you do need options where you COULD “cheat.”
@HH: “So even Christian women in long-term, stable, productive marriages have a tendency to regret getting married?”
Of course! Women are NEVER happy. If they have Chad thunderc-ck with a 9 inch phallus they long for the stable Billy Beta who is sweet and kind and easily manipulated. If they have Billy Beta they dream of Chad. If the Husband has a high sex drive they will gradually tailor back the sex in order to gain control. If the Husband has a lower sex drive they will nag and whine incessantly and take to the internet complaining about Porn and their dead bedroom. If the husband makes $500,000.00 a year they will complain that he is gone all the time. If the husband takes care of everything in the house but makes less money than the wife they will complain that he needs to get a better job. If he cums in 2 minutes they will ridicule his fast trigger and complain bitterly to their friends and family about your “problem.” If he lasts for a half hour they will complain it is taking to long. If God almighty Himself gives them the Garden of Eden they will rebel and demand to be like God Himself. All of this is as it is written.
Go read a dictionary published before 1920. “Celibacy” is defined as bachelorhood by choice… intentionally not choosing to marry. It says nothing about “chastity” or abstinence from sex. A celibate man was one who chose to remain single. The Church itself would assume then he wasn’t having sex because he was unmarried, which is why the word ‘celibate’ has evolved to also mean abstinent.
Opus,
Our fearless leader does not know when to keep his mouth shut sometimes. This comes from his inane belief that he is POTUS of everything and king of all.
“Greyghost was fair with you.”
You’re just butthurt because I said my grandpa didn’t need your goofy Game. I wish you guys were this fervent about Jesus.
Mind your own business. Greyghost and I can handle ours.
bluepillprofessor — “Your claim that Gramps did not have game is simply wrong. Gramps held frame, stayed strong and stoic, set reasonable boundaries, seduced his wife, and probably had sex on demand. New flash: ALL of that is “game.””
You guys just know SO much, now you’re gonna instruct me about my own grandfather, eh perfesser? That you didn’t know. But he’s a perfect example of Game.
Newsflash: reminds me of Feminism.
@Jack Russell T., Dale,
Thanks for the kind words.
@Jack Russell T., Dale, Anon. Reader, Splashman,
I agree with not splurging on the wedding and honeymoon and sticking to a budget. Rubies or sapphires and gold sound good. Better to put the money into a house fund, a next car fund, and an emergency fund. Because of the overemphasis on tax breaks and retirement savings I meet young and middle aged couples who have very little saved up in cash accounts; no emergency fund, no next car fund. My main point is that part of Order is saving money. A single guy that wants to get married needs to be laying aside a good chunk of cash. All of a guy’s savings should not be tied down in IRA’s and 401(k)’s.
Symbols are important. God gave Moses a staff as a symbol of his leadership authority. God designed the Chief Rabbi’s uniform to be studded with precious stones as a symbol of being the Chief. I don’t like the idea of scrimping on the wedding ring because it is an important symbol. It says that this women is married, she belongs to another guy. It also says that her husband thinks she is valuable. I would be very ok with buying a cubic zirconia stone in a real gold band. It conveys the symbolism without the big expense.
Budgeting, scrimping and being frugal are alpha. But a good husband is not, “All Alpha, all the time”; you need to mix some Beta in with the Alpha from time to time.
@ray,
“You guys just know SO much, now you’re gonna instruct me about my own grandfather, eh perfesser? That you didn’t know. But he’s a perfect example of Game.”
You are being passive/aggressive.
If you did not want us to consider and discuss your grandfather, you should not have put him out in a public comment as an example.
23?
The Median age for a man to marry in 1900 was 26. Median, as in half of men marrying were OLDER than 26.
http://www.infoplease.com/ipa/A0005061.html
Look at the chart. The 1950’s and ’60’s were an anomaly. For the last 125 years, the norm has been for men to marry in their mid to late 20’s.
On the other hand, until 1990, the norm was for women to marry in their EARLY 20’s.
I suspect the pastor found this exact same chart (it’s at the top of a google search on marriage ages) and cherry picked the numbers to fit his hypothesis. Had he included the entire set of numbers in his article, it would have been obvious to all that it is women who are pushing back the age of marriage, not men.
A lie by omission is still a lie pastor.
greyghost — “That society doesn’t exist men now have to truly know and place into action red pill knowledge. Individual men are the check now. Romance is over.”
Heck, that WORLD doesn’t exist now. I’m not disagreeing about that. There was a place for men like my grandpa during the Fifties. But you’re correct, there is no place for him now, not in America certainly. And yes, the conditions for men then were vastly different.
However, I do not equate ‘red pill knowledge’ with Game. I’d replace ‘red pill’ in your sentence with ‘Biblical’. Everything I need is in there; I don’t need, or want, the Game Experts. Cultism leads to entrenched dogma, and to personality peacocking. No thanks.
Dunno where you got the idea I’m a conservative. Is that your default category for game-resisters? :O) I’m not political. Ask the neo-cons that spent the past week kicking me over Equality.
Yup romance is cooked. And I’ll cop to the ‘romantic’ thing — more a chivalrist, actually. Those that obey me, I protect. The others, not. Guess you could call it ‘practical chivalry’. My grandpa would definitely understand THAT.
Cheers.
It’s also happening on the male side, too. Most fathers and grandfathers, even when still permitted to be present in the lives of their younger male relatives, are too confused about the current expectations to simply download older generation values onto the younger generation. This is a main reason why so many young men are so confused about masculinity — their fathers and grandfathers were either absent (divorce, etc) or were confused as to what to tell them, having realized that expectations are different now, and yet blurry. You can decide to instill older values anyway, which is what I have tried to do, but you have to be willing to have your son be a bit of an outlier as a result, with all that entails. It seems lots of fathers are fearful of the implications of that. Another factor is that if the guy has sons and daughters, there is a tendency to homogenize them, such that they all get raised in a more androgynous way in that both are encouraged to be independent, competitive, successful, ambitious, achieving, and so on, and so at the end of the day the father has helped raise a masculinized girl, and a boy who is confused about what the difference between himself and females is other than genitalia. It’s a mess.
Excellent.
My step son came back this past Thanksgiving from his first semester of college. He has had a steady diet of red-pill since about the 9th grade. He reads the same sites and understands what has happened. He also shares these truths with his friends in school. He has observed 3 distinct groups of guys:
1. Those that are hopelessly blue-pill and invested in the narrative.
2. Those who perceive that these problems exist, but feel they have no power to do anything about it. They do not believe that there will be a well paying job, and sweet, supportive wife waiting for them when they get their careers started. They are resolved to just make whatever life they can for themselves and enjoy it. (These guys I believe will become MGTOW).
3. Those who are motivated enough to try to an effect change, even though they are fighting an uphill battle. (These may be the leaders or a fledgling “movement.”)
That’s the report from the front lines, anyway.
I have an update. I had a good conversation with my pastor today. He already believed that women undervalued marriage and child-rearing. I had already highlighted a number of feminist biases of various of these other pastors, and he agreed that I was on to something. He’s was entirely sympathetic to everything I said, is willing to engage more, and is even willing to help. I couldn’t have asked for more.
Next I need to finish off that red pill synthesis I started in on. That will probably take me a couple of months. Then I’ll see how he reacts to that. But so far so good.
I have a watchful eye these days when I’m out & about, and I see a disturbing trend of men who are in the 6 – 8 range paired off with some fat woman in the 3 – 5 range. It really is quite glaring.
I see this as well many times. That’s to be expected, though. In a society where hypergamy isn’t restrained, a woman will either mate up, so to speak, or not mate at all.
ray,
You clearly do not know your grandfather or game as well as you think, likely both. Our grandparents (or possibly great grandparents in the case of some here since I am now in that category) were in an entirely different world.
Game principles are far more than the PUA lifestyle many accuse. Keeping your frame is something that came naturally to most of them, at least the ones I knew. My own grandmother was quite strong willed, yet it was always clear who was ultimately in charge even though she ran many things.
I think even some of the pet names used were a form of negging.
I did not see any of this at the time of course and only realized things long after they were both gone.
Feel free to ignore reality though. I choose to believe Solomon, that nothing is new under the sun.
I suspect the pastor found this exact same chart (it’s at the top of a google search on marriage ages) and cherry picked the numbers to fit his hypothesis. Had he included the entire set of numbers in his article, it would have been obvious to all that it is women who are pushing back the age of marriage, not men.
Yes — the part that is being glossed over is the squeezing of the age gap. As you note, the gap was bigger, normatively, historically, other than in the immediate post-war context. Now, the expectation is a smaller age gap of 0-3 years, which, in itself, will push the marriage age back as the male age at marriage returns to the historical level of the late 20s. It appears, based on the OK Cupid data, that women also prefer this smaller age gap. But the fact that no-one is talking about the compressed age gap, and how it’s based on (1) feminism’s distaste for historically normal age gaps and (2) women’s own preference for smaller age gaps — and that’s a factor that is independent of the other factors that are also involved and mentioned above (work/career/soq oats/travel with BFFs, etc.). It all points in one direction, really, in terms of what has changed from historical norms: it’s the women.
Billy: I think you’re exactly right about people 2 and 3 generations ago. Back then, men and women were raised with very different expectations and in a completely different sexual world. Divorce was nonexistent except for a really good reason (“I don’t wanna be married anymore” was NOT a good reason). Holding frame was something men were trained pretty well in. He did what needed done, that was the end of it, and there was nothing more that needed to be said.
back in the good old days a mans solid frame was also respected by the government. A man taking care of his family was supported and backed up. A man that didn’t paid alimony and divorce was fault based. Easy to have natural game when reality provided the natural dread.
Many men are in category 3, in that they believe in their ability to affect the status quo a movement, but also in category 2, in that they can’t do anything to affect their own situations as an individuals.
One of the interesting things about MGTOW is that is doesn’t really need to be a unified or organized movement, nor does it even need to be spoken about or understood in those terms. As the status quo becomes more and more hostile towards men and their roles in marriage and relationships, individual men — regardless of whether or not they have ever heard of “MGTOW” — are going to make life decisions accordingly, hence the movement forms. Even setting policy to punish men for staying single won’t push them to marriage.
Why would he buy the cow when he can get the milk for free? People seem to think the cow refers to a woman, but it more aptly represents marriage. And if he does buy the cow, what does he get? There’s no guarantee of milk, milking the cow without permission is rape, getting milk from other sources justifies taking half his assets and garnishing 25% of his income indefinitely.
With the introduction of marital rape and no fault divorce, there essentially is no difference between a long term relationship and a marriage, except that one carries extreme burdens for the man – giving him no real options, whilst the other gives the man the option of ending it should the woman in question turn into a cunt or refuse to give him sex on a regular basis.
What women have done is turn the man who gets married into an idiot.
Scott,
In trying to get possibly my best friend to accept red-pill truths, he hit me with the bluest of all blue pills in response, a thinking man’s blue pill as it were. He said that I need to shut the hell up about the red pill truth I was telling him because it ignored the most basic blue pill truth that could never be refuted. And that is if you are a red pill man, obviously this feminist world sucks for you, so why don’t you want to be a woman? He is saying that any red pill man that wouldn’t trade places with a woman today and BE a woman if he could, is just being a hypocrite. He is admitting that by virtue of him BEING a “man” he has “privilege” over women (especially in this new feminist world), and he just needs to shut the hell up about red pills.
Keeping your frame is something that came naturally to most of them, at least the ones I knew. My own grandmother was quite strong willed, yet it was always clear who was ultimately in charge even though she ran many things.
You can say that again. Men of those days learned game the same way they learned how to tie their shoes; women learned to be feminine and grow into loving wives and mothers the same way they learned how to cook. There was no need for special lessons. They witnessed these things everyday and they took them as normal. Anything else was considered an aberration.
Then, feminism came, planted its root of bitterness in many hearts, and many became defiled through its poisons. The Apostle warned against this:
“Looking diligently lest any man fail of the grace of God; lest any root of bitterness springing up trouble you, and thereby many be defiled” (Hebrews 12:15).
“For among them are those who creep into households and capture weak women, burdened with sins and led astray by various passions…” (2 Timothy 3:6).
@IBB – Your friend’s comment made me chuckle.
He missed an unrefutable red-pill truth. The US is not the world. The world doesn’t suck for men, the US sucks to one degree or another for devoutly Christian men.
And that is if you are a red pill man, obviously this feminist world sucks for you, so why don’t you want to be a woman? He is saying that any red pill man that wouldn’t trade places with a woman today and BE a woman if he could, is just being a hypocrite.
Hmm?
I mean, if you aren’t Christian and you are red pill, and you “work the program”, you win. You win and win and don’t stop winning, and you win for much longer than women do, because your sell-by date comes much later. A red pill aware man who has self-improved and is not constrained by Christian morals is the ultimate winner under this system — much more than women are. You give up on marriage and family, and you play by the “new set of books”, but you adapt and win. You basically beat the feminist system at its own game, while the blue pill white knight becomes a willing slave with a bit in his mouth — and consoles himself with the privilege of being that slave.
As Christians, we obviously don’t have the “full red pill” option on the table, for moral reasons. This is, indeed, a bind. The bind arises because our sexual morality is tied to marriage, which has been overrun by feminist ideas and is now slavery for men. Therein lies the problem. It doesn’t have to do with the red pill itself, but it has to do with combining the red pill with Christian morals, which is very hard to do. It is worth doing, for obvious reasons, but it’s very hard and challenging to do, and there are many potential pitfalls.
At what point would a Christian pastor conclude that a state-based marriage contract is ungodly? I bet even if divorce resulted in taking 80% of the husband’s income for life, a pastor would still endorse it as being required of marriage. You need that contract.
Certainly a man marrying today with such an ungodly contract may actually be sinning by putting himself in a near impossible position to lead.
“DrTorch on April 22, 2016 at 12:50 pm
A big lie among pastors is, ” large and growing population of unmarried women who would love to be married, and who would make good and godly wives.” As the large population of unmarried women in churches want to be leaders, both inside the Church and inside the home.
Pastors (AMOGs doncha know) love this group of women b/c they follow his lead at church, but not so much in the home. And they encourage strife in the home by calling women to continue their service to him (well his church of course, which is really serving Jesus) and not to serve their husbands and family.
Read the Hermeneutics column at Christianity Today, or those authors’ other works and you see it clearly. Some openly label themselves as “Christian feminists”. Ugh, aside from validating Steve Sailer’s comment about feminists, their words demonstrate that they are ugly on the inside, completely disregarding 1 Peter 3:4.”
It’s strange, Dr Torch.
There is also a suspiciously large group of ummarried women at my workplace. All of them have crashed out of relationships, some out of several. All swear they want nothing more than to be married and straying families.
The question is, why then, did they not marry in the relationships they were in? Why did the men with whom they had coupled up not propose, break off engagement, or simply stop?
Education is one factor. Many of these women are STEM postgraduates working in pharmaceuticals. Any woman already married has done so when a student in their twenties.
I personally don’t hold getting high educational qualifications against them: at least they are meaningfully employed.
I think the biggest factor mitigating against them is choice addiction. They seem to hold out and hold out against marriage, looking over their sexual partners shoulder (the term “boyfriend”. grates on me. Once you are grown up, you are a man or a woman, not a boy or a girl). – for someone better. Eventually the partner wakes to this, and realises he can do better, and he drops her for a woman younger, hotter and more serious who doesn’t play this stupid game. This is why so many women are aghast when they live with men for years, play this game, he tires of it and breaks up, only to quickly find a new partner while she is left wondering why.
Pray it doesn’t make its way into Christian culture….
“And that is if you are a red pill man, obviously this feminist world sucks for you, so why don’t you want to be a woman? He is saying that any red pill man that wouldn’t trade places with a woman today and BE a woman if he could, is just being a hypocrite.”
So whatever else Bruce Jenner is, she’s not a hypocrite.
@BPP “I bet Paul’s arguments would have been even more persuasive if he had Dalrock’s analysis at his back.”
No doubt a worthy complement to our host, but if the Apostolic Authority placed in Paul isn’t enough to persuade a self-identifying “Christian”, nothing will.
@Novaseeker
“It is worth doing, for obvious reasons, but it’s very hard and challenging to do, and there are many potential pitfalls.”
Actually it’s very easy to do…that’s the problem.
@Spike She lived with her partner before marriage or engagement. That is all. The men probably loved them, but since when does love mean marriage? Both sexes now think there is always someone better to come along with the influence of dating apps etc so no real need to settle as well nor any reason to get out if casual relationships. They ought to look older, 35 and up AND accept lower educational qualification AND stepchildren. Also, under no circumstances move in. That proves they are a low quality woman.
I personally don’t hold getting high educational qualifications against them: at least they are meaningfully employed.
One of these days it is going to start sinking into even the most hamster-driven of female skulls that women (the vast majority of them, anyway*) have a choice that is boolean/either-or:
1. Get that advanced STEM or business degree and dive into the technology or business world, making it the sole focus of your time and energy, climbing the ladder to the top, snashing the glass ceiling, and proving you’re as good as any man
OR
2. Make finding a husband you love, respect, and want to have and raise children with your number one priority.
No, ladies,you cannot do/have both. No man worth having –one you’ll respect– wants anything to do with any woman who makes him fifth on her priority scale (at most) and who is going to fight and compete with him for dominance at every step of the marriage. He puts up with enough contentiousness, politics, strife, and stress at work himself. He’s not about to put up with that shit at home for the twelve hours that are supposed to be a time of respite.
I think the biggest factor mitigating against them is choice addiction. They seem to hold out and hold out against marriage, looking over their sexual partners shoulder (the term “boyfriend”. grates on me. Once you are grown up, you are a man or a woman, not a boy or a girl). – for someone better. Eventually the partner wakes to this, and realises he can do better, and he drops her for a woman younger, hotter and more serious who doesn’t play this stupid game. This is why so many women are aghast when they live with men for years, play this game, he tires of it and breaks up, only to quickly find a new partner while she is left wondering why.
The “asterisk”* footnote to the first part of my response above is this: if a woman chooses Option 1 and wants to marry, she had better hope and pray that she is that 0.0001 percent of lucky SheMBAs or SheTechnologists who manages to snag a top-level executive as a husband who out-earns her. Otherwise it’s either a beta bitch-boy whom she’ll settle for and despise (no man worth having will EVER let himself be “that man”) or a lonely cat-filled apartment and Prozac.
The rest of your quoted paragraph serves as a good illustration of why men have historically married down – before misandric family law made it too dangerous for them to continue doing so.
Pray it doesn’t make its way into Christian culture….
I don’t think we can say for sure that hasn’t, at least if by “Christian” culture you mean to say “churchian.”
Opus,
As an American, I’m sorry and ashamed of our Dyke of State’s behaviour (I spelled behaviour with a “u” out of respect). There isn’t a scale to measure the Obama Administration’s foreign policy incompetence.
@Neguy,
“I have an update. I had a good conversation with my pastor today. He already believed that women undervalued marriage and child-rearing. I had already highlighted a number of feminist biases of various of these other pastors, and he agreed that I was on to something.”
Fantastic! That is good news, and answer to prayers. Thanks for the feedback.
“There isn’t a scale to measure the Obama Administration’s incompetence.”
FIFY.
I was going to give him props for ending the embargo against Cuba, but there’s far too much common sense in that move for it to possibly be attributed to him or anyone connected with him or his administration.
Spike your comment was insightful. Going to college and getting and education for employment opportunities is not the problem. Delaying marriage and playing the next game is. Serial monogamy I guess it is called n counts a women into something unmarriable. College isn’t the problem but a characteristic of the makings of a used up women that is not someone to marry. Father to daughter should be to insure that they know it is ok to graduate from college with a husband in attendance at the graduation ceremony. In fact it is a good thing for a wife to bring to the marriage as a dowry of sorts. Just a thought for the FI work a rounds.
I’ve said this before but I might as well say it again. Like Grey Ghost and others, I don’t see a peaceful resolution to this. We crossed the Rubicon a long time ago. Everything that happens from now on will be a result of previous actions, not what’s done today.
The reason I say that is because when even the most conservative of conservative Christians are laying the blame on young single men for all our nation’s marriage woes, it means there is virtually no one to advocate on their behalf. All the feminist propaganda, all the man-up articles, all the cuckservative rhetoric; all of it is creating the moral basis for actual violence against men who refuse to play the fool.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn stated that violence can only be concealed by a lie and a lie can only be maintained by violence. For years threats of violence has sufficed to make this feminist LARPing farce happen. Then they used coercion. But the time will soon be upon us when neither coercion nor threats will work. At some point direct violence will be necessary to keep this going.
How will this make the system work? Simple. They must make it dangerous, a liability, for a man to be single and also not actively seeking out marriage or a relationship, i.e. qualifying themselves to be worthy of a woman and thus complying with the FI. Being a bachelor must become potentially grounds for imprisonment or some sort of state sanctions.
Wait until they start rolling out the propaganda against bachelors and single men. Not like what you see today. I’m talking about propaganda in which they almost condone violence; it is presumed that bachelors have nothing but ill will for the nation. They are the reason that women suffer. They are the reason children have no father. Show them no mercy. They can’t be allowed to continue. We must stop them! They’re destroying our civilization!
Cuckservatives will turn the other way as this violence is meted out. To appease their own consciences they will just mumble under their breath about how it all could have been prevented if those bachelors had just manned up and married those sluts like they were supposed to.
The problem is, there are too many men who have nothing to lose and won’t go down quietly.
It brings to mind what a former IRA member (pre-1969) said of the brutal tactics employed by the IRA during the Troubles in Northern Ireland. “Personally I couldn’t have anything to do with it or approve of it in any kind of way – but I know exactly why it happened.”
@Pedat —
Actually it’s very easy to do…that’s the problem.
What I meant was that it isn’t easy to do and be Christian in moral terms. I probably could have said that more clearly.
This is why I want my daughters educated and capable. Any red pill man in my horrifying opinion rating higher than the churchian Christian men we have today will understands the above quote. That man is also best equipped to survive in todays FI culture. What better man to have as a son in law. No need for a blue pill beta. Damn sure not some supplicating churchian beta talking about God and pussy worship. The day of the submissive bare foot and pregnant wife is over and is a unicorn by law. It is also straight up irresponsible for a man to marry such a woman. Chances are in todays world she is a lazy cunt that feels entitled to be taken care of. What else would this society teach a young woman. A red pill man will see it too especially if he is not thinking with his dick. My kind of guy.
@greyghost
Sounds almost like the inspiration for a Red Pill dating service site. 🙂
How will this make the system work? Simple. They must make it dangerous, a liability, for a man to be single and also not actively seeking out marriage or a relationship, i.e. qualifying themselves to be worthy of a woman and thus complying with the FI. Being a bachelor must become potentially grounds for imprisonment or some sort of state sanctions.
I think we’ll just see the whole system completely collapse before it reaches levels that are that dystopian.
One thing people tend to forget is that as the social fabric continues to disintegrate, so does the economy. Despite what the paid shills for the established economic order who pompously call themselves “economists” try to have you believe, we are MUCH closer to a complete global economic meltdown than most people imagine. There is literally NOTHING of value behind any of the world’s currencies, government debt worldwide is well past unsustainable levels, and eco omic development in most of the world is so stifled by corruption and over-regulation as to be ineffective. What this means is that when the house of cards comes crasbing down, the One Percent will have no one to enforce their will. Unless they have an alien robot army at their disposal, no human will have any incentive to serve as a hired gun for the kleptoligarchy that would seek to wage war on single men as a class – or on any other group, for that matter.
If there’s any kind of dystopian future it will be of the Mad Max or Book of Eli type (i.e., every man for himself), not 1984.
@The Question
Scary stuff and very well thought out/written. Certainly the left will never stop galvanizing their nonsense around straight white males. That hardly needs addressing at this point. What’s worse is the double anger coming from their own kind, meaning the white guys who got married. They’re doubly angry because;
1. Bachelors are wrecking everything with their minimalism/low tax and below replacement birth rate (obv)
2. “Hey, Why did you get to skip out on this shit when I gave my life away for it while you played?” (‘Shit’ meaning marriage. Think of dismembered WW2 vets disdain for the twinkies who stayed home and avoided the carnage)
I have lurked here for years finding great solace in the combined wisdom of those who comment here – particularly other believers. Don’t have much to add other than to say our battle is clearly of a spiritual nature. God help us.
feeriker,
That is what makes me the most concerned. Lots of cool tech coming in the fairly near future, but how can society continue to survive? I do know things don’t happen as soon as they should. I remember reading a book _Bankruptcy 1992_ (I believe that was the title) that showed how the government was going broke in 1992. I think it did, but those in charge managed to shuffle things around enough to keep things going far longer than I thought likely.
I see no way it will continue, but any upset is likely to be very unpleasant and I don’t relish that no matter how much I want to see many things about modern society overthrown.
Don’t read too deep into the post-apocalyptic fiction when dealing with actual scenarios. We’re dealing with 4GW now, so the contours are very different from the past. The only question is whether the body-count can be kept down.
‘If you did not want us to consider and discuss your grandfather, you should not have put him out in a public comment as an example.’
Who ASKED you? Who ARE you?
Whoever you are, I will let you know when it is open season on my relatives. I guarantee you wouldn’t say anything about them to my face.
Passive aggressive that.
Ray, you’re not doing your heart any favors with that kind of anger over absolutely nothing. I’d hate to see you get cut off on the highway. Wow.
Thanks Just a Regular Guy – and I appreciate the spelling – and I am rather relieved and perhaps even surprised to see the home grown views of your current President; I had not realised how you all felt about him. One of the many advantages of your system is that whoever comes next the present incumbent will be gone within nine months. Pity us then; QE2 has been in charge since the time when Harry Truman was POTUS – though she is not disliked and has never behaved with anything approaching inappropriate behavior (note I spell behavior without a u out of respect).
@ray,
This is a public blog. You are making public comments.
@Anon. Reader,
“Returning to point 2: years ago I looked at some of the Framingham heart study dataset. This is the longitudinal study that started back in the 50’s or 60’s, they tried to list every single risk factor for heart attack in men that they could, because men were dropping from heart attacks in their 50’s were terrible regularity. I recall that the risk due to high cholesterol and the risk due to “married to woman with college degree” (this was much less common then) were the same. Yes, there was a time when marriage to a potentially contentious woman was considered a health risk.”
I am genuinely interested in your thoughts on this. What is your explanation for why having a college degree causes a married woman to be contentious? Could it also be that they are less of a helpmeet to their husbands? Does the dataset indicate if they are working full time or not?
Dr. Daniel Amneus references this in his book, The Garbage Generation but he offers no explanation.
anonymous_ng
It’s all in your head and has nothing to do with accomplishments.
Like I said, it’s one guy’s B.S. opinion.
I wouldn’t say your comment is BS, because it does have some truth to it. Confidence is in your head, but what’s in your head is based on what’s in your past, and it’s hard to ignore what’s in your past.
Thanks for your comments at 4/24/16, 4:59 AM, ray. Pleasing God and being confident in Christ are definitely the most important things.
That’s very good self-evaluation for such a young man; you’re way ahead of me at similar age, in these areas. I also had the oneitis before really becoming accomplished and fully mature, at which point those insecurities gradually lessened.
This is really good to hear.
@Bee – April 24, 10:31 AM
Thanks for the detailed post. I am and have been doing many of those things you listed already, such as shooting and lifting weights, and just staying active in general, but that’s what you described is good advice for any man, regardless.
As far as humor and banter go, I do tease people a lot, especially women. I even get the “you’re so mean!” thing sometimes, but I try to be careful to adjust my teasing based on the sensitivity of the person and the situation and adjust, not that I haven’t gone too far at times, anyway.
I’m not actually familiar with “Agree & Amplify,” so I’ll be interested in checking it out. I may even have been doing it without realizing there was a name for it.
The description you have of your relationship with your wife is awesome. That sounds exactly like the kind of passion and playfulness I’d like to have with my wife someday.
I’m not familiar with the “Order” essay you mentioned. Thanks for offering to provide a pdf of it. What’s it about?
Thanks for the hopes and prayers, especially since you don’t even know me and care, anyway.
Bee
I am genuinely interested in your thoughts on this. What is your explanation for why having a college degree causes a married woman to be contentious? Could it also be that they are less of a helpmeet to their husbands? Does the dataset indicate if they are working full time or not?
Remember the Framingham study is rather old by now, the data / document I recall is from the 1950’s (not 1960’s as I previously wrote) so I do not recall if ‘working / nonworking” was in there. Offhand I would speculate “equalitarian” is the issue; fewer women then had college degrees, so having one makes a woman “equal to her man”, therefore not subordinate per se. Therefore inclined to want to dispute decision making. Also bear in mind the tabula rasa fallacy is part of culture, has been for a long time, and is part of the “men and women are interchangeable” fallacy. So in “he said, she said” cases if she does not feel subordinate, she’s likely to be prone to not let the issue drop, to contend with him over it. Contentious, never content.
Women have been taught in colleges that they are the equal of any man for a long time, I suspect.
In the modern world equalitarianism, or equalism, is part of the state quasi-religion. Feminism surrounds us all the time. It takes work for a man to regard his wife as his subordinate, his helpmeet just as it takes work for a woman to regard her husband as her superior, the one she is supposed to help.
All that stress adds up.
I have seen plenty of contentious women who lack college degrees, so I suspect the two are correlated, not one leading to the other. It’s in the water today as the saying goes.
Opus,
I do not believe our current president was even born in the US and isn’t qualified to be such, but I am considered a “birther” by those who can’t handle any dissent. He got the job because of his skin color and he was a symbol, not because he is a good man for the job.
Remember that he got the Nobel Peace Prize, from Europeans as I recall, when he first started his reign. (Yes, I use that term on purpose.) I wonder if any of those would like to withdraw it now.
I hope Britain withdraws from the EU. That would be best for its people.
BillyS
I have seen plenty of contentious women who lack college degrees, so I suspect the two are correlated, not one leading to the other.
Correlation, not causation. That said, the college edumucated woman may be more likely to contend with her husband. Meta issue: the Framingham study was geographical in limit, so it was restricted to a certain culture.
Two quick points:
First, a contentious woman in the 1940’s and 1950’s might just be more prone to try to go to college, i.e. self selection. Correlation, not causation.
Second: Proverbs 21:19 – women back then couldn’t read and college didn’t exist. Something inherent in the female nature is clearly at work. Yet most churchgoing men have never read or even heard of this simple quote.
@Bee,
Mental stress has always been related to a higher level of heart disease in men.
* Refugees have higher levels of heart disease
* Men in stressful occupations (such as coal mining) have higher rates
* People disconnected from the culture the live in (such as immigrants to another country) have higher rates
I haven’t seen any numbers, but I would bet men who have been frivorced have higher rates.
So yea, having a difficult wife would cause mental stress, contributing to heart disease.
BTW, one of the explanations for smoking causing heart disease is smoking triggers a similar physical response as mental stress does.
@Anon. Reader.
Good insights. Thank you.
I wouldn’t get too hung up on the college thing. What makes college educated women a pain is the 10 years of carouseling that pussy and the career high. A 20 year old that marries while in college is more likely to develop social tie to her husbands with introductions at her graduation. Work Christmas parties and after hours BBQ’s with coworkers etc. In todays world when those coworkers get to be 28-38 and talking about husbands they don’t have or worse had she will see the wreckage. (natural dread)
Besides that women don’t submit because they are socially taught not to and men (beta) don’t lead because they are told not to. They will on their own naturally but damn sure not out of any kind of duty. Not the same way a guy out of pure honor from with in care for his wife for no other reason than it is his wife.
Game works as we have discussed
Opus
There are only 2 types of people who support President Obama, people who hate America as he does and those who benefit from the pillaging of the public treasury. He does not represent the people who make up the backbone of this country. Unfortunately, the Destroyers have rigged the vote so that the Builders will be coerced into digging our own graves.
Bee — “This is a public blog. You are making public comments.”
I heard your excuse the first time, I just didn’t accept it. But I’ll be sure to let you know if my relatives need your mouth.
Kaminsky — Are you the guy who decided upthread that another commenter was ‘fair’ with me? Now you’re back, this time judging my anger and my heart. I wonder, without those, would you and your friends even be commenting on a blog such as this? I think I’ll leave that answer to King Jeshua and meanwhile, you can think of something else that needs correcting in me. Whoops I think a redwood just fell in your eye! :O)
Greyghost et al: A small percentage of home schoolers finish high school by age 12 or 13, and finish college by 18 or 19. A girl with the brains to earn a STEM degree could easily shave a year or two off of the educational process by attending classes year round or by taking CLEP tests, etc. It’s a shame that the school system is so regimented. Most women end up working most of their adult lives even if they might prefer to be full-time homemakers. It isn’t unreasonable for them not to want to get stuck in a low-paying job for 30 years or more. The advent of the zero-hours contract at many low-paying jobs makes arranging childcare even tougher than it was back in my day. I think women should stay home with young children, but many couples seem to find this impossible.
Opus: For the past eight years I have turned off the TV whenever Obama appeared. I eagerly await the tell-all biographies that will be published after he leaves office. The circumstances of his birth are still murky, he has apparently used a dead man’s social security number, the people who attended college with him appear not to remember him, he and Michelle have both lost their law licenses, etc. Take heart! Obama has made his last official visit to your country! You are blessed to have Queen Elizabeth. Very dignified, and she keeps very busy for a lady of her years.
“It is common for male statisticians, with characteristic imbecility, to ascribe the fall in the marriage rate to a growing disinclination on the male side. This growing disinclination is actually on the female side. Even though no considerable body of women has yet reached the definite doctrine that marriage is less desirable than freedom, it must be plain that large numbers of them now approach the business with far greater fastidiousness than their grandmothers or even their mothers exhibited. They are harder to please, and hence pleased less often.”
H. L. Mencken, In Defense of Women, 1918
Ray
You’re unhinged and you need to sort yourself out. You keep throwing out nasty stuff at innocent people. Then you conclude with some assertion of your Christianity but it’s a hollow one. Start over.
Feeriker, BillyS…
When everything went sideways with the economy (was it 2007? 2008? Definitely by 2009…) it seems to me that ‘make believe’ money was put into the economy, so that all those too-big-to-fails could hold onto their money after failing-too-big. the next bubble popping might be when they decide to stop accepting each other’s ‘make believe’ in exchange for tangible returns.
In the ad by the father, the daughter’s blog address is posted.
The blog has since been deleted, but the Wayback machine has archives :
http://web.archive.org/web/20160215023102/http://therachelmemoir.blogspot.com/
The profile has a picture of part of the girl’s face. She is average looking. Certainly not ‘gorgeous’.
The sad thing is, the girl herself did not want the ad to be posted. The cartoonish father has unwittingly DECREASED his daughter’s marriage prospects with his stupidity.
This is what the daughter, Rachel Stewart, looks like :
http://web.archive.org/web/20160308171412/https://plus.google.com/109485296036196122220
Poor girl. Cartoonish fathers like this end up creating the opposite result of what they want. The father even claims to be a CFO, yet a CFO is supposed to grasp concepts like risk/reward, and incentives…
@Anon:
The FI and White Knightery trump all consideration.
@ray,
Provide us with a specific quote of anything I have written that specifically insulted either of your grandfathter’s.
Prove your case with facts.
@new anon,
Good info. Thank you.
@Hank Flanders,
Glad to hear you are already doing most of those things. Good job.
“I’m not familiar with the “Order” essay you mentioned. Thanks for offering to provide a pdf of it. What’s it about?”
Rule and dominion. You start by taking dominion over the guy in the mirror and your home, condo, or apartment. After you get married you take dominion over your wife and order, lead, and love her. When you have children you take order over them, and your wife.
My wife is happier and feels more secure since I began upping my leadership.
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Different topic, but Wilson is under attack from a hysterical lady who claims to be a conservative Calvinist. The guy who wrote this article did a nice job of researching matters (unlike Wilson’s attacker, Rachel Miller)
Oops, here’s the link:
http://baylyblog.com/blog/2016/05/rachel-millers-malice-against-pastor-doug-wilson
Point 1:
Men need women (‘It is not good for man to be alone’). Women don’t ‘need’ men.
Men were made in the image of God. Scripture never says that about women.
“The Lord inhabits the praises of Israel (Jacob …men)” –Ps 22:3. Men inhabit the praises of women (see ‘need’ above).
Men glorify God. Women glorify men. – 1Cor11:7 God is jealous of that glory. So are men, in His image.
With the wealth and independence and growing power of women it reinforces their no-need.
Men these days sense this.
My sons are 27 and 29, unmarried and see this. Yes, this hurts me.
My sons are beginning to connect it with Point 2.
Point 2:
“Many pastors have destroyed my vineyard, they have trodden my portion underfoot, they have made my pleasant portion a desolate wilderness” – Jeremiah 12:10.
I believe ‘vineyard’ and ‘portion’ are men.
All pastors and theologians I’ve seen destroy men in some fashion and Wilson is no exception. He is a fine man overall but no exception to destroying men, God’s vineyard and portion here on earth.
Stick to the word men and run your own family (as you are doing) and continue spreading the full gospel.
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I certainly can Blame the women of today why many of us Good men are still Not married yet since Most of these Single women now are so very Damn Picky since Most of them are really looking for the Very Rich type of guy unfortunately.
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Hooboy, this is a rough topic for me. Former youth pastor, 31, raised in the Purity movement etc. I think the hardest part for me has been recognizing my desire to stay pure for my eventual cool wife has been really hurting my Christian walk in other areas. I’ve dated lots of girls, but haven’t found one that would be a good match for marriage, and there were a few I wanted to marry, but didn’t feel the same about me. Lately I’ve been feeling more and more bitter about the experiences, and I don’t like what that’s doing to me. I want to be happier, and more kind, and more helping to others.
I can tell you 9/10 good looking Christian girls I’ve dated were not virgins, and it was always a problem. I’d feel awkward about a lack of experience and feeling “Christ, I can keep it in my pants, why can’t they? I’m I the ONLY one taking this shit seriously?”, and they’d feel bad because they were usually shocked when I told them I was a virgin (I’m not a bad looking fellow, heeyo! #Imonlycompensating). Lately I’ve been aware of feeling smug and superior, and recognizing that? Yeah, it was a pretty shitty feeling. At this point, I’d rather just go and get laid and put this part of my life behind me, so I can get back to doing what I’m supposed to without feeling like God is withholding the sweet, sweet puss from me.
Believe me, I’m laughing about it too, mostly. I know I did it mostly to myself, I’m not blaming anyone. Not God, not the girls I’ve dated. No one said life was easy to figure out.
It’s like, Christianity to me is this beautiful thing. I’ve seen it change lives for the better. But it’s heartbreaking to me to see it so twisted. Not just about sex, but a lot of things. Pharisee is the best way I can put it. It’s not *EVERYONE* and I’m not a misanthrope by any stretch (usually pretty upbeat), but it’s still pretty saddening to see. This isn’t bringing up the innumerable Biblical heroes whose past sexual exploits are essentially glossed over in favor of, “Well yeah, but they were GODS CHOSEN so it was fine for them.”
I’m having a hard of a time taking the typical advice from older men (especially my dad) about finding a wife. The church I go to, like many others, is empty and devoid of the young, single, “good women” that I’ve been told are there. Obviously, no one’s saying that’s the only reason you go to church but “you’re not going to find them in bars,” right? (I bounce in bars and clubs on the weekends so I would know I guess)
The only churches with young single women in them are the big ones with horribly watered down theology, theater production worship services, lots of social functions and expensive coffee. And many of these women, as so many have described above, are riding the carrousel like all the “other” college girls sleeping off the weekend parties on a Sunday morning. I would know that too as I dated one a while back and she invited me to “her church.” And it’s actually worse because many of the “good Christian girls” are forgoing relationships of ANY kind out of a misplaced sense of piety.
Neither group sees value in men, yet young men crawl to them in flagrant desperation because this is what their Christian parents told them to look for in a woman. This in turn perpetuates the artificially high SMV of single, Christian women in the church. It’s a small female market with a ton of men. Something like that scene out of Gone With the Wind…
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