Catholicism – Too Feminized?

  • Thread starter Thread starter ShadowBoxer
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
Yeoman said:
My wife’s view as well.

But not mine.

Working in the law, I’m afraid any inappropriate stuff a Priest can address is likely to have already reached the ears of the young by way of the popular culture long, long before parents believe it has. By the time they’re out of grade school, they already have the same knowledge and exposure that most people didn’t arrive upon in earlier eras until their 20s.

One of the problems we now face is that many Priests never address this stuff at all. And parents don’t either. By the time they’re 16, they already have been told its all okay in music, film, and television, and by their friends who are doing it. Getting around to it after that is going to suggest it’s all just optional, particularly if the pulpit didn’t think it important enough to address.

Our kids now have to walk through the sewer just to get to grade school, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves otherwise.
Click to expand...
Eh, I would disagree.

I’m actually not that fanatical on sheltering my kids, but I would suggest that the sheltered child of today is way more sheltered than the sheltered child of yesterday. When I was a kid, there was definitely a class of movie that was adults only (my parents rented Top Gun and we didn’t get to watch), but the whole family watched a lot of network TV that I would never have on around my kids today. Whereas today, we have a large library of children’s DVDs and a list of approved Netflix shows, and that’s it. We watch anything at all inappropriate after the kids go to bed. So I know for a fact that my kids have gotten way less media sex and violence than I did at the same age. And that’s very common today for families with conscientious parents (and pretty much all the parents at school are conscientious). Little kids in middle class families are very innocent, at least in my experience. Middle school kids, who knows?

Also, kids are different. One of mine has been negative about the idea of marriage or childbearing ever since she heard that having babies hurts some years back–she’s 13 and she doesn’t want to get married. I asked her what her vocation was, and she said “single lady with a horse.” When I read her the sweet American Girls book about puberty (really adorable cartoons!), she was disgusted and revolted by the whole thing. A kid like her doesn’t need to hear too much negative stuff about sex and sexuality–she’s freaked out enough as it is.
 
Xantippe said:
Eh, I would disagree.

I’m actually not that fanatical on sheltering my kids, but I would suggest that the sheltered child of today is way more sheltered than the sheltered child of yesterday. When I was a kid, there was definitely a class of movie that was adults only (my parents rented Top Gun and we didn’t get to watch), but the whole family watched a lot of network TV that I would never have on around my kids today. Whereas today, we have a large library of children’s DVDs and a list of approved Netflix shows, and that’s it. We watch anything at all inappropriate after the kids go to bed. So I know for a fact that my kids have gotten way less media sex and violence than I did at the same age. And that’s very common today for families with conscientious parents (and pretty much all the parents at school are conscientious). Little kids in middle class families are very innocent, at least in my experience. Middle school kids, who knows?

Also, kids are different. One of mine has been negative about the idea of marriage or childbearing ever since she heard that having babies hurts some years back–she’s 13 and she doesn’t want to get married. I asked her what her vocation was, and she said “single lady with a horse.” When I read her the sweet American Girls book about puberty (really adorable cartoons!), she was disgusted and revolted by the whole thing. A kid like her doesn’t need to hear too much negative stuff about sex and sexuality–she’s freaked out enough as it is.
Click to expand...
If I remember right, you also mentioned one of your kids had Aspergers. Is this your 13 year old?

I have Aspergers too and I remember being ambivalent about marriage and motherhood. In fact none of my friends had ambitions about marriage at all. Our moms who were all SAHM encouraged us to have careers.
 
Xantippe said:
Yep.
Click to expand...
I remember my mom asking me the same thing about what I wanted to do when I grew up. I was no beauty, I was skin and bones. Olive Oyl was my nickname. I assumed marriage was improbable for me so I said single lady who studies the stars and lives on the mountain near an astronomical observatory.

No mention of horses. I was terrified of them.
 
Xantippe said:
Eh, I would disagree.

I’m actually not that fanatical on sheltering my kids, but I would suggest that the sheltered child of today is way more sheltered than the sheltered child of yesterday.
Click to expand...
I think parents wish to believe that, but the outside exposure is so enormous that is tougher than we suppose.

I’ve been through all of that as well, but once kids hit junior high you really begin to become aware of the flood of influences. Just walking through the grocery store line exposes a child to more information on what the society wants adults to believe that that they should be obsessed with than sneaking a peak at a really nasty publication tended to do in the 1950s. We don’t even notice it. If they read the newspaper at all they’ll pick up a lot. And in the wider world children their own age are often doing things that are shocking.

The only way to keep children isolated from that would be complete isolation. And then your run the risk that they enter the world and are shocked by it, being incapable of operating in it, or simply viewing everything you told them as so restricted as to not be real.

I’m not offering advice on this, I’d note. I just think that the view parents have that their children are shielded is often quite inaccurate.
 
Yeoman said:
My wife’s view as well.

But not mine.

Working in the law, I’m afraid any inappropriate stuff a Priest can address is likely to have already reached the ears of the young by way of the popular culture long, long before parents believe it has. By the time they’re out of grade school, they already have the same knowledge and exposure that most people didn’t arrive upon in earlier eras until their 20s.

One of the problems we now face is that many Priests never address this stuff at all. And parents don’t either. By the time they’re 16, they already have been told its all okay in music, film, and television, and by their friends who are doing it. Getting around to it after that is going to suggest it’s all just optional, particularly if the pulpit didn’t think it important enough to address.

Our kids now have to walk through the sewer just to get to grade school, and we shouldn’t fool ourselves otherwise.
Click to expand...
You make an interesting point. You can’t believe the junk we have to unpack in High School Catechesis that the teens have already bought into, have seen, have heard, and yes, even experienced. It’s really sad, and VEYR difficult to change those minds back to where they should be. Hard to “unform” a conscience that’s been built on popular media and celebrity activity.

However,
I suspect her (Xantippe’s) parish (which is a college chaplaincy) is geared toward college age students, and the pastor’s remarks there, means that some of the content might not be fit for young ears.
🤷
 
Sarcelle said:
IOur moms who were all SAHM encouraged us to have careers.
Click to expand...
One of the big huge changes of the second half of the 20th Century.

And one of sad facts of our economically driven consumer society has. Careers turn out to just be jobs, and frankly most jobs are disappointing and dispiriting.

Somehow, we went in the last century from the concept that the focus of life was family, and the point of a “career” was to provide for the family, to one where a person is “fulfilled” by a career. Well, except in rare exceptional examples, no career is fulfilling as they all turn out to be jobs. One of the accomplishments of the “liberation” of women from the household in the 20th Century (which had far more to do with the creation of domestic machinery than anything else) is that women were able to now share in this delusion, and now they often have to.

Note, I’m not saying women should not work. The massive change in personal labor needed to get by on a daily basis means that now they certainly can if they choose to do so, and that’s absolutely fine. But part of working in the marketplace for men always was the knowledge that most work is just work, and at some point it becomes personally unsatisfactory. Women now share that dispiriting circumstance too.

That does circle back around to this topic, however. As most work was that way, men tended to find meaning in their families and in certain activities that were traditionally male. Women tended to find meaning in their families and in the fact that women are capable of forming tight social bonds. Women still tend to form tight social bonds in nearly anything they engage in, but men often go to work and go home. Indeed a lot of the more inappropriate conduct men tend to engage in now probably stems from the fact that they don’t have much in the way of outside activity, and they’re bored in their lives.
 
pianistclare said:
You make an interesting point. You can’t believe the junk we have to unpack in High School Catechesis that the teens have already bought into, have seen, have heard, and yes, even experienced. It’s really sad, and VEYR difficult to change those minds back to where they should be. Hard to “unform” a conscience that’s been built on popular media and celebrity activity.

However,
I suspect her (Xantippe’s) parish (which is a college chaplaincy) is geared toward college age students, and the pastor’s remarks there, means that some of the content might not be fit for young ears.
🤷
Click to expand...
In my son’s first year of high school, it was already the case that one of his friends, and I’ve met him and he’s a bright sensitive kid, was carrying on a lurid physical affair with another student, and one of his female classmates had declared herself to be in love with another female classmate. All this was pretty open. A bunch of teachers got canned because an inappropriate skit they put on in a faculty meeting, which is telling.

On the flipside, and different from when I went to the same school, quite a few of the Catholic kids are aggressively Catholic, which we were not. And the new principal (a Mormon) tolerates less monkey business.
 
There’s not many people on CAF that are big into having their heads in the sand.
 
Yeoman said:
One of the big huge changes of the second half of the 20th Century.

And one of sad facts of our economically driven consumer society has. Careers turn out to just be jobs, and frankly most jobs are disappointing and dispiriting.

Somehow, we went in the last century from the concept that the focus of life was family, and the point of a “career” was to provide for the family, to one where a person is “fulfilled” by a career. Well, except in rare exceptional examples, no career is fulfilling as they all turn out to be jobs. One of the accomplishments of the “liberation” of women from the household in the 20th Century (which had far more to do with the creation of domestic machinery than anything else) is that women were able to now share in this delusion, and now they often have to.

Note, I’m not saying women should not work. The massive change in personal labor needed to get by on a daily basis means that now they certainly can if they choose to do so, and that’s absolutely fine. But part of working in the marketplace for men always was the knowledge that most work is just work, and at some point it becomes personally unsatisfactory. Women now share that dispiriting circumstance too.

That does circle back around to this topic, however. As most work was that way, men tended to find meaning in their families and in certain activities that were traditionally male. Women tended to find meaning in their families and in the fact that women are capable of forming tight social bonds. Women still tend to form tight social bonds in nearly anything they engage in, but men often go to work and go home. Indeed a lot of the more inappropriate conduct men tend to engage in now probably stems from the fact that they don’t have much in the way of outside activity, and they’re bored in their lives.
Click to expand...
I for one am grateful that Aspergers women like me with very limited social skills are not under any pressure to marry unlike in the past.

I do agree with you about jobs vs. careers. Most people these days do not have careers but jobs and I am one of them.
 
Yeoman said:
In my son’s first year of high school, it was already the case that one of his friends, and I’ve met him and he’s a bright sensitive kid, was carrying on a lurid physical affair with another student, and one of his female classmates had declared herself to be in love with another female classmate. All this was pretty open. A bunch of teachers got canned because an inappropriate skit they put on in a faculty meeting, which is telling.

On the flipside, and different from when I went to the same school, quite a few of the Catholic kids are aggressively Catholic, which we were not. And the new principal (a Mormon) tolerates less monkey business.
Click to expand...
What does “aggressively Catholic” mean?
Is that just plain aggressive, only with the faith as a convenient excuse? 🤷
 
**Having read this thread, I’m not sure if using the word “feminized” is a productive way to talk about the whole range of issues that the bishop raised. **

Every age has its own somewhat-biased understanding of what it means to be feminine or masculine–which is NOT the same thing as male or female–but in our times we can’t agree on what either one means!

When a word’s meaning becomes both vague and charged with emotional and political impact, it is worse than nothing in a discussion. In our times, for instance, when we use “overly-feminized” as a complaint, we don’t come off as saying that something is off on its “yin-yang” aesthetic balance. It comes off as an attack on women, instead.

So–let us tease this away from the whole idea of “masculine” and “feminine” as ask this:
  1. What imbalances was the bishop really talking about?
  2. Are these imbalances really related to each other at all, excepting that one could choose to trace their source to broad changes in economic and family life in the last 50 years, which do not step purely from changes that came about for women?
  3. Do the imbalances really have to do with masculine-feminine or yin-yang? For instance, do the liturgical problems come from an incomplete transition to a greater participation by the laity in planning liturgies or a improper infusion of pop culture into the liturgy, rather than “women running everything”?
In other words, if the young men were planning the liturgies instead of young women, or middle-aged men instead of middle-aged women, would it improve things that much? Would we see fewer misguided choices, or just choices that were misguided in a different way? If the latter, is “feminine” instead of “masculine” even the problem?

Maybe, for instance, the problem is not an imbalance in feminine and masculine. Maybe the problem is an imbalance in what some liturgists refer to the horizontal (love and service of neighbor) being emphasized *at the expense *of the vertical (love and worship of God). Maybe the problem is a turning attention towards self too much–for instance, the idea that boredom is the worst thing that can happen–rather than towards the I-Thou relationship–in which spending an hour in Church, feeling great, but ignoring God most of the time is the worst thing that can happen?
 
Yeoman said:
I think parents wish to believe that, but the outside exposure is so enormous that is tougher than we suppose.

I’ve been through all of that as well, but once kids hit junior high you really begin to become aware of the flood of influences. Just walking through the grocery store line exposes a child to more information on what the society wants adults to believe that that they should be obsessed with than sneaking a peak at a really nasty publication tended to do in the 1950s. We don’t even notice it. If they read the newspaper at all they’ll pick up a lot. And in the wider world children their own age are often doing things that are shocking.

The only way to keep children isolated from that would be complete isolation. And then your run the risk that they enter the world and are shocked by it, being incapable of operating in it, or simply viewing everything you told them as so restricted as to not be real.

I’m not offering advice on this, I’d note. I just think that the view parents have that their children are shielded is often quite inaccurate.
Click to expand...
I agree that once kids hit junior high, things get really dicey, but in any given Mass, there will be a lot of kids in the 5-12 range, where they often are very innocent (if their parents have been making any effort at all).

This has been my observation from listening to kids and hearing them talk and hearing other parents’ stories about their kids. We had our youngest 3 years ago when my older kids were 10 and 7 and they wanted to know how it is that the daddy’s DNA winds up in the baby. (AWKWARD!) I tap-danced my way out of that and didn’t give an answer at the time (my oldest had her hands full with coping with hearing about menstruation, body hair and acne) and only did the full birds and bees presentation with my oldest at 13. I know a lot of parents (including Catholic parents) operate on a much faster information delivery program, but that’s the parental prerogative, to have the freedom to provide information as it becomes appropriate. If a CCD program chooses to have an age appropriate information session, that’s different, especially if it’s announced well in advance, but I really hate and resent surprises in that area.
 
pianistclare said:
However,
I suspect her (Xantippe’s) parish (which is a college chaplaincy) is geared toward college age students, and the pastor’s remarks there, means that some of the content might not be fit for young ears.
🤷
Click to expand...
That was a very good guess, but it’s actually the reverse.

We mostly attend two different parishes, one a college chaplaincy and one a city parish with a couple of school and a lot of youth programs and a nursery–so very attractive to families. Both pastors are very orthodox and conscientious. The chaplain is calm and reserved and a bit of a trad. The family parish pastor is a yeller and very passionate and sometimes unfiltered–he’s the one who gave us the entire homily on pornography.
 
Yeoman said:
In my son’s first year of high school, it was already the case that one of his friends, and I’ve met him and he’s a bright sensitive kid, was carrying on a lurid physical affair with another student, and one of his female classmates had declared herself to be in love with another female classmate. All this was pretty open. A bunch of teachers got canned because an inappropriate skit they put on in a faculty meeting, which is telling.

On the flipside, and different from when I went to the same school, quite a few of the Catholic kids are aggressively Catholic, which we were not. And the new principal (a Mormon) tolerates less monkey business.
Click to expand...
Not to monopolize the thread, but way more 18-year-olds are virgins than was the case when we were in high school–I believe it’s about half now. Kids are much more supervised and scheduled than they were back in the 70s or even 80s.

This is a tough area to get good numbers, but here’s some stuff from the CDC:

"For example, among U.S. high school students surveyed in 20131

47% had ever had sexual intercourse.
34% had had sexual intercourse during the previous 3 months, and, of these
41% did not use a condom the last time they had sex.
15% had had sex with four or more people during their life.
Only 22% of sexually experienced students have ever been tested for HIV.*

cdc.gov/healthyyouth/sexualbehaviors/

This is meant to scare the socks off parents, but flip the numbers around and half of high schoolers haven’t had intercourse at all, 2/3 haven’t had sex in the last 3 months and 85% have had sex with 3 or fewer partners.
 
Xantippe said:
Not to monopolize the thread, but way more 18-year-olds are virgins than was the case when we were in high school–I believe it’s about half now. Kids are much more supervised and scheduled than they were back in the 70s or even 80s.

This is a tough area to get good numbers, but here’s some stuff from the CDC:

"For example, among U.S. high school students surveyed in 20131

47% had ever had sexual intercourse.
34% had had sexual intercourse during the previous 3 months, and, of these
41% did not use a condom the last time they had sex.
15% had had sex with four or more people during their life.
Only 22% of sexually experienced students have ever been tested for HIV.*

cdc.gov/healthyyouth/sexualbehaviors/

This is meant to scare the socks off parents, but flip the numbers around and half of high schoolers haven’t had intercourse at all, 2/3 haven’t had sex in the last 3 months and 85% have had sex with 3 or fewer partners.
Click to expand...
Huh, those sound lower than when I was in high school, too (early 2000s). Or maybe I’m just less shockable now.
 
This discussion made me think of this. My Dad had a Norman Rockwell book on our coffee table growing up.

 
Xantippe said:
Funny!
Click to expand...
Well, yes, until one of these dipsticks aims their aggression at you or starts blabbing around as if Rome and all the legions of angels are backing their stupid bullying.

That is, if bullying in the name of the Almighty is indeed what is meant by “aggressively Catholic.” Sometimes, people use terminology like that to mean Catholics who are more on the end of the charismatic or the pious than they are!

Sometimes, after all, “She thinks she is more Catholic than the Pope” really means “Harrumph!! She thinks she is more Catholic than me!!” :rolleyes:
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top