REAL Men and REAL Women Needed

Masculinity means creating a family, protecting and defending your wife and children, providing for that wife and children in a responsible way, and building up and defending your community. These are masculine qualities. And societies are infinitely better when men endeavor toward such ideals.

Feminity means a woman who takes care of and comforts her husband, her family, and her children and nurtures the social fabric that binds communities together. 

Unfortunately, As a culture, we've decided that masculine women and effeminate men are amazing, but overtly masculine men and feminine women are terrible. 

When the boundaries that define these traditional roles are blurred, when men take on feminine qualities in droves and women are encouraged to be more masculine, toxic traits emerge that erode the social fabric and lead to cultural decay.

Ben Shapiro, 5/13/23, Facebook post.

What Should Still Be the Desire of Women!

What is amazing about all this [history of the late 1940s through the 1950s] is that the 1950s still had plenty of structure. Marriage and motherhood were considered the main destiny of young women—with teaching and nursing considered their only “acceptable” careers—and magazines such as Seventeen or Mademoiselle or popular books such as Mary McGee Williams’s On Becoming a Woman all operated under this assumption. “It’s Not Too Soon to Dream of Marriage” ran a typical chapter title in Williams’s book.

Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen, A Patriot’s History of the United States, pg.681

Real Women Needed

The female body is a powerful thing. Anyone in advertising knows this. The mere sight of Bathsheba coupled with David’s failure to walk away and control his thoughts changed the course not only of King David’s life but the lives of countless others. Young women are shown early and often how to harness their sexuality, but too few are told to guard their body and their heart. Too few are told the truth about the physical and emotional toll of casual sex.

Our daughters deserve a mother and a father in their home and a host of adults in their life who tell them and show them women are to be treated with respect. Women who do not treat themselves with respect do not demand others do so; women have been told for decades they can and should have casual sex and they can and should fear no consequences, even and especially if a child is a consequence. Countering this damaging rhetoric is incredibly difficult for the increasingly rare parent who is swimming against the cultural tide.

Anna Ziegler, “The Party That Wants To Pay For Moms To Put Their Babies In Daycare Now Supports Breastfeeding.”

Women Are NOT Sex Objects

Prostitution is one of the most severe ways possible to demean women. Since she is made in the image of God, prostitution is a gross example of dehumanizing exploitation and a far cry from the glad use of sex that God intends. Made in God’s image, women are not mere sex objects, but human beings, equal to men in all respects (Gal.3:28) and not to be toyed with or exploited by them.

John H. Scanzoni, Wycliffe Dictionary of Christian Ethics, Carl F.H. Henry editor, pg.545

Abortion: Advancing Women’s Rights?!?

Humanity sees abortion as an advancement of women’s rights, but in actuality, it ultimately leads to the devaluation of both women and human life by eliminating the true philosophical foundation of where our equality comes from Scripture, specifically, the Trinity. While men, women, and children may not be positionally equal they are by nature equal.  Just as the Father occupies a greater position than the Son, and the Father and Son occupy a greater position than the Holy Spirit, they possess the same nature and are co-equal, co-eternal and co-powerful by nature. Humanity’s attempt at creating an egalitarian society ­– as now defined by progressives ­– will only lead to tyranny. Again, if our rights and laws are not determined by God they will be arbitrarily determined by man.

Stephanie A. Potts, “How Do We Enslave Ourselves to the Law?”

Pay Attention, Ladies!

Come on ladies, you know this: your youthful physical beauty is for building a family. It is not a personal plaything your for giddy vanity. If you use your beauty for ego gratification, it will dry up and die in your wrinkled hands. Then it will be too late to be loved.

Stefan Molyneux. Cited by Mike Adams on Facebook

Women, You Hold the “Key”

Deep in a woman [is the knowledge] that she holds the key to the situation where a man’s passions are involved. He will be as much of a gentleman as she requires and, when the chips are down, probably no more, even if he has strict standards of his own. He will measure her reserve, always testing the limits, probing. This is not necessarily because he wants to go as far as possible. It is sometimes from a confused sense of obligation, or even chivalry, to meet her expectations.  

Elisabeth Elliot, Passion & Purity, pg.146

Educate Yourself, Think for Yourself

Privacy is harder than ever when everyone is invited to be linked in, connected and transparent to others (including hackers and the government), but it matters.  Reading books is time consuming, but it matters. Reflection is easily drowned out when life is fired at us point-blank, but it matters. Independent thinking is hard when the social media reinforce groupthink, but it matters. Thinking for ourselves is difficult when it is so much easier to download an expert opinion, but it is essential to the freedom of our own agency, so it matters. Conversations with an iron-sharpens-iron quality are rarer when minds seek carbon-copy approval from others in their own bubble, but they matter. History is more crucial than ever when the relentless modern focus is on the present and the future, but it matters. The courage to hold unfashionable convictions is more difficult when social media mobs give their thumbs-up or thumbs-down like a Roman emperor, but it matters.

And so it goes.  Having the right information is vital, but achieving genuine knowledge is better, and mastering both and then attaining true wisdom is better still.

Os Guinness, Impossible People, pg.201-202

Male vs. Female Sexuality

[T]he most elemental destabilizing force in every culture is not merely unrefined male energy, but his unchecked sexual energy. Full stop. In its fundamental essence, it is deeply anti-social. It has no civilizing, pro-social nature in itself. To become so, it must be acted upon by other forces. By contrast, female sexual energy tends to be inherently pro-social. Female sexuality has the power to create human civilization by moderating the behavior of men, but it can only do this when there is social appreciation for these differences in male and female sexuality, coupled with the strong social mores they require.

Of course, the dark side of unmoderated male energy goes beyond sexuality. A female's naturally domesticating influence on overall male energy and behavior is easily demonstrated. Who pays substantially lower auto, health, and life insurance premiums, married men or their single peers? Service to the god of equality requires there be no difference here. But we all know better. The wedding-ring-clad man enjoys the financial benefit, and not because insurance companies have a sentimental heart for weddings. Every insurance company knows married men direct their male wanderlust and energy toward safety and responsibility. Single men, not so much. . . . 

Without the essential tempering influence of female sexuality, male sexuality is a whole other animal, and not a pretty one.

This is a problem, because sex makes babies. Every society must give greater attention to this fact than it does to the need for food, shelter, and protection from outside attack. These and all other vital needs are either enhanced or crippled by what a community expects of the relationship between a man, the children he sires, and the woman he does so with. If it doesn’t get this right, few other good things the community needs are likely.

Of course, the male’s attitude and approach toward his procreative act is drastically different from hers. His necessary participation in the act is solely orgasmic, lasting seconds, and is all pleasure. He is not naturally connected to the potential of that act. The mother’s connection, however, is profound, starting shortly after conception and intensifying daily. It costs her dearly in energy, sleep, and overall comfort, starting long before the pain of childbirth. She is inescapably invested. He is not.

In Gilder’s words, “The crucial process of civilization is the subordination of male sexual impulses and biology to the long-term horizons of female sexuality . . . It is male behavior that must be changed to create a civilized order.” The crucial process of civilization. No society can develop or endure without succeeding at this.

Glenn Stanton, Manhood Is Not Natural

Feminist Spite

We must rid ourselves of the feminist spite that pretends to despise the woman of many talents and many tasks in the home, preferring the specialist who amputates and cauterizes and does one thing well, for herself primarily and sometimes even at the expense of the family.  I said “pretends to despise” advisedly; envies would have been nearer the mark.  Women themselves can testify to this; they know the looks they receive from a certain sort of woman as they mount the steps of the bus with three small children skipping along after.  Imagine the most human place in your experience, the one that is warmest in heart and soul and mind.  It isn’t an office, is it?  We have plenty of second-rate men in our world.  Our whole late capitalist bureaucratic human-resource drudging economy consumes second-rate men as fuel.  We don’t need any more.  We need first-rate women.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.127-128

The Making of a Woman?

First, do not expect gentleness from young women brought up on the female form of pornography, the sleazy and mind-emptying “romance.”  Do not expect it from them if they are taught to swear like sailors, without the know-how and the risk to life and limb and the rough camaraderie that make the sailor’s roughness pardonable.  Do not expect it if they place before their eyes the glossy magazines that slash the soul like steel knives. Do not expect it fi they are trained up in catfights.  …

Second, you might ask exactly how it helps a girl when a parent, usually the father, presses her into competitive sports, when the team or platoon or ship’s crew is not the pattern of female cooperation, when she knows that she will never be able to compete against her male counterparts at the same level, and when the development of her growing body is directed towards child-bearing, not towards loping across the savannah in pursuit of gazelle or hurling a harpoon to spear seals.  … They could be developing all kinds of beautiful and useful skills that would eventually bring sweetness and grace and health to their families and forge real social bonds among neighbors, but they are too busy learning to hit a softball in a field no bigger than the Little League stadium at Williamsport before a few other girls while the boys are off doing something else.  What, ultimately, is the aim?  Yes, there will always be tomboys, and I have no desire to tell girls that they should not be playing softball.  I do desire to tell girls that they should not be pushing softball upon them.

Third, how can a girl become a woman like Dickens’s Esther Summerson if she cannot do anything?  Consider what a mass of contradictions we are.  If a woman arranges flowers for a living, she earns our congratulations even if she doesn’t do anything else either because she doesn’t know how or because she is too busy at her flower shop.  If a woman cooks fine Italian meals for a living—if her gnocchi, with their wonderful hundreds of calories, are famous all over town—we sing her praises, even if when she gets home she is spent.  If a woman plays the violin for an orchestra or gives singing lessons, she can hope to find her name in the newspaper, even if she buys fast food for herself and her family on the way home from the music hall.  But if a woman, because she is well versed in all of the household arts, can do all these things and in fact does them for the people she loves and for those whom she welcomes into her home (and she is not afraid of guests, because her home is always just a whisk or two away from hospitality), we shake our heads and say that she has wasted her talents.  Not developed them, notice, and put them to use.

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.126-127

What Makes a Bad Woman

The question remains.  What does it mean to be a woman?

I hear the answer, mainly from a certain kind of woman, “It means whatever you want it to mean.”  Sorry, but that is equivalent to saying that it means nothing.  Women, in my experience, prefer their nihilism to be dressed up in perky relativist clothing.  Relativism is nihilism for girls.

If we are to believe the women’s magazines on sale at groceries and drug stores, a woman is obsessed with her body, eager to learn new sex tricks, always on the watch for dirty revelations about pop-culture celebrities, prone to consulting horoscopes, ready to shell out a lot of money for new fashions, all-in for “safe” gay men who destroy one another’s lives rather than women’s lives, and firmly committed to “women’s health,” which depends on contraceptives and abortions and everything else that is meant not to restore healthy function to a diseased organ but to thwart the natural action of a healthy one.

If we are to take as evidence women’s political shows, a woman is loud, vulgar, screeching, ignorant of history, morbidly touchy, vindictive, smug, voluble in slogans, impervious to the principles of any coherent political philosophy, and ready to see the world as the she-bear sees it when her cubs are restless and the food is scarce.   . . .

That is not what women are.  That is what bad women are.  It is what happens when you fail to cultivate the difficult virtue of womanliness, just as the thug and the lout are what you get when you fail to cultivate the companion virtue, manliness.  

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.118