Fascinating, thank you! I also hold out hope for better understanding and mutual support between women and men, and this is a brilliant summary of some recent steps forward. Another seismic shift is the way the trans controversies around women's spaces and sports have highlighted our differences. I don't think we can get anywhere without being honest. In that vein, I think we have to confront the reality of male violence and promiscuity, which traditionally have been airbrushed out of the picture in favor of happily ever after fairytales. In societies that advocate liberty and justice, we keep hitting our heads against the reality of male domination. Because, and this is the crux of our problem, men have had to control women in order to know who their children are. Our social systems are based on that female subordination, yet it flies in the face of our ideals of individualism and freedom. Men have never been, and never will be reliably monogamous, but we looked the other way for good providers. Men often take out their anger on women and children, but we pretend that only those "other" men do that. Women are brutally violent in indirect ways, and are much less promiscuous but still stray. To be successful at this, we have to confront reality.
I agree with your point about transgenderism forcing us to confront the reality that men are different from women. But I take issue with the assumption that men cannot be monogamous. Nancy Pearcy has done some research on the whole idea of “toxic masculinity,” and interestingly she found that before the Industrial Revolution, boys were not assumed to be naturally “wild,” and men were expected to equally be caregivers in the household with children. Once the Industrial Revolution removed men from the household and farm and had them work away from home in factories, did we start to see a rise in male violence, promiscuous, and other behaviors that at first, society was concerned about. But when things didn’t seem like they could change, then you suddenly had this notion that boys and young men were “wild” and the whole “boys will be boys” mentality took off from there. So no, I do not think we need to assume that men cannot be monogamous less so than women can. That is a fundamental myth that only encourages men not to strive for monogamous relationships. Men and women need to work together for monogamous relationships, they also need to work together to raise children and have strong families.
I liked her commentary, but I also took issue with that point. It's not in the interest of those who need males for the military, or for industry leaders, to have monogamous males bonded to their families. I believe male suicide leads directly back to the societal brainwashing telling us "Boys will be boys" and that monogamous males are all hen pecked. The sex drive varies in and among both women and men, but multiple sex partners are not healthy for men or women. Humans are meant to form lasting bonds and the family is that primary bond. Your point about the industrial revolution reminded me of a book about the history of educating children prior to the formation of government schools. According to the author, children stayed next to the mother until approximately 3-yrs-old, when they had reached a point where they could feed themselves and take care of some of their own hygiene. After that, the boys went with the father or were apprenticed out to learn a trade. The girls stayed with the mother to learn their mother's home trade.
Agreed. And interesting point about the boys learning from their father from an early age. That’s definitely missing from a lot of families, and esp fatherlessness that’s rampant in our society today.
Respectfully, completely disagree. “Multiple sex partners are not healthy” is simply what you’ve been led to believe from Christian religions, it has no real basis in fact or reason. Religion has warped ordinary sexual pleasure to be conceptually entirely in service of reproduction. One of the larger world religions explicitly forbids contraception, nutty. Many societies and civilizations permitted mutiple sex partners throughout life, Mormons and Muslims being recent versions of having multiple concurrent partners. Divorce and remarriage is predicated on the idea of multiple sex partners, as well as remarriage after death of a spouse. I could give the usual spiel about Romans and Greeks varieties of sex, but that’s easy to find through self-directed reading.
On a second dimension, to have pleasureable sex, you have to learn. Nobody was born cooking superb cuisine, playing fantastic stirring music, telling stories through dance, accomplished visual artists. They learned. Wonderful sex takes honesty, affection, and learning. Multiple partners are a good way to learn.
Lastly I could speak about Bonobos but I have to go to dinner. Cheers!
I'm not a Bonobo or a bee or a horse or anything other than a human. A religious ban on contraception has nothing to do with this discussion. Multiple societies also permitted human sacrifice and other fun things. I agree sex has to be learned, but that doesn't require multiple partners. It just requires 2 people who are attentive to each other's needs. Having a single, committed partner also removes some of the stress of worrying about the consequences of disease, violence and unattached pregnancy. As the minister who married us said (crudely), new puss/ck becomes old puss/ck. He got the message across!
So you have no point of reason or fact to support the assertion other than... you’re not a horse? And equating human sacrifice to the pleasures of sex with different partners? Following this, sex is a horror, something humans have which is a harsh fact of life and the less of it the better, seek one partner so that you can grope blindly through the hideousness of existence together minimizing the abject torture that it brings.
You literally promoted the It's been done by lots of others before, so it must be good argument. You are also the one who introduced a non-human animal.
I find this an interesting and compelling example the sanity-making quality of the historical perspective. Verifiable historical facts can be used to call into question decades of cultural air-castle building and concomitant denial of realities. The fact that close public examination of a numerically inconsiderable (of course totally valid) biological variant of human sexuality has been instrumental, and for people caught up in the castle-building, necessary, in confirming the reality of sex-based (almost universal) male/female difference says it all. How deluded can a culture get? We're still finding out.
One of the advantages of getting old is that none of this matters. Eventually, hopefully, we all grow up and see men and women as men and women and not objects.
There's a difference between being an object and an object of desire. An object is something static, not alive, without feeling, unthinking. At any rate, I don't think that Beauvoir speaks for all women, everywhere, at all times.
That's just one view and one aspect of sex. I don't need you to explain it to me. You can have sex any way you want it with any woman who wants to have sex with you in that manner. It's not a universal view. I'm not saying that you're wrong, it's just not always that way.
" I don't think we can get anywhere without being honest."
Yes! Besides the usual "honesty is the best policy", another saying that is not original with me, that I enjoy repeating is "Reality Is Not Optional". Also, see Yeats poem "Ode to a Grecian Urn".
"... the crux of our problem, men have had to control women in order to know who their children are." I had never thought of that in quite that way (i.e., control!), but it certainly makes sense. Plus, whether in reference to fatherhood or other understandings, no one likes to be played for a fool. Then again, there are plenty of examples where a man took on the burden of (knowingly or unknowingly) supporting another man's child/children. Women can do that to a man! :-)
I am sorry to say that today the evidence shows it is the women who are promiscuous more than the men. Very few men have anything like the appeal to bed many women. Perhaps film stars and rock legends. But ordinary men?
The latest data shows many young men are having no sex at all. The picture is rather different for the young women.
And I don't really buy the violence angle either. I have no doubt it happens. But I don't believe it is anything like the epidemic feminists paint. Dysfunctional people exist of course, male and female. But women are choosing the men so they must take some responsibility.
Interesting trends you mention which to me are evidence of the unnatural state of affairs we're in. I'm influenced by evolutionary biology and my half century plus observations of humans and animals. Males have predatory sex drives (and I don't mean that in a pejorative way, though I know it's a loaded word) in order to maximize their reproductive chances. In that sense females are prey, best defended by another male. We're all a lot better off if we understand those drives. Fathers of daughters are the most honest about it, in my experience.
Women can have strong sex drives and can be promiscuous of course, but it's so much more dangerous for women, with risks of pregnancy and intimacy with someone much stronger, that historically and across cultures women tend to be much more cautious and focused on selective seduction rather than seeking variety.
Male violence in hunting and defense of self and tribe is what allowed us to thrive as a species. It's not inherently bad but may not be suited to modern life without, again, awareness.
We've only been off the land for a very short time, even most Americans lived on farms until 100 or so years ago, so it's no wonder we haven't adapted perfectly yet to our new circumstances.
Yes, I am encouraged by a subset of feminists who are realizing all the ways that the feminist movement (and sexual revolution) largely failed women. But it’s still an uphill battle.
On a side note, I really wonder at anyone learning about feminism from someone like Judith Butler who is decidedly anti-biological sex. How can I really gain anything that helps me as a woman, from a thing that can’t define a woman in the first place?
Learning about straight men and women (and things like human biology, sexual selection, reproductive strategies, the pair bond, etc) from Judith Butler is like learning about African-Americans from the KKK.
She simply moves the class struggle of Marxism into the realm of women and sex, and hopes to burn it all down to appease her resentment at being a very manly woman that was never included in the usual mating games of the sexes.
And I say this knowing that it's not fair to judge someone's "philosophy" by their appearance, but in this case, it's just too obvious that the English language (and women who commit the grave sin of liking and desiring men) is sentenced to be tortured because too many people mistakenly called her "Sir".
Of course Butler's entire output is a monumental pile of bullshit and no one in all recorded History was ever more in need of a Pol Pot Holiday in Cambodia—where intellectuals get to work the fields 18hrs a day and subsist on a diet of gruel—which would quickly refute her claim that all sex differences are oppressive cultural impositions...but that being said, she deserves eternal mockery and scorn just for her horrific prose style alone, which is to reading what chewing glass is to eating.
Could the religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian Donald Trump be in any way described as a mature adult. Some say that he has the speech patterns of a four year old, and of course the emotional "maturity" of a sub-adolescent.
And yet he is idolized by many right-thinking Christians!
The common, more biological, answer is that a female becomes an adult after they go through puberty. However, adult in body does not equal mature in mind, which the term “adulting” implies. When a man or woman becomes a mature “adult” in mind, attitude, and behavior differs from person to person, and we can argue about which age society expects adult males and females to start acting like “adults” in this definition of the term.
I assumed that everyone understood an adult was a person who was recently, but no longer a child. When a child has a mature body (not growing), mature mind (they can conceptualise the future, as a starting point), they have mature sex organs (can reproduce) they aren’t a child anymore. All people naturally reach these stages at different times. Some cannot reach mature thinking and make responsible decisions as a young adult, some mature sexually far earlier than their thought process can keep pace, some stop growing far sooner than their potential would indicate
This always seems to revolve around sexual maturity, but sexual maturity, cessation of growth, and ability to think maturely about consequences for actions are very different concepts, we expect all three in adults.
It is commonly recognized in some circles that human beings do not grow into their bodily maturity until about the age of 25. Such could thus be said about their emotional-sexual maturity too. The key to understanding anyone's sexual is their emotional maturity - what one is at the emotional level signals one's sexual maturity, or lack thereof too.
What you cant hide is if you are crippled (emotionally) inside.
I often had the job of mentor to younger employees in our division of a gigantic company. My mentees were alway easy to divide into 2 groups, one which wanted to know the secret of becoming a “manager” equivalent next promotion cycle, without any real conversation, and one which actualy engaged with me, more a friend than a pompous-feeling "mentor" beyond next promotion cycle.
Exasperatedly I always ended up somehow telling the former to tell their boss what role they wanted, since they could only focus on the next 6 months it seemed. To them, I must have had some “secret” being the shadow advisor to C-level people that I was to reluctant to divulge.
With the latter, I always asked something very conversationalky to the effect of where they saw rhemselves outside of work, when they were retired perhaps, perhaps age 60 or 70. After initial very hard struggles with the concept (I wish I had reaction videos of the blank stares) most came through after a few months, and once they saw themselves in a future, then they developed their own framework for good decisions - and happiness - and realized the "career" question was tangential.
Ultimately, with what I thought of as the most mature people, they wanted to somehow feel that "they mattered", that their life was of consequence. Some would have large extended familes that they supported, many focused on their life in leadership within a community religious or LGB setting (or both) or political (or all of the above). Something of a future.
That's why I agree, the ability to conceptualize the future for ones-self, and make good decisions, seemed the Hallmark of adults I worked with, and age 25 was around when that seemed possible.
Ok, my initial comment did not use the word “adult” at all though, only the word “woman.” So I am still a bit confused as to what exactly you are trying to point out. That we can’t define “woman” when we can’t define “adult?” Or that we assume what “adult” means without defining it while using it in the definition of another word like “man”’or “woman?” Yes, I take it for granted that most readers of Slouching towards Bethlehem Substack do know the correct, non-Woke definitions of such terms as adult and woman.
Well the real definition of when a female becomes an adult female, is in fact after said species completes puberty. Then they are biologically an adult. When a human adult begins acting like a mature person, is a whole other conversation, in which you could argue is nonsense, sure. But I’m not sure how the argument about when a woman (or man) starts acting maturely within society is in any way relevant to the article talking about feminists realizing that the feminist movement was bad for women.
If you're demanding a definition of an adult, then you have some sort of problem with adulthood. Mature adults don't tire of the use of the word adult.
A positive development but nothing like the sea change needed. I suspect it will be younger women and men who do it, not the old guard.
The videos on Tik Tok of childless women in their 30s and 40s almost deranged in their inability to manifest the feminist dream they were promised speak louder than feminist literature. The very young are social media addicts after all and what they have access to is not flattering to the sisterhood. I know the young men are definitely consuming it. There is an entire genre of content covering it in some detail.
The current climate is deeply toxic, particularly for men. And for increasing numbers of women it is becoming less appealing to be strong and independent as many are now realizing those glittering careers are just jobs. I watched one young lady online do the mental calculation of how long she would have to work if they increased the retirement age to 75 (46 years); the shock on her face as the implications sunk in were visible. She was in New York City and was unable to find a suitable husband.
Not really disagreeing with you, but perhaps to phrase it as "women should seek to be appealing as strong and independent persons who are also willing to be an equal partner in a relationship." I surmise that most strong and independent men would prefer a strong and independent woman over a weak and dependent one (all things being equal).
On retirement: if a single woman has a semi or fully professional job and income, she would have enough to retire comfortably by age 60 if she saved and invested wisely. Avoid costs for new cars, overly expensive vacations, excessive recreation and clothing, etc. Then if she is still invested in her career she can continue in that direction with even less concern for the future, or seek an alternative path in her life. This latter situation might also make her more attractive to some of the (past or new) men in her life.
Since the general topic here is feminism perhaps this book review essay by Arnold Kling I just found will be of interest to you all: Persistent Differences in Gender Temperament, discussing Joyce Benenson’s Warriors and Worriers [2014]; https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2023/klinggender.html
I could not decide among the several pithy comments I might extract here, but the essay is short and might merit your examination. She claims her results comparing the behavior and interests of boys/males vs. girls/females are from 30 years of research and presumably cross cultural lines so are not just Western society biased.
You might also want to look at Christina Hoff Sommers, particularly _The War Against Boys_. She wrote a lot in the late 90s and early 2000s, and got effectively unpersoned for it.
“A woman’s highest calling is to lead a man to his soul so as to unite him with Source. A man’s greatest calling is to protect woman so that she is free to walk the earth unharmed”.
There doesn't seem to be much progress in either of these endeavours.
This is something I have been writing about for several years now, and this proverb sums up my understanding. The woman gives man his reality by pulling him...I was going to say out of the clouds but let me change that to out of his mom's basement. In turn, he frees her from the endless demands made upon her by the world--giving her the support, encouragement, and space needed to grow. If I go back to the word "clouds," we can see that they serve in complementary ways (not that I consider myself a complementarian Christian). She pulls him down from the clouds; he pulls her up from the ashes (think Cinderella--the drudgery of the work often imposed upon women). Sadly, we seldom see this in action.
I recently read Mary Harrington's book Feminism Against Progress, and also Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I agree 100% that we have gone the wrong way and have hurt men. I especially agree that before World War I, men and women worked together, mostly in agriculture where men took on the heavier workload. Family was central. Women worked in the fields and pitched in where needed but had many little ones to care for. I come from a long line of farmers and I'm old enough to have seen the last of this generation fade away--my grandmothers' and grandfathers' generation. I am not saying they got it right but they were closer. The fifties and sixties gave rise to what we are witnessing now. Ironically, many Christians believe this was the golden age. Thanks for sharing.
Interesting comments. Perhaps the root error of feminism - as with all 'isms - is its adversarial nature. Adversarial not constructive..... always looking for something or someone to blame for one's discontents. A more constructive intellectual journey would be one which tries to imagine a future in which the essential differences between man's and woman's natures are recognised whilst at the same time recognising that the full flourishing of both sexes is of equal importance to The Good Life. I think about this a lot these days.
There are of course many different kinds of both modern and ancient feminism which go muchly beyond the binary exclusions given by the authors that you quote and the work of Judith Butler too.
It is interesting to note that in some of the Southern US states it used to be illegal, and maybe still is, to engage in any kind of sexual intercourse other than the missionary position. Such a position demonstrates how the male completely dominates his female "partner" - no dancing allowed (quite literally)
One of my favorite such feminists is introduced below - note the assessment of Donald Trump and what he represents.
Another very useful resource is the book edited by Karen Tate titled Voices Of The Sacred Feminine Conversations to Re-Shape Our World which features essays by 40 contributors, all of which are very interesting with some of them being superb.
None of whom would appear at a CPAC freak show or be featured on the Unherd website
It's not masculinity and femininity, it's men and women that complement each other so well.
Women and men are the reality. Femininity and masculinity are the heavily-stereotyped perceptions.
And it's not feminism that caused the problems, it's the thousand years of misogyny that necessitated feminism that caused the problems. You forgot that part, asshole.
Come on, didn't you know that before the dreaded feminists came along, the earth was utopia and the lion and lamb slept in the same woodland spot? As a believer in women's self-determination (a feminist), I don't have a hive mind, and the word feminist is used to lump the basket of deplorable females into one globular lump and then blame each one for anything the other females say or do. As in "She makes women look bad." She makes herself look bad, just as a male rapist makes himself look bad. I don't sit there thinking "He makes men look bad," but too many men and women have no problem throwing all XX into the basket and under the bus.
I love reading you, no bullshit, no dilky-dallying.
Every time I read the phrase “the problem with feminism”, the soundtrack to “My Fair Lady” and the songs “Poor Professor Higgins” and “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man” pop in my head, and it’s a laugh. Very similar to the sensation when I read the phrase “all Black People” or “all Asians”.
Look, we all know that if Germaine Greer just had been more tractable we wouldn’t have the Metrosexual. There a straight line between the 19th amendment and Bill Clinton’s affairs. “Maude” caused “The Bachelor” - it’s practically a spinoff. If it weren’t for “Golden Girls”, Trump wouldn’t have had sex with a porn star while his wife was prégnant. As far as I can tell, every single straight male public failing is due to feminism, somehow, right?
As a gay male, I get along great with women, but we’re not... complimentary. More collegial.
Somehow in all these discussions, I have a longing for just complimentary compliments, like “you’re in a good mood today!”
Graphic typo? Did you mean to have two copies displayed of the covered wagon photo? The first one looks misplaced or extra.
There will probably be a lot of back and forth on this thread, but let me instead point you to two places which might help on your last topic for Part 1: "Was Christianity’s somewhat puzzlingly rampant spread through the Roman Empire spearheaded by women?"
First, unless you meant sometime after 100 or 200 AD, the spread of Christianity might not have been all that rampant, at least until Constantine provided his imprimatur around 312 AD. And later as pagan tribal chieftains were converted, their whole tribe was forced to follow suit (willingly or not). The book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World [2022], by Daniel Kohanski cites a scholar David Sim, who claims there were maybe 800 Christians around 70 AD, and perhaps around 8000 Jewish and Gentile converts by 100 AD. [This is located at 1324 & 4226 of 6085 screens in my Kindle version; perhaps page 129 or 192 in printed version, per the "Index" (that does not index the e-book version!! In the bibliography I found: David Sim 2005 "How many Jews became Christians in the first century? ... " in something called Hervormde Teologiese Studies 61, 417-40. 10.4102/hts.v61i1/2.430; should you wish to dive deeper :-)]
HELEN DALE AND LORENZO WARBY AUG 28, 2022. While discussing the transition to the Romanized (or Hellenized?) Constantinople from the Rome based empire, Lorenzo says this about feminized sexuality and the impacts of male chastity:
“The third shift is the Christianisation of the Empire. This can be categorised many ways, but at its core was shift from an immanent (this-world) to a transcendental (other-world) conception of sacredness, plus the imposition of a feminised sexuality. Christianity sanctified sex-as-commitment, via the extolling of an ethic of chastity for men.
Civilisations typically impose an ethic of chastity on women, to maximise the paternal-reliability of female fertility. Imposing an equivalent ethic on men, including sanctifying the single-spouse marriage that is a necessary support for an ethic of male chastity, was a profound and striking cultural shift.
The modern sexual revolution un-does the Christian sexual revolution in many ways. But a key aspect, accelerated by the rise of dating apps, is a shift from female-typical sex-as-commitment to male-typical sex-as-casual-catharsis. (Which, prior to Christianisation, had been very much the elite Roman male view and social norm.)”
I will be looking forward to your Part 2 discussion topics, perhaps more than what you presented here in Part 1. My father by his example, and my mother by her explicit admonitions, taught their sons to treat women respectfully and as intellectual equals. Any woman who does not want to be treated that way probably has problems beyond my ability to mend.
Thank you for all this.....I'll bear it in mind for my Part 2 when I get to it.
The two images of the covered waggon photo (one a close up of the man and woman and one the full photo) was deliberate. It is such a powerful image and one that I felt really contributes to my man-woman-life-journey theme....but if it appeared too early in the text risked confusing the reader into thinking this essay was mainly about the American pioneers.
really the photo duel placement was just slightly confusing since it was not included in the photo caption, so did seem out of place. Also of course the wagon photo is aiming at the idea of long term joint commitment, etc., while the other two are slanted more towards the "right now" couple moment (granting the marriage register pic is about marriage, too, but the honeymoon comes first! :-) ).
If I ever dig for the David Sim reference, I will pass along what I find.
It's just occurred to me that "spearheaded" was not the right word for what I meant. I was picking up from an article I'd just read (can't remember where now sadly) that was speculating - not that women spearheaded Christianity but - that feminine-typical personality traits played a large role in keeping it alive in its early 'incursion' years.
This caused me to think along the lines of comparing masculine and "macho" on the male side: macho having the flavor of being a show off, inappropriately aggressive, dominating, while masculine is more neutral but includes the "strong silent type". Then I sought the equivalent for the female side and I struggled to find the right words. Neutral femininity includes the motherhood/ nurturing aspect, and love/ support for the men and children in her life. I ended up deciding the equivalent to macho was more along the lines of the Victorian fainting/ swooning stereotype, just short of being whiny: somewhere along the line of "I am helpless and need a man to make me important", when we realize "real women" don't need or convey that attitude at all.
I think the article I mentioned was taking from the 'Big 5 Personality Traits' that evolutionary psychologists talk about....and how they differ in their balance along a male/female axis....things like 'Agreableness' etc (but I've only ever skim-read this sort of thing).
We can understand the traits via an evolutionary developmental perspective [4/10/22] .
I also found this new reference that I intend to explore further, which may have some relevance to your future considerations of the feminine influence on promulgating Christianity. Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not 1st Edition, by Robert N. McCauley: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199827265?tag=psychologytod-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1
There are any number of people who have explored the details of the sexual marketplace and pointed out the terrible mistakes women today are making there. Stefan Molyneux on Free Domain Radio has a number of excellent videos on the topic.
Fascinating, thank you! I also hold out hope for better understanding and mutual support between women and men, and this is a brilliant summary of some recent steps forward. Another seismic shift is the way the trans controversies around women's spaces and sports have highlighted our differences. I don't think we can get anywhere without being honest. In that vein, I think we have to confront the reality of male violence and promiscuity, which traditionally have been airbrushed out of the picture in favor of happily ever after fairytales. In societies that advocate liberty and justice, we keep hitting our heads against the reality of male domination. Because, and this is the crux of our problem, men have had to control women in order to know who their children are. Our social systems are based on that female subordination, yet it flies in the face of our ideals of individualism and freedom. Men have never been, and never will be reliably monogamous, but we looked the other way for good providers. Men often take out their anger on women and children, but we pretend that only those "other" men do that. Women are brutally violent in indirect ways, and are much less promiscuous but still stray. To be successful at this, we have to confront reality.
Much truth here Brigid... and things I expect to write more on over time. As I said "steering a fair course through the choppy waters of discourses about relations between men and women is the trickiest of all." Some of the things you mention I've touched on here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/the-less-desired and here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/life-in-the-shadows-of-metoo....in case you haven't seen them already.
Looking forward to reading, thanks!
I agree with your point about transgenderism forcing us to confront the reality that men are different from women. But I take issue with the assumption that men cannot be monogamous. Nancy Pearcy has done some research on the whole idea of “toxic masculinity,” and interestingly she found that before the Industrial Revolution, boys were not assumed to be naturally “wild,” and men were expected to equally be caregivers in the household with children. Once the Industrial Revolution removed men from the household and farm and had them work away from home in factories, did we start to see a rise in male violence, promiscuous, and other behaviors that at first, society was concerned about. But when things didn’t seem like they could change, then you suddenly had this notion that boys and young men were “wild” and the whole “boys will be boys” mentality took off from there. So no, I do not think we need to assume that men cannot be monogamous less so than women can. That is a fundamental myth that only encourages men not to strive for monogamous relationships. Men and women need to work together for monogamous relationships, they also need to work together to raise children and have strong families.
I liked her commentary, but I also took issue with that point. It's not in the interest of those who need males for the military, or for industry leaders, to have monogamous males bonded to their families. I believe male suicide leads directly back to the societal brainwashing telling us "Boys will be boys" and that monogamous males are all hen pecked. The sex drive varies in and among both women and men, but multiple sex partners are not healthy for men or women. Humans are meant to form lasting bonds and the family is that primary bond. Your point about the industrial revolution reminded me of a book about the history of educating children prior to the formation of government schools. According to the author, children stayed next to the mother until approximately 3-yrs-old, when they had reached a point where they could feed themselves and take care of some of their own hygiene. After that, the boys went with the father or were apprenticed out to learn a trade. The girls stayed with the mother to learn their mother's home trade.
Agreed. And interesting point about the boys learning from their father from an early age. That’s definitely missing from a lot of families, and esp fatherlessness that’s rampant in our society today.
We are failing the future, but I believe the tide is turning.
I really hope you are right!
Respectfully, completely disagree. “Multiple sex partners are not healthy” is simply what you’ve been led to believe from Christian religions, it has no real basis in fact or reason. Religion has warped ordinary sexual pleasure to be conceptually entirely in service of reproduction. One of the larger world religions explicitly forbids contraception, nutty. Many societies and civilizations permitted mutiple sex partners throughout life, Mormons and Muslims being recent versions of having multiple concurrent partners. Divorce and remarriage is predicated on the idea of multiple sex partners, as well as remarriage after death of a spouse. I could give the usual spiel about Romans and Greeks varieties of sex, but that’s easy to find through self-directed reading.
On a second dimension, to have pleasureable sex, you have to learn. Nobody was born cooking superb cuisine, playing fantastic stirring music, telling stories through dance, accomplished visual artists. They learned. Wonderful sex takes honesty, affection, and learning. Multiple partners are a good way to learn.
Lastly I could speak about Bonobos but I have to go to dinner. Cheers!
I'm not a Bonobo or a bee or a horse or anything other than a human. A religious ban on contraception has nothing to do with this discussion. Multiple societies also permitted human sacrifice and other fun things. I agree sex has to be learned, but that doesn't require multiple partners. It just requires 2 people who are attentive to each other's needs. Having a single, committed partner also removes some of the stress of worrying about the consequences of disease, violence and unattached pregnancy. As the minister who married us said (crudely), new puss/ck becomes old puss/ck. He got the message across!
So you have no point of reason or fact to support the assertion other than... you’re not a horse? And equating human sacrifice to the pleasures of sex with different partners? Following this, sex is a horror, something humans have which is a harsh fact of life and the less of it the better, seek one partner so that you can grope blindly through the hideousness of existence together minimizing the abject torture that it brings.
Just sayin’
Its a puzzle why you spend so much time on this site... since you are not a subscriber.
You literally promoted the It's been done by lots of others before, so it must be good argument. You are also the one who introduced a non-human animal.
I find this an interesting and compelling example the sanity-making quality of the historical perspective. Verifiable historical facts can be used to call into question decades of cultural air-castle building and concomitant denial of realities. The fact that close public examination of a numerically inconsiderable (of course totally valid) biological variant of human sexuality has been instrumental, and for people caught up in the castle-building, necessary, in confirming the reality of sex-based (almost universal) male/female difference says it all. How deluded can a culture get? We're still finding out.
One of the advantages of getting old is that none of this matters. Eventually, hopefully, we all grow up and see men and women as men and women and not objects.
There's a difference between being an object and an object of desire. An object is something static, not alive, without feeling, unthinking. At any rate, I don't think that Beauvoir speaks for all women, everywhere, at all times.
That's just one view and one aspect of sex. I don't need you to explain it to me. You can have sex any way you want it with any woman who wants to have sex with you in that manner. It's not a universal view. I'm not saying that you're wrong, it's just not always that way.
" I don't think we can get anywhere without being honest."
Yes! Besides the usual "honesty is the best policy", another saying that is not original with me, that I enjoy repeating is "Reality Is Not Optional". Also, see Yeats poem "Ode to a Grecian Urn".
"... the crux of our problem, men have had to control women in order to know who their children are." I had never thought of that in quite that way (i.e., control!), but it certainly makes sense. Plus, whether in reference to fatherhood or other understandings, no one likes to be played for a fool. Then again, there are plenty of examples where a man took on the burden of (knowingly or unknowingly) supporting another man's child/children. Women can do that to a man! :-)
I am sorry to say that today the evidence shows it is the women who are promiscuous more than the men. Very few men have anything like the appeal to bed many women. Perhaps film stars and rock legends. But ordinary men?
The latest data shows many young men are having no sex at all. The picture is rather different for the young women.
And I don't really buy the violence angle either. I have no doubt it happens. But I don't believe it is anything like the epidemic feminists paint. Dysfunctional people exist of course, male and female. But women are choosing the men so they must take some responsibility.
Interesting trends you mention which to me are evidence of the unnatural state of affairs we're in. I'm influenced by evolutionary biology and my half century plus observations of humans and animals. Males have predatory sex drives (and I don't mean that in a pejorative way, though I know it's a loaded word) in order to maximize their reproductive chances. In that sense females are prey, best defended by another male. We're all a lot better off if we understand those drives. Fathers of daughters are the most honest about it, in my experience.
Women can have strong sex drives and can be promiscuous of course, but it's so much more dangerous for women, with risks of pregnancy and intimacy with someone much stronger, that historically and across cultures women tend to be much more cautious and focused on selective seduction rather than seeking variety.
Male violence in hunting and defense of self and tribe is what allowed us to thrive as a species. It's not inherently bad but may not be suited to modern life without, again, awareness.
We've only been off the land for a very short time, even most Americans lived on farms until 100 or so years ago, so it's no wonder we haven't adapted perfectly yet to our new circumstances.
Yes, I am encouraged by a subset of feminists who are realizing all the ways that the feminist movement (and sexual revolution) largely failed women. But it’s still an uphill battle.
On a side note, I really wonder at anyone learning about feminism from someone like Judith Butler who is decidedly anti-biological sex. How can I really gain anything that helps me as a woman, from a thing that can’t define a woman in the first place?
Learning about straight men and women (and things like human biology, sexual selection, reproductive strategies, the pair bond, etc) from Judith Butler is like learning about African-Americans from the KKK.
She simply moves the class struggle of Marxism into the realm of women and sex, and hopes to burn it all down to appease her resentment at being a very manly woman that was never included in the usual mating games of the sexes.
And I say this knowing that it's not fair to judge someone's "philosophy" by their appearance, but in this case, it's just too obvious that the English language (and women who commit the grave sin of liking and desiring men) is sentenced to be tortured because too many people mistakenly called her "Sir".
Hahaha, yes well put. Agreed.
Thanks!
Of course Butler's entire output is a monumental pile of bullshit and no one in all recorded History was ever more in need of a Pol Pot Holiday in Cambodia—where intellectuals get to work the fields 18hrs a day and subsist on a diet of gruel—which would quickly refute her claim that all sex differences are oppressive cultural impositions...but that being said, she deserves eternal mockery and scorn just for her horrific prose style alone, which is to reading what chewing glass is to eating.
If a woman is an adult female, at what point does she become an adult? What is the criteria? Same for males who become men.
Pretending not to know the obvious in order to suck fools into trap debates. Lame.
Please reference the post you are refuring too. Thank you. On the surface, what's obvious to some is not obvious to others.
You don't know what makes an adult? Lol. GTFO.
Could the religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian Donald Trump be in any way described as a mature adult. Some say that he has the speech patterns of a four year old, and of course the emotional "maturity" of a sub-adolescent.
And yet he is idolized by many right-thinking Christians!
Instead of snark, offer a definition.
You're just being Trolled I think.
Avoiding the argument by quibbling over tone. More lameness.
The common, more biological, answer is that a female becomes an adult after they go through puberty. However, adult in body does not equal mature in mind, which the term “adulting” implies. When a man or woman becomes a mature “adult” in mind, attitude, and behavior differs from person to person, and we can argue about which age society expects adult males and females to start acting like “adults” in this definition of the term.
I assumed that everyone understood an adult was a person who was recently, but no longer a child. When a child has a mature body (not growing), mature mind (they can conceptualise the future, as a starting point), they have mature sex organs (can reproduce) they aren’t a child anymore. All people naturally reach these stages at different times. Some cannot reach mature thinking and make responsible decisions as a young adult, some mature sexually far earlier than their thought process can keep pace, some stop growing far sooner than their potential would indicate
This always seems to revolve around sexual maturity, but sexual maturity, cessation of growth, and ability to think maturely about consequences for actions are very different concepts, we expect all three in adults.
It is commonly recognized in some circles that human beings do not grow into their bodily maturity until about the age of 25. Such could thus be said about their emotional-sexual maturity too. The key to understanding anyone's sexual is their emotional maturity - what one is at the emotional level signals one's sexual maturity, or lack thereof too.
What you cant hide is if you are crippled (emotionally) inside.
I often had the job of mentor to younger employees in our division of a gigantic company. My mentees were alway easy to divide into 2 groups, one which wanted to know the secret of becoming a “manager” equivalent next promotion cycle, without any real conversation, and one which actualy engaged with me, more a friend than a pompous-feeling "mentor" beyond next promotion cycle.
Exasperatedly I always ended up somehow telling the former to tell their boss what role they wanted, since they could only focus on the next 6 months it seemed. To them, I must have had some “secret” being the shadow advisor to C-level people that I was to reluctant to divulge.
With the latter, I always asked something very conversationalky to the effect of where they saw rhemselves outside of work, when they were retired perhaps, perhaps age 60 or 70. After initial very hard struggles with the concept (I wish I had reaction videos of the blank stares) most came through after a few months, and once they saw themselves in a future, then they developed their own framework for good decisions - and happiness - and realized the "career" question was tangential.
Ultimately, with what I thought of as the most mature people, they wanted to somehow feel that "they mattered", that their life was of consequence. Some would have large extended familes that they supported, many focused on their life in leadership within a community religious or LGB setting (or both) or political (or all of the above). Something of a future.
That's why I agree, the ability to conceptualize the future for ones-self, and make good decisions, seemed the Hallmark of adults I worked with, and age 25 was around when that seemed possible.
Ok, my initial comment did not use the word “adult” at all though, only the word “woman.” So I am still a bit confused as to what exactly you are trying to point out. That we can’t define “woman” when we can’t define “adult?” Or that we assume what “adult” means without defining it while using it in the definition of another word like “man”’or “woman?” Yes, I take it for granted that most readers of Slouching towards Bethlehem Substack do know the correct, non-Woke definitions of such terms as adult and woman.
In other words, there's no real definition and all the brouhaha over it is nonsense.
Well the real definition of when a female becomes an adult female, is in fact after said species completes puberty. Then they are biologically an adult. When a human adult begins acting like a mature person, is a whole other conversation, in which you could argue is nonsense, sure. But I’m not sure how the argument about when a woman (or man) starts acting maturely within society is in any way relevant to the article talking about feminists realizing that the feminist movement was bad for women.
It was just a small point. I tire of the use of the word adult, without a reference to a definition.
If you're demanding a definition of an adult, then you have some sort of problem with adulthood. Mature adults don't tire of the use of the word adult.
A positive development but nothing like the sea change needed. I suspect it will be younger women and men who do it, not the old guard.
The videos on Tik Tok of childless women in their 30s and 40s almost deranged in their inability to manifest the feminist dream they were promised speak louder than feminist literature. The very young are social media addicts after all and what they have access to is not flattering to the sisterhood. I know the young men are definitely consuming it. There is an entire genre of content covering it in some detail.
The current climate is deeply toxic, particularly for men. And for increasing numbers of women it is becoming less appealing to be strong and independent as many are now realizing those glittering careers are just jobs. I watched one young lady online do the mental calculation of how long she would have to work if they increased the retirement age to 75 (46 years); the shock on her face as the implications sunk in were visible. She was in New York City and was unable to find a suitable husband.
Not really disagreeing with you, but perhaps to phrase it as "women should seek to be appealing as strong and independent persons who are also willing to be an equal partner in a relationship." I surmise that most strong and independent men would prefer a strong and independent woman over a weak and dependent one (all things being equal).
On retirement: if a single woman has a semi or fully professional job and income, she would have enough to retire comfortably by age 60 if she saved and invested wisely. Avoid costs for new cars, overly expensive vacations, excessive recreation and clothing, etc. Then if she is still invested in her career she can continue in that direction with even less concern for the future, or seek an alternative path in her life. This latter situation might also make her more attractive to some of the (past or new) men in her life.
Since the general topic here is feminism perhaps this book review essay by Arnold Kling I just found will be of interest to you all: Persistent Differences in Gender Temperament, discussing Joyce Benenson’s Warriors and Worriers [2014]; https://www.econlib.org/library/columns/y2023/klinggender.html
I could not decide among the several pithy comments I might extract here, but the essay is short and might merit your examination. She claims her results comparing the behavior and interests of boys/males vs. girls/females are from 30 years of research and presumably cross cultural lines so are not just Western society biased.
I LOVE THAT BOOK!
Everyone needs to read it
I could add it to my list or pile, but I would probably never get to it.
Can you provide a decent synopsis beyond Kling's article?
Judith Butler's Gender Theory?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_Trouble
At the very least I have introduced you to the English language's worst living prose writer.
Sorry. I thought you were referring to the Warriors and Worriers book by Joyce Benenson.
I'll rely on Graham for interpreting Butler's version of "reality".
oops sorry
so many books!
Thank you for this.
You might also want to look at Christina Hoff Sommers, particularly _The War Against Boys_. She wrote a lot in the late 90s and early 2000s, and got effectively unpersoned for it.
This is supposedly a Native American proverb
“A woman’s highest calling is to lead a man to his soul so as to unite him with Source. A man’s greatest calling is to protect woman so that she is free to walk the earth unharmed”.
There doesn't seem to be much progress in either of these endeavours.
This is something I have been writing about for several years now, and this proverb sums up my understanding. The woman gives man his reality by pulling him...I was going to say out of the clouds but let me change that to out of his mom's basement. In turn, he frees her from the endless demands made upon her by the world--giving her the support, encouragement, and space needed to grow. If I go back to the word "clouds," we can see that they serve in complementary ways (not that I consider myself a complementarian Christian). She pulls him down from the clouds; he pulls her up from the ashes (think Cinderella--the drudgery of the work often imposed upon women). Sadly, we seldom see this in action.
I recently read Mary Harrington's book Feminism Against Progress, and also Louise Perry's The Case Against the Sexual Revolution. I agree 100% that we have gone the wrong way and have hurt men. I especially agree that before World War I, men and women worked together, mostly in agriculture where men took on the heavier workload. Family was central. Women worked in the fields and pitched in where needed but had many little ones to care for. I come from a long line of farmers and I'm old enough to have seen the last of this generation fade away--my grandmothers' and grandfathers' generation. I am not saying they got it right but they were closer. The fifties and sixties gave rise to what we are witnessing now. Ironically, many Christians believe this was the golden age. Thanks for sharing.
Interesting comments. Perhaps the root error of feminism - as with all 'isms - is its adversarial nature. Adversarial not constructive..... always looking for something or someone to blame for one's discontents. A more constructive intellectual journey would be one which tries to imagine a future in which the essential differences between man's and woman's natures are recognised whilst at the same time recognising that the full flourishing of both sexes is of equal importance to The Good Life. I think about this a lot these days.
There are of course many different kinds of both modern and ancient feminism which go muchly beyond the binary exclusions given by the authors that you quote and the work of Judith Butler too.
It is interesting to note that in some of the Southern US states it used to be illegal, and maybe still is, to engage in any kind of sexual intercourse other than the missionary position. Such a position demonstrates how the male completely dominates his female "partner" - no dancing allowed (quite literally)
One of my favorite such feminists is introduced below - note the assessment of Donald Trump and what he represents.
http://susangriffin.com/strong-man
Another very useful resource is the book edited by Karen Tate titled Voices Of The Sacred Feminine Conversations to Re-Shape Our World which features essays by 40 contributors, all of which are very interesting with some of them being superb.
None of whom would appear at a CPAC freak show or be featured on the Unherd website
The editor also has a talk show http://www.blogtalkradio.com/voicesofthesacredfeminine
Thank you for these links.... I'll take a look.
It's not masculinity and femininity, it's men and women that complement each other so well.
Women and men are the reality. Femininity and masculinity are the heavily-stereotyped perceptions.
And it's not feminism that caused the problems, it's the thousand years of misogyny that necessitated feminism that caused the problems. You forgot that part, asshole.
Come on, didn't you know that before the dreaded feminists came along, the earth was utopia and the lion and lamb slept in the same woodland spot? As a believer in women's self-determination (a feminist), I don't have a hive mind, and the word feminist is used to lump the basket of deplorable females into one globular lump and then blame each one for anything the other females say or do. As in "She makes women look bad." She makes herself look bad, just as a male rapist makes himself look bad. I don't sit there thinking "He makes men look bad," but too many men and women have no problem throwing all XX into the basket and under the bus.
I love reading you, no bullshit, no dilky-dallying.
Every time I read the phrase “the problem with feminism”, the soundtrack to “My Fair Lady” and the songs “Poor Professor Higgins” and “Why Can’t a Woman Be More Like a Man” pop in my head, and it’s a laugh. Very similar to the sensation when I read the phrase “all Black People” or “all Asians”.
Look, we all know that if Germaine Greer just had been more tractable we wouldn’t have the Metrosexual. There a straight line between the 19th amendment and Bill Clinton’s affairs. “Maude” caused “The Bachelor” - it’s practically a spinoff. If it weren’t for “Golden Girls”, Trump wouldn’t have had sex with a porn star while his wife was prégnant. As far as I can tell, every single straight male public failing is due to feminism, somehow, right?
As a gay male, I get along great with women, but we’re not... complimentary. More collegial.
Somehow in all these discussions, I have a longing for just complimentary compliments, like “you’re in a good mood today!”
Graphic typo? Did you mean to have two copies displayed of the covered wagon photo? The first one looks misplaced or extra.
There will probably be a lot of back and forth on this thread, but let me instead point you to two places which might help on your last topic for Part 1: "Was Christianity’s somewhat puzzlingly rampant spread through the Roman Empire spearheaded by women?"
First, unless you meant sometime after 100 or 200 AD, the spread of Christianity might not have been all that rampant, at least until Constantine provided his imprimatur around 312 AD. And later as pagan tribal chieftains were converted, their whole tribe was forced to follow suit (willingly or not). The book A God of Our Invention: How Religion Shaped the Western World [2022], by Daniel Kohanski cites a scholar David Sim, who claims there were maybe 800 Christians around 70 AD, and perhaps around 8000 Jewish and Gentile converts by 100 AD. [This is located at 1324 & 4226 of 6085 screens in my Kindle version; perhaps page 129 or 192 in printed version, per the "Index" (that does not index the e-book version!! In the bibliography I found: David Sim 2005 "How many Jews became Christians in the first century? ... " in something called Hervormde Teologiese Studies 61, 417-40. 10.4102/hts.v61i1/2.430; should you wish to dive deeper :-)]
Second: is this from Lorenzo Warby's Substack: : https://www.notonyourteam.co.uk/p/succession-claims-and-succession Succession claims and succession games, What is the lineage of a state? or, what Romanitas and Britishness have and the Russkiy Mir does not
HELEN DALE AND LORENZO WARBY AUG 28, 2022. While discussing the transition to the Romanized (or Hellenized?) Constantinople from the Rome based empire, Lorenzo says this about feminized sexuality and the impacts of male chastity:
“The third shift is the Christianisation of the Empire. This can be categorised many ways, but at its core was shift from an immanent (this-world) to a transcendental (other-world) conception of sacredness, plus the imposition of a feminised sexuality. Christianity sanctified sex-as-commitment, via the extolling of an ethic of chastity for men.
Civilisations typically impose an ethic of chastity on women, to maximise the paternal-reliability of female fertility. Imposing an equivalent ethic on men, including sanctifying the single-spouse marriage that is a necessary support for an ethic of male chastity, was a profound and striking cultural shift.
The modern sexual revolution un-does the Christian sexual revolution in many ways. But a key aspect, accelerated by the rise of dating apps, is a shift from female-typical sex-as-commitment to male-typical sex-as-casual-catharsis. (Which, prior to Christianisation, had been very much the elite Roman male view and social norm.)”
I will be looking forward to your Part 2 discussion topics, perhaps more than what you presented here in Part 1. My father by his example, and my mother by her explicit admonitions, taught their sons to treat women respectfully and as intellectual equals. Any woman who does not want to be treated that way probably has problems beyond my ability to mend.
Thank you for all this.....I'll bear it in mind for my Part 2 when I get to it.
The two images of the covered waggon photo (one a close up of the man and woman and one the full photo) was deliberate. It is such a powerful image and one that I felt really contributes to my man-woman-life-journey theme....but if it appeared too early in the text risked confusing the reader into thinking this essay was mainly about the American pioneers.
really the photo duel placement was just slightly confusing since it was not included in the photo caption, so did seem out of place. Also of course the wagon photo is aiming at the idea of long term joint commitment, etc., while the other two are slanted more towards the "right now" couple moment (granting the marriage register pic is about marriage, too, but the honeymoon comes first! :-) ).
If I ever dig for the David Sim reference, I will pass along what I find.
It's just occurred to me that "spearheaded" was not the right word for what I meant. I was picking up from an article I'd just read (can't remember where now sadly) that was speculating - not that women spearheaded Christianity but - that feminine-typical personality traits played a large role in keeping it alive in its early 'incursion' years.
This caused me to think along the lines of comparing masculine and "macho" on the male side: macho having the flavor of being a show off, inappropriately aggressive, dominating, while masculine is more neutral but includes the "strong silent type". Then I sought the equivalent for the female side and I struggled to find the right words. Neutral femininity includes the motherhood/ nurturing aspect, and love/ support for the men and children in her life. I ended up deciding the equivalent to macho was more along the lines of the Victorian fainting/ swooning stereotype, just short of being whiny: somewhere along the line of "I am helpless and need a man to make me important", when we realize "real women" don't need or convey that attitude at all.
I think the article I mentioned was taking from the 'Big 5 Personality Traits' that evolutionary psychologists talk about....and how they differ in their balance along a male/female axis....things like 'Agreableness' etc (but I've only ever skim-read this sort of thing).
Your comment sent me on a top level search about the Big 5, where I found this intro level discussion: https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/theory-knowledge/202204/evolutionary-functional-analysis-the-big-five-traits An Evolutionary Functional Analysis of the Big Five Traits
We can understand the traits via an evolutionary developmental perspective [4/10/22] .
I also found this new reference that I intend to explore further, which may have some relevance to your future considerations of the feminine influence on promulgating Christianity. Why Religion is Natural and Science is Not 1st Edition, by Robert N. McCauley: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0199827265?tag=psychologytod-20&linkCode=ogi&th=1&psc=1
There are any number of people who have explored the details of the sexual marketplace and pointed out the terrible mistakes women today are making there. Stefan Molyneux on Free Domain Radio has a number of excellent videos on the topic.
You're right of course but the point of my essay is to focus in on feminist women who are questioning the received feminist narratives of recent times