Tag Archives: University

Commentary

Are young, unmarried women sincere about wanting to be married “some day”?

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College students puking in toilet
College students puking in toilet

Here’s a useful video for learning about what men think of marriage now that radical feminism has redefined it:

This comment about the video by Gaza on the Elusive Wapiti blog deserves a post of it’s own, so here it is:

One thing that Helen seems to miss is how women value and prioritize marriage and what role this plays vis a vis the male corollary. 

The “story” isn’t just about men being “on strike” or even (to Helen’s credit) rationally choosing to delay and/or avoid; it must also include how women treat marriage WRT their own valuation and prioritization and life decisions (NOT merely stated desires). 

There are not swarms of 25 y/o female college-grads looking for a husband with no willing men within sight. There are, however, swarms of 25 y/o/ female college-grads looking to have fun, travel, chase dreams, build careers, and explore their options. 

I’ve “dated” a few of these women; most (and their social circles included) are so focused on the self-indulgence (“experience”) and the status associated with sexual conquest/power that any mention of marriage is usually as a joke (enter the “boyfriends/husbands are boring/stupid/lazy” meme); marriage is merely some distant thing to be acquired at some seemingly distant age. 

Sure, over time (cue: the wall), the distant thing becomes a stated desire, but the transition from stated-desire to behavioral change and actual prioritization often takes years. I meet women well into their 30’s who still can’t alter their behaviors to demonstrate congruence with their stated desires. 

But that is when we start to hear how important marriage is, how men are avoiding commitment, why men should value marriage. All bacon-wrapped in various shaming mechanisms. The women singing the “Man-up and marry me” tune are not the 25 y/o versions; they are too busy singing the “you go girl” showtunes, exactly as prescribed by the Sandberg, lean-in, [binge drinking, continuous alpha male hookups, alpha male cohabitation], [and later, jump off the carousel into a marriage to a beta provider that makes her perpetually feel that she married down compared to the alphas that she used to hookup with while drunk].

So we can plainly see how something is valued based on the prioritization of one’s choices. Most young women value marriage as an idea, as a capstone to her personal journey; an indicator of status and achievement but not as a goal in-of-itself and not as a life decision that supersedes the accumulation of personal experience, the flexing her sexual and relationship power, or the kindling her optionality. 

These women desire to “hang-out” with the most attractive men they can, under any number of relationship approximations while pursuing their personal journeys and then suddenly desire to elevate commitment and marriage as something paramount, right around the same time their ability to define and opt-in/out of those indulgent relationship approximations wanes. Hmm.

After 10+ years of treating men and relationships as consumable commodities, marriage is now so valuable? So sacred that it will magically be more robust in the face of challenges, requiring more giving and less taking than those previous marital approximations, and yet because it is now a “Marriage”, it won’t be treated as merely a vehicle for the pursuit of her apparently perpetually fleeting “happiness”? Convince me.

There is a false premise at work that assumes that it is men who are devaluing marriage. Sure, there is some truth to this, but woman are messaging their own valuation of marriage as well; in real-time, often in very overt means and often at the expense of men who are still clinging to some idealistic view of marriage. 

And likely those are the very men who are willing and able to be husbands at 25. The very same men who will grow to become self-sufficient 35 y/o men feeling their own blossoming optionality, harvesting their own “experiences” with the 25 y/o versions of the suddenly-marriage-minded women, while a decade of observational and experiential evidence of what women truly value buries what remains of their marital idealism.

Tl:dr
I’d consider marriage to a woman who has demonstrated through her choices, prioritization, sacrifice and delayed gratification that marriage is valuable to her and who can articulate how it would be valuable to me. [not holding breath]

What do you think? Is that something that you are seeing more of in the current generation of young, unmarried women? I have to confess, I see a lot of emphasis among Christian women on short-term missions trips and on careers, but not much planning on how to be prepared for marriage. In my experience, there is not much preparation work going on, and marriage is put off later and later. This is despite the fact that a woman’s fertility declines starting at age 27 and is pretty much dead at 35. IVF is very expensive, but has a higher risk of birth defects and and can often lead to too many embryos, some of which will then need to be aborted. Men respond to incentives, and they have certain things they are looking for out of a wife and marriage.

It would be nice if there were some wisdom being transferred from older, married women to young, unmarried women, but I don’t see it happening. What I see happening is young women, including ones raised in Christian homes, going off to college to binge drink and hookup and cohabitate, and always expressing the desire for marriage “some day”. But marriage is something you prepare for early with every decision. Some decisions are not good preparation for marriage. I get the impression that young, unmarried women think that marriage is “boring” and not the way to “make a difference”, and so in practice, they are trying other things.

Remember, the offer that a woman such as Gaza describes to a man is not the same as the offer of marriage that was made by 20-year-old women in the 1950s.

Marriage used to mean:

  • Being the legally and socially recognized head of the household.
  • An expectation of regular sex.
  • Legal rights to children.
  • Lifetime commitment.
  • That you are guaranteed a chaste bride on your wedding night.

Men liked the original version of marriage without the modern debasements. Should they feel obligated to settle for the new version of marriage which is influenced by radical feminism? I would have to be convinced. Women are kidding themselves if they think that they can do anything they want and wait as long as they want and still be as attractive to men.

News

Bisexual Latino professor chased out of CSU Northridge for being too conservative

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Young people seem to like gay marriage more than they like individual liberties
Young people seem to like gay marriage more than they like individual liberties

This College Fix article is a must read. Don’t just read my excerpt, you need to click through and read it all. (H/T Katy)

Excerpt:

Even when one can check off a few “minority” or “marginalized” boxes, if they have their own opinions that run afoul of the party line, they’re the enemy.

Case in point: Professor Robert Lopez of California State University Northridge, who has been harassed and vilified by students and peers to the point that he can’t stand his work environment anymore and he is leaving his position as an English professor — and the safety of tenure with it.

[…]As Lopez explained on American Thinker on May 26, he was also the target of frivolous student complaints, “including charges that I ‘had erections while teaching,’ called Helen of Troy ‘promiscuous,’ and said that liberals were ‘nutjobs.’”

As for the administrative Title IX probe into his decision to allow students to attend the pro-traditional family conference at the Reagan Presidential Library, the investigation remains “open and undecided after 600 days.”

“The case was based on a gay student claiming he had a nervous breakdown because of anti-gay ‘targeting’ at the Reagan Library and a woman who claimed I did not nominate her for an award because she alleged that the five female speakers at the Reagan Library were ‘anti-female,’” Lopez explained, adding:

By 2014 I could no longer trust any of my students. I was teaching like a robot: come in, hook up the laptop, give one of my canned lectures, tell the jokes at all the right junctures, try not to screw up, and get out before students can get into any unsupervised conversations. I had an inkling which of my colleagues were planting students in my class to annoy me – at first I thought I was crazy to suspect it – but when it was clear that most of the people lodging weird complaints had the same few professors as mentors, I knew that there were no real coincidences anymore. You don’t try to guess who the snipers are; just assume they are all out to get you, and never get close.

In the end, it was all too much for Lopez.

“I had served for eight years under a dean trained in Women’s Studies, surrounded in her executive suite by lesbians and feminists, who hated me for celebrating the beauty and glory of chastity and Biblical love. I could not have my relationship with Jesus Christ and this job simultaneously. The choice was not that difficult,” Professor Lopez explained in a June 7 op-ed in The Daily Caller. “It is a rare thing for a relatively young scholar to walk away from tenure after three years. But salvation is also a rare thing. So is happiness.”

Tenure did not protect the professor at Marquette university either. This is one of the reasons that I decided to abandon my plan to go for a PhD. If tenure only protects liberals, then there is no point wasting time and money on a PhD in order to teach at a secular university. Black conservative professors face similar hatred. As the article shows, there is no tolerance or diversity at the modern secular university. Secularism doesn’t produce open-mindedness, it produces fascistic bigotry.

So what do we learn? This is yet more evidence for the advice that I give the young Christians who I mentor about what to study. If you are going to blow $15,000 a year on a university education, you cannot study politicized brainwashing nonsense that teaches you nothing useful for getting a job. You need to stick with STEM degrees – especially math, engineering, physics, chemistry, etc.  Get in, keep your mouth shut, get a job, and then when you vote, vote to cut off all subsidies for state universities.

News

Courageous pro-life student organizes her own conservative “Sex Week”

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Ratio Christi event at Ohio State University featuring Frank Turek
Ratio Christi event at Ohio State University featuring Frank Turek

I always enjoy hearing news of events on the university campuses where conservative and/or Christian viewpoints get a hearing.

The College Fix reports: (H/T Terrell)

After eight long months of planning, Students for Life UNM brought “The Real Sex Week” to the University of New Mexico in March.

We began with a workshop discussing the male and female body, the biology behind intercourse, and how the act of sex affects our minds and relationships, linking humans chemically and contrasting the notion that one-night stands have no impact on women’s psyches.

Our second workshop was packed with STD education and information on contraception from a local OBGYN, Dr. Ann Church. We discussed the success and failure rate of different contraception (did you know that condoms have a 18 percent failure rate?) and looked at how hormonal contraception negatively affects the body, because those who use oral contraceptives have up to ten times the risk of developing breast cancer as does a non-user.

We also taught about other forms of contraception, such as Natural Family Planning, which is an umbrella term for different methods used to cause and prevent pregnancies, all based on the observation of the naturally occurring signs of the fertile and infertile phases of a woman’s menstrual cycle. The A-word, abstinence, was also touted. Students learned that avoiding sex before marriage actually has positive effects, such as lower exposures to an STD and more positive thoughts about life in general.

[…]During our “Pregnant and Parenting Support” workshop, we heard from a local pregnancy center, Women’s Pregnancy Options, as well as testimonies from five mothers who are recent graduates or still in school. The advice they doled to female students who find themselves pregnant? Stick it out – there’s support available, such as pregnancy resources centers and the national Students for Life of America initiative, Pregnant On Campus.

[…]Our next night offered healing from sexual assault with counselor Rebecca Frock, as well as healing from abortion with the help of Surrendered Hearts.

[…]We concluded “The Real Sex Week” with a women’s self-defense class offered by MMA fighters Jesonna Ollis and Greg Mundth. Instead of hearing that most college men are rapists who need to be taught to control themselves, females in our workshop gained empowerment by learning how to fight off would-be attackers.

I really like her focus on getting people to be responsible before they have to make a tough decision.

So, most of you know that I support apologetics events on campuses, especially debates and lectures by scholars I like. But I also support pro-life events, as well. It’s very important for older Christians to keep an eye on what younger Christians are doing on university campuses and be there to help them out. It’s important for us to connect with college kids and give them guidance and support. They do much better when they feel that a grown-up cares about what they are doing and planning.

I recently had my annual check up, and my doctor checked my blood pressure. It was 110 over 76. My resting heart rate was 60 beats per minute. He asked me how I managed to have such low blood pressure when I am always upset about secularism, feminism, socialism, etc. I told him that the best thing to do when you are upset about something is to do something about it. Obviously, writing this blog is my effort to do something about whatever is upsetting me. I know a lot of Christians and conservatives do more than me, too – which is very good. Think of all the people who are in Ratio Christi, or the people who counsel people considering abortion outside of abortion clinics, or the people who went door to door for Ted Cruz.

I really recommend to people that they get focused on doing something positive instead of complaining, or believing conspiracy theories that just make you feel more powerless. What you do doesn’t have to be anything big, and you’ll feel a lot better when you do it. And remember, you’re not responsible for results, you’re just responsible for doing things that are likely to move the ball forward.