Tag Archives: Sex Roles

Commentary

Should men marry women who don’t want to be wives and mothers?

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Consider this article by Suzanne Venker from National Review. (H/T Salvo Mag)

Excerpt:

A new report by Pew Research Center shows that barely half — 51 percent — of adults in the United States are married. In place of marriage are nontraditional living arrangements — including cohabitation, single-person households, and single parenthood — that may likely continue. The share of adults who are currently married could drop to below half within several years.

While the report says it’s “beyond the scope of this analysis to explain why [emphasis mine] marriage has declined,” senior writer D’Vera Cohn adds this: “I’m struck by the fact that a large percentage of people who say that marriage is obsolete still want to get married. I think they may be having two ideas in their head at once: one about the institution of marriage and what its status is in society today, which is to say that it’s a lot less dominant, central, or important in society, [and another about] their own wishes for their future, in which they personally would very much like to be married.”

Indeed they do. But some major changes have to take place first.

[…][W]e must retract the message Boomers sent young women about female empowerment. Indeed, it isn’t a coincidence that marriage rates have plummeted alongside America’s fascination with the feminist movement. Empowerment for women, as defined by feminists, neither liberates women nor brings couples together. It separates them. It focuses on women as perpetual victims of the Big Bad Male. Why would any man want to get married when he’s been branded a sexist pig at “hello”? In the span of just a few decades, women have managed to demote men from respected providers and protectors to being unnecessary, irrelevant, and downright expendable.

[…]Women have also been raised by their feminist mothers to “never depend on a man.” As a result, couples no longer think of themselves as one unit but as separate entities sharing space. “The confusion over roles is there, as are the legacies of a self-absorbed, me-first, feminist-do-or-die, male-backlash society,” wrote Judith Wallerstein and Sandra Blakeslee in The Good Marriage: How and Why Love Lasts. Honestly, are we really surprised marriage is on the decline?

[…]There may be more than one reason Americans are delaying or eschewing marriage, but almost all of them can be attributed to feminism. Feminists assured women their efforts would result in more satisfying marriages, but that has not happened. Rather, women’s search for faux equality has damaged marriage considerably (some might say irrevocably, but I’m an optimist) by eradicating the complementary nature of marriage — in which men and women work together, as equals, toward the same goal but with an appreciation for the unique qualities each gender brings to the table. Today, men and women are locked in a battle. The roles have changed too drastically, and the anger runs deep.

I don’t know about you, but I don’t call that progress.

You know something? Women can’t neglect the roles of men in a marriage and then expect to get married to a man. That is going to come to a shock to a lot of feminists who think that they can act selfishly and men will still continue to woo them and marry them and love them faithfully for life. Men have noticed that feminists are no longer interested in being wives and mothers. And that feminsts are no longer respecting men for their traditional roles as protectors, providers and moral/spiritual leaders. Feminists don’t want men who earn and save – that’s bad because men who earn and save have authority to make decisions, unless the woman works too. They don’t want men who can use guns to defeat burglars and use reason and evidence to defeat lies – that’s bad because guns and truth are scary. They don’t want men who make moral judgments and exclusive theological statements – that’s bad because moral judgments and exclusive theological statements can hurt people’s feelings, and make women less popular with her friends.

According to feminists, men are supposed to be fun, funny and sexy! They should provide drama and turmoil – not stability. It’s the government’s job to provide, protect and lead. Men should be replaced by welfare checks, policemen and universal public school education for children – from birth to adulthood. But all of those views are completely opposed to marriage – so why do feminists think that are suitable for marriage? What man in his right mind would consider marriage to a feminist? Marriage isn’t when a woman does whatever she feels like all the time, and neglects her husband and children. Marriage means that women take care of their husbands and children, and in return husbands take care of their wives and children, too.

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Commentary

Dennis Prager: Does a full-time homemaker swap her mind for a mop?

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On National Review, Dennis Prager argues that going to work full-time is not as intellectually fulfilling as being a stay-at-home mother – if it’s done right.

Excerpt:

I seek to refute the idea that full-time home making is intellectually vapid and a waste of a college education.

Let me first state that I have no argument with those mothers who need or even just wish to work outside the home. My argument is with those who believe that staying at home is necessarily mind-numbing.

Nor do I wish to romanticize child rearing. As a rule, little children don’t contribute much to the intellectual life of a parent (although older children who are intellectually curious can spur a parent to seek answers to challenging questions they may not have considered before). Any intellectually alive woman who is a full-time mother must therefore find intellectual stimulation elsewhere.

The point is that she can find such stimulation without leaving her house. Furthermore, the intellectual input she can find is likely to be greater than most women (or men) find working outside the home. There is a reason that about half the audience of my national radio show is female — they listen to talk radio for hours a day and broaden their knowledge considerably. To the Left, the notion that talk radio enhances intellectual development is akin to fish needing bicycles. But that is because the Left’s greatest achievement is demonizing the Right, and because they never actually listen to the best of us.

I am syndicated by the Salem Radio Network. My colleagues are Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Michael Medved, and Hugh Hewitt. Two of us attended Harvard, one Yale, and one Columbia; one of us taught at Harvard, another at the City University of New York, and a third teaches constitutional law at a law school. In addition to reviewing the news and discussing our own views, we all routinely interview authors and experts — left and right — in almost every field. The woman who listens to us regularly will know more about economics, politics, current events, world affairs, American history, and religion than the great majority of men and women who work full-time outside of the home.

Lest the latter seem a self-serving suggestion, there are many other opportunities for full-time homemakers to broaden their intellectual horizons: recorded books and a few television networks, for example. And if a woman can get help from grandparents, neighbors, older children, or a baby sitter, there are also myriad opportunities for study outside the house — such as community-college classes, book clubs, etc. — and for volunteer work in intellectually more stimulating areas than most paid work.

Let me give an example of the woman I know best, my wife. She is a non-practicing lawyer with a particular interest in, and knowledge of, taxation and the economy. She decided to stay home to be a full-time mother to her two boys (one of whom is autistic) and her two nieces (who lost their mother, my wife’s sister, to cancer when they were very young). Between talk radio, History Channel documentaries, BookTV on C-SPAN2, recorded lectures from The Teaching Company/The Great Courses, and constant reading, she has led a first class intellectual life while shuttling kids, folding laundry, and making family dinners.

I guess by now everyone knows my view on this. I expect a good wife to have a college degree, and preferably a graduate degree, and then a couple of  years experience before the children start to arrive. At that point, her job becomes the most important job in the world: making sure that the children that the husband entrusts her with are able to have more of an impact for Christian than either the wife or the husband. That is one of the major reasons why Christians get married in the first place, in my view.

The husband’s job is to go to work and do mindless, useless drudgery in exchange for money. This is the more self-sacrificial role in marriage. He does this so that he can afford to keep a professional teacher in the house to bond with the young children, make sure that they learn empathy and relational skills, and then go on to get bachelor and graduate degrees and influential jobs. She has to plan all of this out and then navigate their path to success – which means she has to know how to follow the path, and how to neutralize any obstacles that may appear. The woman’s role in the home is a massive undertaking, and more significant (ultimately) than the man’s role outside the home.

It’s very important for a woman to choose a man to marry who has this vision for what a woman does in the home. He has to have set the pattern in courtship that it is his responsibility to help her to know as much as possible about all kinds of different subjects. She has to study more than the man, and then impart the knowledge the children. The man only has to have an overall big picture, but the woman has to know the details. In order for the woman to get the details of math, science, foreign policy, economics, etc., she needs to have a constant feed of intellectually challenging materials, and quiet time for study. And it’s the man’s job to provide these materials and that time, so that she can produce influential children.

Please note that I do not endorse any of the other hosts on the Salem Radio Network. In particular, Medved, Bennett and Hewitt are center-left and support Mitt Romney, with all that that entails.

Commentary

Dennis Prager offers the best concise analysis of the effects of feminism ever

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Dennis Prager has summarized many of my viewpoints on this blog in a tiny, tiny little article. He calls it “Four Legacies of Feminism“.

Read the whole glorious thing and bask in its wisdom!

Full text:

As we approach the 50th anniversary of the publication of Betty Friedan’s feminist magnum opus, The Feminine Mystique, we can have a perspective on feminism that was largely unavailable heretofore.

And that perspective doesn’t make feminism look good. Yes, women have more opportunities to achieve career success; they are now members of most Jewish and Christian clergy; women’s college sports teams are given huge amounts of money; and there are far more women in political positions of power. But the prices paid for these changes — four in particular — have been great, and outweigh the gains for women, let alone for men and for society.

1) The first was the feminist message to young women to have sex just as men do. There is no reason for them to lead a different sexual life than men, they were told. Just as men can have sex with any woman solely for the sake of physical pleasure, so, too, women ought to enjoy sex with any man just for the fun of it. The notion that the nature of women is to hope for at least the possibility of a long-term commitment from a man they sleep with has been dismissed as sexist nonsense.

As a result, vast numbers of young American women had, and continue to have, what are called “hookups”; and for some of them it is quite possible that no psychological or emotional price has been paid. But the majority of women who are promiscuous do pay prices. One is depression. New York Times columnist Ross Douthat recently summarized an academic study on the subject: “A young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed and the present stability of her sex life diminished.”

Long before this study, I had learned from women callers to my radio show (an hour each week — the “Male-Female Hour” — is devoted to very honest discussion of sexual and other man-woman issues) that not only did female promiscuity coincide with depression, it also often had lasting effects on women’s ability to enjoy sex. Many married women told me that in order to have a normal sexual relationship with their husband, they had to work through the negative aftereffects of early promiscuity — not trusting men, feeling used, seeing sex as unrelated to love, and disdaining their husband’s sexual overtures. And many said they still couldn’t have a normal sex life with their husband.

2) The second awful legacy of feminism has been the belief among women that they could and should postpone marriage until they developed their careers. Only then should they seriously consider looking for a husband. Thus, the decade or more during which women have the best chance to attract men is spent being preoccupied with developing a career. Again, I cite woman callers to my radio show over the past 20 years who have sadly looked back at what they now, at age 40, regard as 20 wasted years. Sure, these frequently bright and talented women have a fine career. But most women are not programmed to prefer a great career to a great man and a family. They feel they were sold a bill of goods at college and by the media. And they were. It turns out that most women without a man do worse in life than fish without bicycles.

3) The third sad feminist legacy is that so many women — and men — have bought the notion that women should work outside the home that for the first time in American history, and perhaps world history, vast numbers of children are not primarily raised by their mothers or even by an extended family member. Instead they are raised for a significant part of their childhood by nannies and by workers at daycare centers. Whatever feminists may say about their only advocating choices, everyone knows the truth: Feminism regards work outside the home as more elevating, honorable, and personally productive than full-time mothering and making a home.

4) And the fourth awful legacy of feminism has been the demasculinization of men. For all of higher civilization’s recorded history, becoming a man was defined overwhelmingly as taking responsibility for a family. That notion — indeed the notion of masculinity itself — is regarded by feminism as the worst of sins: patriarchy.

Men need a role, or they become, as the title of George Gilder’s classic book on single men describes them: Naked Nomads. In little more than a generation, feminism has obliterated roles. If you wonder why so many men choose not to get married, the answer lies in large part in the contemporary devaluation of the husband and of the father — of men as men, in other words. Most men want to be honored in some way — as a husband, a father, a provider, as an accomplished something; they don’t want merely to be “equal partners” with a wife.

In sum, thanks to feminism, very many women slept with too many men for their own happiness; postponed marriage too long to find the right man to marry; are having hired hands do much of the raising of their children; and find they are dating boy-men because manly men are so rare.

Feminism exemplifies the truth of the saying, “Be careful what you wish for — you may get it.”

I wish I could add something to this, but I can’t because every time I think of something to add, he says it in the next sentence.

If you like this short essay, then this medium essay arguing against feminism authored by Barbara Kay would be nice follow-up.

It might be worth forwarding these articles along to your friends. And I highly recommend books on male-female relationships and roles by George Gilder, especially “Men and Marriage“.