Original post: https://www.aaronrenn.com/p/stop-shaming-men
Archive post: https://archive.ph/JzmQy
It’s one of the most well known facts in social science that women initiate the vast majority of divorces – around 70% or so depending on the source you look at. It’s a fact I have never heard an evangelical pastor mention. In fact, as one feminist scholar found in her academic research, in evangelical sermons ‘women are framed primarily as receivers of divorce rather than initiators.’ And, while there have been improvements, divorce court and child custody practices still favor women. . . . It’s also worth asking what Blake – and by extension the rest of the evangelical leadership class – are doing to reduce these risks, help men manage them, or to create an environment in which men have a better chance of marital success. The answer is basically nothing. . . . They could tell men, “Get married and we’ve got your back.” But they don’t. Instead, should some man actually get married and any troubles arise, they will almost certainly blame him for it.”
Evangelicals, is there nothing they can't fuck up?
Marriage is risky but what is the other option?
Realistically, only extinction. Because marriage is just a fancy pants word for the union of parents, and will always exist as long as we need two to make baby.
Because the inverse of his point is also true. MGTOWs and all the other anti-marriage crusaders don't offer anything either. They just tell you "don't do it" and then vaguely handwave either a utopia where women are properly controlled (lol) or something something artificial wombs.
All the criticisms are valid, usually, but they don't offer a solution to go forward with anymore than the Evangelicals do.
There is no easy solution to this current mess.
You cannot pretend decades of feminism never happened and you cannot pretend that marriage in America is a net positive for men.
Evangelicals are trying to shame men into doing what they want while people like me who are MGTOW are just telling you the current state of the sexual marketplace.
The choice is for individual men to make.
Men have to choose between wading through the cesspool that is modern women and accruing a huge potential risk to their finances and mental health for the sake of furthering the their bloodline or they can see what a raw deal marriage is currently in western society and how terrible modern women are and say just fuck it and stay single.
There is no magical solution I can offer you.
Evangelicals are demanding men self sacrifice while people like me say that you are free to make your own choice when it comes to deciding if marriage is worth it for YOU personally.
I am not a collectivist. I will not self sacrifice myself for a civilization that hates me.
I personally think marriage is not worth it and thus I made my own choice.
Evangelical clowns would try to shame me and browbeat me into marrying.
This is what I find repulsive.
I personally think that individual men should not self sacrifice for a society that hates them.
To add to this, leftists are also demanding that men self sacrifice. Main difference is what areas they tend to target for sacrifice, but it still adds up to the same effect: Use up most of the male population so that those at the top can reap the benefits, while claiming that it's all for the "good of society".
And both do everything they can to discourage and shame a man's passion for life and to break his spirit.
Not that this is an especially new insight around here. That similar and familiar tone is precisely what first launched Gamersgate, MGTOW, and similar developments in the first place, where men (and some women) started to take notice to all of the manipulative bullshit going on at the top.
And MGTOW type clowns would try and shame you for daring to try and improve society somewhat, by having a family and attempting to give this world a next generation, and then browbeat you into never trying at all.
This wasn't an attack saying they are wrong in all their beliefs and criticisms of society. I've been an anti-feminist since before most people here were born. Only that they are much the same as the Evangelicals in this regard, only in the other direction.
The thing the MGTOWs are right about is that marriage isn't really a marriage in the sense that the woman submits to the husband whose authority is accepted, because any time the woman wants she can appeal to the State, and the State will either drag the man out in chains or put a bullet in his head. And everyone knows this.
I remember an old episode of the original CSI where they're investigating some S&M group, and the main CSI guy says something like "The fact of the matter is the submissive ultimately has all the power, because when he says the safe word everything stops." Which is how all modern marriages (including the ones where the wife claims to be submissive to the husband) function in practice. And few men upon discovering that's how things work want to sign up to such an arrangement.
The Evangelicals have internalized too much leftism to offer a solution to this problem, and no one else in the mainstream even sees it as a problem.
You are trying to equate MGTOWS telling men to make their own informed rational choices and the evangelicals shaming men into getting married as the same thing.
I don't care if a guy gets married of his own volition.
The evangelicals seethe if a guy chooses not to get married, I don't care if a man chooses to get married. Key difference here.
MGTOW at least offers protection from a system designed to destroy a man's future. It's not a societal solution of course, but it doesn't claim to be for the most part. There are solutions, but they all involve fixing the rotten incentive structure that rewards women for destroying families. That those solutions are politically unfeasible isn't on MGTOW. It's not their fault (or the Evangelicals for the matter) that women would rather destroy society than accept anything less than absolute power in a relationship.
A man has no future if he has no children, only his limited lifespan. In that sense, it only affords him protection for his own hedonism, his personal pleasures in this mortal coil as he dies failing to accomplish the only single function life is designed to fulfill.
They aren't wrong to want to protect yourself. But "lol just fix all of society first, then we ball" isn't a solution. As such, they shouldn't be prescribed as one. Only a stepping stone to fixing yourself before you go back out in the world.
How sad your life must be if you think having a child is the "only single function your life is designed to fulfill".
I suppose the life of Jesus and his disciples (those that had no children) was meaningless?
MGTOW offers no solutions other than hedonism. No one is arguing why they are angry and no one is denying the problem.
They just offer no solutions.
Women are controlled just not by anything good. Liberalism is beatable. Its Golden Age is beginning to end. The problem for us is human lives are damn short relative to history. Liberalism can be dying for multiple generations.
I don't see liberalism ending until the global economy crashes, or the apocalypse. I suspect Sargon is correct that there will eventually be a synthesis of liberal and conservative values. "I can do what I want - after fulfilling obligations to my family and nation." Maybe that's just wishful thinking on his part as a classical liberal.
No man can serve two masters.
Either he lives for himself or for something greater than himself.
Since self-serving is a part of human nature our best case is where some people genuinely serve a higher purpose and the rest do so performatively when in public. That way the genuine people aren't being demoralized.
That's the thing, marriage does bring all the benefits that most people think they do, but most American women of dating age are not marriage material.
This is what evangelicals of Gen X or Boomer age don't seem get, that most women have responded to modern cultural cues by going completely batshit crazy. My own religious beliefs are pretty hard core Christian, what is usually called fundamentalist, these days. I never attended mainline protestant churches, so lutheran/baptist/7th day aventist etc. are all those other people to me. shrug
Full Societal Collapse
When shit gets real, all the fake BS ends and natural selection takes over.
It's going to suck.
People are going to die.
Allahu Akbar
Perhaps it's time to bring arranged marriages into our culture, and start training children from their tweens how to be good husbands and wives. It doesn't happen, everybody is supposed to just naturally know how to be in a good relationship, and just like most things, relationships can use training and experience.
It never should have stopped. Allowing women to choose when and whom to marry was one of the greatest failures of our civilization.
That’s what marriage was before dating culture in the 1920s with the invention of the automobile.