Grey Dawn Over Chicago

You Bowed Up When You Should Have Bowed Down

Where wives fall (run) into rebellion is not when they choose not to do something evil their husbands command, but when they do not submit to those husbands. It’s not “legitimate” rebellion for a wife to refuse to take birth control as her husband wants–It’s not rebellion at all! The rebellion is when she believes and acts as if from that moment she does not have to seek his approval; even and especially concerning the evil act under consideration.

Over and over again we see examples in Scripture where a servant cannot or will not obey a master; whether good or evil. The righteous servants always say something along the lines of, “I cannot comply with this. What can I do instead to appease my lord?” David says this to Saul; Daniel to Nebuchadnezzar; Lot to the men of Sodom; Esther to King Ahasuerus; Tamar to Amnon…

The absence of the bolded bit is the rebellion, and it is never legitimate.

 

This post repurposed from a comment I made on SunshineMary’s post: “When submit in everything means ‘but not this thing’ “

More Human than You, Man

Recently, I’ve given people around $70 for the privilege of watching pictures flit by at a high rate of speed in two respective sequences. One called “Don Jon”, and another with the captivating title, “Prisoners”. (bah-dum-ch!) Reviews will probably be forthcoming, but for now I want to talk about a third film that I saw twice while waiting to retrieve my already surrendered value coupons.

It’s a documentary advert about an appliance that can answer answer obscure questions, build confidence, provide companionship, and instruct mating habits. The appliance is called Nexus 7.

Like Government Check Dad, this app can’t play catch, but it does leave Mom free to live a more empowered and YOLO life than previous generations could afford. I’m not sure how the Treehouse of Solitude gets built under this dynamic, but once it is the kid can just hang there by himself and let Google’s pathetic bastardization of The Young Gentleman’s Illustrated Primer initiate him into the mysteries of life.

…And Thanks for All the Fisk

Several people have linked to me recently. I tender this post in lieu of individual replies of thanksgiving. These are in no particular order except as I recall them.

Dalrock

SunshineMary

Elspeth

Donal Graeme

Free Northerner

Chris

 

Innumerable Insanities

Donal Graeme asks a question:

As a man, I never gave serious thought to how women would rate themselves and each other. Part of me assumed that women could at least get a rough estimate. But after having read some comments and e-mails, and talking with some women I know, it seems that this isn’t the case at all. Apparently they are quite poor at rating their own attractiveness.

This shouldn’t have surprised me, really, but it did. And I don’t have a good excuse for it. How many posts and threads in the manosphere have discussed how women have completely unrealistic expectations these days? Hundreds at least. While the toxic hypergamy which infects the water supply in the West might be the cause of some of this, it can only work with what is already present. So it should have been obvious to me that women aren’t able, in most cases, to accurately place their own SMV value (which is what the 1-10 scale essentially represents).

[…]

Should a single woman looking to marry strive to find out her respective attractiveness on the 1-10 scale, in order to calibrate her relationship efforts towards men with whom she is roughly matched?

Now, this is an important and delicate subject, and Donal Graeme is undertaking a search for understanding. Like many undertakers, he’s working in the dark. So before we even attempt to suss out all the nuances, subtleties, and intricate interactions of this corpus we must illuminate what is to be studied. Let me get the light for you:

Women are crazy.

1) The singleness of a woman has nothing to do with whether she is concerned about her attractiveness. With very few exceptions: Every woman wants to know if she is attractive. Age and infirmity do have a mollifying effect, but even then the downward pressures of time and circumstance will only cause this desire to seek affirmation in lower regions (“I’m so glad you like it, honey. You love Grandma, don’t you?”)

Wherever you go, if the threads of conversation veer into the importance of the 1-10 scale, the women start throwing out their numbers, bolstering each other, etc. I’m speaking of Christian, married, and ostensibly sane women. (And perhaps they are; with passing moments of madness.) You can’t stop them from wanting to know; from trying to dictate; from competing with each other, and trying to make sure no one gets too far ahead of the fold. They’ll protest that they don’t mean to be competitive. As the saying goes: “Numbers don’t lie”, and self-referentially invoking the 1-10 scale is nothing but numbers. So what we see here is that, untrained, women are short sighted, vain, and envious; which looks a lot like cruelty.

One of the ways we know that women are short-sights, etc. is that the 1-10 ranking system is a guy thing. Generally speaking, women are more concerned with the brute question of, “Does he want me more than her?” It’s only after some man tells a woman of the 1-10 system (which is instinctive and naturally understood by men) that she becomes enthralled with knowing her place on it. My second point will show that this is insane.

2) The 1-10 scale is abstract; not concrete. It’s meant to illustrate; not define. Pursuit of “real knowledge” of a “real number rank” is a disorder revealed by the light of our first premise that Women are crazy. As I said: Men intuit that each man’s rank of the same woman will be different, and that it’s an expression of where that particular woman’s attractiveness ranks at this particular moment; respective of who we can recall immediately without too much effort.

3) Women are like fields of flowers: They are very pretty when bloomed, but go bad from the head down. This fading confuses and exasperates women as they daily greet each new day with less petals. Now, remember: Women are crazy. They have no idea how to value themselves, and in their insanity each wrinkle, grey hair, and saggy bit of face causes them a fit of re-evaluation; which seems reasonable on the face of it.

Except it’s not because they also tend to be short-sighted, vain, and envious. What usually ends up happening is that a score of scores in words are bled out in explanation of why they are still a 6 today even though they were a 6 yesterday, yet are objectively not as prettily-petaled today as yesterday.

Men are like farmers, and place a higher value on rich virgin soil, smooth slopes, easy irrigation, and a decided lack of plow-shattering stones. These all factor into an (abstract) appraisal of the rank of a given property. In addition, men grow an attachment to their own fields as they work them, and work with them. This attachment deepens into real appreciation as that work is rewarded with the joy of the harvest, and that joy recalibrates his sense of the 1-10 scale in the favor of his field; flowers or no.

Finally, what women consider attractive is irrelevant to those to whom the attraction actually matters. Men decide who is, and who is not, attractive.

My suggestion to women that want to obsess over numbers is to get into the kitchen and whip me up something delicious out of that dusty cookbook. It will tell you all the numbers you need to know. Those women who find this suggestion offensive are welcome to instead take off those sweatpants and sew a dress from pattern. Alternatively, you could make a grocery budget, or count out 3 sets of 10 lunges; knees all the way down to the floor, ladies. There’s no cheating in math.

Why They Are Like That

A woman is not taught to be uppity; she is born wanting more and better. That’s the role women will naturally play in civilization. When they are at their best they provoke and beseech; at their worst they usurp, tempt, and nag. Either way,  women are the living expression of the idea of upward mobility (more and better) and it’s (part) of what God intended women to be.

Now, let’s address some common lies that surround this need in women; this hypergamy. One of them I’ve already covered above: Hypergamy is a good thing, and it’s intended. If a man doesn’t feel like dealing with any hypergamous impulses then he doesn’t want anything to do with women. More for me and mine, then.

Another common lie is one that we see most often coming out of churches and other peoples who might describe themselves as “socially conservative”. It’s a perversion of women’s role of provocation and beseeching, and it goes something like this: “Women are a civilizing force on men.” This is wrong. Women are an impetus for men to express civilizing force. The force comes from men. Even when it comes from women, civilization is an inherently male expression of force; so children better do what Mama said and stop actin’-the-fool because one way or another she has access to Daddy’s belt.

We understand this when we examine why the presence of women provokes men to civilize things, or why mothers civilize their children’s behavior: We’re trying to make it–homes, streets, grocery stores, anywhere–safe, orderly, and pleasant, if not beautiful. Does Mama swat her kids because they made her? Only if she’s dysfunctional and abusive. They certainly provoked her, but they don’t make her. She’s doing it because somebody needs to make sure those kids know how to behave, succeed, and be useful to someone besides themselves. What does that tell us about women?

The big daddy lie of them all is that women must be encouraged to “be themselves”; to “reach for the stars”, and “live their dreams”. [1] It is repeated because it must be maintained in the face of all evidence to the contrary–which is ubiquitous–and that maintenance is necessary because it is a cover for the more fundamental lie that women aren’t like that. Oh yes, they are. We see it every day on every street, in nearly every song, and certainly in every advertisement.

It’s precisely the mechanism upon which the serpent in the Garden of Eden operated, and he attacks it in the same way. It insinuates that Eve is held back from something good, and that’s bad. She wants good, doesn’t she? And God makes good things; so whatever she wants must be good, and if she wants it to be good, then it is good for her, and in fact will make her better, won’t it? Keep in mind: At this point, the Fall has not happened, and we see hypergamy already in play; a hypergamy that God created and said was Good.

Notice what happens there: The serpent slips in the insinuation that it’s bad that she’s being kept back. If we were to make a list of “good” or “bad” word associations corresponding to the content of the conversation between Eve and the serpent it would look something like this:

GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD bad GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD GOOD

But one fly ruins the ointment; especially when that one fly says it’s ok to ignore what your Daddy told you if you feel like it’s holding you back and you really want it.

This is an expansion of a comment I made in my last post.

[1]I doubt whether there has ever been born any woman who did not lean this way from the cradle.

Insert Tab A into Slot B, Right?

It’s a terrible idea for a woman to marry a man for whom she believes she is settling. Conversely, it’s usually a good idea for a man to marry a woman who is below his station in life. The relative classlessness of America (on both counts) makes opaque what would be fairly transparent in a more firmly stratified culture.

In our aspirant meritocracy, various factors will be weighted differently for the respective genders. For example: Physical beauty raises a woman’s station more than it would a man’s, but a man’s intelligence–particularly if he can parlay that into more funds, or witty quips–is a bait valued more by a woman than a female’s eloquent speech is to her quarry.

There are, of course, limits to these generalities. Good-looking strippers are rarely accepted into the polite company of upper society, and men with a surfeit of brains will prefer the smart-mouth broads who can trade barbs. (Guilty.)

Are you getting the picture? This stuff is subtly complex, and complicated by subtleties. When it comes to assortive mating we (individually) barely know our asses from our elbows, as it applies to differentiating what is good for us from what we want. For this task we want the wisdom of the counsel of many; particularly from those who have been been heated in the furnace of marriage, yet have endured to be purified. Parents are a good start. Grandparents are even better because they are too old and too short for the world to give a damn about your modern conventions of emotion. At the very least, they will confirm you to the path you choose, and can provoke an “us against the world” attitude that can be useful when the world actually is against you.