Simcha Fisher on male-female friendship

[Xantippe]

I really enjoyed this piece by Simcha Fisher on the importance of male-female friendship.

https://www.catholicweekly.com.au/simcha-fisher-fostering-friends-can-save-us-sexual-chaos/

Some quotes:

“A dreadful number of problems arise between men and women simply because they have no idea how to act around each other. They just haven’t had any practice. Combine this lack of practical experience with a heavily pornified culture, and disaster is guaranteed.”

“Some Catholics, seeing the sexual and psychological chaos of so many lives, live in such rigid fear that their children will fall into sexual sin, they keep boys and girls apart as if they’re chemicals that will explode if they mix. What a dreadful mistake. When we segregate the sexes, we teach boys and girls to be fearful and suspicious of each other – and, at the same time, we encourage a wild curiosity that will be sated in one unhealthy way or the other.”

“What happens, horribly often, is that a married man who was raised this way thinks he’s entitled to whatever he wants from his wife’s body, and she thinks she has to put up with it, because that is the reward for pre-marital chastity. Pure misery all around.”

"When you are friends with the opposite sex, you get used to thinking of them as more than sexual objects for your consumption, and it will be harder for you to let yourself even think of pressuring them into sex, much less assault them.

"When you are friends with the opposite sex, you will be more likely to come to the defense of someone who needs help – a young woman who is being harassed or threatened by other men, or a man who is being ill-used or manipulated by other women.

“When you’re friends with the opposite sex, you become a better parent to your own children of that sex, because their ways will not be so foreign to you.”

“It might be difficult to remain friends with someone you’re attracted to, but I reject with disgust the idea that it’s impossible for boys and girls to be friends, or that girls are somehow defrauding boys if they enjoy their friendship without wanting romance.”

I got a lot out of platonic friendships in college and as a young adult and I think they helped a lot in teaching me to be a good wife to my husband.

 

[alice24]

yep. Thank you, this is very good.
A very good friend on me and my husband (male) once told me that he is glad to have my female view on understand some situations with women he didn´t understood. Not that he had problems with respecting borders, more the opposide - but I think this in every way healthy and good. He has no sister and I have no brother, and really, sometimes we laugh and say “if we knew each other earlier, we probably hadn´t went trough some bad situations”.
Husband told me that in his only male (ex)friend circle there were so irational ideas in their minds nobody really questioned because there were no orrecting female.
I think being created as woman and men is also helpful to learn some things. We weren´t different Iv it were good for us to seperate in male or female only groups.

 

[Xantippe]

Husband was telling the family recently of disagreeing with someone (a woman) who thought that women were mysterious. When he heard the story, my 12-year-old son (who has both an older and a younger sister) was also puzzled by why one would think of women as being mysterious.

 

[alice24]

Well it often happens this way I think:
women /men are different - we can´t understand them - they are mysterious - so we don´t need to understand them, as we can´t . This is of course the worst way. But a too romantic view on masculinity or femininity is not very healthy, too. The boyfriend of a co-worker seriously thought women have no hair on their legs, except a minority who uses all the stuff he sees on TV. I don´t know if I should laugh or cry because of this (not happened with sisters )

 

[Xantippe]

The boyfriend of a co-worker seriously thought women have no hair on their legs, except a minority who uses all the stuff he sees on TV. I don´t know if I should laugh or cry because of this (not happened with sisters )

Oh, wow!

Yeah I actually have seen that before in an online context–it was a manosphere guy (I forget which one) who was giving ratings of women’s looks based on how much body hair they had naturally, obviously working on the assumption that the default for women should be to not naturally have leg hair.

For those playing along at home, thicker, darker leg hair is actually a sign of puberty for girls.

 

[F_Marturana]

Some Catholics, seeing the sexual and psychological chaos of so many lives, live in such rigid fear that their children will fall into sexual sin, they keep boys and girls apart as if they’re chemicals that will explode if they mix. What a dreadful mistake. When we segregate the sexes, we teach boys and girls to be fearful and suspicious of each other – and, at the same time, we encourage a wild curiosity that will be sated in one unhealthy way or the other.”

I went to Catholic school, and boys and girls were separated in 6th grade. It was horrible. Up until fifth grade a number of my closer friends were boys. We’d chit chat and make jokes. Once I got into sixth grade, I no longer had the friends that were boys. Many of the girls were just extra catty. I suffered academically and socially.

Thanks for the article. I like Simcha.

 

[1Lord1Faith]

“How can a man or woman possibly come to see sex this way, if they’ve been trained since childhood to think that the opposite sex is off-limits? I pity the poor married couple who were taught that premarital chastity consists of tying your hands behind your back and gritting your teeth until the other person goes away or stops haunting your dreams. What is such a couple supposed to do when they get married? How can they flip a switch and suddenly learn how to enjoy and respect each other, when just yesterday, each other’s bodies were their worst enemy?“

Is this a recent phenomenon? Because this wasn’t a thing when and where I was a teenager.

I see this fear of all things sexual on CAF all the time. It pretty much only comes from the teenagers and young adults here. I am fairly convinced that it’s a result of young people reading the CCC on their own without any guidance, but not only that, there is also something lacking in their understanding of basic theology, which has to be understood first before reading things like the CCC.

I think it partly boils down to a problem of people attempting self-catechesis, or being catechized in a bad way by others.

I’m always surprised at some of the posters here who say that they teach catechesis to kids at their parish. I wouldn’t let my kids anywhere near these people. From what they say here on the forums, I can tell that there is something fundamental missing from their own formation.

 

[Xantippe]

I see this fear of all things sexual on CAF all the time. It pretty much only comes from the teenagers and young adults here. I am fairly convinced that it’s a result of young people reading the CCC on their own without any guidance, but not only that, there is also something lacking in their understanding of basic theology, which has to be understood first before reading things like the CCC.

I think it’s easy to self-generate bad ideas from isolated truths.

It’s easy to get from “I must not have premarital sex” to a lot of terrible ideas, if you don’t have a good, cohesive theological framework.

You hear a lot today about “purity culture,” but when I was a young Evangelical, I came up with many of those bad ideas almost all by myself, without anybody’s help.

Elizabeth Smart Shares How Teaching Chastity the Wrong Way at Church Has Harmful, Lasting Effects

While Elizabeth credits her faith for the hope and healing she experienced after her abduction, she shares how our culture can often harm women in unintentional but profound ways.

www.ldsliving.com

 

[1Lord1Faith]

That is a great article. The analogy about the chewing gum was so awful that I cannot see how anyone could ever use it. The fence analogy is not as vial, but it is just as useless, and as Elizabeth points out, actually harmful. Neither analogy provides a healthy look at sex outside of marriage.

Even after her rescue, Smart sat through another such lesson, in which she was told: “You’re like this beautiful fence, and you hammer these nails in, and then every time you have sex with someone else, it’s like you’re hammering in another nail. And you can take them out, you can repent of them, but the holes are still there.”

Another analogy that misses the point of the gospel and our Savior Jesus Christ, who came to this world to atone for our sins and to experience our pains so that in every circumstance He can make us pure, make us whole, and heal our broken hearts. Analogies like these can not only limit our divine worth and power, they also can limit His.

“I just remember thinking, This is terrible,” Smart shares. “Do they not realize I’m sitting in class? Do they not realize that I’m listening to what they’re saying?”

 

[Xantippe]

The analogy about the chewing gum was so awful that I cannot see how anyone could ever use it.

Yeah. There are apparently a lot of other horrible purity analogies in circulation, including a licked candy bar or a rose crumpled by being handled by many people. As I have seen other people point out, the problem with these popular analogies is that these are cheap, disposable items that you would throw away once they got used or spoiled–which is not really how we want our young people to think about themselves or others.

See also Michelle Duggars bicycle story and Jim Bob’s cup-full-of-spit story:

The Duggars’ dangerous cult of purity

In “A Love That Multiplies,” Michelle Duggar recounts a story that her husband told his older children “to explain the importance of purity.” “Imagine that your parent…

www.chicagotribune.com

As Elizabeth Smart points out, these stories don’t offer any hope.

 

[alice24]

The Duggars’ dangerous cult of purity

The Duggars are off the air, but we need to start pushing back against their ideas, too.

As Elizabeth Smart points out, these stories don’t offer any hope.

They scare me to deah, really.

 

[F_Marturana]

It must have been a manosphere guy who actually never saw a real woman except in magazines and videos where they’ve been airbrushed.

 

[F_Marturana]

Elizabeth Smart is that young girl abducted out of her bedroom by the couple right?

 

[Xantippe]

It must have been a manosphere guy who actually never saw a real woman except in magazines and videos where they’ve been airbrushed.

Well, it is true that women tend to have shaved/waxed legs when wearing shorts and skirts when out and about, so a guy who hasn’t lived with young women might not know.

 

[Xantippe]

Elizabeth Smart is that young girl abducted out of her bedroom by the couple right?

Yeah.

(16 characters.)

 

[DarkLight]

The really annoying thing is how these analogies are used just for sexual sin.

I have had a friend use a very similar analogy for sin in general, in an explanation of why we do penance. Basically, all sin follows that idea of leaving holes. Confession pulls the nails out, but we still need to fill the holes left by sin with virtue instead. So that’s where things like penance come in, to try to replace those holes.

 

[Norseman82]

It’s a good thing some of you weren’t alive in Jesus’ day. He’d never be able to get a parable told with the “Analogy Gestapo” ready to silence Him over imaginary offenses over the examples He used.

Youse need to stop dwelling on the objects of the analogy and look at the lesson being told, unless it is that underlying lesson that for some reason you feel threatened by.

 

[alice24]

The “lesson being told” in the Duggar example is that women are dirty and used when their virginity is lost - no matter why. This is sick and nothing I would teach my children.

 

[Xantippe]

The “lesson being told” in the Duggar example is that women are dirty and used when their virginity is lost - no matter why. This is sick and nothing I would teach my children.

Yeah.

In fact the bicycle analogy is basically an analogy for rape. The bicycle didn’t choose to be stolen or damaged, but it’s still wrecked forever, and its lawful owner will never love it or enjoy it they way he would if it has stayed pristine.

 

[Xantippe]

It’s a good thing some of you weren’t alive in Jesus’ day. He’d never be able to get a parable told with the “Analogy Gestapo” ready to silence Him over imaginary offenses over the examples He used.

Youse need to stop dwelling on the objects of the analogy and look at the lesson being told, unless it is that underlying lesson that for some reason you feel threatened by.

What is the lesson being taught by the candy bar analogy? That any sexual contact (premarital or marital, consensual or nonconsensual) turns the recipient into useless garbage?

I don’t know if you notice this (being a guy), but the message of most of the analogies is that even marital sexuality is gross, dangerous and destructive. Even if one were to follow the rules perfectly, the underlying ideas could still undermine one’s marriage because it makes sex sound terrible (and yes, quite a number of people who grew up with those messages have reported exactly that result).

None of the analogies reflect the fact that the listener is a child of God, has an immortal soul, that marital sexuality is a great gift, and that the listener will (hopefully!) one day be a perfected saint in heaven. The analogies are mostly about how they are throwaway, disposable, nearly worthless items.