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Commentary

Feminist and self-described “professional misandrist” explains what to look for in a man

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Do young women understand how to get to a stable marriage?
Do young women understand how to get to a stable marriage?

I heard about “Everyday Feminism” by listening to the Andrew Klavan podcast. Today, I wanted to link to an article featuring 10 questions that a radical feminist should ask the man on the first date.

Here are a few:

4. What are your thoughts on sex work?

You may scratch your head at this one, but much like racism and misogynoir, being pro-sex worker is a necessary pillar of dismantling the patriarchy. I don’t mean pro-sex worker in the sense where non-sex workers write op-eds and think pieces about how sex work is amazing and feminist.

I mean the kind where we pass the mic to sex workers because they know their experiences better than anyone who hasn’t ever engaged in sex work. I mean the kind of pro-heauxism where you understand the labor of sex workers of color, especially trans women of color who engage in sex work, because their experience and knowledge is crucial to understanding the oppressive structures of our world.

7. Do you think capitalism is exploitative?

Anti-capitalism, especially in the U.S., is imperative if you have an understanding of systemic racism, the prison industrial complex, the 13th Amendment, and exploitation. Capitalism, for one, teaches us that we are only valuable if we produce capital. That means that if you aren’t contributing to the system with your labor, your life means almost nothing.

If your date says they’re anti-fascist and part of the resistance but they’re cool with exploiting labor from communities of color and they support the school to prison pipeline, then there’s a good chance they’ll only value you for your ability to nurture them without any reciprocation.

8. Can any human be illegal?

We live on a tiny planet, with land and water within a galaxy surrounded by a universe with an inconceivable number of other galaxies and planets. Yet here we dictate where we are and who is allowed to be where we are. It’s mind-boggling that borders are even a thing, so to call people “aliens” or “illegal immigrants” is so inhumane and despicable.

White Americans stole this land, colonized this land, created so many borders, pushed out, killed and enslaved people of color and somehow they have the audacity to claim that this land is theirs and that black and brown immigrants are stealing their jobs, land, and homes? Miss me with that b***s***.

9. Do you support Muslim Americans and non-Muslim people from Islamic countries?

I can’t think of any other religion which has been vilified and lied about more than Islam in a cultural and systemic way. I am not Muslim, so I will stay in my lane, but I cannot imagine for a second even claiming to be a feminist if I didn’t stand in solidarity with my Muslim friends and family — especially now, especially after 9/11.

Don’t waste your time and energy on dating someone who thinks that Islam is inherently violent or misogynistic. Instead, read some Huda Sha’arawi or Mona Eltahawy to educate yourself further on Muslim feminism.

So, she’s looking for a man who doesn’t enough marketable skills to work in the private sector, who doesn’t believe in the rule of law, who thinks that his earnings should be taxed to pay for illegal immigrants to get free school, free health care, free entitlements, etc. (instead of paying for his own family and household), and who thinks that radical Muslims are doing great work by intentionally targeting innocent people for terrorist attacks. Is this man she is looking for someone who can do man-roles in a long-term relationship? It doesn’t sound to me like he is capable of doing the jobs a man does in marriage. Marriage-capable men protect, provide and lead on moral and spiritual issues.

I found a little bit of biography about this woman. I was shocked to find that she does not have a STEM degree. (not shocked!)

I am an intersectional feminist writer and freelance journalist. I was born and raised in Geneva, Switzerland and I moved to Philadelphia in 2010. I received my BA in Journalism from Temple University and interned at the Philadelphia Daily News as a full-time news intern and reporter. I wrote over twenty pieces covering court stories, crime and neighborhood events, including my own column and two front page stories.

Following my internship & graduation I became increasingly committed to writing freelance for feminist and anti-racist publications like BUST, Guerrilla Feminism, Rewire, Blavity and Philadelphia Printworks. I am currently the senior editor for Wear Your Voice Magazine and a freelance writer for publications like Teen Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Elle, Allure and more.

I specialize in online editorial branding and communications for anti-racist, pro-feminist sites. I helped rebrand and re-focus Wear Your Voice to expand their readership and provide a platform for marginalized voices and those who wish to learn more about intersectional feminism.

I am available for speaking events and panels about anti-racism, feminism, journalism, freelance writing and activism.

Political science is one of the easiest and most useless degrees to get, and jobs for political science graduates pay far less than science and engineering careers. Writing feminist screeds is not a career. Petroleum engineering is a career. Intelligent people study hard things, so that they can get good jobs, and make real money by offering real value to customers.

Her Instagram describes her as a “professional misandrist”. Yet she’s looking for a man. Imagine that! Marriage requires a woman to embrace her feminine nature, and to affirm and cultivate her man’s male nature. None of her views are compatible with what a woman does in a marriage. And none of her views are compatible with keeping a husband engaged in a marriage. She just doesn’t have any ability to keep a long-term relationship together.

Secular men might find her useful for a quick hook-up or as a friend with benefits, but she would be an absolute nightmare to marry. And that ability to get hook-up sex will fade as her youth and appearance fade. Then she’ll have no value whatsoever, to any man – even the ones who just want to use her for sex. It’s sad. Her father should be able to convey some wisdom to her about how to live, but I suspect her father is absent – probably because her mother made poor choices about who to have babies with.

Ten better questions

You can find my list of ten questions for courting here. I don’t ask these questions all at once, on the first date. I just raise these issues and see if there is any interest in them. I think you’ll find that my list of 10 questions is a lot more relevant to the roles that a woman plays in a marriage than the radical feminist’s ten questions are relevant to the roles a man plays in marriage. But then again, I doubt that radical feminists are interested in a marriage that lasts – not enough to make choices to really achieve it. 

Finally, my friend Wes posted a response to the radical feminist questions by equity feminist Christina Hoff Sommers:

Commentary

Can relationships succeed independently of the efforts of the people involved?

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Man helping a woman with proper handgun marksmanship
Man helping a woman with proper handgun marksmanship

A few years ago, I blogged about the soul mate / fairy tale view of marriage, which I think is the dominant view of marriage among young people today – even among Christians. This view of marriage basically says that there is a person in the world out there who will match up so perfectly with each one of us that we will have to expend no effort and perform no actions and take responsibility for nothing in order for the relationship to work. it will just work on its own!

I’ve decided to link to this recent article by Matt Walsh which is on that same topic.

He writes:

The disease is the fanciful, unrealistic, fictionalized perceptions that both males and females harbor about marriage.

For example, think of the glamorization of the “mysterious” and “damaged” guy from the “wrong side of the tracks.” Hollywood makes him seem alluring and sexy, but forgets to mention that most of the time, in the real world, that dude probably has herpes, a coke habit, and a criminal record.

Still, that bit of propaganda is nothing compared to the underlying misconception that so many of us carry around consciously or subconsciously, because we’ve seen it on TV and in the movies, and read it in books a million times since childhood: namely, that there is just one person out there for us. Our soul mate. Our Mr. or Mrs. Right. The person we are “meant to be with.”

Matt thinks this view of relationships is not realistic:

I didn’t marry my wife because she’s The One, she’s The One because I married her. Until we were married, she was one, I was one, and we were both one of many. I didn’t marry The One, I married this one, and the two of us became one. I didn’t marry her because I was “meant to be with her,” I married her because that was my choice, and it was her choice, and the Sacrament of marriage is that choice. I married her because I love her — I chose to love her — and I chose to live the rest of my life in service to her. We were not following a script, we chose to write our own, and it’s a story that contains more love and happiness than any romantic fable ever conjured up by Hollywood.

Indeed, marriage is a decision, not the inevitable result of unseen forces outside of our control. When we got married, the pastor asked us if we had “come here freely.” If I had said, “well, not really, you see destiny drew us together,” that would have brought the evening to an abrupt and unpleasant end. Marriage has to be a free choice or it is not a marriage. That’s a beautiful thing, really.

God gave us Free Will. It is His greatest gift to us because without it, nothing is possible. Love is not possible without Will. If we cannot choose to love, then we cannot love. God did not program us like robots to be compatible with only one other machine. He created us as individuals, endowed with the incredible, unprecedented power to choose. And with that choice, we are to go out and find a partner, and make that partner our soul mate.

That’s what we do. We make our spouses into our soul mates by marrying them. We don’t simply recognize that they are soul mates and then just sort of symbolically consecrate that recognition through what would then be an effectively meaningless marriage sacrament. Instead, we find another unique, dynamic, wholly individualized human being, and we make the monumental, supernatural decision to bind ourselves to them for eternity.

It’s a bold and risky move, no matter how you look at it. It’s important to recognize this, not so that you can run away like a petrified little puppy and never tie the knot with anyone, but so that you can go into marriage knowing, at least to some extent, what you’re really doing. This person wasn’t made for you. It wasn’t “designed” to be. There will be some parts of your relationship that are incongruous and conflicting. It won’t all click together like a set of Legos, as you might expect if you think this coupling was fated in the stars.

It’s funny that people get divorced and often cite “irreconcilable differences.” Well what did they think was going to happen? Did they think every difference would be reconcilable? Did they think every bit of contention between them could be perfectly and permanently solved?

Finally, regarding his own marriage:

There were literally millions of things that either of us could have done. An innumerable multitude of possible outcomes, but this was our outcome because we chose it. Not because we were destined or predetermined, not because it was “meant to happen,” but because we chose it. That, to me, is much more romantic than getting pulled along by fate until the two of us inevitably collide and all that was written in our horoscopes passively comes to unavoidable fruition.

We are the protagonists of our love story, not the spectators.

I see this problem everywhere, even with Christian women who have been raised as Disney princesses. I was just told by one last week that she will marry when she meets “the right man” – the man who will require her to do nothing. This magical relationship will require no communication, no working through disagreements, no problem solving, no compromise, no effort, no self-sacrifice of any kind. it will just “work”, without any growing up by anyone. Two unemployed people with degrees in English can have a fine marriage, I suppose, traveling the world and skydiving every Tuesday.

I think that when problems arise between two people who are largely compatible, the right thing to do is to engage and solve the problems. Yes, work isn’t required in pop culture notions of romance, but those things don’t reflect the real world anyway. In the real world, actions to solve a problem count for more than words that avoid the problem. Engineering principles and self-sacrificial attitude are infinitely more useful in a relationship than all the pop culture descriptions of ideal men and ideal women and ideal relationships combined.

By the way, the best book on this problem is Dr. Laura’s “The Proper Care and Feeding of Husbands”, which clearly sets out how a woman’s choices influence her husband’s ability to perform well. The myth of the mind-reading “right man” is also debunked.

Commentary

Even alpha male bad boys are disappointed by the Sexual Revolution

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Marriage stability vs sexual partners,(Teachman et al. JAMF, August 2010)
Marriage stability vs sexual partners,(Teachman et al. JAMF, August 2010)

Thanks to radical feminism’s dominance in the culture, young unmarried women are no longer desiring marriage, nor selecting men for husband and father roles. In my experience, I would say that about 80% of young unmarried women are competing for 20% of the men. Instead of evaluating these men for husband and father roles, they just evaluate them on externals.

This article from the UK Daily Mail illustrates the problem:

Women are often said to be the less shallow sex when it comes to what they find attractive.

But a study of an online gallery of ‘hot male commuters’ has found that the fairer sex are just as superficial as men – as they find muscles and money the sexiest male attributes.

The study based its findings on a website called Tube Crush, where women and gay men secretly take pictures of the capital’s attractive men on the London Underground.

[…]While the authors acknowledge that gay men also use the site, they say that female responses to the ‘hot commuters’ suggest females have not moved on in what they find attractive beyond ‘money and strength’ – despite their advancement in society.

Signs that the man is wealthy – such as a flashy watch or an expensive suit – were considered highly attractive by site users, as were powerful arm and chest muscles.

But the classic image of the ‘new man’ – a man holding a baby – or skinnier or nerdier types of man were far less represented.

This is a good illustration of what the marriage-minded men now see on college campuses. Today, marriage-minded men who focus on sobriety, chastity and providing for a family are ignored until women tire of chasing the minority of “bad boys” who have these shallow, external characteristics. On campus, marriage-minded men  are ignored while young, unmarried women hope to boost their self-esteem and have fun by having sex with guys who possess shallow external qualities. Alcohol is used as a lubricant for this operation, reducing inhibitions and providing an alibi to the woman’s peer group for the slutty behavior. It seems as if women have completely given up on marriage – at least until their youth start to fade in their early 30s.

Now, as one of the 80% of men who are marriage-minded, I am dissatisfied with women’s decisions to delay marriage for fun with bad boys. But it turns out that even the other 20% of men who are “bad boys” are also dissatisfied with women’s choices.

Consider this article from the UK Sun: (H/T Sarah)

It sounds like every young man’s idea of heaven: endless sex with a constant stream of gorgeous, up-for-it women who don’t even expect a pizza date before, or a conversation afterwards – and all via a tap on your smartphone.

Yet incredibly, a new generation of handsome, successful – and sexually prolific – Tinder-weary lads are claiming sex with hundreds of one-night stands is leaving them burned out, bored – and lonely.

Despite bedding a bevvie of beauties, they claim they’re desperate for lasting romance – and broody for children with a new wave of sexually-liberated young women who just don’t want to commit.

I got to know a group of these seemingly lucky men after I co-wrote the UK’s biggest ever academic study into more than 2,000 British men, released this week.

Called the Harry’s Masculinity Report, the survey was conducted by University College London and Harry’s, a new men’s grooming company that’s just launched in the UK.

Harry’s wanted to shatter the myths around masculinity, and discover what truly made modern men tick in 2017.

Here are some details:

One of these was Simone Ippolito, 25, from Bournemouth, a self-confessed Tinder “player” for two years.

The salesman and part-time model claimed: “When I first got Tinder two years ago, it was heaven. In three months I got 300 matches. They were coming so fast I couldn’t keep up.

“People on Tinder are only there for sex. I’ve been on 200 dates, and I get a result 99 per cent of the time.

“Getting sex is too easy. You get bored of it. Tinder takes all the pleasure out of flirting. It’s not fun anymore. Tinder is literally two glasses of wine then back home for sex. There is no emotion.

“It is boring, empty and lonely. You can’t have a nice conversation after mechanical sex. It’s just sex and go. Now I just want to stop it and settle down”.

Talking to other single men, it rapidly became clear that while dating apps like Tinder means it’s never been easier to get sex, it’s never been harder to fall in love.

This sentiment was echoed by Gary Barnett, 34, social media manager from Brighton, who’s been single for three months.

“For the first time ever in human history, sex is on tap,” he says.

“Nine times out of ten you don’t even have to go out on a date. If a girl likes your photos, they just come round.

“If you’re half attractive you’re bombarded with offers. You can go on Tinder dates every single night of the week.

“The social interaction is totally lacking. You can have sex and never talk again.

“They always ask the same three questions. ‘Hi how are you?’ ‘how’s your week been?’ or ‘I love your beard/tattoos’. That’s literally code for ‘do you want to f***?’

“That was really good for the first year. I filled my boots. After 50 Tinder dates, including 20 in the last two months with no sign of any ‘keepers,’ I’m over it. You get to the point where you can’t be bothered to do it anymore”.

Ah yes, the beard and tattoos. These are apparently very important for attracting women today. But it doesn’t work to attract a serious marriage-minded women to settle down with. Men are designed to want relationships with women. But not every woman is capable of having a relationship with a man. Especially after so many women have been taught by feminism not to prefer commitment-minded men who can perform the traditional male roles: protecting, providing and leading on moral and spiritual issues. Bears, muscles, shiny watches and tattoos might attract women, but it doesn’t make those women marriage-ready. They’re not marriage ready at all.

Who is there today who is teaching women to be ready for marriage? They’re being taught to look for shiny watches, beards, piercings and tattoos. After a while of smashing up their character with bad boys, they aren’t good for marriage any more. Women who choose men based on shallow externals quickly lose their ability to trust any man – even if the right man comes along. And no amount of bad boy attractiveness can fix up a woman who has chosen over and over in favor of fun and thrills.

The Sexual Revolution have messed up love and commitment for everyone, it seems.