This is a guest post by Lucinda Hancock, who describes herself as the mother of her husband’s nine children.
In a recent internet exchange, Brad Wilcox made the case for men to “Be a Man. Get married.” , and was rejoined by a group of men, MenGoingTheirOwnWay, who refuted Wilcox’s claims of improved life, citing particularly the high divorce rate primarily initiated by women.
Wilcox’s point of view is problematic because he seems to take for granted the sexual loyalty of married women, which is the premise that makes his entire argument so easy to attack. It doesn’t seem to occur to him that most men simply don’t have confidence in their ability to hold onto devoted female attention without the society-wide sexual mores that used to promote female fidelity. But anyone who wants to revitalize a marriage culture must understand how marriage appeals to men in the first place as having a high probability of female loyalty. Wilcox seems to think that telling men they will work more hours for more money and live 10 years longer is sufficient incentive. But this sounds a lot like, “We keep you alive to serve this ship. Row well and live.” (from Ben Hur).
So why do men marry? What is the real incentive? It is true that the primary purpose of marriage for some men is to achieve the kind of status that will give them greater access to power and influence, but for most men, the purpose is verifiable reproduction. To paraphrase Jack Donovan, author of “The Way of Men”, if you fail to reproduce, your genes don’t make it to the next round. But the ability of marriage to guarantee female loyalty in reproduction has failed so decisively that it really has become somewhat of an illogical choice for the majority of men (based on the calculation of 44% of first marriages ending in divorce, and the doubling of never-married men since 1960). And many men have calculated that their best chances of reproduction lie in high numbers of low-investment ‘scoring’.
The primary tool by which marriage has been destroyed is feminism.
From the perspective of men, feminism has played the part of Iago in the play Othello. Iago convinces Othello that his wife, the virtuous Desdemona, is not being faithful, and the end result is tragic. In a similar way, feminism causes men to distrust even virtuous and well-meaning women, who often fail to see the sinister implications of what they perceive as innocent efforts at ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’. And even more obviously, feminism’s ascent to dominance has meant that women’s tendency to be loyal to dominant culture has made sexually chaste women a rarity. While feminism has had the effect of decreasing fertility among certain groups of women, mainly the highly educated and married, it has increased fertility among unmarried women.
Herein lies the incentive for low-investment scorers. Despite radical feminist ideology, the vast majority of women remain interested in becoming mothers. Only 1 in 5 women, currently, will never become mothers, and many of those women would have liked to be mothers, but simply failed to pursue such a goal with sufficient urgency. Modern women tend to regard becoming a parent as a sort of natural right regardless of marital status. Women are less aware of the basic reproductive insecurity most men face when female fidelity is actively discouraged. While most women understand the desire their children will have for a father, and also understand the benefit such a relationship will be to the child’s success and thriving in life, they are less likely to understand the ways that feminist undercurrents are weaving insecurity into the fabric of their relationships with men.
In Brad Wilcox’s response to the responses of MGTOW men, Wilcox brings out this angry sentiment of single men, “nor will I ever have kids with any woman unless guaranteed 50-50 custody.” These are not the words of a man who has no interest in being an involved father. And it shows an important fact. Flooding the single men demographic with disaffected men who really do want to be fathers has made it that much easier to be the kind of man whose primary interest is in siring children with the intention of abandonment. Indeed, despite the surface claims, almost every feminist talking point has had the effect of making life much easier for men whose primary interest is escaping the duties of fatherhood, giving them greater ease of access in the first place through feminist promotion of female sexual freedom and giving them easier outs by ’empowering’ women to be independent of “patriarchal” marriage, as well as making it easier to hide among large numbers of men who mainly lack confidence in women.
It is not a working strategy to tell men to ‘man up’ while entirely ignoring that a huge part of the marriage bargain is male confidence in reproduction. There is a strategy that could help alleviate the strain between the sexes that is resulting in so much anger on both sides (and so many fatherless children). Responsible men need to be more effective in repudiating feminism and understand it’s role in sowing distrust between the sexes. They must recognize that feminism is a profitable tool for the worst of men. This is a difficult path because many responsible men are beholden to women who care very much about the more innocent-seeming feminist aspects regarding ‘fairness’ and ‘equality’, but men need to remember that most women are simply being deceived about feminism and they need reinforcement in seeing its problems. That will never happen if good men don’t even fight the real enemy, which is the main problem with Wilcox’s “Be a man. Get married” video. It concedes ground to feminist lies that incline women to believe it reasonable to demand male productivity while denigrating responsible male authority. It other words, it says what women want to hear, but produces a result opposite of its apparent intent of persuading single men to marry.
New Post: Guest post: be a man, get married?: This is a guest post by Lucinda Hancock, who desc… https://t.co/jP0F2jxZhJ #LDS #Mormon
A brief comment on divorce statistics, which are brought up in this post. Lucinda cites the number of 44 percent, which is actually not that far off. Here is a post that discusses the chance of divorce in a more complete way:
http://www.divorcesource.com/ds/main/u-s-divorce-rates-and-statistics-1037.shtml
Here are some statements to consider:
*About 31 percent of a person’s friends, aged 35 to 54, who are married, engaged or cohabiting have already previously been married.
*People who have been married many years (say, 35-plus) and have never been divorced have almost no chance of the marriage ending in divorce.
*The rate of divorce per year per 1,000 people has been declining since 1980.
*A young couple marrying for the first time today has a lifetime divorce risk of 40 percent, “unless current trends change significantly.”
TheMillennialStar: Guest post: be a man, get married? https://t.co/DcvSvGsJB2 #lds #mormon
Two comments:
“*The rate of divorce per year per 1,000 people has been declining since 1980.” — This is in large part due to the steep rise in cohabitation instead of actually marrying. Less people are marrying, so naturally, the divorce rate will go down.
My second comment is that I really enjoyed this post. I don’t know Lucinda Hancock, but her analysis is very insightful. I’ve been aware of the profound internal contradiction of feminism for a long time, but she expressed them very well here.
This is an issue where I turn a fair bit more “conservative” – we currently have a society that enables sub-optimal behavior *because* we (as a society) don’t feel entirely comfortable with punishing children for their parents stupidity/mistakes/sins. The “liberal” part of me very much likes the concept of not punishing children for their parent’s stupidity/mistakes/sins and in fact helping them to overcome the deficits imposed on them by their parents’ choices; but the conservative side of me is very depressed at the sheer volume of the stupidity/mistakes/sins which occur. The public policy arena of trying to figure out how to extend help to such children through constructive programs is one which could benefit from a lot more attention, research, and experimentation.
While feminism may contribute somewhat to the changing mores (I think it plays a much smaller role than the author here) the real issue is that *any* parent can survive with children outside of a marriage relationship. In the very distant past one had to be wealthy, or willing to face a life of drudgery (which would likely end very early) if one went down that path.
I think the main motivation for the “natural man” is sex, not necessarily reproduction. Evolution “works” not because organisms necessarily make conscious choices to “pass on their genes” but because behaviors which result in a trait consistently showing up more frequently in the subsequent generations “win”. In a society where illegitimate children tend to die before reproducing the behaviors which lead to illegitimate children will be selected against. In a society where such children are provided for such behaviors will be select for.
I find it very interesting to examine how the Church’s teachings about women (and men) have developed from the earliest days of the Church. It has not been a linear development at all. At various times women in the Church might have been viewed simply as appendages to the sealing ceremony, yet at others they were viewed as powerful partners with a unique role. Still some aspects of the current versions of the temple ordinances treat women fundamentally differently than they treat men (both in terms of access to the ordinances and in terms of the wording used within some of the ordinances).
In my opinion marriages are successful when the attitudes and behaviors associated with the “natural man” are cast off/rejected – that will involve intellectual, emotional, and physical fidelity on the part of *both* the man and the woman, but it will also involve charity and mutual striving for the sanctification. The couple must become one in the Gospel sense. Looking back over the broad history of humankind any society which has a hyper vigilant focus on “female” fidelity tends to develop a very sexist patriarchal system of law and custom. Whether that is manifest in the bizarre “honor” killings we see in the news, child marriages, women “trapped” in very abusive relationships because they have no alternative as a “used” women, or simply a rape tolerant culture the root cause is the same – powerful men and institutions taking advantage of, and controlling, women.
What is needed is exactly what the Church (currently) preaches, an emphasis of mutual fidelity, mutual respect, and mutual spiritual growth and development. I think that can occur much better when both partners are capable adults who are free to enter into relationships based on spiritual equality and respect.
Long term marriages based on roles and expectations which acceptable to both partners (over their lifetimes, not just at the time of marriage) have many advantages for both the marriage partners and the resulting children (if any). Research has documented these many times; chiefly they are that people tend to live longer, they tend to have a better quality of life, they tend to have more sex (and theoretically enjoy it more), they tend to have more money at retirement, their children tend to have better educational, vocational, and life outcomes. Obviously it is not a guarantee, but the odds are if your favor if you are in a mutually agreeable long-term marriage.
I do know Lucinda, and I agree that she has stated the contradiction of feminism well in this post.
I happen to be the spouse in my family who earns the money. While many would cite this as primarily due to feminism, I recall Brigham Young’s writings/speeches telling the men to go do the hard work of the kingdom, as the women were perfectly capable of the intellectually strenuous jobs men were occupying in lieu of the hard work. I am also aware of how much my religious culture empowered women within a milieu that celebrated female fidelity.
Perhaps this post could have been titled, “Be a Woman. Be Faithful.” In the chicken and egg matter of marriage, female fidelity ought surely to be seen as a critical component of making a culture’s men act like men.
Responsible men need to be more effective in repudiating feminism and understand it’s role in sowing distrust between the sexes.
Maybe responsible women need to take the lead in this matter. In our culture, men have been silenced and are not allowed to speak on this matter.
I appreciate the sentiment of the original posting.
Afterthoughts on feminine loyalty:
There are two companions to feminism’s sexual licentiousness that have undermined marriage’s ability to provide paternal confidence and they are more of a problem for religious women than is sexual license. Women are generally oriented toward detail and preparation, a biological necessity given the complexity and vulnerability of the female burden in reproduction. It is currently unfashionable for women, because of feminism, to curtail criticism and micro-managing of husbands. I’ve been as guilty as many wives on this point, but I’m trying to repent. Criticism and micro-management from a wife is detrimental to the relationship between a father and his children. Indeed, it confuses a child’s natural affection for a father, especially when he tries to defend himself and outright contention ensues. Wives should recognize their husband’s vulnerability in this area and restrict criticism and micro-management to the most necessary and constructive cases, and even more, they should make a sustained effort to honor and respect husbands.
Religious mothers particularly should heed the phenomenon observed by Freud: A person’s view of God is usually a reflection of their view of their father. Women who are overly critical of husbands set their children up for a difficult relationship with God, while women who honor and respect husbands, which will require the occasional, possibly frequent, giving of the benefit of the doubt, set their children up for an easier relationship with God.
The second companion to feminism’s sexual license is mothers’ tendency to undermine the moral instruction given by fathers. Mother’s tend to focus on correcting socially unacceptable behaviors. “People won’t like you if you’re mean,” for instance. Fathers are much stronger in teaching children about moral truths involving right and wrong. When there is a conflict between a man’s understanding of right and wrong, and the dominant social consensus (welcome to the modern world!), women will have a tendency to feel her husband’s compass is off, and undermine his efforts to instruct their children. Of course men should counsel with their wives, but both need to recognize their different areas of strength. Indeed, because the social consensus currently favors ungendering the world, women will have difficultly even recognizing the differences and complementarity of the masculine approach and the feminine, so it will fall to the men to account for this feminine vulnerability.
I know this post will feel to some like it promotes oppression of women and inequality, and it should come as no surprise that I reject such a characterization. I would ask if the loss of sound marital principles leading to stable marriages has generally made women, who mostly become mothers, more free and equal, or less. I would say that the answer to that question is the real dividing line.
Another problem men face today is the extremely hostile and punitive nature of the court system once a couple is divorced.
How is today’s court system “extremely hostile and punitive” compared to a prior day?
In my extended experience (self, friends, family), it appears that modern courts have the ability to force a man to pay for his offspring. However modern courts are willing to award custody to a father and will typically not award much if any alimony. In the past the court took it for granted that the wife would be unable to obtain a job to replace the support her husband had provided her as (usually) a stay at home wife.
Lucinda,
You have thought deeply, and I appreciate your postings in his thread.
Elsewhere, there has been talk about the serious social unrest that becomes more likely when large numbers of young men fail to be civilized by marriage. Jack Donovan, that I spoke about above, and who is a self-described heathen, has a video on masculinity describing it as strength, courage, mastery, and honor. Wow, that is really appealing, especially when so many other places, masculinity is treated like a disease.
The really frustrating part is that Brad Wilcox and other Christian men really have the superior model of manhood. Christianity engages the masculinity of strength, courage, mastery, and honor as husbands and fathers, with attendant leadership and heroism in protecting children and being an example to them, as well as respect for womanhood, whereas the heathen understanding has more to do with brotherhood and association with other men. Fatherhood is a concept that has deeper appeal because of the way it fills men’s desire for immortality, something brotherhood doesn’t do.
Good men are cautious about promoting manliness because they believe feminism is a women’s movement, but it’s best not to see it that way. Feminism destroys the very things that women really do cherish, intimate relationships. Feminism destroys trust between men and women through sexual licentiousness in the single and mutual disregard in the married. Most women do not actually want to be harpes, who attract then devour men. It also makes it almost impossible for mothers to enjoy a special connection with their children, because it leads them to believe that men and strangers can be just as nurturing, almost guaranteeing that women will be less materially invested in the specialness of motherhood. And finally, it wreaks havoc in the friendships between women because of it’s tendency to push them into masculine models of competition. Men can compete in a sporting event, then afterward have a sense of mutual respect. This is often true even for soldiers at war, but women do not compartmentalize in that way. Competition for women leads to hard feelings.
Effectively combating feminism is so very important to help our daughters know how to achieve their most important goals of fulfilling relationships, and would do wonders for recruiting young men into moral fatherhood.
If you can take it, watch Jack’s video (especially read the text below it):
http://www.jack-donovan.com/axis/what-is-masculinity/
I’m not saying we should try to compete, exactly, but we should at least acknowledge the appeal of these ideas so we can rediscover a compelling alternative.
I wanted to point out that men are often not thinking rationally when they act in order to maximize reproductive potential, given the rules of the game at the time they are playing. They are thinking with their lizard brain, which may or may not be communicating with their acknowledged rational thoughts.
Women similarly think with their lizard brain in a manner often unrelated to their rational thoughts.
What I like about Lucinda’s essay is that it points out how the alleged rational intent of the well-meaning doesn’t result in the professed outcomes women claim they desire.
By the way, note to self to nurture my husband more effectively…
Reply to agesilaus’ comment:
The divorce court system is a problem because of no-fault divorce. If there is no fault, then the whole paradigm of child-support and alimony doesn’t make sense. Those things are a stand-in for prison-time when people have broken the law, a sort of speeding ticket, which is why you can go to jail for not paying them.
No-fault divorce means neither party has broken the law, and so threatening them with jail-time for failing to pay alimony/child-support is unconstitutional. It often ends up meaning that being a victim of a unilateral no-fault divorce was somehow a criminal act. This is what is making so many young men so angry with the current system, because it effectively allows a woman to declare a man a criminal just for being unacceptable to her. This really does put a damper on marriage for most men.
No-fault divorce is an easier divorce path, so many women who qualify for fault divorce (abuse, adultery, etc) end up no-fault divorcing because many victims do not want to make the offender angry, and pay higher court costs, but putting someone under punishment of law without lawful accusation is unconstitutional.
For more on this subject: http://www.stephenbaskerville.net/default/assets/File/The%20Politics%20of%20Family%20Breakdown_FRC_2002.pdf
or
http://familyinamerica.org/journals/fall-2013/divorce-and-forced-separation-children-their-parents/#.V0mm7OMY42Y
“Custody now includes the power to bring the penal system into the home to punish family members—not for legally recognized offenses but for ordinary family differences.”
For what it’s worth, re divorce, as someone who has been doing divorce work for about a decade: Child support is intended to remedy a) unequal earning capacities of parents, and/or b) unequal parent time arrangements. Both of these issues typically arise because, during the course of the marriage, one parent became the primary caretaker of the children–thus foregoing career advancement, and also becoming the superior candidate for primary custody post-divorce (I understand that the current thinking in child development circles is that while you do want to maximize time with both parents, a child of divorced parents needs a “home base” and a sense of permanency; and so perfect 50/50 arrangements are frowned upon).
We men sincerely aspire to be equal partners with our wives when it comes to the day-to-day activities of child-rearing; but when the rubber hits the road–FAR more often than not, we become content to let our wives take a dominant role while we focus on other marital responsibilities. That’s fine–as long as we don’t get divorced. But then along comes feminism, telling our wives that they’ve consented to a life of drudgery and oppression; so some of them go off seeking greener pastures–an action that statistically speaking, more often than not leaves everyone (including the women) more miserable than they were before.
Be a man, get married? https://t.co/Frz07ovhCK
Feminism, fidelity, manhood. Tweeted mostly for the discussion in the comments.
Outstanding leadership on the preeminent topic (as before also) Lucinda!!
Providing the reasoning to direct the “lizard brain” is indeed what’s wanted, and substantially provided here.
Our culture is so lost that the basics aren’t even in the clue range for almost all people entering their parenthood years. We don’t realize how fully attraction is based on a desire to make children until we are well along the path of having failed those children. Recognizing how all other attractions fade takes time, and the perspective that faithful marriage is THE way to best cultivate that objective of attraction comes way after investment/failure for all too many.
Wanting to make children with someone is the ultimate compliment, and staying true to that as a commitment is what everyone would want for themselves and anyone else they care for, but which we blithely assume will just happen as if one could build their dream career just sitting around waiting for employers/investors/customers to be inspired to call.
There need to be some clear standards which those mutually attracted discuss in honest terms of their commitment to what will make the most ultimate difference:
1 — Children are the purpose of marriage.
2 — Sexual fidelity (actual LOVEmaking) is based on making babies, and the culture of birth control turns a marriage into just official going steady.
Other good ones there are, but we are so falsely compassionate to those who can’t have children (trying to spare their feelings by refusing to state the obvious about what is most important) that we fail to stand up for children in their deserving to have families committed to what will best start their lives… wealth and longevity are nice for men, but all of that comes from doing right by their children.
Speaking of which, the best situation for children if divorce is “unavoidable” is BOTH stability and equal attention — the right solution would be for the courts to grant the children the family home and the parents to rotate residence, keeping expenses down by rooming w/ other singles during their weeks “off”. It probably sounds crazy until you consider what the status quo has imposed on children who are often alienated from their fathers and robbed of resources due to the unequal standards of $$ vs. time.
” … Lucinda’s essay is that it points out how the alleged rational intent of the well-meaning doesn’t result in the professed outcomes …”
A theme of Jane Galt’s creeping margin essay. No-fault divorce is discussed.
https://web.archive.org/web/20120420204152/http://www.janegalt.net/blog/archives/005244.html
Out-of-wedlock births, state welfare, no-fault divorce. Jane Galt used those three to illustrate how when society publicly shows compassion to those who accidentally (or through the fault of another) messed up their lives, (or society destigmatizes the mess, saying it is no longer a mess/sin) there exist those waiting in the margins who then purposely mess up their lives (or sin) and ask/demand “Ok, now where’s _my_ compassion?”
Lucinda: I forget if you’ve said that you have read it, but if not, please do. You seem a kindred spirit to Jane. Her essay will provide you with more ammo/argument to illustrate and prove your thesis.
I think we have to be careful to distinguish between idealized views of marriage from evolutionary psychology views of marriage. They really are different. While passing on ones genes makes a ton of sense from evolutionary psychology that issue ultimately is less significant for people in practical terms beyond explaining some intuitions and drives. You don’t need to be conscious of why evolution developed sex drives to want to be married. And from a gospel perspective God’s perspective is rather different from the natural man (more tied to evolutionary forces).
We also should probably note that the middle class – especially the educated middle class – don’t have a marriage problem. For people with a college degree the marriage rate has stabilized after dropping in the 70’s and actually started increasing. For people with High School or less the rate continues to drop quickly.
There are some clear reasons for this, especially for those in poverty. After all when you marry someone you also marry their network of relations. (Friends, family, etc.) For those who are poor this often ends up entailing demands that people in the middle class simply don’t have. (I should not some people in lower income such as immigrants don’t necessarily face this due to a different set of networks) If marriage has more costs than it does benefits — especially if your spouse is apt to not be a good wage earner — then it’s no surprise marriage is unattractive.
My suspicion is that the effects of more choice in marriage in the 70’s meant that a lot of people stopped getting into bad marriages. That process ended in the 90’s for the more well off. It continues for those in poverty especially as there are fewer and fewer economic opportunities due to the changing nature of work.
The other issue is of course the prolonging of when one marries. People that even when I was young would get married in their late 20’s now are postponing until well into their 30’s. Again I suspect economic stresses play a big part. You need to get educated. You have debt. Further there isn’t quite the social drive to get married there once was. Having children is the big limit for women (get past 40 and it gets harder) but people are now only having 1 – 2 children if they decide to have children at all. Societal expectations have changed radically. Having children isn’t an expectation. Children are coming to be viewed as a kind of extravagance. That is having extra children is (for a growing part of society) a choice more on par with buying a Porsche. Something to keep in mind as our religion remains rather fecund. (On my street I think nearly everyone has 3 – 4 kids)
Clark,
If you are willing to think that same-sex marriage is a viable understanding of marriage, then I think it’s fine to claim that marriage isn’t in trouble among the educated, but I’d have to question your credibility in other ways. As the MGTOWers say in the beginning of their response to Brad Wilcox’s video (and I didn’t watch the whole thing because of the crudity) “Women are so desperate to get married that they are marrying each other.”
But if you think it takes a man and a woman, then the numbers should give pause (even for the educated middle-class.) The supply-demand situation is not favorable for women, and it’s not getting better. This is from Pew Social Trends:
“The new Pew Research survey findings suggest that today’s unmarried women place a high premium on finding a spouse with a steady job: 78% of never-married women say this is very important, compared with 46% of men. And much of the research that has been done on marriage markets has focused on the ratio of employed men to women. When the employment status of unmarried men is taken into account, the number of men compared with women decreases dramatically. Among all unmarried adults, the ratio of employed men to all women goes down—for every 65 employed unmarried men, there are 100 unmarried women. Among those who have never been married, the ratio is 84 employed men per 100 women, and for those who have previously been married it is 47 employed men for every 100 women…
The pool of employed men is relatively small for never-married young women with college degrees as well. For every 100 college-educated never-married young women, there are only 88 employed college-educated young men. The ratio is even more skewed for never-married young women with a post-graduate education: There are only 67 employed young men per 100 women in this education group.”
“For never-married men, someone who shares their ideas about raising children is more important in choosing a spouse than someone who has a steady job.”(http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2014/09/24/record-share-of-americans-have-never-married/)
This article spends almost all it’s efforts talking about the lack of marriageable men. It spends almost no time talking about the lack of marriageable women (women capable of cooperative raising of children.) I would say that men generally accept, along with women, an understanding of financial security as part of marriage prerequisite since it’s not hard for men to see the importance of financial security to the idea of family. On the other hand, modern women generally reject an understanding of expected fertility as part of marriage prerequisite.
But it does not surprise me that there are many men who go along with women’s fancies by claiming that fertility isn’t a big part of their plans since it keeps their own costs down and gives them better chances of ‘scoring’ with women whose children are on someone else’s tab. It means these men must force a rational consciousness of the basic purpose of sex into the ‘subconscious’ (or else just lie). I do not have much respect for such men, but I do understand the strategy.
I’m divorced and active in the Church. My confidence in my PB is pretty much shot. I don’t live where women live and my PB says to marry someone who is active in the Church and we aren’t supposed to date nonmembers so I am basically stuck for following advice and I can’t leave my son here to go off with someone I met online or whatever. So, I tell people if God wants me to get married he’ll have to move someone here and he knows where I live. There is a policy where divorced men can’t ever serve as a YSA Bishop and you have to have been divorced 20 years before you can serve as a Bishop in a ward or have been divorced prior to joining the Church. In the church too a divorced man can get to the celestial kingdom and get hooked up with a women and become God but can’t serve as a Bishop, God but can’t become a Bishop.
whizzbang,
There are many people that will qualify for the Celestial kingdom without ever being a Bishop or RS President. There are many worthy people who also will not get called to those callings for any myriad of reasons without ever having been divorced.
I am comfortable with this policy since:
1. There are plenty of worthy people to fulfill the callings and not everyone will ever have all callings.
2. These callings are not needed to provide us with any special personal fulfillment or to qualify us for any special post-mortal reward.
“So, I tell people if God wants me to get married he’ll have to move someone here and he knows where I live.”
Maybe He already has. Maybe He will soon. Maybe He will move you (and your son, or not), even though you likely do not see how that would work with your personal plan for yourself. Usually we think we know what is best for us and try to bend God’s will to match what we think our immediate result should be. I know that I struggle with this constantly. However, submitting to His will generally ends up best for us in the long run. It is just much more difficult for us natural men to do as our vision is so annular and we rely so much on the arm of flesh.
That was very nice, thank you Mike!!
Lucinda: Perhaps China can or will supply the solution to the West’s (Or United States’) lack of worthy and marriage-elligible men. Due to their one child policy, and the millions of infanticides/feticides of girls, there are somewhere between 20 and 30 million “excess” males in China.
All we need to do is get a few million of them over here and converted, or send our single women over there and convert them.
Whizzbang: ( you don’t explicitly state your gender, but since you said “I don’t live where women live”, I assume you are male.) Why make the your future spouse do all the work? Why don’t _you_ ask God what ward “she” (the one who can move to live where you are) is in, and you take a weekend to go visit there on a Sunday? If God can tell Nephi where to go to get food, and where the apostles are supposed to send each and every missionary, He can tell you where to go to find a spouse who will move to your location. She’s probably praying the same thing, for God to bring her someone.
Lucinda the amount of same sex marriage is pretty small. It’s estimated by Pew to be around 170,000. There are 60 million married couples. So you’re talking around 2% of marriages. When you consider that without same sex marriage most of those people still wouldn’t be married (they aren’t in same sex relationships because of the lack of people of the opposite sex – let’s be honest) it’s hard to see this as statistically meaningful. Contrast that with divorce which seems a bigger threat. Except that among the middle class and educated the divorce rate keeps dropping.
There is a problem, but all signs point to it being tied to economic stress or cultural problems likely tied to economic stress. The point you make about men with poor economic prospects rather is confirming what I said, isn’t it?
China can’t provide the numbers of marriageable women we need, which is the point of the OP, that there is a dearth of marriageable women, because of feminism. I would guess that most American women don’t even understand that marriageability is different for women than for men. I didn’t, until just recently, and I haven’t heard it discussed among young women, except when they denigrate men who would be interested in their ability to become mothers.
Clark, the middle class is shrinking, largely due to the failure of middle-class-capacity men to ‘man up and get married’. So I guess your claim holds, since those who still are able to avoid the cut do still have many of the benefits. The problem I see with this mentality is that the men who don’t make the cut (because they understand that they aren’t going to get one of the women who will benefit them, but rather one that will rip their hearts out) are making up an increasing share of the population, probably an unsustainable share. Marriage to a good woman really is a civilizing influence, and so it is too bad that so many mothers, including religious mothers, are indoctrinating their daughters in the tenets of feminism.
Interesting that the detail of “who gets to be a bishop” comes up in this — since when has bishop (or RS pres, or even apostle) been considered a more important honor in life than the only position God commands us to honor… parent.
Think of you favorite apostle/prophet… would they still be as important to you if you (or he) never had parents? Sounds almost ridiculously obvious, but it’s the real deal which many are failing to understand and tell their kids — they will never do anything in this life more important than parenthood.
It seems so degrading to many — how great could it be since even someone as lowly as your own parents, and a great many even lesser types managed to do it — but think about it… 100% of people who fail to have kids came from parents who succeeded, some even w/o the successful marriage w/in which their kids deserved to be raised. So any given person is actually LESS LIKELY to succeed in that way as their parents did — it is only in the realization of following the primal commandment to multiply that there end up being enough people succeeding in the next generation.
If each pair of parents only had 2 kids the world would take a population spiral at the very least because a significant percentage of each subsequent generation don’t marry/reproduce. We scoff at the idea of the “usual” marriage and kids as if they are no big deal compared to more exclusive recognitions, and yet the only way all but the tiniest percentage (<1% of the top 1%) in any profession/art ever achieve anything like the immortality (mattering to anyone 100+yrs after your death) which parenthood typically conveys.
David, US, Canada, most of Europe, Russia and Japan are already in a demographic death spiral. Immigration is now providing the only increase in those countries, as native birth rate is below replacement level. IE, the West is dieing off.
( since Japan has little to no immigration, it is shrinking, and is about to go over the cliff due to their inverted pyramid of population-by-age. It’s not the eventual deaths of the current retirees that is the problem, but the replacement of the soon-to-retire generation, as there are not enough adults up-and-coming to replace them. They will soon not have enough people to run and operate the businesses, institutions, services, goverment, etc. people wanting to retire will likely be forced or bribed to continue to work. But eventually, little by little, things wil start shutting down.)
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Lucinda: I apparently misunderstood your post. I thought it was about men who dont want to get married. China has about 20,000,000 adult men of childbearing years for whom there are not enough women in china for them to marry. I understood you to say that (American) women still want to get married and have children, but are putting conditions on marriage and their potential husbands that turn off many American men. Those “turned off” men, then become known at MGTOW, who neither marry nor engender children OoW.
I’m saying that many of those 20,000,000 chinese men will find their way over here, sweet talk the feminist women, tell them whatever they want to hear, verbally agree to their feminist demands (“sure, babe, whatever you want is okay with me!”) , marry them, impregnate them on whatever schedule the wife wants, and then might or might not fulfill their promises. But, at least it will gain another maybe 10 to 15 years of baby-making before the Chinese “wise up” and turn into MGTOW themselves.
this is already happening in the church with some US-born LDS women marrying immigrants (I know several LDS professional-career-women who have married guys from Mexico.) And there is nothing wrong with that. I point it out to illustrate that the dearth of husband-material men is already being answered by immigrants, at least to some degree. And China has 20,000,000 waiting in the wings, who likely, at least initially, would be willing to go along with feminist ideas (or at least give lip service/false promises) in order to replicate their DNA.
Bookslinger,
Point taken.