Typically, Culturcidal doesn’t cover what’s happening in Great Britain, but since this article looked interesting and we see exactly the same kind of pattern happening in America, it seemed worth discussing.
There is a great season of the TV series Fargo where Kirsten Dunst plays a wife, Peggy Blumquist, that illustrates the modern female problem very well. This was set in the 70s I think. Peggy has a loving and caring husband in a small town. He isn't a looker though... (actor Jesse Plemons), They both have reliable working-class jobs. She is a hairdresser; he is a butcher and dreams of taking over the butchery from his boss who is about to retire. He talks of buying a house on some land and raising children. That isn't enough for her. She is obsessed with becoming "self-actualized". Peggy's feminist boss that owns the salon keeps pushing her to spend money on a self-actualization seminar.
I think Dunst knocked it out the park in her role. I won't spoil the end, but her brain foggy behavior not knowing what she really wants results in a very bad ending outcome.
Notable lines include:
"I'm a victim, too! I was a victim first!"
"I never meant for any of this to happen. You know? Not to Ed. Not to anybody. I just wanted to be someone."
"No, see? I wanted to choose, be my own me. Not be defined by someone else's expectations."
"It's a lie, okay, that you can do it all, be a wife and a mother and this self-made career woman, like there's 37 hours in a day."
"It's just a flying saucer, Ed. We gotta go!"
"I'm sorry... but how is sittin' here gonna help me be the best person I can be?"
"Don't think about the person I wanna be, just be that person!"
She is in a fog of not being satisfied with life, but she really does not know why and does not really know what she wants.
That is the way I see these educated liberal females. They rage even though they have achieved their career "self-actualization". The problem is that they are in a biological and evolutionary mismatch. They are in a reverse life-choice box of their own making. They are designed for marriage, making babies and raising a family. However, that life seems so constraining to them and less attractive than the life of a career man. Or so they thought. But then they get to that life they decide that it sucks too. They really don't like working those long and hard hours. They certainly don't do any hard manual labor that can be dangerous.
They cannot admit that they want marriage, family and babies. And they hate their jobs and careers as not being fulfilling enough. However, females in general are terrible at self-awareness, self-reflection and self-accountability. They are a perpetual victim and it is other people's fault that they cannot decide what they really want in life, make the choices that require tradeoffs. They want it all, but they don't know what "all" even is. And of course, nobody can have it all.
This is the female pattern. They are wired to find someone to care for them. And yet the feminist movement lied to them and told them that they were going to be happy taking care of themselves. Now they are pissed that there is nobody taking care of them while they practice vulnerable narcissism that sends good men running far away from them.
I think there is something to Sharia Law. As women in those countries are oppressed and there is definite abuse and tragedy related to it, in general it seems that the culture might be a better fit for the general female condition that is the culture of the modern feminized and educated industrialized West.
There are absolutely are plenty of good moms that can (and do) have great careers. However, what so few people tell women is that those are still different tracks that lead in different directions.
It's not "Being a good mom (or maybe being a mom at all)" AND "being someone who puts in 60 hour weeks climbing the corporate ladder," it's OR in most cases.
Are there people that pull it off? Absolutely. I admire the women that can do it, but it's hard. It's a lot easier to find a good man and get married fresh out of college at 22 than at 32 with a high powered job. You can say, "Well, it's not fair for women to have to try to make that kind of decision when they're so young," but it is what it is and the world would be a better place if more people understood that.
What a mess they have made. The world will be made up of lots of single and childless bitter girlbosses still blaming men for not taking care of them. Many of them will settle for lesbian relationships and be more bitter about it.
The problem is that they already had a list a mile long of what makes a "good man"... and many of those items are contradictory. For example, caring, humble, educated and sensitive and willing to stay home to raise the kids if her career is important, but self-assured, self-motivated, self-confident and career oriented. But now, although they say that he should be fine with her making higher income (and he usually is) she is NOT and loses respect and interest for him... as her biological wiring is to have a man that takes care of her.
I think the good part is the realization that women need to be cared for and caring for them means to constrain their power to make everyone else around them miserable.
I too am loath to suggest anything positive coming from Islam, but as I've said on other occasions, even a broken clock is right twice a day. I've also mentioned this before, but in WI, we already have 5 liberal women on the Supreme Court, and a clone has already announced her candidacy for a 6th (out of 7) opening in 2027. WTF is wrong here; is it becoming a women's only club? It is not a good thing when that happens! Thanks, Frank.
There are a number of reasons for this that could be explored but I'll confine myself to the main one:
Women are far more conformist than men. I first observed this in high school where I saw that the girls were the ones who believed what teacher said, did what teacher told them to do, failed to see obviously false things the teachers and the text books said.
One day a leftist teacher of American history whom I especially disliked spent much of the class period carrying on about how wonderful, kind and Christian Abraham Lincoln was and how rotten White Southerners (our ancestors) had been not to reciprocate and reflect his benevolent goodness.
I am not a "professional Southerner" and I am not interested in squabbling with Northern Whites. We have a full plate of other problems and we need to get along and work together. I also think the Civil War was simply a catastrophic mistake on both sides, a useless war that could have been and ought to have been avoided by sensible people on both sides. We should have sat down and talked rather than rushing to the guns to kill each other.
But...
My ancestors and their relatives held significant positions in the Confederate Army and government. As the leftist history teacher rattled on attacking my forebears I was annoyed that she - a disagreeable person I disliked - expected us to believe something as ludicrous and as obviously false as the idea that Abraham Lincoln, the man who killed more Americans than any other enemy in our country's history, was some kind of Sweetie Pie and wanted to turn me against my grandmother, my great aunts and uncles, who had told me about the Civil War.
So, when she - expecting us to grovel to her and be an echo chamber for her opinions - opened the floor for our, I raised my hand.
I reminded her that we were sitting in a city that Abraham Lincoln had burned to the ground. His troops had hauled the sick out of the hospitals, thrown them on the ground, torched the hospitals, destroyed the surgical instruments and medical supplies, burned the food stores, burned down the civilian populations houses with winter coming on....and so on.
I spoke politely but firmly and concluded by pointing out that we (Americans) had executed Germans for lesser crimes than these.
I need not go into the hysterical rage this provoked from my leftist teacher.
What is pertinent to the problem of most women in our times being brain dead liberals is the reaction of some of the girls in my class.
When we were eating lunch in the school cafeteria a couple of hours later, a number of the girls were angry....at me!
They told me I had no business disagreeing with teacher.
Since I had been polite, well-mannered, thoughtful and not an obnoxious trouble maker in making my contribution to the class discussion of teacher's lecture and since what I had said was undeniably true (especially since we were sitting in Atlanta, one of the city's Lincoln burned to the ground), I was taken by surprise that the girls apparently believed that the right thing to do was to swallow everything whole that the goofy teacher said and not to "make trouble" by pointing out the obvious falseness of teacher's narrative.
The point:
Women are hardwired by evolution and biology to want to get along, to go with the flow, to obey authority.
The authorities today are the journalists in the System Media. Women comply with what the authorities say. They are not constituted like some men to oppose the voices of authority.
They are the way they are because nature made them that way. Even the ones who say they don't want a marriage and don't want children are instinctively acting out of a woman's concern that she have a safe next for her biddies (children).
There's no reason to be unhappy with them about that. Under normal circumstances this is the right way for them to be...but we live in abnormal times.
One last pertinent example for European history:
In 1871, after their crushing defeat by Bismarck and his Germans and after the collapse of the monarchy and the flight of the King to England, the French elected a constituent assembly to write a new constitution.
The Monarchists, unfortunately, were split 3 ways (Bourbon Legitimists, Orleanists and Bonapartists). Otherwise, they would have won the elections and a monarchist majority in the constituent assembly would have sat someone on the Throne and spared France a republican government.
As it was, the Monarchists were close to having a majority in the constituent assembly.
In the new French constitution, France had the misfortune of becoming the first country in the world to allow universal MALE suffrage.
The issue was raised of whether women should also be given the right to vote.
Today, we would expect that it would be the leftists (the republican socialists) in the constituent assembly that would have wanted women to vote.
Not so.
It was the anti-monarchist, leftist delegates who voted down universal female suffrage and kept women from voting, not the Monarchists.
The leftists were sharp. They read the tea leaves. They understood.
The leftists denied women the vote precisely for the reason that women are conformist and obedient to authority.
They said that the authority figures (back then - not today) the women would obey were the priests and aristocrats. Therefore, they would vote monarchist in the next election, the republic would fall and the monarchy would be restored.
As I said, the authority figures in our society are the leftist journalists in the System Media (and the teachers, professors and textbooks used to indoctrinate kids in our pathetic "educational" system).
So, women are leftists.
Not because they are feminists like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan (although, as instructed, they worship such freaks) but because they are instructed to be feminists and leftists.
They "rise up" because they are told to rise up.
If we could change the authority figures back to what they were 5 generations ago, women would obey the Kaiser and direct themselves to "Kinder, Kirche, Kuche" (Children, Church and Kitchen) the way Kaiser Wilhelm told the German women to do.
The "Kinder, Kirche, Kuche" has a much greater meaning. My MIL came to the US after WWII. I have met and interacted with my wife's German relatives. I also did graduate school with several students from Germany studying in the US.
The woman's domain is in the home. This means she is in charge of all domestic decisions. The husband goes to work and when he gets home, his paycheck is handed over to his wife. She dictates the household finances. She will give him an allowance of what she considers to be sufficient for him. He is just the provider, she makes the important decisions about the family.
My FIL learned about this the hard way. His wife expected to be in 100% charge of the finances. She would cash his paycheck and give him some money and the rest she used for the household needs. At first, he thought it was great. Dinner was on the table when he came home, she made all the decisions about the children. Then he realized that if he were going to start saving for a retirement, he had to take on second jobs. This caused a lot of stress. He was a firefighter and worked one day and was off for two. So, he had time for odd jobs. His wife loved the idea until he refused to hand over those checks to her. He told her this was his money. He gave her the paycheck from his job without questions, but this was his to do as he saw fit. He socked it away and started investing it. He also used it to fun and vacations for the family and some of the extras in life.
When he retired from the fire department, after 25 years, he took another job at a car rental agency and worked that for 30 years. He had to quit because of COVID. He continued investing this money and used it for even nicer vacations. His wife constantly complained that he did not give this money to her. They were married for over 55 years and they argued about this most of that time.
When I married my wife, she thought arguing was just a normal part of married life. I grew up in a bad situation and hated the constant conflict. So we set up ground rules. It took us years to reach the point where we are at. We do not argue about anything. There are some decisions that are too important so each has the power of veto and the other respects it. We talk it over and figure it out.
My wife definitely did not want to follow the German plan. Ironically, she loves to cook. When we married, I did most of the cooking because her mother never let her into the kitchen. My wife started with simple things and now cooks wonderful meals that are better than many restaurants. Our son and I said, her misses were still better than the best of most people.
She is actively involved in our church. We worked together to raise our son. She was thrilled that I was a more involved father than her father was. He loved her, he did not show it well because he grew up in the depression and men at that time were not very involved in child rearing.
BTW, my wife is probably more conservative than I am. She was a Trump supporter long before I.
Thank you for a very interesting analysis of "Kinder, Kirche, Kuche." Some of what you said was new to me but some of it was not. I'm not certain that your personal experiences are the norm in the traditional German household. My grandfather was German. His parents came to South Carolina in 1848 after the failure of the Frankfurt Assembly. They are my only post-independence ancestors. I didn't know my grandfather because he died when I was 1 year old but from what I have heard from family members, he was a strong guy. He was a good husband and father but was definitely the head of the household and, while considerate to his wife and accepting of her dominant role in the household, I can't imagine that he would have put up with his wife expecting him to turn over the money to her and allow him an allowance. I suspect that what you related was more a matter of the husband giving most of the income to the wife because she would be buying most things the family needed and retaining sufficient cash to meet his own needs outside the family. You are certainly correct that the wife traditionally makes most of the day to day decisions. This was true of the Vikings. When the couple married and entered their first marital residence, the Viking tradition was that the husband handed his wife the keys in recognition that she would run the family. And, as a practical matter, that's true of the nature of marriage. As my father, a Presbyterian clergyman, told me, he made the BIG decisions in the family. He decided whether the Pope was infallible, how many sacraments there were and whether Red China got into the UN. My mother, he said, made the LITTLE decisions...such as what clothes we wore, what we ate at our meals, where we lived, what car we rode in. You know, little things like those. Your story of your marriage indicates to me that both you and your wife are thoughtful people who know how to deal with life. Congratulations on making your marriage work. I only wish you had had 6 children instead of 1. Our society and our country needs more people like the 2 of you.
Boy this really resonated with me due to the actions of the liberal women I know. Childless cat ladies, goofy elderly never Trumpers, and haters of America, and esp. of the white Christian men who built it and still live here. It seems demonic to me, because there's so much untruth to the attacks and the protests. The truly sick thing is that we have to put up with their B.S. and do our best to cope because we still need them and they need us, no matter how much they pretend otherwise. When I see discussions about feminism as it now presents itself, it makes me feel distressed and discouraged, too, because it's all so wrong headed and counter-productive. As a man, how do you broach this subject to the women that you love? It seems to feed right into their obsession that you, too, are one of those dreaded paternalistic oppressors. Oh what I'd give to hear the Apostle Paul address one of these feminist groups! Thanks, John, for this thought-provoking essay, and thanks for the many other almost essay length(!) comments it generated...
Good Stack, and very relevant to the world we are surviving, um, I'm mean living in. Gender relations have never been more complex. At least for some. I only see two genders. It's a very cut and dry issue for me.
As far as woman of today goes, I find it amazing to see how many liberal woman are happy, but still screech at the world. The only thing I recommend to young men today is to be very careful. Live with each other for 5 years before you think about proposing, and, yes, get a prenup. Again, I see in very black and white sometimes...
I don't understand. I keep reading posts by men that complain that young men are lonely, suicidal, etc. and it's all women's fault because women reject them. Then I read posts by men claiming that liberal women are unhappy and bitter and it's their own fault because they won't marry men (yours). Then I read research reports stating that 30 percent of young men are misogynists, that young men are addicted to porn and video games and marijuana at astonishing rates. So...young men are unmarriageable, but young women are supposed to marry them anyway, either because without being married to these addicted and misogynistic men they will be somehow miserable, or they need to marry them to bolster the young men who are apparently victims because young women refuse to marry them. I don't know how much more absurd or misogynistic it can get.
There is a great season of the TV series Fargo where Kirsten Dunst plays a wife, Peggy Blumquist, that illustrates the modern female problem very well. This was set in the 70s I think. Peggy has a loving and caring husband in a small town. He isn't a looker though... (actor Jesse Plemons), They both have reliable working-class jobs. She is a hairdresser; he is a butcher and dreams of taking over the butchery from his boss who is about to retire. He talks of buying a house on some land and raising children. That isn't enough for her. She is obsessed with becoming "self-actualized". Peggy's feminist boss that owns the salon keeps pushing her to spend money on a self-actualization seminar.
I think Dunst knocked it out the park in her role. I won't spoil the end, but her brain foggy behavior not knowing what she really wants results in a very bad ending outcome.
Notable lines include:
"I'm a victim, too! I was a victim first!"
"I never meant for any of this to happen. You know? Not to Ed. Not to anybody. I just wanted to be someone."
"No, see? I wanted to choose, be my own me. Not be defined by someone else's expectations."
"It's a lie, okay, that you can do it all, be a wife and a mother and this self-made career woman, like there's 37 hours in a day."
"It's just a flying saucer, Ed. We gotta go!"
"I'm sorry... but how is sittin' here gonna help me be the best person I can be?"
"Don't think about the person I wanna be, just be that person!"
She is in a fog of not being satisfied with life, but she really does not know why and does not really know what she wants.
That is the way I see these educated liberal females. They rage even though they have achieved their career "self-actualization". The problem is that they are in a biological and evolutionary mismatch. They are in a reverse life-choice box of their own making. They are designed for marriage, making babies and raising a family. However, that life seems so constraining to them and less attractive than the life of a career man. Or so they thought. But then they get to that life they decide that it sucks too. They really don't like working those long and hard hours. They certainly don't do any hard manual labor that can be dangerous.
They cannot admit that they want marriage, family and babies. And they hate their jobs and careers as not being fulfilling enough. However, females in general are terrible at self-awareness, self-reflection and self-accountability. They are a perpetual victim and it is other people's fault that they cannot decide what they really want in life, make the choices that require tradeoffs. They want it all, but they don't know what "all" even is. And of course, nobody can have it all.
This is the female pattern. They are wired to find someone to care for them. And yet the feminist movement lied to them and told them that they were going to be happy taking care of themselves. Now they are pissed that there is nobody taking care of them while they practice vulnerable narcissism that sends good men running far away from them.
I think there is something to Sharia Law. As women in those countries are oppressed and there is definite abuse and tragedy related to it, in general it seems that the culture might be a better fit for the general female condition that is the culture of the modern feminized and educated industrialized West.
There are absolutely are plenty of good moms that can (and do) have great careers. However, what so few people tell women is that those are still different tracks that lead in different directions.
It's not "Being a good mom (or maybe being a mom at all)" AND "being someone who puts in 60 hour weeks climbing the corporate ladder," it's OR in most cases.
Are there people that pull it off? Absolutely. I admire the women that can do it, but it's hard. It's a lot easier to find a good man and get married fresh out of college at 22 than at 32 with a high powered job. You can say, "Well, it's not fair for women to have to try to make that kind of decision when they're so young," but it is what it is and the world would be a better place if more people understood that.
What a mess they have made. The world will be made up of lots of single and childless bitter girlbosses still blaming men for not taking care of them. Many of them will settle for lesbian relationships and be more bitter about it.
The problem is that they already had a list a mile long of what makes a "good man"... and many of those items are contradictory. For example, caring, humble, educated and sensitive and willing to stay home to raise the kids if her career is important, but self-assured, self-motivated, self-confident and career oriented. But now, although they say that he should be fine with her making higher income (and he usually is) she is NOT and loses respect and interest for him... as her biological wiring is to have a man that takes care of her.
I agreed with you up until the last paragraph. Nothing about Sharia Law is good for anyone
I think the good part is the realization that women need to be cared for and caring for them means to constrain their power to make everyone else around them miserable.
I too am loath to suggest anything positive coming from Islam, but as I've said on other occasions, even a broken clock is right twice a day. I've also mentioned this before, but in WI, we already have 5 liberal women on the Supreme Court, and a clone has already announced her candidacy for a 6th (out of 7) opening in 2027. WTF is wrong here; is it becoming a women's only club? It is not a good thing when that happens! Thanks, Frank.
There are a number of reasons for this that could be explored but I'll confine myself to the main one:
Women are far more conformist than men. I first observed this in high school where I saw that the girls were the ones who believed what teacher said, did what teacher told them to do, failed to see obviously false things the teachers and the text books said.
One day a leftist teacher of American history whom I especially disliked spent much of the class period carrying on about how wonderful, kind and Christian Abraham Lincoln was and how rotten White Southerners (our ancestors) had been not to reciprocate and reflect his benevolent goodness.
I am not a "professional Southerner" and I am not interested in squabbling with Northern Whites. We have a full plate of other problems and we need to get along and work together. I also think the Civil War was simply a catastrophic mistake on both sides, a useless war that could have been and ought to have been avoided by sensible people on both sides. We should have sat down and talked rather than rushing to the guns to kill each other.
But...
My ancestors and their relatives held significant positions in the Confederate Army and government. As the leftist history teacher rattled on attacking my forebears I was annoyed that she - a disagreeable person I disliked - expected us to believe something as ludicrous and as obviously false as the idea that Abraham Lincoln, the man who killed more Americans than any other enemy in our country's history, was some kind of Sweetie Pie and wanted to turn me against my grandmother, my great aunts and uncles, who had told me about the Civil War.
So, when she - expecting us to grovel to her and be an echo chamber for her opinions - opened the floor for our, I raised my hand.
I reminded her that we were sitting in a city that Abraham Lincoln had burned to the ground. His troops had hauled the sick out of the hospitals, thrown them on the ground, torched the hospitals, destroyed the surgical instruments and medical supplies, burned the food stores, burned down the civilian populations houses with winter coming on....and so on.
I spoke politely but firmly and concluded by pointing out that we (Americans) had executed Germans for lesser crimes than these.
I need not go into the hysterical rage this provoked from my leftist teacher.
What is pertinent to the problem of most women in our times being brain dead liberals is the reaction of some of the girls in my class.
When we were eating lunch in the school cafeteria a couple of hours later, a number of the girls were angry....at me!
They told me I had no business disagreeing with teacher.
Since I had been polite, well-mannered, thoughtful and not an obnoxious trouble maker in making my contribution to the class discussion of teacher's lecture and since what I had said was undeniably true (especially since we were sitting in Atlanta, one of the city's Lincoln burned to the ground), I was taken by surprise that the girls apparently believed that the right thing to do was to swallow everything whole that the goofy teacher said and not to "make trouble" by pointing out the obvious falseness of teacher's narrative.
The point:
Women are hardwired by evolution and biology to want to get along, to go with the flow, to obey authority.
The authorities today are the journalists in the System Media. Women comply with what the authorities say. They are not constituted like some men to oppose the voices of authority.
They are the way they are because nature made them that way. Even the ones who say they don't want a marriage and don't want children are instinctively acting out of a woman's concern that she have a safe next for her biddies (children).
There's no reason to be unhappy with them about that. Under normal circumstances this is the right way for them to be...but we live in abnormal times.
One last pertinent example for European history:
In 1871, after their crushing defeat by Bismarck and his Germans and after the collapse of the monarchy and the flight of the King to England, the French elected a constituent assembly to write a new constitution.
The Monarchists, unfortunately, were split 3 ways (Bourbon Legitimists, Orleanists and Bonapartists). Otherwise, they would have won the elections and a monarchist majority in the constituent assembly would have sat someone on the Throne and spared France a republican government.
As it was, the Monarchists were close to having a majority in the constituent assembly.
In the new French constitution, France had the misfortune of becoming the first country in the world to allow universal MALE suffrage.
The issue was raised of whether women should also be given the right to vote.
Today, we would expect that it would be the leftists (the republican socialists) in the constituent assembly that would have wanted women to vote.
Not so.
It was the anti-monarchist, leftist delegates who voted down universal female suffrage and kept women from voting, not the Monarchists.
The leftists were sharp. They read the tea leaves. They understood.
The leftists denied women the vote precisely for the reason that women are conformist and obedient to authority.
They said that the authority figures (back then - not today) the women would obey were the priests and aristocrats. Therefore, they would vote monarchist in the next election, the republic would fall and the monarchy would be restored.
As I said, the authority figures in our society are the leftist journalists in the System Media (and the teachers, professors and textbooks used to indoctrinate kids in our pathetic "educational" system).
So, women are leftists.
Not because they are feminists like Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan (although, as instructed, they worship such freaks) but because they are instructed to be feminists and leftists.
They "rise up" because they are told to rise up.
If we could change the authority figures back to what they were 5 generations ago, women would obey the Kaiser and direct themselves to "Kinder, Kirche, Kuche" (Children, Church and Kitchen) the way Kaiser Wilhelm told the German women to do.
The "Kinder, Kirche, Kuche" has a much greater meaning. My MIL came to the US after WWII. I have met and interacted with my wife's German relatives. I also did graduate school with several students from Germany studying in the US.
The woman's domain is in the home. This means she is in charge of all domestic decisions. The husband goes to work and when he gets home, his paycheck is handed over to his wife. She dictates the household finances. She will give him an allowance of what she considers to be sufficient for him. He is just the provider, she makes the important decisions about the family.
My FIL learned about this the hard way. His wife expected to be in 100% charge of the finances. She would cash his paycheck and give him some money and the rest she used for the household needs. At first, he thought it was great. Dinner was on the table when he came home, she made all the decisions about the children. Then he realized that if he were going to start saving for a retirement, he had to take on second jobs. This caused a lot of stress. He was a firefighter and worked one day and was off for two. So, he had time for odd jobs. His wife loved the idea until he refused to hand over those checks to her. He told her this was his money. He gave her the paycheck from his job without questions, but this was his to do as he saw fit. He socked it away and started investing it. He also used it to fun and vacations for the family and some of the extras in life.
When he retired from the fire department, after 25 years, he took another job at a car rental agency and worked that for 30 years. He had to quit because of COVID. He continued investing this money and used it for even nicer vacations. His wife constantly complained that he did not give this money to her. They were married for over 55 years and they argued about this most of that time.
When I married my wife, she thought arguing was just a normal part of married life. I grew up in a bad situation and hated the constant conflict. So we set up ground rules. It took us years to reach the point where we are at. We do not argue about anything. There are some decisions that are too important so each has the power of veto and the other respects it. We talk it over and figure it out.
My wife definitely did not want to follow the German plan. Ironically, she loves to cook. When we married, I did most of the cooking because her mother never let her into the kitchen. My wife started with simple things and now cooks wonderful meals that are better than many restaurants. Our son and I said, her misses were still better than the best of most people.
She is actively involved in our church. We worked together to raise our son. She was thrilled that I was a more involved father than her father was. He loved her, he did not show it well because he grew up in the depression and men at that time were not very involved in child rearing.
BTW, my wife is probably more conservative than I am. She was a Trump supporter long before I.
Mr. Myers,
Thank you for a very interesting analysis of "Kinder, Kirche, Kuche." Some of what you said was new to me but some of it was not. I'm not certain that your personal experiences are the norm in the traditional German household. My grandfather was German. His parents came to South Carolina in 1848 after the failure of the Frankfurt Assembly. They are my only post-independence ancestors. I didn't know my grandfather because he died when I was 1 year old but from what I have heard from family members, he was a strong guy. He was a good husband and father but was definitely the head of the household and, while considerate to his wife and accepting of her dominant role in the household, I can't imagine that he would have put up with his wife expecting him to turn over the money to her and allow him an allowance. I suspect that what you related was more a matter of the husband giving most of the income to the wife because she would be buying most things the family needed and retaining sufficient cash to meet his own needs outside the family. You are certainly correct that the wife traditionally makes most of the day to day decisions. This was true of the Vikings. When the couple married and entered their first marital residence, the Viking tradition was that the husband handed his wife the keys in recognition that she would run the family. And, as a practical matter, that's true of the nature of marriage. As my father, a Presbyterian clergyman, told me, he made the BIG decisions in the family. He decided whether the Pope was infallible, how many sacraments there were and whether Red China got into the UN. My mother, he said, made the LITTLE decisions...such as what clothes we wore, what we ate at our meals, where we lived, what car we rode in. You know, little things like those. Your story of your marriage indicates to me that both you and your wife are thoughtful people who know how to deal with life. Congratulations on making your marriage work. I only wish you had had 6 children instead of 1. Our society and our country needs more people like the 2 of you.
Boy this really resonated with me due to the actions of the liberal women I know. Childless cat ladies, goofy elderly never Trumpers, and haters of America, and esp. of the white Christian men who built it and still live here. It seems demonic to me, because there's so much untruth to the attacks and the protests. The truly sick thing is that we have to put up with their B.S. and do our best to cope because we still need them and they need us, no matter how much they pretend otherwise. When I see discussions about feminism as it now presents itself, it makes me feel distressed and discouraged, too, because it's all so wrong headed and counter-productive. As a man, how do you broach this subject to the women that you love? It seems to feed right into their obsession that you, too, are one of those dreaded paternalistic oppressors. Oh what I'd give to hear the Apostle Paul address one of these feminist groups! Thanks, John, for this thought-provoking essay, and thanks for the many other almost essay length(!) comments it generated...
Good Stack, and very relevant to the world we are surviving, um, I'm mean living in. Gender relations have never been more complex. At least for some. I only see two genders. It's a very cut and dry issue for me.
As far as woman of today goes, I find it amazing to see how many liberal woman are happy, but still screech at the world. The only thing I recommend to young men today is to be very careful. Live with each other for 5 years before you think about proposing, and, yes, get a prenup. Again, I see in very black and white sometimes...
I don't understand. I keep reading posts by men that complain that young men are lonely, suicidal, etc. and it's all women's fault because women reject them. Then I read posts by men claiming that liberal women are unhappy and bitter and it's their own fault because they won't marry men (yours). Then I read research reports stating that 30 percent of young men are misogynists, that young men are addicted to porn and video games and marijuana at astonishing rates. So...young men are unmarriageable, but young women are supposed to marry them anyway, either because without being married to these addicted and misogynistic men they will be somehow miserable, or they need to marry them to bolster the young men who are apparently victims because young women refuse to marry them. I don't know how much more absurd or misogynistic it can get.