The way things are going for so many women these days, romantically, is beginning to make virginity until marriage, traditional roles, and even arranged marriages look like the better options that they are. Some promiscuous women are even acknowledging this now. Those women who persist in practical feminism are doomed to undergo a lot of psychological trauma, not to mention the physical and financial ramifications of using their teens and twenties for playing around. While boys are belittled in school, the girls there are told that they can accomplish literally anything. But after school, the interesting thing is that the majority of them find that they can’t marry the man they want, and thus cannot be as happy as feminism promised them they would be. This realization hits them hard right about the time they feel the urge, because of their dwindling eggs, to settle down to make the babies they want with responsible men. The problem, then, however, in their late twenties, is that the men they are used to dating don’t want to marry them; and this problem is compounded by the fact that these women are not attracted to the responsible men that they should have married ten years earlier when they were virgins or at least more eligible. They have become addicted, by their late twenties, to ‘bad boys,’ and no other kind of man will do but the bad boys who don’t want them permanently. Tragically, this state of affairs is unnecessary; and we know this because of stories that we have all heard women of previous generations tell. Who has not heard an old woman say that at first she thought that the man she ended up marrying was kind of odd but that after a few dates he grew on her and pretty soon they were happily married with children? This man, if we were to give him a label, would not be tagged as a ‘bad boy,’ but a ‘nice guy.’ The nice guys who are responsible are always more weird than cool. The cool cats sleep around while the duty dog nice guys work on pet projects in garages after work because they know that they are invisible when present before the girls. Many of these nice guys wind up being later ‘settled for’ by women addicted to bad boys; and they are the ones who lose their houses and kids when their forty-something women divorce them to go back to their addiction or just to get a payout. These nice guys suffer the greatest trauma, which leads to reputational abuse, dispiritedness, isolation, financial ruin, and even suicide for multitudes of them. The women who persevere to follow the protocols of feminism, though, reap their own traumatic rewards. And here is how that unfolds, in seven degrees: anxiety, frustration, bewilderment, doubt, frenzy, cynicism, bitterness.
After being easy for more than a decade (what now is called ‘hooking up’) the woman starts to get anxious. Anxiety is the first degree of feminist trauma where romance in view of marriage is concerned. The men she sleeps with or even only dates feel that anxious vibe coming across. She hopes for the best nevertheless, but can’t get a man to commit. She doesn’t know that it’s because she’s going for the wrong kind of man. She figures that any man willing to sleep with her will possibly want to marry her, even though, as far as externals like age, looks, and financial potential matter, the bad boy is more of a heavyweight catch than she is. So she uses up months and years engaging in one night stands and getting into ‘situationships,’ and might even fall for a fairly long-term shack-up waste of time, maybe more than one.
Then the second degree of trauma strikes: frustration. This vibe comes across to the men even more feelingly than her anxiety does, and makes the men uncommonly nervous and ready to run. She doesn’t realize that her frustration makes her irritable and curt because her mind is not on her manners, but her biological clock. She can’t notice her bad manners because of the ticking of that fast-running timepiece in her ovaries, which, although located in her lower abdomen far from her ears, seems to tick like a megaphone right against her eardrums. Who can conduct herself with good manners while being continuously yelled at like that?
After frustration scares off enough men, the third degree of trauma wells up: bewilderment. She can’t believe, and is farther from solving the riddle than ever, that none of these men so willing to tango won’t go near a jewelry store, much less tie a knot and do a chicken dance at their wedding reception. Instead of telling men in general to man up, like she did during her periods of anxiety and frustration, now her videos, if she’s into doing videos, are queries put mostly to women. She’s not willing to take the advice to ‘be yourself’ or ‘date yourself’; and she’s extremely annoyed, now, with the old line that “it’ll happen when you least expect it.” She still ‘knows her worth,’ of course, but the men she wants to get down on one knee in front of her don’t seem to know it very well. How can it happen when you least expect it when your worth is not noticed for what it so obviously is? What man doesn’t want to ‘wife up’ a thirty-four-year-old woman who’s had just a handful of abortions, more men than she’s had dental appointments or grades in school, has a therapist, is on antidepressants, and even makes her own money? How bewildering! And if her face is caked with chemicals called makeup, her hair changes color every two months, her nose ring hangs just right, her fingernails extend a full half inch past her fingertips, and her tattoos run up and down her arms like they used to for 1972 convicts, what could the turnoff possibly be?! Where are the men who are not only six feet tall, handsome, and well on their way to being independently wealthy, but also willing to snatch up the thirty-four-year-old catch? It just doesn’t make sense.
After this trauma has been absorbed, the woman falls from frustration all the way down to doubt. Her common saying now is: “I’m going to die alone.” She half believes it too. She’s exhausted now, real soul-searching has begun, and because of that, this is where she is most tempted to quit digging her wedding grave and take a pickaxe to the philosophy that has been dooming her to old maid solitude from the start. Late thirties or early forties are ages on the far edge of a zygote being conceivable in a woman, incidents of miraculous intervention excepted; if the earth were flat, this edge would be the country farthermost from the safe and fruitful interior where zygotes are produced aplenty. What will she do? Will she turn celibate, at this late stage, and act like a virgin who won’t even kiss unless a ring is made to adorn her naked finger? Or will she attempt to slice through men like a Ginsu knife through beer cans until, either she becomes too dull to attract a man, or finally cuts into a heart that’s been waiting all its life to spill slavish love upon this one particular princess? Neither option is especially appealing to her at this point. But the second option is still more fun in practice, at least she supposes that it is; and to switch ideologies before her friends or audience will cause uncomfortable blowback. So a woman in fourth stage trauma usually reaches for the Ginsu knife before a year of doubting has passed, and soon begins to wield it like a Samurai on an infomercial.
So if the woman continues to hang on to the empty feminist promise that ‘knowing your worth’ will get her the man of her impossible dream come true, even after doubt has warned her to ditch feminism and disembark the sinking ark that will never make it to shore, she enters the next phase of feminist delusion: frenzy. This, her fifth degree of trauma, is when she doubles down on promiscuity as a last ditch effort to land a man inside her boat. Caution is really cast to the winds this time. What happens in whatever city at this stage better stay in said city, let me tell you! She tries not to have any anxiety on display before the men anymore; and she succeeds at this more than she has done in the last ten years. She acts like she doesn’t care; and really, the truth is that she doesn’t care half as much as she did when she was thirty. Even menopause is on her mind now because forty to fifty is a faster track than thirty to forty, the old folks say, and she believes it. So she lays it all out there. “If happiness happens, it happens,” she says to herself. “If it doesn’t, cats will be my companions.” Seeing married couples with children will always be hard. But she has begun to be more scornful than envious.
Then around the corner at the age of about forty-five, the trauma of cynicism settles on her heart—the heart that is now variously scarred by Cupid’s arrows that were shot by insincere men. Hardcore feminists are now her fellows, fellows being the right word for them too because of their manly mien. But what kind of manliness is this? It’s manliness of the butch type; it’s a mutant form of toughness. It’s not necessarily lesbian; but it frequently becomes exactly that. She used to talk a lot about her ‘feminine energy,’ which is all the proof we need that she had a kind of manliness inside her during all her former degrees of trauma, latent and toxic though it certainly was. In her sixth degree of trauma, her male energy is fully out of the closet. If toxic masculinity exists, this is one of the forms it takes: feminist cynicism incarnate. Toxic masculinity is that which cannot help but show disdain for true masculinity and traditional femininity. Now the woman has gone from being a propagandized victim of feminism, to a feminist in theory but also in practice when it is to her advantage, and finally to a raging feminist demanding every penalty that can be thought of to damage men. “Believe all women”—: this is now her motto. She hates men now, and is not afraid at all of being found saying it because all men are misogynistic rapists, after all, if not actually, then for certain potentially.
She has sometimes given nice guys a chance ever since she began to feel anxious in her late twenties. But she thought that butterflies in the belly were supposed to be necessary and everlasting, which nice guys have not the wherewithal to generate; or if they do, these butterflies are not very active and have life spans comparable to the ones found in literal gardens. She would have discovered that even a bad boy could not have kept her butterflies alive if she had been able to tame one into marrying her; but she was never able to retain one for long enough to find that out. She has been so picky about men that she never got picked. If she had been picking on herself instead, criticizing herself, improving her character, and aiming no higher than she had a right, based on her standing, to aim, she had gotten her man, her marriage, and her chance at marital happiness. Setting the bar too high beside her own questionable height, she was unable to reach up high enough to receive the marriage kiss. She demanded perfection in men, but proved too defective to attract that level of magnificence. Even if she had been committed to by a bad boy, the odds are high that she would have been disappointed to the point of divorcing him because of his failure to be up to her ideal. What kind of man did she think her worth deserved? What was her ideal man like? She wanted a successful man, preferably of the white collar set; hunky but not husky or barrel-chested; with good hair genes that defy male-pattern baldness or even thinning; with a mischievous smile of one hundred and one variations; sensitive enough to drop a tear but never known to sob; so funny as to overtop her own witty remarks to make her howl with laughter, but never hinting, thereby, that she is an inferior wit; in matters of intimacy, knowing when to advance and when to abstain, respecting the borders of each one of her moods; and toward all other pretty persons of the female sex, extending respect, but with a sort of distance that silently communicates that he is unavailable but not unapproachable. She wanted a nice guy wrapped up in the image and frame of a bad boy, who could be nice when he had to be nice, bad when he had to be bad, reading her mind exactly at each suitable time; a man who could work hard but never stink up a sweat, make money as easily as a shuffler spits out cards, flawlessly interpret her meandering complaints as if gifted by God with the spirit of interpretation, who would then promptly give her precisely what she was asking for in ‘not so many words’; a man so rare that the question “where have all the good men gone?” must be answered thus: “they never existed except in your mind.” She should have set the bar at least as low as her own moral height, irrespective of all other qualifications, which are all secondary. She could have accepted a ‘shy guy’ like the following old woman testified to having done when she was many years younger. See how low this woman’s bar was. She says: “One morning [not long after the honeymoon] while eating breakfast in our kitchen [his kitchen] the phone rang. ‘Hello?’ Ian answered. Then a pause before he soon said, ‘No!’ He listened, then said, ‘Never!’ and he returned to the table. He told me that a teacher in Sandugo was sick, and they asked if I’d come to teach that day. Upon hearing I wouldn’t be able to come then, they asked when I’d be able to come. They heard Ian say ‘Never!’ before he hung up” (The Senior Paper, May 2022.) What woman would put up with this today? What woman would permit her husband to decide for her like that? What woman today would not have divorce on her mind after that incident? How does this woman end her article?—: “Ian has been gone 16 years. I certainly miss him.” This woman had set the bar appropriately, especially considering that she was a widow with two children when she accepted the man’s proposal. Maybe she had gone through some degrees of psychological trauma before this. But it is likely that she never went through any of them because she’d been married before, was relatively young when she married for the second time, and knew and accepted what level she was at and what kind of man she was able to receive a proposal from. She was open to the ‘shy guy’ after he finally got the nerve to invite himself over for coffee at her place, which was after he’d been too timid so much as to talk to her at the dances they both saw each other at, even when she stood next to him. This man had had to take a course (something called a ‘Christopher course’) to get his courage up; and she ended up marrying him when he did. He was not a bad boy, only a nice man with weaknesses and flaws. And this woman was wise enough to show him she was interested and to be passively ‘wifed up’ by him.
We have seen our imaginary feminist woman, au contraire, go through the degrees of anxiety, frustration, bewilderment, doubt, frenzy, and cynicism. Now she passes on from cynicism to bitterness, the last and worst degree of trauma. This can happen even before menopause. During this degree, her penchant is to lash out unreasonably. Before, this behavior was intermittent; now it becomes her lifestyle. Isn’t it interesting that the apostle Paul thought it necessary to instruct Titus to teach aged Christian women to not be ‘false accusers’? (Titus 2.3.) If even old Christian women have the tendency to falsely accuse, how much more the secular women who have reached the degree of bitterness? Who pushed the ‘me too’ movement the most in recent times? It was women who were way past their ripe stage of beauty. And they were women who were bitter about their loss of love life. Only bitter women would demand that their allegations of rape or sexual harassment, many of them decades old, be believed without proof or even inquiry. (See Deuteronomy 19.18, 19 on what should happen to false accusers, even today.) Getting to bitterness from cynicism is as natural as switching from briskly walking to getting on a travelator in an airport. “Let bitterness take me where it will,” the woman reasons; then she flies off on her broom. “I’m invisible to men, and I like it that way,” she affirms, even while she mourns the death of her romantic trinity: wedded bliss, giving birth, and her bad-boy-nice-guy doting husband. “Menopause is a blessing because now I don’t care what men think, and there are no more cat calls and whistles.” This she says to other women, all of whom know that she’s lying, which is written all over their faces. In truth, she hates what menopause has done to her. She used to be full of desire and unusually pretty. She is finding out, now, that the prettier women are, the more menopause delights to dig its furrows into them at last. “That which is best when ripe, is worst when rotten; liquor which is sweetest in one stage, becomes sourest in another” (C. H. Spurgeon, Enduring to the End.) The great preacher wasn’t talking about pretty women aging there, but about bright professing Christians becoming apostates. The thought fits, nevertheless, the inferior subject that I have chosen to make it highlight. My poem says the same thing in other words:
MENOPAUSE
Those girls on whom most beauty rests
Doth menopause most love to blight,
Must glory to humiliate.
Faces taut that promised youth
Forever,
Figures fit that seemed no time
Could weather—
Cursed are they without consent,
Though prompted to recover.
No plastics made and mixed by man
Can cover monster menopause
To hide from view the rotting grace
Of nature.
So high from which this grace doth fall
That august beauties of the earth
Might feign be termed angelic waste
Once menopause hath wrought
Its wounding to the uttermost.
It is not without wisdom that a better poet warned virgin women to get their man while the getting is most feasible: “Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,/Old time is still a-flying:/And this same flower that smiles to-day/To-morrow will be dying.”
Women today seem to be picky for the wrong thing. They’re addicted to tall weeds when just below the weeds are these rosebuds that are unseen. Instead of falling in love with rosebuds, they become obsessed with weeds posing as flowers. And before they know it, their own flowering beauty has begun to fade, and time has driven them to the age of thirty and fast-diminishing fertility. Then comes forty, fifty, and solitary old age.
The obvious root of this outcome concerns the subject of morality. It used to be that men were the ones most likely to look for a mate based on appearances, and to tarry, perhaps, for a decade or so beyond the age of twenty. Now the women are doing this at least as much, in addition to their insisting that a man have plenty of resources, of course. If they were to insist on virtues instead, while being virtuous themselves, they could secure a man for marriage before time has had time to fly and to carry their cute smile away with it. The plain inference to be gathered from the fact that virtue is not what’s looked for is that the basis of virtue is paid no mind. This basis is religion, the Protestant religion that was so much in the ascent during Robert Herrick’s day (1591-1674.) And without faith in the life and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, the cornerstone of true religion, it will matter little, in the end, if a woman lost her prime before marrying. She will have lost, not only her dream in this lifetime, but her soul forever. Since it is true that in the next life, persons “neither marry, nor are given in marriage” (Matthew 22.30) and that this has reference to persons saved from their sins and going to heaven, how true must it be that no unforgiven sinner in hell will marry or be given in marriage? If sleeping around is equal to whoring around, and a whore is called a ‘deep ditch’ in Scripture (Proverbs 23.27), it must be that tramps and the playboys they fornicate with, if persisting to the end of life as impenitent souls, are destined for that pit called hell. Therefore, away with all whorish behavior; and away with romance too until heaven may be said, with biblical knowledge and experiential confirmation, to be one’s new and certain destiny.
Nice guys and virgin daughters, take note as well. No one gets to heaven by being nice or staying chaste. “He that believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God” (John 3.18.) ‘Condemned to hell’ is the default future of sinful man. The sentence just hasn’t begun yet. This is hard for unbelievers to believe; but that’s what the word of God teaches. What is romance, marriage, and family compared with this metaphysical reality? It is as nothing when compared with it. This is why Jesus spoke like so: “If any man come to me, and hate not his father, and mother, and wife, and children, and brethren, and sisters, yea, and his own life also, he cannot be my disciple” (Luke 14.26.) If a person’s chief pursuit in life is romance leading to marriage, as natural and innocent as this pursuit is, he or she needs to know that this is a journey towards hell. It cannot be allowed to be the chief thing. The chief place in one’s heart must be the Lord Jesus Christ, evidenced by living the way that the Bible commands us to live.
Romantic love is lovely if you can get it; but if you can’t or even if you can, obsessing over it is a sign that greater love and communion have not been found and enjoyed. Obsession is ignorant love. It is love that is uninformed about the nature of man. Once a person knows enough about what man and woman are made of: sinful flesh, obsession may be easily overcome. No man or woman is worth obsessing over. Obsessing over romantic love is a warning signal that subjects divine have not the first place in one’s life. If this state of affairs continues to the end of one’s life, nothing will be seen, in the afterworld, to have mattered except what was ignored in this one.
No comments:
Post a Comment