Saturday, April 01, 2006

Follow-up to "Where are the boys?"

Yesterday at Pontifications, I was deeply struck by a comment made by somebody with the handle 'Marcy On' in a thread about male headship in marriage:

Where patriarchal dignity is not respected, human males refrain more often from marrying, (though not necessarily from fathering children) and more women therefore live unmarried, too. American Black culture is a contemporary example
of this disaster.

And, aside from some in the feminized elite classes, most males will avoid institutions where their male dignity is not respected. Consider the gender demographics of the clergy in “mainline” churches. There is no demographic future in this.

From an evolutionary psych point of view, Christianity is certainly a feminization of religion, because it hypervalorizes love, ie, affiliation, over rank…among humans. It may have been (and likely was) a powerful and necessary softening of the patriarchal impulse. BUT, it was enacted within a larger frame of patriarchal Deity. So-called Christian feminism, by de-masculinizing the Christian God, has eroded the frame in which the revelation was meant to function. And the end result is, at best, Unitarianism in drag (ie, the Episcopal Church).

And if you have erased the significant differences between the father and the mother (and functionally made both of them mothers, one talented at it, one pathetic at it), why not erase the difference between parents and children, and make them all parents, or all children? Watching TV these days, you can see it played out. It’s not pretty. Or funny.

One way to look at contemporary liberalism is that it is the revenge of the primitive mother on the father, since it (publicly, anyway) makes affiliation trump rank in every situation. (Covertly, of course, the mother uses affiliate to create rank, as she always has). Perhaps Marduk killed Tiamat for a reason? Is there a segement of this worldview that does not either pathologize or devalue classical, ie real and actual, experience-able maleness? And when western liberal culture has reached its apogee, say, in modern Western Europe, who shows up to challenge it? The most misogynistic, violent, and patriarchal religion in history, unapologetic and ravenous, dressed in the clothing of a race-victim. Who do you think will win that one?

Burnham was right, I think, and liberalism may be the ideology that justifies and accelerates the suicide of the West. And the castrating animus hidden inside almost every form of feminism is central to it. Wouldn’t it be charming if the logical (that is, naturally and historically logical) outcome of Betty Friedan is the Burka?

Just thinkin’ out loud. St Paul is by no means a hero of mine, but I think he had a point here.

I think he did too; the Pauline point in question may be found in Ephesians 5. Marcy herself has many other stunning ones. Frankly, her (I presume the writer is female) comment inspired my post of yesterday Where are the Boys? She articulated my thoughts better and more courageously than I ever have or still have.

Thanks, Marcy. I don't know who you are, but I hope you see this.

2 comments:

  1. Anonymous9:53 AM

    Very insightful. As a young feminist, I noticed that the introduction of women into all-male settings really messed up the dynamics, for just the reason noted. It made affiliation trump rank. And smuggled in affiliation-based rank on the terms of the most talented, seductive, or manipulative women.

    A fierce and destructive social intervention.

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  2. Thank you for this. As a mother of boys, the nurturing of their male identity has been one of the primary reasons we homeschool. And key to that is the headship of my husband in our marriage. We really are happiest when he is in that role and I support him in that. Disaster strikes when I try to usurp that role.

    My parents were greatly distressed that after all my schooling I embraced that traditional role of wife-at-home. "How could you turn your back on the gains made by women?" my mother asked greatly scandalized.

    Now that the boys are teens, and we've somehow escaped the cultural imperative of "boys behaving badly", they see the wisdom in what they style as my "sacrifice."

    I laugh at that because from the very beginning of my marriage, I accepted it as a spiritual calling to be a wife-at-home. There is deep contentment in this.

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