Commenter Elisea observed the temptation women have to worship what they fantasize as the purifying power of their vaginas:
This is the prototypical female story, stemming from the original Beauty and the Beast. There’s a reason why they are so obsessed with vampires, werewolves, BDSM billionaires, and stunningly crazy things like werebears and weredragons. The creature is inherently dark and dangerous, but she tames him with her moral purity and magical sexuality (by which I mean she starts out as a complete virgin having sex with a man who has bedded hundreds of women before her, yet she wows him sexually into being insatiable for her). Not only is it important for him to be an otherworldly creature so as to provide her with the best possible protection (vampires and werewolves are pretty unbeatable), but they are also creatures of darkness- and obviously this applies just as well to BDSM billionaires, criminals, and the like. By being considered morally inferior by the female, which she frequently and openly acknowledges, she then has a lifetime of opportunities to use it against him whenever she wants.
This is why women are interested in vampires over superheroes. The ideal male must be eligible to go through the female purification system.
This temptation is equal parts self worship and rationalization of women’s promiscuity and sexual attraction to dark triad traits.
What makes this particular temptation so pernicious is that men share the same temptation, as this goes all the way back to the fall. Just like women, men are strongly tempted to worship what they see as the holy vagina. Earlier this week I shared two examples of conservative Christian leaders teaching that God speaks to men through their wives’ vaginas. But this also manifests in a more general form, where women’s sexuality is seen as a benevolent mystical force guiding society. As George Gilder explains in Men and Marriage:
Modern society relies on predictable, regular, long-term human activities, corresponding to the sexual faculties of women. The male pattern is the enemy of social stability. This is the ultimate source of female sexual control and the critical reason for it. Women domesticate and civilize male nature. They can jeopardize male discipline and identity, and civilization as well, merely by giving up the role.
Gilder believes that women are more cerebral and wise about sex than men, who unlike women have mindless sex drives. This wisdom comes from women’s ability to conceive and bear children. Women use their innate sexual wisdom to decide how to dispense salvation with their vagina:
…greater sexual control and discretion–more informed and deliberate sexual powers–are displayed by women in all societies known to anthropology. Indeed, this intelligent and controlled female sexuality is what makes human communities possible.
This difference between the sexes gives the woman the superior position in most sexual encounters. The man may push and posture, but the woman must decide. He is driven; she must set the terms and conditions, goals and destinations of the journey. Her faculty of greater natural restraint and selectivity makes the woman the sexual judge and executive, finally appraising the offerings of men, favoring one and rejecting another, and telling them what they must do to be saved or chosen. Managing the sexual nature of a healthy society, women impose the disciplines, make the choices, and summon the male efforts to support it.
Note: Gilder is clearly a primary influence on Glenn Stanton, and Stanton quotes this same work by Gilder in his recent article Manhood is not natural (H/T MikeJJ). I’ll do a follow up post on Stanton’s article shortly.
and telling them what they must do to be saved or chosen.
“Master, what must I do to be saved?”
The ancient Greeks’ view was just the opposite; rationality and control belonged to the male, whereas the woman was the dark, cthonic wellspring of irrationality and sexuality.
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All these men are engaged in a big round of sample error. They look backwards at older women who were raised in a different culture, different time and therefore different country, and extrapolate that forward. There is also more than a whiff of Victorian woman-pedestalization particularly in Gilder. He might still fall for the idea that giving women voting rights would clean up politics, because women are “more moral” than men.
This is exactly the kind of wrongheaded emotionalism that led to the absolute success of 2nd stage feminism in the 1970’s and 1980’s. It is the exact kind of romanticism that leads fathers of daughters (like Stanton) to treat them both as proxy sons and little do-no-wrong Disney princesses.
When radical feminist law professors next try to embed “Yes means Yes” into the US state legal code, emotional blather such as this can be expected from the TradCon corner of the debate. Just as TradCons even now will insist that mens-fault divorce is always mens-fault, despite decades of evidence to the contrary, chin-strokiing academics and aging preachers will be ready to offer up serious intoning on the issue of regret rape / “lack of enthusiastic consent” rape and so forth.
This is exactly why traditional conservatives almost always wind up as sock puppets for feminism.
Heidi is correct. The word “hysteria” comes from the Greek word “hystera,” or “womb,” which is what they believed was the cause of it. They were wrong about the body part, but they knew which gender it plagued.
As “crude” Dalrock’s analysis may seem, this is literally what they teach when you strip down all the fluffy rhetoric and language and force their logic into a consistent philosophy.
From the Stanton article you linked:
Manhood is not natural, but it is essential. No society can endure if it does not harness male sexual energy and teach men to take care of the children they father and the women who bear them.
Maybe I’m getting ahead of you here, but i had to weigh in on this.
This is nonsense. How can manhood be essential and not natural? The base word of “essential” is essence, from Latin esse, the infinitive “to be”. To exist. If something is essential, it is part of who a man is. It cannot be unnatural if it is innate to him. If a man’s sexual energy is essential, then it is natural. It’s there and it can’t be removed. It can be harnessed and channeled, but that’s not the same thing as saying it is not natural.
And society cannot endure if it does not restrain female sexual energy, which, as we are seeing currently and for the past 40 years or so, is premised on women having sex with the most attractive men they can for as long as they can, until they can’t anymore, at which time they give table scraps and warmed over leftovers (if that) to the men they deign to lower themselves to marry.
Men and Marriage is actually a re-released second edition of Gilder’s 1973 book Sexual Suicide, which was interestingly published by New York Times Books. It’s easy to sit here in 2018 and criticize Gilder, but writing back in the early 1970s (no fault divorce only began in 1969) he was actually one of the most prescient critics of the sexual revolution, one who foresaw a lot of what came to pass. He also understood the implications of things like government provided universal day care, which he strongly opposed. Yes, Gilder got some important things wrong, but his work needs to be seen in the context of when he originally wrote it and developed the ideas and the many things he got right. We also need to have the humility to realize that future generations, if they take notice of what we’re writing here at all, will be judging us for our blind spots.
Her faculty of greater natural restraint and selectivity makes the woman the sexual judge and executive, finally appraising the offerings of men, favoring one and rejecting another, and telling them what they must do to be saved or chosen.
This is correct. Women control sex. Men control commitment, and the provision that comes with it. Marriage is an agreement to trade one for the other. The problem is, that men are expected to hold up their end of the deal but women seem to think nothing is expected of them.
“…Gilder believes that women are more cerebral and wise about sex than men, who unlike women have mindless sex drives. This wisdom comes from women’s ability to conceive and bear children.”
This comes from the era before the advent of The Pill, Feminism, and open recognition of how women can (and do) abort ‘unwanted’ and ‘inconvenient’ children, or will bear children for spurious and selfish reasons — such as gaining money through welfare (from the government) or ‘child support’ (from the ex-husband, and enforced by the government), or to “feel fulfilled” (by becoming a single mother in her late twenties or older).
The advent of MGTOW has also disproven as a cultural myth that men “have mindless sex drives”.
The Question: The word “hysteria” comes from the Greek word “hystera,” or “womb,” which is what they believed was the cause of it. They were wrong about the body part, but they knew which gender it plagued.
To continue my discussion from the previous thread, Penny Dreadful‘s feminism deals with that issue as well.
Victorian England (the setting for most of the series) believed in the malady of “female hysteria.” Penny Dreadful “exposes” the “sexist misogyny” of this view.
Vanessa Ives has a supernatural vision at a ball, whereupon she gets hysterical and faints. Later, all the “rational” men suggest that maybe she was hallucinating. Vanessa snaps, “I was not suffering from female hysteria!”
And when she’s possessed by Satan, she’s believed to be insane and is committed to an asylum for women. We see the horrific medical treatment women had to endure. Vanessa is sprayed with a water hose. Dunked in a bathtub of ice water. Placed in a straight jacket. The doctors eventually want to drill into her head. All because they think she’s suffering from “female hysteria” rather than accept her claims of being a witch possessed by Satan.
I’ve seen other horror shows that depict the horrors that women (and only women) had to endure at the hands of sexist 19th century doctors.
How sobering and refreshing to read the apostle’s Paul advice in 1 Co 7:
“The husband should fulfill his marital duty to his wife, and likewise the wife to her husband. The wife does not have authority over her own body but yields it to her husband. In the same way, the husband does not have authority over his own body but yields it to his wife. Do not deprive each other except perhaps by mutual consent and for a time, so that you may devote yourselves to prayer. Then come together again so that Satan will not tempt you because of your lack of self-control”
I.e. marry, then have sex whenever one of you feels to.
Unfortunately, it is a message I do not hear from the pulpits.
Let’s say he right about this.
By that logic when female sexual control is out of control…ERRRRR….liberated, men become uncivilized and undomesticated. So perhaps female promiscuity isn’t a good thing to be worshipped.
@Anon Reader
I think this is part of it, but I think the larger driving force comes from a sort of sexualized mommy worship where the mommy-wife doles out favors. Glenn Stanton exhibits the same thought pattern:
In this sense it is a sort of reverse apex fallacy. He can’t see that women actually have sexual desires, because he has never generated sexual desire in a woman. He therefore assumes no other men do either. It is cringe inducing beta game mistaken for spiritual insight.
Indeed. From an interview Gilder gave to Religion and Liberty:
Bingo! It’s another pot shot at masculinity. Remember it says in the Bible ‘God made them male and female.’ Masculinity is as natural as femininity.
Fundamental misunderstanding of women’s sexual nature, sadly. His understanding was based on a pre-pill scenario. Post-pill, women’s sexuality came roaring into the open, and has roared more loudly and ferally with each generation since then. Any man who is actually privy to how young women are behaving today (having sex for fun and sexual desire because they are horny and aroused by hot guys and aren’t worried about pregnancy) would never write what Gilder wrote there. When women stopped having to worry about pregnancy, their behaviors changed, and even moreso with each successive generation of them. That understanding is missing in Gilder (because the book was written before the behaviors became manifest on a wide scale). The men who are looking at things today, like Stanton, are simply blinded by their own unwillingness to see things as they really are, due to it destroying the pedestal they have placed women upon.
“Indeed, this intelligent and controlled female sexuality is what makes human communities possible.”
There goes agriculture, sanitation and criminal justice. Also, monasteries.
The Gilder book is on my list to read this year. I was under the impression that he offered good insights in it.
I suspect that he was just a man out of his time and afflicted by the”angel in the house” syndrome that still affects a significant portion of American men even today.
Serious question: Are the contents of the Gospel about 90% directed towards men? If so, all of this new Churchianity is just a way of creating contents to satisfy the new Western woman in Faith.
Gilder believes that women are more cerebral and wise about sex than men, who unlike women have mindless sex drives. This wisdom comes from women’s ability to conceive and bear children. Women use their innate sexual wisdom to decide how to dispense salvation with their vagina:
As we know, nothing can be further from the truth.
Women write love letters to serial killers. Women incentivize behavior in men that is precisely the opposite of what improves civilization, and women are completely unattracted to any male behavior that moves advanced societies forward.
Just look at the latest flurry of articles I recently posted :
‘AI is coming to sexist conclusions’
‘Cryptocurrencies are sexist’
George Gilder is around 75, but still.
@Dalrock
Yes, this is it. The pulpits are flooded with Momma’s Boys. Their view of God is as a womanly person; despite the fact that all revelation characterizes each person of the Godhead as God but not goddess. Their view of properly practiced power and authority is as a mother. In “Satisfaction Guaranteed” you quoted Dave Wilson’s words:
Wilson said that because he “used” God’s word for mere preaching instead of snuggling with God. Then God–through Ann–punished Dave by withholding sex from him. It’s a thoroughly feminine view of power and authority. It’s something I’d expect to hear from a priest of Hera rather than a man of the Almighty Lord of Hosts.
Dalrock,
In this sense it is a sort of reverse apex fallacy. He can’t see that women actually have sexual desires, because he has never generated sexual desire in a woman. He therefore assumes no other men do either.
This is becoming more and more apparent in the cuckservative goddess cult. It also explains the extreme possessiveness they have for their daughters (who resemble the wives, but many actually like her father).
George Gilder is 78.
Back around the Y2K period, I paid $26 + tax for a hardcover version of his book ‘Telecosm’. He is an unusually good writer.
But even in that book, he managed to slip in a sentence or two about how he is ‘against feminism’, when in reality he is anything but.
As good as the rest of that book was, and despite the fact that it was about a completely different subject, I regret spending money on something that a cuckservative pedestalizer produced.
MORE OR LESS ON TOPIC:
Good article, with graphs, on the Sexual Revolution, contraception, abortion, the decline of shotgun weddings, the decline in marital births, and especially, the increase in out-of-wedlock births.
https://www.mercatornet.com/family_edge/view/how-we-ended-up-with-40-percent-of-children-born-out-of-wedlock/20881?utm_source=MercatorNet&utm_campaign=40f9462b67-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2018_01_12&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_e581d204e2-40f9462b67-124674403
He can’t see that women actually have sexual desires, because he has never generated sexual desire in a woman.
This is a kill shot. One hit, drop to the ground, no further movement. It is merciful for animals in hunting, but brutal for a man in this context. And it is not just a likely case for Glenn, but a multitude of other men; and especially clerical men of whatever faith tradition. The understanding is that her desire must be negotiated for by acts in accordance with her will, and as we all (now) know, desire cannot be negotiated. It will probably never happen because that is not how “desire” works nor even how it is defined.
What woman can respect a man that always bends to her will? We’ve set up a hopeless do-loop using the concept of negotiated desire.
“…because he has never generated sexual desire in a woman.”
Truth. And even in the off chance that he has, he wouldn’t see it as such.
This is a big part of the perverse and destructive nature of the blue pill; to blind men to not only female nature, but all nature, including their own.
Before I began awakening to the truth of nature, I likely generated real desire in many women, but the blind spot created by the sacred and pure female sexuality prevented me from attributing both their desire to the various aspects of true female sexual nature, as well as to the aspects of my behavior and social context that ignited that desire.
When I jettisoned the blue goggles, I was genuinely shocked at the feral, wanton desire of women I was able to elicit with very little (if any) effort on my part. Various counterintuitive iterations ensued, and the red pill was undeniable; female nature was out of the tube for good.
For me, genuine sexual desire, specifically, desire that I generate in women, is one of the most powerful active properties of the red pill. None of the books, blogs, experts, or word-of-mouth compares to living it in real time.
Hence the value of game. I was never really that interested in PUA, per se, but for me it didn’t take but a mere approximation of PUA to reveal the depths of depravity that women will offer up when they catch tingles. And being that tingles is the threshold from which all else flows, I am viscerally aware of those things I was once oblivious too.
These old boomercucks spewing more ink into the blind spots of men may have good hearts but they are doing the work of evil nonetheless.
Chapter 7 in The Garbage Generation, by Daniel Amneus, debunks Gilder:
https://dontmarry.files.wordpress.com/2007/10/garbage-generation-by-daniel-amneus.pdf
Damn Crackers @ 12:58 pm:
“Serious question: Are the contents of the Gospel about 90% directed towards men?”
Yes but only on the technicality that the four books of the Gospel are about Christ. Men are to follow Christ, women are to follow their men. A large part of Churchianity involves cutting out the men and pushing women to follow Christ directly in order to make women the spiritual peers of men.
Even so, most of Christ’s parables and sermons are relevant to both sexes. Sex & marriage are critical issues but there’s more to Christianity.
If he’s never generated sexual desire in a woman…that means he’s never atoned for his sins. Guess the choreplay is not enough.
I think the REAL red pill is telling these buffoons that women’s sexual desire for you and your state with God are not correlated.
Seems the large part is more making the men follow their women…and perhaps the women follow Christ (although I’ve never actually seen proof of that from Churchian pastors).
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@Anon
And yet men who demonstrate pro-civilizational behaviors will nonetheless tend to produce children with women who demonstrate anti-civilizational behaviors. What they don’t realize is that that is anti-civilizational.
I got into a conversation about this Gilder book at the What Wrong With the World blog some years ago. I don’t feel I gained much from the attempt – many of the same questions I raised in the form of pushback against Gilder’s positions are still unresolved for me today.
Someday I’ll get a link right on the first try. Or maybe the blog post I linked to is just too old. At any rate here’s another try at the link…
http://www.whatswrongwiththeworld.net/2011/01/the_sexual_constitution.html
MarcusD,
And yet men who demonstrate pro-civilizational behaviors will nonetheless tend to produce children with women who demonstrate anti-civilizational behaviors.
That is why women are increasingly becoming obsolete.
1) Women have proven that there are few ways in which most of them can be net contributors to society, beyond reproduction and childrearing in a Marriage 1.0 culture where she cannot unilaterally throw out the father while taking his money. The only female-dominated professions that are absolutely necessary are the RN and some female entertainers.
2) But we all agree that we no longer want a birth rate of 8, so even this path cannot keep women occupied and productive. So even a SAHM becomes a pampered housewife that just forces the misallocation of resources into shoes, purses, diamonds, and mortgage interest.
3) Every new technological advance is now working against women. From VR to AI to Cryptocurrencies. Their complaints about these technologies are becoming louder.
4) It is not that women can’t be productive. It is that they HATE being productive. They are only productive under coercion and threat.
Women are becoming obsolete.
Some quotes from Gilder’s 1973 Sexual Suicide
I could go on. To be sure, Gilder is blue pill to the max. Though I believe he’s a pre-Boomer, he shares in the “Boomer problem.” I’ve never met a Boomer who is truly red pill. Even the most unplugged of them say things like, “I support patriarchy because I’m a feminist.” There seems to be some piece of missing cultural DNA in the Boomers and Silents.
I wonder if this female fantasy has a potentially positive basis that has become perverted. This desire to rule the beasts could be a very good thing IF one was bringing them to God. If a woman is merely trying to bring a beast under *her* control, I wonder what she thinks she’ll do with it once she has? Aren’t many people (men and women) setting themselves up as false idols, seeking attention and followship rather than acting as a conduit to the Almighty?
@Dalrock
In this sense it is a sort of reverse apex fallacy. He can’t see that women actually have sexual desires, because he has never generated sexual desire in a woman. He therefore assumes no other men do either. It is cringe inducing beta game mistaken for spiritual insight.
This is a great point, one that I think also ties into something else about how the church views sex within marriage. Modern pastors spit out a lot of talk about how Christian men should handle their wives, and it can usually all be condensed down to one central point: The best thing that a husband should always be is . . . . non-threatening.
Just think of any of the “scold sermons” you’ve heard directed towards men in the church, or the standard-issue “Father’s Day special.” You can probably already picture the Thou Shalt Nots! that will get shouted from the pulpit to the church’s husbands and fathers:
1. DON’T make her jealous!
2. DON’T make her afraid!
3. DON’T make her angry!
4. DON’T make her worry!
A lot of people (especially those from a church background) are going to see that list, and cluck about how wrong it is when any woman finds herself feeling such emotions — let alone in her marriage! But take a moment to consider some of the sexual choices you’ve seen women make in the past, and also of the occasions that you’ve heard of as being notorious for inspiring the most torrid kind of sex imaginable. And ask yourself:
1. Do women ever sleep with a man because other women wanted him?
2. Do women enjoy sex with men who are bigger, stronger, and more powerful than they?
3. Do women ever have screaming fights with their man, only to end up vigorously fucking him just hours later?
4. Do women ever crank up their sexual frequency when they suspect that they’re about to lose a man with an especially high SMV?
The church puts so much importance on men who enter into marriage being “safe” that now the women who end up being married to them are also going to wind up being safe from ever having to live with a partner who is capable of inspiring their sexual attraction. That quote from Stanton is key:
That’s the kind of marriage that the modern church is setting you up for: One free of all “negative emotions” for the woman. No fights, no conflict, no unease. Just one long uneventful stretch of tepid placidity, courteously provided by a loving husband who still can’t understand why his wife finds him boring and never wants to have sex with him.
Armenian you shouldn’t have to game your wife, to use “dread game” to make yourself seem a little dangerous (but not too dangerous) to try and get your wife to have sex with you. Being a decent husband should surely be enough by itself for your wife to want to have sex with you. Did society used to work like that? Or have husbands always been obligated to Alpha up if they want sex from their wife?
This comes up a lot, even in the manosphere;
The all-powerful, civilization shaping, taming, dominant, not-to-be-denied GOLDEN VAJ.
Women have the vaj, they rule. STRAIGHT ACROSS THE BOARD. Any woman with a vaj can bring any man into a stupor of obedience and subservience any time she wants. That is the extraordinary power of the vaj.
Well….have any of you been to Walmart and Target lately or simply anywhere?
A small (and ever waning) fraction of women UNDER 30 have these “all hail” slave-driving golden vajjes. Even the vaj-havers (thin, healthy, about 20% of under 30’s) are losing it via their horribly edgy, masculine voices, and via having the same lightlessness in their eyes that you see in sharks.
I think golden vaj and the males who worship them will soon fall into the same cultural bin as wild, beer pong, beer bong, kegstand parties….for the 23 and unders only. And even then, only a fraction of people that age.
The rest of the culture will be fat or monstrous or fat and monstrous women and the men who will be far to wise to engage in a situation that offers maximum risk and a not a whit of reward. It will be like shopping in the Nothing Mall. You are expected to pay even though there are no products on the shelf at all.
Glad you enjoyed my comment, Dalrock. 🙂
From Darwinian Arminian: “Modern pastors spit out a lot of talk about how Christian men should handle their wives, and it can usually all be condensed down to one central point: The best thing that a husband should always be is . . . . non-threatening.”
This is clearly negated in female fiction as well. Half of the reason for having the male romantic hero be capable of significant violence is for the female’s protection, but that’s certainly not all. Although women never want that violence directed at them, they are very fond of violence that is about them.
There are many examples of this in literature written by females for females. Both of the Bronte sisters loved the hero driven to madness and violence by his great love for the heroine.
-When Jane Eyre states that she must leave Mr. Rochester because she found out he has a wife, he becomes distraught:
‘”Jane! will you hear reason?” (he stooped and approached his lips to my ear); “because, if you won’t, I’ll try violence.” His voice was hoarse; his look that of a man who is just about to burst an insufferable bond and plunge headlong into wild license. I saw that in another moment, and with one impetus of frenzy more, I should be able to do nothing with him. The present–the passing second of time–was all I had in which to control and restrain him–a movement of repulsion, flight, fear would have sealed my doom,–and his. But I was not afraid: not in the least. I felt an inward power; a sense of influence, which supported me. The crisis was perilous; but not without its charm: such as the Indian, perhaps, feels when he slips over the rapid in his canoe.’
And during that same fight:
‘”Never,” said he, as he ground his teeth, “never was anything at once so frail and so indomitable. A mere reed she feels in my hand!” (And he shook me with the force of his hold.) “I could bend her with my finger and thumb: and what good would it do if I bent, if I uptore, if I crushed her? Consider that eye: consider the resolute, wild, free thing looking out of it, defying me, with more than courage–with a stern triumph. Whatever I do with its cage, I cannot get at it–the savage, beautiful creature! If I tear, if I rend the slight prison, my outrage will only let the captive loose. Conqueror I might be of the house; but the inmate would escape to heaven before I could call myself possessor of its clay dwelling-place. And it is you, spirit–with will and energy, and virtue and purity–that I want: not alone your brittle frame. ‘
There is a recent film adaptation of Jane Eyre (2012 I think), and although they don’t have Mr. Rochester shake Jane in this scene, they have him place his hands around her neck as if to choke her.
Rhett Butler from Gone With the Wind threatens violence in a drunken rage, jealous over the man his wife has always pined for:
“Observe my hands, my dear,” he said, flexing them before her eyes. “I could tear you to pieces with them with no trouble whatsoever and I would do it if it would take Ashley out of your mind. But it wouldn’t. So I think I’ll remove him from your mind forever, this way. I’ll put my hands, so, on each side of your head and I’ll smash your skull between them like a walnut and that will blot him out.”
These same reactions are typical of just about any romantic novel hero.
@Red Pill Latecomer
These horrors did occur, and feminists will sometimes gleefully relate that women were put away for “hysteria”, and then remind us of the embarrassing fact that in antiquity this malady was believed to be caused by the womb wandering around inside the body.
However, it was not only women who suffered from medical ignorance. In the 19th Century, most men who were sent to the asylum were deemed to be suffering from “general paralysis of the insane”, a euphemism for tertiary syphilis. When a test for syphilis became available, it was found that only a third of those so diagnosed actually had the disease.
Oh another example of believing that women are innately good therefore they can be trusted with all power is The Wife of Bath by Geoffrey Chaucer written in the 1400s. The moral of the story is that husbands should always give complete control to their wives, because when husbands are in control they are mean and horrible and it makes their wives act out against them. If you want a wife that is good and faithful, just let her make all of the decisions:
“I’ll give you a choice,” she said, “between one of two things. I can be old and disgusting until the day I die but be humble and faithful to you and never upset you, or you can have me be young and beautiful and take the risk that I’ll cheat on you with the many men who’ll try to seduce me. Now, make your decision, whichever you prefer.”
The knight thought a moment, sighed, and then finally said, “My lady, my love, my wife. I put myself in your good hands. You decide which of these options will be better for yourself and for me. I don’t care which of the two you decide. I’ll be happy with whichever you choose.”
“Then do I have control over your life and destiny because I get to the make the decisions?” she asked.
“Yes. Yes, you do. Because I think it’s best that way,” he replied.
http://www.sparknotes.com/nofear/lit/the-canterbury-tales/wife-of-baths-prologue/
Alright, one more comment on female desire for a violent male.
The feminist interpretation of the female desire for a violent male, particularly one that is near violent about his love for her is of course that it stems from internalized misogyny from millions of years of men constantly beating their wives. There are quite a lot of holes in that theory.
There are no literary examples of male heroes written by men who are violent or at least threaten violence to their female romantic interests, certainly none that are frequently beloved by men as Rhett Butler and Mr. Rochester are by women. If male on female violence was as pervasive and accepted as feminists like to believe it was in the past, it would be as apparent in male literature, if not more so, as it is in female literature.
When we consider the gender role reversal version of this- females becoming violent as an aspect of their desire and love for their male love interests- we find interesting examples in media. If the situation is portrayed as leaning toward the male perspective, or seeing the male as a kind of victim and martyr, then the female character is considered to be a sexist stereotype. Think of “bunny-boiling” Glenn Close from Fatal Attraction or Kathy Bates in Misery. These are supposed to be examples of the unfair and untrue stereotype of the hysterical female, obsessed with getting a man.
But if the story does not too closely follow a male perspective, then the female who is violent in her love is benign or simply a strong woman who doesn’t take shit from her man. Take this example from the show Shameless. A woman suspects her boyfriend is cheating on her. He comes home and she asks him to undress, then begins tying him up to a chair, acting as if it is for sex. She then threatens him with hedge clippers, obviously implying that she would chop off a certain part of his anatomy. We don’t view her as abusive or scary, we view her as strong. As far as I know, the couple is considered a favorite of the show.
Clip of scene here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x-Es4pFPnrQ
Oh I forgot to add one last example of the violently in love female: Ygritte from Game of Thrones, who shoots John Snow with an arrow when he decides to leave her. We are not left with the impression, from either the book or the show, that he views this as abusive on her part. Once again, the constant mantra is always: she’s just so strong!
@Elisea
According to the research on the subject, women desire men more capable of violence (not necessarily violent otherwise) when their immediate environment is perceived as being more dangerous (what this means in practice varies). This is generally expressed as a desire for more masculine men, and less of a desire for better providers. What is interesting is that the increase in the labor force representation of women has reduced their demand somewhat for those providers. Ironically, such large shifts in society are likely to produce a dangerous environment.
CSI,
A man shouldn’t always have to force obedience in his wife, but acting like a real man is good in any time period. Too many today do act like wimps and get the consequences for it, especially since most restraints on bad female behavior are gone.
Some version of what you decry is needed today because even the most righteous woman will face ongoing temptations to bale on her commitment, including form those who should be strongly pushing her otherwise, to the detriment of our churches.
George Gilder must come from another planet, because on this one:
-Women initiate divorce on a no-fault basis in 70% of cases
-Women abort – kill – their own children at a rate of 1M /year in the Western, “civilised” world.
As Rollo once said: Game and Frame. Game is needed to stop men putting women on pedestals due to our innate sex drive.
Frame is the moral centre given to us by God. Whether law or conscience, as St Paul explains in Romans 1, Jew or Gentile, believer and unbeliever alike in men know what is right and what is wrong on a binary basis*.
If you do not have them, you will be led by the nose by a woman like a sheep to slaughter.
*That is, unless you have been raised by a woman with the rationalisation hamster.
As Stanton says:
“Womanhood is a natural phenomenon. A female’s biological make-up usually ensures that she will grow into a healthy woman. Leave her to herself, and it’s likely to happen. It’s why the phrases “woman up,” “be a woman,” or “make a woman out of her” don’t exist.”
So true. We must berate young men to have the courage to man up, get out of the way and let young women SWIPE RIGHT FOR JESUS.
http://www.christianitytoday.com/women/2018/january/swipe-right-for-jesus.html
I came across a copy of George Gilder’s book Men and Marriage in a second-hand bookshop and bought it on impulse. It turned out to be a source of hours of alternating amusement and infuriation: 240 pages of slobbering vagina worship attempting to hide behind a thing veneer of “scholarship.” Gilder is convinced that women are the civilizing force in society, and that without their purifying influence, men would only create a society like what is seen in Lord of the Flies.
I have no doubt that the majority of women agree with Gilder, either secretly or openly. Trouble is, way too many men do also. I follow a different line of reasoning: men and women are a civilizing force ON EACH OTHER. A healthy balance of yin and yang yields the best civilization, but in our contemporary society, what little yang remains is subjected to relentless shaming and pathologizing. Books like Gilder’s only exacerbate the imbalance.
It is worth noting that only one of three Bronte sisters married (Charlotte- only for a short period before her death). Margaret Mitchell did marry a “bad boy” till her “beta boy” got rid of him and she married him. Just like most art- in particular, music,- we are bombarded with unhealthy ideas about love and relationships because they’re being created by those who don’t understand it. Chaucer may have been a “happy wife, happy life” sort, but the point in many of his tales was to reveal the absolute corruption of morals of his characters, not only of the wife but religious figures as well. There may have been only one profession he portrayed as noble: the knight. I think it best to understand our great love is with God; we belong to Him and are merely on lease to our parents, our spouse, and our children.
Some version of what you decry is needed today because even the most righteous woman will face ongoing temptations to bale on her commitment,
I don’t think Gaming your wife is a bad think, its a good thing if you can do it right, but just seems unfair to me that you should need to do this to convince your wife to have sex with you. If this is the case, then it means marriage is a bad idea for a lot of decent but average men.
Heh, “swipe right for Jesus”. It includes this memorable incident:
In one particularly memorable instance, I met with a young man from a country people don’t talk about much, with a professional background I have no experience in, and of a devout Muslim faith I wish I understood better. ….Then the conversation came to a head in a single moment.
“Wait,” he interrupted. “Jesus is alive?”….
To me and our little New England coffee shop, he shouted in shock, disbelief, and proclamation: “Jesus is alive! Jesus is alive! They didn’t teach us that in school. Jesus is alive!”….
he exclaimed, “Jesus is alive! That changes everything.”
This is so ridiculous I don’t think she isn’t making it up. If the incident is real, then its either a real miracle, or this guy was just making fun of her, and she was too dumb to realize it. It seems that she knew nothing, absolutely nothing, about Islam. Shouldn’t Christians be taught at least the basics of other religions so they can better deal with situations like this?
MarcusD,
That’s interesting. I have always understood that principle- of women wanting more violent men according to their environment- as a sort of jungle vs civilization thing. If in the dangerous jungle, women will want the most violent man because he is the one who can provide the best protection. If in a civilization, women want the richest man because he is the one who can provide the best protection.
However, what I see from male protagonist heroes recently is that they must have both of these qualities in the extreme. You can see the increase in the desire for violent men with brute strength, but I don’t see a decrease in the desire for him to also be an excellent provider. The trope of romantic books is that the male love interest will always be the handsomest and richest man of the heroine’s acquaintance. This is true of Mr. Darcy, Rhett Butler, Edward Cullen, and Christian Grey. And then with the influx of supernatural creature romance, he is also the strongest of anyone she knows.
We also know from statistics that women who earn the most money are the least likely to marry down, so it sounds as if when women are in the workforce they care even more about a man’s earning ability.
I wonder if this is mainly a reflection of that when women are in an environment where they recognize that they are dependent on men, they will forego a lot of their other preferences in favor of the one that benefits them the most. This would be true for an environment where they feel dependent on men for their safety or for resources. But when women don’t feel dependent on men for anything, their safety or economy, their preferences are fully unleashed
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Shouldn’t Christians be taught at least the basics of other religions so they can better deal with situations like this?
Yes, absolutely. First, however, they need a thorough education in the foundations of their own faith, something that I needn’t point is …**ahem**… “lacking.”
@Elisea
The primitive brain is likely the underlying cause for interest in strength/violence-capability. Wealth (not necessarily status or power) is generally a more rational consideration.
There are hundreds of studies on the subject, but two that might be helpful:
DeBruine, L. M., Jones, B. C., Crawford, J. R., Welling, L. L., & Little, A. C. (2010). The health of a nation predicts their mate preferences: cross-cultural variation in women’s preferences for masculinized male faces. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences, 277(1692), 2405-2410.
Lee, A. J., & Zietsch, B. P. (2011). Experimental evidence that women’s mate preferences are directly influenced by cues of pathogen prevalence and resource scarcity. Biology Letters, rsbl20110454.
@Elisea
That’s a disaster already happening. Also, it’s women who earn money period. Given that women feel they must marry someone with equal or greater education (but mostly equal or greater earning power), many women are going to go unmarried. In today’s world, this won’t necessarily be a positive for a marriage (e.g. attraction, and lack thereof), but it also won’t be as negative for men – I’ve witnessed a few situations where men receive alimony and child support payments. Because the system was set up with the intent to punish men, it is rather interesting to see some women forced to either go unmarried or become subject to the same system.
“I’ve never met a Boomer who is truly red pill. Even the most unplugged of them say things like, “I support patriarchy because I’m a feminist.”
However, it is good to say, “I support patriarchy because I’m pro-women.”
“But when women don’t feel dependent on men for anything, their safety or economy, their preferences are fully unleashed.”
Doesn’t recognition of dependency play more into her estimation of a man’s MMV rather than her SMV? Hypergamy can come into play with both evaluationsm, and so paradoxically rather than lowering her expectations of what she wants in a man because she has no need for those benefits, her expectations are raised even higher because of what she perceives as being her own status. “I’m equal to these men, so they are not good enough for me.”
“Across 30 countries, masculinity preference increased as health decreased.”
That is really interesting, especially considering that most would believe this to be one of the healthiest ages of all time. We have so many advances in medicine and protection from disease, yet if women are focusing more and more on ultra masculine-looking men, then one has to surmise that this is a really unhealthy time to be alive.
No wonder there is no category for Big Beautiful Men under the amazon romance section…
Roger,
“I follow a different line of reasoning: men and women are a civilizing force ON EACH OTHER. A healthy balance of yin and yang yields the best civilization, but in our contemporary society, what little yang remains is subjected to relentless shaming and pathologizing. Books like Gilder’s only exacerbate the imbalance.”
Years ago, when I had a blog, we discussed this very topic!
Whilst I see your point of view completely (I am in general agreement, I would say!) I found a mantra that covers this without treading on the roles of manhood and womanhood respectively.
I would put it this way: Men CIVILISE women, and not vice versa. Women SOCIALISE men, and not vice versa.
I remember a few men at that time on my blog were unhappy with my ‘socialising’ view, but I think it is true. Women, in general, own the social platform. This is a fact of life. So women can and usually do manipulate ‘society’ according to their whims. Men can play along or withdraw…
And that is what is happening right now in this era.
But it is men and men alone who can bring (and take away) civilisation. It is in male nature to civilise everyone around them, including women and children. This is not really a part of feminine nature. Civilising and socialising are (usually) complementary but also I think necessarily mutually exclusive.
I think, for example, this is why we need 2 parents of both sexes – one to civilise you and the other to socialise you. And the problems that occur when one is missing… are… self-explanatory.
Kate,
“I think it best to understand our great love is with God; we belong to Him and are merely on lease to our parents, our spouse, and our children.”
No truer word has EVER been spoken!
Life suddenly became a stroll in the park once I understood this.
Thank you for reminding me of this TRUTH. Or as I often hear in these parts, TROOF.
🙂
@Spacetraveller: Thanks! Elisea’s commentary bringing out the best in everyone (how refreshing!).
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Throughout the sociology literature the consistent benefits of marriage that men experience are attributed to women. Like other things in sociology (the benefit of fatherhood could be absolutely everything but never….you know…the actual father) this a theory driven conclusion from the data. We could attribute these benefits to a man taking on the responsibilities of children, being given responsibility over a wife, etc. But its always ascribed to the magic of the wife.
Long term activities are driven first by men with plans and then second by women WITH children. Most women without children in our culture are feral and cannot see the consequences of their actions 5 minutes away, but they don’t have children so their ruin is sometimes mitigated.
The fact that women are more careful with sex when they might bear a child is true and historically is in contrast to the way women behave without it. Men historically are far less likely to be considerate of this given they don’t get pregnant. But that is not what builds civilizations. Tribal people that have lived the same for thousands of years have women that protect their sexuality relative to men because of the consequences of pregnancy. That’s not civilization. Civilization arises through a combination of male ambition, certain way of looking at the world, men accumulating wealth, and the long term planning necessary to build civilization. Men build Cathedrals – a building that takes >100 years. Thats male civilization building and its pathetic to attribute a women worried about getting pregnant so insisting she wait to have sex until marriage (a good thing) with the type of planning that built the modern world.
Women are better mothers than men are. They are blessed with a great love and devotion for their children. They sacrifice their lives for them, their bodies in having them, etc. I think the authors ascribe these admirable traits to women on the whole outside the sphere where it shines. Their positive emotions are ascribed spiritual qualities about how they are more in tune with God. The basis which drives these beliefs is correct, they are just wildly misapplied to women and the culture on the whole.
And as Dalrock hints, we should never underestimate how much our love of our mothers totally clouds peoples minds in their perception of women and ability to rationally look at women and dissect the truth about them. Most men will love their moms more than anything in the world until the day they die and this is a normal and powerful brain response that clouds the minds. Fathers are not the same because a son must prove himself to his father and in proving it he changes the bond. The mother bond stays deep within the brain often unchanged. Their are men with apron strings from their mother all their life, its almost unheard of for a man to have the father equivalent (belt buckles? A girl could be “daddy’s little girl and continue an award father/daughter bond too long).
The difference in the sexes gives women the advantage in sexual encounters (short term) and it also gives men the advantage in commitment (long term).
The observation that male and female sexuality act differently, and that females get aroused by dominant male behavior, is only the starting point of the discussion. Christianity has always understood the power of sexuality, and God-given laws are about channeling sexual desire into desirable behavior. Sexuality does not trump these laws, it’s the other way around. As these laws prescribe sex to be experienced in monogamous marriage, I’m not interested per se to generate sexual desire in women, strictly I’m not even interested to generate sexual desire in my wife. I’m focused on obeying God and trying to get my wife to follow me. Unfortunately modern society, specifically feminism, has us all brainwashed into vagina worship, which is a strong habit to break. Thanks to red-pill more men have become aware of this brainwashing and are struggling to escape it. How strong has the deception become!
Deep-down, elements of red-pill are fully in line with the Christian message of men leading and women submitting. For me Christianity trumps red-pill, but in general does not negate it. Unfortunately, churches have developed a feminism-inspired version of Christianity that has killed almost all masculinity at the cost of femininity. It is time for churches to wake-up and return to core teaching about men and women. I’m however afraid it is not going to happen on a large scale, because from the beginning churches have been backsliding and fallen away from orthodoxy and orthopraxy.
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“telling them what they must do to be saved or chosen”
Based on what I’ve seen, to be saved I have to be unemployed, illiterate, unshowered, and just an all around loud douchebag. It helps to be tall too I guess?
Women clearly are very wise and guiding us to Utopia with their magical fleshtubes.