The Christian Marriage Dilemma

Marrying a Christian woman won’t necessarily give you a Christian marriage.

Readership: All; Christian Men;
Length: 2,900 words
Reading Time: 10 minutes

Running the Gauntlet

Earlier in my life, as I was struggling with my choices in the marriage marketplace, a married, Christian lady who knew me rather well gave me some very wise advice, but it was also very confusing advice.

“You need a Christian marriage more than you need a Christian wife.”

At the time, I had no idea why she made a distinction between the two.  I struggled with this conflicting dichotomy for years, trying to make sense of it.

I had made a commitment to myself that I would only “date” women who were Christians with the intentions of marriage. I attended a Christian college which I thought would increase my chances of meeting someone appropriate. Although I must have “dated” close to 200 women during my college years — most all of them professing Christians — again and again, I found that these women had no Christian mental concept of purpose in dating and marriage. Instead, they had an unspoken assumption that sexual relations should commence within the first few “dates”, and some of them showed little restraint in this expectation. Over the years, I met several women who posed a significant temptation to engage in sexual relations. Since I was hesitant to go forward outside of marriage, I was invariably rejected.

For years, I endured this cycle of temptation and rejection, never getting anywhere closer to marriage. To say I was “tempted sore” (as the Bible describes) is a severe understatement. To make matters worse, my parents divorced while I was in college, and this made me more confused about what kind of woman would be right for me. By the time I reached my late 20s, I had become rather cynical about “dating” and angry at God.

Yes, I was Blue Pilled, as was every guy in my generation (Xers) at that time. Yes, I had my own set of problems and hang-ups, including generational curses and anger towards my mother for divorcing my dad. But I couldn’t understand why I should be excluded from the grace of God and the blessings of obedience and believing in God. I always had a creeping feeling that something wasn’t right, but I could never put my finger on exactly what it was.  I didn’t recognize how postmodernism had infiltrated the church and had morphed into Christianality.  I never realized that Christian women were entirely subsumed by the wider Western sex culture.  Actually, no one was cognitively aware of this back then.

Non-Christians who behave like Christians?

A few years later, I came to Taiwan and I met many women here who actually ACTED like what I had always envisioned a Christian woman to be like – soft-spoken, humble, demure, kindhearted, and honorable. They were community oriented, looking to help and serve others.  They were respectful to men and dutiful to the elderly.  They held a high regard for marriage and viewed sexual relations seriously.  They were also thin, attractive, and well dressed. I was astonished to discover that these women were not actually Christians!  They were Buddhists, Daoists, and some were agnostic.  What a shocker!*

In a controversial post, Why do Christian women have the reputation of being wh0res? (2019 February 23), I briefly described this strange phenomenon I had learned through my personal experience living in Taiwan – how the typical Asian Buddhist woman might make a better wife than the typical Western Christian woman.

“Even here in Asia, if a western guy wants to get laid, scoping out the local single women at the nearest Christian church will yield a better lay ratio than hitting up a bar. Many women go to Church for the sole purpose of meeting and slaking foreigners. If a man wants to have a “Christian marriage”, he’s wiser to marry a thin, mature, submissive, respectful, Buddhist woman, and lead her to Christ in the process. That’s no joke!  They are more likely to be loyal for life, because they take their wedding vows seriously.”

For the first time in my life, I was able to get a glimpse of what my friend was talking about – that I needed a Christian marriage more than I needed a Christian wife.  For a long time after I discovered this, I thought long and hard about how this could be true and how I might best implement this truth in my life.  Is it really “God’s will” for me to marry a non-Christian woman?  How could I share my Christian faith inside a marriage with a non-Christian wife?  Wouldn’t our children be confused?  I was still in a quandary.

* From this, it is apparent that cultural expectations and upbringing have a much stronger influence on women’s behavior than religious affiliation or devoutness.  I presume that genetics also plays a significant role.

Christians who behave like Non-Christians?

Deti said something that helps make sense of this.  In The Feminist Life Script (2020 December 17), he described why Christian women of the West are fundamentally less than Christian.

“All women, and I mean ALL women, born after about 1960 are marinated in feminism and are feminists.  All women in the US over the age of 25 are feminists, and I don’t care what anyone says to the contrary because it’s not true.  EVERY man who has gotten married in the last 40 years married a feminist.”

I think the answer to my quandary is contained in this paradox.  The Buddhist women I met in Taiwan were taught filial piety, which conditioned them to be obedient to God’s created order, whereas the (nominal) Christian women of the west were steeped in feminism and were thoroughly disobedient to God’s created order.  I have met a significant number of Muslim exchange students over the years, and from what I can see, they are also more obedient to God’s created order than Western “Churchians”, especially in the area of Headship.

In summary, whatever religion a woman claims to believe in doesn’t really mean as much as whether she is actually obedient to God in her daily living.  The way we’ve heard this truth expressed in Red Pill parlance is “Don’t listen to what women say.  Watch what they actually do.”  Likewise, women who claim to be Christians, and who may even quote scripture and attend church, but who also believe in Feminist ideology and/or follow the Feminist Life Script, fit under this bill.  They “talk the talk”, but they don’t “walk the walk”.  They may have an appearance of godliness, but they deny the power of conforming to God’s intended ideal of them being submissive wives and feminine mothers.

Nikole Mitchell, former church leader and OnlyFans celebrity.

How does Christianity Apply to the Current SMP/MMP?

In NovaSeeker’s previous post, The Sexual Market IS the Marriage Market (2021 February 22), it was concluded that, in the Western feminist culture, young people must run the gauntlet of the SMP before being eligible for the MMP. This is true even among Christians and within the church. When this social melee is compared to other cultures, as vividly exemplified by my own life experiences written above, we come to a very uncomfortable truth concerning both the Churchian social culture and Western culture (which are basically converged).

Marrying a Christian woman won’t necessarily give you a Christian marriage.

Several questions arise at this point.

1. What actually makes a person a Christian?
2. What motivates a person to be obedient (or disobedient)?
3. Is having a Christian Marriage (i.e. Headship) really more important than having a Christian spouse?

The remainder of this post will explore these questions.

What actually makes a person a Christian?

Last year, I wrote a series of posts on the Purity Movement.  I was sad to see that, other than two posts in particular, these posts were not very popular.  In one post, The Elimination of the Church (2020 May 29), I wrote,

“Among those who were marginal or cultural Christians, it became fashionable to be more or less spiritually “preoccupied” with various Idols of the Tribe.  For example, those with a relatively high SMV were busy worshipping the fruits of the sexual revolution, and low SMV duds and snits were busy worshipping chivalry and feminism, respectively.”

There was a diffuse, unnamed fear that was prevalent within the Purity Movement.

“This fear caused a trifurcation of moral realism.  One group took abstinence to the prudish puritanical extreme and shot themselves in the foot in regards to their MMV.  Another group dabbled in sexual relations without “going all the way”, and used their technical virginity as a false psychological justification for remaining pure.  A third group was comprised of those who engaged in clandestine fornication and dealt with the stigma by either keeping it a secret, or else putting social distance between themselves and others in the Purity culture, all done in order to reduce the risk of possible exposure and the resulting shame.

Of course, some had already decided that they were going to explore their sexuality, and they could not handle the denial or duplicity of the second or third group respectively.  These individuals chose to leave the church altogether.”

What we are seeing here is the failure of the Church to provide a functional social context in which young people can move towards marriage.  As a result, it became relatively impossible for the mating process to fit the traditional Christian mold of courtship. So because there was no framework set in place to mold the growth of their faith, they chased after their personal desires, in some form or fashion. All in all, young people within the church lost sight of what it means to be a Christian.

If we answered the question of what actually makes a person a Christian? strictly on the basis of who is obedient to God’s ordained order, then virtually no one in the West would qualify. Everyone has compromised in some form or fashion. It is impossible not to do so, because the entire western culture is built on an amalgamation of Greco-Roman-Gothic values that have been whitewashed with a veneer of Christian values. Only recently, have we seen the bitter fruit of this society revealed in the decay and decline of Western morality and the now obvious corruption of “Christianality”.  As things stand now, there are exceedingly few people, even among Christians, who really know what it means to be obedient.

Joshua Harris, former pastor and author of “I Kissed Dating Goodbye”.

What motivates a person to be obedient (or disobedient)?

The purpose of being obedient is to partake in the beauty and blessings of God’s ordained order and His divine plans for one’s life.  In order to be obedient, we must recognize and appreciate God’s creation, His order, and His plans. If a person doesn’t taste the flavor of this through the family of origin or church involvement, then it is easy to miss in the mess of secular cultural influences.

If a person has no joy in partaking in the beauty of God’s ordained order through being obedient… if a person doesn’t understand the purposes of being obedient in accordance with His divine plans for one’s life… nor possess any hope to obtain the blessings of obedience… if there is no glorious sense of identity in Christ, then obedience becomes little more than rigamarole rule keeping — a legalistic exercise in fruitless futility. The willpower alone may not be enough to restrain one from joining in the ways of this world.

On the other hand, the wider secular culture is blaring a loud message that meticulously lays out all the adventures and alluring ecstasies of being disobedient, complete with a beautiful life plan and purpose.

• Liberal and profuse justifications of various deviations from morality abound (e.g. “single mothers need love too”; relaxed dress codes being the norm; the belief that love justifies immoral intimacy; etc.).
• The immediate satisfactions of profligacy appear to outweigh the arduous task of denying the fleshly nature.
• The value of exercising self-control has been replaced by the moxie of “Finding Yourself™”.
• Delaying gratification with respect to a larger sense of purpose is regarded as prudish.
• Drawing healthy boundaries has been suspended in favor of dissipation and lawlessness.
• Propriety has waned and has been transformed into the “Fear of Missing Out™” (FOMO).
• Any long term benefits of obedience become obscured and difficult, if not impossible to achieve.
• Any rewards of obedience are summarily ignored, or otherwise presented as naïve abstractions which carry little guarantee of fulfillment.

All of these influences call us to worship the god of sexual identity by partaking in the freedom of fleshly pleasures and the soul numbing satisfactions of corruption.  Thus, the path of obedience has become exactingly legalistic and detached while barely promising infinitesimal benefits, while the path of disobedience is the ostensible working “solution”, portrayed as prevalent in the wider culture, and well justified.  Those who try to straddle the fence in an effort to obtain the best of both worlds have to swallow an assortium of lies to do so.

It stands to reason that the true Christian is the one who lives a life that is uniquely distinct from the world – in spite of the sacrifices. Yet, even this is commonly confused with Rousseau’s individualistic approach to life when God is totally omitted.

Is having a Christian Marriage (i.e. Headship) really more important than having a Christian spouse?

Going back to my story in the beginning of this post, it is clear that I was faced with a difficult choice of compromises with no clear answer.

1. A nominally “christian” woman who has been steeped in the doctrines of feminism and materialism since her childhood, who is deeply entrenched in worldly values and lifestyles, and who, at some level, is at war against men and God’s ordained order of Patriarchy.
2. A non-Christian woman who embraces Christian practices, such as Headship, and is already familiar with living a life in obedience to God’s created order.  Such a woman may or may not be willing to convert to Christianity.
3. There is a third choice, even more uncomfortable than either of the first two.  Continue waiting for a Christian woman who has the mind and habits necessary to build a Christian marriage. In my case, I waited for nearly two decades without finding anyone to my liking.  Eventually, I buckled under the temptation and ran the gauntlet properly. I also had a failed first marriage.

Granted, this may be painting a false dichotomy with a broad brush, but the overall differences should now be clear to my readers. 

When men are faced with the question, “Which kind of mate would you prefer?”, the answers come down to something like this.

1. A Christian woman from a feminist culture, who has the mind of an arrogant 16-year-old girl, and acts like a slore?
2. A (insert other religion here) woman from a patriarchal culture, who talks like a lady, and acts like a Christian?*
3. Marry your fist, and forego having a wife altogether.

Choice 1 is the wide road leading to destruction which many western men have walked.
Choice 2 is difficult to find, and tortuously arduous in the adjustment.
Choice 3 is basically MGTOW, 30+ years of masturbation, and no family nor children when you are older.

Which one would you choose?  Any choice you make requires some type of sacrifice.

* There are Christian alternatives, such as joining the Amish or starting your own commune, but implementing this type of option is just as difficult as searching for a wife abroad.

Image Source: Schwartz and Sweet: 10 Things That Happen When You’re a Non-Amish Woman Married to an Ex-Amish Man (2019 January 7)

Conclusion

In his post, On the ethics of teenage marriage (2020 December 18), NovaSeeker answered the fundamental question of how to navigate this dilemma.

“It comes down to how much we are of the world, how compromised we are with it, how different we are willing to be from it.  Each of us makes our own decisions in these areas. I say that not to point fingers — I am personally no sort of “ultra” in these regards, not at all. But I do think we need to realize that we are all compromised by the culture, and we should resist the temptation to baptize or otherwise bless/sanctify our own reasoned compromises with the culture in which we live, rather than seeing them as just that — personal compromises that we personally judge as being appropriate, based on the culture in which we live and its broader standards.  How that fits into our own personal approach to living in the world, but not of it, is necessarily ensconced within the particular time and place of our culture, including all of the norms of said culture.”

As NovaSeeker wrote, under the present circumstances, it is a matter of how much (or how little) one is willing to compromise with the culture in which we live.

Readers might be disappointed with this conclusion if they try to correlate any compromise at all with a lack of true faith. Whether this is true depends on the context. The reality is that there is no perfect solution. Some type of compromise is inevitable as a cost of opportunity.  In fact, God intended life to be this way so that we would break free from the logical contraptions of our minds and realize faith.

If you’re struggling with the unsatisfactory choices described in this post, and the degree of compromise is your biggest concern, then your faith is not fully formed. You’ll always suffer from the regret of making one choice over another, and the bitterness of being forced to choose will eat away at your soul. You’ll be double minded, and you’ll miss the grace of God.

Instead of focusing on how much or how little we compromise, we need to get in touch with the Spirit of God, because there is no way to justify ourselves in this mess through our own logic, good choices, and self-discipline. The practical application comes down to your individual convictions about the issues in question and what you believe is God’s purpose for your life.

When making a choice, what does your heart tell you (your heart, not your mind) will glorify God and lead to your inner peace with God, your redemption, and sanctification in this present life?

If you are unfamiliar with this Heart-Led approach to faith, then I strongly suggest that you read Ed Hurst’s posts at Do What’s Right.  And pray!

Related

• Do What’s Right: Recognizing the Need for Redemption (2018 November 2)
• Σ Frame: The Elimination of the Church (2020 May 29)
• Do What’s Right: Peace in This World Not Possible (2020 July 7)
• Do What’s Right: Untrustworthy Logic (2021 January 20)

Parental Divorce Ruins Daughters’ Future Marital Commitment and Confidence

Another red flag: If her parents are divorced.

Readership: All; Parents;
Length: 2,000 words
Reading Time: 8 minutes

Introduction

When a married couple with children file for divorce, the children are often the worst to suffer.  But how does divorce affect children by sex?  Do either sons or daughters suffer more than the other?

I found a scientific research report published in the Journal of Family Psychology that answers this question.

S. W. Whitton, G. K. Rhoades, S. M. Stanley, and H. J. Markman, “Effects of Parental Divorce on Marital Commitment and Confidence”, Journal of Family Psychology, 2008 Oct; 22(5): 789–793. doi: 10.1037/a0012800

This study at Boston University revealed how daughters suffer worse than sons in regard to their future marital success.  I’ve collected snippets of quotes from this paper to be reviewed below.

Summary

Based on a comprehensive reading of the paper, women are identified as being the critical link in the success of a marriage.

The current findings show that, at the outset of their first marriages, women whose parents had divorced reported lower relationship commitment and less confidence in the future of their marriages than did women from non-divorced families. These results add to previous evidence that adults with divorced parents have lower commitment to marriage as an institution (e.g., Amato, 1996) by showing that women have less commitment to, and confidence in, their own marriages. Daughters of divorced parents appear to be more ambivalent about committing to a particular partner, not merely to the notion that marriage, in general, should be forever. Further, they report less perceived confidence in being able to make their own upcoming marriage last. The effects of parental divorce on marital commitment and confidence were small to moderate, as has been found for general attitudes toward divorce (e.g., Amato, 1996).

“General attitudes” is a heavy term which is not explored in this paper. Speaking from my own experience, it can be inferred that the experience of having divorced parents foments anger, bitterness, cynicism, and distrust, and it destroys the childrens’ hopes.

Results were consistent with those from previously presented analyses; significant gender × parental divorce interactions indicated an effect of one’s own parental divorce on relationship commitment and relationship confidence for women but not for men. In no case was partner parental divorce or the interaction between self- and partner- parental divorce significant, suggesting that couples in which both partners have divorced parents are no less committed or confident than those in which only the woman experienced parental divorce.

This means that if the wife’s parents are divorced, that’s the worst thing that could be for the marriage in regard to my introductory question. If the husband’s parents are divorced, it has much less influence on the marriage. This further supports my previous conclusions that the wife has more influence over the unity, harmony, and overall success of a marriage than the husband.

These findings echo those of previous studies showing a stronger impact of parental divorce on daughters’ than sons’ risk for divorce (e.g., Amato, 1996).

This effect is well studied, documented, and confirmed.

All in all, many things contribute towards undermining a woman’s attitude about marriage, but having divorced parents is a major wrecking ball.

Women who rock the boat sink the ship.

As mentioned above, women are the critical link in the success of a marriage. Going further, two factors were found in women, commitment and confidence, which were predictive of marital outcome. Digging into these effects further, they report that low confidence affects her psychological well-being.

…in the larger study from which the current sample was drawn, relationship confidence predicted change in women’s depressive symptoms over the first years of marriage (Whitton et al., 2007).

A woman with poor confidence is more likely to be deleterious, sensitive, and moody, and this has a significant, negative influence on her marital life. Now add in low commitment, and you have the recipe for a disaster.

Variance within a similarly restricted range of commitment has predicted marital stability over 18 months (Impett et al., 2001). In a large, community based sample, minor variation in confidence that one’s marriage will last was strongly associated with marital disruption (Nock et al., in press)

This means that regardless of her level of commitment, only slight falterings in the wife’s relationship confidence can create big waves in the marriage! It gets worse…

The measures of parental divorce and conflict were retrospective, introducing the potential for distortion by current mood or relationship adjustment.

Yes, wimmin are ALWAYS subject to the Feeelz! A woman who has had a miserable emotional history in her family of upbringing tends to bring a moody attitude into the marriage, and I surmise that this happens on the subconscious level, meaning she is not aware of it. And if all this is not bad enough…

During engagement, there appears to be little variation among couples in their levels of relationship commitment and confidence, with mean levels above 6 on a 7-point scale. Nevertheless, parental divorce is predictive of who will score relatively lower on the commitment and confidence measures, which may be important given the evidence that even small variations in marital commitment and confidence can have meaningful consequences to couple and individual outcomes.

This is scary! The word “predictive” in this passage implies that the risks inherent in marrying a woman with divorced parents goes undetected during engagement, and the attitudes and behaviors that contribute towards marital dissolution (i.e. poor commitment and low confidence) don’t show up until after marriage!

Perhaps there is good reason why daughters are a special protected class; they are the Achilles’ Heel of a society.

Statue of Achilles Wounded in the Heel at Achillion Palace, Corfu, Greece.

Generational Links

In the vast expanse of human history, the character and reputation of a woman’s family of origin was a major consideration for her worthiness of marriage. A multitude of classic literary works bear out this truth. But in recent times, this red flag has been largely overlooked, much to our undoing.

I know from my own family history that divorce runs in families, longitudinally (from generation to generation), and laterally (brothers, sisters, cousins). My paternal grandparents and my maternal grandfather are divorced. My parents are divorced. I and my two sisters are all divorced. My mother’s brother and sister are both divorced, and I have three cousins who are divorced. There are more people in my family who have been divorced than not. So I have always been on the lookout for an explanation of why divorce often presents itself as a “genetic disease”, so to speak. This paper offers a few tidbits of answers.

It is apparent that the shadowy zephyr of parental divorce, and not conflict itself (nor the absence thereof) within the family, is responsible for eroding the critical attributes of emotional health in the woman.

Controlling for interparental conflict did not reduce the effect of parental divorce on women’s relationship commitment or confidence. This finding is consistent with previous evidence that parental divorce, but not parental conflict, is linked with lower commitment to the institution of marriage (Amato & DeBoer, 2001). The present results do not diminish the likelihood that parental conflict increases offspring risk for poor marital outcomes through other mechanisms, such as the development of poor relationship skills (Amato, 1996; Sanders et al., 1999); however, it appears to be parental divorce, rather than heightened conflict preceding the divorce, that affects women’s appraisals of their own marriages.

The authors offer an explanation of why this is.

It is possible that because women are socialized to be more relationship-oriented than men (e.g., Gilligan, 1982), they may be more attuned to their parents’ marital dissolution and its lessons regarding the (im)permanence of marriage. In addition, women generally suffer more negative consequences from divorce than do men, especially economically (Hetherington, 2003).

Therefore, being primed to be conscious of the fragility of marriage by observing parental divorce may lead women, more than men, to suppress levels of marital confidence and to hold back on their commitment to their marriages.

Women take childhood lessons to heart, and carry these with them throughout life.

Also, the effect of parental divorce on commitment and confidence could not be explained by its effect on general relationship adjustment, suggesting the effect is robust and highlighting support for the theory that low levels of relationship commitment and confidence may serve as specific mechanisms through which divorce is transmitted from one generation to the next.

Holy smoke!  Scientific evidence for Generational Curses!

Because the cause-effect relationship is so hard to pin down, I can only assume that the fundamental cause of divorce is ultimately spiritual in nature — the shadowy zephyr of divorce is real.

Caveats

A few other noteworthy findings and conditions are summed up in this section.

There are limitations to the present research. Foremost, the sample was not representative. Most participants were White and moderately well educated, and all were married through a religious organization. Findings may not generalize to couples from other ethnic or educational backgrounds or to those who do not marry in a religious organization (although over 75% of U.S. couples do; Stanley, Amato, Johnson, & Markman, 2006).

OMG! So here we are talking about Christian/churchian wimmin and their families!

The small effect size of female parental divorce on commitment and confidence suggests that these premarital variables are also influenced by other factors, and that the influence of parental divorce on marital outcomes is likely mediated by other factors as well, such as communication patterns (e.g., Story, Karney, Lawrence, & Bradbury, 2004). The data were cross-sectional, prohibiting confident statements about directionality or causal effects.

Yes, this effect is compounded by other factors.  So if a woman has divorced parents, AND she has several other red flags, then she’s definitely a no go if you’re looking for a stable marriage.  I suppose some exceptions may exist, by the grace of God.

The somewhat restricted range on the measures of relationship commitment and confidence, typical of a premarital sample, may have limited power to detect effects of parental divorce for men. Also, internal consistency of the relationship commitment scale was lower than desired for women.

The Feeelz makes it all so confusing and corrupts the data consistency!

Finally, we did not assess whether the lower levels of relationship commitment and confidence observed in daughters of divorced parents eventually result in higher rates of marital distress and dissolution; future work is needed to test this hypothesis.

The answer to this question is not too hard to guess.

Despite the robust associations observed in women, parental divorce was not associated with men’s relationship commitment and confidence. Experiencing a parental divorce appears to have a stronger impact on women’s than men’s desires and beliefs about the future of their own marriages. Furthermore, the experience of parental divorce by both partners did not predict any lower commitment or confidence than did the woman’s parental divorce alone.

The author is saying that this phenomenon only affects women, not men. That is, men do not lose confidence and a sense of commitment towards marriage because of parental divorce. However, since my own parents are divorced, I have to say that it does have a negative impact, but not on confidence and commitment, per se. Going off of my own experience, I think the impact on men causes them to lose hope about ever having a joyful marriage, and to objectively rethink what marriage is all about from a very cynical perspective. It also leads men to develop certain particular sensitivities about what he can or cannot accept in a mate, to be distrustful of women (especially if his mother was responsible for the divorce), and to play the field a bit longer. If a man has bitterness and anger towards his mother (because of the divorce, but it could be for any other reason too), then this will cause him to feel attraction towards s1utty women. If the divorce happened before he reached maturity, then he may not realize this connection, and just think that he is unlucky in love. Moreover, experiencing parental divorce creates a lot of internal conflict that changes a man’s feelings towards women and leads him through a more tortuous path to marriage. I think this wear and tear does have an influential impact on marriage and especially on his choice of a mate. But I agree with the authors in that once the decision has been made to go into marriage, commitment and confidence are not affected.

Source: Institute for Family Studies (Brian Hollar): Regular Church Attenders Marry More and Divorce Less Than Their Less Devout Peers (2020 March 4)

Conclusions

In sum, a woman’s confidence in the marital relationship is a huge predictor of marital success. So guys who are vetting for a wife should place this trait as a high priority. Parental divorce was found to be one factor that is a major blow to this important trait (i.e. a woman’s confidence in marriage). The paper doesn’t say this, but I would guess that if a woman’s parents are divorced, but she still has a strong confidence in both her own relational skills and the institution of marriage, then that risk may be abated. However, the paper does say that you can’t know this for sure until after you’ve been married for 18 months.

I might speculate that the rise in the divorce rate since No Fault Divorce legislation was introduced in 1970, has had a snowball effect in contributing towards an ever greater incidence of divorce among subsequent generations. (See above graph.)

Despite these limitations, this research highlights the negative effect parental divorce may have on marital commitment and confidence, particularly for women. As such, these findings suggest that it may be important for relationship education programs to include specific strategies to help women from divorced families develop higher levels of relationship commitment and confidence by learning skills that promote healthy, happy, and long-lasting marriages.

More evidence for how much we need marriage education, especially for women.

Related

• Biblical Gender Roles: Why Unity In Marriage Has More To Do With The Wife Than The Husband (2016 November 23)
• Σ Frame: My Unhappiness Is Your Fault! (2018 June 3)

The Sexual Market IS the Marriage Market

Young people must run the gauntlet of the SMP just to get into the MMP!

Readership: All

Introduction

In a previous post, The Lopsided Liberalized Mating Market (2021 February 17), I reviewed how economic and technological changes, as well as shifting social norms and undying human nature have all created a lopsided mating market which generally favors women over men, apart from the very top level male participants in the market.

To recap briefly, the rise of the most influential “objective” factors of cheap, reliable, and legal contraception (and, later, legal and safe abortion) and economic independence for women, in turn led to the emergent imbalance of power and female dominance within the nascent “sexual market place” (SMP), and the interrelated “marriage market place” (MMP), which we see today.

While the adage that “a rising tide raises all boats” is probably true of the current SMP in general in that most people overall probably have more pre-marital sexual encounters than they did in 1950, the distribution of even these sexual encounters is wildly uneven, due the hypergamous skew of the liberalized market.

Due to the inherent link between the SMP and the MMP, the process of finding a suitable marriage partner has become significantly to substantially harder for both sexes under the liberalized system of the SMP/MMP/”dating market” than it was under the “old rules” and their related pressures, prior to the sexual revolution.

This post will describe the dynamics of how the old system was replaced by a liberalized market, and how the sexual market has stabilized as the new marriage market.

The Old Market vs. the New Market

A market is liberalized when the rules which govern the market are relaxed or, in some cases, removed, thereby permitting more “freedom of action” to market participants. Any market that is liberalized tends to get dominated by the strongest hands in the market, because freeing market participants from the “rules” permits them to use their natural strengths and advantages more freely for their own benefit in the market. In the “old” mating market, the system featured a number of restraining rules, such as:

1. “You break it, you own it” (pregnancy results in marriage, not all, but most of the time).
2. Open caddishness and open sluttery was far less socially tolerated (far less anonymity, far more people being “in your business”, far more scrutiny of young couples).
3. The clock is ticking, for both sexes (obvious for women, but also for the men — “better not think of being a cad long term, son, or that promotion … is going to the guy with the wife, and not you!“).
4. Parental pressure to marry was strong, at a slightly younger age on daughters than on sons, but it was exerted on sons as well — long-term singlehood was generally not tolerated, celebrated or serviced culturally, socially or by families, except in the cases of persons who were obviously unacceptably unattractive (using a low bar), obviously unacceptably eccentric, or presumed to be exclusively homosexually inclined — in which cases bachelorhood/spinsterhood, perhaps a religious vocation in some cases, was the socially accepted role.

All of these rules created pressures that worked to tamp down the advantages enjoyed by the “strong hands” in the market, because they were under the same pressures to marry as everyone else was — as hard as it is for us to picture this from the perspective of how the world works today, prior to the liberalization of the mating market, these people weren’t exempted from the rules simply because they were very attractive. They had more attractive options than others, of course, but they were pressured to take those options early in life, and thereby take both their choice in a mate and themselves out of the market. This behavior had a domino effect on the entire market that heavily favored assortative mating up and down the curve by removing people from the market who were most attractive early in the process.

In the current market, by contrast, these pressures do not exist, because the “rules” which created the pressures have been removed. In fact, they have not only been removed, but they have, in some cases, been replaced with different pressures that operate in the opposite direction, creating substantial pressure to delay marriage, to engage in extra-marital sex and, for women, to date hypergamously until a better-than-assortative mate expresses an interest in committing.

In effect, what was, under the “old rules” a unitary “mating market”, was recast by the sexual revolution into two new, and separate-yet-linked, markets:

1. A “sexual marketplace” (SMP) that applies from puberty until (and, actually, even during) marriage and after divorce, which features mostly “dating”, but also has other forms of coupled encounters; and
2. A “marriage marketplace” (MMP) for market participants who have specifically decided to search for a spouse.

And further, as explained below, these two markets are separate-yet-linked because the MMP is actually a subset of the SMP!

Churchianity has Failed to Respond

Beyond the “objective” factors of contraception/abortion and economic independence noted above and in my last post, the general attrition of Christianity in the broader culture, which has been accompanied by a slow decay in the practice of Christian values and norms, both in the broader culture and among Christians themselves, has also played a substantial role in the rise of the emergent SMP/MMP, and its quick and almost ubiquitous adoption by American Christians of all kinds.

Therefore, from a Christian perspective, a substantial underlying cause of these developments is a rather broad and obvious spiritual malaise, above all in our churches and families, which permitted the sexual revolution to take place to begin with. A society that was as interiorly Christian as it outwardly claimed to be, prior to circa 1965, would not have changed so dramatically in such a short period of time in ways that were fundamentally antithetical to well-settled Christian moral doctrine (although it does need to be pointed out that much of Christianity — but not all of it — seems to have grossly misunderstood the broader impact of widespread availability of contraception downrange temporally as an early warning of what was to come in the subsequent decades).

Ed Hurst wrote about this dynamic in his post, A Full-Blown Apocalypse (2021 February 13), which was a response to Scott’s post, We can’t plant seed in the middle of winter. (2021 February 13). Ed writes,

“The reason it’s a real apocalypse is because we are not allowed to teach our children, and we are not allowed to build a community in which people of faith can actually expect to find other people of faith. Do you understand that it’s normal when churches are filled with people who very much need to learn how to walk by faith, because they still struggle with the flesh? That’s okay, because church is where they are supposed to learn faith, but having those same people lead the church is a serious problem. And that’s what we have now. Churches are so institutional and so professional that genuine faith is actually a hindrance to the system.”

“What makes this tribulation and persecution is that it is technically illegal for me to build something more amenable to my faith. Think about this: How many judges are willing to shut down an SJW complaint? How many judges would protect a genuine statement of biblical faith about gender and family structure? We shouldn’t care what people do to themselves, but we pine for the freedom to make different choices for ourselves. And it’s really not just judges, but the people who hold the actual power in making things possible in the current situation. How many state governments, ruling over education, would tolerate a home school curriculum based on heart-led faith that disparages materialism?

“Pro-family cultural norms are increasingly illegal, and impossible to promote even in private — there is no privacy. We are not allowed to have a closed community, as would be entirely necessary, in order to create the atmosphere for passing on biblical values to our children. [Jack’s and Scott’s] emphasis is that men and women of genuine faith can’t find each other and marry to raise children that way, because the system is so corrupt. By the time we have come to this understanding of faith, we would be too old for a clean first marriage that produces children. The faith community can’t get started because the members have to pass through a hellish landscape of immoral relationships first.

And that’s what they pass through when they start out in churches!”

The “hellish landscape of immoral relationships” is the emergence of the SMP/MMP arrangement, which applies with equal force to Christians who are looking for mates (and, eventually, spouses) in the current environment.

Running the Gauntlet

The original meaning of the expression (to run) the gauntlet has often been applied to various less severe punishments or tests, often consisting of consecutive blows or tasks endured sequentially and delivered collectively, especially by colleagues such as roommates, teammates (in sports), or fraternity brothers. As these do not usually cause serious injuries, only bearable pain, the rituals are sometimes eagerly anticipated by the initiate as a sign of acceptance into a more prestigious group.  The phrase running the gauntlet has also been used, informally, to express the idea of a public but painless, ritual humiliation such as the Walk of Shame or Perp Walk.  In this post, the phrase describes the experience of passing through a series of successive relationships, which in the SMP/MMP’s culture of “dating”, invariably involve sexual liaisons. These liaisons are inevitably followed by periods of disappointment and heartbreak and, over time, lead participants to incur increasing amounts of lasting spiritual damage. Even for those who resist having intercourse, they are still exposed to suffer extreme temptation and pressure to do so.

This is the case because in the current mating market, almost all couples — whether they are seeking a mate in the SMP or the MMP — meet each other through participation in the process commonly known as “dating”. “Dating”, in the current SMP, is a polite euphemism for coupled interactions which, in virtually all cases where the dating process proceeds for more than a couple of meetings, involve sexual encounters which can only be described as casual by any normal meaning of the term.

In fact, dating is, in itself, the core vehicle of the SMP for virtually all participants. Likewise, dating is also the core vehicle for almost all participants in the MMP. Thus, the MMP is embedded in the SMP due to the MMP also following the process of “dating”, which is an SMP process. In other words, the entrance door to the MMP is, for most people, located in the SMP, such that one must successfully navigate the SMP in order to enter the door of the MMP.

Furthermore, since the MMP selection process runs through “dating”, which, as stated, is itself a process that is inherently sexual in nature, it is therefore subject to the sex skew of the SMP, as discussed in my last post. It’s important to note that the sex skew exerts a strong impact on both the SMP and the MMP as well. This is because one’s sexual market value, or SMV, plays the primary role in one’s “competitiveness” in being selected in the competition of bid/ask interactions in the market for dates — again, this applies no matter whether one is participating in the SMP or in the MMP.

The MMP is not ensconced in the SMP for *all* participants (some persons practice arranged marriage or semi-arranged marriages via matchmakers and the like), but it is for almost all of them, because for almost all market participants, the MMP is embedded in the SMP and its conventions. This remains the case even for participants who are actively seeking a spouse rather than a boyfriend or girlfriend.

Conclusion — The Christian Conundrum

To summarize, entering into the MMP requires one to successfully run the gauntlet of the SMP. This reality spells out a difficult conundrum for Christians, to wit:

• Under morally orthodox Christian teaching, Christians should not have sex outside of marriage.
• Under contemporary social practice, as described above (namely the linking of the SMP and the MMP), including for most Christians, men and women will face substantial difficulties securing an attractive mate for marriage without having sex prior to marrying.

What I have written thus far on this poignant dilemma only scratches the surface of this issue. Neither this post, nor the preceding one, have addressed the implications of this situation, but have only explained a portion of the contours of the current marketplace and what leads to the issue facing Christians in this area today.

We’ll be examining this conundrum and the related questions in a series of occasional posts over the next month or two.

Related

• Σ Frame: Is the Christian Red Pill a Black Pill? (2020 November 29)

Fad Diets and Adjustment Disorders

This week’s ramblings.

It’s not just about sports nutrition, I promise. That’s only the first third.

0-0.33 — Introduction
0.33-12:19 — Fad Diets and Nutrition
12:19-14:15 — Comments about Joker at Better Bachelor (MGTOW) YouTube Channel
14:15-16:32 — Comments about James Lindsay at New Discourses (Paradox of tolerance; Herbert Marcusa’s political theories) YouTube Channel
16:32-17:19 — Comments about Zach Morris is Trash
17:19-24:05 — Diagnostic Criteria for Adjustment Disorders
24:05-25:04 — Personal life update and Closing

Correction: Karl Popper is responsible for the phrase “the paradox of tolerance”.

Basic Nutrition Principles

• Avoid processed foods
• Plenty of protein from lean/clean sources – supplement as needed
• Not all fat is created equal
• Carbs are your friend
• Fruits and vegetables
• Your goals matter
• Timing of macros (probably) matters

DSM 5 Diagnostic Criteria for an Adjustment Disorder

Personality disorders are a series of adjustment disorders that continually recur.

A. The development of emotional or behavioral symptoms in response to an identifiable stressor(s) occurring within 3 months of the onset of the stressor(s)

B. These symptoms or behaviors are clinically significant, as evidenced by one or both of the following:

1. Marked distress that is out of proportion to the severity or intensity of the stressor, taking into account the external context and the cultural factors that might influence symptoms severity and presentation.
2. Significant impairment in social, occupational, or other important areas of functioning.

C. The stress related disturbance does not meet the criteria for another mental disorder and is not merely an exacerbation of a preexisting mental disorder.

D. The symptoms do not represent normal bereavement.

E. Once the stressor or its consequences have terminated, the symptoms do not persist for more than an additional 6 months.

We all have stressors, so it’s difficult to identify an adjustment disorder. A lot of the time, an adjustment disorder is only seen clearly in hindsight.

Zack Morris is Trash

Related

• Σ Frame (Scott): How to open up the topic of personality disorders in conversation (2021 January 2)

Sexual competition continues after marriage

Married couples have a duty to remain the apple of the other’s eye.

Readership: Married couples;
Length: 3,000 words
Reading Time: 10 minutes

Attention is Womens’ Sexual Currency

Deti wrote,

“Women want attention. They absolutely crave it, like men crave the sexual act. If a woman has to have sex with a man to get and keep his attention (or money, or whatever else she wants from that man), she’ll do it even if she’s not sexually aroused. Of course if she’s around an attractive man who’s pushing the buttons, she will get aroused, but it’s not necessary for her to have sex.

This is a reason why more and more girls are turning to sugaring. They get attention. They get money. They can’t seem to get boyfriends to take them out and pay, so they turn to sugaring. They can’t seem to get men to bite the bullet and wife them up, at least not until she panics and he relents because he’s so hard up. So they turn to sugaring. They are prostitutes for all intents and purposes, but they really don’t care and don’t have any kind of moral problem with this at all.

It’s because women want attention, and they’ll get it any way they can. Just as men want sex, and they’ll get it any way they can.”

As NovaSeeker pointed out recently, ALL attention is sexual attention, and women’s drive for (sexual) attention is intense. Women have complex mechanisms to attract the attention that they need without giving the outward appearance of neediness. The next section will examine one such example.

Visual Shamelessness to the World

In a previous post, PW – When wanton treachery brings shame not honor (2020 October 14), I tackled the false claim that women’s bodies are something to be ashamed of. Mature women know inwardly (at some level) that men are visually oriented and are easily distracted by the feminine form, and that this causes men to focus on their fleshly desires and give the woman the attention she covets. (See Romans 8:5-8.) But some women make this claim that her body “is nothing to be ashamed of” or “I’m just being my sexy self”, so that they can be the centerpiece of (sexual) attention by showcasing their silhouettes of skin, while outwardly denying the fact that men are visually stimulated. It’s a self-defense measure — gaslighting in the form of Plausible Deniability. Womens’ underlying purpose of denying this reality is so that they can dress provocatively to attract mens’ attention and still avoid contingent responsibility for any unwanted consequences that might arise.

All this is just another take on how women hold predominant power and control over the mating market. But they run into a problem when they want to be taken seriously…

Women are Sexually Oriented

Looking at this from the other side of the aisle, women are enticed by a charismatic man who is good looking, and has power, status, athleticism, and money (PSALM). Just as men have a radar to detect the female form, women also have a sixth sense for scoping out men. Cameron did some introspection from this perspective.

“…I have some reservations about the Christian bodybuilding thing you see promoted on some Christian Manosphere sites.  When I used to lift weights and got fairly big, women definitely noticed, including Christian women.  One of [my] wife’s friends made an explicit remark [about my physique], and another Christian friend of hers told [my] wife how she wished her husband did the same thing.

This doesn’t seem charitable to other men to encourage their wives to look at you (I don’t mean to sound arrogant as if I was God’s gift to women.  I am simply relating my experiences).

I understand not wanting to be a fat slob, and some of the young boys are really skinny and weak from doing nothing but playing video games.  But I don’t think inciting attraction in other men’s wives is a very Christian thing to do.  Women can and do lust too.“

Yes, women, especially younger women, are always on the lookout, sizing up men according to their socio-sexual rank, among other things. But very few men can elicit a sexual reaction from women like Cameron did. Those few men who are able do so are reaping the benefits of genetics and upbringing, so they really don’t need to try very hard. In contrast to women, men are not as acutely aware of the impact they have on women, nor are they so hungry for female attention in itself. Cameron was unaware of this until two women made explicit remarks. For men, coitus and especially insemination is necessary to obtain an ego payoff of comparable intensity.

The Shame of Illicit or Unintended IOIs

Contrary to what women might claim, there’s nothing shameful about the body itself. The shame arises when an individual presents his/her body as a vector of lecherous lust and illicit temptation outside of marriage.

Ed Hurst summed it up like this.

“There’s nothing shameful about the human body.  What is shameful is exhibiting that body to people whom God says don’t have the proper privilege for seeing it.  Outside of the covenant marriage bedroom, no one is authorized by God to see it.  There’s a reason that, after the Fall, God gave Adam and Eve coverings that they didn’t need before the Fall.  We are fallen; we need covering.  Covering symbolizes a whole range of things.”

When Ed talks about “exhibiting the body”, he means the nude body, or the body in very revealing, provocative clothing, which in many cases, is casually labeled attention getting. But a woman doesn’t even need to show her skin suit to do this. Remember NovaSeeker’s axiom: To women, ALL attention is sexual attention! Depending on the socio-sexual rank of the man, sometimes this attention is wanted, and other times, it is not.

It is for this reason that men always have to be careful whenever they are interacting with a woman in a formal setting. If a man does anything that might be interpreted by her as an Indicator of Interest (e.g., a smile, extended eye contact, frequent interaction, or simply failing to break off a conversation in a curt and decisive manner), a woman will interpret this as a sexual advance, whether it is intended to be or not!

Women’s propensity to interpret everything through a sexualized lens is all very taxing on men, especially to those men who can’t measure up to the hypergamic expectations of the female’s imaginations. This phenomenon is greatly exacerbated because of the centrality of sex in Western culture.

Visual Gatekeeping in Marriage

What I have described so far is just one side of the coin. The other side is how wives (and some husbands) fail, or even refuse to show off their bodies to their spouses. This is surprising, seeing how women crave attention like men crave sex, as Deti described above. So we have to ask ourselves why this is.

In some cases with people who have a hot body and a heady libido, this takes the form of hard gatekeeping, i.e. refusing visual or sexual access to one’s body, sometimes called “closing the door” (in the physical sense) or “putting up a wall” (in the emotional sense). In other cases with people who have a weaker sex appeal or who have an insufficient determination to preserve sexual inclinations after marriage, they simply stop making any effort. This is colloquially called “letting themselves go”.

Imagine a husband who comes home after a long, unnerving day at work, and he wants some genuine affection from his wife — a titty show or a lap dance — to set himself in the proper mood to share the evening with his family. After all, “women’s bodies are nothing to be ashamed of”, right? But this is not the response that many husbands get from their wives upon coming home. Suddenly and for no apparent reason, the wife is “ashamed” of her body, and proceeds to hamsterize a different kind of Plausible Deniability, all done in an effort to close the door on him.

• “I’m too tired.”
• “I have a headache.”
• “I need to take a bath first.”
• “I need to do X, Y, Z… right now. Maybe later…”
• “The kids are in the next room. They might hear us.”

Isn’t it funny (in a cynical way), how women are quite eager to show off their bodies to everyone and his handsome cousin, except the man God intended them to show their bodies to? They want to be sexually objectified by the world, but at the same time, they want to be taken seriously by their husbands. It should be the other way around.

If we compare women’s need for attention to mens’ need for sex, then a woman who forfeits mens’ sexual attentions by “letting herself go” is like a man clipping his own balls off! Going into decline must be suffocating to a woman’s desire for attention! And yet we see not just a few, but lots of women taking this path! (We also see lots of women going to extensive lengths to maintain a youthful image too, all in an effort to preserve her sexual currency assets in garnering that precious attention.)

The only motivations I can come up with as to why a woman would do this to her husband (i.e. intentionally deny him regular visual access to her body), is just sheer hatred for the man in the case of “closing the door”, and hatred for herself in the case of “letting herself go”. (This might explain men’s visceral disgust for blimps.) She might also simply hate the fact that she’s no longer free to swing from one tree stand to another in the open market.

This dynamic works the other way too, with a few variations in the respective sexual currencies. Just as a woman who covers up or blows up after marriage is defrauding her husband out of some measure of joy, a man who quits his job, and chugs his way towards having a beer belly is doing an injustice to his wife.

Given the centrality of sex in Western culture, for a man (or woman) married to such a person, it is easy to understand how temptation and/or shame (for both men and women) is always no farther away than the adjacent office cubicle or a few clicks on a mating website (e.g. Ashley M@dison, Bumble, OnlyFans, Tinder, Tumblr, etc.).

Food can stay fresh past the expiration date with proper care

In the title of this post, I stated that sexual competition continues after marriage.  By this, I don’t mean competition for sexual intercourse (as in swinging), but rather competition for sexual market position. Married individuals have a responsibility to stay crisp and fresh, and remain the primary object of their spouse’s desire. In our grandparents’ day, this wasn’t always so important, but in the current oversexualized cultural climate, it has become essential in avoiding a decline in social capital (i.e. protecting one’s bank account and reputation), maintaining authority in a relationship, and preventing an affair.

People should know that they need to conform to our God ordained, “traditional” gender roles if they ever hope to be married. But after getting married, they need to continue the same habits that got them into marriage.  Wife Goggles alone can work wonders, but it’s unwise for a wife to put all her eggs in that basket, so to speak.

The same applies for men too, maybe even more so, this day and age.  It’s a losing strategy to allow yourself to grow lazy and complacent, and drop the ball after marriage.

Some readers may object to this by arguing that many wives want their husbands to dress down, and they don’t object when he develops a dad bod.  Be ye herewith informed that there are several ominous reasons for this.

• It’s much easier to take a casual approach.
• They don’t want to feel pressured to maintain themselves.
• They don’t want to feel jealous.
• They don’t want to deal with the envy of their friends.
• It reduces the chances that you might ever receive advances or invitations from other women.
• They don’t want to worry about you ever having an affair.
• It cuts down your ability to employ Dread Game, which is one of the most effective tools of wife management.
• It reduces your authority over her body and her sexual desire, thus giving her a false sense of comfort and control.
• It reduces the opportunities that you have to advance yourself in life.

In sum, it assuages her ego needs and gives her greater leverage of control over her husband’s life.

Men, don’t fall for this!

It goes the other way too. I’ll offer my own story on this.

Case Study 1 — Teaching my wife to be presentably attractive

My wife has a very voluptuous body.  When I met her, she had a habit of dressing in baggy raggy, ripped-up cottons.  I asked her why she always dressed down.  She said it was less time consuming, more convenient, more comfortable, and it averted a lot of unwanted attention from men.  I told her, “No, I am a Christian and a professor.  As long as you’re with me, you’re going to dress and act like a lady.” I took her shopping and bought her some elegant clothing.  This made her feel loved, and it also renewed her self-esteem.  Then whenever she acted in a manner that was unbecoming of a lady, I pointed it out and took her to task.  Sometimes I had to instruct her about the particulars.  In the early years of our marriage, this made her angry.  She said I was too demanding and too controlling, but I did not admit her argument.  Over time, she eventually realized that being a lady had its own set of benefits, and that I was dead serious about this expectation, and then she started to shape up.

Focus on your own marriage first

The last four memes shown in this post compare how a woman carries herself when she is in a relationship with a man to how she presents herself when she is not formally attached. We think these memes are funny because they are true, but actually, it is sad. When a woman is single, she’s fishing for (sexual) attention and so she presents herself as sexually vivacious. When a woman is in a relationship, she doesn’t need to do the work of playing the honey and displaying her sex appeal to her man in order to get attention from him, although she should if they are married. She also feels ashamed of herself for doing the same things to attract attention as she did before. Women who show this kind of change between being single and taken are quite self-centered at heart. It should be the other way around. She should be working to attract and keep her man’s attention while being respectable in public. But we know very few women are actually this way.

It works the opposite way for men. When men are in a relationship, they have a venue in which their ego needs can be fulfilled, and they can therefore grow and shine. In addition, Preselection draws more interest from other women. So the challenge for married men is to stay focused on the woman they’re with.

Case Study 2 — Cameron

I want to go back to Cameron’s comment earlier in this post. He is aware of the effects of his sexual presence, and this is a good quality for a man to have.  However, I think he may have been focused on the wrong things.  His first priority should be to consider the overall impact that his physique has on his wife.  But instead, he was thinking about how his appearance thrilled other women, and then he felt self-conscious.  His wife’s friends may have felt envious, but provided that his marriage is solid, his wife probably felt thankful to be married to him — and blessed!  Cameron’s manly physique is undoubtedly a vector of his wife’s attraction to him.  Moreover, it is his scepter of his sexual authority over her desire. (Sorry, I don’t mean to strafe Cameron by pointing this out. I just want to provide an alternate viewpoint for the sake of discussion.)

Think about this from a man’s perspective.  Would you want your wife to get fat and dress like a hag, just to prevent other men from looking at her?  Is this the right way to avoid introducing temptation?  No, you would want your wife to look her best at all times.  Her cleanliness, hair, physical appearance, and style of dress are a representative social expression of her righteousness, her SMV, her authority over her husband’s body (i.e. his sexual value and desire), and the sum total contributes to the glory of God! The same goes for men too.

Food can stay fresh in the proper container

Instead of taking the easy route, both husbands and wives should do what they can to maintain their SMV after marriage, because one of the top priorities of marriage is to keep your spouse titillated with the sensual pleasures of your body.  The best way to avoid an affair is to hold your spouse’s sexual attention with regular visual and sexual treats. If any person wants to throw their marriage to the rats and encourage the other to have an affair, the easiest and fastest way to do this is to become slavishly lazy and out of shape such that all sexual desire is obliterated.  Add on top of this a little bit of carelessness and disrespect, and this will surely do the trick.

When a husband and wife get fit, dress up, and look their best, they are expressing their identities as a sanctified married couple and children of God.  They are also putting competitive pressure on all those around you to step up their game and increase their own social value.  As Christians, we should not shy away from this challenge by holding the lazy thought that by doing so, we are merely increasing temptation or giving a sin a foothold.  Do not focus on sin and the flesh, but instead, focus on emanating the power and the glory of God.  I like to think that the Holy Spirit would make this clear to the believer, however it seems that wives need to be continually reminded of the importance of looking attractive, yet modest.

In short, all this is to say, be someone that other people want to be around — especially your spouse.

And also, keep her on her toes, gentlemen!

Related

• Do What’s Right (Ed Hurst): Against the Sport of Bodybuilding (2020 October 17)
• Σ Frame: Formal attire is making a comeback. (2020 October 21)

The Lopsided Liberalized Mating Market

Women have a significant advantage in the Mating Marketplace. Here’s why.

Readership: All
Author’s Note: Cameron232 requested this post, which will sum up some Classic Manosphere Lore and includes some infographics from online dating websites.
Reader’s Note: I realize that the “visual attractiveness rating numbers” for women are generally a topic of nearly endless fascination and conversation in the sphere, and in general among men as well. This, however, is not the topic of this post, and is a sidelight. Leaving aside the specific “ratings” (which represent my own take on the issue as is fairly well-known) in terms of which “ratings” of women are in which “slice” above, and the issue of which “rating” or “band” a specific woman or type of women fits into, the general distribution of women in the SMP (and therefore indirectly in the MMP via “dating”), by general level of attractiveness, is generally as set forth here. We are planning to publish a separate post on the “ratings” questions, which will address in some detail the methodological, practical, and personal issues that the “ratings” question tends to raise in discussion. Readers are asked to defer a more detailed discussion of those issues for that post.
Length: 3,000 words
Reading Time: 10 minutes

Introduction

Finding a “great” mate has always been highly competitive, and thus very difficult. In a sense, it is the “great game” of the early years of adult life. In prior eras, the outcomes reached by individual people in that race differed greatly, but in general, most people did marry, due to many pressures that existed. These pressures to marry came from all angles, socially, religiously, culturally, economically, and from family. Because of these pressures, the average period of singleness was short lived and marriages were largely assortative. More attractive prospects couldn’t “hold out” and “test the water” indefinitely, because this was simply neither feasible nor tolerated for most of history, even until the relatively recent past of the mid-20th Century.

But during the 1955-1975 timeframe, there was a drastic change in the social and economic conditions that dramatically and decisively altered the mate market in significant ways.

The underlying reasons for this can be traced to an array of social shifts and technological developments during the critical period of the social revolution which took place between 1955 and 1975 which have together worked to remove many of the natural constraints that limited the full exercise of hypergamic mate selection. In his post, The Six Sirens of The Sexual Apocalypse (March 17, 2016), Chateau Heartiste set out a list of these factors defining the change:

1. Effective and widely available contraceptives (the Pill, condom, and, the de facto “fallback” contraceptive, abortion).
2. Easy no-fault divorce on economic and other terms that are generally very favorable to women, irrespective of the marital economics, and unfavorable to men.
3. Women’s economic independence (hurtling towards women’s economic advantage if the college enrollment ratio and relative income levels among younger generations is any indication).
4. Rigged feminist-inspired laws that have created less incentives in favor of marriage for men and an greater incentives in favor of divorce for women.
5. Penicillin and related antibiotics (reduced the cost of contracting STDs).
6. Widely available hardcore pornography (decreased marginal participation rates of men in the SMP and MMP).

Since this post was written, this list has expanded to include others.

• Equal Opportunity Legislation and The Tender Years Doctrine which created economic leverage and independence for women.
• The centrality of sex in Western culture, and the widespread social acceptance of sexual liberation.
• The predominance of Chivalrous norms, and other prevailing lore such as the “Soul Mate Myth” and “Friends First”, that places men under the sexual authority and the service of women.
• Within the church, there is the flaccid “love and forgive” social atomosphere.
• Social media and dating websites which employ the power of digital aggregation to provide women whoards of opportunities with men.
• SMS and internet communications which are convenient and easy to hide and delete.

Most of these changes revolved around the fundamental goals Feminists have for social change.

To a great extent, the difference between the market that existed before that period and the one that has existed since then (and to a greater and greater degree the further removed temporally we get from that period) is that, under the “old” system, if you were like most people and didn’t get to have a “great” mate, you still mostly ended up in an “okay” situation, which was at least tolerable, at least most of the time, and quite a few people ended up in situations that were pleasant and happy despite not having an objectively “great” mate. And of course there were quite a few people “stuck” in crappy marriages, too — not as many as the feminists of today like to claim, but it also was non-zero. All this changed, and changed substantially, when the mating market was reformulated in the wake of sexual liberalization and female economic independence.

The Two Pillars of Female Power in the Mating Market

Among the factors listed above, sexual liberalization and female economic independence are the two outstanding changes responsible for the current mating market. Namely, the advent of (1) safe, legal, and reliably obtained abortion, (2) cheap, effective contraception, coupled with (3) the transformation of the economy in such a way that many new jobs were created which did not require or even place a premium on size or strength.

The simple and obvious reality is that when you take pregnancy and economic dependency out of the equation, together with the related social pressures that arose from these two base realities, women are by and large “freed up” from the necessity of mate selection, and therefore select mates on other attributes. Due to women’s pronounced hypergamic tendencies, this selection is primarily based on desire, which results in a very concentrated skew in female mate selection upwards — that is, directed at better-than-assortative men.

1967

The Nature of Applied Hypergamy in the Mating Market

A mating market which features far less temporal pressure to marry (and, indeed, features a fair amount of pressure to delay marrying) will feature an extended period of “dating”, which, since the period of the social revolution, has been the primary locus of pre-marital sex, and a high number of other no-strings or otherwise low commitment sexual encounters (yesterday’s “pick up ONS” and today’s app hookups). The reason a liberalized market plays out this way is because of the basic nature of men and women, i.e. applied hypergamy. The following image depicts how women strongly desire top men, while these men are quite willing to choose more than one woman, thereby creating a glut that destroys assortative mating.

Due to the generally higher male libido and perceived “sexual need” of men (not in every case, but enough generally so as to skew the entire market), any market that is primarily, or even substantially, about sex will feature much greater male demand expressed at all levels of the market than female demand, other than at the very top of the male side of the market due to the concentration of female demand there … so that in the rest of the market outside the top 10% (or so, now due to the tightening effect caused by the rise of swipe/phone dating apps and their intensified screening of men) of males, women are the “sellers”, and men are the “buyers”. This fundamental inequality in demand is why the world features such things as Instagram, and OnlyFans, and internet porn, and cam girls, and sugar babies, and all the rest as well — male demand substantially exceeds female demand, such that females are “sellers” and can, if they wish, literally charge men fairly easily as we have seen recently.

Very Few Men Can Satisfy Hypergamy

Another feature of human nature that plays into the mix and greatly exacerbates the glut is that men regard womens’ collective attractiveness by a normal distribution, whereas women tend to view most men as unattractive. This tendency is reflected in the following graph based on OK Cupid data, which illustrates the skew in perceived attractiveness between men and women, and how womens’ high attractiveness ratings are concentrated towards a very small group of men, as compared with how men tend to perceive attractiveness in women.

This means that very few men (currently estimated to be about 10%) are deemed by women to be attractive, and therefore can satisfy womens’ desire for expressed hypergamy. It should be well noted that this difference in perceived attractiveness is basically equivalent to sexual authority. The result is that only these men are “chosen” by women.

The Resulting Glut in the Mating Market

The following graphic displays well the change I am describing in this article and the impact on the SMP/MMP.

The left side is the way “dating and mating” are generally distributed (there always were outliers, but this was the general distribution) among males in a system where (1) unavoidable, not easily/safely/legally terminable pregnancy is generally the result of sex and (2) the economy did not provide a lot of jobs that could be done by women for the same, or better, economic remuneration as men. This kind of a system encourages assortative mating because there is timing pressure exerted on virtually all market participants, as explained above.

The right side shows how “dating and mating” are generally distributed among males in a system where (1) pregnancy is opt-in at the woman’s sole discretion and (2) the economy provides a plentiful amount of economic opportunities for women to earn as much as, if not more than, peer-aged men. This kind of a system encourages hypergamous skew in mating because there is much less timing pressure, until a later period, and market participants therefore feel free to optimize mate selection opportunities based on their actual market power apart from such pressures.

The distribution on the right side alters somewhat when women decide that they definitely want to marry (which in most places in the US appears to be in the late 20s, while in the larger urban metros it is now in the early 30s), such that the interest expressed towards the men begins to encompass the top 50-60% of men for the first time.

Caveats

Some may object that the mate market is not actually liberalized due to the current divorce regime in the United States, in particular, which in many ways remains punitive for men and beneficial for women. While it may be true that the *marriage* market itself has not been entirely liberalized due to the divorce regime experienced by men once they are married, it is nevertheless true that…

1. The sexual market in which the marriage market is, for almost all participants, deeply embedded, has been almost totally liberalized in the sense of having the previously applicable “rules” removed from it.
2. The overall pressure to marry is overall much less (for reasons discussed above), which results in more “holding out” for better-than-assortative mate pairings, predominantly among women, in the marriage market itself due to the prevalence of “dating” (which is fundamentally a vehicle of the sexual market) which, quite apart from divorce law, creates pressure on assortative pairings in the midrange of the attraction curve.
3. The effect of the punitive divorce regime, due to its flipping of marriage from an economic necessity for women to an economic windfall for many of them, actually serves to amplify the other trends exerting pressure on the sexual and marital market places, all in the direction of more delay, holding out, and attempted hypergamous optimization.

I also note that it is possible to characterize the current mating market(s) as “scientifically subsidized”, rather than liberalized, because one of the main factors was, in fact, the removal, scientifically, of the main natural “check” on behavior in the market (i.e., female pregnancy), such that the resulting market is actually a “subsidized” one rather than a “liberalized” one. While I agree with the underlying point that the “natural check” has been removed, nevertheless I think this perspective obscures more than it explains, because the impact of the removal of that natural check was the near wholesale removal of all of the existing “rules” of the market and their replacement with one base rule. It seems to me that a change in the market that is characterized by the dramatic reduction in the number of rules applicable to market participants is clearly best viewed as a “liberalized” market, in terms of the end effect on the market participants, even if the underlying cause of that liberalization, or removal of rules, was, itself, a kind of science/technology-based removal of the “natural check” on market behavior which had led to the development of the various, overlapping, “rules” on participation in the mating market prior to the sexual revolutionary period.

Flexing for women, 2021

The New Power Distribution

Under the “new rules” market, the top men hold the most power (smallest in number for the demand related to them), followed by the top women, followed by the top half or so of women, followed by the next group of men (in most markets this used to be the group between the 60th and 80th percentiles, but with the rise of phone/swipe dating apps, women’s screening has become substantially more empowered, and therefore more stringent, such that in many markets this group is now stretching upwards so that it runs from the mid to upper 60 percentiles to the upper 80 percentiles of men), followed by the next 1/3 of the women, followed by the men between the 40 and 60-65 (mid-range men) percentile, followed by the remainder of the women, followed by the remainder of the men.

So like this (women are indicated in red):

1. Top 10% of men (used to be top 15-20% before phone/swipe dating apps)
2. Top women (9s, 10s for most men) … not close to 10%, more like 1-2%
3. Rest of the Top 50% of women (5s-8s for most men)
4. Men in percentile 65-90 (used to be men between 60 and 80)
5. Next 30% of women (3s-4s for most men)
6. Men in percentile 40-60-65
7. Remainder of women (1s-2s for most men)
8. Remainder of men (percentiles 1-39).

As you can see, there are more women towards the top of the power structure than men. This means that half of the women are more empowered than 80-90% of the men in the market … something which leads to alpha chasing (women are generally not attracted to men whom they know they have power over) and long droughts for the men below the top 10-20%, even if true “incels” are concentrated at the lower rungs. And even though only those men are truly “incels”, men are disadvantaged relative to women at all levels of the market apart from the very top … even at the bottom they are disadvantaged relative to women at the bottom.

Here’s another graph based on data from Tinder that shows why there is an imbalance in the power dynamic between men and women. This has been circulating around the Manosphere for a few years, but it still applies.

As you can see, the attraction ratio is far from linear. It is heavily skewed in favor of women.

Conclusions

The principal difference between the “old” mating market and the one we experience today is that the market has been liberalized, largely due to technological advances and economic changes. This “free market” allows market participants to engage in sexually liberal practices with very few rules, limited primarily by the extent of their value in the marketplace.

The bottom line is that when you remove pregnancy and economic dependency, the market becomes largely about sex and sexual desire. Again, this is so even in the MMP, due to the nature of “dating”, even if it is somewhat lessened because of the presence of other factors that play a stronger relative role in that market than they do in the SMP, where they play almost no role whatsoever. And any market that is substantially about sex and sexual desire will always favor women over men because men, on average and on the population level (that is, outliers aside), desire sex-qua-sex more than women do. Substantially more. Any market that is “liberalized” in such a way that it boils down to sexual desire will always disfavor men, barring strange scenarios like vast male shortages due to warfare and the like. A “liberalized” market for mating simply doesn’t work — for either men or women, generally, other than for the top men, who are better positioned than they have been for thousands of years, perhaps for all time to date.

In the long run this “new lack of rules” market based on sexual desire doesn’t actually serve the women market participants either, because they are increasingly left with relatively unattractive men as options for mates once they are finished exploiting the height of their own market power during their 20s and earlier 30s. This negative impact is something that most contemporary women don’t worry about until the mid-30s, and that’s just human nature — most humans of both sexes have terrible future time orientation innately unless it is forced on them by external constraints and/or social expectations and rules.

Related

• The Rational Male: The Global Sexual Marketplace (2019 February 27)
• Σ Frame: Is the Christian Red Pill a Black Pill? (2020 November 29)

The Futility of Justifying the Crash Landing

Women are struggling to rationalize the sad, bitter consequences of feminism. Is it truly justified?

Readership: All
Length: 3,300 words
Reading Time: 11 minutes

Introduction

What becomes of women after they hit the wall and can no longer ride the carousel? They must invariably face up to the lack of music.

We have the common idea that most women in this predicament will settle, and settle hard to get into marriage. But as time goes on, we are finding that more and more women are absolutely unable to settle hard enough to attract nuptial commitment. Instead of settling, women are wandering through the carnival of life after all the rides have shut down. They’re wondering why the music has stopped, and they are coming up with all kind of rationalizations, which are actually justifications. Many of these justifications are of the victimization variety.

In this post, I’ll review a number of these justifications based on this article at The Guardian (Emma John) Why are increasing numbers of women choosing to be single? (2021 January 17). The author is not groping for a man to wife her up.  Instead, the author does a bit of introspection in an effort to find a new identity as a single woman. But forging a new identity is turning out to be much harder than she imagined.

• Single? That’s not an identity.
• Spinster? That’s too hilarious, and it’s still “freighted with pity and misogynist undertones of sour dessication or bumbling hopelessness.” No.
• Never Married? What does that mean?
• A Free Woman? That sounds insulting to everyone else.
• Lifelong Singles? “Sounds like a packet of cheese slices that’ll last forever in the back of your fridge.”

Even “flappers” had more dignity. She never finds a suitable term to her liking.

Let’s dive into the Justifications.

Justification by Demographics

She cites some interesting demographical statistics.

“The Office for National Statistics shows that women not living in a couple, who have never married, is rising in every age range under 70. In the decade-and-a-half between 2002 and 2018, the figure for those aged 40 to 70 rose by half a million. The percentage of never-married singletons in their 40s doubled.

And it’s not just a western phenomenon. In South Korea, the rather pathetic figure of the “old miss” has become the single-and-affluent “gold miss”. In Japan, unmarried women over the age of 25 are known as “Christmas cake” (yes, it’s because they were past their sell-by date). Shosh Shlam’s 2019 documentary on China’s sheng nu explores these “Leftover Women” and the social anxiety they cause as traditional marriage models are upended.”

Nothing to see here…

Justification by Apex Fallacy

She uses these statistics as a springboard to justify being single, and then compares herself to Hollywood starlets, and later in the article, Bridgette Jones, of all people. She writes,

“Singleness is no longer to be sneered at. Never marrying or taking a long-term partner is a valid choice. For a brief spurt, it even appeared that the single-positivity movement was the latest Hollywood cause, with A-listers such as Rashida Jones, Mindy Kaling and Chelsea Handler going proudly on the record about how they had come to embrace their single lives. Jones and Kaling have since found love; Handler announced on her chatshow last year that she’d changed her mind and really wanted a relationship. And when Emma Watson (also not single) announced to Vogue she was “self-partnered” I found myself suppressing a gag reflex. Give it another 10 years, I wanted to say. Then tell me how empowering it is going to parties/dinner/bed alone.

The article is littered with images of Hollywood starlets and pop culture figures who appear to be aging well.

But there I go, living down to the spinster stereotype of envy and bitterness. How is it possible that, despite being raised by a feminist mother and enjoying a life rich with friendships and meaningful employment, I still feel the stigma of that word? Or fear that, even in middle age, I haven’t achieved the status of a true adult woman?

These women had a spirit of urgency. They weren’t waiting for anything.”

From this, we see how women cling to very bad role models by identifying with…

1. Elite pop stars, who are actually the worst role models of all.
2. Idealized modern fairy tales (e.g. Bridgette Jones), which do not match reality for the vast majority of women, at all.
3. Their mothers, who were feminists themselves and who appeared to enjoy it.

There are no role models for being a happily married woman. I suppose that there are, but these have been intentionally ignored because of the shame and guilt that they would instill in her. She wouldn’t want to write anything that might glorify God’s created order or the dreaded patriarchy.

Justification through the Exploration of Literary Mythos

She finally identifies with spinsters described in classic English literature, of the Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and P.G. Wodehouse variety (which I advise everyone to read). But with the news of her younger sister (who is in her mid-30s) having a baby, even this is a bittersweet disappointment.

Yet in all this, she cannot see how the choices she made earlier in her life to emulate these role models could have possibly left her in a state of purposelessness.

I assumed that my own situation was a temporary aberration, one that required no sense of emergency or active response. My social calendar was full, my work constantly introduced me to new people. Mother Nature would, surely, pick up the slack.

Personally, I believe that the persisting ignorance that surrounds left over women is a form of God’s grace. If they ever knew what they did wrong, and what they’re missing as a consequence, the pain and grief would be too much for them to bear. I can also see how the natural psychological defense of avoiding this pain and grief would keep them trapped in a state of ignorance.

 “One of the cruelest tricks spinsterhood can play is to leave you feeling like an outlier and a freak – yet my status is far from unique as the statistics show. I see that in my own close friendship group – almost a dozen of us are never-married in our late 30s and early 40s, and none through choice.”

No, they had a choice, but they missed it. That moment passed by and they never saw it. Maybe it passed by again, but they never took action because they thought that opportunity would always be waiting for them “when they were ready”. Meanwhile, they were focused on other things going on in their lives – things that, in the moment, they felt were more urgent and important. This is the main point of the literary examples of Spinsters, but somehow, she’s overlooked this fact.

Justification Based on a Perceived Lack of Opportunities

This justification has the strongest “woe is me” flavor.

“There’s no avoiding that our romantic opportunities have dwindled as the pool of age-appropriate men has emptied. Annually, we manage a small smattering of dates between us. Most of us have grown weary of online dating, which requires you to treat it as an all-consuming hobby or part-time job. We’re tired of Tinder, bored of Bumble – I’ve even been ejected by eHarmony, which, last time I logged on, told me it couldn’t find me a single match.”

In other words, they’ve been through so many men that they are now totally jaded and/or alpha widowed. This alone will eject them from ever being considered as marriage material. It’s sad.

Justification through Peer Identification

Despite all the advances that Female Empowerment and Women’s Liberation has brought, she still cannot escape the social pressures of being single.

“In our 20s, my friends and I used to revel in gossip and talk endlessly about the guys we were interested in; now, the subject is sensitively avoided, even within the sisterhood. The only people who do tend to ask whether we’re seeing anyone are complete strangers, because relationship status is still considered a key component of small talk, a vital piece of the information trade, essential in categorising someone’s identity.

My friend Alex has a range of responses to the question “And do you have another half?” depending on which she thinks the other person can take. Her nuclear option, “No, I’m a whole person,” is deployed only in the most desperate of circumstances.”

The unavoidable truth is that our individual identities are forged in the furnace of our relationships.

• For Christians, this relationship is with Christ.
• For men, these relationships are with their business partners and weekend buddies.
• For the married, these relationships are with their spouse and children.
• For spinsters, these relationships are with the Chads and Brads of their youth.

The question of identity can only be answered by building relationships, and spinsters have great difficulty in embracing the identity that they have built for themselves through their choices about relationships.

Justification by ¡Science!

She writes that this intimation of perdition is backed up by ¡Science!

As we age, the distance between our shared life experiences and viewpoints has only been widening. Professor Sasha Roseneil, author of The Tenacity of The Couple-Norm, published in November by UCL Press, says: “All sorts of processes of liberalisation have gone on in relationships, in the law and in policy.” Her research focused on men and women between the ages of 30 and 55, the period in mid-life “when you’re expected to be settled down in a couple and having kids”.

“But what our interviewees told us was that there remains at the heart of intimate life this powerful norm of the couple,” says Roseneil. “And people struggle with that. Many of them long to be part of a couple – there was a lot of feeling of cultural pressure, but there was also a sense of that norm being internalised. Single people felt a bit of a failure, that something had gone wrong, and that they were missing out.”

“…a sense of that norm being internalized” That is not a “norm”, per se. That is the human heart calling out for love and belonging, and for a soul identity forged through a relationship. In other words, the relationships which have wrought their identities are a one-and-done interaction, and then they find that they have no one to walk through life with them, and help them work out their salvation. She more or less confirms this when she writes,

“Being a spinster can be isolating – it’s easy to become convinced that no one else is quite as hopeless a case as you. It leaves us, the perennially unattached, asking ourselves big questions that we can’t – daren’t – articulate to others. Are we missing out on the greatest emotions a human can have? Shall we slide into selfishness, loneliness, or insignificance? Who will be there for us when we grow old? And is a life without intimate physical companionship one half-loved, and half-lived?”

¡Science! can never answer these questions, so ¡Science! is a dud.

Justification by Feminist Mythology

To answer these questions of the heart, she returns to the religious tenets of Feminism.

“Within the framework of the current feminist narrative, there’s a strong sense that the answer to each of the above should be no – or the questions shouldn’t be asked at all. “We interviewed a lot of people around Europe and that’s a very real early 21st-century experience for women,” says Roseneil. “And people are conflicted – that’s the mental essence of being human. They can simultaneously have contradictory feelings: on the one hand it’s totally fine to be single and I can have a nice life, on the other hand – what am I missing out on and is there something wrong with me?”

As modern, single women, we are not supposed to feel that we’re missing out. And so we feel obliged to hide any feelings of shame or inadequacy or longing.

I know I don’t want to take my many privileges for granted and I suspect that many single women in a similar position to me dread being thought of as whiny or desperate. And so we don’t talk about the subject, and we try not to acknowledge that spinsters still exist.”

Yes, privilege would be utterly shameful, not only to confess the relationships that formed their identity, but also to denounce Isis (the god of female empowerment) and Aphrodite (the god of gynocentric sexuality) as being insufficiently powerful enough to satisfy the needs of the heart and soul. I admire her bravery for writing such blasphemous doubts about the gods of this age.

“Perhaps that’s the reason that, instead of finding my #inspo from modern have-it-all heroines, I prefer to look back and learn from the spinsters who came before.”

So she realizes that the justification through Feminist Mythology fails grandly.

Justification through Solipsism

Turning away from bad role models and engaging in more introspection are good, but it still falls short of a full repentance. But upon further introspection, she still tries to justify her solipsism, by blaming society and recounting the virtues of spinsters.

“Western society has always struggled with the issue of what to do with unmarried women. Take the religious mania for persecuting so-called witches in the middle ages. Communities fixated on single women – their era’s “other” – not only because they were suspicious of their alternative lifestyles, but because of the collective guilt over their inability to cater or care for them.”

What she calls “collective guilt” is actually a healthy fear of corruption.

¹ It is actually reported that there is sexual immorality among you, and such sexual immorality as is not even named among the Gentiles…  ² And you are puffed up, and have not rather mourned, that he who has done this deed might be taken away from among you.  ³ For I indeed, as absent in body but present in spirit, have already judged (as though I were present) him who has so done this deed.  ⁴ In the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, when you are gathered together, along with my spirit, with the power of our Lord Jesus Christ, ⁵ deliver such a one to Satan for the destruction of the flesh, that his spirit may be saved in the day of the Lord Jesus.
⁶ Your glorying is not good.  Do you not know that a little leaven leavens the whole lump?  ⁷ Therefore purge out the old leaven, that you may be a new lump, since you truly are unleavened.  For indeed Christ, our Passover, was sacrificed for us.  ⁸ Therefore let us keep the feast, not with old leaven, nor with the leaven of malice and wickedness, but with the unleavened bread of sincerity and truth.
⁹ I wrote to you in my epistle not to keep company with sexually immoral people.

1^st Corinthians 5:1-9 (NKJV)

In Red Pill parlance, this mean that a few loose women in the community will ramp up the competition in the SMP and increase the rate of promiscuity. So it should not be tolerated.

“When single women weren’t assumed to be witches, they were often taken to be prostitutes – to such an extent that the two terms were interchangeable, including in court documents.”

There is a fundamental reason for this, but feminists do not have the discernment nor the courage to articulate the truth of it like Samuel did.

For rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft,
And stubbornness is as iniquity and idolatry.

1^st Samuel 15:23 (NKJV)

Now consider that,

“Feminism is the promotion and glorification of rebellion.”

Deep Strength’s Law of Feminism (2016 February 18)

However satisfying it might be to identify with rebellion, solipsism cannot answer the question of her heart either.

Historical Justifications

Next, the author launches into a 350-word historical review of wayward wimmin throughout western culture, from the original spinsters of the mid-1300s up to the flappers of the early 20^th century, all trying to squeeze out some nuance of identity. She manages to find some nuance of a shared identity, but not one that ameliorates her condition. She concludes this review with the following statements.

“What I love about these women is their spirit of urgency – they weren’t waiting for anything. Of all the anxious experiences of spinsterhood, one of the most debilitating is the sense of a life on hold, incomplete.”

This point does bring her to some introspection. Let’s see where it leads her.

Justified by Immaturity and the Inability to Delay Gratification

Twice now in the article, she writes about how she admires women with a spirit of urgency. Whether this is to be admired or not all depends on what the urgency is all about. This goes back to the issue of choice and what exactly is chosen. Is all this talk about urgency just another verbalization of the importance of overcoming the Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) and embracing the You Only Live Once (YOLO) mythos? Or could this be better framed as the child who doesn’t have enough self-control to delay gratification (as exemplified by the Marshmallow Test) but who does have the courage to be defiant?

As Roseneil argues in her book, membership of grown-up society is marked by coupling. “There’s something symbolic about transitioning into a permanent relationship that says you are an adult.”

This is a separate topic entirely. What brings a person into the adult world? Is it merely sexual experience? A lack of love in the home of upbringing can surely thrust a young person into the adult world, but this doesn’t imply that the person is truly an adult, especially in terms of his/her ability to form healthy boundaries and to assume the necessary responsibilities. However, at the same time, a lack of love prevents them from learning the self-confidence necessary to succeed, and so it places them at a severe disadvantage in the actual handling of the adult world.

For those of us who haven’t, and may never, make that step, we can be left with the strong impression – not just from society, but from within ourselves – that we’re immature or underdeveloped. Consider another wave of “superfluous women”, between the world wars, whose marriage prospects were shattered by the loss of an entire generation of young men. Popular history recast them as dilettantes and flappers: the spinster’s contribution to national life once again belittled and mocked.

She is referring to the MMP fallout after WW1, in which millions of young women had been damaged by the war in some way, either by losing their father or husband (or potential husband). The lack of young men created a sex imbalance in which fewer women were able to marry and more women turned to “alternative lifestyles”.

Justified by Herd Feeelings

We should not be surprised that her last thoughts in this post are about personal feelings and social conformity. Ultimately, it all comes back to Feeelings, and fitting into the Herd.

No wonder modern spinsters feel conflicted about where we stand, and whether we’re all we should be. When Professor Paul Dolan, a behavioural scientist at LSE, published research claiming that single women without children were happier than married ones, he was taken aback by the response. “I had lots of emails from single women saying thank you,” says Dolan, “because now people might start believing them when they say they’re actually doing all right.” But more interesting was the reactions from people who didn’t want to believe it.

It’s more interesting to her (and less interesting to us) because misery loves company.

“I’d underestimated how strongly people felt: there was something really insulting about choosing not to get married and have kids. It’s all right to try and fail – but you’d better try. So with these competing narratives, you would be challenged internally as a single woman, where your experiences are different to what they’re expected to be.”

Yes, people have a deep visceral disgust to spinsters (s1uts, and wh0res too) because of many reasons. Most obviously, they are defiled,* meaning that they are unfit for, and perhaps even corrosive to a family-based society. This is noteworthy because marriage and family is the setting and context in which people come to know God. If a person outrightly rejects this, then it’s a slap in the Creator’s face. Thus, spinsterhood, in its most egregious form, is not only a rejection of the continuance of society, as well as the race and tribe, it’s also an insult to God, who commanded us to procreate and “fill the earth”.

Whether a spinster is happy with her state depends, of course, not just on her personality, her circumstances, and her mood at the moment you ask her, but an ambivalent definition of contentment. We struggle to remember that, says Dolan, because our human psychology doesn’t deal well with nuance. “Almost everything you experience is a bit good and a bit bad. But with marriage and singleness it’s not voiced the same way. You’ve ticked off this box and got married so you must be happy. The divorce rates show that’s categorically untrue.”

Happiness as an indicator of self-worth is sorely inadequate. She is right that marriage and having a family is also no guarantee of happiness. Marriage and having a family doesn’t even guarantee that you’ll “find God”. But embracing Headship is the one thing that is available to everyone in life that is most conducive to that end.

* I am not saying that all single women are defiled, but only those who become spinsters by willingly choosing the Feminist Life Script (and all the profound sin that it entails) over marriage and family.

Epilogue

After all this frustration, readers will hope to find satisfaction in how the author, and women like her, might see the wisdom of repentance. But because of the plethora of justifications, repentance is still not on her table of options. Instead, we get a dismissive line about “the conversation”.

It is time, surely, to change the rules, and the conversation. As the population of never-married women expands, we should be honest about what it meant, and means, to be one. We should celebrate our identity and the life experience that has given it to us. We should reclaim our history and stop being defined by others. Why not start by taking back that dread word, spinster?

The problem with this plan is that it does not respect God’s Covenant Law, and it works against God’s ordained order. So by embracing this mindset, they are setting themselves up for a lifetime of angst, disappointment, and loneliness.

Oh my… Isn’t that what she is discovering now? Yet in spite of imminent catastrophe, they still seek to justify themselves. SMH…

Related

• Σ Frame: Women’s choice to be relevant (2020 February 6)
• Σ Frame: It was god’s will for her to be a stripper. (2021 January 22)

We can’t plant seed in the middle of winter.

No community, no organization, no faith for the future… –> No go.

Readership: Christians

Under the post, Is the Christian Red Pill a Black Pill? (2020 November 29), Nikolai Vladivostok wrote,

“From my secular perspective, it looks like a failure of game theory in the absence of social control. Men and women fall into a defect-defect pattern (as noted by Jim) and those few who still cooperate, lose. Especially when there’s a sex imbalance, as you point out.

I respect your view that Christian men should try to walk the line despite the odds. However, I wonder if there could also be a role for re-establising pro-family cultural norms. There are small groups within the West – Amish, Orthodox Jews, assorted cults – that manage to do this.

Or, if women and feminized men are so susceptible to media brainwashing, perhaps that avenue could be hacked to push them in another direction.”

This [statement in bold] is what the entire Christian Red Pill hopes and dreams for in their wildest fantasies. And the reasons it doesn’t happen are as numerous and complicated as the ocean is wide.

I tried to hone a workable list of what this might look like. I attempted to include as many different denominational/traditional world views and I got precisely zero other Manospherians, (who lament the lack such communities) to consider a very mild courtship proposition wherein children brought up in like-minded homes could at least be exposed to each other. No guarantees, no arranged marriages. Simple, wholesome introductions into a newly minted subculture with no weirdos, no purity rings, no perverts, just people who think family formation would be more likely under certain conditions.

Hence, another “black pill” consensus wherein the one thing everyone agrees on is that this re-establishing of bygone social norms (like knowing and really being involved in the lives of the people your kids marry) ain’t going to happen.

The Stone Village of Gostuša, Serbia.

All over the Christian Manosphere (and most of those blogs are still up, with comments going back at least a decade and a half) was a weeping and gnashing of teeth, low level grumbling about what a culture that reinforces marriage and family formation would look like.

Everyone agree(d) that this remnant would have to rise from the ashes of the demolished culture and accomplish what Dalrock once called “saving the seeds of civilization while the fire rushes over the forest”.

But this nucleus, this hidden, silent group never materialized and those seeds are (maybe) being saved in individual families (like Elspeths?) and without interconnectedness and multiplying will be consumed by the fire as sure as I sit here today.

What good is it for me to read ancient texts and share ancient wisdom (“Things that We have Heard and Known” – the name of Cane Caldo’s blog) to 5 year olds in my house when no one within 1,000 miles is doing the same?  We’re all going to be a bunch of Yodas practicing a dead religion on a jungle island in one generation. But Luke will not be visiting to learn the ways of Christ and go slaughter the Cathedral.

So what should you do? Go to an American Heritage Girls troop?  Join an Amish community?  OK. The internet and our super cool jobs and gadgets are just too fun.

Richard Grannon (I will be critiquing a really interesting video he did recently) posed this rhetorical question almost flippantly, “Who has a value system that remains useful over multiple contexts?”, and that really struck me. I mean who, really?  I am like a chameleon in my public life. My true beliefs would get me shunned from the company of even those who call themselves “conservatives”.

So sure…  If we have about a bazillion dollars and want to buy a nature preserve like in the movie, “The Village” (2004), then can we can bring all our friends to start a commune?  That’s about the only option we have, as far as I can tell.

Related

• Radix Fidem: Conditions Not Ripe Yet (2020 November 26)

One Night in Beijing

A taste of Chinese culture in music.

Readership: All;
Notes: Originally posted on January 17, 2015.

The Occasion

The first day of the Chinese New Year holiday is today (2021 February 12)!!!

In case anyone is wondering why the Chinese New Year is in February (?!?), it is because the traditional Chinese calendar is based on lunar cycles (similar to the ancient Hebrew calendar), and not the tropical year, which the western Gregorian calendar is currently modeled on. There is roughly a two month difference between the two because around 713 BC, King Numa Pompilius added January and February and placed them at the beginning of the year. The first six months were also renamed after Roman gods. Later in 46 BC, Julius Caesar reformed the calendar and revised the seventh and eighth months (July and August) to be named after himself and his adoptive son who became the first Emperor. The modern Gregorian calendar is an evolution of the Julian calendar.

In fact, the Latin roots bear out this difference. “Sept” in September (which is the ninth month) means 7, “oct” in October means 8, “nov” in November means 9, and “dec” in December means 10. When you do the simple math based on this, you quickly find that March should be the first month of the year, and indeed it was, more than a millennium ago. The ancient calendar of Romulus started at the month of March.

In comparison, there are still a few cultures throughout the world that associate the start of the new year with spring, technically the equinox (normally March 21). Easter originated from the Babylonian celebration of the new year.

So it was the Romans who messed up the western Calendar. The Chinese have it right.

A Cultural Exploration in Music

In keeping with the occasion, I thought I would break away from the “China bad” narrative and give the readers a little taste of “Taiwan good”.

This is an old hit that has become a classic!

One Night in Beijing (北京一夜) is a masterful work of fine art.

The modern version, presented in the video below, is from the Taiwanese artist, Shin (信 meaning ‘Trust’). This artist combines the traditional Chinese formal theatrical style of singing with a modern, western rock anthem structure.

About the Artistry

The Taiwanese artist, Shin, has, with this song, almost single-handedly revived the traditional Chinese formal theatrical style of singing that has fallen out of popularity since the World War Two era and has nearly disappeared.

Westerners will quickly recognize the iconic style of singing as sounding reminiscent of Bruce Lee’s ‘cat call’.  To be honest, I never appreciated this style of singing until I learned that it is an artful expression of ‘repressed rage’, an emotion rarely encountered in the west. But after coming to understanding the emotional significance of the expression, I very much enjoy such performances now.

Listeners will also hear bits of an emotion westerners might call, ‘impertinent sarcasm’ thrown into some of the lyrics. Westerners consider this emotion to be rude and annoying, so the full significance of this emotion, conveyed in the song as sincere, yet mocking, is lost on foreign ears.

Chinese classical instrumentation also appears, including the er-hu, an ancient two-stringed instrument played with a bow, and the ‘flying gong’ (also called an ‘opera gong’, ‘hand gong’, or ‘bending gong’) which has the curiously rising intonation that creates a glissando effect.

A previous release from Bobby Chen (陳昇) and Liu Chia-Hui (劉佳慧) came out in 1992. Liu Chia-Hui’s delicate soprano voice captures the fascinating and heart-gripping hope of longing, which was an emotion highly valued in the Chinese arts and entertainment in bygone times.

About the Poetry

Keeping in step with Red Pill lore, the overriding theme of the song concerns the immutable strength of sexual bonding. There is a reference in the song to an old lady who waits decades for her man to return home. Her continual pining after so many years is a moving testament to the the Alpha Widow syndrome.

The details captured in the lyrics suggest that the song is several decades old, perhaps even predating World War 2. There are many literary twists with double meanings in the lyrics. For example, one of the words, 花 (huā), literally means ‘flower’ or ‘embroidery’, but it is used as a euphemism for ‘spend’, and as a metaphor for ‘lady’. Now, imagine how several words laced throughout the song, each having multiple meanings, could produce a panoply of puns, metaphors, and alternate narratives within the same verse! For this reason, some Chinese poetry makes the brilliant prose of Shakespeare seem like a school boy’s blathering by comparison! Even native Chinese speakers can’t understand some of it, which is largely why the song is suspected to have originated in a bygone era.

A Taiwanese mother with her two daughters. Can you tell who the mother is?

English Translation

Here is an English translation that will help western listeners appreciate the art in fuller detail.

ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING

Don’t wish to ask where you have been
Don’t wish to wonder if you are ever returning
I’m thinking of your heart, I’m thinking of your face
I’m thinking of your embrace – I won’t let go, I just won’t

ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING
I leave behind much love
Whether you loved or not
It’s all the dust of history

ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING
I leave behind much love
I fear to ask the way at midnight
Lest I walk into in the valley of flowers

People say in the valley of flowers an old lover sits and sews embroidered shoes
The old woman with a kind face awaits her beloved departed one

ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING
Please don’t drink too much
Whether you loved or not
It’s all the dust of history

ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING
I leave behind much love
The men of wine and songs
They are the northern wolf clan

People say the northern wolf clan, when the cold wind blows, stands beyond the city gates
Wearing rusted armour, calling for the gates to open, their eyes are full of tears.

I have waited one thousand years why won’t the city gates open?
I have waited one thousand years why hasn’t my beloved returned?

ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING
I leave behind much love
I fear to ask the way at midnight
Lest I’m touched by the ghosts of sadness

ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING
I leave behind much love
I fear to ask the way at midnight
Lest I walk into the Gates of Earthly Peace

People say within the Gates of Earthly Peace an old woman waits and dreams
The old woman with a kind face awaits her beloved departed one

ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING
Please don’t drink too much
At the Gates of Earthly Peace,
Nobody will remain untouched

ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING
You leave behind much love
Don’t be asking the way at midnight
Less you’re touched by the ghosts of sadness

ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING
Don’t wish to ask where you have been
Don’t wish wonder if you are ever returning
I think of your heart, I think of your face
I think of your embrace, I won’t let go, I just won’t

ONE NIGHT IN BEIJING
You leave behind much love
Don’t be asking the way at midnight
Lest you be touched by the ghosts of sadness

Original Chinese Version

ONE NIGHT IN 北京　我留下許多情
不管你愛與不愛　都是歷史的塵埃

ONE NIGHT IN 北京　我留下許多情
不敢在午夜問路　怕走到了百花深處

人說百花的深處　住着老情人　縫着繡花鞋
面容安詳的老人　依舊等着那出征的歸人

ONE NIGHT IN 北京　你可別喝太多酒
不管你愛與不愛　都是歷史的塵埃

ONE NIGHT IN 北京　我留下許多情
把酒高歌的男兒　是北方的狼族

人說北方的狼族　會在寒風起　站在城門外
穿着腐銹的鐵衣　呼喚城門開　眼中含着淚

嗚……我已等待千年　為何城門還不開
嗚……我已等待了千年　為何良人不回來

ONE NIGHT IN 北京　我留下許多情
不敢在午夜問路　怕觸動了傷心的魂

ONE NIGHT IN 北京　我留下許多情
不敢在午夜問路　怕走到了地安門

不想再問你　你到底在何方
不想再思量　你能否歸來麽
想着你的心　想着你的臉
想捧在胸口　能不放就不放

ONE NIGHT IN 北京

Related

• Σ Frame: A Noodle Asian Inspiration (2017 November 3)

What Hitting Bottom will look like

The final dissolution before reintegration.

Readership: All
Length: 3,200 words
Reading Time: 11 minutes

In Hitting Bottom must be necessary (2020 November 6), I described how the West has been following a downward trajectory, not just for decades, but for centuries. I concluded that we must “hit bottom” at some point in the very near future.

Then, in December of last year, I saw a pattern of insights on this topic emerge across the Men’s Sphere. This post will pull these together to form what I believe is a prophecy for the West.

*       *       *       1       *       *       *

“…for those coming of age for marriage, America has become a social toxic wasteland. It’s bad enough that America is Western, with all the serious problems that can bring. Still, within that flawed system until recently, it was possible for good things to happen with romance. Those possibilities have now been reduced to a mere fragment, memories of quaint customs no longer tolerated.

All the most useful cues are gone, so that the process of getting to know someone well enough to fall in love has lost all the warmth. Romance is just about dead. It’s not that people no longer pair for sex, but that the vast majority never pair up for actual love and marriage.

The Men’s Red Pill movement is dying for a reason. It’s not that the study of what women are like has failed; fundamental truths about feminine nature that women once kept hidden in their own society have not changed. Women of the younger generations have begun to admit this stuff openly. But they do so only to confirm it as their right, with all the enforcement that comes with such a status. Soft manipulation becomes law. The common social expectations of these younger generations have dramatically shifted. The number of women still dreaming of romance has dramatically dropped to a tiny minority of the population. Such dreams are openly suppressed.

It would be easy to pass off this ugly shift as the influence of networking technology and how people interact with the virtual world. This is the age of technocracy. That much is patently true, but the question is: Do you understand it? Do you understand how things have shifted? The sheer power of this pervasive change in human orientation is bigger than most people in the older generations can comprehend. The momentum of this thing makes it utterly impossible to even think of rolling it back, or any part of it.”

“I feel sorry for the younger generations of men and women. They will have make their own way, and it looks like the system is flatly hostile to their needs. The only thing that can make life bearable is divine revelation, and that calls for disconnecting from this world in some measure. I can’t help them within their own realm of existence; they have to awaken a higher faculty. The genuine biblical path of a Christian family is truly alien to this world.”

Do What’s Right: Funeral for the Red Pill (2020 December 7)

Ed is right. The Red Pill addressed the problems and confusion in the Socio-Sexual/Marriage Marketplace (SSMMP) created by the Sexual Revolution and 3^rd and 4^th Wave Feminism, which were faced by late Boomers, Xers, and early Millennials. But over the past few years, the times have changed. Late Millennials and Zoomers have an entirely different SSMMP to contend with, and it’s pretty bleak.

Troy Francis gives one account in his post, The Death of Togetherness (2021 January 16).

Another putrid example is described in this video.

The Thinking Ape: Dutch Divorce Rate Skyrockets in Response to Alimony Reform (2019 December 14) Length: 10:22*

* H/T: Whores and Ale: The Plan Doesn’t Change, Just The Timetable (2020 December 8)

*       *       *       2       *       *       *

Nikolai Vladivostok offers an outline of these changes in his post, Am I Out of Touch? (2020 December 8). I’ve summarized his points as follows.

• Cultural shifts surrounding love and mating.* First there was the 1960s free love movement. Then in the 2000s, women became more interested in getting an education and career before dating seriously so there was a shift from serial monogamy to casual dating and hook-ups. The next step was Tinder, which normalized meeting strangers online and having sex with them a short time later with limited preliminaries. The final step (so far) was the popularization of sugar baby sites and OnlyFans. Once you see this progression it starts to make more sense: the jump from 1950s kissing only on the third date to pro sugar baby is extreme, but the jump from Tinder hookups with strangers to similar hookups with a few gifts thrown in is not so great. Nor is the jump from sending badboys nudes to offering pics online for cash.
• A rapidly evolving shift in the SMP. It’s gone from serial monogamy, to dating, to PUA Game, to Hookup, and then to Online Dating (OLD), which then had its own rapid shift from OK Cupid, to Tinder, to online amateur prostitution (OASIS, e.g. OnlyFans). This shift unfolded differently in different countries, but overall, sex has become routinely transactional, and talking to a stranger in public could get you arrested.
• The SMP has become transactional. These days, an increasing number of men, out of desperation, are willing to pay $$$ simply to interact with a woman online. Women are now incentivized to regard both sex and sex appeal as a medium of financial exchange. This shifts the SMP to a whole new level of hypergamy, in which men are not only judged by their ability to induce the Tingles and perform in bed, but also to deliver $$$ and a preferred lifestyle. The bar has been raised so high, that now, women are utterly bored with common interactions with men.
• Monetized Sexual Transactions. The theme for January at Σ Frame covered the Online Amateur Sex Industry and Socialization (OASIS). This rise in “compensated dating” has cemented the annihilation of the SMP as a potential MMP as it was in years past. Now, not only do a significant (but practically unknown) proportion of young women now have some form of soft p0rn modeling (e.g. Instagram) or soft prostitution (e.g. OnlyFans) in their past, some have become accustomed to being compensated and now expect it!
• Feminine Empowerment is the Norm. Women have an unprecedented amount of power, and even if they haven’t taken the ticket, they know it’s there. This option has the effect of altering their bargaining position in a relationship, making them raise their standards unreasonably high. Why should an average young woman date Mr. Average gratis when another Mr. Average online is willing to stump up cash? Mr. Average without a short-time dowry may no longer be good enough.
• A cultural religious movement has been afoot. It had its roots in 3^rd Wave Feminism, then “The Great Awokening”, took off in 2013 and has been progressing rapidly since then. Previous to that year, feminism was a big thing but understanding sh!t tests and the true desires of women were enough to overcome anti-male conditioning. Since 2013 it’s been getting harder. You need to be very careful around university-indoctrinated Western women, whether you are approaching or in a relationship. The risk is not rejection – it is denunciation. See also, MeT00.

In sum, relation$hips are now centered around illicit sex and money, instead of faith, love, respect, companionship, sharing joy, and building a family within marriage.

* Nikolai Vladivostok calls this the Marginal Effect, meaning that things that happen in the margins of society slowly, then suddenly and quickly, become the new norm.

*       *       *       3       *       *       *

The next excerpt offers a Biblically based, metaphysical context for what has been described so far. I have condensed the content in the interests of reading time. Click on the link below to read the entire post.

1^st Corinthians 11:3 can be drawn in the form of a word diagram:

God <- Jesus <- Man <- Woman

If there is no man between Jesus and the woman, then the woman looks to Jesus outside of a man’s authority, and that’s not always good as we read in Numbers 5:14-18 (NKJV). The essential thing is that the woman is under the husband’s authority. If necessary, the husband can bring the woman to the priest, and the priest stands the woman before Jesus, uncovering her head.

Isaiah 3:1-4 describes a time when the wisdom of the ancient and honorable is lost* and children are set as rulers. The result of this inverted state of affairs is oppression and chaos as verses 5-11 describe.

The next verse illustrates what happens when the proper hierarchy is overturned.

“My people — children are their oppressors, and women rule over them.
O my people, your leaders mislead you, and confuse the course of your paths.”

Isaiah 3:12 (NRSV)

When things get bad enough, God judges the men first, especially the older men who are supposed to serve in leadership and guidance for the people and who, ultimately, are the cause of all of this. (See Isaiah 3:13-15.)

Since the women have been elevated to leadership, and there is no man between them and God, they are exposed to his direct judgment, and it is terrible. (See Isaiah 3:16-24.)

The judgment of the women is to make them experience and realize their shame. They have been operating outside of the covering of a man.

And what has been going on with the men? They die, and the city falls down. (See Isaiah 3:25 NRSV.)

Once the women are shamed and the unworthy men are dead, the people have hit rock bottom. [Note: women are already shamed and many men are “dead” in the figurative spiritual sense.] What is the way upwards? Isaiah tells us in the first verse of the next chapter.

“Seven women shall take hold of one man in that day, saying,

“We will eat our own bread and wear our own clothes;
just let us be called by your name; take away our disgrace.”

Isaiah 4:1 NRSV

Food and clothing are two of the things a husband gives to his wife or wives as directed by Exodus 21:10.

¹⁰ ”If he takes another wife to himself, he shall not diminish the food, clothing, or marital rights of the first wife.”

Exodus 21:10 NRSV

What we are seeing here is that the shamed women realize they are in disgrace being outside of a man’s covering of authority. They are directly exposed to God’s judgment and it is terrifying. With so many men dead, they are tacitly willing to share a husband to get rid of the shame and be covered.

Once the proper hierarchy has been restored, then in Isaiah 4:2-6 (NRSV), the prophet paints out a beautiful picture of Mount Zion being covered by the Branch of the Lord via a canopy.

This is how Paul can say that the relationship between Jesus and His Body (the Church) is the same as the relationship between a husband and his wife. As the husband covers his wife, so the Messiah covers the ekklesia. We notice the language that Paul uses in Ephesians 5:22-27 — how a husband makes his wife holy by washing her with water is similar to the language of Isaiah where God washes away the filth of the daughters of Zion.

If we ponder the necessity of men covering the women like Jesus covers the daughters of Zion, then we understand why Paul so forcefully tells Timothy that forbidding marriage is a doctrine of devils when pushed by apostates when they depart from the faith. Indeed, if marriage is forbidden, then the only covering women have is their fathers. Forbidding marriage robs the women of the covering of husbands!(See 1^st Timothy 4:1-4 NRSV.)

If our people only realized how intimately our faith is bound up and pictured by marriage, then getting biblical marriage right and men covering one or more women will lead to the glory of Zion as Isaiah described.

Source: Kol Yisrael Torah and Prophecy (Brian Somers): End Time Judgment of Men and Women: Isaiah 3-4 (2020 December 5)**

We’ve not yet reached this point, however, we can already see evidence of this happening in the margins. For an example, see Wintery Knight’s, Young Woman Regrets that Older People in Her Life were Dishonest with Her (2020 December 7).

* For an example of the wisdom and knowledge that has been almost entirely lost, read Dark Brightness: Marriage is for Raising Godly Children (2020 December 9).
** H/T: Pete Rambo at 11:3 Restoration.

*       *       *       4       *       *       *

When we strike bottom, the despair and despondency cause people to seek God once again. J.M. Smith and Alan Roebuck speak to us about this topic.

The most read Orthosphere post of all time is Alan Roebuck’s “Why You are Demoralized and What You Must Do About it,” which he published eight years ago, on June 8, 2012.

[…]

Alan tells us that three key spiritual nutrients have been withdrawn.  First and foremost is the firm conviction that there are such things as spiritual nutrients, and as a corollary to this, that there are such things as spiritual junk foods and poisons.  This key spiritual nutrient was withdrawn by the doctrine of tolerance, non-judgmentalism, and cultural relativism.  This doctrine states that each of us is free to choose our spiritual nutrients according to our own individual tastes.  Every “good” chosen is therefore equally good, from which it follows that none of them are really good at all.

As the doctrine of tolerance destroys belief in objective value—the belief that anything is absolutely true, good, or beautiful—there is an unsurprising proliferation of ugliness—of intellectual, moral, and aesthetic ugliness.  Truth, goodness and beauty are nutrients that revive the spirits of men and women.  Ugliness is the spiritual toxin that makes them feel a morbid desire to go and hang themselves from a rafter in the barn.

The dolor of this spiritual wasteland has been further deepened, Alan tells us, by a false and malevolent history that alienates us from our ancestors and our past.  He is speaking here particularly of white people and Western civilization.  When it comes to white people and Western civilization, the doctrine of tolerance and non-judgmentalism is suspended in favor of scathing judgments and resounding damnations.  It is hard for anyone to keep his pecker up in the spiritual wasteland, but it is especially hard when the loudspeakers boom that he is part of a cursed people that has been found wanting in the balance of history.  It is demoralizing to learn you are the world’s one and only unchosen people.

[…]

What you must do about your demoralization is reverse the process that demoralized you.  Think of it as spiritual detox.  You must:

1. Reject relativism and recover a belief in objective truth, beauty and goodness. This begins by recovering a belief in the one true God that is described and worshiped in orthodox Christian religion.  There can be no spiritual absolutes if there is no spiritual absolute, and there certainly can be no spiritual absolutes if there is no spiritual.  If there is no one true God, we are all just wanking in the void.
2. Reject tolerance and become judgmental and discriminatory. This does not mean persecutorial.  Spiritual tolerance for ugliness (the mendacious, the transgressive, the grotesque) is like physical tolerance for alcohol.  You will stop vomiting but go on destroying your liver.  When you are spiritually intolerant, you will avoid all forms of ugliness whenever you can, and you will curse them whenever you cannot.  When you cannot curse them out loud, you will curse them under your breath.
3. Reject the poisoned myths of your enemies and keep faith with your fathers. This filial piety is not uncritical, but it is intensely jealous.  Alien criticism is either ignored or treated as casus belli.

Source: The Orthosphere (J.M. Smith): Acquiescence in Cuckoldry: An Excursus on Kristor’s Latest (2020 December 6)

These three steps are the point at which the individual man wakes up from the collective delusion and confusion, and a return to God and His ordained order begins to appear on the margins.

The Bible instructs us not to curse fellow believers, but to pray for them instead. But it’s a different story for the apostates of this age. It requires a strange balance – forgive them, and then curse them.

For a plethora of examples, read the faux news. On second thought, don’t bother!

*       *       *       5       *       *       *

Similar to my conclusions under the last epiphany, there will be some strange combinations of responsive actions that will be required by the faithful during these times. At first glance, it may seem like a conundrum with no good options, but in fact, it just requires some dirty politics which are currently frowned upon by polite, converged churchianity. NovaSeeker and I will be reviewing some of these crucibles of faith through the next couple months.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going!

Epilogue

I’m offering this post as a prophecy, but that doesn’t mean it will necessarily turn out as bad as described in Isaiah. If we recognize what is happening, and how far we have drifted from God’s ordained order, and then respond in such a way that these trends are dampened or upended, then we may avoid a descent to the bottom of the abyss and a total annihilation.

Even if most do not respond, God will grant those few who do an individualized dispensation of grace and mercy.

In order to avert this fate, the important thing for us to do, is to remove those elements which are most egregious to God, and to embrace those elements that are paramount to the Kingdom of God. The degree to which we do this, as a culture, will determine how much decadence and destruction we will see in the next decade or two.

What are these elements?

• Get in touch with your heart. Pray and study the Bible. Get away from various addictions. Be sensitive to your convictions and act accordingly. (1^st Corinthians 8)
• Seek after the Kingdom of God and His righteousness by faith. (Matthew 6:33)
• Find ways to worship, praise, and glorify God, and be thankful. (Psalm 145)
• Embrace and defend God ordained gender roles. Men focus on their work. Women focus on the home and supporting their husband’s work. (Titus 2:1-8)
• Exercise personal boundaries. Separate yourselves from those who are defiled, those who scheme, and those who practice lawlessness. (2 Corinthians 6:17) This includes not patronizing businesses and separating from individuals that endorse or support the same.
• Pursue sanctification, i.e. sexual purity and covenantal marriage (i.e. Headship). (1 Thessalonians 4:3)
• As much as possible, live in Shalom with your fellow man. (Romans 12:18) At a societal level, this means we must stop engaging in useless foreign conflicts.

I suggest pursuing these elements in the order given.

Related

• Σ Frame: Buckle down for the ride of the centuries (2018 August 9)
• Σ Frame: Yankee Stay Home! (2019 February 12)
• Σ Frame: Paul Harvey “If I were the devil” (2019 August 24)
• Σ Frame: The 5 Phases of Deprogramming from the Matrix (2020 February 4)
• Σ Frame: You have to leave Murika to get the Real News (2020 November 3)