It’s too easy to blame everything on Feminism

Is the church feminized as a result of the Silence of Adam?  Or was Adam silenced by Feminism first?

Readership: Men; Christian Men;
Theme: Masculine Authority and Responsibility
Author’s Note: This post is based on a conversation between Jack and Deep Strength, author of Christianity and Masculinity.
Length: 1,600 words
Reading Time: 9 minutes

Introduction

A couple years ago, Deep Strength gave us an entertaining look at the double standards for bedroom performance that are usually imposed on married Christian men and women.

Christianity and Masculinity: Double standards around sex: the purest example of the feminization of Christianity (2020-6-9)

The double standard referred to here is that the same command to both husbands and wives to have sex with each other (given in 1 Corinthians 7:3-5) receives two drastically different responses from “Christian” men and women.  Hence, we often hear phrases like “evil patriarchy” and “oppressive/toxic masculinity” from women whenever this command is brought up, and we hear practically nothing from men.

Although DS did not explain how in the text of this post, the title itself states that the double standards between sexes (among other differences) are a manifestation of the feminization of Christianity.

Although I believe this to be true, I wasn’t content with this assumption, and I decided that this manifestation of Feminism within the church needed to be further examined.  So in response, I wrote a post Explaining the Double Standards around Sex (2020-06-10), and I reposted it on Reddit/RPChristians under the same title.

In this post, I argued that the double standard is not purely a result of the feminization of Christianity, but is instead a result of the differing viewpoints of men and women and how outspoken they are. It follows that…

1. There is a selection bias based on the inherent differences between the sexes.
2. The church prioritizes women’s arguments as the predominating view, and men have no resolve to counteract these arguments.

I’ll add a third reason here — the whole idea of a double standard is an assessment based on “fairness” AKA “equaluhty”, which buys into the societal-wide liberal consciousness. People who live in fear of the culture of Progressivism have a tendency to shy away from anything that doesn’t favor females in a vain effort to make them the same as men, and we see a whitewashed version of this within the church.

As a comparison, we have standards for pastors, standards for teachers, and standards for supervisors, but we don’t necessarily hold pastors, teachers, and supervisors to the exact same standards, even though their roles are more similar than those of husband and wife.  The reason that Liberals don’t attack and deconstruct these roles is because this doesn’t further their goal of erasing the distinctions between men and women and undermining the family, which also happens to be one of the primary goals of Satan.

Instead, the right way to think of this is that there are standards for women, and there are standards for men.  This is not a new idea, nor should it be sensational.

Anyway, the main point of my post was to elucidate how men and women respond differently to criticism, and that the prevailing viewpoint matches that of disobedient women rather than obedient men. This is neither good nor right.

Precision Control

Here’s a case in point.

Case Study – Denying Sex to One’s Spouse

Under Deep Strength’s post Sexual authority is only for sex and not against sex (2021-10-5), Jonadab-the-Rechabite wrote,

“There is confusion due to a lack of consensus on the meaning of “force”.  It plays into the feminist’s frame of “abuse”, “doormat”, and victimhood.  Is persuade, compel, or insistence force?  Is it the evil patriarchy at work when a refusal to acknowledge the withdrawal of consent as anything but covenant breaking sin?  Why does the knee-jerk reaction bring up rape and not defrauding?”

This confusion is a direct result of admitting rebellious wimminz arguments. The words “abuse”, “consent”, “doormat”, “rape”, “victim”, etc. are all from discontented women’s attempt to gaslight everyone into believing that dominant men are brutish louts and that God’s ordained order is abusive, unfair, and evil. The words “defrauding” and “withholding” are from the suffering husband’s point of view.

Which of these two narratives is more truthful according to the Word of God?

In bizarro world, wives can defraud their husbands and husbands who point this out are called abusive.  Women are encouraged to be outspoken and men are supposed to remain silent so that the true abusers (rebellious wives) can blame the true victims (sex starved husbands) for being abusers. An eisegesis of God’s Word is then moulded around this model. No one is permitted to point this out without being branded a misogynist.  Women have all the power.

Jonadab’s question (in bold) gets to the core of the matter. As long as men allow this dynamic to continue, they will have a feminized church filled with confusion.

Facts Falling on Deaf Ears

Over at RPChristians, my post had a mixed reaction. It seemed that most of the moderators and commenters agreed with the post, but they didn’t know what to make of it because my reasoning and how it was phrased didn’t sit well with them. I didn’t understand what they didn’t agree with, so I asked DS about this in a private message.

DS told me the issue was my approach to the topic, which I would describe as part analytical, part praxeological, and part mystical.  He said most people would say points 1 and 2 are due to the feminization of Christianity, so parsing them out into different things (and not explicitly saying it’s due to feminization) is generally specious to most RPChristian readers. So instead of recognizing my post as a nuts and bolts description of how a church becomes feminized, they read this as me saying that Christianity is not feminized, or attempting to justify why or how it is feminized.

DS explained, for instance, that women’s views only have a predominating expression in arguments if feminism has crept into Churches and leadership.  Yes, but my question is, exactly how does this happen?  Is it when the mysterious zephyr of feminism has crept into the church, or is it when good men stay silent and let rebellious women do all the talking?

The good men at RPChristians stayed silent on this question.  It’s easier to blame everything on “Feminism”.

So apparently, any cause and effect analysis of real observations, even one that conveys transferrable knowledge, is useless and unsatisfying unless it includes a pat condemnation of Feminism — an abstraction that is already assumed and has no transferrable knowledge. 

I think the deeper reason why my approach was not received is because instead of taking the common Manospherian approach of catatonically blaming abstractions (i.e. Feminism, women, or churchianity), it put an onus on men to accept the situation as a challenge to stop tolerating the predominant fem-centric view, and to stop blaming the feminization of the church as a hopeless catharsis. That no one picked up on this gives me some concern for the men at RPChristians.

Conclusions

The Manosphere has long been in the habit of blaming every social ill on Feminism, and rightly so. Ten or so years ago, this was a prophetic revelation. But anymore, the Manosphere has formed a cathexis on Feminism which functions as a catharsis for the ills of Feminism.  Feminism is now, and has been for quite some time, a pat answer to every woe.  As such, it’s easy for us to pin the blame on “Feminism” as an abstract malady in order for us to get a satisfying sense of denouement without delving into the details and identifying the specific methods of the madness that Feminism has created. The question and task for men is to figure out what to do with themselves within this social structure.

All that is required for evil to flourish is for good men to stand by and blame everything on “Feminism”.

Conservatives have a similar approach when they identify a problem but do nothing to resolve it.

As for the assumption posed by DS which I addressed in my post, admitting women’s arguments as the predominating view (i.e. an inversion of Headship) is the fundamental core of the feminization of Christianity. It’s not the other way around, viz. the feminization of Christianity allows women’s arguments to be the predominant norm, at least, not until the church has been entirely subsumed by Feminism. The interaction defines the structure. But apparently, the guys at RPChristians think that the structure defines the interaction.

Σ Frame Axiom 7 (Jack): The natural interaction defines the relationship structure according to which model it fits best, not what we think it is or hope for it to be.

I can see how it works both ways, but the thing I don’t like about their viewpoint is that it is a dead end approach. Guys won’t think that they can change their interactions with women as long as they regard Feminism as a monolithic power that holds immutable tyranny over their lives.

It’s important for men to establish and maintain Headship by dealing with their wives (who are women in the church) directly, especially when a top-down approach for tamping down feminism in the church is not a feasible approach (and it isn’t for men in most churches).

So instead of quarrelling about which came first, the chicken or the egg, eventually, we’re going to have to stop ascribing such overwhelming power to Feminism in the abstract, and start picking apart the tacks and threads that hold it all together. In practice, we should start engaging in some brinkmanship with those who are limited by their need of a rhetorical catharsis and those who presume Feminism will continue to be the overriding norm to which all others have to bow.

Related

• Σ Frame (Jack): Don’t Admit Her Argument (2018-3-19)
• Σ Frame (Jack): The magic of introspective judgment and authentic confession (2020-05-08)
• Σ Frame (Jack): Do men need talk therapy? (2021-6-16)
• Σ Frame (Jack): 8 Things that Increase Discernment (2021-6-25)
• Σ Frame (Jack): Women Rely on a Man’s Frame for Redemptive Introspection (2021-06-28)
• Σ Frame (Jack): When walking on eggshells, step boldly! (2021-6-30)
• Σ Frame (Jack): Why challenge the character of your wife? (2021-7-7)
• Σ Frame (Thedeti): On Red Pill Awareness (2021-7-23)
• Σ Frame (Jack): Exhuming the Masculine Frame (2021-9-10)
• Σ Frame (Jack): Sexual Authority and Sanctification (2022-8-8)