Parental Guidance in the flesh ( bless my wife)

Today was the annual “field day” at my seven year old’s elementary school. Since my older cluster of kids were home schooled for the most part I came to know about field day only as my now 16 year old was in middle school, now subsequently with my little one. As an older parent of a young child something happened today while I was out there. Something (for me) profound, but dealing with what is really obvious.

If it had been a movie the scene would have me standing and the camera circling faster and faster with blurred images of the kids in the background becoming little more than swirling colors and an electric swooshing sound growing into a loud crescendo at the moment the thoughts congealed. The moment had a catalyst.

We, my wife and I, were standing in the classroom prior to the beginning of the outdoor activities. The “room mom” was asking grilling the teacher on what the arrangements for lunch would be. The teacher explained. The room mom would not relent…”what about napkins, what about fruit, what about this and that?” The teacher is the rare 30 year old who isn’t fallen into the over-do-everything way that today’s guilt driven parents all seem to be so she was flustered. I just watched. My wife chomped her bit. And we had just watched Parental Guidance last evening so the parody of those ridiculous parents was standing right in front of us.

Sit that aside for a moment.

Outside we went. My wife was charged with a group of eight kids from the class, and she was to move them from station to station. No big deal. At each station was a parent assigned to facilitate the activity. Boy honey did they facilitate. Imagine the Bataan death march being managed by frozen faced smiles hiding clenched teeth, manufactured cheerfulness and an exuding desire that these kids have a good day….dammit! These women were bought in and sold out. And it showed.

It showed because I suddenly noticed that my wife, at 47, was one of maybe three attractive women in the entire crowd. The rest looked worn out, overweight, poorly dressed, pale, and unapproachable with attitude. My wife, bless her, after four kids is still within five pounds of the 120 she weighed when we met. And its not a product of obsession, not even a little bit. To the contrary, the other mom’s unattractiveness IS a product of their obsession, and their obsession is their kids. And this hit me as one arm of the divorce epidemic that we know instinctively, even discuss tangentially, but is bigger than we give due.

I once heard my wife take a call from the school. My daughter had grabbed a hot bar on the playground equipment (sun heated) and it had burned her hand. My wife asked, “is it blistered, visibly burned?”. No “Well is she crying?”yes she cried. “No, I mean is she crying right now?”. Well, no. “Then send her back to class.” I’m sure that cemented her reputation as an uncaring horrible mother. The scandal that she didn’t drive right down there and rescue the child from the school and maybe take her somewhere and buy something special to make up for the badness of the day. But…what they didn’t know is that I had stole home from work in the middle of the day and we were alone. Nuff said. Betcha she is in a small minority.

What is driving parents to be those absurd people in that movie? I couldn’t decide whether to laugh or cry because the parents portrayed are more the norm than the grandparents, who to me, were the normal ones. It had a good message when Bette Midler told her daughter to go and be with her husband because the kids leave and the husband stays. How many of the moms I saw today would be moved by that scene? And how many would lump that scene in with the humor and yuk it away?

I work with a guy. His son married a woman who is a medical Dr. Top of class, Vanderbuilt. Smart gal. They had babies. The babies are the kids from that movie, the parents too. It drives my colleague crazy. The kids are vegans, they eat hummus, they have speaking protocols, and they recycle dontcha know. They make my colleague take all his guns to a neighbors house when they visit. He has a steel, locked gun safe. Not enough, its the aura of eviiilllll that the steel cannot contain. They are devoted parents indeed. But are they a couple? Time will tell.

There are two levels of Utopia being pursued. One is just the secular liberal idealism that says that our lives really are like The Game of Life…where if you just set the rules correctly we will move in an orderly fashion around the board, happy in whatever block we land in at the moment.

But the other is for the kids, and it is insidious in so many ways. Life isn’t even real like that. It produces adults who move on to chase the other Utopia. And God is not truly a part of either, because who needs Him when all of life’s corners are padded, and all the outlets have plastic inserts and the cabinets where the organic cleansing products are kept are triple locked and no one holds anyone accountable for anything except not buying into the Utopian dream?

The church adds to the foundations of this false fortress instead of blowing the literal hell out of it.

I’m not sure if I said anything new but I feel better

 

Frivolous Divorce Prevalance, Point goes to Dalrock

Dalrock and HUS have an ongoing dust up about the prevalence of frivolous divorce. I came across a site called Womans Divorce where I found the results from a survey of 1745 divorced women regarding the primary reason for their marriage breakup. The results are shown below and linked here.

Answers	Percentage	Responses
Infidelity	26.7%	465
Violence	8.6%	150
Money	6.1%	107
Children	1.0%	18
Incompatibility	17.1%	298
Grown Apart	20.2%	352
Other	20.3%	355
Total number of responses:		1745

I make no claims about margins of error or confidence levels or Z scores or any statistical metrics. But look at those results. At the very least nearly 44% of the divorces were frivolous (Incompatibility + Grown Apart+ Money). If you include all of the “Other” category as frivolous the number is nearer to 66%, our magic two thirds number. Finally, only 36% are in categories we could say with some confidence were not frivolous.

To be fair, drilling into the “other” category may reveal some divorces that we would not consider frivolous. Bear in mind I am not using strict biblical grounds as  the cut off for calling a divorce frivolous.

Women have written their divorce stories on the site. They appear at the bottom of the page with the chart on it. Most manosphere readers know how to read and understand these stories, the more cynical of us reached a point where we take nothing at face value regarding this subject. My take away was that the stories qualitatively support the conclusion the numbers reflect. The majority of female initiated divorces are filed frivolously.

Point: Dalrock

Movie Review: The Mona Lisa Smile (Spoilers in Review)

I am offering another movie review of a feminist film, this time more comprehensively. Rather than wasting everyone’s time with my own review of the plot, let’s consult Wikipedia, which states:

In 1953, Katherine Ann Watson (Julia Roberts), a 30-year-old graduate student in the department of Art History at Oakland State, takes a position teaching “History of Art” at Wellesley College, a conservative women’s private liberal arts college in Massachusetts because she wants to make a difference and influence the next generation of women. At her first class, Katherine discovers that the girls have already memorized the entire syllabus from the textbook so she instead uses the classes to introduce them to Modern Art and encourages spirited classroom discussions about topics such as what makes good art and what the Mona Lisa’s smile means. This brings her into conflict with the conservative College President (Marian Seldes) who warns Katherine to stick to the syllabus if she wants to keep her job. Katherine comes to know many of the students in her class well and seeks to inspire them to seek more than marriage to eligible young men. Joan Brandwyn (Julia Stiles) dreamt of being a lawyer and enrolled as pre-law so Katherine encourages her to apply to Yale Law School, where she is accepted. Joan, however, elopes with her fiancé Tommy (Topher Grace), and is very happy. She decides that what she wants most is to be a wife and mother after graduation and asks Katherine to respect her choice.

Betty Warren (Kirsten Dunst) is highly conservative like her mother, the head of the Alumnae Association. Betty doesn’t understand why Katherine is not married and is strident in insisting that there is a universal standard for good art. She writes two editorials for the college paper, one which exposes the nurse, Amanda Armstrong (Juliet Stevenson), for giving out contraception, which results in the nurse being fired, and one attacking Katherine for advocating that women should seek a career instead of just being wives and mothers as intended. Betty can’t wait to marry Spencer (Jordan Bridges) as their parents have arranged and expects to get the traditional exemptions from attending class because she is married, but Katherine insists she will be marked on merit.

Connie Baker (Ginnifer Goodwin) is dating Betty’s cousin, Charlie (Ebon Moss-Bachrach). Betty persuades her that he is only using her since it has been arranged by his parents for him to marry Deb, a girl more of his social standing. So, Connie ends the relationship. However, Charlie has already decided for himself that he is not going to marry Deb, so he and Connie get back together.

Giselle Levy (Maggie Gyllenhaal) has liberal views, and she supports Katherine because she sees her as having chosen what she wants in her life and because she herself has often felt out of place at the school being Jewish among the mostly WASP student body. Giselle brazenly has affairs with a professor and a married man.

Katherine confides to the girls that she was engaged when she was younger, but that she and her fiance were separated by the war. The relationship fizzled out, and she has since had several affairs. Katherine declines a proposal from her boyfriend (John Slattery) from California because she doesn’t love him enough. She begins seeing the Wellesley Italian professor, Bill Dunbar (Dominic West), who is charming and full of stories about Europe and his heroic actions in Italy during the war. He has also had affairs with many students (including Giselle), and Katherine makes him promise that it will never happen again. When Katherine learns that Bill spent the entire war at the Army Languages Center on Long Island, she decides to break up with him because he is not trustworthy. Dunbar responds that Katherine didn’t come to Wellesley to help the students find their way, but to help them find her way.

Betty’s marriage fails miserably, as Spencer spends as much time as possible in New York on business. Giselle also catches him having an affair and tells her about it. Betty’s mother, Mrs. Warren, tries to pressure Betty into remaining married to Spencer, at least for a while to avoid causing a scandal. She refuses and asks her mother if the Mona Lisa’s smile means she is happy. At graduation, Betty asks Katherine about an apartment, but Mrs. Warren interrupts her and asks her why. Betty tells her mother off that she divorced Spencer after learning how disloyal he was to her and wants to have her own future. She adds that she is going to share a flat in Greenwich Village with Giselle, and that she is considering applying to Yale Law School.

Katherine’s course is highly popular, so the college invites her to return. But Mrs. Warren and the president impose conditions on Katherine: she must follow the syllabus, submit lesson plans for approval, keep a strictly professional relationship among all faculty members, and not talk to the girls about anything other than classes. Katherine decides to leave, exploring Europe. In the ending scene, Betty dedicates her last editorial to her teacher Katherine Watson, claiming that Katherine is “an extraordinary woman who lived by example and compelled us all to see the world through new eyes.” As Katherine’s taxi speeds up, all her students follow on their bicycles and Betty is seen increasingly struggling to keep up with the taxi as a last effort to thank Katherine for changing her life.

Yeah I know that’s a long quote, but in case people haven’t seen it I wanted them to know the plot synopsis so that they know what I’m referring to. For my personal review, it’s a good movie in that it was well shot, well paced, well directed, well acted, had a decent soundtrack in my opinion.

It has two elements that are part of the feminist ethos apart from the blatantly obvious themes in the synopsis.

The first is that whatever men do that is displeasing to women is terrible, barley even worth discussion. For instance, there is this bit:

Katherine declines a proposal from her boyfriend (John Slattery) from California because she doesn’t love him enough.

 

This part of it is a really awkward part of the film. When she sees him she is overjoyed, they are clearly having a wonderful time, clearly lovers, and he takes it for granted that they will get married; she rejects him but doesn’t really explain exactly why she does. It is clear to the viewer that she wants to remain footloose and fancy free but still date and sleep with men when she feels like it. Contrary to feminist popular belief, this is NOT what men are trained and brought up to do generally–for the most part men are trained to date say during High School but to start taking things more seriously afterwards. This part of it is pure Germaine Greer–Marxist type destruction of family oriented stuff. But moving on…

She begins seeing the Wellesley Italian professor, Bill Dunbar (Dominic West), who is charming and full of stories about Europe and his heroic actions in Italy during the war. He has also had affairs with many students (including Giselle), and Katherine makes him promise that it will never happen again. When Katherine learns that Bill spent the entire war at the Army Languages Center on Long Island, she decides to break up with him because he is not trustworthy. Dunbar responds that Katherine didn’t come to Wellesley to help the students find their way, but to help them find her way.

 

In this part, the Julia Roberts character is hardly deceived; she has never really asked about his war record, and already knows he sleeps around with the female students BEFORE she accepts a date with him, obviously wanting him not in spite of his reputation but because of it, then finds an excuse to reject him later on.

However notice that this is very much in contrast with the behaviour of the female lead characters towards one another.

The Kirsten Dunst character has done the following things in the movie:

1. Got the school nurse fired simply because she gave one of the female students a diaphragm, suggesting that she was promoting promiscuity.

2. Lied to a schoolmate about how her boyfriend was really seeing someone else, so that they would break up. (reason not really made clear)

3. Exposed the fact that the Julia Roberts character was teaching about modern art (which apparently being an art teacher she wasn’t supposed to do) to force her to adhere to the curriculum.

4. Constantly tried to undermine Julia Roberts’ teaching.

5. Complains about how Julia Roberts encouraged the Julia Stiles character to go to Yale rather than focus on her upcoming marriage.

6. Is constantly bitchy and gossipy to the point where you’re amazed anyone even likes her.

Yet all it takes for her to be forgiven is for her to be really unhappy because her new husband doesn’t love her. She’s forgiven and all it takes is that loving forgiveness to make her a happy and whole person. Furthermore, the one girl, Giselle, who used to be the Italian professor’s lover and whom the Kirsten Dunst character has called a slut and whore (which she basically is) turns out to be best friends with her and they decide to get a flat in Greenwich Village together.

When I compare the two sets of conflicts–the ones with guys and the ones with other women, I see a huge contrast. Now hardly any woman is ever going to admit this, and especially no feminist will ever admit this unless she wants to be drummed out of the sisterhood, but it’s an ironic example of feminism in action. In fact the male characters generally encourage the women to do what they like, and try to pursue and impress them. When Kirsten Dunst’s character is encouraged by her mother to try to work on fixing her marriage, she flat out refuses.

I challenge others to come up with similar examples. Such films are increasingly common and persuade people in a passive osmosis like way to disarm themselves against the views of feminism. The basic message is “Man Bad, Woman Good.”

15,000 Happy Mother’s Days

HuffPo has a short article up with an interesting fact about Mother’s Day.

Apparently Mother’s Day magnifies the amalgam of life’s choices and the side effects those choices have wrought

From work obligations to play dates, doctor’s appointments and so much more, busy moms have a lot on their plates

So, some Moms are doing something about it. AshleyMadison.com reports:

the highest spike in female signups on the day after Mother’s Day. In 2012, they saw a whopping 439 percent increase on that day as compared to a typical Monday.

There are lots of plates to spin

From work obligations to play dates, doctor’s appointments and so much more, busy moms have a lot on their plates

And finally the harried Mom decides to go and do something for herself only to find that by adding infidelity to the mix a tipping point is reached

 

Of 15,000 cheating mothers polled by infidelity site AshleyMadison.com, one in five said they’ve found themselves in a “sticky situation” while trying to balance motherhood with an affair.

 

Some of the things that can happen while balancing work/life/affair.

Of the 15,000 mothers polled, 67 percent reported that they have taken a call from their lover in front of their child.

 

Fity-six percent reported that they have been late to pick their child up from sports, school, a play date, etc.

 

Twenty-nine percent of the moms polled admitted to changing their child’s plans in order to accommodate a rendezvous.

 

Four percent of moms polled said that they have introduced their child to their lover under a false pretense.

 

The survey found that 2 percent of moms have been caught by their child in a compromising position.

 

Happy Mother’s Day

 

Swallowed by a Hippo

A rant about a churchian suburban American wife who frivorces her diminutive husband, helicopter parenting, and fast food wrappers carpeting the floorboard of a luxury SUV.

Swallowed By Hippo: A Man’s Harrowing Tale

Not really…

Cost this guy an arm. Had it been the aforementioned rant there would have also been a leg involved.

 

 

Matthew 18:19, Marriage Imperative?

I raise this topic a lot, but I have no axe to grind with those who pray together daily with their spouse. If they both wish to do so, are able to be truly open of and to the spirit as they pray and there is no motive based on man’s expectations but only to commune with God….then what can possibly be wrong with that?

There are some other questions and points that come up. But before we look at those, lets look at a typical churchian pitch for the practive of husbands and wives to pray together. This from the Raineys:

We believe—and have learned from long experience—that the true secret to spiritual intimacy in marriage is praying together. [ ]

This really troubles me. It means that 9 out of 10 Christian couples today are resisting the number one thing that could draw them closer together spiritually.

Spiritual intimacy. Oneness.

Another guy wrote to tell me he had tried praying with his wife at night before bed, “but I would always find an excuse not to. One day God really convicted me that I needed to step up as a husband and commit to pray with my wife nightly. I came home that day and told her of my conviction.”

In tears the wife said, “I’ve been praying about this for months, but I didn’t want to tell you and pressure you into it. I wanted God to do the work in you.”

The wife desired that her husband pray with her. She had prayed for God to bring this to pass. And of course not once had she expressed this desire to her husband, he was blissfully unaware that she even wanted this, so pure was her motive so as to not put pressure on the man.

I want to challenge you to begin praying together daily. I can promise you, on the authority of the Scripture, that if you pray together daily for two years, you will not be the same couple that you are today (see Matthew 18:19). Inviting the God of the universe into your marriage on a daily basis will change things!

Lets talk about that scripture.

Again, truly I tell you that if two of you on earth agree about anything they ask for, it will be done for them by my Father in heaven

Its a tough one to handle. What is it telling us? It cannot be saying, simply, literally, what the words convey, or can it? My questions and comments are rhetorical because I’ve explored them before, heard it explained, read about it. My focus here though is about spouses praying together for spiritual oneness and how easy churchians pick up loosely related things and form what amounts to almost new doctrines. Its a complicated theological hamster not unlike the one that evangelical feminists listen to when rearranging gender order as described by scripture.

But this hamster is tough, and he has a lot of help. Some of the theologically arrogant will grab onto this with the same gusto as the theologically ignorant. They have the same motivation. They LIKE what is being said, it fits a larger narrative. It buttresses sanctimony in one group and helps the other assuage guilt born off tastes great less filling faith.

I’ve written about the churchian spousal task list for the husband who wishes to be the spiritual leader of the home, and how that is a list born not of scriptural admonishments but of pandering to women’s emotions. There is an aspect of that in the notion of spouses praying together but that is not the full story, because prayer IS a scriptural admonishment. Prayer IS obedient. Prayer IS essential, where reading devotionals aloud to children is perhaps a nice thing to do but no one can credibly state it is a scriptural imperative.

Where does that leave us on praying with the spouse?

One guy who has commented here several times as well as elsewhere around the sphere confessed something he and I realized we have somewhat in common. His situation seemed more rigid than mine, but we each got the point when he described how he does not and will not pray with his wife. He explained it plainly saying that when he does he finds his prayers are being customized and directed more to what his wife was hearing than what he may have wanted to take to the throne of God. I believe he explained the reluctance or discomfort many men feel but had not put a description to yet.

Lets revisit the anecdote the Raineys shared. The story is clear if not read through quickly from the persepective of one who has already drank the churchian Kool Aid.

In reverse, the woman expresses that when her husband had shared “his conviction” she was so pleased because she had not let the man even know she wanted him to pray with her and instead she had cried to God to move her husband in that direction. But the man clearly stated that he had tried to do so and always found excuses not to, that then he was convicted to “step up as a husband” and pray with his wife. Can you find God in that? Really? God is telling a man to do something AS A HUSBAND that is never once mentioned in scripture. God is instructing a man to corrupt his prayer life in the way the poster described as I mentioned above as a way of stepping into leadership as a husband?

But empath, it IS scriptural you say, just read Matthew 18:19. Not so fast. Praying with my wife in specificity, together, for reasons either thankful or distraught….that is per the scripture. Some medical news comes regarding an aging parent, a child is missing, whatever, yes, praying together OF ONE MIND to express that gratitude or that need for comfort finds firm basis in that scripture. Nightly making prayer the equivalent of laying on the therapists couch in order to pander to the woman’s empathy driven emotional needs is summarily NOT what that scripture refers to at all. If you doubt me, ask yourself this….have you ever read or heard taught or expressed that the reason a man and woman pray together nightly is literally because when two pray together these prayers are addressed by God? Or, rather, is it not that women are craving this prayer time with the husband, something mumbled about spiritual intimacy, and a quick dropping of the scripture reference for good measure? How could that woman be praying that her husband would come to pray with her if she viewed Matthew 18:19 as it is written?

To further understand this, imagine the couple who do pray together nightly praying to the instruction of that scripture. They pray in agreement, for their kids, for their needs, they give thanks, so forth. Will that sate the woman? In some rare cases…perhaps. But that is not the nature of the prayer the wife envisions and what will develop this spiritual intimacy she craves. What she really craves is for her husband to emote. Period. The very best prayer together are the ones where they both end with tears. This meets a need of hers. There is nothing necessarily wrong with the need for emotion sharing. There is a lot wrong with playing loose with the scripture and then using guilt  to get men to corrupt their prayer life by  having to fake something they should do with an open heart and mind. There is something voyeuristic about wanting to hear that happen.

Why do we pray? To whom to we pray? What are the express purposes of prayer? If the answer to those questions can coexist honestly with where you are in your together prayer life, that’s great.

If not, this is one of the more insidious manifestations of churchianism and its in your marriage too.

A first class gum noshing slack jaw

On May 1 I boarded a flight to Detroit. Until last year I traveled a lot overseas so I always get upgraded due to mileage status. Settled comfortably into my aisle seat, I was reading a book on my Ipad when someone said, “excuse me”.  I looked up and a woman, late 30’s I’d guess, was standing in the aisle looking at the window seat expectantly. She smirked. I excused myself and let her in.

The woman was overweight. She was of a diminutive height. Cliché, but she had a pretty face and minus sixty pounds would have been an attractive woman. She was dressed in a black loose fitting blouse and a gauzy pleated black long skirt. Slimming….I guess.

She wore black bejeweled flip flops, and something I find very distasteful, had grown her toenails well beyond the length of her stubby toes and had them manicured into rounded off points and carefully painted a brilliant red. Women, I am not sure where the men are who like toenails that are long like fingernails, and shaped like claws, maybe I’m the odd man out, but those things look like Wolverine. Dangerous. Unattractive. Over done. Anyway…

She was chewing gum. Repeat. She was chewing gum. And how. Mouth wide open, jaw hinging up and down like toy dentures, cracking, smacking, slurping, and constant motion defiled my hearing and my peripheral vision. I sat there knowing myself and knowing that during the flight I’d have to ask, “do you have an extra stick of gum, or IS ALL OF IT IN YOUR MOUTH?”

To go with those things, she was executing some serious moves on the screen of her smart phone. Pecking, scrolling, wiping, pinching, hinging, and the metronome like chewing. If I could rap, just flow a tad, we’d have been golden on Youtube.

She gave off exactly the vibe of the late thirties woman who at once would declare her awesome hotness and insist she be beloved based on who she is on the inside. She was unapproachable. A mask for insecurity? No way of knowing. Either way a no win for even an hour flight, meaning even an attempt to have banal banter would be out of the question, risky on all levels for a man with common sense. Besides, I’m not generally banal banter equipped.

Yashar would say my perceptions were discriminatory. In all of his writing he has yet to drill deep enough to find the bedrock of self-responsibility for women. The woman beside me, her appearance, her behavior, the vibe she gave off….all men’s fault, and any reaction a man has to it….all men’s fault. Women are as they are; men failing to adapt are discriminating. An anecdote about His friend MYchelle:

I was 21 and out with two women friends at an electronics store. As I explored the DVD section, they were seeking to have their questions answered by a male salesperson. After two minutes, they found me and explained their frustration and demanded to leave.

When I asked my friends why they were frustrated, both of them explained that the salesman (this was a store that didn’t pay commissions to salespeople) was unhelpful, giving only short and clipped responses to their questions.

My friend Mychelle told me, “It’s a woman thing.”

I remarked that I was confused by what she meant.

“He doesn’t want to deal with two women, he hates women.”

I combined the scenarios. The woman beside me was the one shopping. She was signaling her awesomeness using her aloof slack jaw chewing and don’t forget those talons. She was a conflicting mess of images. Unapproachable but imminently desirable, a set up for discrimination no matter what a man says or does. He didn’t take her seriously, he was shallow and noticed how she looked and was hitting on her, he was shallow and noticed how she looked and conveyed disinterest hence overlooking the precious inside. No way for a man to engage with her, even in a sales clerk situation, and not come away in the wrong. But Yashar would have none of these claims that suggest that maybe SHE adjust herself the way men are compelled to do daily.

Why is equality defined as men accommodating women?

The strong independent woman maintained her chew pace while we learned the plane’s computer was busted and we had to get off to make other arrangements. My other travel arrangements differed from hers. I saw her sitting somewhere waiting for her next attempt to reach her destination. My next leg had me at the window in a regional jet with a very big man occupying 30% of the cubic footage allocated to me. But he was being himself.

The charms of the strong independent woman were being wasted on another.

Where the best treasure lies

Ballista wrote a post called Woman Thy Name is Vanity about a week ago. In the comments we discussed a little bit about the tendency of women, Christian women, to demand that no matter how they let themselves look, their husband nod to their awesome awesomeness and the fact they they are hot hot hot. They do so by explaining it is whats on the inside that matters.

How does a curvy by choice secular woman find a work around? Well, simple, she understands something that Deti often writes about. Men find most women sex-able.

I can’t say it better than the author in her article called I’m Fat and Still Get Laid:

no man has ever seen me in a thong and then changed his mind about putting his willy inside of me. Never.

Its about perspective.

In the 80′s there was a radio show host in Chicago named Jonathon Brandmier. He did stupid parody songs, one to the tune of Petticoat Junction. It went like this…

Get rid of all that fat

Thats been hangin’ down your back

with some suction

Lipo Suction

He didn’t know that instead of surgery, a simple change in perspective would suffice:

Through rigorous mental exercise, I’ve become very comfortable with what my mama gave me: bouncy little boobies and rounded hips and curves that wrap into those special fleshy warm bits like a kind hand gently guiding towards where the best treasure lies

Who would want rid of signposts that point to the best treasure?

When you take the entire corpus of female centric and feminist writing and opinion and imagine the dystopian future if all these ideas manifested as normative….what do you imagine?

Don’t answer with pictures.

One X Bad, Two X Good

Louise Pennington, who writes for the Huffington Post, says:

The older I get, the more I believe that ‘equality’ is nothing more than a smokescreen to prevent the true liberation of women.

This is most interesting. Here’s the article by the way:

http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/louise-pennington/radical-feminism_b_3169754.html

It is called “Becoming a Radical Feminist: On Male Violence, Cultural Femicide and Sisterhood”.

In this article, she writes about how she believes that “the source of women’s oppression is male violence which is perpetuated by the structures of our capitalist economy”. She writes:

Feminism requires more than equality. It requires liberation. It require the liberation of ALL women from male violence.

 

 

In a sense, this is brilliant marketing. Ideally, good marketing means that what you have to offer is ALWAYS wanted. That creates cash flow. There is a cash flow of ideas as well, and liberation is one that works very well, especially if you don’t define clearly what you want liberation from. “Male violence” is great because as we’ve seen it can be defined in so many ways! But following listing her sources of inspiration (including Andrea Dworkin, Kate Millet, Susan Faludi, Gail Dines, Germaine Greer and so on) she has given a strategy for her approach.

My feminist activism involves privileging women’s voices over men’s voices. I now only read books written by women. I try to get my main news from women’s news sites and women journalists like Soraya Chemaly, Samira Ahmed, Bidisha, Helen Lewis, Bim Adewunmi, and Sarah Smith. I follow only women journalists on Twitter and Facebook. I support organisations which are placing women’s experiences at the centre of public debate: Women Under Siege, The Everyday Sexism Project, and The Women’s Room UK.

 

I’ve heard and seen more than one person in the manosphere ask this of Feminists: what is the endgame? What does a Feminist victory look like? Vagaries and platitudes are the best possible response.

The idolatry of this is profoundly disturbing. We are way past the maxims of Animal Farm and way into the Newspeak.

 

Flashback to disquieting times

Izzy was watching birds in the back yard. It seems like she dislocates her jaw to make those primitive cackling noises. She thumps the wooden blinds against the pane of glass over and again, lunging. When she looks out the window and sees the birds I think she imagines a cooked chicken, like in cartoons when cats look at birds. It’s all about food for us companion animals. I take mine from a bag. Birds are safe around me. I’m small, but Izzy better not look at me with that primordial cackling.

Yesterday master saw something on the kitchen table. It was from the mailbox. I know it was from the mailbox because it was with the thing he read out loud that was a coupon for my heart worm medication. I know lots of stuff. And I know I don’t want worms in my heart or in my butt or anywhere.

I saw him looking at that other paper and it had a picture of some flowers on it. I heard him ask his wife something about when is mother’s day, whatever that is. I’m thinking it’s not a good day because he didn’t look happy. Precious was watching him from the hallway and at first I thought she was plugged in to the moment. Then I heard the garage door start going up and Precious’ bark altered the molecular structure of my pituitary gland. The wife reads anatomy and physiology books and tells everyone who will listen what she is reading and I’m just guessing I have a pituitary gland since master and the wife and the brothers and sisters do. The whole pack has’em. She is an adult learner which sounds strange. Good gravy, Izzy wants to eat things and the wife wants to label things and master wonders when is mother’s day. Oh. I get it.

He got quiet. I imagine what he is thinking when he is quiet. I already said quiet is not good. Master told me some quiet can remind him of certain types of silence and he knows a lot about silence, of sorts. He likes this book he read that starts with something about a silence of three parts. He told me a story some time ago when he and I lived alone and it was good and it was a very bad time, and he mentioned that part of the book in his story. I can picture it just like he told me. In a time when I was not born and my parents and their parents and even their parents were not born and after that I can’t keep track but it was a long time ago. In the story it was raining.

It was quiet. And the noises were…

falling rain in the winter forest, through grey limbs and on dead leaves built up on the ground over seasons,

feet shuffling through the mounds of rocks piled beside the wheel ruts on the gravel country road,

crinkling plastic trash bags the two walkers had adorned themselves with to keep them dry,

and electricity crackling when the rain hit the big power lines that divided the forest and crossed the gravel road.

The power lines glowed with the sparks caused by the rain and the conductivity of the mist in the air.

In the story, he explained, noises didn’t mean it was not quiet. It was a quiet of types. More like a type of silence than quiet. That type of silence was loud because it was massive. He said he could see it, the silence. It was the single hours of the morning. I know those hours because they are the hours when I lay awake in the bed and watch over master as he sleeps. The gravel road was traveled by a handful of cars by day. At that hour, on that night, rain with temperatures just above icing, there would be no cars coming along. They were mindful, always, of places to hide along the side if a car passed. To be found out while walking would be bad for the two of them. So they dragged their feet through the gravel, shifted trash bags full of belongings from shoulder to shoulder, and listened to the water on the leaves and the snapping sound of electricity. They were cold, and they kept to themselves. They added their quiet to the silence.

I saw master sit heavily at the table. The wife came behind him and put her hands on his shoulders. They didn’t say anything. He reached down and picked me up and put his hands on my shoulders. I get that a lot. No one spoke, and then he got up and started loading the dishwasher. I took my post where I guard the food bowls. Brothers and sisters went in and out, Precious barked by the door. It was normal.

It was not normal to be walking down a gravel road at two in the morning wearing a trash bags and listening to rain fall. Even the animals in the adjacent woods had found what cover they could and were hunkered down for the duration. Master and Mimi had someplace they needed to get to and that was that.

Walking, because earlier that night it had been really loud and master had held his hands over his ears, and buried himself under his covers, and felt the floor and walls shaking in the small mobile home where he lived with his mother and her husband.

One of the bad ones.

Those trailer homes have walls but they don’t really. Whenever I have been in them it’s like the only thing those walls do is block my view. Otherwise it’s like one big metal box and anything inside is for everyone inside. Master had stayed home alone while his mother and the man went somewhere drinking that night. That confuses me because master and the wife and the brothers and sisters just drink in the kitchen pretty much. Maybe they had to go to the store.

Master was 12. He had an Ithaca single shot twenty-gauge he’d received at Christmas and I sure wish I was around then because he told me he used to go in the woods behind the trailer and kill rabbits and eat them. I can’t picture master eating a rabbit. Wish I’d have been there and seen that and eaten rabbits with him in those woods.

He said the shotgun and the three TV stations kept him company and kept him safe in that trailer in the woods on that gravel road late into the night. He didn’t know about odds but he had instincts like I have instincts and when he saw the lights of the returning car he got in his bed and pretended to be asleep. Waiting to see what kind of night this would be and hoping for nothing.

Calm lasted  30 minutes and then screams and broken doors and crying and begging and finally full acquiescence leading to utter silence that was louder than the rain on the metal roof. Master risked forming a small opening to allow fresh air under the blankets for breath. He was light headed and craved to breathe deeply but he stayed still. Aching muscles not stretched, itches not scratched, wishing he’d have chosen a better position.

Master has a small stuffed red dog. Cracks me up…he named it. Its name is Doggy. It’s smaller than me. One eye is missing, its little black felt tongue hangs barely be a thread, and the material is worn bare over most of its body. It stays high on a shelf in master’s closet, next to some coffee mugs the brothers and sisters made when they were little children. I’ve seen him get that little dog down and show it to one of the sisters, the one young enough to still find things like that interesting.

It was his first dog. Boring. But there is something about that dog that still affects him. So I know what he is describing when he tells me that later that night, in that trailer in the rain, when his mother crept into his room and whispered they had to go and to put some things into a trash bag to carry, master would not leave that place without finding Doggy. He was too old to have stuffed animals in the bed, but he kept Doggy with him everywhere they lived. There were many places. So Doggy was wrapped in some cloths and stuffed in a bag and they had set out to walk a long distance to the town in the rain in the loud silence.

Mimi was young then, much younger than master is now, but she was staggering and limping and holding her side, walking slowly. They made the highway in about an hour and a half. From there they could see the lights of the little town. The side of town they came from was the side they needed to reach so they soon turned up the little street lined with small houses clad with pastel aluminum siding. He said that the houses had been built with government money. They went to the first one on the left. I can really picture this part of the story better because he showed me that house once when we were up there, up north. It was empty that night. It’s where they lived before they moved to the trailer in the woods.

They found an open window in back and climbed inside. There was stuff strewn everywhere, junk and trash mainly, from when they had moved out recently. There was no power, no heat, the water was off to prevent frozen pipes. No pillows, no blankets, and they wanted to sleep. They found some carpet and carpet pad remnants from when the garage had been turned into a family room and snuggled in and among those things in their coats, cloths, and shoes and master lay awake waiting for the car he feared would come to the driveway looking for them. Doggy was allowed in the bed that night. No one would find out.

Sun hit the bare windows early and they woke stiff and tired. Hungry. They had no money until they found an old toy safe master used as a piggy bank and in it was a handful of coins. It was enough to go to the only diner in town and buy a plate of eggs. It was also a good place to go because they gave master’s mother a job there. Some friends came and led master and his mother to a back bedroom in their home and they told her they could stay as long as they liked. They were very nice people and they had lots of dogs for hunting and the man there liked to hunt and fish a lot and he took master with him. At night master found himself sneaking Doggy into the bed. Doggy is stuffed and still there is something kindred I feel but won’t admit.

It was too hot to sleep most nights because they heated with a big wood burning stove. Master said he’d put an ice cube right there on the center of his chest sometimes. But the seasons changed and for a time, it was quiet.

When is mother’s day? Master only asked the one time. He didn’t seem to care when no one answered him.

[not sure where I'm headed with these but I enjoy writing them]