Things I learned from feminism I wish I'd learned from Christianity

[Xantippe]

Those things are not mutually exclusive.I would have no problem signing a private contract.
“No price is too high to pay for the privilege of owning yourself.” (Friedrich Nietzsche)

Let’s imagine that you follow your plan and then have a seriously disabled child or a couple of them and you stick around and parent your seriously disabled child or children until the day you die.

I’m not sure that Friedrich Nietzsche is really the go-to guy for dealing with that situation. In fact, he’s probably the least helpful person (next to Ayn Rand) for coping with having life-long dependents.

Also, more practically, this is definitely one of those situations where living a normal bourgeois life will make things easier and more pleasant for everybody (if not actually easy and pleasant).

 

[DarkLight]

I’m confused. SST, do you want a sacramental marriage and an agreement of “until death do us part” to have a stable home for children (just minus the paperwork), or do you want to show a woman the door if she’s ever unhappy with your behavior?

Those things are not mutually exclusive.

I’m really not sure how this works.

 

[Xantippe]

SST,

How are you planning to square your “I get my way all the time or I bail” theory with the needs of small children?

Does your personal philosophy make any sense at all for a prospective father?

Have you ever met anybody with those views who is a truly admirable father, with a good relationship with his kids?

 

[SuperLuigi]

Xantippe;14754567]–We’ve already had a lot of experimentation with out-of-wedlock parenting and cohabitating parents over the last 50 years. I can’t find the stat right now, but as I recall, 39% of cohabitating parents break up within five years. The fragility of cohabitating parenting is a well-known fact of American life:
live.washingtonpost.com/onlove-pitfalls-of-cohabitation.html
“A recent study from Drs. Sheela Kennedy (Minnesota) and Larry Bumpass (Wisconsin) found that 65% of children born to cohabiting parents saw their parents break up by age 12, compared to just 24% of children born to married families.”

Co-habitation is bad news all around.

–In case SuperLuigi is following, it looks like Starshiptrooper is obliquely espousing the views on 100% wifely obedience that SuperLuigi said were nonexistent on CAF. Those views are not that hard to find in the “Christian” Red Pill world.

Also, I never said they didn’t exist on here, I said I could never find posts that people in general complain about.

–If Red Pill guys are so negative about porn, why do I keep hearing Red Pill guys pining for sexbots and virtual reality porn?

I never said they were. A lot of mainstream atheists who are in PCwife’s small-letter red pill category just released commentary on this recently because feminists were angry at the newer versions of sex-bots.

 

[SuperLuigi]

Speaking of people getting burnt out, there is a widespread belief among conservative Christians (including among Catholics on this board) that marital duty involves sex on demand, with no right of refusal.

I sure hope not.

That seems like a recipe for burnout to me and for marital sex becoming a chore, but I’ve never been able to talk anybody out of it.

…I’ll defer on this.

 

[SuperLuigi]

–feminism

Uhh…usually 3rd wave unless I am talking about Christina Hof-Sommers (Based Mom), or Julie Bindel.

–third wave feminism

Feminism tied into post-modernism.

stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/hicks-ep-full.pdf

 

[DarkLight]

Also, I never said they didn’t exist on here, I said I could never find posts that people in general complain about.

Unfortunately, the last couple of threads I can think of all got deleted by the mods. I know there was one pretty recently that ended up deleted that had the “sex-on-demand” thing in it. And a lot of black-and-white thinking between a “loveless marriage” and “sex on demand”.

 

[chevalier]

That’s more or less true–as I’ve mentioned more than once on CAF, it’s been a learning experience for me to discover that the emotional dial can contain other emotions than CALM and BERSERKER RAGE, those being the two approved emotions in my family-of-origin (with berserker rage being primarily the privilege of senior members of the family).

That does sound rather WASP-y, admittedly.

However, I just don’t relate at all to what you describe of your lady friends–I don’t know anybody who acts like that, and if I did, we wouldn’t be friends. (It does remind me a bit of my husband’s Warsaw grandma, though–she drove everybody nuts.)

One thing does jump out at me, though–although you may not notice it, there may be a similarity between your lady friends and your own personal style. You’re also very idiosyncratic and have a lot of unusual personal rules and like spontaneity. Isn’t that more or less what you don’t like in these women? I suspect that if you were less idiosyncratic, had fewer complicated personal rules and were less focused on spontaneity, that you could meet women who were less idiosyncratic, had fewer complicated fewer rules, and were less focused on spontaneity.

Which ones do you mean? Some of my could-have-beens I may have said something about in the past or the two or three lady friends whose positive behaviours I’ve only just cited appreciatively as an example of how one can be considerate in dating contexts? It’d be difficult for me to comment without knowing this.

 

[chevalier]

Speaking of people getting burnt out, there is a widespread belief among conservative Christians (including among Catholics on this board) that marital duty involves sex on demand, with no right of refusal.

Strictly speaking that’s true, though we’d need to take an analytical approach. There is a right to refuse ‘unlawful’ demands (and that, interestingly to some of those folks no doubt, would be any demand aimed solely at the demander’s own sexual gratification, for which I could find a precise quote from Aquinas) simply because such an invalid demand cannot create an obligation.

Next, people can’t be expected to take a serious risk of incurring a disease or otherwise endanger their health or submit to a humiliating demand.

However, a married person does indeed not retain the sort of sovereignty that a sexually active single person enjoys in popular culture.

Hence, a wife asking her husband or a husband asking his wife for sex is emphatically not the same kind of request considered at absolute liberty as asking someone out on a date (or a girlfriend asking a boyfriend for a kiss or vice versa).

‘Do not withhold yourselves from each other unless you agree to do so just for a set time, in order to devote yourselves to prayer. Then you should come together again so that Satan does not tempt you through your lack of self-control.’ (1 Corinthians 7:5.)

This refers to anything from old anti-sex heresies to modern ‘I only have a duty when I absolutely feel like it’ notions.

Hence there is indeed no straight-out acceptance vs refusal consideration as if of a non-binding proposal completely within the freedom of the negotiating parties. In this sense there can be said to be no right to just simply refuse (marriage removes such discretionality).

 

[BlueEyedLady]

I realize that unmarried couplehood and parenthood is a thing among ultra-rich Hollywood types and also among poor people and people from weird Protestant groups, but those are also very poor people. It’s virtually unknown for comfortably middle class practicing Christians to raise children outside civil marriage. Do you have any real life examples to point to of people doing this successfully, because I don’t.

It’s interesting you associate this idea with Protestants. When I hear this, I don’t think of religion at all. I think of the worst trailer park, barely getting by with government assistance, Mountain Dew in the kids’ sippy cups, mom’s temperamental boyfriend drinking away every paycheck, Midwestern or Appalachian stereotype.

For someone who so clearly craves respect to aspire to this is just weird. It’s the old cutting off your nose to spite your face thing.

 

[chevalier]

If Chevalier is still around, I just came across this, which is by a woman who was sexually abused by an adult man in her early teen (he was convicted but did a very brief sentence and their Protestant church community ostracized her and her family):

natalierose-livewithpassion.blogspot.com/2017/02/intimacy-after-abuse-my-childhood-abuse.html

“When you’re a survivor of sexual abuse, navigating sex and intimacy can be awfully tricky territory. **There are unexpected pitfalls and triggers seemingly everywhere. Something you think will be okay turns out to really not be. Something that felt safe for years suddenly feels unsafe. **The footing never feels very sure.”

“One aspect of intimacy after abuse that I’d like to give a voice to in this post is the idea that abuse doesn’t just hurt the victim, it hurts everyone the victim will ever be close to. My abuse didn’t just hurt me, it hurt my husband, too.”

“1.) My husband finds himself accidentally re-creating my abuse. Gosh. Could it be any worse? Nope, not really. On occasion, during intimacy, something will happen that reminds me of some aspect of the sexual abuse I experienced. Or to put it more bluntly, my husband will do something that reminds me of something my abuser once did to me (please note, my husband is very kind and respectful to me, there are just some things within sex that unavoidably remind me of my abuse.)”

And?

 

[chevalier]

Here’s what I’m talking about:

Let’s say that repeated boundary testing is making me feel uncomfortable about a particular individual (be it a date, a platonic male friend or a female friend).

My instincts are screaming at me that I feel unsafe and disrespected with this person, whereas I feel safe and respected with 90-99% of other people.

Why do I have to spend time alone with this one person, versus the other 90-99% that I feel safe and respected with and whose company I actually enjoy?

Just like everybody else, you don’t have to spend time with people whose company you don’t enjoy. Rather, the problem is that according to your list about 90% of the people a woman dated would trigger her. Hence she would be unrealistically and without a need or purpose harm her own chances of establishing a happy relationship. Hence the advice at least borders on harmful. One other thing is also rash judgement and unfounded accusations, which goes against the 8th commandment and can in serious cases be grave matter (not that a confused person would necessarily accomplish the knowledge and will, but repeatedly electing to judge people superficially perhaps could).

And in what way is that paranoia?

The paranoia is in (and throughout) the list of alleged red flags, not the ‘feeling unsafe compared to 99% other people’ you’ve brought up right now. The one is not consistent with the other.

And to be clear, this wouldn’t be announced with some loud, dramatic flourish. I would just spend no time alone with them anymore (if at all avoidable) and as little time with them and other people as possible.

Last time I checked the advice was to exit quietly, which is what I had an issue with. Hence I cannot simultaneously be accusing you of proposing a loud, dramatic flourish.

My contention is that judging potentially good people on the basis of wild hypotheses derived from exaggerated clues in their potentially innocent behaviours and then leaving them clueless (without feedback) as to what they allegedly did wrong, that’s hugely toxic behaviour as far as relationships go.

(Unlike when dealing with a real toxic person, where deescalating the relationship, even so it hopefully dies a ‘natural’ death, would indeed be preferable to pointless confrontation.)

I just don’t normally find myself spending time with people I don’t trust at this point in my life.

And that’s great, but you can’t just tell people to be so distrustful of those they interact with as to stop barely short of calling the cops because something was odd in the person’s voice.

 

[starshiptrooper]

Indeed.

I don’t really see the point of a) being super afraid of divorce but b) dealing with that by raising children in cohabitation instead. (Children of divorce are typically more functional than children raised by cohabitating parents–there are a lot of stats on this.)

Of course not, you do not see the problem with a contract that is biased in your favor. To quote a feminist saying, “Privilege is invisible to those who have it.”

Let’s imagine that you follow your plan and then have a seriously disabled child or a couple of them and you stick around and parent your seriously disabled child or children until the day you die.

I’m not sure that Friedrich Nietzsche is really the go-to guy for dealing with that situation. In fact, he’s probably the least helpful person (next to Ayn Rand) for coping with having life-long dependents.

Also, more practically, this is definitely one of those situations where living a normal bourgeois life will make things easier and more pleasant for everybody (if not actually easy and pleasant).

SST,

How are you planning to square your “I get my way all the time or I bail” theory with the needs of small children?

Does your personal philosophy make any sense at all for a prospective father?

Have you ever met anybody with those views who is a truly admirable father, with a good relationship with his kids?

When I started going to the gym, I severely restricted my consumption of fluids other than water. There is a lesson there that is applicable to other areas of life.

 

[chevalier]

Like, I’d have to dig them up, but there’s some interesting studies on classrooms. Men tend to talk more than girls. But when they take steps to even that out, the men tend to perceive the women as dominating the conversation - even when statistical analysis shows that the men are still speaking more often.

I’m not trying to offer vain talk in refutation of empirical findings, but that sounds odd to me.

Similarly, I’ve dealt with a lot of men who consider any rejection from a woman, or hint that she’s not appreciative of their advances, to be a sign that she’s a “feminist *****” or a “man-hater” or somesuch.

Feminist, I see no connection (unless perhaps the language used is mentally associable with feminism, e.g. it resembles the typical writing style of feminist writers the woman reads and subconsciously quotes or emulates, sort of like a pious Christian’s language would reflect whatever was the going Bible translation of the time, or like it’s easy to tell a lawyer by his writing, even in non-legal contexts).

As regards ‘man-hater’, well, I suppose some women unload their entire frustration with the male sex on whatever man they are currently chastizing for his behaviour, just like mothers and teachers do in obviously non-dating contexts. Men aren’t actually bad at emotional intelligence, and they can pick up clues women think they aren’t showing. Hence a man, even the average bloke that isn’t particularly dense, can indeed spot some kind of general disappointment in men that a woman has too thinly disguised and thinks it doesn’t show.

Not because she actually is one, but because they have an idea in their minds of how things are supposed to work.

Naturally, there are still going to be men who will do anything to vilify a woman for rejecting them (labels, shaming, false accusations of loose morals etc.).

 

[chevalier]

I suppose uber-Catholic dating involves marriage by proxy?

It involves dating by proxy. Through the girl’s father.

And it has more to do with being uber-Protestant than uber-Catholic anyway, except those mighty armchair theologians don’t even begin to catch the wind.

Chaperone is another favourite concept.

 

[starshiptrooper]

Most people don’t match with the red pill list that is referenced over and over like beating a dead horse.

The term **red-pill is long past those confines **and from what I can tell was never in those confines anyways. So if someone says they are red pilled, it doesn’t mean they follow that list.

I would say the same for blue pills, but no one outside of here really uses that term

Sir, I object to your cultural appropriation.

I never said they were. A lot of mainstream atheists who are in PCwife’s small-letter red pill category just released commentary on this recently because feminists were angry at the newer versions of sex-bots.

Why would feminists worry about sexbots? They should be overjoyed at the prospect of all the men who “sexually objectify” women and value them only for sex having no motivation to bother them.

Maybe it is because they will lose the only value they ever had in the dating market.

 

[AdamP88]

Of course not, you do not see the problem with a contract that is biased in your favor. To quote a feminist saying, “Privilege is invisible to those who have it.”

Well that’s just it…the Catholic vision of marriage is much more than just a contract. It’s a
sacrament, and a bond that is indissoluble until death.

If you want to have a marriage that lasts, then you could start by practicing the faith yourself, and searching among Catholic women who are seeking the same thing.

Otherwise you could keep complaining about how marriage is weighted in favour of women and how bad feminists are yada yada yada…but that’s not going to actually do anything unless you simply are happy to do that and settle for the kind of woman who is happy to deal with a man who can’t commit.

This is my main puzzlement with your philosophy…you essentially are trying to justify the very type of fear of commitment that has destroyed marriage in the first place…and claim that it liberates men when in fact it only makes the problem worse!!!

 

[faithsmind]

Let’s imagine that you follow your plan and then have a seriously disabled child or a couple of them and you stick around and parent your seriously disabled child or children until the day you die.

I’m not sure that Friedrich Nietzsche is really the go-to guy for dealing with that situation. In fact, he’s probably the least helpful person (next to Ayn Rand) for coping with having life-long dependents.

:Kleenex: so true, so true.

 

[chevalier]

There is no such thing as normal bourgeois life. There is only typical bourgeois life, and that’s a difference.

 

[starshiptrooper]

This is my main puzzlement with your philosophy…you essentially are trying to justify the very type of fear of commitment that has destroyed marriage in the first place…and claim that it liberates men when in fact it only makes the problem worse!!!

I will explain my opinion with an analogy. How familiar are you with free market concepts: particularly the boom and bust cycle, inflation, and sound monetary policy?