Even where the term is eschewed, the core convictions of feminism are taken for granted most everywhere today.
My first reference to psychologists was from age thirteen. The mothers of two of my childhood friends were in counseling. And in both cases, after a few sympathetic sessions examining these women’s discontent with their husbands, both counselors arrived at the same ultimate advice — that their patients should step out on their husbands for a one-night stand or affair. Y’know, just to determine if the grass really might be greener elsewhere.
And this under auspices of Christian counseling.
I came to the unhappy knowledge of these matters only because these women’s children knew all the gritty details. Because their counselors advised them to sit down and explain their dissatisfaction with their fathers and the desperation to which traditional family structure had driven them. Which, though leveled as justification and a demand of sympathy, was only an added cruelty on both husbands and children. And the audacity of that moral inversion only further embittered all who were concerned.
Two different women, two different counselors, same resolve to destroy the family.
But even where the churches have yet held the line against the notion of female ministers, that resolve grows more tenuous by the day. Because they granted concepts like women’s Bible studies and women’s ministries, which, as a rule, result only in ever leftward and frankly more heretical turns of doctrine. Even in otherwise “conservative” congregations, and even if aiming at encouraging one another to good works and accountability, the dynamic of women’s groups bends toward gossip, grief counseling, and psychoanalysis, which in turn bend toward every extreme of experiential interpretation of both doctrine and practice.
All of which has coagulated into deconstructionist formulae to ‘liberate’ women from their husbands, children, and all proximate Christian duty. And that under the pretext that “God wants us to be happy.”
It is not hyperbole to say that “women’s ministry” is become synonymous with the battle to overthrow the Patriarchy, which is itself the basic Christian family/social structure.
In point of fact, someone recently passed a diagrammed chart on the “types of domestic abuse” published by a Christian* “Abuse Recovery Ministry & Services” out of Hillsboro, Oregon along to my wife. But before we look at it, we note that this organization claims as fact that “90-95% of domestic violence victims are women.” This is a statistic which, in this day and age, only a complete imbecile would believe. No, the CDC figures prove men, not women, are the predominant victims of domestic violence; but everyone knows even those figures underrepresent female-on-male violence because men are so much more committed to dismissing it and/or hiding it. If not seriously injured, except to file preemptively ahead of their wives’ impending claims, men don’t report assault by their wives.
This presumption of women-as-victims and men-as-abusers is the context for all that follows, and their use of pronouns confirms the same. Anywhere a pronoun is not neutral like ‘their’, they use female pronouns, never male.
At twelve o’clock on their wheel of pain they identify “mental coercion” as psychological abuse. By which I can only assume them to mean the act of proving a point. Yes, they cast a man’s logical persuasion of his wife as a moral crime.
So too is “conditional affection”. But wait a hot danged minute, now. Isn’t this whole chart the elaborate justification of conditional affection? We know they aren’t saying that women are required to be affectionate regardless of their husbands’ behavior or how it makes them feel. They make that plain in the “sexual” portion. So this ‘conditional affection’ point clearly targets men. Men aren’t allowed to withhold affection. But women very much are.
“Treating your partner like a servant” is also condemned. But doesn’t that condemn traditional marriage vows which include the oath to “obey”? And therefore, also condemning the Christian concept of marriage? And when an aggrieved woman presumes to level this list of demands to her husband, isn’t she, in fact, treating him as her servant?
Though the Scripture admonishes us not to lord our authority over those beneath us as the heathen do (Matthew 20:25), they yet emphasize that wives are subject to their husbands: from the creation to the appointment of the Patriarchs, to the context of the law assigning governance to fathers, to Christ’s appointment of an all-male apostolate, to the pastoral epistles requiring wives’ obedience to their husbands, wives are subject to their husbands’ rule under God.
“Depriving your partner of friends and family” is not categorical abuse either. In an anti-Christian age, heathen (an in some cases liberal Christian*) relatives commonly attempt to have children removed from Christian parents for the offense of homeschooling, for not vaccinating, or for teaching their children what Scripture says with respect to gender, creation, sin, etc. In such a case where unbelieving kin are bent on destroying your nuclear family, yes, they must be alienated. And as respects friends, there are two categories that are notoriously caustic to the family:
1) Liberal female friends do nothing but try to subvert the Christian home at every turn. They seed discontentment, urge rebellion, and recommend divorce in response to every traditional aspect of marriage. Did I mention they regard all norms of marriage ‘abuse’?
2) Wives who imagine it their right to keep close male friends, including old boyfriends, are committing adultery at one level or another.
In such circumstances the husband has every right and duty to demand all such associations cease. And if the tables were turned, no one would dare question a wife’s anger at her husband maintaining close female friends. Everyone would condemn it as adultery and divorce advice would flow to her free as air.
And “frequent moves” – really? Next to the death of a loved one, moving is regarded as the greatest stress event in life. And guess who has to do the bulk of the labor in it? The man. So no husband wants to move around, willy nilly. Unless it is for business, pursuit of financial betterment, or increased quality of life for the family, men don’t move. Fact is, when it comes to moving for quality of life concerns, women are typically the catalyst. It’s women who foremost daydream of white picket fences. And the move is only an attempt on the part of husbands to fulfill those dreams.
Either way, though, this is a bogus ‘abuse’ claim that acts only as garnishing to volumize grievances on paper. It’s nothing but an excuse for a malcontent.
And this one’s comical — “making her feel crazy”. Now, I could understand if the objection were wrongly calling her crazy, or purposely gaslighting her, but making her ‘feel’ crazy can encompass everything a man does, and even the things he doesn’t do. Completely without substance, this is frankly tantrum talk.
Under physical abuse they include “restraining”. But the morality of restraining someone is always determined by context, many of which are quite moral. We certainly cannot condemn the man who finding his wife slashing her wrists and restrains her. Neither in the case of a man who restrains his wife when she attempts to harm him or their children. The permutations of this scenario are manifold. Restraining a woman is not necessarily abuse. And for all the same reasons the same applies to “making someone move or not move against their will”.
They also decry “posturing to intimidate by your size”. But this is just the baptized version of the secular crusade against “manspreading”. For men, being larger than women or taking up more space than women is ‘abuse’. Never mind that in their tally of sexual abuse they include verbal “put downs” as abuse too. So criticism of size is also reckoned ‘abuse’, but only if coming from a man, it seems.
Included in the sexual category are things like “requiring her to dress a certain way.” So if a man insists his wife not dress like a harlot — which is to say, requiring her to be faithful to her husband — that’s deemed ‘abuse’. To denounce modesty in this way is a plain objection to the institution of marriage.
This one made me guffaw — “interrupting sleep” is supposedly sexual abuse? Egad, folks, there are lots of men who get off work after their wives are asleep and have to be back on the job before their wives get up in the morning. Whether by accident, or for intimacy’s sake, interrupting sleep from time to time is just part of being married.
Or if granted, what then of all the sleep interruptions babies bring? They would be likewise condemned.
Again, this is an objection to the normal facets of human life as designed by God.
And “jealousy”? Come on, in context of what we’ve read above, we’re talking about a wife who insists it is her right to keep a stable of male friends (ex-boyfriends even), dress immodestly, and keep secret correspondences from her husband, even, as we’ll see, clandestine comings and goings. Any man without a twinge of jealousy in the midst of those things is following a roadmap to cuckoldry. And feminists take sadistic joy at carving this ransom letter into his very hide.
Though jealousy for the possessions of another is covetous and contra the tenth commandment, as regards one’s rightful territories, jealousy is not deemed sinful in Scripture. God Himself is redundantly referred to as a “jealous God”. Especially with respect to His glory in His bride. Protectiveness and territoriality — i.e., jealousy — is, in the context of family, a virtue. The man without jealousy in his heart for his wife doesn’t really love her at all.
They also laughably pronounce “threatening to get rid of a family pet” as animal abuse. That’s right. If his wife and kids can’t seem to remember to feed, water, or clean up after the dog, and leave it up to Dad alone, ultimatums are the necessary recourse. Either take care of the dog, or he’s going to someone who will. That’s not domestic abuse. It’s actually preventing animal abuse.
They define financial abuse, among other things, as “controlling the money [and] unilateral decisions”. So a man making money decisions for his family is condemned. Who wants to break it to these ladies that there is no way to make money decisions equal? All such decisions come down to somebody making the call; either Dad is the head of house or Mom is. But without saying so, it’s pretty clear which option these folks are advocating.
Nonetheless, as it pertains to daily spending, in traditional families wives are the primary stewards of the purse anyway. What this ‘ministry’ and movement are taking issue with here is husbands auditing their wives’ use of funds. They are demanding full autonomy – which is antithetical to marriage.
Congruent with this, they add “restricting employment” as another such injury. Imagine a man daring to have his wife work for their family at home rather than abandoning the children to strangers so she can work for the shareholders in some company! If she did that, why, she’d be so invested in the marriage that she might have to keep her vow and remain with the same man her whole life! The horror.
Concerning things verbal they claim “controlling conversations, countering or discounting, criticizing and blaming” are all abuse. Which in summary means that they want men forbidden not only from overruling, correcting, or informing them, but even from disagreeing with their wives, or having any commentary apart from wives’ preapproved script. ‘Countering’? Seriously?
I went out of order purposely to save the discussion of spiritual abuse till the end. And this portion must be cited in full:
Misusing Scriptures or God to control or abuse, negatively effecting someone’s image of self or of God, demanded submission and obedience, questioning her salvation, not letting her go or making her go to church.
Which, in short, is to say they condemn any reference to or interpretation of Scripture or God that doesn’t affirm a woman’s behavior in every way and at all times. And all Scripture is weighed against that standard. Thereby all spiritual headship of husbands is cast as abuse. And God Himself is placed in the dock.
Which tracks with women’s popular Christian* writer and pastrix Rachel Held Evans’s teaching on the godly woman of Proverbs 31, wherein she concludes that the description of the godly wife is not a mold to be pursued, but rather, “a celebration of womanhood, no matter what form it takes”. Basically, the law of Thelema for women; women are to be glorified for doing as they wish. This is the same ethic basic to satanism and witchcraft — hedonism. In this context, blatant goddess- and self-worship. To Evans and the majority of women’s ministry advocates, a ‘godly woman’ is a goddess. This is the reason why Lewis’s White Witch appears at the final battle wearing the mane shorn from Aslan’s pelt. The liberated woman usurps and claims the authority of God as her own.
Did I mention Evans credits that perspective as being taught to her by an ascendant orthodox Jew?
But aside from satanism in the name of Christianity, most ironically, this manual to identify abuse by husbands turns out to be an inverted and magnified “rule of thumb”: a holistic strategy on how women should best abuse their husbands, and justify it by their own ego.
Listen, we all know men are prone to abuse power. Because mankind is fallen men and women tend to be self-serving, but even the abuse of patriarchy does not invalidate it. In fact, any extreme examples of abuse that might be cited only prove the majority of traditional clans that have embraced complementarity throughout the millennia do not result in grief for wives. Truth be told, whether or not they ever experience it firsthand, the storied hurts of patriarchy are principally felt only by feminists who are, all around, the most miserable people, whether in or out of such circumstances. I won’t here recite all the grievances of the Men’s Rights movement, legitimate though they may be. Bob Wallace has encapsulated the case well enough:
When women are let loose to do as they please, away from the influence of men, they have not come up with a cornucopia of great inventions, and discoveries. Instead, they have aborted tens of millions of infants, blamed all their problems on men, voted leftists into office, become excessively promiscuous, gotten worthless college degrees, and demanded equally worthless make-work jobs, believed that wealth falls like manna from heaven, come to believe marriage is temporary, destroyed children’s lives through easy divorce and single parenthood … and rationalized every bit of it.
Part 2
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