Just in time for Valentine’s Day, the New York Times warns us that Husbands Are Deadlier Than Terrorists.
Husbands are incomparably more deadly in America than jihadist terrorists.
And husbands are so deadly in part because in America they have ready access to firearms, even when they have a history of violence. In other countries, brutish husbands put wives in hospitals; in America, they put them in graves.
Red Alert responds, pointing out that married women (and their children) are far safer than unmarried women are.
This constant drumbeat of contempt for men who play by the rules isn’t limited just to Carlos Slim’s blog. The message that married fathers are fools at best, and dangerous brutes at worst is the same message on offer from Christian leaders.
H/T Boxer
I hope men take this message to heart and protect women by staying bachelors. I’m fairly certain that the bad boy thugs modern women seem to prefer these days will treat them with the respect they deserve.
In other news, this NYT article increases the MGTOW rate.
Articles such as this NYT piece will not be forgotten when the Saxon relearns to hate.
What is hilarious was that I periodically receive email offers to subscribe to the NYT. Why in Heaven’s name would I subscribe to a newspaper that hates me and people like me? Let Carlos Slim Helu keep pouring money into that money losing fish wrap. They will never get a single penny from me.
As Dennis Prager astutely noted years back, many people see a problem and don’t like it, however they don’t confront the real problem because they know there will be serious repercussions. So, what do they do when they lack courage but want to feel good about themselves? Ironically, confront the less threatening and more peaceable side. You see this all over the place. Confronting the police instead of criminals is one example. Demonizing respectable husbands instead of wives and thugs is another.
Ironically, Prager teamed with Brian Wilcox to add pressure to husbands instead of wives. As Prager learned the hard way, when he told wives “if your husband is a good man and is in the mood when you aren’t, give it a try” he was accused of endorsing marital rape.
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This sounds more like gun control than husband control.
“I read the Bible and the New York Times every day, so I know what each side is up to.”
– Cal Thomas
This quote seemed appropriate today. I think it was Cal who said, hope I’m right.
It’s BRAD Wilcox. PJMedia messed it up too.
@Dalrock
For a possible blog post.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2017/02/170207135943.htm
“Too many American men view marriage as weighing them down with a ball and chain, overlooking the many benefits that accrue from having a spouse — from more money and a better sex life to significantly better physical and mental health.”
Brad Wilcox, not Brian. My apologies. Thank you, Deti
Well, I was wondering why the annual “Super Bowl WIfe Beating” propaganda piece didn’t show up in any of the media that I subject myself to. Now it’s clear. I wonder if reading this hatchet job aloud will be part of any Vagina Monolog performances this year?
@Dalrock
Somebody should send this NYT piece to the pastorbaters you’ve written about recently who whine about men not getting. “This” is why, among a thousand other reasons. They’re told that husbands are more dangerous than terrorists. What young man who reads this would want to sign up for a role like that?
What I despise so much about churchianity is that they pretend things aren’t happening that requires woeful denial to ignore. They have to know this stuff is being published and that young women read it. Where’s their criticism? Where’s their pleas to young women that these articles are lies and that young men are not this way and anyone who looks at them as a terrorist is giving into hate and fear?
This is how the conversation needs to occur. Deflect all criticism of the SoCons, Tradcons, and spineless cowards toward those whose misandry cannot be denied. Let’s them and them fight it out – unless of course, they end up nodding at one another in tacit cooperation and redirect their hate towards their true enemy.
Trust: Only so we can know who the guy is so we can search for his articles.
Question, that is a very interesting link. First of all, W. Bradford Wilcox is a well known name in certain research circles, that will draw more attention from other academics.
But more hilarious is this:
The marriage rate in the U.S. continues to decline and the view that marriage entails a “lack of freedom” is becoming more entrenched, particularly among younger men, according to researchers Nicholas H. Wolfinger and W. Bradford Wilcox. This can be seen in the recent rise to prominence of the Men Going Their Own Way movement.
Will 2017 be the year that MGTOW is seriously acknowledged by the mainstream ? On the one hand, the debate space is already prepared with years of “Peter Pan manboys who play games all day in their parents basements (and have a small penis)” so it should be a slam dunk to discredit. On the other hand, if the likes of Wilcox actually produce even popular-press articles asking “What causes this strange MGTOW movement?” then Rebuilding the Mound (narrative) will become a bit more difficult, because of the cult of “the expert”.
Either way, this is the first known appearance in a popular science article sorta kinda mainstream of MGTOW. An historic moment.
@Deti: I’m very glad you pointed it out. PJM is where I read the name too. I remember video.
@The Question:
Re your linked article discussing the Wilcox piece, what men always notice is that the message is always
“Men, this is what you need, and this is what you should be to get what you need. This is why marriage is good for you and why you need it. If you don’t want these things or think that marriage is obligation and burden, then you’re obviously a misogynist who won’t man up and do his duty. You’re obviously an overgrown kid who won’t grow up and take responsibility.”
Nowhere in ANY of these pieces by Wilcox or Prager or Geraghty is there any question asked, any circumspection, about why men are really saying these things. No where is there any question asked whether women are doing the things required of them, are cultivating the skills and mindset for marriage, and whether these women make good marriage partners. Nowhere is anyone asking what women bring to the table. Nowhere is anyone asking if women are willing to commit their minds, hearts, lives, bodies and livelihoods to their marriages, as is being demanded of men.
And Dalrock’s covered it quite well. It’s much easier to flog men, criticize men, and accuse men. Calling women to account is hard. Criticizing women and holding their feet to the fire is hard. And it’s hard because it just feels bad. Because when you criticize a woman, she feels bad. And cries, and complains. And points her fingers at you and wails to the crowd, “He made me FEEL BAD!” And then the crowd gangs up on the man who rightly criticized her. And the man who criticized her is chastised, ostracized, eviscerated and excoriated. All because he said “yeah, but the women aren’t doing it right either. Here are the things women need to do/say/be.”
But no, we can’t have that. We cannot have anyone correcting or criticizing women. Unless it’s another woman. We can’t have men, husbands, telling THEIR OWN WIVES that what they’re doing is wrong and they need to stop doing it now and they need to repent and do it the right way. We can’t have pastors telling the older women in the church to be quiet and ask their husbands. We can’t have anyone telling the strong independent woman anything, because if we do, she’ll collapse into a sobbing heap while the men around her gang up on and destroy the man who criticized her.
That’s why Wilcox et al. won’t correct women. First, they really don’t think women are the problem. Second, they’re terrified of what women will do, and then what the mass of men (i.e. white knights) will do.
Running the words “Nicholas Kristof” and “fraud” simultaneously through google will be fun for anyone interested in the moral character of the author of this hit piece.
Some fodder at a random petition site:
We want Nicholas Kristof fired from the New York Times newspaper and lawsuits filed against him for committing fraud and stealing money from the public by providing them with false sex trafficking horror stories that were lies to send money to the Somaly Mam and Afesip charities. These charities then committed human trafficking themselves by forcing women and girls to stay in their (rescue) centers against their will and to lie about being forced into sex trafficking to the western media and donors.
Yeah Kristof seems to be very concerned about the safety of women and girls, all right.
There’s good fun to be had over on twitter with this dork, too. https://twitter.com/herbiemarcuse/status/831218562631135232
Criticizing women is hard also, because women and wives retaliate.
“You’re mean! Go away!”
“If you keep criticizing me, NO SEX FOR YOU!”
“If you keep criticizing me, i’ll divorce you, take everything from you, you’ll never see your kids again, and everyone will hate you. I will DESTROY you in a divorce.”
“I’m going to tell the priest/pastor/clergy about this! We’ll just SEE who has to submit to who around here!”
“I don’t believe your interpretation of that Ephesians 5 passage. Pastor says it’s different!”
“I don’t have to submit to you if I don’t want to/you’re not praying/you’re not Godly enough/you’re doing things I or pastor think are sinful.”
“You’re so mean and hurtful to me! *Sobs sob sob*
I was wondering why, after a relative hiatus, Wilcox et al have re-appeared in the media. Seems all this is part of a push for “National Marriage Week USA 2017”, from 7 Feb through 14 Feb:
http://www.nationalmarriageweekusa.org/
And the same c**ts who will devour every word of this article and amplify it will be the very same ones who fly into a butthurt rage on Wednesday, February 15th because no man gave them anything for Vagintine’s Day.
Incidentally, try Googling this: “Why do you think you deserve anything for Valentine’s Day?”
The type of results returned won’t surprise you, but the number of them might.
I came close recently to de-friending a Facebook friend when he linked to an infographic which demonstrated that more in America people die from falling our of bed than die from terrorism. That may well be the case but that is to conflate two entirely different phenomena. Terrorism is not to be judged on the basis of numbers killed but on the effect of the acts of terrorism on the culture and life of the nation that is being terrorised, Falling out of bed does not affect in that manner and neither do murdering husbands.
Kristof is indulging in moral relativism and in doing so is appeasing terrorism.
“will be the very same ones who fly into a butthurt rage on Wednesday, February 15th because no man gave them anything for Vagintine’s Day”
AKA wanting to have your cake and eat it too.
In Japan, it’s backwards: women chase the men and give them chocolates for V-Day. On top of that, you will never catch one Jap-man complaining about anything he received, be it chocolate, a watch, or just a simple “Happy Valentines Day”. They are quite content and appreciative of.their women. This behavior also upholds in Christian churches here. I miss my home America, but returming home to a place where Jihadists are honored and praised above the local men would be pure madness in it’s purest form.
@ Ben Sake – Do the “herbivore men” also get chased after, or is it only well paid salalrymen?
Got back from church’s young adult retreat. More tempted to visit Japan just to experience what female attention feels like (Japanese tourist girls always want to take photos with me). Talking with Christian girls, it feels like you are immediately placed in the “plan-B when I’m turning 30” category; you get deadpan wallflower responses or their attention shoots over to a taller guy at the drop of a hat. And when the tall guitar player from the worship band walks around he gets every girl’s full attention. They are just not interested in marrying while young and will dump a guy for the smallest thing they don’t like (if they don’t match the mold they have in their head or if he isn’t entertaining enough). All with complete backup from the church as following the holy spirit.
Submitted:
https://americandadweb.wordpress.com/2017/02/13/taking-crazy-pills/
Carry on.
@thedeti
I agree.
The problem is, you can’t shame men into doing something that everything else says is stupid. You can’t shame a man for not wanting to wear a dress or high heels.
They are throwing rocks at the moon thinking that will make it go away.
Instead, they might come up with ways to incentive men to marry, but this brings us back to Rollo Tomassi’s Cardinal Rule of Relationships. For one side to succeed, the other side has to compromise. This means any and all positive changes to marriage and fatherhood will ultimately involve a loss of privilege and power currently held by women, and I think we can all agree they will never give it up.
The current setup cannot be reformed. It must be forcibly brought to its knees.
@ thedeti
“Criticizing women is hard also, because women and wives retaliate.”
No-fault divorce has to be the first thing to go, whether by resistance or repeal.
As long as woman have the finger on the nuclear button in a marriage, there’s very little that can be changed elsewhere – at least peacefully.
@thedeti
Nowhere in ANY of these pieces by Wilcox or Prager or Geraghty is there any question asked, any circumspection, about why men are really saying these things.
Right on target. What young men would be saying about marriage, the current crop of wife prospects, or how the church might help them with these struggles would be easy to find out. YOU COULD ASK THEM. We never see any evidence that the questions get asked. It’s a Kangaroo court where they are tried, convicted, and sentenced in advance; then brought into the courtroom to receive admonition and punishment. Your testimony will not be required, thank you. Some of them are still blinking at the bright lights and wondering where they are when the gavel strikes for case closed.
These pastors could handily assemble a group of young men, or speak with them individually and get the straight skinny on what it’s like out there these days. It doesn’t appear to be happening since they don’t reference such events. I have had this conversation with a pastor in his office, where I was able to gesture at the conference table and chairs when asking if he ever thought about sitting down with the young men to get a feel for conditions “in the field”. The answer was something along the lines of – I was once a young man, I had a job in the packing house and talked about these things with the other guys, Ecclesiastes (there’s nothing new under the sun), and we have Men’s Fraternity. He wasn’t going to do it.
Before I forget, there are “community groups” of young singles in this church where these things can be discussed. Co-ed. LOL if it weren’t so tragic.
“Right on target. What young men would be saying about marriage, the current crop of wife prospects, or how the church might help them with these struggles would be easy to find out. YOU COULD ASK THEM.”
Yes, but it’s even more basic, and more threatening, to folks like Prager, Wilcox, et al. To get to the bottom of this you have to examine what the women are doing. You have to see they’re having sex with the most attractive men they can for as long as they can, then settling for men they’re really not all that attracted to. Especially after sampling lots of alphas but being unable to keep one of them.
Or they’re spending all their time on their educations and careers. Or they’re badmouthing men and talking them down. Or, most likely, they’re just ignoring most men, summarily dismissing them as “not good enough”.
And so a lot of men are saying “well, OK.” And they’re just checking out. I don’t blame them, really.
But it is very hard to point at what the women are doing and saying they’re not doing it right, or criticize their decisionmaking. Because people who do that are derided and dismissed as sexist, misogynist, they hate women, they’re backward thinking, they don’t want to help women, they don’t care about women, they’re nasty and mean spirited, they’re cold and cruel and heartless and callous.
No one is saying this is all women’s fault. It isn’t ALL women’s fault, but it is PARTIALLY their fault. But we can’t solve this problem by just pounding on the men. And we’re not going to get anywhere by not holding women accountable.
“And husbands are so deadly in part because in America they have ready access to firearms”
Likewise women are more dangerous than jihadist terrorists because they have access to guns and the courts.
” But we can’t solve this problem by just pounding on the men.” – If anything, that will only make things worse. Then we get to read “Where have all the good men gone?” articles.
Lost Patrol
These pastors could handily assemble a group of young men, or speak with them individually and get the straight skinny on what it’s like out there these days.
You left something out. These pastors do assemble groups of young men and speak with them, or more accurately to them. The “something” that needs to be done? Shut that pastoral mouth and listen to them for once. Not just “words in one ear and out the other”, and not just “hear enough words to be able to start an argument”, either.
Not one of these preachers who is going to solve the marriage problem all by himself, not one of them shows the slightest evidence of having sat down with a group of 20-something men, asked “So what’s it like out there?” and then shut his mouth while taking notes. Not one.
Makes me wonder exactly what job they think they are signed up for.
Jonadab
Likewise women are more dangerous than jihadist terrorists because they have access to guns and the courts….
…and the abortion clinic…
“Makes me wonder exactly what job they think they are signed up for.”
Simple. It’s to appease women so that more money is dropped into the collection plate. Pastor Bob has a family to feed, not to mention a bossy wife who he just can’t please. Preaching inconvenient truths from the pulpit is a good way to get into a lot of trouble. What’s the point of listening to young men if his hands are tied?
@ AR – “…and the abortion clinic…”
Very good point. I’m guessing that women kill more children in a week than women killed by abusive bad boys (which women are attracted to like moths to a flame) in 100 years.
First of all, Carlos Slim is an investor. He doesn’t support every stupid feminist or BLM writer or article written by that degenerate rag. He merely owns a crap ton of NYT stock. Not uncommon. Jeff Bezos of Amazon owns major shares in the Washington Post. Warren Buffett same thing. Diversification. Most of Slim’s money was made in telecommunications, not media. But since the November US election, NYT’s stock price has increased, and Slim’s NYT position (16% of stock at $350 million) is just another reason why he is freaking a billionaire 50 times over.
Secondly, misandry continues unabated. No one needs this NYT article to tell us how male feminists consider husbands and even single young men as violent slave masters, rapists and pedophiles who must be strictly controlled, by state force if necessary.
For men young and old the message has been received loud and clear.
This is why MGTOW is gradually reaching a baritone-like crescendo:
https://www.google.com/trends/explore?q=mgtow
And nobody cares to notice.
A lot of pastors of bigger churches were alpha males at small Christian colleges, and they got lots of opportunities to speak up front at college ministries, which is the ultimate way to be identified as an alpha male in the evangelical subculture. These guys got married young to beautiful, young, virgin women who have always been faithful to them. Other pastors were beta males who just happened to be in the right place at the right time (when R. Albert Mohler, who often scolds single men for “sinful delay of marriage”, was in college, he was a nerdy guy who began dating his roommate’s sister, whom he eventually married). I think this explains some of their lack of empathy towards the average single man.
Desiring to write an article on gun control he tosses in that husbands are more murderous as a class than terrorists. I wish it were incredible, but incredible is the antonym of the proper descriptor.
The other day you countered someone’s argument…Mine? Deti’s? I can’t recall, but it doesn’t matter. What I remember was that your counter-argument was that the idea someone had put forward didn’t pass the laugh-test. Upon reading that, I thought, The laugh-test doesn’t pass the laugh-test in our society. Kristof’s article shouldn’t pass the laugh-test either, but somehow it does.
@thedeti: “Yes, but it’s even more basic, and more threatening, to folks like Prager, Wilcox, et al. To get to the bottom of this you have to examine what the women are doing. You have to see they’re having sex with the most attractive men they can for as long as they can, then settling for men they’re really not all that attracted to. Especially after sampling lots of alphas but being unable to keep one of them.”
_____________
Would women want to sign up for a deal where men spent all their time partying with and having sex with models until their looks and erections sag, then they ‘settle’ for a homemaker that aren’t attracted to. She can then cook for him and be his maid, while he refuses her any of the affection or support he provided to the models, and if he should happen to get another shot at a model… she is STILL obligated by force of law to be his cook and maid while he again is indulging in a model AND providing her what he refused his wife. She may even be forced to cook and clean for his model mistress, which just may happen to be the house her and her husband designed together.
No woman would want that deal. Why it’s so shocking that it isn’t a failure of manhood that makes me disinterested in doing the same.
It’s all fine and dandy for the kid in the man’s body to “grow up and take responsibility”, “man up”, but unfortunately the husband has all responsibility with no authority, while the wife has all authority with no responsibility. It does bear repeating, over and over and over. Fewer and fewer are signing up for that very bad deal.
What is it with the triple chins of the most vocal and aggressive trad-cons; Prager, Geraghty and now Bradford Wilcox. These guys could live for months on a deserted island with all the calories stored under their chins. Middle-aged non-lifters, low T, watery chin fat….hmmm…..could it be that their sex lives are ailing? Hmm……”C’mon. Get married like I did.” Misery loves company.
“Would women want to sign up for a deal where men spent all their time partying with and having sex with models until their looks and erections sag, then they ‘settle’ for a homemaker that aren’t attracted to. She can then cook for him and be his maid, while he refuses her any of the affection or support he provided to the models, and if he should happen to get another shot at a model… she is STILL obligated by force of law to be his cook and maid while he again is indulging in a model AND providing her what he refused his wife. She may even be forced to cook and clean for his model mistress, which just may happen to be the house her and her husband designed together.”
Okay, dude, whoever you are. You just nailed it so far out of the park right there that I might just hang up my manosphere cleats on that scenario alone. AWESOME. I wasted my whole morning manosphering and it’s getting to be a bad habit, though I appreciate it all. But I need to get back to other stuff and your quote helps. That is a walk-off homerun.
I was looking at W. Bradford Wilcox’s “Hey Guys, Put a Ring on it,” on National Review:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444746/marriage-benefits-men-financial-health-sex-divorce-caveat
Wilcox gives a quote from an “average” guy named Craig:
“The fact is, my six-pack abs have gotten me far more sex with high-quality women in their prime than a man’s six-figure income ever will. The sex is passionate and did not require begging like married men often have to do, as the women are physically attracted to me rather then just interested in my ability to provide.”
Two thoughts,
First, if Craig is telling the truth, he is not an average guy. He is an alpha male. It seems like all these pieces lamenting the delay of marriage always assume that all men are either players sleeping with lots of women or slackers playing video games and looking at porn in their parents’ basement. How come these pieces never talk about nice, hardworking guys who have been rejected by a lot of women because they are not alpha males?
Second, if Craig is telling us the truth, then what does this tell us about women? A lot of women are willing to have sex with a man just because he is an alpha male. Why should the average guy be willing to put a ring on the finger of a women who has spent most of her twenties having casual sex with men like Craig?
” How come these pieces never talk about nice, hardworking guys who have been rejected by a lot of women because they are not alpha males?”
Because that derails the Churchian narrative that modern women want good, loving, responsible betas and don’t want bad boys.
Of course, the narrative is derailing on its own, as sagging marriage rates will confirm. They will stick with that narrative until NO ONE is buying it anymore. But that won’t be for a while.
“Why should the average guy be willing to put a ring on the finger of a women who has spent most of her twenties having casual sex with men like Craig?”
Because that’s all he’s gonna get, and he should be grateful that a used up carousel rider is now mildly interested in him (and said interest rises with his income) /sarc
Jeff:
That’s a really good point. Wilcox is seizing on the alpha male in great physical shape having sex with a lot of women, and calling him “average”.
Yeah. There is this false notion of the “average” guy as the six pack, in shape, surfer dude with frosted tips, living as a beach bum, but at the same time with a beach house, drives a luxury car, and has sex with all kinds of women who find him physically attractive. Wilcox is living so disconnected from reality that he thinks the “average” guy lives like Matthew McConnaughey or Brad Pitt or Elon Musk or Dan Bilzerian. Wilcox’s delusion is that the “average” guy is a pickup artist, or a grown up fratboy, living a never ending booze and babes party train.
Dr. Wilcox, let me explain to you what the “average” unmarried guy is.
He’s late 20s with some college, maybe a Bachelor’s degree. He works as a paper pusher in a cubicle, or as an apprentice or journeyman. He doesn’t live in Malibu or midtown Manhattan. He lives in Omaha or Des Moines or Indianapolis or Phoenix or Queens or the suburbs of Philly or DC or San Bernardino. His parents divorced when he was 14; he spent his high school years living with his mom, his older sister and younger brother in a 3 bedroom house his mom bought after she and his dad sold the house in the settlement. He saw his dad every other weekend; doesn’t have much of a relationship with him now.
He’s working 40 to 50 hours a week or more at a job to support himself. He has a boss riding his ass every other day. His life is deadlines and appointments and places to be for work. He has a car payment on his used Honda Accord. He has a checking account and a credit card that he takes care of himself.
He’s got a 2 bedroom walkup apartment he rents in a decent part of town. (If he lives in California, he’s barely making rent and lives with at least one roommate.) He has a couple of friends he keeps in touch with from college and a few acquaintances he meets now and then. He dates now and then, from the online service or through some friends, but nothing really great. He broke up with a girl from college a couple of years ago; he took it pretty hard and still kind of isnt’ over it. He hasn’t had sex since he had a 3 month exclusive thing last year that she ended. He has a lifetime N of 6 – composed of two relationships, one ONS, and three short termers that just didn’t work out. He has kind of a hard time meeting girls because there’s really nothing all that distinguishing about his look. He’s pretty nondescript – average height, average weight, kind of flabby, decent but not great hair. He approaches sometimes, gets rejected 95% of the time. He gets a date now and then, but it never really goes anywhere. He doesn’t really want to get married, but he probably would if the right girl came along.
Compare him to Six Pack Craig. Are we all going to believe that Six Pack Craig is an “average” guy? And are we to believe that this “average” guy I just described is going to be bedding all sorts of women all the time?
Dr. Wilcox, the “average” guy is getting NEXT TO NOTHING when it comes to women. He squats beneath incredible money and social pressures. He’s got a job to work. It kicks his ass every day. He’s slowly, one day at a time, having his soul sucked out of him. And you think this guy is living it up on a constant life of awesomely awesome awesomeness?
Let me tell you – a 95% rejection rate is NOT “awesome”. Having your soul sucked out of you through your job is NOT “awesome”. Being unable to attract women and not knowing why is not “awesome”. Being told that this is ALL your fault that some slut somewhere can’t find a man to marry her is NOT “awesome”.
Think again, Dr. Wilcox.
Not a week goes by where I dont hear a story of some mother who killed or brutalized their child or allowed their boyfriend to do so. It is now an epidemic that is being ignored. The worse that can happen to a child is for their mother to divorce. Oh, and the excuse is how their ex is abusive and this is to protect the children.
The perfect reply to any wife that parrots this atrocity is, “Well honey, if that’s true, I’ll just stay out of the way when the jihadists come along. You’re a ‘strong independent woman’ after all.”
Are we really going to believe that the “average” guy I just described has it so great that he’s specifically avoiding marriage? His life is one awesome thing after another, and THAT’s why he’s not married yet?
Really?
@Spike – “The perfect reply to any wife that parrots this atrocity is, “Well honey, if that’s true, I’ll just stay out of the way when the jihadists come along. You’re a ‘strong independent woman’ after all.”
Judging by the Muslim led “women’s marches” from January, I’d venture to say that she wants that (the Jihadists to come) to happen.
@thedeti
“Dr. Wilcox, the “average” guy is getting NEXT TO NOTHING when it comes to women. He squats beneath incredible money and social pressures. He’s got a job to work. It kicks his ass every day. He’s slowly, one day at a time, having his soul sucked out of him. And you think this guy is living it up on a constant life of awesomely awesome awesomeness?
Let me tell you – a 95% rejection rate is NOT “awesome”. Having your soul sucked out of you through your job is NOT “awesome”. Being unable to attract women and not knowing why is not “awesome”. Being told that this is ALL your fault that some slut somewhere can’t find a man to marry her is NOT “awesome”.
Think again, Dr. Wilcox.”
Thank you, Deti.
The churchians live in la-la land, pure and simple. This stuff just appears like borderline sadism the way they take the most despised demographic in this country, young single men, and make it sound like they’re having the time of their life. These guys are barely staying above water and these people come by to stick their foot on their heads and tell them how easy they have it.
@thedeti – “Are we really going to believe that the “average” guy I just described has it so great that he’s specifically avoiding marriage? ”
We won’t, either because we are that guy, or one or more of our sons and nephews is that guy.
They don’t give a rat’s tail what we believe. They’re pushing a narrative and they’re sticking with it. Besides, they know it’s the wifey who drops the money into the collection plate. Who cares what dumb ol’ hubby thinks? He knows what will happen should he try to assert himself. If he’s lucky he’ll sleep on the couch that night. If he’s unlucky he’ll spend the night at the county jail.
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@Trust
Would women want to sign up for a deal where men spent all their time partying with and having sex with models until their looks and erections sag, then they ‘settle’ for a homemaker that aren’t attracted to.
I think you need to redo your example and rethink your line of argument. That guy sleeping with models and partying? Alpha. Settling for the home-maker? She got the ring and commitment from the Alpha.
If anything, that’s the female dream … Taming the Alpha. Pussy on the side may be a turn off for some women … but in some cultures, mistresses are expected and tolerated as long as wife gets legitimacy and the stuff. Women are willing to accept all sorts of degradation, like being a faceless member of a harem – as long as they get a bit of Alpha.
@SirHamster
True, and I did think this would have to be an appealing alpha for this to happen. But what I was trying to present an option where the woman was the back up plan for a woman with a history of more attractive men.
There really isn’t a great parallel to come up with. It’s easier for women to rack up a high count of men more attractive than they are. The average guy usually cannot do the same.
Basically they are asking men to be rejected by a woman who did more for alpha acquaintances than the husband they took a vow too. And they don’t acknowledge how troubling this would be for a man. It would be for them if it were possible to reverse it. Perhaps a rich beta that took pretty girls on cruises but wouldn’t take his wife to a nice hotel.
I love that “Carlos Slim’s blog” is now acceptable to call the NYT. No one had quite found a good put-down for them, but this one really works.
constrainedlocus @ 3:10 pm:
“But since the November US election, NYT’s stock price has increased…”
Yes, the NYT has learned to make a profit by renting out the office spaces of dearly departed coworkers. Which perfectly explains Kristof’s furious virtue-signaling in this article. “Guns bad, Trump bad, Wymyn need MOAR THREATPOINT!” = “Please, please don’t fire me and pimp my desk to a Republican.”
Deti
Wilcox is living so disconnected from reality that he thinks the “average” guy lives like Matthew McConnaughey or Brad Pitt or Elon Musk or Dan Bilzerian.
Or Haven Monahan…
Seriously, is this the NYTimes or The ONion???
Increasingly there’s little difference — except there’s more truth in the Onion. And The Onion is actually enjoyable to read.
Even for those of us “old dudes” left in the churches, it is next to impossible to get an audience with the young people due the segregation of age groups in bible studies. The bible studies I have attended at some of mega-churches in my area are packed with middle-aged hags, divorcees and weak kneed men. Fat good I can do with that crowd. I even asked one of the “leaders” why they didn’t interact with the young people more often as we have already been down the road that we hope our kids don’t travel . . . they of course thought that was a novel idea! Instead they have “youth pastors” who know nothing leading this impressionable minds full of mush. They couldn’t handle men like me teaching a class to the young. I don’t think they want their ears to hear the truth, which mean their is no truth in the people leading many of these churches today . . . just show-up, shut-up and pass the plate! We truly are living in the age of the apostate church.
The Onion has been a better news source since the 90s.
“There really isn’t a great parallel to come up with. It’s easier for women to rack up a high count of men more attractive than they are. The average guy usually cannot do the same.”
Was trying to think up a better example myself and having trouble. Men get married to have sex; women get married to *be* married.
Men who get marriage without sex have been bait and switched … not so much for the women.
A closer parallel might be a woman sacrificing and doing all sorts of things for her boyfriend on the promise of marriage … only for him to leave her because he got all he wanted and marriage wasn’t part of it. Pump and dump.
Frank K says:
February 13, 2017 at 4:02 pm
@Spike – “The perfect reply to any wife that parrots this atrocity is, “Well honey, if that’s true, I’ll just stay out of the way when the jihadists come along. You’re a ‘strong independent woman’ after all.”
Judging by the Muslim led “women’s marches” from January, I’d venture to say that she wants that (the Jihadists to come) to happen.
Frank K: What you say HAS already happened in Sweden. As liberal-minded women have interacted more with Muslim men, they have found out the hard way that their values -surprise, surprise – are incompatible.
@SirHamster: Men get married to have sex; women get married to *be* married.
________
Men marry for relationships, women marry for resources. This was a good trade off in Marriage 1.0. Not so much for Marriage 2.0, when the resources are guaranteed even when she withholds the relationship (or worse provides the relationship perks to another man who isn’t providing the resources).
SirHamster
Was trying to think up a better example myself and having trouble. Men get married to have sex; women get married to *be* married.
A lot of women get married…to get married. Not to be married, mind you, but to get married. This is due to a combination of factors: hypergamy and “be your own beta” are two obvious ones.
I’m beginning to suspect that men invented marriage to have reasonable certainty about paternity.
But that’s just a half baked idea floating around in my head, for now.
” What you say HAS already happened in Sweden. As liberal-minded women have interacted more with Muslim men, they have found out the hard way that their values -surprise, surprise – are incompatible.”
One would think that the Burqas and the polygamy would be dead giveaways. And even then, they still welcome the Muslims with open arms.
I have heard that some theorize that the liberal minded women see Muslim males as Alphas and thus welcome them. AFBB I guess.
“A lot of women get married…to get married. Not to be married, mind you, but to get married.”
Yup, it’s all about her “Princess Day”. The groom is just another accessory.
From what ive observed, those two terms are synonymous with the average Jap-man. They get attention when they want it, no questions asked. I think it’s due to Jap-girls still not fully buying into the feminist mindset (yet), although they are not far behid their Western test subjects.
I think I’m confused. My understanding is that “herbivore men” are under achievers. That they have menials jobs, like working at a convenience store, and that they aren’t salarymen who work for Corporate Japan.
Am I wrong?
That would go a long way to explaining the rash of marriage benefit pieces I’ve seen this week.
Online profile from 37 y/o “Christian” woman. Lawyer. Never married. 6.5/10 in looks. Not fat, so she thinks she’s a 8.5. How many “average” guys is she going out with on actual dates? How many guys has she “dated” that were not “marriage material”? How many guys has she dated that were marriage material, but she wasn’t “ready”? I’m seeing a lot more of this kind of qualifier at the top too. I’m not online dating, but I’ve heard women say as much aloud IRL, many times.
“I am amending my profile here with one note at the top because this has proved to be a great filter– If you supported Donald Trump and/or voted for him, we will NOT be a match, so please save yourself (and me) time and MOVE on. And please don’t e-mail me to ask me why I didn’t support Trump, tell me I am “closed minded” and should reconsider or (cringe) don’t I think HRC was “just as bad.” This was not a toss up folks, and if you are even just “not bothered” by Trump or nonchalant about it, we are NOT a match. I need a man who has his eyes wide open. Thank you. Now back to my regularly scheduled profile…)
Let’s face it, life can be rough, and having a partner (with similar values) makes things a lot easier and more fun, albeit marriage has its own challenges. (That’s why it is important to choose wisely!) I am in a place where I would really like to find the right person to build a family with and just live life with. I really trust that God has a plan for me and knows exactly where the right person for me is. I trust that he will put him in my life when the time is right.
I feel like I’ve lived like four or five lives at this point in my life because I have followed my education and careers through six states, not to mention the personal side of things with relationships and so forth.”
What I am looking for most in a partner:
-Christian (My biggest dealbreaker)
-Stability: emotionally stable, financially stable
-Sexual attraction (has to be there obviously)
-Mental and emotional connection/intelligence
-A good sense of humor/ lighthearted (doesn’t take himself overly seriously)
-Loyal -Honest -Reliable/unwaivering/unfailing
-Even-tempered. Not easily angered
-Wise
-Humble, but confident.
Luckily her preferred age range goes down to 27, so she is really being flexible guys. Come on, man up. She’s (finally) ready…for fried ice.
Who cares what dumb ol’ hubby thinks? He knows what will happen should he try to assert himself. If he’s lucky he’ll sleep on the couch that night. If he’s unlucky he’ll spend the night at the county jail.
Reading this suddenly leads me to ask: has there ever been a confirmed case of a supplicating pastorbator who turned out to have been a battered husband?
I really trust that God has a plan for me and knows exactly where the right person for me is.
Seems like this would be straightforward given that she seems to be her own god.
Online profile from 37 y/o “Christian” woman. Lawyer. Never married.
Self-disqualifies immediately as wife and mother material.
“Many cats in her future I see.” (Apologies to Yoda.)
Seems like this would be straightforward given that she seems to be her own god.
Thread-winning comment so far!
““Many cats in her future I see.” (Apologies to Yoda.)”
Always in motion the future is … but not with this one.
Okay we get – we understand – you hate us and there is nothing in us that can ever be redeemed – message received. We’re going away now either leaving the country or moving to the countryside to be away from you. We wish you and the feline of your choice every happiness.
@Feeriker
“Self-disqualifies immediately as wife and mother material.”
Too bad. She “Definitely Wants” children and thus her ideal betabux needs to “Definitely Wants”. Better have that stable financial thing going for him too. Couple of rounds of IVF lie in wait.
Too bad. She “Definitely Wants” children and thus her ideal betabux needs to “Definitely Wants”.
No, women of that stripe like the idea of children more than the flesh-and-blood real deal. They sure the hell don’t want to actually raise the stinky, squalling, selfish little bastards, which is why they toss them into daycare as soon as the C-section incision heals and they can go back to corporate YouGoGirllllllll world again.
I haven’t found a down side to being dangerous.
Your definition is right, it’s just that it applies to a wide variety of men, including salary men. Most salary men I work with (99%) are very much afraid of the vag and HR. The beta-orbiting is beyond belief.
@Jeff @thedeti
We’re also seeing a sort of reverse apex fallacy going on in mainstream discourse. That is, not the apex fallacy that women believe in about men, but the apex fallacy men believe in about women. This is something Novaseeker addressed in a previous thread:
you have these pastors who see these young women, some of them quite hot, all driven and successful and participating to some degree in the church and so on, and they think “where the hell are the young men!?! These babes are awesome, and the young men are just total fails for not being here and scooping up these great young women!”. And so he goes off on the young men for not showing up to be BFs and husbands for these super-amazing super-hottie Christians in his church. What idiots, right?
The average, middle-class journalist / pastor / low-level politician / “relationship advisor” (or whatever they’re called) – who lives an isolated, suburban life – believes that the average middle-class single woman is feminine yet ambitious, gracious, slender, has good hygiene, doesn’t whore around, has a well-paying and satisfying career, wants to get married and have children in her youth, is completely fit to be a mother and wife etc. At the same time, these women aren’t getting asked out and aren’t getting marriage proposals, or so these idiots believe, which is a total contradiction, but nevermind.
The truth, of course, is that lots and lots of these women – probably the majority – are actually in bad shape, in more ways than one, obese or at least plain-looking while putting on weight, with small/saggy breasts/ass, with disproportionate bodies, in debt, having dead-end cubicle jobs or some other shitty service sector job, infected with venereal diseases, having “flings” and one-night stands regularly, getting drunk (alcoholism is a growing problem even among middle-aged women), using drugs (both legal and illegal) – in fact, their health is generally so bad the mortality rate of white women is rising -, bad or mediocre hygiene, shitty hairstyles, bad attitudes, bad/abusive relationships, divorced, raising children as single moms etc.
@Melmoth
How come these pieces never talk about nice, hardworking guys who have been rejected by a lot of women because they are not alpha males?
Great point. This wedding announcement below really sums it up. The bride and groom basically weave a redpill narrative without realizing it. They’re a cute couple, but prior to meeting, she makes it clear in her hamsterish way that she was carouseling, while he was clearly incel. What’s funny is that he accidentally ran good game by being an apathetic omega, which the bride misinterpreted as alpha aloofness!
They met right at the point that their SMVs crossed paths. Hopefully she will stick with him.
https://www.theknot.com/us/lisa-thompson-and-ben-verstegen-apr-2017
“Last year Americans were less likely to be killed by Muslim terrorists than for being Muslim, according to Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina”
Since they hold that true I have a good proposal for them – lets move all those liberals en mass to Syria, they will be safer there.
I think the proper response to this is
“Yes. Yes we are. Keep us happy.”
Fiddlesticks,
I don’t think it is appropriate to post their wedding announcement here, especially with such a critical commentary. They aren’t pubic figures. I’d hate to be embarrassed in a similar way. If you know them personally a better avenue would be to address the groom privately.
No, women of that stripe like the idea of children more than the flesh-and-blood real deal.
Yes, in the same way that women of that stripe love the wedding, but the marriage….not so much.
The “something” that needs to be done? Shut that pastoral mouth and listen to them for once.
…..how dare you……HOW DARE YOU!!!!!!!!
So, an advocate of marriage like Wilcox should really focus more on telling young women to look for a beta provider earlier in life, instead of wasting his time exhorting alpha males to settle down?
As a father of a nine year daughter, I already know the advice I will give to her when she leaves to college, “Find a good church with a good college group. Don’t be obsessed with the guys who speak to the group or who play in the worship band, because you will have to compete with a lot of other girls for those guys. Look for guys at that church who are STEM majors who are slightly nerdy and socially awkward, but who are basically nice, hardworking guys with good character. Flirt with them. Signal interest. Go out on date with a guy like that and give him a chance. Don’t have sex with him before marriage, but get married young, if necessary, instead of making him be a ‘celibate boyfriend’ for five years.”
@Jeff
Great advice.
Lol at “Carlos Slim’s blog”…still pretty funny. The article seems like trolling a la Daily Mail. It reminds me of Chomsky saying, right around the election, that the Republican party is the most dangerous organization in world history.
Dear Fellas:
With respect, I have found women are much more sensitive to women’s opinions. I trust your wife will echo your sentiments.
As an aside, this is yet another place where the ancient text of the Bible points out a glaring problem in modern society. When Saul of Tarsus/St. Paul encouraged old women to teach and lead younger ladies, he didn’t mean for a bunch of dried out old bull dyke feminists to be poisoning minds in the queer theory class, but that’s what we got.
Credit where due: I stole that funny line from Mike Cernovich over at dangerandplay dot com. It’s funny because it’s true.
Best,
Boxer
Frank K says:
February 13, 2017 at 8:22 pm
“A lot of women get married…to get married. Not to be married, mind you, but to get married.”
Yup, it’s all about her “Princess Day”. The groom is just another accessory.” ”
“to get married” — “to have a wedding”, is what I think he means (that was the first thing to flash through my mind).
Western women have proven by their actions for at least the last forty to fifty years that they would much rather have a wedding than to have the marriage; or that they marry to not only have a wedding, but especially so that they can ultimately have a divorce and be awarded “cash and prizes” later on in court.
The groom not only serves as an accessory at the wedding — he also serves only as an ATM, animated dildo/sperm dispenser, whipping boy, and punching bag during the marriage, and a Golden Goose during the divorce.
More men of all ages need to learn these lessons, take them to heart, and join us other men in the ranks of MGTOW.
So Brad Wilcucks, even after reading all the rebuttals, becoming aware of MGTOW, and being zinged even in The Economist, still doubles down and a) pretends that there is NOTHING wrong with the present divorce laws, treatment of men by the media/culture, or extreme delaying of marriage by women, and b) mistakes an alpha male for the average male. Since the alpha experience was certainly never available to Brad Wilcucks, the fact that he thinks the average man is doing that reveals how needy and pathetic he is.
If physiognomy is real, then it IS relevant to point out that Brad Wilcox has just about the most beta look one will ever see :
Jeff:
“Find a good church with a good college group. Don’t be obsessed with the guys who speak to the group or who play in the worship band, because you will have to compete with a lot of other girls for those guys. Look for guys at that church who are STEM majors who are slightly nerdy and socially awkward, but who are basically nice, hardworking guys with good character. Flirt with them. Signal interest. Go out on date with a guy like that and give him a chance. Don’t have sex with him before marriage, but get married young, if necessary, instead of making him be a ‘celibate boyfriend’ for five years.”
There’s a few problems with this advice, actually. First, she’s gonna have a hard time finding a man she’s sexually attracted to from that group. This advice is the kind of thing that creates marriages borne of convenience and people-pleasing. If the sexual attraction isn’t there, and she marries a man she’s not sexually attracted to, she’s consigning herself to a life of frustration, unhappiness, a dead bedroom, and ultimately disillusionment and divorce.
Two crows,
They should not have put it on the public Internet if they didn’t want it addressed. Posting the details in a public forum automatically opens you for public evaluation.
“Republicans should Man Up on Fatherlessness”
http://dailycaller.com/…/republicans-should-man-up-on…/
“GOP must act on national epidemic of absent fathers”
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/gop…/article/2610911
and “Fatherlessness, What are Republicans doing about it”
http://dailycaller.com/…/fatherlessness-what-are…/
If physiognomy is real, then it IS relevant to point out that Brad Wilcox has just about the most beta look one will ever see :
A few of us have mentioned this on several occasions, yet a few others here continue, inexplicably, to come to his defense despite his own “guilty as charged” pleas (as evidenced by his doubling down on beta servitude).
They should not have put it on the public Internet if they didn’t want it addressed. Posting the details in a public forum automatically opens you for public evaluation.
Heartily seconded. You choose to post your personal information in a public venue, you’ve made yourself a public figure and are thus fair game. It’s that simple..
Fatherlessness, What are Republicans doing about it”
Precisely NOTHING. Like Republicans “do” about anything else. Talk up a storm of verbal flatulence, sure. But follow it up with action? Not so much.
@Boxer
There is no bigger Cap’t Save a Ho at the NYT than Kristof. Along with your mention of his abject failure against sex trafficking, I wonder how much of his White Knighting is from his Alpha Tiger Woman wife, Sheryl WuDunn.
@thedeti
Well, the lack of sexual attraction may be a problem. But I would think that a young woman would have an easier time being sexually attracted to the “beta provider” if she was not comparing him to more alpha men she had been with in the past. In other words, find the beta provider as a virgin at 20 instead of settling for a beta provider at 30 after racking up a N of 5 or 10 with more alpha men. Before the sexual revolution, wives had a much easier time sexually bonding with a rather ordinary husband.
Also, I would like to teach my daughter that commitment creates attraction, rather than the idea that attraction creates commitment (and the corollary that commitment should only last as long as there is attraction). This is an older idea that goes against everything in our culture today, so I realize that my wife and I face an uphill battle with our daughter that we may lose.
OT: Dalrock, how do you mark people as authorized to make replies and link to articles? I had to approve myself on my blog!
Jeff,
Don’t you know that all those older marriages were unhappy? That is what I hear regularly….
(I do not agree of course, but that is the message many have/put forth.)
feeriker @ February 13, 2017 at 9:27 pm:
“Reading this suddenly leads me to ask: has there ever been a confirmed case of a supplicating pastorbator who turned out to have been a battered husband?”
My brief Google searches only turned up Pastor Saeed. The articles/forums I found were really depressing. Young pastors get placed in their first senior-pastor throne, are horrified at the rush of domestic abuse claims from the ladies and quickly turn to the civil authorities (Child Services) for advice and booklets.
Church and State are definitely in bed with each other.
Also found some stuff on how put-upon pastors are, tirelessly saving the world every day for the wimminz. First pastors hoard all power, then they expect us to be grateful for it. Not that any of us are properly trained to wield Christian authority anyway, this despite being lectured at every week by professionals….
Makes one wonder where Christ’s 70 disciples came from. Probably from rocks.
Boxer,
Yeah Kristof seems to be very concerned about the safety of women and girls, all right.
Remember, a committed mangina is usually a creepy predator, or at least a deviant, in disguise. This happens with great regularity.
From Jeff above:
“Look for guys at that church who are STEM majors who are slightly nerdy and socially awkward, but who are basically nice, hardworking guys with good character.”
I strongly doubt you can convince your daughter that she wants to date awkward nerds.
@Jeff
Deti and Broski are right. You’re trying to reverse the roles of desires and the mind, but that will backfire. She will be attracted to whomever she is attracted, so she ought to look at those guys. Then, from those, she ought to control for good character and weed out those with bad character. Whoever is left is a candidate. That way both heart and mind are engaged and satisfied.
But especially I must say: Sending a daughter off to college is one of the most foolish things a father can do. Do not do it.
Jeff, Feb 14, 2017 at 10:53 am:
“Well, the lack of sexual attraction may be a problem.”
It will be a very, very big problem in a marriage if she’s not sexually attracted to the man she marries. Trust me; I know whereof I speak on this. I’ve seen marriages where they looked great on paper – got along well, shared values, same beliefs on most things, liked doing the same things together, great friends, he was sexually attracted to her. The only missing ingredient was that she was not sexually attracted to him, or was, well, maybe a little sexually attracted, but just “meh I can take it or leave it” with him. And that one missing ingredient collapses the soufflé. If she’s not absolutely burning for him sexually, it will fail. And it will ruin everything.
I am firmly, firmly convinced that this is the number one problem in marriages today – women are marrying men they just really aren’t all that sexually attracted to. And what little attraction these women do have isn’t anywhere near enough to keep her with him for 30 years or more, through the really bad stuff that couples go through (every couple goes through really bad times. Every single one). A woman will not respect a man she doesn’t want to jump into bed with.
“But I would think that a young woman would have an easier time being sexually attracted to the “beta provider” if she was not comparing him to more alpha men she had been with in the past.”
Yeah, that will help. But sexual attraction either is there or it isn’t. Time won’t create it. Relationship won’t create it. Going on 10 dates won’t create it.
“In other words, find the beta provider as a virgin at 20 instead of settling for a beta provider at 30 after racking up a N of 5 or 10 with more alpha men.
That helps too. But that beta provider has to have quite a bit of alpha ‘not going to put up with your bullshit or your disrespect’, and willingness to walk away from your sweet daughter, or she will absolutely walk all over him. It might be on you to help him stand on his own two feet in that regard.
“Before the sexual revolution, wives had a much easier time sexually bonding with a rather ordinary husband.”
No, before the sex rev, wives had a much easier time remaining with their husband choices because they made their choices sensibly from the limited options available, and made the best of it. Most women pre sex rev weren’t all that attracted to their Joe Lunchpail, John Q Public husbands. Think of Mad Men. Most men in 1960 didn’t look like Don Draper. They looked more like Harry Crane. (http://www.bing.com/images/search?q=harry+crane&FORM=HDRSC2) Most men throughout all of history looked, acted, and lived, like Harry Crane.
You think women got all hot and bothered for Harry? Nope. They stayed with Harry because Harry was the best they could do, they knew it, they made their choice, and made the best of it. And HARRY WAS WILLING TO MARRY HER, whereas most other men weren’t. She knew damn well she couldn’t get Don; and if she did get Don it would be only for a while and he’d just pump and dump her. (Plus, most women found out that Harry really wasn’t so bad.)
Women stayed with men they chose because they were constrained by a deep and wide network of laws, customs, culture, church/religious pressures, and familial pressures, to stay. They were pressured to be accountable and to do what they promised they’d do. Women weren’t enthralled with sex with Harry. They made the best of sex with Harry. And it was ok because those women got a home, a husband who didn’t cheat (usually), rights to his resources and protection, physical security, and a guy who treated her reasonably well.
“Also, I would like to teach my daughter that commitment creates attraction, rather than the idea that attraction creates commitment (and the corollary that commitment should only last as long as there is attraction). This is an older idea that goes against everything in our culture today, so I realize that my wife and I face an uphill battle with our daughter that we may lose.”
Hold it. No. NO NO NO. Commitment does NOT create attraction. There is sexual attraction and there is commitment. Sexual attraction has to exist FIRST, before commitment is considered. It’s either there or it isn’t. It’s tingles. Commitment does not create tingles. Masculinity, physical appearance, confidence, dominance and status create tingles.
Your viewpoint leads to women marrying men they aren’t sexually attracted to, or maybe a little sexually attracted to, and then both sides hoping that the sexual attraction will “come with time” or “come later”. NO. It’s either there at the beginning, right at the get go, or it’s not. People cannot marry with the hopes that the sex will just “take care of itself”. No. That will not work. She has to be really hot for him or it’s not going to work, she will ruin his life and hers, she will make herself miserable, and she’ll probably end up telling him “I love you but I’m not in love with you”.
Don’t do this.
Or, if you prefer, Ken Cosgrove.
Or, for a more working class representative, this guy.
Deti, what a great explanation. The problem is women and their pair bonding. The red pill truth is that women’s desires are not compatible with a healthy civilization. They all need a righteous man to lead them, and a culture that lets men lead. Otherwise, women run civilization into the ground. Now the righteous men are walking away, and we will see a change.
thedeti,
I am firmly, firmly convinced that this is the number one problem in marriages today – women are marrying men they just really aren’t all that sexually attracted to.
The problem with this is that only 20% of men are attractive to women. Hence, either only 20% of people marry, OR polygamy happens.
That is why ALL traditional societies ensured that girls married at 18 as virgins, so as to suppress any chance of this being a problem. It worked for centuries, but I am not sure I am a fan of that either.
The bigger takeaway is that female attraction is adverse for civilization, as women are precisely attracted to male traits that do not move civilization forward, and entirely unattracted to male traits that move civilization forward. Hence, the majority of women are obsolete. The exceptions are the minority.
Anon:
First, that picture of Dr. Wilcox is… telling.
Second:
“The problem with this is that only 20% of men are attractive to women. Hence, either only 20% of people marry, OR polygamy happens.
“That is why ALL traditional societies ensured that girls married at 18 as virgins, so as to suppress any chance of this being a problem. It worked for centuries, but I am not sure I am a fan of that either.”
I know. My approach to this means most men should not marry. But that’s the world we live in now. I can’t advise men on how the world was, or how it should be – only on how it is. I can’t advise men to take action based on what used to be or should be – only on what is. I can advise men only on how to navigate THIS sexual market place and THIS marriage market place, RIGHT NOW. And right now, all of society’s cultural, economic, governmental, legal, political, and religious institutions are arrayed against men. That’s just how it is.
” But sexual attraction either is there or it isn’t. Time won’t create it. Relationship won’t create it. Going on 10 dates won’t create it.”
I have heard it said that within 60 seconds on meeting you, a woman will decide if she would sleep with you or not, and that nothing you can do will get you out of the friend zone once she has shoved you in there. And if you’re a beta, you’ll be friend zoned 99.999999999% of the time.
To tweak Dalrock’s quote: beta men are patiently waiting for their future wives to tire of having sex with men that they find attractive and then settle for a yucky beta bucks, especially after they are thrown from the carousel and the hot bad boys no longer want them.
Given the contemporary dynamics in “relationships” this is the only choice most beta men have these days, he waits patiently for Chad to be done with his future wife and toss her aside like an old moldy piece of bread, which like a starving scavenger he will try to grab before someone else does.
“The problem with this is that only 20% of men are attractive to women. Hence, either only 20% of people marry, OR polygamy happens.”
Or they settle for a guy they don’t really like, and then divorce him a few years later. Given the 50% divorce rate, where most divorces are initiated by women (who already have a backup man in the wings), this appears to be the most common choice, especially since most Alpha men fully understand that they gain NOTHING by marrying the women they bang.
“I have heard it said that within 60 seconds on meeting you, a woman will decide if she would sleep with you or not,”
It’s more or less true. Though it’s probably more like 5 to 10 minutes. And it’s not that she’ll decide “i’ll sleep with him” in that 10 minutes. It’s more that she decides “he’s a definite possibility” and “I’m tingling” in that time period. She decides “I could sleep with him” and “I would sleep with him if I feel sufficiently comfortable with him and doing so will not make me feel like a slut or cause others to perceive me as a slut.” In some cases, it takes a week or three for her to get to that last statement. If he’s attractive enough and all other things are “right”, it might take an hour or two to get to that last statement.
Most of society has been rejiggered to remove as many barriers as possible for women to get to that last statement as soon as possible, with the most attractive men.
It’s much easier for her to decide “no” in the first minute. It’s the first minute where she decides “he is definitely NOT a possibility” and “I would not sleep with him if he were the last man on earth”. And once she has made the decision that you are a “no”, then you will stay a “no” forever with that woman. There is literally NOTHING you can do to change “no” to a “yes”; and even if there were something you could do; the effort wouldn’t be worth it and is far better spent on other women.
“and that nothing you can do will get you out of the friend zone once she has shoved you in there.”
Yeah, pretty much. Not worth it to try to get out, really. And don’t stay “friends”. You are not in the friendzone because she truly wants to be a friend. It’s face-saving for her. Plus you can’t use a woman who friendzoned you to meet her friends for date possibilities. All her friends know she friendzoned you. If their friend didn’t want you, they won’t either. it’s “pre-rejection”.
“And if you’re a beta, you’ll be friend zoned 99.999999999% of the time.”
This is why the advice is to escalate with a woman you’re attracted to. Make her reject you so you know where you stand. Make her make the decision. Be bold. If you must make a choice between being bold and being hesitant, go with bold. The advice also is to move on immediately.
@GunnerQ
Young pastors get placed in their first senior-pastor throne, are horrified at the rush of domestic abuse claims from the ladies and quickly turn to the civil authorities (Child Services) for advice and booklets.
As I so often assert, there shouldn’t be any “young” pastors. A massive part of the problem with churches today is that too many wet-behind-the-ears kids are entering seminary/Bible college* who have ZE-RO clue about how people and the world work, ZE-RO experience working a real job (and thus ZE-RO ability to relate to adult problems and challenges), and ZE-RO experience being a husband, father, and leader – skills that are essential in leading a congregation.
No denomination should permit any man under the age of 30 to enter pastoral training, and even then not unless he’s had at least a decade of real-world work experience, is married, and the father of at least one child. Otherwise he will simply be overwhelmed by the responsibilities that maturity (a.k.a. “time in life”) will enable him to handle. A 24-year-old kid right out of seminary who has nevered dealt with the real world on an adult level is just being set up for failure.
(* not that anyone of ANY age should be spending any time in these heresy factories)
“This is why the advice is to escalate with a woman you’re attracted to. Make her reject you so you know where you stand. Make her make the decision. Be bold. If you must make a choice between being bold and being hesitant, go with bold. The advice also is to move on immediately.”
Since we no longer have arranged marriages, this is the way it is done.
But for a beta it can get VERY discouraging when he is repeatedly rejected (even by even plain Janes), over and over. I’ve met a few young men, who while they are slim and fit, are very beta. It seems that without exception, the few who have a girlfriend have one who is utterly unattractive (typically they are morbidly obese).
Something has changed. Back in the stone age when I was a college student I wasn’t an Alpha but I was able to date a few cute girls and had a few nice girlfriends before I finally met my wife (who was also cute). I would never have considered dating a girl who was outright ugly or obese, and especially not one with an N count above zero (and those with N==0 were hard to find even back then)
W. Bradford Wilcox, Geraghty and Prager couldn’t identify a barbell in a line-up of gardening tools. Also, Wilcox seems to not include his wife in any google-able photos….Hmmm.
I’ve never watched Mad Men but I’ll venture that one thing about ‘unattractive’ Harry Crane is that he existed pre-obesity/pre-feminism (odd coincidence that obesity and feminism have about the same birthdate). So in a nation filled with healthy, feminine women, who kept their tits hidden and still looked good in a Sunday dress, ‘unattractive’ Harry Crane was gifted a few pillars of PUA/Game without even trying; abundance and options. Plus it was an environment much less conducive to oneitis and pedestalization. So simply through culture, Harry Crane’s game was much tighter and his SMV was high enough to elicit tingles in women even if he was schlubby. I’ve seen an international nine sobbing in true lovesickness over the most ridiculously ugly, short, skid-marked stained boxer wearing, career butcher, soccer-headed loser. It was in Brazil, where attractive women outnumber attractive men by about 50 to 1. America is the same way, just reverse the genders.
It’s more or less true. Though it’s probably more like 5 to 10 minutes. And it’s not that she’ll decide “i’ll sleep with him” in that 10 minutes.
Yes. Which is why the ability to do daytime approaches is the single biggest determinant in the quality of a single man’s life. Even if he doesn’t want to have sex with 50 women, just the ability to do daytime approaches will do wonders for his confidence and communication skills which will improve all other areas.
It is about much more than a PUA. The underpinnings of the entire psyche can be overhauled and improved.
This business of “churches refusing to help abused women” keeps cropping up more and more in various places. To read some church-related publications there is an epidemic of abuse out there, and the oh-so-patriarchal churches are all involved by protecting bad men. I’ve been skeptical because of the ever growing list of things that count as “abuse”, because of the ongoing feminization of UMC men, MC men and working class men, and other reasons.
Now I have an hypothesis. Conservative churches tend even now to restrict divorce to cases of “Abandonment, Adultury or Abuse”. Abandonment is pretty much moot now. The push to make “uses porn” equivalent to “committed adultery” didn’t get as much momentum as desired, despite movies like Fireproof. What does that leave?
“He’s a sex addict!”, “He looked at porn once!” “he’s mean to me!” Abuse, abuse, abuse.
It’s just another way for married girls to either get total control of their beta, or get rid of him and hit the trail again in search of the elusive, tameable Alpha. The fact that some number of men will be crushed under the Duluth wheel? Does not matter in the least. Not to the women, not to the church leaders, not to anyone…except the rightly angry men.
We get it. It matters to us. False accusations of abuse should be punished with jail time.
@melmoth
Also, Wilcox seems to not include his wife in any google-able photos….Hmmm.
See my comment from last summer. They gave a lecture together at his university. By 40-something standards, you will see that he has done well for himself. And they have a lot of kids. Kudos to him; he just needs to understand that the Epiphany Phase comes much later nowadays.
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/the-mysterious-male-marriage-premium/#comment-215468
Fiddle:
Even the Wilcox marriage confirms lots of Red Pill. It’s been a long time since we broke out the Q36B Space Hamsterlator.
As you said:
“Danielle speaks about how she had been dating “an artist from Seattle” before she met Brad in grad school in the early nineties.”
Hamsterlation: I was having hot monkey sex with the Seattle artist, having a GREAT time, despite the fact that Picasso on the Puget wouldn’t marry me (and I don’t think I would have liked being married to him, what with the lack of money and all, and i couldn’t control him, and he probably would have cheated on me if i had stayed with him.
“She calls her husband a “Steady Eddie””
Hamsterlation: He’s a predictable man who I can control and manipulate, and who will marry me.
“who when they were dating was concerned about her “health insurance.””
He’s really predictable and he will take care of me while i control and manipulate him.
“She also notes that she had a really tough time getting him to escalate.”
Jeez, where’s that artist when i need him. Come on Brad, we need to get this thing moving. Ask me out already so we can move on to the marriage. OK, now we’ve gone out. Ask me to marry you, or i am breaking up with you and going to find someone else, which i’ll be able to get done PDQ. So let’s MOVE IT.
Fiddlesticks : “But….but…. I still want to defend Brad Wilcucks (*squeak*)..”
Deti : Sledgehammer
“she had a really tough time getting him to escalate”..
If a man is EVER guility of that with a woman he is attracted to, he is a loser. Always err on the side of bolder..
Yeah not bad for him. But I still gazed lovingly at my passport when I saw her, especially when I heard that voice. I didn’t watch much but enough to see that they both could vomit blue pills with the intensity of that girl in The Exorcist.
oh i don’t think Fiddle was defending Wilcox.
Frank K: I have heard it said that within 60 seconds on meeting you, a woman will decide if she would sleep with you or not, and that nothing you can do will get you out of the friend zone once she has shoved you in there.
And I have read about scientific studies that show time can create sexual attraction. This is why there are so many office romances. Working together — being together — for long periods of time can trigger hormones and sexual attraction between two people who had not initially been attracted to each other.
RedPill Latecomer:
“And I have read about scientific studies that show time can create sexual attraction. This is why there are so many office romances. Working together — being together — for long periods of time can trigger hormones and sexual attraction between two people who had not initially been attracted to each other.”
Is it sexual attraction that’s created? Or is it comfort that makes a woman feel better about tolerating sex with him because her options are running out? Or is it comfort that makes a woman feel better about tolerating sex with him because she needs some affirmation/validation?
Is it actual “I want to have sex with him” sexual attraction? or is it “I feel better about having sex with this man who makes me feel comfortable”?
With office romances: Is it really that these people’s proximity and regularity of being around each other actually CREATES sexual desire out of whole cloth between two people who otherwise wouldn’t be attracted to each other?
Or is it latent, dormant sexual attraction that awakens when the other person, previously oblivious to the first, expresses interest?
Or, is it that these are two people who are attracted to each other and would be even if outside an office setting; it’s just that they happened to meet in an office setting?
Or is what’s being called sexual attraction really isn’t “attraction” at all; it’s just a need for affirmation/validation? A need to feel important? A man or woman at a vulnerable, lonely place in her life, says they’re “attracted” to someone who’s really familiar to them? Is that attraction? or some other emotion masquerading as attraction?
“And I have read about scientific studies that show time can create sexual attraction. This is why there are so many office romances. Working together — being together — for long periods of time can trigger hormones and sexual attraction between two people who had not initially been attracted to each other.”
There is definitely truth to this. I have experienced it myself, although I’ve never had a relationship out of it. As long as the girl isn’t butt-ugly, I think men naturally start to wonder after a while what it would *ahem* “be like”. Gets even worse if you have a good interpersonal relations with each other, as certain flirty dynamics – obvious or subtle – will invariably emerge after a while and escalate the idea.
@Fiddlesticks
I was intrigued by your comment re the video –
“(He does deserve credit for having masculine body language and speech patterns.)”
I didn’t watch all of it but I skimmed the video at what seemed to me to be likely looking places in the talk and the Q&A. If he had done that whole thing alone, he would have indeed come across as a knowledgeable authority figure giving us “the word”. With the wife in the picture it unravels a bit. As you say, body language and speech patterns are key indicators.
Maybe you had to have been a man very like Mr. Wilcox to see it, I don’t know how obvious it is otherwise; but she is running that show, period, dot. I flatter myself that I’ve seen too many of these ministry type “teams” to mistake the dynamic. She even included the I-let-him-out-to-make-this-talk joke at one point. deti’s wrap up no doubt comes very close to nailing the preface of this love story all the way.
Classically, the terminology throughout is partner/spouse. I never heard husband/wife enter the scene. Also, the questions from the girls were true to form along the lines of “how can I be double sure this guy will be/do what I want”?
In addition to some of the content in deti’s comments.
It’s summer here in Australia. I try to spend most of my weekends at the beautiful beaches on the Sunshine Coast. I love body-surfing when the surf’s up, and it provides an interesting platform for kicking back and observing (largely unregenerate) human behaviour. It is a microcosm of the wider world. The beaches attract many very attractive young women.
These beautiful young women have no shame in flaunting everything they’ve got, because it’s all they’ve got. They might as well be naked. While I don’t expect any of them to put any particular effort into attracting me, a middle-aged man, they have zero appeal to any man beyond their physical beauty. In fact the general behaviours and personalities displayed are obnoxious, arrogant, ignorant, narcissistic (me, me, me, “Look at me!”), and disrespect of any man because…vagina. God knows what their life’s plan is, because I seriously doubt they have any life skills such as cooking, cleaning, home-making, etc. They have absolutely nothing worthwhile to offer beyond their bodies. Their talent is their physical beauty, nothing more. They’re extremely shallow. No personality whatsoever. They seem to believe their bodies are their personalities, and the only thing they need to attract the Brad Pitt of their dreams.
They make no effort to really attract a man, because they must be thinking, “I don’t have to, men will be attracted to my body, and that’s enough.” What (real) man would want to sign up for that? Besides Harley McRockdrummer? And the beach is flooded with these obviously single women just waiting for Brad Pitt to approach them, and likely make a fool of himself anyway.
They have a general disrespect of all men, including disrespect for their elders. They make excellent eye candy, but they have absolutely nothing else to offer beyond that. Except headaches for the men who get involved with them.
This is the gynocentric world of vagina-worship we live in.
Is it really that these people’s proximity and regularity of being around each other actually CREATES sexual desire out of whole cloth between two people who otherwise wouldn’t be attracted to each other?
I’ve NEVER grokked the whole “office romance” thing, probably because I can’t imagine wanting to do anything to the people I work with (of either sex) other than to ignore them (best case scenario) or strangle, dismember, and bury them (worst case scenario). The though of romance with any of the women I’ve ever worked with has all the appeal of eating one’s dinner inside a public bathroom.
Yeah, it was not Fiddlesticks defending Wilcucks, it was someone else in that previous thread. They went to great lengths to declare that Wilcucks ‘spent his entire life studying marriage’, which frankly makes it even worse, given how Wilcucks cannot see some very obvious truths even after others have pointed them out to him many times.
” Or is it comfort that makes a woman feel better about tolerating sex with him because her options are running out? ”
Especially after a divorce, when she suddenly realizes that it can be slim pickings for a divorced, post wall woman?
Not worth it to try to get out, really. And don’t stay “friends”. You are not in the friendzone because she truly wants to be a friend. It’s face-saving for her. Plus you can’t use a woman who friendzoned you to meet her friends for date possibilities.
Not just that, but single women make terrible friends. They take much more than they give. They won’t help you in any way. They aren’t interested in the same hobbies or any other subject. It is all one-way.
Blue-pill fools think that female friends will introduce a man to other women. No chance. Even a man’s sister will rarely do that for him.
Office romances are safe. The other is always on their best behaviour. Compared to the slob at home who actually will sometimes disagree with the lady of the house. The other is just sooo niiiice!
“:There is definitely truth to this. I have experienced it myself, although I’ve never had a relationship out of it. ”
I recently had a female coworker flirt with me, and hard (she knows I’m married). Turns out she was having trouble with the hubby. Being who I am, I encouraged her to patch things up with him. She has, to a degree, but periodically complains about how he doesn’t cook dinner or this or that. “Who does all the yard work?”, “Who fixes things when they break?” I asked her (oh, he also makes 150K and showers her with pricey baubles).
Anyway, I think she still wants to dump him, but hasn’t been able to line up a replacement for him. I strongly suspect they have a dead bedroom, given how she complains about him. I suspect that were I a cad I could have had some fun with her. She’s in her 40’s, and is in good shape for her age … but she’s still 45 or so … so slim pickings in the hubby replacement department, especially ones that earn what he does. The other day she told me that if she were to divorce him that she would not remarry (I told her that if my wife were to die that I would probably not remarry). Anyway, her remark sounds to me like she’s rationalized hitting the eject button even though she doesn’t have a new vine to grab onto.
“Not just that, but single women make terrible friends. They take much more than they give. They won’t help you in any way. They aren’t interested in the same hobbies or any other subject. It is all one-way.”
Yup, she will see you as a resource, but one she doesn’t have to sleep with. A lot like an ex husband.
“Maybe you had to have been a man very like Mr. Wilcox to see it, I don’t know how obvious it is otherwise; but she is running that show, period, dot.”
Lost Patrol, I’d like to give Dr. Wilcox the benefit of the doubt. Perhaps it is Danielle’s influence and involvement in her husband’s work that causes his myopia and deafness on what men are saying.
Some MGTOW under the moniker of Turd Flinging Monkey put out a blistering response point by point demolishing Wilcox’s video on marriage and its good points for men. Wilcox responded to it. His response basically was all Blue Pill feminine imperative, straight down the line: “Misogyny! Peter Pan manboys who won’t grow up! Don’t look at that man behind the curtain! Don’t pay attention to any of those facts! Just listen to me while I repeat what I said before, only in bold and with more passion this time!”
And the next time he responded, he gave some lip service to divorce risks. Yes, 50% of marraiges fail, he intoned and lamented. Yes, 42% of first marriages end in divorce. But, said Wilcox, it’s ON YOU MEN to handle and control those risks!! Get a job! Make money! Save money! Don’t cheat on her! Be “emotionally engaged”! Be nice to her!”
It’s all feminine imperative, serve women, all the way down the line.
The only info I can find on Danielle Wilcox is that she is a “director” of the National Marriage Project at UVA, like her husband, who holds a full professorship in sociology at UVA. I don’t see that Mrs. Wilcox has any academic appointments, though I could be wrong, I suppose.
Robert Franklin at the National Parents Organization throws down the gauntlet:
https://www.nationalparentsorganization.org/blog/23287-brad-wilcox-do-women-contribute-to-the-decline-of-marriage
“Meanwhile, where are the women in all this? Nowhere to be found. Now, as a writer, I fully understand that he’s writing about men and to men, not women; his chosen topic intentionally omits them. I have no quibble with that. After all, every article is about what it’s about and not something else.”
“At the same time though, when something’s relevant to one’s topic, omitting it invites criticism, as it should. So when Wilcox tells men to “put a ring on it,” he’s assuming a lot, not only about men, but about women as well. Nowhere in his article does Wilcox mention the glaringly obvious fact that it takes two to make a marriage. For wedding bells to chime, there must be an affirmative answer to “Will you marry me?”
“The point being that men aren’t solely responsible for our declining marriage rates. Women have an equal say in whether men and women marry, so if rates are going down, it’s likely that women bear at least as much of the blame as do men. But to my knowledge, Wilcox has never addressed such a screed to women, while he’s addressed several to men and men alone.”
Read the whole thing. It’s pretty good.
And now I’m done. I’ve hijacked the blog enough today….
Or is it latent, dormant sexual attraction that awakens when the other person, previously oblivious to the first, expresses interest?
Perhaps the baseline potential for sexual attraction is higher than it seems from our societal experience?
Meaning that if men and women realized their full potential masculinity/femininity, you could pair off at random and still have attraction. Or you could ship them as is off to a desert island and *fwoosh* there would be attraction.
I’m reminded of the pimp who claimed every woman could be converted to a ho. Every pairing has potential, but some take too much effort to realize that potential to be worthwhile.
W. Bradford Wilcox has a book entitled Gender and Parenthood: Biological and Social Scientific Perspectives (Columbia, 2013) that he co-authored with a woman. First of all, by using the word “gender” (which properly refers to parts of speech) when the proper word is sex, because there are two sexes, Wilcox surrenders to Feminist premises from the start. He also has a book Soft Patriarchs, New Men: How Christianity Shapes Fathers and Husbands (Morality and Society Series).
I suppose one can say that Wilcox is trying to do something good, but proceeding from false premises. False premise -> false conclusion. Actually, a false premise means the conclusion has no meaning, in a formal sense.
Everyone bear in mind, outside of the androsphere this is what passes for deep, serious thought – rehashing the same old blue pill stuff with slightly differnt words.
“Everyone bear in mind, outside of the androsphere this is what passes for deep, serious thought – rehashing the same old blue pill stuff with slightly differnt words.”
Fortunately, fewer and fewer men are buying it.
This graph of sexual attraction or Sexual Market Value will surely be new to some readers.
Many have whine about it or objected to it, but it so far has held up well: predictions can be made from this graph, especially about women in the 27 to 32 year age bracket.
“Fortunately, fewer and fewer men are buying it.”
Fewer and fewer would want to trade places with the man-up screechers either. No one envies Wilcox, Geraghty, Prager, Driscoll, Gottman. No one wants to be them, as much as they take it for an absolute given that their lives and marriages are the gold standard. Driscoll even titled his book “Real Marriage.” Okay boss.
They’ve mistaken 100% allegiance to the FI as happiness and it’s the error of a lifetime. They must know this on some level and they have to stave it off through hard-selling their own life choices. They’re trying Tom Sawyer’s fence painting sales trick of feigning happiness over a shitty, unwanted role to provoke envy and close the sale, but no one’s buying.
We can see your wife Wilcox, we can hear her voice. No one wants that.
“No one wants to be them, as much as they take it for an absolute given that their lives and marriages are the gold standard. Driscoll even titled his book “Real Marriage.” Okay boss.”
These clowns seem to confuse pop psychology and feminism for the Gospel. Or maybe it’s not confusion and rather it is deliberate.
Driscoll can shout “How dare you!?” all he wants. I’m sure that gets women to fill the collection plate, but the day will come when he will have to give an account of his actions and possibly hear the Lord say to him: “I never knew you”
@ Frank K
Ironically, feminists describe Driscoll as misogynistic, toxically masculine and homophobic. When will these supplicants learn that they can’t please feminists?
“Or Haven Monahan…”
Ha!
Wilcox is 57 years old. His wife is probably 53. That means they married back sometime in the early 1980’s. About the time the Minnesota feminists were coming up with the Duluth wheel, about the time anti Family court was just barely coming into existence, long before VAWA. The vast majority of their friends in college came from intact families. Being upper middle class, they probably don’t know many men who have been frivorced, and almost certainly don’t know of any men who have killed themselves while being frivorced.
So what we have here is a couple of trailing edge Boomers who formed their relationship in a time when feminism had not yet weaponized the law, who live in a UMC bubble world that has little in common with ordinary people. Listen to the vid presentation at
https://dalrock.wordpress.com/2016/08/01/the-mysterious-male-marriage-premium/#comment-215468
and hear Wilcox’s vaguely sheep-like, bleating voice as he talks about cohabitation. I haven’t yet listened to the full presentation yet, but I wager he will not even discuss the aspect of GISS that explains risk of divorce. It is ironic that Slumlord, who is a major pedestalizer of women, has a better grasp of the effect of N on probability of divorce.
Maybe there’s something worth hearing in this presentation but I haven’t run across it yet.
He’s actually only 46.
It’s hard to imagine a study with more inherent bias than Wilcox and his wife coming up with that lovesong for themselves. They basically undertook this study to prove (to themselves) that their choices are the best ones and that they’re the happiest people. The conclusions were laughably foregone. Imagine them doing their ‘research’ and then presenting their findings; “Well it turns out that single, digital nomads who’ve expatriated to Columbia are the happiest. They are 386% happier on average than men who are married with children. Divorced men are the least happy, even if you credit divorcee suicide victims with maximum happiness. As it turns out, the more children you have, the less happy you are. Men who have between 3-7 children are the least happy of all.”
Also, the concept of rating happiness is bogus anyway. People more invested in a long-term decision (marriage with children) will naturally protect their decision more. A single man with every option in the world might be more honest, like, “Yeah, last year wasn’t so great. There were some missteps. Oh well, on to the next phase of my life. We’ll see how that one feels and if it’s not good for me, I’ll try something else.”
If you want to rate how someone feels, then you have to draw blood. Check their hormonal state, T-levels, serotonin, endorphins etc. You can’t just ask. The people trapped long-term in the most unsatisfying place will naturally overcompensate.
They’re not trying to please feminists, because they see themselves as the protestants of the feminist movement. To Driscoll, the establishment feminsts aren’t being radically feminist enough. The other radfems are callously abandoning women to lesbianism and cats, when such women would be much happier as the wives of supplicating she-males in his congregation (where they could pay him tithes and offerings, of course).
When these people (Driscoll, Fiene, etc.) claim to be “anti-feminist” they tell the truth, but tell it slant.
Boxer
He’s not worried about judgment day. Guys like Driscoll don’t have a genuine faith in God, any more than I do. Shit, guys like that don’t even approach those of us secular types who recognize that there’s wisdom and good advice in the text. For them, it’s an act. They get up on stage and ply their artful craft, and live at your expense, while laughing inside at the suckers they claim to be serving.
Driscoll’s such a degenerate parasite that he’s willing to destabilize society (and imperil himself and his family in the process) just so that he doesn’t have to do an honest day’s work.
This is really the only way his act makes any sense.
Guys like Driscoll don’t have a genuine faith in God, any more than I do.
Yes. They have a complete lack of genuine faith.
That is why they are manginas that extol the church fatties as being ‘beautiful, beautiful, beautiflu’ (three times).
Driscoll’s such a degenerate parasite that he’s willing to destabilize society (and imperil himself and his family in the process) just so that he doesn’t have to do an honest day’s work.
Yes, and that’s why my suggestion upthread (no “kid pastors.” Let them do a decade of work life first) won’t ever fly. Most of these clowns aren’t capable of doing an honest day’s work (or anything else that’s “honest,” for that matter).
That wasn’t Driscoll. I suppose I could go to the service where someone said that and check, but I don’t think it is worth the drive. It is possible some really are good looking, but even those women can bring other “gifts” with them.
He’s actually only 46.
Oh, I pulled up the wrong Wilcox. He’s this one:
https://infogalactic.com/info/W._Bradford_Wilcox
It’s hard to imagine a study with more inherent bias than Wilcox and his wife coming up with that lovesong for themselves.
Still working my way through the UVA recording, but I did get to hear and see Mrs Wilcox talk about her artist in Seattle, and how she was back in DC and the same time as Brad, and how all their friends and relations played matchmaker. So she followed Sheryl Sandberg’s script, the standard carousel script, but happened to dismount and land on her Beta earlier than many women do now.
Call it luck or call it Providence or karma or whatever – they are lottery winners to some degree, and therefore not really in a position to give anyone else much advice. Especially given that she clearly picked him Bradford “beta bucks” Wilcox is in no position to advise any man at all.
“When looking for a life partner, my advice to women is date all of them: the bad boys, the cool boys, the commitment-phobic boys, the crazy boys. But do not marry them. The things that make the bad boys sexy do not make them good husbands. When it comes time to settle down, find someone who wants an equal partner. Someone who thinks women should be smart, opinionated and ambitious. Someone who values fairness and expects or, even better, wants to do his share in the home. These men exist and, trust me, over time, nothing is sexier.”
― Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead
What’s the point of an all-boys and all-girls school?
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=1041479
Husband left me 4 another
http://forums.catholic.com/showthread.php?t=1041883
Finished the video.
Points to the Wilcox’s for suggesting it is better to get married in mid 20’s, and that the standard “wait until you are over 30” model is flawed. They have 7 children, some are adopted.
Video: beginning at 30:15 Mrs. Wilcox describes their courtship / dating through 31:52
* For some time they were “just good friends” – beta orbiter.
* Then she mentions the moody artist in Seattle, and how much her parents liked him.
* At 30.48 she flat out calls him “steady Eddy”. AF-BB
A common religion is urged. That’s good.
33:59 she mentions compimentarity. Briefly.
Brief discussion of Facebook but no real depth discussion.
Some discussion of Eharmony style web sites, a vague discussion of possible utility.
On the whole, this talk and the Q&A is pretty much the standard fare.
Again, this man is a beta who got pursued by a woman in her Epiphany stage.
It has worked out for them, and so in their solipsism…
The androsphere knows more than this Phd about real relationship issues starting with attraction.
Correction:
* Then she mentions the moody artist in Seattle, and how much her parents liked Brad vs. the artist.
So Missus Willcox is an alpha widow (courtesy of the Moody Artist in Seattle – MAIS… and possibly others(?)), and Brad was pre-cucked… the BB who allowed her to stick the landing when she was flung from the carousel as The Wall loomed. Beta-Brad is happy about that, because getting a dismounting carousel rider is the only way he was going to get a pretty girl (for whatever time she had left), and he gets to engage in the serious churchian virtue signaling inherent in overlooking her past and telling everyone else how to “succeed” like he did. He also gets to pretend that he “beat” the MAIS because he “lost” her to him. (See? White Knights and Nice Guys win in the end!) After all, all MAIS got was her youth and peak beauty. But Brad… Brad gets to keep her!… (now that MAIS is done with her)… and pay her bills… and live under her threat-point…
What a lucky guy.
Is that it in a nutshell?
Interesting article on love and death. Makes me want to read the book it talks about:
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/geneveith/2017/02/the-two-kinds-of-romantic-love/
They have 7 children, some are adopted.
more virtue-signaling?
Dear Anon & Billy:
That’s right. That guy was small time, compared to Driscoll…
https://v5k2c2.wordpress.com/2017/02/15/never-forgive-never-forget/
Regards, Boxer
@PokeSalad
more virtue-signaling?
Opinions differ on this, but I tend to prefer the term virtue-signaling for those who don’t walk the talk, i.e. SWPLs.
SWPLs are usually clever enough to understand that it’s enough for them to tout their virtuous bona fides without ever actually jeopardizing their comfort on anything more than token desegregation. It’s literal-minded Christians who do more than signal – they take these pseudomoral messages to heart and are actually led to LIVE by them in their missions and adoptions.
“Beta-Brad is happy about that, because getting a dismounting carousel rider is the only way he was going to get a pretty girl (for whatever time she had left)”
As I mentioned above, this is quickly become standard procedure for betas, especially churchian betas, to find a woman who will marry them. They pretty much have no other choice these days, except perhaps to go their own way and maybe become American herbivores.
I can’t help but wonder, if on those many, many nights when she tells him “not tonight, dear” if she rolls over, closes her eyes are replays in her mind those bedroom romps she had with Mr. “Moody Artist In Seattle”, who was the man she really wanted, but couldn’t get to commit.
But yeah, Brad “won”.
The “alpha fux beta bux” strategy is much, much more common than most want to admit. It leads to women marrying men they’re not sexually attracted to.
“The “alpha fux beta bux” strategy is much, much more common than most want to admit. It leads to women marrying men they’re not sexually attracted to.”
It also leads those women to eventually cheat on and divorce the yucky betas they married.
Re: “What young men would be saying about marriage, the current crop of wife prospects, or how the church might help them with these struggles would be easy to find out. YOU COULD ASK THEM”
The problem with this is that the young men who could tell the pastor the most no longer attend. Most of those who do attend have been conditioned so that they will never disagree with the pastor. After all, he has been called as God’s representative and must always be right. If these young men were ever to be asked why they are still single, they would probably not know the real reasons, or even if they do, they will probably concede that there must be something wrong with them (not praying hard enough, not reading the Bible enough, women are out of their league, etc. but never acknowledge the genuine problems). And pastor will gladly back them up and reinforce that they are solely to blame, while offering more of the same advice that created the problem.
Funny, as for the marriage premium to work and uplift society, most men must get the marriage benefit, thus working harder and for longer to support a family. Isn’t that the whole point? To incentivize men to work at 100% rather than the 30% they need to survive?
And if women only married men they were hopelessly attracted to, that man would have to keep up that level of attraction for life whilst the wife’s dwindled to almost nothing. Not a good prospect.
In the end, it’s for naught, unless you have the social, moral and legal representation behind marriage to make the parties respect it and keep to their vows. Without that social and legal force, the line won’t hold.
@Trust & @Melmoth et. al.: In retirement communities, the women outnumber the men, with the ratio becoming more lopsided as the population becomes more elderly. I have been told that the elderly widowers often have a “harem” of widows and play the field, not choosing to remarry until their health begins to fail. When they get to the point that they can’t drive anymore and have endless medical appointments, they quickly choose a healthy, younger wife to care for them.
It will be interesting to see if this pattern will hold true when the boomers reach that stage of life.
Hmm. More about Brad and Danielle Wilcox from the video and public sources.
Danielle Wilcox, nee Danielle C. Dunne, apparently raised in New Jersey. Lived in Princeton NJ, probably attended Princeton University. Lived in Seattle where she “dated” (i.e. was in relationship with and had sex with) the “moody artist” her parents didn’t like. Returned to DC where she met Brad Wilcox who was also working in DC. They were just “really good friends” for a year while they “muddled through [their] courtship”. Her parents met Brad and decided he had all the important “qualities of virtue”; and parents were “alarmed by” the “moody artist”. Brad was a “steady Eddie” and “I didn’t have health insurance, and Brad was like (imitating dorky male voice) “oh, health insurance is a must!” Parents sent Danielle’s younger sister to live with her; she pushed Brad to escalate by (kid you not) bringing Danielle vanilla lattes, her favorite drink.
Their first date was on April Fools’ Day.
Ok. So let me hamsterlate this.
Young woman with nondescript and poorly formed life and relationship views in late 80s sent to top university where she attends and does well. Moves 3000 miles away from home, alone, probably for grad school, where predictably she dates (i.e. lives with and has sex with) at least one “bad boy”. (Can’t get much more clichéd than “moody artist”.) It was serious enough that her parents met the Puget Picasso and made it clear they didn’t like him. So she was at the very least, serious with him, which in early 90s parlance means they were having sex. No bad boy does anything with a woman he’s not having sex with. No bad boy EVER gets “serious” with ANY woman unless she’s giving up sex.
Danielle for unknown reasons returns to the East Coast and is working in DC. She is probably in a long distance relationship with the artist. She meets Brad when they are working at the same place. Parents somehow meet Brad and decide they like him muuuuuch better than they like the artist. (That’s why I think she was in an LDR with the artist – parents are drawing clear comparisons between the two and make it very clear they like dorky Brad Poindexter better than they like moody artist.)
Parents and younger sister conspire to get Poindexter and confused manic pixie dream girl together. She’s done with grad school and needs to “get serious”, dump the moody artist, and pull her shit together. Poindexter doesn’t know what to do, so they’re “just good friends” for a year. Younger sister is sent to live with Danielle in DC, to help coach Poindexter. He complies like a good little omega, and supplicates and buys her whatever she wants.
Danielle succumbs to the pressure and “reason”, and decides that Brad looks really good on paper. Poindexter is earning or has a PhD with a promising career in academia. She wants kids eventually. She also doesn’t want to disappoint daddy. Poindexter can support her; Puget Picasso can’t. Mommy and Daddy like Poindexter and don’t like Picasso. She has a couple of degrees and is working a “real job” unlike sexy Picasso. Poindexter also has a “real job” with steady income. (Oooooh, but Picasso is sooooo sexy and hawt! Whut about muh sexeeee!) Oh well, can’t be helped. Poindexter is ‘safer’. She’s not really sexually attracted to Poindexter, but that will come eventually. If it doesn’t come with Poindexter, it doesn’t matter, because they are big boys and girls now. They need to “get serious about life” and get about the business of living and making money and buying stuff and having kids. Besides, mommy and daddy must be appeased. Poindexter PhD is the clear choice.
deti,
So Wilcux got a but fortunate to be *just* barely in the era where :
i) Danielle even *had* a father who had authority. In the same situation today, Danielle’s father would be divorced from her mother, and certainly have no authority.
ii) There was still some shame in being a single women over 30.
iii) Since Danielle’s parents did not divorce, this also saves Wilcux from divorce today..
Wilcucks is certainly in no position to advise men. He got in as ‘beta bux’ only because of Danielle’s father. He stayed in because of that too. A decade or so later, the script would have been very different.
Someone needs to find a way to send Deti’s analysis to Wilcucks.
The analysis of Jim Geraghty would be even more devastating, since Geraghty married a single mother who may in fact be older than him, and then proceeds with the ‘Ward Cleaver is a Stud!’ homoerotic tripe. I have hardly seen a more transparent attempt for an omega to demand that the hierarchy change to elevate him above the rock bottom.
Here’s another reason why I think Brad Wilcox is, well, kind of gamma, and why he’s just not getting it.
He makes his points in the videos and pieces where he extols the virtues of marriage and leans on men to get married.
Men respond with usual MGTOW responses: Marriage is a bad deal for men and here’s why, explaining in great detail how and why marriage is a bad deal for men. Plus, Dr. Wilcox, you’re not looking at what women are doing. They’re clearly and directly relating conditions on the ground for most men, something Dr. Wilcox doesn’t seem to see, safely ensconced in his ivory tower.
If Dr. Wilcox won’t hear disgruntled, bitter, young, unserious MGTOWs, then here’s a “real adult”, a lawyer from the NPO named Robert Franklin, who says pretty much the same things in less vulgar, more stilted but no less blunt and direct language.
Wilcox responds to the MGTOWs by doubling down, calling them names and accusing them of being immature woman-haters.
After that, he retreats a little, saying “yeah, divorce is a problem, a big problem. But hey, men need to reduce those risks by being nice, being “emotionally engaged”, don’t do drugs, don’t get drunk, and don’t cheat.” He completely ignores the millions of frivorced men who were emotionally engaged and did none of the “bad things” he mentioned, while simultaneously suggesting that divorce is all mens’ fault and totally within men’s power to avoid. He completely ignores women’s role in trashing their marriages. He ignores these things despite people with intimate knowledge of those conditions patiently and painstakingly explaining them to him, point by point, bit by bit, so that even a high school sophomore could understand it.
Wilcox’s last pronouncement on this is his stupidly assigning the “average” designation to “Six Pack Craig”, an unmarried 29 year old California surfer dude with six pack abs who works 20 hours a week and lives in a beach house, and who talks about the fact that he can get many more women to sleep with him living this way than he could working 50 hours a week and getting married to one woman. He points out that if he gets married, he might not get to live life the way he wants, and might not get sex. Astoundingly, Wilcox says this guy is “average”. Wilcox says this guy represents how the “average” unmarried man lives.
Wilcox paints a picture of a man living on an endless booze and babes party train, living his life like a Jersey Shore gorillahead going from Gym/Tan/Laundry by day, and hitting the bars at night to “get it in” (a reference to casual sex). He thinks the “average” guy is a cross between The Situation, Jimmy Buffett, and Elon Musk.
This is patently absurd. None of this makes any sense at all. Dr. Wilcox is hopelessly out of touch with what is really going on in American society. He has no idea what life is really like for the average single man now. He has no idea what life is really like for the married man now, nor for the divorced man.
He lives completely in the apex fallacy. He’s like most women. Six Pack Craig is what most women think the “average” man is like. Most women really do believe Ernie Engineer and Louie Lawyer and Paul Plumber and Stan Stemlord are out there slaying poon left and right, sleeping with one new girl a month, etc. This is patently ridiculous.
It makes me think the only person he’s listening to when doing his “research” is his wife.
Opinions differ on this, but I tend to prefer the term virtue-signaling for those who don’t walk the talk, i.e. SWPLs.
So, if Angelina Jolie does it, its v-s, but if a Christian “missionary” does it, its pure?
I have been told that the elderly widowers often have a “harem” of widows and play the field, not choosing to remarry until their health begins to fail. When they get to the point that they can’t drive anymore and have endless medical appointments, they quickly choose a healthy, younger wife to care for them.
I assume that these are widowers with significant disposable income…
“I assume that these are widowers with significant disposable income…”
You assume well. Unless he’s a stud, I doubt any wealthy widows will give him the time of day.
@PokeSalad
So, if Angelina Jolie does it, its v-s, but if a Christian “missionary” does it, its pure?
Forget “pure.” Look at it this way – how much skin does each have in the game? If you’re middle class – not a multi-millionaire like Jolie – a bad seed can bankrupt you.
Among intact middle-class families, foreign adoption is more prevalent by Christians than by SWPLs, who certainly aren’t going to jeopardize their carefully orchestrated life trajectories on something so risky.
@thedeti
“It makes me think the only person he’s listening to when doing his “research” is his wife.”
Or the people paying his salary.
He who pays the Piper calls the tune. We don’t pay Wilcox, so no matter how many times we tell him to play another song, he’s not going to switch tunes.
Trying to argue with these men is futile, the only thing that can be done is demonstrate to those who might listen to them why they’re fools.
“Trying to argue with these men is futile, the only thing that can be done is demonstrate to those who might listen to them why they’re fools.”
+1
@PokeSalad & @Frank K:
Some women have a huge need for male attention; other women have a huge need to be “needed.” In retirement areas the male/female ratio can be completely skewed. Many retirement communities are expensive enough that the doomed and the screwed have mostly been filtered out. There are going to be some people in there who are hanging on by their fingernails and may be desperate to marry someone with greater wealth, but most of the residents are financially stable whether they are married or single.
The “wealthy widows” probably won’t be willing to marry down, and a lot of widows who are super-involved with their kids and grandkids will not be seriously interested in remarrying, but any man who is still in reasonable condition for his age can probably get remarried if he wants to do so, due solely to the fact that he has outlived so many of his peers.
@ PokeSalad says:
February 15, 2017 at 10:34 am
“So, if Angelina Jolie does it, its v-s, but if a Christian ‘missionary’ does it, its pure?”
What’s “impure” about obeying the 45 verses telling us to care for orphans?
Wonderful analysis by Deti. Wilcox now has an authority about him (as the hair-flicking Mrs Wilcox attends her appointment with the wall – I doubt that even in her salad days I would have found her hot) yet even so, Mrs Dexter cannot help reminding her husband and in public that in an ideal world she would still be putting out for the moody artist. What exactly – apart from the moody artist was she doing between the ages of fifteen and – I suppose – her mid-twenties? Their ‘courtship’ is not exactly convincing – truth is, surely, that their relationship was non-existent until she decided it was time to settle down for he would have been just another creepy guy had she noticed him, but was it that when she attended the dinner at which she was not required to provide any food or alcohol that discovering she was just one out of three or four women that she concluded that Brad was after all a man with a harem and thus desirable?
Strange as it may seem to men, women all appear to assume (perhaps because of the endless attention they and their female friends receive) that all men – at least those they think about that is to say the ones in whom they are interested are out there nighty slaying poon. Not true of course: Projection. It also plays to women’s vanity that all men find all women sexually attractive; we don’t, do we.
To listen to a red-flagged former Carousel Rider pronounce on the required ingredients for marriage is somewhat breathtaking.
ASK THEM:
Why do you insist on living in your mother’s basement like some kind of man baby?
THEM: Because I can find a girl at the bar any night of the week willing and excited to take me back to her place and have sex. And mom cooks.
Why won’t you man up and make her your girlfriend?
THEM: Because that girl can get angry at me and stab me and if I call the police on her I will likely be arrested from my on house.
Why won’t you contribute to society and get married?
THEM: Because society has given me no protections against a woman who divorces me and takes everything I added to the relationship as well as future earnings after she leaves me.
Why do you work a part time job like a lazy unmotivated loser?
THEM: Because without a woman to support I save a ton of money and my needs are simple.
It all comes down to what society allows and encourages women to do to their lovers. And that women today save nothing for any further husband that they won’t give away for free to any good looking bloke at the bar. Which means a good looking bloke has no need to commit for anything he’s already getting for free. But this is the man’s fault?
Men’s standards for women are so far below women’s standards, that all women are basically interchangeable, and yet women still aren’t able to meet those basic expectations even as they demand more from men in exchange. She’ll have sex with you on the first date, but she can’t be bothered to make you a sandwich because that’s demeaning.
“Why do you insist on living in your mother’s basement like some kind of man baby?
“THEM: Because I can find a girl at the bar any night of the week willing and excited to take me back to her place and have sex. And mom cooks.”
That’s true sometimes. More likely for most men, it’s
“Because I have no reason to move out. Its not like any girls really want to date me. Even if I moved out, got a job and earned good money and looked/lived “respectable”, the only reason most women would want anything to do with me is to use me for money. Why should I put forth all that effort for a woman who uses me and will probably leave anyway? And beleive me – i’ve tried. I’ve done all the stuff you tell me to do, like be nice, be myself, and take showers and look good. Doesn’t work. Plus, mom cooks.”
deti,
Here’s another reason why I think Brad Wilcox is, well, kind of gamma, and why he’s just not getting it.
Well, his picture indicates an almost hopeless degree of gammatude.
Physiognomy is real, especially here..
Wilcox is probably a lower Delta, if we’re going by appearances and positions. Professor at BYU and a public speaker is a bit too much for nearly all Gammas. But a Delta would have a lot he perceives to lose, at all times, so he’s going to be hedged in by self-preservation instincts rationalizing the doubling down.
http://www.bradwilcox.com
See the main website image. He’s showing he’s holding on quite dearly, but she also isn’t running away. Gamma repels Women, so I think he’s a step above that.
LG:
That’s a different Brad Wilcox. The one you linked to is a Prof of Education at BYU.
The man we’re talking about is W. Bradford Wilcox, Prof of Sociology at UVA and director of the National Marriage Project.
Gosh, you could be forgiven for thinking them the same. Pictures tell a thousand words.
@Boxer:
Guys like Driscoll don’t have a genuine faith in God, any more than I do.
Your judgment on the faith of those inside the church as a non-Christian is noted and dismissed.
“Who are you to judge someone else’s servant? To their own master, servants stand or fall. And they will stand, for the Lord is able to make them stand.”
Any Christian who accepts non-Christian authority to judge Christian faith has abandoned a sure foundation for sand.
SirHamster – While I agree with you in principle, the thought of Driscoll as being a spokesman for the church, even if only for the Churchian Evangelical wing, makes me cringe. He is so awful that even non believers can smell the stench of his hypocrisy.
Disliking Driscoll is not a good reason to accept non-Christian authority on Christian matters.
Rebuilding starts with a correct foundation, which may not be the conveniently available one.
@thedeti:
My mistake. Though an Image Search for the full name mostly has hits for the BYU guy.
Are we sure she isn’t a beard?
“Disliking Driscoll is not a good reason to accept non-Christian authority on Christian matters.”
I never suggested that. I’m simply pointing out that Driscoll’s heresies are so obvious that even non believers can see them. And that is pathetic and something Christians should be ashamed of. Of course we aren’t going to let non believers tell the church what to do. But it’s painfully obvious that NO ONE of any importance in the Evangelical church is willing to call him out, most likely because his heresies are popular and they fill the collection plates. The only places I’ve seen him condemned are in blogs like this one. And no one, especially in Evangelicalism, gives a rat’s tail about what we think here.
Dear Frank K:
There are people here you can learn from, and then there are people, like Sir Hamster, who never seem to contribute anything save attention seeking antics. I guess you can argue with these pseudofeminists, but you won’t get any knowledge out of it.
To your point…
I don’t think serious Christians should be ashamed of Driscoll, because he would be the first person to tell the world that he rejects you guys. I saw some speeches he gave, a few years ago, where he sounded almost post-Christian. Had he claimed to have had a new revelation from god to start his own unique religion, I wouldn’t have been surprised. He never went that far, though had he not imploded so spectacularly I wonder if he’d have made the leap to full-on cult leader.
http://www.seattlepi.com/local/politics/article/The-return-of-Mark-Driscoll-A-new-church-and-7955134.php
I do like Dalrock and related critiques, because it’s going to be harder to find a new flock to fleece, with all the readily available realtalk on sites like these.
Boxer
@ Frank K
I never suggested that.
You said, “While I agree with you in principle …”
Are you disagreeing outside of the principle? That’s what I responded to.
@ Boxer
There are people here you can learn from, and then there are people, like Sir Hamster, who never seem to contribute anything save attention seeking antics. I guess you can argue with these pseudofeminists, but you won’t get any knowledge out of it.
The truth is not in you. “seem to” is a nice fat Gamma tell, by the way.
@Deti
Do you have a link to the response you are referring to?
Dalrock:
I was referring to Wilcox’ most recent study, summarized in essay form here:
http://www.nationalreview.com/article/444746/marriage-benefits-men-financial-health-sex-divorce-caveat
The quote I’m referring to and which I paraphrased in pertinent part, is:
“But marriage is not without its risks. Foremost among them is divorce. About 42 percent of first marriages end in divorce. Most divorces are initiated by women. This means that many men who marry will end up unwillingly divorced. These men obviously don’t realize much of a return on their investments in married life.
“Both scholarly research and common sense suggest that there are a number of things men can do to reduce the risk of divorce. Men who do their best to hold down a stable job, don’t abuse drugs or alcohol, are sexually faithful, attend religious services regularly with their spouses, and, above all, make a regular effort to be emotionally engaged in their marriage are less likely to divorce. Men seeking to avoid divorce should keep these facts in mind.”
The actual study is linked at the bottom of the essay text. It comes up in PDF.
The point I was making is that Wilcox’ only real substantive responses are two fold. (1) The pushback is from an insignificant band of misogynistic men who just want casual sex and won’t grow up. (2) Yes, there are marriage risks, chief among them divorce, but it is on men to avoid that risk and if you do/don’t do the list of things, you probably won’t get divorced. There’s no discussion at all of what women can/should do to avoid divorce, and no discussion of precisely why Wilcox is getting the pushback he does.
What an embarrassment these people are. Laughable and pathetic.
Not that Christian feminists are any less embarrassing than their secular sisters. e.g.:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/soloish/wp/2015/08/27/why-women-are-more-likely-to-initiate-divorce/?utm_term=.f595d84131a5
Excellent link, Deti.
Wilcox:
“Both scholarly research and common sense suggest that there are a number of things men can do to reduce the risk of divorce. Men who do their best to hold down a stable job, don’t abuse drugs or alcohol, are sexually faithful, attend religious services regularly with their spouses, and, above all, make a regular effort to be emotionally engaged in their marriage are less likely to divorce.
Sigh. This, again?
I know more than one man who had a stable job, didn’t abuse alcohol (one didn’t even drink), never touched drugs, was totally faithful sexually (Blue PIll, woman pedestalizing men do that), went to church about as often as she did and regularly engaged in all the choreplay, “yesdear!” self abasement that “experts” like Wilcox teach. Because their wives loved them, but weren’t in love with them. Because the wives had a problem with no name.
Because one way or another, their wives lost attraction. Betaization does that. Sometimes divorce happens, sometimes it doesn’t. But increasingly the ca$h and prize$ are quite tempting…
tl;dr
I know men who did all that, and wound up frivorced by their “till death do us part” wives. So from my perspective, Bradford Wilcox is at best very ignorant, at worst a flat out liar. Most likely he’s just blind, cannot see, needs a good pair of Glasses; although his dyed-blonde wife might not like that, at first anyway.
Western men have never been more accommodating to their wives and at the same time western women have never been more unhappy with their husbands.
Yet, we are told that the solution is more of this.
Boxer
I read the article. Intentionally did not look at the author so I could test my skills. Second paragraph, it’s a woman. Correct!
She summarizes her analysis of the situation thusly:
So there’s something about marriage that makes it harder on women.
So predictable. So monotonous. Men that have been reading in the sphere for years must just about puke at this stuff by now.
“tl;dr
I know men who did all that, and wound up frivorced by their “till death do us part” wives.”
There are three young men in my extended family who were frivorced by their carousel longing wives. And each one, without exception, hopped back onto the carousel. And of course, that was after cheating on their hard working, faithful, hubbies. I expect there will be more stories like this to follow.
The stunned mothers of these young men, rather than blame feminism, blame “millenials”, as if their sons were somehow complicit in the matter and are not victims of their unfaithful wives. Fortunately, only two the guys had kids with their “wives”, so they will be spared the Child Support and Visitation Hell.
Oh, and by the way, not a single man in our extended family has ever been unfaithful or abusive with his wife, nor initiated a frivorce. Not even obe,
Frank K makes the statement that launched a billion words.
Western men have never been more accommodating to their wives and at the same time western women have never been more unhappy with their husbands.
Anon Reader:
Thanks. but I read it only because Jeff linked to it waaaay up there in the comments a couple days ago.
What is funny is how each cuck rationalizes the opposite extreme to come to their ‘women can do no wrong’ conclusions.
Wilcucks assumes 6-pack Craig is the average guy. Wilcucks thinks that this really is the average, and if he believes that, why does he think marriage is such a good deal for men at all.
Pastorbator Fiene thinks men watch porn and have never had ANY direct contact with women. His whole ‘argument’ is that if men stop porn, they will discover how wonderful real women are. Geraghty says the same thing, except for video games. He does not account for any possibility that these men have in fact had direct experience with women.
So is the average man getting tons of action like Wilcucks thinks? Or has the average man had zero direct experience with women, like Pastorbator Fiene thinks? Those are two opposite extremes.
Look at how haphazard these idiots are in their clumsy process of remaining in pathological denial about women’s role in the situation…
I think on the Wilcox arguments it really skews depending on where you are in the order of things. Not all “college educated” are in the same boat. Generally my observation is that the divorce rate is lower for people with college education who are at the higher end (professionals, like docs, lawyers, execs) — these seem to have quite a low divorce rate, and there are lots of factors for that which have been discussed and which basically amount to “these are the people with high success characteristics overall, so they also succeed in marriage more often” and also there are golden handcuffs in marriages where, say, each spouse earns 200-250k, so if they get divorced, no big payouts will occur (no alimony, and neither spouse wants full custody to to very time consuming career), and lifestyle will go down considerably from 400-500k to 200-250k.
These factors don’t apply in the “lower” end college educated marriages, where there isn’t the same lifestyle hit in income, people don’t have careers so will take sole custody to get payouts, and so on, and so here the divorce rate, while not as high as in non-college educated couples, is higher than it is for the people above.
The factors also don’t apply where the W (typically it’s the W) is a SAHM and/or is educated but earns a lot less than H. These situations don’t create the same incentives, because cash and prizes are on the table in a big way for the lesser earning or SAHM spouse. And, anecdotally, I have also noted that there are more divorces in these marriages, too, even for very high end people — it’s about the incentives, I think. In a situation where both are pushing their careers and have about equal, and high incomes, there is a golden handcuffs effect that makes divorce less appealing to women, particularly if they do not want sole custody (which most in that case do not). Now that doesn’t mean that these are all very happy marriages — doubtless some are, and some aren’t. I think that the divergence in divorce rates has to do with who is in the marriages (more successful people overall) and the golden handcuff effect at the higher end that alters the incentives to divorce.
“Or has the average man had zero direct experience with women, like Pastorbator Fiene thinks?”
It’s closer to what the Pastorbator thinks, but not for the reasons he thinks. What the delude fool doesn’t understand is that if you aren’t an Alpha few women will give you the time of day, and the that do are typically ugly, obese or simply unpleasant (most likely some combination of).
He thinks they aren’t meeting women because they’re too busy with the X-Box or the Playstation, when the fact is that they play video games and watch porn because they are all too familiar with what women are like now.
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Novaseeker
I think on the Wilcox arguments it really skews depending on where you are in the order of things. Not all “college educated” are in the same boat. Generally my observation is that the divorce rate is lower for people with college education who are at the higher end (professionals, like docs, lawyers, execs)
Too many words, let me help you: “Upper Middle Class Gated Bubble”. I do interact from time to time with UMC people, the high income (not necessarily high worth) crowd. More and more it’s like meeting with some 18th century French ancien regime aristocrat. The only interactions they have with people outside of their Gated Bubble are with waitstaff at Le OverPrixFIxe, Yupscale coffee, the departmental / partnership secretary, etc. They don’t bowl, but if they did it would be alone in a sense.
They have no clue what almost everyone else, the 95%, are going through. Wilcox is one of them.
Returning to Bradford, I re-viewed the relevant part of the video, and I have an alternative narrative.
The future Mrs. Wilcox got ridden hard and put away wet out in Seattle and by her other lovers (she admits to 1, so there must be at least 3). It became obvious that Artist couldn’t ever keep her in the style her parents had accustomed her to, so she tucked tail and ran home to DC.
The whole Seattle thing was probably a bit of “Up yours, DAD” that she had to sorta kinda a little bit admit hadn’t worked out like she expected it to. Oh, well, “lessons learned”…
Once home she poured out her woe to her girlfriend circle and her gay friend, who also happens to know Bradford (not that there’s anything wrong with that). Her parents already approved of Beta Brad.
It was easy to meet up with her gal pals and gay friend over Mimosas and decide she needed to marry Brad. Since he’s obviously totally clueless about women, it became necessary for someone, probably the gay friend, to clue him in that it was really, really, really ok to approach her with a take out latte’. Really ok. Not creepy, not sexual harassment, really ok. He got the nerve up to do that, and was pleasantly suprised when she liked him. She really liked him!
Probably she made the first move to kiss, and in time let him surprise her with a proposal…he looks like a “bended knee” type, too.
Note that she quit working for money after child #3 according to her own narrative. Both of them have 2 of Gottman’s 4 points down pad: no “stonewalling” by the man and no “nagging” by the woman. Mrs. Wilcox admitted she had to learn not to pop some problem into his lap at 10:45 at night, right before bed. She also admits to having had to learn to treat the man at home at least as well as any employee at work – look for the “praise sandwich” speech in the video.
But the word “contempt” wasn’t ever spoken. One of the major marriage killers in Gottman’s work, and they didn’t mention it for some reason or other. Major blind spot for someone who supposedly is all about “the literature”. I don’t expect an academic to know about hypergamy, SMV curves, AF-BB and all the rest of things we know about, but come on! At least list all 4 of the killers, not just 2, if you are really all that steeped in the literature. Which IMO, Wilcox isn’t.
He’s a dabbler. Not really serious.
With one or more adoptees, she and he are likely involved in a church community, so her probability of frivorce is reduced; the hit her prestige would take in her social circle would likely be pretty big, since he’s so betaized. Also even though he’s tenured at UVA and running some kind of advocacy group, the cash and prizes might not be all that big, not nearly what would be on tap if he was a law partner or a medical specialist.
tl;dr
The UMC lives in a bubble that is someday going to pop.
Wilcox lives in that UMC bubble and has no clue what the social market is like for 20-something men, he’s puffed up solipsism at his own “successful” courtship that he didn’t run.
Again, this is like getting investment advice from a lottery winner.
PS: If anyone wants to assert that I’m being too rough on Mr. & Mrs. Wilcox, try again. They ahve set themselves up as experts on marriage and their marriage as a good example. Therefore it is fair to analyze ther advice and the visible parts of their marriage while wearing a good pair of The Glasses, with Red Pill on the side. I would have no problem saying these things to them in person.
Novaseeker,
I think that the divergence in divorce rates has to do with who is in the marriages (more successful people overall) and the golden handcuff effect at the higher end that alters the incentives to divorce.
It has been said for a long time that divorce rates depend only on ONE thing :
Will the woman's living standard go down shortly after a divorce?
If yes, that society or community has a low divorce rate.
If no, via rigged laws, that society has a high divorce rate.
That is all there is to it. All post-hamster claims of 'we grew apart' or 'he is boring' are just retroactive cover for the cold financial calculation.
Thanks Deti! That was exactly what I needed. I’ll work up a post when I have some time.
Dalrock,
Thanks Deti! That was exactly what I needed. I’ll work up a post when I have some time.
Excellent. It is essential to write up something about Wilcucks this way, since he always does more to bring visibility to red-pill ideas, despite his belief that he is rebutting them. This helps topple cuckservative smokescreens.
You may want to include the observation from my comment above, which is that Wilcucks and Fiene/Geraghty come to entirely opposite conclusions about why men are not marrying. Wilcucks thinks every man is an alpha, while Fiene thinks men who watch porn have never even had any direct contact with women, and hence are unaware of how ‘wonderful’ they are. Both of these are manifestations of variants of Dalrock’s Law. To avoid seeing the obvious, they keep coming up with increasingly absurd rationalizations..
It is an utter shame that a clueless charlatan like Wilcucks has a cushy sinecure at a major university, and Deti has to comment anonymously with no financial compensation at all. That is completely upside down. Universities are funding massive misinformation (we all know why), as opposed to life-saving truth.
I would consider myself to be an advocate of marriage, but I do find it frustrating when marriage advocates assume that:
(1) Men are primarily responsible for the rising age of first marriage (as if 50 years of feminists telling women to delay marriage never happened).
(2) Men are either alpha male players or porn-addicated, video-game-playing losers living in their parents’ basement (thus nice, hardworking beta men always get scolded as if they are one or the other, when they are neither).
(3) Women are more virtuous than men (but somehow many beta men have to end up marrying women who have had lots of sex with alpha males and bad boys)
(4) Men can’t become virtuous or mature without marriage (thus young women should settle for immoral or immature men – marriage advocates would never tell any individual woman to do this, but do seem to advise it in the aggregate)
(5) Men shouldn’t worry about no-fault divorce (but if it happens, it’s their fault anyway).
(6) Staying single makes a man a loser (are single men losers because they are single, or single because they are losers?)
Dalrock:
If you hat tip anyone on that new post, H/T Jeff, not me. He’s the one who found it.
I’ve had another look at the video. They seem good people and indeed at ease together although there is surely an irony in that Brad says that a marriage does not require an equal division of labour even as he and his wife equally divide the presentation. Perhaps it was hot but do not fail to catch the two yawners at about the thirty-three minute mark.
I am also thinking that we have queer eye for the straight guy in that the friend Andrew seems to have been the catalyst in persuading the reticent Brad to make the first approach but although any approach may well be better than none, producing an unrequested Vanilla Latte (whatever that may be) is surely not in the pick-up manual of any PUA.
To my eye she looks somewhat older than him and yet they claim to have met in fourth year at the University of Virginia so perhaps not. He’s a big guy and I venture to suggest that with a different attitude and had he hit the gym he might have had a lot of female interest – but again how do we explain the three other women who seems to have raised the green-eyed monster in the future Mrs Wilcox.
@thedeti
That’s why Wilcox et al. won’t correct women. First, they really don’t think women are the problem. Second, they’re terrified of what women will do, and then what the mass of men (i.e. white knights) will do.
Wilcox does know the score. He recently RT’d The Economist’s article on how women’s ideal male physique was basically a superhero cartoon that doesn’t exist in the real world.
So we can surmise that his reasoning mainly falls into your second point.
Counseling young men is dicey for him as well though, because a “marriage is great” meme is far more credible from a mentor who could date well and wasn’t afflicted with a scarcity mindset.
@Novaseeker
The lower end of the college-educated crowd is where you find “bright” but not highly intelligent women who convince themselves that they will somehow be able to hang on to the nice house in the good school district post-divorce, even though the biggest problem in the marriage is fighting about financial issues. This is why women with IQs over 130, even if they never went to college, have substantially lower divorce rates — they are able to figure out that if they divorce, they will end up in a downward financial spiral that will result in the loss of the house. Maybe not immediately, but within a year or two.
Marry an intelligent woman who is a natural-born worrier who saves money for the future. She’ll be a little neurotic, maybe, but the “Magical Thinkers” who think that everything will work out no matter what they do because Jesus loves them so much are likely to be bad with money AND highly impulsive in other ways as well.
“they are able to figure out that if they divorce, they will end up in a downward financial spiral that will result in the loss of the house.”
No alimony/CS in your neck of the woods? I’ve never seen or heard of this scenario in the 24-25 divorces of my 30 closest friends/family
Original Laura,
The ‘natural worrier’ will also be quick to cut of the husband if it means more for her. For example, there are many examples of women who don’t let their husband retire, or who secretly ensure he dies early so more savings are left over for her…
@Original Laura
Marry an intelligent woman who is a natural-born worrier who saves money for the future.
Oh, we try, but they are extremely susceptible to getting carried away by a “happy go lucky” hubby (who only brings “luck” to himself) – think Katy McLaughlin of the WSJ who constantly enables her “fun spontaneous” husband and his purchases of toys for boys.
“No alimony/CS in your neck of the woods? I’ve never seen or heard of this scenario in the 24-25 divorces of my 30 closest friends/family”
Depending on the jurisdiction, family court judges can be quite generous with the cash and prizes and all too often the only only who winds up living in penury is the hubby. Sure, she might have to sell the McMansion and get a smaller house, but she won’t end up living in some shady apartment complex like he will.
The basic problem is that if the husband and wife are both working full time prior to the divorce AND they are already living beyond their means, the divorce cannot help but trigger downward mobility for both of them. I have known a number of women who did not figure this out prior to filing for divorce. They either completely misunderstood their prospects for a quick remarriage, OR they really do have a problem with impulsivity or Magical Thinking.
If the woman is working full time already in a job that isn’t completely disproportionate to what the husband earns, the alimony is usually going to be both modest in amount and temporary. Without good money management skills, the typical college-educated wife will not be able to hang onto the marital home, nor will she usually be able to downsize into a smaller one, because she will wait until it is too late to try to downsize. The standard pattern is that she tries to hang on to the house and maintain the pre-divorce lifestyle until she is in a very deep financial hole and has to file for bankruptcy. Divorcing men may go directly to an apartment, but divorcing women usually end up in an apartment within a couple of years unless they remarry.
“Divorcing men may go directly to an apartment, but divorcing women usually end up in an apartment within a couple of years unless they remarry.”
I’m curious. Do you regard this ^ as unfair?
” Divorcing men may go directly to an apartment, but divorcing women usually end up in an apartment within a couple of years unless they remarry.”
That has not been my observation. What I have seen is that when there is a McMansion that she won’t be able to afford to keep, it goes on the market before the divorce is finalized. In the more fair states, hubby gets to keep some of the proceeds, but in others she keeps it all.
I will agree that remarrying helps keep the standard of living up, though I know more than a few professional post divorce couples who cohabitate, sometimes even buying a house together (which I really don’t get).
The lower end of the college-educated crowd is where you find “bright” but not highly intelligent women who convince themselves that they will somehow be able to hang on to the nice house in the good school district post-divorce, even though the biggest problem in the marriage is fighting about financial issues. This is why women with IQs over 130, even if they never went to college, have substantially lower divorce rates — they are able to figure out that if they divorce, they will end up in a downward financial spiral that will result in the loss of the house. Maybe not immediately, but within a year or two.
This is a part of it, I agree, but it also depends how much total income is on the table and how it is split. Again a couple where both are earning 250k, say, (which takes a substantial career commitment), is going to suffer a massive loss of lifestyle by divorcing. The woman in this case normally will not seek sole physical custody (can’t do the career that way), and so the CS payments are minimal (incomes are similar and physical custody is shared), there are no alimony payments for the same reason, and basically her lifestyle drops from a shared 500k to 250k overnight. That hurts — a lot. Completely different lifestyle in every way.
If someone, however, is in the scenario where say H earns ~180k and W earns ~85k (she has a decently paying job in a coastal blue city, but not a substantial “career” per se), she can divorce and collect CS (less likely to seek joint physical, because she doesn’t value her job anything like the woman above values her career), at least some alimony for some period of time, and she gets control over the kids. Now that is tempting as hell for W when she gets bored of H. On paper, they’re doing well — college educated, shared income of 265k. But when you look at the details you can see the incentives are different because the perspectives are different and the income is differential. She can have a lifestyle of her 85k plus CS plus alimony (for a while at least) which, while still less than what she was doing, is close enough, and nothing like the dropoff between 500k and 250k. In these cirumstances, I have often seen that the W does indeed spiral down — perhaps after the alimony dries up, and once the house is sold and proceeds are distributed. I have seen women like this end up living in apartments, too (this scenario is, in fact, based on a real life scenario that has unfolded before my eyes at work over the past 5 years or so of a woman’s divorce with a situation similar to what I am describing). Surely this has something to do with short-sightedness. But it also has to do with different incentives (she can get more out than what she is putting in, at least in the short term, whereas the career woman above really can’t unless she gives up her career, in which case she’s worse off anyway, and she doesn’t want to do that anyway).
My wife didn’t even try for the house. I should be able to swing it, though my credit rating has taken a hit with all this. This should all be cleared out in 3-4 years, including ongoing payments to support her living on her own.
I never did figure the logic that she should have support leaving home, but Texas law is what it is. I probably got off cheaply. (No child support as no children were at home any more and had not been for some time.)
My wife will be in for a mess when my money runs out and she may not even really make it until then as she has no degree past high school. She was expecting double what she got for a longer time.
I do not think she has thought much of anything through, though her siblings are glad to have her living close to her 90 year old mother so they don’t have to take care of that mother. (Who refused to move close to her children.)
I just need an older, pure, geeky woman who is committed to God. And you all think you want unicorns!
I recommend paying off singular debts first and joint debts second if a divorce is possibly in the cards. Since men typically have a higher income, I see men getting stuck with a disproportionate amount of the marital debt, so I would want to pay off their singular debts while still together . I have yet to see a judge look backwards into the marriage and award assets/assign debt based on how much of the marital income was used to pay off debts of one spouse or the other.
I know this is in hindsight for those already facing divorce, but don’t let your spouse be a “stay at home” such that she loses or never obtains a marketable skill . . . this will cost you alimony in the future almost always. And if you insist on keeping her at home, get a pre-nup.
@BillyS:
You’re in Texas. It’s a lot worse in a whole lot of other jurisdictions.
Ben Sake says:
February 13, 2017 at 1:42 pm
“In Japan, it’s backwards: women chase the men and give them chocolates for V-Day. On top of that, you will never catch one Jap-man complaining about anything he received, be it chocolate, a watch, or just a simple “Happy Valentines Day”. They are quite content and appreciative of.their women’
When HALf of Japanese marriages make the husbands into incels, and the wives barely have ANY children (about 1.3 or so children/woman lifetime now, <<the 2.15 that is replacement rate), I call complete horsesh*t on this. Just from how feminist Japanese women are now would alone preclude Japanese men being "content and appreciative" of their women.
@Melmoth Every divorce is unfair to one party or the other, usually because one spouse thought that marriage was permanent, while the other spouse had a lot more moral flexibility. A spouse who leaves a marriage without any Biblical justification and ends up living in an apartment instead of a single family residence doesn’t elicit any compassion from me. Most people getting divorced have a fairly modest family income, and the initiator of the divorce (who may or may not end up being the plaintiff) should realize that you can’t support two households and pay two lawyers for the same amount of money that barely supported one functioning household prior to separation. I do feel a lot of compassion for situations involving school-aged children who are uprooted from a nice house in a safe neighborhood with good schools and friends that they have had since infancy to live with mom’s new boyfriend in a completely different school district, etc.
@Frank K: You’re right that most divorcing couples who have a huge mortgage and few other assets will sell the house before or during the divorce process. But when there are other assets, and the wife thinks that she is going to get substantial alimony & child support and that doesn’t pan out for her (as in BillyS’s case) it is not uncommon to see her gradually burn through every asset she was awarded in a futile effort to hang on to the house. In some cases, the kids are begging mom not to sell the family home because they don’t want to move away. But whether she is trying to hang on to the house forever out of a selfish need to keep up appearances or just trying to hang on to the house until the youngest child leaves for college, it often creates tremendous financial distress. By the time someone in this situation finally loses the house, it will be out of the question for them to buy a condo because their credit will be wrecked. As a wise man once said, “When you can “barely afford” something, you can’t really afford it.”
@Luke & @Ben Sake and others who have recently discussed Japanese society in this thread and a couple of previous threads — What do you mean when you talk about Japan being a low-trust society? I thought they were known for emphasizing honor, etc. How does a population with an enhanced sense of honor end up forming a low-trust society? And can you give an example or two of how Japanese society is low trust?
Laura… I did not say Japan was a low-trust society. However, the women have become so feminist that they do not DESERVE much trust. (They thankfully are not quite so far gone as ours, but are getting there fast.) I should note that I lived in Japan for 3 years back in the 1970s, and am rather well-read about the place.
No one has heard of White Day? Haha.
More seriously, Japan should never be taken as an example for other societies, as the “Feminists” won there a 1000 years ago. If you don’t understand that detail, you don’t get what the FI is, how it operates nor what Japan has done to survive.
As for “low-trust”, that’s my point. It is not a low-trust society. It is one of the highest *social* trust societies in history. It is, however, a very low *interpersonal* trust society. And it’s been that way for centuries. You are your role in Japan, and the only trusting place is between your ears.
@Luke — Sorry, I didn’t mean to put words in your mouth. There were other remarks about Japan a few days ago on a different thread and I couldn’t remember which thread or which commenter, so I was just trying to see if someone would elaborate on the low trust issue.
@Looking Glass:
“As for “low-trust”, that’s my point. It is not a low-trust society. It is one of the highest *social* trust societies in history. It is, however, a very low *interpersonal* trust society. And it’s been that way for centuries. You are your role in Japan, and the only trusting place is between your ears.”
This is what I don’t understand. I am aware that there is very little street crime in Japan, etc., so that must be an example of the high social trust, but what do you mean by “low interpersonal trust”?
Japan is a culture that easily traces itself back 1700 years and has never been successfully invaded. They do things different and care little about what others say think about it, so there’s always a “translation” issue when dealing with them.
Japan does not have the Western conception of Trust. That conception of Trust is wholly Christian in nature. You just assume what I mean by “Trust”, but that concept is alien to the Japanese. Japan is a Shame-based culture with clear demarcation of Roles. You are your Role, in Japan, and you’re expected to perform it without really complaining. (Thus the heavy drinking problems.) Thus, the oppressive nature of the Culture produces a “high-Trust society”.
However, person to person, the Japanese interact with each other as if statues. The other person is their role and everyone is acting out their duty. Thus you do not trust the person but the role. This produces a very low Interpersonal Trust. This also affects romantic & marriage relationships. Especially where Marriage is viewed more as duty than much else, resembling much more the arranged marriages of European Aristocracy for most of the society.
Westerners are guilty of viewing the rest of the World as having an assumptive Christian functionality to their existence. This is simply untrue. (It also goes to the foolishness of the anti-Christian factions.) The Japanese culture is quite oppressive and everyone has to fit within the norms; no deviation.
Looking Glass,
You are right that I got off fairly well. I am now glad I didn’t build up large assets (yet), so she got little. I did keep the house, but I also got a bunch of debt, including some to generate the cash to pay her part of my so-called cash-on-hand. The spousal support still bugs me, but that will end in a reasonable time.
Laura,
She was smart enough to not keep the house and fortunately a sale was not forced. It would have gotten much less in its current state. I plan on working on that in the next few years.
She didn’t want to live in the area though. She got just enough to cover most of her rent (I suspect), but she will likely be surprised at the extra taxes due next year, since it is taxable to her, and I get to deduct it.
Ah yes, a nation which is an overcrowded group of islands offshore from a continent, long ruled by a Monarchy where cars are driven on the left and where the natives love their gardens and are uneasy with too much physical contact and where their politeness may be seen as hypocricy. Gee, there surely can’t be two places in the world with those identical characteristics. 🙂
@Opus:
To modernize, the Japanese pretty much set about from 1860 to 1920 copying nearly everything about the UK that they could. Right down to translated naming conventions for the Aristocratic Class. There’s a clear & deep affinity.
And a serious love of drinking. Come to think on it, the Isles are the two places with a true “pub culture” still.
@Looking Glass
There is however one major difference between the west and the far east: creativity. The Japanese copy but they do not innovate and this must have something to do with the Japanese respect for authority. To choose one example, the best and certainly best known of the Japanese composers is surely Toru Takemitsu and yet he is, whoever – and it is usually Debussy or Ravel – he wants to be. The same goes for the petite Korean Unsuk Ch’in (looks like a LadyBoy to me) who I am happy to say I get to see a few times a year and she is a Ligetti clone. Both are despite their indebtedness terrific composers.
The American relationship with Japan can be summed up as Madama Butterfly (you cads: marrying fifteen year old geishas on R&R – and then abandoning them for a strong empowered woman called Kate). Hard though it may be to believe, perhaps the best American movie about Japan is (that I have seen) Bad New Bears goes to Japan (1978) – with as an added-bonus a wonderful Mikado (Sullivan) derived score from Japanese American composer Paul Chihara – but I fear I am digressing.
One day I and some other dude had picked up two Japanese females. We were walking up a hill towards someone’s home; the two Japanese girls had fallen in step a few paces behind us. We told the girls to walk side-by-side with us something which they were clearly not used to. I love submissive women. 🙂
@BillyS
In re your divorce, you’re going through much of what I’m going through and it sounds like our circumstances are very similar (long marriage of more than two decades, no minor children, modest assets, wife blew up tbe marriage ’cause “unhaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaapppy,” wife not well educated and with a spotty or nearly non-existent recent employment history, disappointed at how modest her “cash and prizes” payout wound up being post divorce). It also sounds like you had a good divorce lawyer (better than hers), as did I, one who was able to negotiate you out of the ass-raping that so many men suffer (I being to wonder if not having dependent minor children is the big difference maker and mitigating factor, one that robs both the frivorcer and her ally, the courts, of much of their leverage).
Anyway, what you’re suffering right now financially, especially the hit to your credit rating, is completely normal under the circumstances (I’ve had to restructure some debt repayments in tbe wake of my own divorce), but it’s nothing you won’t recover from, and relatively soon. It’s a different feeling, one we mostly likely never anticipated happening to us. But you’ll also find, if you aren’t finding it already, that there’s a certain peace and tranquility, like having a malignant tumor removed that was causing pain, but that you’d grown accustomed to tolerating. Now that it’s gone, you feel the burden removed. You can also take (admittedly cold) comfort in knowing that life is only about to get lonelier and more difficult for your ex, that she has years ahead of her of sleeping in the hard bed that she so diligently made for herself.
Also, while I know that you’re probably not actively looking for it, be prepared to find love again – or have it find you. Yes, unicorns are rare, but they’re out there. I found one who is the polar oppisite of my ex in every conceivable way (she’s not American either, which helps tremendously).
My point, tl;dr version: be of good cheer; happier days are ahead!
I knew about Billy, but didn’t know about you. Much love, brother.
The real reason I’m responding… I’m a lot younger than you guys, but I think I have more experience in one particular area (not that it’s a good thing).
I am really glad that you found a unicorn, but they’re a rare find. In my experience, it’s much more likely that Billy will run into a monocerus fauxensis — a fake so convincing that the average man cannot tell the difference, until it’s too late.
In the same way men have certain strengths (upper body muscles, analytic tendencies) women have them too. Their most pronounced superiority is their ability to playact, elicit sympathy, and give a false impression of their true nature. Women also have an uncanny ability to smell a man’s sadness. Such chickies, rather than feeling empathy or understanding, will see such a brother as an easy mark, and move accordingly to strip him of his wealth, health and dignity. When I’ve seen this happen, I’ve been amazed at the breathtaking speed such women move at.
It’s wise for a newly divorced brother to decide on a set period of time (three months, a year, whatever) for a dating and sex moratorium. Just take some time to set up one’s new house in the way he wants it, to indulge in some travel or learning for himself, and to get comfortable being a single man again. After this, then such men can judiciously allow those few worthy women access to his personal space.
Good luck bros,
Boxer
Feeriker,
I asked my lawyer if the other one was any good. She said she was good “on the technical details.” I suspect that was code for “I can’t say anything bad about her, but I am not impressed either.”
I “scared them” because I cam into the office to drop off a scanner and some pictures (per our agreement). Apparently not being impressed with the lawyer and being a big guy is enough to scare them.
I think God blessed me with a relatively incompetent lawyer on my wife’s side. It could have been worse.
I just want her lawyer to be good enough on the “technical details” to finish formally writing up our agreement so I will no longer be “married” and thus not wanted at singles activities. Though I am not sure how much time I would spend at those.
I do believe I am better off. I still have pulls to my wife. I agree with whoever noted months ago that such were just evidence of my faithfulness to God. I see no chance of restoration and the trouble would have to get much harder on her end to get her to repent, if she would even do so then.
Coming across old pictures, especially electronically, is tough. I am not going to delete or shred those however, since they are history. I will just store them away.
Coming across old pictures, especially electronically, is tough. I am not going to delete or shred those however, since they are history. I will just store them away.
Interestingly, one of the conditions contained in my divorce decree is that I give the ex full access to all of our old photos, home videos, etc., so that she could cull through them to pick and keep whatever she wanted. Last Fall when she returned one more time to gather up the last of her personal property to send back to her new digs, she indicated that she couldn’t think off hand of any pictures she wanted to keep. Now that should have been my cue to start shredding and burning, but I didn’t. Even though I have ZE-RO desire to ever again stare at any image of my ex, it somehow seemed … well, wrong to just summarily destroy what was more than a quarter of a century of my life. I know that I will get rid of it soon (the new Mrs. feeriker-to-be quite understandably doesn’t like having it around, and neither do I, really), but I guess I’m still in the last vestiges of the “readjustment” period. Weird, the feeling.
@Boxer
Alas, I don’t doubt for a second that you’re absolutely right. I know that I’ve put my own unicorn through the mother series of all trials and shit tests, a period of pure hell between the fallout/aftermath of my divorce, the financial hits I’ve taken as a result, the loooooong multi-month spell of unemployment from which I’ve just now emerged, the inability to give her “the better things in life” (barely able to keep either of us fed, clothed, and sheltered), the brief period hospitalization that left me an invalid for a month, and the generally extreme stress it has all caused – much of it happening at the same time. In other words, I’ve more or less been a walking, living, breathing example of “WARNING! LOSER ALERT! GO FIND SOMEONE ELSE WHO CAN GIVE YOU WHAT YOU WANT OR NEED!” Granted, ths is a BEAUTIFUL woman who looks two decades younger than her actual age who could go out and pick any man she wanted.
She would have none of it. Her words to me: “God brought us together for a reason and He has a plan for both of us. Right now He is testing both of us to see just how strong our faith in Him is. We’ve both been through difficult times before and He has never failed or abandoned us yet, and He isn’t going to start now. I’m not going anywhere, no matter how bad things get. You’re not getting rid of me that easily!”
Soooo … I guess that means that either she’s a damned good actress or is indeed a unicorn/gift from God. I can’t think of any more tests to put her through that would be the ultimate filter, short of complete apocalypse.
Billy, may she have a spiritual and physical twin sister who finds you!
feeriker,
It sounds like you found a unicorn. I went through a pretty rough patch off-and-on for several years myself. I was derailed from a high-prestige career into a series of jobs that were, frankly, embarrassing and/or unstable, along with massive cuts in both pay and benefits. We ended up living with my parents, then her parents, then my parents again. She had nine surgeries in the first decade we were married. Hers were all covered by the military, but after I was RIF’ed I got really sick and had to have major surgery with no medical insurance. We got a lot of help from some people in our church, but things were pretty rough for a long time… probably not what she anticipated she was signing up for when she picked out my file at “Christian Singles Connection.” I’ll admit to having a bit of an identity crisis… the path I was on was not at all the one I had spent my entire life trying to follow. I had to keep telling myself that there’s no shame in honest work, but several of the jobs I had to take to keep food on the table were the kinds of jobs that required me to remind myself of that a lot. One of them was so bad that if I saw my boss’s truck parked at the shop when I arrived in the morning it immediately felt like someone punched me in the guts.
When the opportunity to get back in uniform presented itself I figured she’s be against it… I was finally on an acceptable civilian career track, and I’d been kicked in the balls more than once and was pretty jaded about the DoD, but she knew that going back was something I needed to do for myself – being a military officer isn’t just what I did, it’s who I was/am – and she’s the one who tipped the scales for me. (That turned out to easily be one of the five best decisions I’ve ever made.)
Despite all the obstacles, we’re coming up on 30 years of marriage and to this day we’ve never raised our voices to each other in anger. If someone asks whether I think I found a unicorn my answer is, “She believed in me even when I no longer believed in myself.“
I have had too much of your path in the past feeriker. I really hope that is not my future! I will plow through whatever comes though.
I own everything remaining in the house, so I avoided your problem in that area. She has whatever she already took. I am out a nice blender she was going to return, but I can buy another one if needed. My Nutri Bullet is working fine for now, almost better. I am glad she took the slow cooker because I got an InstanPot that is much better.
I agree with the principle Boxer. I have been single for several months already, whatever my legal state. I need to be more focused on organizing the house, but that is a lifelong struggle. It is possible I could be cheated again, but less likely. I will not mask the core of who I am for anyone and making it through that would take more than a gold digger would likely want. Not enough gold now either.
Most of the profiles I have seen on Plenty of Fish are full of warning signs. I just need to pay attention to those signs and not jump just for companionship. It is amazing how many love the outdoors yet have time to post under such a site. Lots of “strong, independent women,” in their own words, to avoid, however good they look. “Lots of bad experiences in the past” is another flag. I am also amazed how many pictures with other men not their fathers or sons are used. Not a majority, but I wouldn’t expect any. (I am just browsing now, especially since I couldn’t date now anyway, per my lawyer.
Family Law is the equivalent of entry level in a computer game; one cannot go far wrong. To say that ones legal opponent is good enough on the technical details is surely to damn with faint praise. Most lawyers are contemptuous of each other and thus regard each other as legal pond life. Lawyers are the partially sighted leading the blind: as a kindly Judge once confessed to me, he learned something new (in law) every day.
Family Law has become the preserve of the female of the species and she practices Family Law for the same reason that others go into Human Resources,: to poke into the lives of other people for she will either be childless or have farmed out to institutions her own children. Practicing Family law leads one to imagine (which is not the case) that all people are unhaaapy all of the time. Female lawyers, I observe, often lose sight (and more often than male lawyers) of the fact that their responsibility is to obtain the best result for their client rather than to indulge their own emotions and biases.
Thus endeth the lesson.
Family Law has become the preserve of the female of the species and she practices Family Law for the same reason that others go into Human Resources,:
Opus, I was sure you were going to conclude this sentence with “because it is the least intellectuallly challenging and least complex of all branches of law, one that allows her to claim the respectable professional title of “barrister” like her male peers, but without doing any of the legal “heavy lifting” that would make the title an earned one. (Sort of like a female naval officer who does a weekend aboard a harbor tugboat and then proudly crows “I have sea time too!”).
@Feeriker
I believe you will find that I made your preferred point but in different words in the first sentence of my comment to which your kindly referred. To again put it in different words my pupil-master (I recall him saying) was of the opinion that Matrimonial Law was not real law (unlike Tort or Crime or Contract or even Real Property or Probate or…) and one made it up as one went along – or to put it in Manosphere language it is not about Law but about Feeewings.
My lawyer is female as well, but I believe she is much more competent. A friend had just gone through his own frivorce and referred me to her. I am glad she is not my wife’s lawyer. Though the divorce would likely be final now if she was since she is likely more competent about follow up.
Opus says:
February 19, 2017 at 10:00 am
You did indeed make the point the first time, my good man. My sincerest apologies for my early-morning short attention span!
No problem terrified. I will be glad when I am done with this stage and things are final.
Apparently, Swedish feminists, who are in open rebellion against their husbands and boyfriends, are very submissive to terrorists:
http://speisa.com/modules/articles/index.php/item.3708/the-swedish-walk-of-shame.html
The Islamic Ideology Dissemination Organization (IIDO) is behind the right now perhaps the most controversial images in the world. IIDO works by their own admission for the spread of the Islamic religion and culture. The pictures were taken by the Iranian state news agency Mehr.
Pictured are seven women, representatives of a Swedish “feminist” government delegation, obediently in a row wearing the veil. A victory for the Shiite organization that since 1981 has worked to “study in depth cultural enemy attacks and anti-Muslim propaganda to design policies to counter the conspiracies and inform the public”.
“The Walk of Shame”, tweets the UN-linked news agency UN Watch’s CEO.
OFF TOPIC:
http://familyinamerica.org/newsletter/tuesday-february-14-childhood-obesity-europe/
Danish children are three times as likely to be obese if their parents separated before they were born. Study questions current-day emphasis on school programs to educate children about eating right and points to infant stress level as a causative factor.
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” Again a couple where both are earning 250k”
FWIW, I have a friend who with his wife were pulling in together mid 300’s (both were mid level managers). That didn’t stop her from cheating on him and divorcing him. She also dumped their two children on him so she could have more flexibility to ride the carousel. There were no alimony or CS payments, though it is my understanding that when the kids went off to college that she chipped in to cover the costs. She moved out of the house and rented a condo.
Yes, it’s an anecdote. It was also rather shocking to the circle of friends as she was supposedly so in love with him and very religious when they married ten years before (when their combined income wasn’t even 100K) and she insisted on a wedding at a church that was much more magnificent than their parish church, According to my friend her N count was 0 and he met her when they were in high school and they dated exclusively until they married. They did not cohabitate prior to marriage.
She eventually remarried some ten years after the divorce, to some high income manager, who knew of her past. I believe that their aggregate incomes approach 500K. How she accomplished this is a mystery to me, as the woman was always a plain Jane and is now very post wall and even less attractive. I guess even guys with $200K+ incomes are thirsty betas.
My friend dated for a while but never remarried. He hinted to me that he didn’t trust women anymore and became a member of the “Once and done club”
@Frank —
That’s interesting. Not typical for a woman to do that in that situation, but I suppose she was willing to take the lifestyle hit to pursue other opportunities in sex and romance. It’s exceptional for a woman to drop the kids like that — if he had full physical, he should have gotten some CS from her, and it’s odd that he did not.
As for the remarriage, yes there are tons, and I mean tons, of thirsty guys making between 200 and 300k. Most of them AFCs who are not sexually attractive to women. I can totally see one of them wifing up a woman like that at the older ages (adding the years up, she was in her 50s when that happened, I am guessing).
IIRC, she was in her late 30’s when she cheated on him want to, and in her mid 40’s when she remarried. I recall thinking at the time that she was gross and who in his right mind would want an affair with her? I mean she was outright fugly. She lost a lot of weight after the divorce (surprise, surprise). I’m sure being high income herself (by that point she was a senior exec at a smaller company making mid 200’s herself) made her more attractive to the thirsty beta exec dude. I saw a picture of him once. FWIW, my friend is far better looking than the guy she remarried. By a mile.
As for the CS, my friend was happy to get the kids and didn’t ask for any CS. She would chip in over the years for big expenses (orthodontia, etc.) and take the kids shopping for clothes, etc, but my understanding is that there was no binding CS awarded. He was very devastated by her betrayal. I only ever saw her once after the divorce and she showed no remorse in what she did to him or her family. I guess she thought that taking the kids to Hawaii (with her boyfriend du jour) made up for it,
The kids have since finished college and my friend has built a bachelor’s life for himself. Being in his mid 50’s I suppose that his only prospects are post wall, divorced women, and he has no interest in them.
BTW, I’m not familiar with the definition of AFC. I’m assuming it’s some sort of subset of beta.
AFC= average frustrated chump. Your usual, average man earning decent money and a good dad, married to woman for long time, unhappy in his sex life. Or, a bit less common, unmarried men getting started in their careers who are doing well professionally, but doing poorly in the social arenas and especially doing poorly with women.
Can usually get dates here and there but can’t get past date 2 or 3. Get some sex, sometimes, but almost never without offering a relationship. They are almost never in charge of any aspects of their interactions with women. They have repeated sexual and relational failure, over and over again. Just your average man who just can’t seem to make it work with women.
They’re guys who just never “got it”, just never figured it out.
@Frank —
Interesting case. In many places CS is mandatory and can’t be waived/settled out of, so it’s interesting that she didn’t manage to pay any given that your friend had full custody.
I can see a thirsty beta exec marrying another exec in the 40s range — they have few options, they don’t know how to get more options, and there is relatively little risk in that situation (she has so much of her own money).
Many people who divorce do not have remorse — it’s the same for most people who cheat. It isn’t common for people to feel remorse, because they’ve already crossed the bridge and convinced themselves that what they are doing is right/justified or that they were otherwise entitled to do it.
Your friend has better options, but he would need to work on himself in order to avail himself of them, and he may not think that is worth the effort — it depends on his motivations, really.
My friend is very fit, he exercises a lot and I’d say he’s in better shape than men 20 years younger. But I think he realizes that his options are limited to divorcees who bailed out because they were unhaaaappy and he doesn’t want to try to make them happy. He even reconnected with a woman he knew from high school, who has always had her eyes on him. He immediately saw red flags and ended the relationship.
He has had no trouble dating, he has dated younger women and more than a few were willing to move in with him, but he never extended an invitation to any. I suppose that he is comfortable being alone and has possibly decided that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze. Being in one’s 50’s I could understand that. I’ve never heard him say “All Women Are Like That”, but he was really burned by the betrayal and perhaps can’t bring himself to trust another woman.
Personally, for me the problem with a divorced woman (beyond the fact that she is most likely not free to remarry, at least from a religious perspective) is that she will have baggage, and a lot of it. I have seen this all too often with the remarried couples that I know. Children can be a royal pain in the neck, especially adult children. It seems like every older couple I know has issues with adult children: unemployed, constantly in trouble, always needing financial help, etc. And if the children are still underage, there’s always the ex, who doesn’t ever seem to truly go away. And the thought of living with another man’s teenagers and trying to raise them sends shivers down my spine. No thanks.
Just seeing all that drama in their lives would make me say “no thanks” should I ever become a widower. I suppose there are unicorns out there: virtuous widows with exemplary adult children. The thing is, I’ve never met one.
Dear Frank K:
This is a story that young men desperately need to hear. I might steal the highlights and put them up on my blog (giving credit to you, of course).
All this “marry a virgin” hoopla is often too much for a Mormon boy to stomach… I have a mother who married as a virgin, and she frivolously divorced my father. I have six aunties, who married as virgins, four of whom likewise divorced good men. (I shit you not: my grandparents had seven daughters, and five of them ran men through the divorce courts.)
Truth!
When I meet a divorced woman, there are only two possibilities:
1. She has already run a good man through the divorce courts.
2. She married a bad man.
In the first case, it’d be suicide to marry her, knowing that she has a proven track record of abandoning her most important commitments. In the second case, she has a proven track record of extremely poor judgment, in marrying someone who turned out to be abusive, criminal or someone so unstable that he frivolously divorced her. Either way, such a woman is untouchable.
Boxer
“2. She married a bad man.”
In this case, my guess is that she will avoid good men like the plague, as they still won’t give her the tingles. There’s a reason she’s attracted to bad boys.
Regarding marrying a virgin: while stats show that with an N=0 she is in the group least likely to cheat and/or frivorce, the risk is still non trivial, as my friend learned the hard way.
I am facing that exact same decision now. I am used to having a wife around and that absence is harder than I might have thought. That said, I do not miss the strife. I can easily see how older men can go the bachelor route. I am almost certain to not have kids now, so I don’t even see an obligation of that in front of me. (I believe furthering civilization is a Christian goal.)
I would not live with someone, so that leaves much fewer options for me.
====
My wife is unlikely to ever show remorse. She has already told my son “I am sorry things didn’t work out,” pushing the blame outside herself. He is not happy about it, but she still is the one who raised him. (He and his siblings were adopted.)
Her mother never showed remorse for any action, so I don’t expect any remorse from her either. It is rather ironic that her dad supported her in our divorce (paying for her end) even though she is doing the same things her dad despises about her mother.
Billy S – “My wife is unlikely to ever show remorse. She has already told my son “I am sorry things didn’t work out,” pushing the blame outside herself.”
It never seems to be their fault, is it? Vows? I have told young people that unless they are VERY serious about making good on their vows that she shouldn’t exchange them, as they make a mockery of the Lord when the break them. In that light, in the last few marriages I have attended NO vows of fidelity or permanence were exchanged. Unless the wedding is performed in a very traditional denomination or especially if it’s a civil ceremony, the bride and groom will exchange romantic pleasantries, such as: “you’re the light of my life”, “you make me complete” or some other non binding sentimental pablum. But binding promises are not to be made.
” It is rather ironic that her dad supported her in our divorce (paying for her end) even though she is doing the same things her dad despises about her mother.”
Some dads will support their kids decisions, no matter how bad they are. If you don’t do that and tell them what they don’t want to hear, you might be accused of being “negative”, “too strict” and everyone’s favorite “unsupportive”. That he supports her in doing what was done to him shows that he’s a cuck with no backbone. Instead of telling his daughter “Have you lost your mind?”, he supports her in committing a great sin. Non believers could be excused for this trespass, but for someone who claims to be part of the Body of Christ, it is shameful and despicable.
Still somewhere around a 20% chance with a no-partner wife. Better than the 55% chance of failure, but non-trivial.
Her dad never really liked me Frank. I committed a huge discretion when I asked that we pray before the meal when we were eating at a country club, during our engagement. I also never properly asked her dad for her hand, because I had no idea I was supposed to do that. (No one ever trained me on that part.) I wasn’t perfect, but I was good for her. I didn’t quit work at 55 as he did either, adding to her disappointment.
I am sure he was glad to be rid of me, at some level at least. Ironically, his son divorced a wife for reasons I could have used against my wife. I don’t think anyone in the family saw that or would have agreed even with the obvious similarities.
I have to move on. It is costing me a bit more than I thought, since I just found her payments will be after tax, not before, but she is a thief and I believe she will face consequences for this. I don’t wish Hell on her, but I would not want to be in her position as it seems awfully close to “depart from Me, I never knew you.”
“I am sure he was glad to be rid of me, at some level at least.”
Hopefully he’ll be just as glad to take her under his roof again when her cash and prizes run out.
” I didn’t quit work at 55 as he did either, adding to her disappointment.”
Unless you have a gold plated pension from your job, how would you be able to do that? How many people have those kinds of pensions (other than some government employees) anymore.
Many women are spoiled to such an extent that they seem to never realize that making money takes work. Dough, to them, is just the stuff daddy gave (gives?) them, in exchange for existing and being moderately nice. How he gets it originally is of no concern. For all they know, it just obtains for a man. If a husband doesn’t make enough, then it only means he doesn’t love her — after all, if he did, he’d make more of it appear, and instantly give it over, so she could go have a spa day.
…since I just found her payments will be after tax, not before…
If you’re referring to the alimony you’re paying, you realize, don’t you, that that’s a major tax WRITEOFF for you. It’s taxable income for her, but a deduction for you.
Many women are spoiled to such an extent that they seem to never realize that making money takes work. Dough, to them, is just the stuff daddy gave (gives?) them, in exchange for existing and being moderately nice. How he gets it originally is of no concern. For all they know, it just obtains for a man. If a husband doesn’t make enough, then it only means he doesn’t love her — after all, if he did, he’d make more of it appear, and instantly give it over, so she could go have a spa day.
Yup. Seriously, I’m halfway ready to accept scientific proof that women, with all but a few precious exceptions, are hardwired to believe that money comes from human male penises and that if a man lacks it in sufficient (for her wants) quantity it’s because he simply doesn’t want it badly enough to masturbate more of it into existence, or because, as you describe, he’s just being mean to her by being stingy.
Even my own unicorn, a very conservative and generally fiscally responsible woman, has to periodically have the fundamental laws of economics mansplained to her when she wants to get carried away. The majority (like my ex and my brother’s wife) cannot be reasoned with and really should be put on an allowance that takes all but an Act of God for them to access.
Yup. Seriously, I’m halfway ready to accept scientific proof that women, with all but a few precious exceptions, are hardwired to believe that money comes from human male penises
Oh, yes. That is why almost no woman thinks unilateral CS with imputation of income is unjust, except when in the 1% of cases where it happens to women.
Women truly act as though men earn money as easily as they grow hair.
Only three types of women deserve to escape poverty :
i) The 15% of women who can do useful work in the private sector without any affirmative action.
ii) A woman who marries a man, stays married to him, does not put herself ahead of the children, etc.
iii) If a woman has a rich father, and the schlub wants to pay, hey, it is his money and I will grudgingly concede that this is not the business of an outsider.
Those are the only three types of women who deserve to be spared from poverty.
has to periodically have the fundamental laws of economics mansplained to her when she wants to get carried away.
Didn’t I often say that the three subjects in which female aptitude is THE lowest (even lower than engineering) are :
Economics
Astronomy
Quantitative Aspects of Finance
These are the three subjects in which women are complete zeroes. Not coincidentally, these are three subjects of utmost importance in the grand scheme of things.
Frank K,
as they make a mockery of the Lord when the break them.
You are assuming that women believe in God. They do not. They may *say* they do, but their actions indicate otherwise.
One could argue that the behavior of women in violation of every imaginable pillar of civilization is proof that there is no God, but that is a topic for another day.
@feeriker:
If the Woman is a 10, isn’t that actually a true statement for her life?
I know what you’re saying, but for certain Women, the statement is literally true.
Now, if you’re talking about the “Never let a Woman have her fingers on the button for a nuke” Effect, that’s something different. Women simply don’t have in the same league of self-control that any Man capable of operating within a Civilized Society. Men that lack this ability, in the West, would normally get themselves killed very young.
We see the Men that lack this self-control coming in with the rapefugees. Some idiot called it a “sex emergency”. Same effect. We killed that issue out of Civilized Men. (That’s not a joke.)
Anon,
Astronomy may be interesting, but it is hardly a foundation for daily life. Name one thing you do different because of actions in space.
Stickwick at Vox Day’s site and a Castalia House author works in the field of astronomy. You may question her work, but 0% knowledge is unlikely.
I would also note that most men are ignorant in both the economic and finance areas, as witnessed by our modern spending idiocy.
This is all a fulfillment of the curse in Gen 2. No surprises if people paid attention. The Epistles also cover the issue. I don’t have all the arguments myself, but many have argued that the existence of evil proves the existence of God. Either way, people falling short of the target doesn’t disprove the existence of that target.
Hi BillyS:
I think you might be conflating Astronomy (which is a branch of physics, and relevant to pretty much everything we do on Planet Earth) with Astrology (which, as my fellow Frankfurt School theorist Theodor Adorno described it, is the metaphysics of knuckleheads).
Best,
Boxer
It is costing me a bit more than I thought, since I just found her payments will be after tax, not before,
The way this works is that alimony and CS are both paid with after-tax dollars, but you an at least deduct alimony (and she has to count it as income). Child support is not deductible for the payor, nor is it income to the recipient. So yes you’re paying after-tax, but at least with alimony you get a deduction for it — no such luck with CS.
Unless you have a gold plated pension from your job, how would you be able to do that? How many people have those kinds of pensions (other than some government employees) anymore.
Some guys save a LOT beginning in their 20s, so that in 30 years time they can retire earlyish. 55 is very early, I have not seen it really. I have seen late 50s/60. It’s very uncommon for people who have kids (college tends to suck up a lot of savings), however, unless there is some kind of windfall income involved (say, people who bought a house 20 years ago for 150 k and now it’s worth 1.2m … happened in some parts of the country, but it’s mostly luck as to whether you were in that trade or not).
But I think he realizes that his options are limited to divorcees who bailed out because they were unhaaaappy and he doesn’t want to try to make them happy.
Well, he could go younger, and not divorced, but then you’re looking at, realistically for most guys who are mid-50s, women in their late 30s/early 40s who have never been married. That’s a group that also has baggage, although it’s different from the divorced women baggage. Basically once you get past a certain age (say 40) it’s baggage all around, because whatever life experiences people have had, whether single or divorced, have carved themselves into the person’s psyche and persona, and so you’re getting a formed person with experiences that may not be what you want. Of course, your friend is in the same boat himself in terms of baggage, given his own marriage and divorce. So, in some ways it’s messier than when dating younger. I do agree that quite a number of older people just decide to not bother with the whole thing, because it’s more trouble than it’s worth.
“Some guys save a LOT beginning in their 20s, so that in 30 years time they can retire earlyish. 55 is very early, I have not seen it really. I have seen late 50s/60. It’s very uncommon for people who have kids (college tends to suck up a lot of savings), however, unless there is some kind of windfall income involved (say, people who bought a house 20 years ago for 150 k and now it’s worth 1.2m … happened in some parts of the country, but it’s mostly luck as to whether you were in that trade or not).”
From my anecdotal experience, it is only single men with good incomes who can save enough to retire young.
I thought of that Boxer, but he was the one who said it was vital to know that for day-to-day life. Though that may not be a proper read of what he said. He did note “the overall scheme of things”.
It does assume that field is any more reliable on “overall scheme of things” than the other two however. (Many things are dubious. See the String Theory debates for example.)
BillyS,
I thought of that Boxer, but he was the one who said it was vital to know that for day-to-day life.
No, I did not say that.
I said these are subjects of importance in the grand scheme of things.
Plus, the metric is how much women lag vs. men. Not whether the average man is an expert in this subject.
You did not understand the point.
@Anon,
I have a family member who is part of that 1% female set who has to pay alimony at about 600$ a month. I know her ex and I’m sure he barely pursued any kind of payout. It might have been judge ordered, or the lawyer threw it in their unasked for. I don’t know. Of course to her it is the most unfair thing ever perpetrated. Never mind that she rode the aff. action, HR sisterhood zeitgeist of Seattle to her salary while her white, Christian hubby struggled against it. When we talk about, I agree with her and then, when the time seems right, I try to say; “Yeah. That sucks. But imagine if he had stayed in the house, kept the kids, locked the bolt behind you and you had to ship off and then pay 4k a month while only seeing your kids a month a year.” Of course by then her solipsism has whizzed away on brushed stainless steel neural pathways back to that 600$ and the baubles it could by getting her.
I think they read men like this; A man is equal to the money he makes. That’s his rating as a man. So once he has that rating then the money simply comes to him due to his rating. So for the money to stop coming (loses his job, changes jobs) then the women don’t understand it. “But you’re a 200k man, why would you just choose to reject the money that is due to you?” Or “You have a penis valued at 200k a year, go rub one out.” (Freeriker’s theory)
WORK never enters into their equation.
And that will be the day when a man is forgiven by a wife for having a stalled or even backpedalled career due to the cunty, donut friendly world of the United States of HR.
Anon,
As I noted in the following sentence. I should have made it clearer, but I still question how much Astronomy impacts “the overall scheme of things”. I would bet you and I disagree on the implications of Astronomy, and we are both male. I do not know you education level, but mine is reasonably high, so it is not just a case of me not knowing any of the issues involved with Astronomy.
You are free to believe differently of course.
That’s an interesting point. String theory isn’t part of Astronomy, but it’s a part of another subdiscipline in physics. I think the case could be made that it will always be limited to conjecture. We can’t test string theory — unless we wanted to build a particle accelerator the size of the galaxy, harnessing all the power generated therein, lol — so perhaps it’s more like philosophy or math than empirical natural science.
In any event, Astronomy is actually more relevant than people imagine, because astronomical experiments teach us things about gravity and electromagnetism, and we use those every day. Anyway, good discussion!
Gravity and electromagnitism would be physics as well. I would put things like star formation, the mechanics of the Big Bang, etc. under astronomy, though they would also have elements of physics underlying them. I am not sure the two can be neatly removed, from the Astronomy end.
That is why I question the idea that Astronomy is key to overall life. The physics you note certainly is, but I can’t see any direct implication to my life of any theory of star formation, for example.
@melmoth:
Considering the inflection points where Divorce rates drop off, 3 times local Median seems to be where most Women lose the ability to understand how much money a man makes. Beyond that point, it’s “a whole lot” or “yachts”.
90% of Physics working on String Theory should be forcibly reassigned to working on Material Sciences. That’d do some actual good for the world.
Actually, the nuts-‘n-bolts of stellar formation IS vitally important to our day-to-day lives. Allow me to explain:
The structures of the Universe are utterly inconsistent with the structures that would have been formed by the contents of the Universe. That’s true at every stage from subatomic particles to galactic super-clusters. Stars, for example, simply could not have formed from gas clouds falling in upon themselves due to gravity. Neither would stars form into spinning galaxies on their own. Something made them, put them there, and set them in motion. (Judges 5:21 refers to “the stars in their courses”… funny, that.)
Even astronomers acknowledge that the contents of the Universe only supply a tiny fraction of the gravity that would have been required for stars to form and for those stars to form into galaxies. But rather than applying Occam’s Razor and deducing that something outside of observable nature caused all the observable order, they just made some crap up that they call “dark matter” to explain away the massive amount of “missing” gravity. Keep in mind that they call it “dark matter” because they can’t detect it. The obvious deduction is that it’s not there and something above nature is responsible for imposing order on nature… a man devoted to finding the truth might think that if 90-99% of the physical mass required for stellar and galactic formation was simply not there, there’s a good chance that the order is being imposed by a non-physical source capable of imposing physical order on the Universe (a working definition of the word “God”). (When you look at your watch you don’t think about how lucky you are that a bunch of materials naturally formed themselves into something that keeps time in an orderly fashion – you accept that some intelligent force made the thing.) But few scientists seek truth outside the scope of physical nature, and most people who call themselves “scientists” are more accurately referred to as “naturalists,” because they categorically reject any explanation that requires a non-physical cause (no matter how absurd they have to be searching for a natural cause).
Similarly, not only is there far too little mass/gravity in the Universe, but there’s also far too much energy. The Universe is flying apart far faster than it ought to be, and everything is accelerating away from everything else (which defies everything that ought to be happening), which means the naturalists also had to dream up with something they call “dark energy” to explain that. And remember, calling it “dark” means, “We know this is happening, but there’s no known natural explanation for it no matter how hard we look for it where it would have to be, so we’re going to make something up so that we don’t have to look to a supernatural cause even though that is by far the most sensible answer.”
Of course the standard answer they give to people who point out that they – like the religious people they mock – accept the existence of something that isn’t detectable, is that since they can observe the after-effects, they can deduce the existence of both undetectable sources of both gravity and energy… a cause so great that it dictates the structure and motion of everything in the entire Universe. But that’s no solution at all, because they reject a supernatural cause (God) on thosevery same grounds (since He can’t be detected they must reject Him as a cause)!
As much as “scientists” (i.e., naturalists) mock the “God of the Gaps,” the joke’s on them. They keep saying that religion is the result of people being ignorant of “The Nature of Nature” so simpletons invent supernatural causes to explain away phenomena they can’t understand… but as humanity’s scientific knowledge increases we’ll see that the inexplicable areas get smaller and smaller, and we’ll eventually realize that there’s a natural explanation for everything that cro-magnons and Southern Baptists ignorantly attribute to “God.” But the exact opposite happened: the more we know about the Universe the more we realize that naturalism can’t explain it. it wasn’t ancient superstition that told us that there’s too little mass and not enough energy to explain how the Universe behaves… it was modern radio telescopes hooked up to super-computers. It wasn’t medieval barber-surgeons who figured out that DNA couldn’t be the product of random chance… they didn’t even know about DNA. It was modern geneticists who decoded our genome and discovered irreducible complexity at the genetic level. If anything, scientists have less excuse to reject the existence of a God who creates and applies order than a guy cowering in a cave worried about being eaten by a sabre-toothed tiger.
So, yeah… stellar formation IS important to us – it provides some of the strongest mathematically-quantifiable evidence for a supernatural creator.
Lyn,
I enjoyed that. I’m keeping it for future reference. It has seemed to me for years that scientists and mathematicians would be among God’s most enthusiastic cheerleaders, given that so much of their work keeps pointing right there. They want me to choose between God and science, and choose science if I want to hang with the cool kids; but there is no way to choose between them. They are the same – if you know what I mean.
Lyn, Lost Patrol:
The most honest scientists and mathematicians readily admit there is much they don’t know and cannot prove via the scientific method, and admit that there’s a lot of room for faith in there. They will admit that much of the theory and explanatory work is
A, then B, then C, then
MIRACLE HAPPENS/DEUS EX MACHINA
Which produced D, then E…..
LP – “They want me to choose between God and science, and choose science if I want to hang with the cool kids”
I don’t get why they just can’t stick to science. Some, like Emile DeGrass Tyson, seem Hell bent (Oops! What am I saying? There is no Hell!) on spreading the good news of atheism. They seem to think that believers somehow can’t fully appreciate the magnificence of creation and the cosmos unless they say “there is no God”.
“A, then B, then C, then
MIRACLE HAPPENS/DEUS EX MACHINA
Which produced D, then E…..”
DeGrass Tyson mocked this point of view in one of his documentaries. His platform is that while “MIRACLE HAPPENS/DEUS EX MACHINA” is perceived, all it means is that either we are ignorant or simply lack the brains to understand what it really happening. And he did concede that there are probably mysteries in the Universe that are beyond our comprehension.
Who is “they” exactly?
There are tons of educated people who are Christians (lots of Jews and Muslims too). It ain’t mutually exclusive. You can do technical stuff and still have faith.
Great post, Lyn.
A personal favorite is to mock the “Science = Religion” folks with “and Millions of Years happened” is less intellectually honest than waving a Magic Wand. The cognitive dissonance is always a sight to behold.
thedeti,
Unfortunately, the “most honest” scientists don’t get to write the textbooks, and are excluded from the larger debate. The very idea that the only rational explanation (or even the most tentative suggestion of the mere possibility) that any observable effect might have a cause that is beyond the scope of naturalism is enough to invite a storm of mockery and an immediate rejection from “respectable” so-called “scientific” journals. That’s why obviously false theories (or should I say, Articles of Faith?) like macro-evolution, the Big Bang Theory, and Plate Tectonics are clung to despite the fact that – not only are there mountains of evidence against them – but they cannot be true based on observable, repeatable, physical laws.
“For the scientist who has lived by his faith in the power of reason, the story ends like a bad dream. He has scaled the mountain of ignorance; he is about to conquer the highest peak; as he pulls himself over the final rock, he is greeted by a band of theologians who have been sitting there for centuries.”
–Robert Jastrow, theoretical physicist and founding director of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies
Professor Richard Lewontin, a geneticist and one of the world’s leaders in evolutionary biology, admitted to the following with regard to naturalism – which he misrepresented as “science.” (Emphasis in original.)
He wrote this very revealing comment (the italics were in the original). It illustrates the implicit philosophical bias against Genesis creation—regardless of whether or not the facts support it.
‘Our willingness to accept scientific claims that are against common sense is the key to an understanding of the real struggle between science and the supernatural. We take the side of science in spite of the patent absurdity of some of its constructs, in spite of its failure to fulfill many of its extravagant promises of health and life, in spite of the tolerance of the scientific community for unsubstantiated just-so stories, because we have a prior commitment, a commitment to materialism.
It is not that the methods and institutions of science somehow compel us to accept a material explanation of the phenomenal world, but, on the contrary, that we are forced by our a priori adherence to material causes to create an apparatus of investigation and a set of concepts that produce material explanations, no matter how counter-intuitive, no matter how mystifying to the uninitiated. Moreover, that materialism is absolute, for we cannot allow a Divine Foot in the door.
________________
There you have it. They prefer to accept absurdities rather than following the evidence whenever it leads to a conclusion that is outside of naturalism. It’s no surprise that one will not find the truth if one is not really looking for it.
Lyn, that is a great explanation. “Dark Matter” and “Dark Energy” always seemed to a bit of ‘hand-waving’ as a way to say “I don’t know, but trust me I have a PhD”. Funny thing is, you can read all about it the first chapter of a really popular book.
Who is “they” exactly?
The classic, ubiquitous, yet ill-defined they. In this case scientists. Specifically the ones that would dispute the notion that science and religious faith are compatible.
There are tons of educated people who are Christians (lots of Jews and Muslims too). It ain’t mutually exclusive. You can do technical stuff and still have faith.
Of course I agree with your statement, and thought I was affirming that idea with my last sentence.
You’re not just trying to get my goat are you Boxer? Like you know what I mean but it’s my turn to get tweaked? You’re known for that (insert smiley face).
White guy,
I was having an argument with a strident atheist I know, and he had nothing in his bag of tricks more impressive than mockery and repeatedly screaming “SCIENCE!” Obviously I know a LOT more about science than he does, and it got pretty ugly, because I simply refused to let him force me to play by one set of rules while he got to play by a different set. “Scientists” do that all the time: they demand physical proof for things that cannot be put into a test tube, yet demand the right to right to declare “truth by assertion” when their own claims cannot meet that standard (which happens a lot more than most people realize – including them).
I brought up “dark matter” (which he had never heard of), and told him that he rejected my view on the grounds that the order that is physically present in the cosmos relies on an invisible cause, yet his view ALSO relies on an invisible cause. The difference is that if physical material is supplying 90-99% of the gravity in the Universe – it would be visible everywhere we look, whereas a supernaturally-imposed order would not, so the “supernatural cause” construct is MORE scientifically viable than the naturalistic one.
He called me a cocksucker and stormed off.
I’ve debated a physics professor and a NASA engineer, among the usual garden-variety internet “true believers.” In the end, they all scampered away beaten. I’m not even a scientist in the sense of the word that most people mean, but you don’t have to be to beat them in debates. Saul Alinski was right about one thing, “Make your enemies live up to their own standards,” and call them out on their hypocrisy when they don’t. If the claims of naturalism were subject to the same standard of proof that naturalists use to mock supernaturalism, “scientists” would be a lot less noisy about rejecting it out-of-hand.
Dear L.P.:
Ah, well, that excludes me, then. Originally it was “scientists and mathematicians” — I used to be one of the latter (as in, that was actually the title of my job, not as in I was any good at arithmetic). I never hated you guys, and I worked two cubicles away from a Persian Muslim dude with a good sense of humor who prayed every week.
I do know sorta who you’re talking about. The Richard Dawkins types are annoying and boring and I don’t pay them much attention. I don’t think the scientific community is all of one mind on anything, and certainly I don’t think that most of them pay attention to the scientistic types.
I’ll probably do that after you become a die-hard male feminist, and start acting like Manboobz. Until then, you’ll always be cool with me.
Boxer
I know precisely what you mean, I’ve been round with a couple of these chuckle-heads before (mostly the weather related ones) and it is truly a religion to them, not a very good one, but one none the less. Here’s a fun one, keep it for a rainy day (Hah!), there is enough water stored in the earth’s crust to cover the surface of the planet deeper than Mt. Everest, how do I know this, I calculated it based on the numbers in this article, which the researcher didn’t do, you can’t have badthink going on, you know. https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25723-massive-ocean-discovered-towards-earths-core/
Boxer
I never hated you guys either. This is a fact from my personal life. Among the men that stood up for me at my wedding, lo these decades past was a dyed-in-the-wool atheist. He probably didn’t believe anything he was hearing, but there he was, right up front. Just like I was always there for him. Friends.
I might have thrown in mathematicians because I seem to remember reading commentary from one of perhaps minor prominence, that he could not mathematically reconcile a near infinite series of sequentially ordered, mutually supporting, yet chance events leading to the existence of the universe as we know it. But I get in over my head fast with this stuff.
“Red Shift”. That’s one that causes a lot of fun, as the entire field of cosmology requires that it’s utterly accurate. (We have actually very little proof it’s accurate, plus there’s very little in the way of ability to actually check it over any distance of importance.)
Looking Glass, re: Red Shift:
All of that is predicated on the speed of light being constant for all time and in all places, while there is substantial evidence that it is not. In fact, a decreasing speed of light explains a lot of things better than a constant one does, and secular physicists with no creationist axe to grind are openly admitting the likelihood that the speed of light is not constant, despite the fact that it immeasurably bolsters the creationist case in the realms of both Newtonian and quantum physics.
The best quote of that article is this (emphasis added): “If confirmed, this revelation could reshape physicists’ understanding of cosmology from the ground up. It may even help solve a major conundrum: Why are all the constants of nature perfectly tuned for life to exist?”
Gee… it’s almost as if they were designed that way, and the more we learn about the cosmos the more we realize that every time we learn something new it reinforces the notion that there’s a Universal Designer who is a whole lot smarter than we are. Despite the false boasts of atheists, the gaps between what we can observe and what materialist science can explain are getting LARGER, not smaller, and exponentially so.
If only someone had thought of that 3000 years ago and wrote it down. Oh wait.. somebody did, “The heavens declare the glory of God; the skies proclaim the work of his hands.” (Psalm 19:1)
In fact, it’s entirely possible that the speed of light has been decreasing along a curve that looks like a geometric parabola, which not only solves the current problem of near-uniform temperatures all over the Universe without resorting to either string theory or forcing the bulk of the Universe to exceed to the speed of light in the first few moments of creation (but by necessity after gravity separated out from the theoretical universal force, thus rendering the current iteration of the Big Bang Theory physically impossible even on its own terms), but it also neatly disarms whatever shreds of credibility still reside with radio-isotope dating… a major club with which naturalists criticize creationists despite its numerous and serious (and already-known) flaws.
Lyn87,
You made me case about applicability. I was referring those who posit we have to accept their view of such things, the ones you knock out, because believing that is so important to our lives. I don’t think we really disagree at all, at least on most of the points.
I need to read up on the exact implications of a really high speed of light on the appearance of very distant objects and how that can be reconciled with a young earth view. The idea it is a parabola might allow far more distance than would though to be proper, since it could have been REALLY FAST at the start.
====
I do doubt many women have really thought most of this through. I can’t recall a single speaker in this area outside of Stickwick at Vox’s site, for that matter.
I was not disagreeing with you.
The idea that “c” is decreasing has been around for a long time, and gained some currency within creation science circles at least as far back as the 1990s, but until very recently it got little or no traction among the larger physics community. But now that alternate theories to explain existing phenomena are hitting brick walls they’re willing to consider it… especially now that the evidence is mounting for it to the point where it’s getting harder to deny. This has to potential to be as paradigm-shifting as General Relativity… maybe more so.
Make no mistake, we’re still a long way from materialist “scientists” just coming out in large numbers and admitting the obvious: “Design” fits the evidence better than “Random Chance.” But every time the earth shifts beneath their feet and they discover that their pet theories are not only wrong, but physically and/or mathematically impossible, it undermines the whole materialist religion… and that’s a good thing.
@Lyn87:
Wow, don’t often run across someone that’s actually up on the topics involved and not blown away by the Technobabble Stupid that they use to run off critical questions. When you actually understand them, most of their thinking falls apart pretty quickly, thus it’s the high-bar of entry into that realm that makes them look intelligent.
It’s probably been 5 years since I’ve taken a crack at getting up to speed on the arguments, but I also haven’t cared enough to expend that type of energy. I already have the “big” answer, and I already understand that they’re quickly approaching the complete inability to test any hypothesis they might come up with.
Yet the biggest issues they don’t want to look at will remain: Information is Lost; not everything is knowable; they are not gods. The last one is the real issue.
One of my personal favorites is that Sumatra moved 500k years of “continental drift” in 20 minutes during the major earthquake in 2004. So, is it 20 minutes or 500,000 years?
More seriously, my background scientific endeavors leave no doubt about “random chance” producing anything. There are Systems and the God keeps them in place. Claiming “because it exists, it had to have happened because science!” is far stupider than believing in the tooth fairy.
When the peak of human understanding, billions of Man-hours of work, cannot yet produce something as complex as your finger, one can finally come begin to understand how far beyond us the Lord is.