DoW II: Diversity Plus Proximity Equals Whore

Carrying on from the previous post in the series, we’ll look GW’s second objection from his comment at Dalrock’s:

Certainly not all young females who delay marriage do so because they want to fornicate with multiple men, and in the church this demographic is rarer. Normal women tend to want to get married. The number of loving Christian fathers who are okay with their daughters whoring around is zero. Let’s put aside foolish and worldly talk.

Just as with the first sentence (you can read about it by following the first link in this post), the second is, again, factually true, yet still misleading; just as anti-missile flares distract because factually they are hot.

Normal women want to get married, but normal women don’t necessarily get normal  instruction and discipline (by historical standards) to be good wives. It is also quite normal for normal women to want to end their marriages. This is because of sin nature; both what women suffer directly and also what they have to suffer by proximity to their husbands’ sinful natures.

Nature teaches us that women should be submissive to men, and that women are most beautiful when covered. Men grow in stature and their heads are uncovered when at their most manful. This is not true of women, who are covered even at their most feminine; yet they want that kind of manly glory even though it is harmful to them.

Today weddings are practiced in such a way that they begin with a man’s submission to a woman when he bribes her to marry him with expensive jewelry (preferably while kneeling). The wedding proceed as a celebration of her in as full feminine regalia as can be purchased; usually beyond affording. It ends without her declaration to obey him. All of which is to say that a modern wedding conveys no symbolism about the thing it mocks. I mean it has nothing to say about Christian marriage. So why do normal women want to get “married” if they are in rebellion against, or in ignorance of, Christian marriage? Two reasons: They want to be celebrated, and because if she doesn’t get a husband she can’t pursue her sinful desire to rule him. When that doesn’t work out to her satisfaction (It never will; that’s some of the trouble with sin.) she starts thinking that she must have been fooled into marrying the wrong man. She begins to think she needs someone stronger, gentler, kinder, tougher…better. Thus normal women are strongly tempted to entertain the idea that what they need is a new marriage to a new man.

This brings us back to the motivation behind GW’s objection that, “Normal women tend to want to get married.” The unavoidable implication is that generally what normal women need are superior men than what God has provided them from which to choose. It is a statement of encouragement to a woman that they deserve a better man; that in a just world they’d get a man who understands her needs. He is saying women should get a man like him.

A Preface to the Discussion on Whores

The Bible tells us that our conduct will speak for us and for Christ as we make our way through this time of exile in the world before our Lord returns. We can either honor Christ and ourselves with our conduct, or bring both into disrepute.

Last week I saw a retweet from someone in California of a guy who looked like someone from around where I live. So I followed the original tweet to its owner to see if in fact he did live in Texas. I didn’t find out, but I did see his tweet was also retweeted by some young woman not only in Texas, but in the town where I live. Small world and so forth. That young woman had in her Twitter feed an exhortation to herself that Jesus was looking out for her. So far so good, you may think.

As you know, newest tweets are at the top and you have to scroll down to go back in time, as it were. Long story short, about four hours before she tweeted about Jesus, she had tweeted, “I miss being choked at night.” My hope is that there is no connection intended.

I can hear your wheels spin from here. “Oh, she’s not a real Christian.”, your mind ejects. Whew! That was a close one. Now you can go back to pretending girls like that don’t know really know Christ is the son of God, born of the virgin Mary, and was crucified for our sins and raised on the third day. Right? Therefore she’s not a girl from your church who went off to college to learn a career and “find herself”. Shhh… Be at ease, sleeper…

The next day I went into work and heard this conversation between three college-aged coworkers:

Senior Cody: …and just say to her, Look, you swiped right, I swiped right. We both know what this is about. Let’s get it on!

Underclassmen: Hahahaha! Right! Exactly! What else could she be thinking?

Cody: And, hey, listen…listen…if she’s got a Bible quote on her profile then definitely go for it because you know she’s a ho!

Maybe your daughter isn’t one of these two women. Maybe she’s just one of her hundreds of co-eds, roommates, coworkers, social media followers, church group buddies, and BFFs.

CoE VIb: We Must Start at the Head and Work Down

Before we talk about pants and what should cover the lower body, we must start at the head. I’ve written several posts on women wearing pants, and how that custom has weakened and blurred the distinctions between men and women in the Western World. I stand by most of what I wrote in those posts, yet we should start at the head–the command of our faith, and source of the same–which is the Word of God taught by the Apostles to us, the Church. We must start at the head, and work down.

If you asked me what needs to be done to begin to reintroduce good order to Western churches, my first change would be for us to be obedient to the Word of God from 1 Corinthians 11 on head coverings; and to require obedience to it upon pain of refusal to worship, or even excommunication. The individual church’s heads must teach head coverings for women but not for men, and the church body must obey. The family head must uphold it, and–supported by the church heads–the family body must be expected to obey. We must start at the head, and work down.

Those who are in submission, which is all of us, must look to our individual heads and see that it is suitably covered or uncovered so that our responsibilities are clear to ourselves and others. We must individually own those responsibilities, and take joy in them. What I mean is: I can’t expect someone to act as my subordinate if they will not accept that truth. If she won’t take the teachings on head coverings, then pants are a moot point because she will not accept the sign, symbol, and practice of submission. We must start at the head and work down.

COE VI: We Have No Such Custom, on Head Coverings

In March of 2016 I wrote a post about the “Head Coverings” passage from 1 Corinthians 11.

³ But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.

⁴ Every man praying or prophesying, having his head covered, dishonoureth his head.

⁵ But every woman that prayeth or prophesieth with her head uncovered dishonoureth her head: for that is even all one as if she were shaven.

⁶ For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.

⁷ For a man indeed ought not to cover his head, forasmuch as he is the image and glory of God: but the woman is the glory of the man.

A pretty good discussion followed in the comments. One of the parts which was not good was my reply to GK CHesterton wherein I wrote:

I think a fair reading of Paul’s teaching is that a woman’s long hair is an acceptable covering of itself, but perhaps I am just a big lib. But it must be long, and–as one under authority–the owner of the hair is not the one to decide how long is long enough to be a covering.

It’s one of those times where what I wrote was correct, but yet still not good. A woman’s long hair is an acceptable covering generally, but it is not an acceptable covering for prayer or prophecy, if I accept that 1 Corinthians 11 is truly God’s word. Verse 6 is the lynchpin.

⁶ For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.

Paul said that a long-haired woman who won’t cover her hair should have her hair cut off. That is a simple statement which makes it clear that obedience on head coverings is not covered (rimshot) by long hair. Paul addressed my mistake directly because it is important that the conspicuous sign of submission by head coverings was not optional.

I had no excuse for my error except that:

1. I lacked the imagination to think that there was a time when women really were disciplined (discipled) at church.
2. I feared a battle with my female relations over something that no one else obeyed; which signaled that it was an unimportant custom. Did I really need to start a fight that would end with me being angry at them all, and them at me? I would have been angry if I did not get obedience, and they all would have bound together.

Well, after I wrote that post in March 2016 I was, in my spare time, hassled by 1 Cor. 11:6 until the following fall when I read the passage to my wife and daughters and asked them if they could see any way around it. They did: They said (like I had) that long hair was a covering. I brought it back to verse 6. They were unhappy, but they obeyed God and did not grumble at me too much…though they were sometimes “forgetful” until I was “remindful”.

“But! But! But! Times have changed…” Indeed they have. It is common in Christian circles, when it comes to time pray, for one man to remind another that he still has his hat on. When we do that we harken back to that custom that a man should not pray with his head covered. What time changed was whenever it was that a woman would be reminded to cover hers up.

Paul closes the section on head coverings with:

But if any man seem to be contentious [CC: about the custom of head coverings], we have no such custom, neither the churches of God.

The History of Cheerleaders, the Future of America

Originally, cheerleaders were men.

That’s Jimmy Stewart and his cheer squad, third from the right. Notice the terms: “leader”, and, “team”, and “squad”. These are manly terms. Notice the dress: pants, shirts, sweaters, ties.  Manly dress.

In 1923, at the University of Minnesota, women were admitted into cheerleading. I’m sure they asked themselves, “What could be the harm? Technically, women can cheer… I’m sure it will be fine.”

Then, in the 1940s, women came to dominate cheerleading because the men were away being toxic. When they came back, efforts were made to restore order to cheerleading, but women protested.

By 1960, cheerleading was seen as predominantly a girl thing, and for effeminate men. At the same time, the uniforms began to become less formal…and to shrink. Today, the “far-right moral position” on cheerleading is that it should be reserved for girls (who  only pretend to be sluts) as nature intended. In the future, conservative won’t even notice this.

Security Conference Seduction

Last Thursday the sun shone, the air was warm, and the apartment complex pool next to the sand volleyball court was clean. Swarmed in this space were a hundred or more men and women; college students with the day off. Nearly all the men had taken off their shirts. Most of the women wore bikinis. Each had a can or bottle of something, and they all laughed and touched and mooned. Trap boomed and screeched from overdriven speakers. To the untrained eye, it was something like a bacchanalian scene. But I–having been raised in church–knew that I witnessed the dark ritual seduction of innocent females seeking security.

The men faked good humor while the music hypnotized the women with its subtle lyrics of fornication and riches. They only did so because it was expected of them by the prospective papas at this impromptu security conference. The bumping propaganda lulled the women, and by this clever hypnosis and other unseen trickery the young men coerced the women to rub their bodies upon their oppressors. They only hung on the predators–as if each were a jungle gym–to see which man was strong enough to give a paternal hug, or some day hand his little girl an ice cream cone.

And so what about the beverages? What recourse had the poor, nearly naked, dears from this nightmare but to drink? How else to quell their fears of remaining unloved for who they were on the inside, or to drown their sorrows for having to pick from such a poor selection of future fathers who could not even manage a shirt?

Those women didn’t mean to wear bikinis around a bunch of sex-minded men instead of their dads. It was just bad luck.

Sure, Codpieces are Over the Top

Oscar wrote:

The more backwards and uncivilized the culture, the more peacockish the men.

I don’t know if causation exists between the two, but the correlation is too strong for me to ignore.
[…]
I’m not in favor of men dressing more flamboyantly. The cultures where men do are not cultures I want to emulate.

I see his point and it is very close to what I thought for a long time. However; it’s not as simple as that. For starters, there are a lot of pre-suppositions and contexts which are bundled up in those thoughts. One of which is the near total domination of world fashion by The West. For 200 years, any country or its leaders who wanted to be civilized, or seen as civilized, has followed our patterns. That (what we mean by civilization) is a huge topic, and The West has won a huge bias for a long time. Instead of arguing all that, I think it would be more productive to give some examples.

While I was writing that post, I had two specific social groups in mind as exemplars of men’s fashion; both of whom I chose to leave out for others to bring up. Dalrock claimed one of them, men’s western wear. Here are some examples. Notice the bright colored and patterned shirts, big hats, exaggerated footwear, exotic materials, and shiny accessories (buckles, buttons, etc.)

The second was military officers; specifically in their dress blues. There is no other reason for the shiny brass buttons, big white hat, white gloves, medals, and ribbons, braids, and a saber except to “peacock”. The effect is awesome; as it is intended to be. It’s tempting to dismiss this and say, “Well, yeah, but that is uniform, and everyone is doing it together. It’s no big deal.” That misses the point. The dress blues uniform is at its most iconic, striking, and militaristic when among civilians.

Hayley Geftman-Gold, a a liberal feminist Jewish journalist from New York, obviously thinks consumers of western wear are uncivilized and should be dead, but my experience (and I would bet Oscar’s) of life in the US is that Southerners and other country folk are more polite and better mannered than a great majority of those who are not. Likewise, all of the military officers I can recall to have met are nearly impeccable in their manners and similar measures of civilization.

I’m for the Opposite of the Pence Rule

Zippy Catholic made me aware of a controversy and scandal (of either one sort or another)  which had happened, and is still happening (in one way or another), at a place called Christendom College in Virginia.

Apparently a young female student drove herself (she was the driver with the car keys) and her boyfriend away from the college, past the local town with its hundreds of businesses and thousands of residences, deep into the Shenandoah mountains, to an isolated location in a national park.  A year and a half later she was talking about it with a professor and claimed she now realized that she was raped, in a classic “he said she said, long after the fact” scenario.

I find this story perfectly plausible. It is also manifestly unverifiable.

By all accounts the college did everything it could do in as professional, compassionate, and (nontrivially) legal a manner as anyone could reasonably expect.  The young man was investigated and punished for actually verifiable behaviors on campus, etc — the details (putative and otherwise), again, are available elsewhere so there is no need to rehash them here.

[…]

A more pertinent question then is, who is responsible for there not being any evidence?  Who put us in this situation?  Was it Christendom College with its overbearing and oppressive institutional success, when compared to pretty much all colleges everywhere, in keeping rapeyness and even consensual debauchery off campus; or was it someone else?

The most proximate person responsible for the impossibility of determining the truth in an objective, public way is the person in the literal driver seat who chose to drive the two of them, alone, deep into the Virginia wilderness.  And in close proximity to that person – perhaps carrying the greater responsibility, because responsibility comes along with age, wisdom, and authority – are parents who give driver’s licenses to young women and send them off to college hundreds of miles distant without any inkling that a seventeen year old driving deep into the wilderness with a random boyfriend is every bit as imprudent as a ten year old getting into a car with a stranger offering candy.

I agree with basically all that. My one difference is that I think we can also add colleges who encourage parents to send their daughters off to coed colleges hundreds of miles distant.

Christendom may be the best run coed in-residence college in the history of colleges. I couldn’t say. I also don’t care because coed in-residence colleges are a really foolish idea. At best, Christendom College is the finest college at conserving Feminist victories and making them “work”.

Moist and Twisted

As far as I can tell, all of the Western world is in denial about the temptation of women to lust. We are the proverbial fish, and female lust is the feel of wet. For women still under the pull of the red tide, they are tempted to view everything from a sexual perspective. Ev-er-y-thing. Those beyond it are sympathetic, even wistful.

Every piece of clothing is measured on its sex appeal. Every purchase is made either in congruence with, or in opposition to, its sexual connotation. Every interaction with a man is investigated and dissected for sexual content. If it’s there and desired that’s good to that woman. All other combinations disappoint in some way.

Everybody understands that sex sells, and everybody understands that women are the target audience for the great majority of advertising, but nobody puts the two together.

It is the same among Christians, but we add a twist: When women dress, behave, or speak lewdly, we blame men for noticing the lewdness. We accuse those men of lust. But it is at least the second act of lust, because the desire to attract illicit sexual attention in the first place just is lust.

Real Men Don’t Impede Her Desires

Men will set expectations for other men. They will say things like, “You’re not a real man if you don’t know how to change your own oil.”, or,  “A real man knows how to harvest game from the field.”, or, “Real men help women first.” They will hold such expectations on a regular basis, and they will invent new ones as needed to make a point about the importance of this thing or the other.

Men will also set limitations for other men. They might say, “A real men would never wear a dress.”, or, “Real men don’t play video games for hours.”, or, “A real man never hits a woman.” I trust you understand the dynamic of expectations and limitations to which I refer. They know that a man is a man. What they mean by real is good; good men will do these things and won’t do those things.

Now, once in a great while a man will set a very general expectation on women. If he is a bold Christian he might say, “The Bible says wives should submit to their husbands.” It’s hard to imagine a safer statement than that. The man himself hasn’t actually placed any expectation on women.  Yet even then he will surround it with quibbles and bromides and caveats and exceptions so that the plain and unoffensive statement has no practical meaning whatsoever; lest some man out there start to actually believe what the Bible says. But at least he made some vague attempt at something that might look like an expectation if it is seen at some distance in a dark alley on a moonless night.

What he will never, ever, do is say, “Women shouldn’t  _________.” You can fill in the blank as you like. It doesn’t matter because whatever it is that you think women shouldn’t do won’t actually be said. You can think of the manliest activity, and ultimately a modern man will reason that a woman must not be forbid to do it because she wants to, and because he refuses to stand in her way. Only jerks do that, they say; only a jerks makes a women forgo something she wants to do. He will marshal all forces of technology or rule available to ensure that she gets to try whatever she wants. Worse: He can’t explain why.

He can explain that he doesn’t allow his son to wear skirts even just once a year because it is unseemly for a man to wear women’s clothes. But he cannot explain why he lets his daughter wear a ballcap, jeans, and sneakers as routine. If his son is given a doll he will throw it out, but if his daughter is given a football then the municipal Pee-Wee league needs to give her a shot on the field. If his son picks up knitting needles his father will sneer and deride, but if his daughter picks up a gun then she will be able to defend herself. If his son puts on shorts he will be corrected to dress respectfully. If his daughter dresses like a slut she is merely expressing herself, and what man would dare to make a concrete pronouncement on modesty anyway? Who does he think he is?

They can’t draw a line anywhere around women; what women are, what women aren’t;  what women are to do, what women are not to do.Any man who can find a reason to let her have her way (any reason will do) is an enlightened hero. But any man who forgets himself and tries to put real material expectations and limitations on a woman is scorned as a misogynist and belittled as a wimp who can’t handle women. He will be told it’s not his place to say what his wife or daughter–or wives and daughters in general–are to do or not do.

This is one of the themes which I have come back to over and over. I talked about it with modest dress in sports, cowgirl crossdressing, pioneer women, women roaming malls and churches in various states of disrobe… Modern Christian men simply will not stomach the idea of actual, real, discriminating expectations and limitations on women; of telling them, “No.”