Modern Romance

I’m afraid this one is going to be a bit personal. Whether it is a good analysis or just a bitter man railing…you be the judge.

I have a good friend who is one of the most all-time patient persons you will ever meet. Super intelligent. He and his wife seemed a match made in Heaven. The two were obviously so in love. Then when Covid let society get out a little, I stayed the night at his house, maybe twice. His wife was out of town both times, and the second time my spidey sense tingled. I said nothing, I tried to be a good guest. We watched each other’s tv shows (he has amazing taste in movies). He has been a comfort to me in some very dark times.

The other day he announced on Facebook he and his wife are getting a divorce.

Another friend of mine, one of my best, is having difficulties in his marriage, and I feel helpless to assist. They are both some of the best people I know, yet they find it difficult to maintain happiness together.

My own experience with marriage notwithstanding, it seems marriage is less viable all the time. The divorce rate itself has been a wondrous (from Screwtape’s perspective) 50% of US marriages since 1975. Essentially, through all of my half-century of life. It only recently declined a pip, but some argue it has declined only because the marriage rate is so low.

While in this post I make no claims to being logical, I am going to say three things about the current state of romance between the sexes (I don’t know enough about homosexual romance to speak in an informed fashion. I leave them out, not out of homophobia, just from ignorance).

• 1) The relationship between the sexes has been adversarial since Adam and Eve. For good or ill, we have had thousands of years of trying to bridge a chasm between us when we have tried to come together.
• 2) The Feminist movement began as a positive movement to bring Freedom to the 50 percent of the world that had rarely known it.
• 3) The Feminist movement has been co-opted by the very “patriarchy” they hate. The current contempt for the common man serves the Hegemony perfectly, as the divide weakens both sexes.

The poetic creation story in Genesis tells us that Adam and Eve were created without sin, but after eating the forbidden fruit, they failed to take responsibility for their actions. Eve blamed the serpent, and Adam blamed Eve. From that point on God decreed “I will greatly multiply/ Your pain in childbirth, /In pain you will bring forth children; /Yet your desire will be for your husband, /And he will rule over you.”

I don’t mean to get into theology or debate here, but suffice it to say that some of the most ancient stories contain elements of contention between the sexes. We are different, we see things differently, and for whatever reason, the Patriarchy that has evolved feels they have a right to dominate women. And I can’t help but feel that were I a woman, I’d resent that. I’m not saying there haven’t been innumerable couples throughout the ages that were epic love stories. What I’m saying is we are often drawn to each other, but we are also very much afraid of each other. Nothing can hurt you like a member of the opposite sex.

And don’t think that the abusive members of each sex are unaware of this.

Western civilization was not very kind to women. When I read the Old Testament women seem to be only slightly higher than property. When I read the Iliad it is even worse. The whole point of the book is that Agamemnon has to give up a slave woman or Apollo will kill the Greeks with a plague, and Agamemnon throws a tantrum at the loss so he takes the slave woman of Achilles. There is a great deal of literature assuring us that there used to be matriarchal societies that lived in peace for millennium. And the Native American tribes had a great number of matriarchal communities. But Western civilization, built off of Judeo Christian theologies and Greco Roman culture, was often little better than misogyny. Paradoxically, the best treatment women had in the pre Christian west was in the testosterone laden state of Sparta. Women were allowed to own property there, and at one time as much as 60 % of all property was owned by women. Not bad Leonidas.

https://griekse-les.nl/women-and-their-role-in-ancient-greece-and-rome/#:~:text=In%20ancient%20Rome%2C%20only%20free,did%20women%20in%20ancient%20Greece.

Skip on forward (we’ll just hope you know about the burning of witches and the whole Spanish Inquisition) and you come to the American and French revolutions. Women were intensely influential on these movements. John Adam’s correspondence with Abigail Adams is a national treasure. And what would the French revolution be without the carmagnole? I’m being unfair to the French. They were so enlightened, they decided that breasts should bar you from being a citizen. I can think of several Senators that would disbar….Sorry Ted Cruz, you’re out. But this foolishness did inspire Mary Wollstonecraft to write the pivotal Vindication of the Rights of Women.

The Feminist movement of the nineteenth and early twentieth century was a movement for justice. Just like any other downtrodden group, the woman simply wanted what was good for the goose to be good for the gander. She wanted the right to vote, to say what she believed, to own property independent of a husband. She wanted her body to belong to her and not to arbitrary men. She wanted men to respect her the same way she was required to respect men.

While men were painfully slow to hear (I know, I can hear the throng of women now, “You are always slow to listen”), eventually women got the right to vote. August 18, 1920, the Nineteenth Amendment was passed.

One last thing that I have to make clear. The feminist literature I have read makes it seem that the early movement was peaceful and largely respectful. I think in the main this is true, but it is not the whole truth. Neither sex looks better when we analyze things more closely.

https://www.bl.uk/votes-for-women/articles/suffragettes-violence-and-militancy

Before I found this site, I was going to write that the early Feminist movement was the only time I can recall in history when a privileged class relinquished power without violence. I was wrong. Does this mean the Feminist champions I’d been taught to admire are less worthy of the esteem I give them? It certainly erodes my admiration of the men of the time, who I had thought had given up their unrighteous power because of reason and and the natural love we bear for the female sex.

Of coarse the Tired Blogger is wrong again. No surprise there. But I will move to the last point. Whatever the early Feminists may have accomplished has been largely undermined by the virulent modern Feminist movement. They have devolved from a group of freedom fighters to another tool of the Hegemony to keep us all oppressed.

I’ve already touched on this topic at some length. I’ll leave links to the two posts that I think are most salient to this point.

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/1778

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/1937

https://wordpress.com/post/tiredmidnightblogger.com/2025

Glancing back over the post about the shadow side of women, I feel like I didn’t do a very good job explaining it, I mainly just described my own reaction to it. So let’s see if I can do a better job here of explaining how the Hegemony uses the Feminist movement. Hopefully this won’t require a post of its own.

I think I struck gold on my first search. I googled “how the feminists fall prey to the patriachy.” I notice I misspelled “patriarchy.” This may have been serendipitous, as this article was at the top of the search:

https://www.dissentmagazine.org/article/talking-back-to-patriarchy-feminist-history-tone-exuberance

I’m going to quote Ann Snitow here, I think she puts it pretty succinctly. She expresses how she is happy about the progress women have made, that she is so glad women are being taken seriously when they make harassment charges. But she expresses her concerns, and they are the same concerns any thoughtful man or woman would have:

“The worries many have expressed are also pressing in: fear of backlash (the richly recurring hatred of women who speak); fear of a loss of due process and proportionality in punishment; fear of a misdirection of the eye toward individual “monsters” and away from the need for systemic change. For me, too, a dislike of some women’s current delight in the shaming of men, which puts women in their traditional role as moral arbiters and, sometimes, scourges. Making men ashamed, from cradle to grave, is a constitutive part of how men—excuse the generic—spend their lives trying to establish a masculinity to cancel all doubts. Shaming men is simply joining the system, a return to the idea of women as sexual gatekeepers. (Women are constantly shamed, too, in quite a different way. They should be experts in the failure of this emotion as a goad towards positive change.)”

And there lies part of the crux of the problem. Going all the way back to the original sin: Adam responding to God with “I heard your voice in the garden, and I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself.” But what was at the heart of that fear?

Shame.

We have been shaming each other for thousands of years. And I don’t want to go too far here. Like fear, shame has likely got its place. If we do something wrong, then we should feel shame. Trouble is…

Who decides what is wrong?

On the men’s side of the argument I’m going to share this website:

https://medium.com/@sooth.b.sayer/a-mans-response-to-i-hate-men-21c4ffffa4a6

I have mixed feelings about sharing this site. I don’t want it to be believed that everything the man says is the Gospel Truth. Having said that….

“

“Dislike for men is a fact, especially if you are a white man. White men grow up in America with a lot of undeserved hate and dislike. We are supposed to feel guilty for a lot of things we did not do. I am against slavery. I never owned slaves, but the fact that I am white educated man and earn a lot of money makes me a target for hate. I am in the privileged group. Should anyone accuse me of anything, or should I do anything wrong, I can expect zero sympathy and the maximum punishment.

“Men in general are under attack, not just white men. Take a good look at the number of rape allegations and sexual harassment lawsuits. We hear about them in the news and most of them are serious and have merit. But what we don’t her about are the ones that have no merit. I know of a lot of men that lost everything just because they were accused. In the end they were cleared, but some of them lost their jobs and families just because of the accusation.

“It makes you think twice before you ask a woman out. I never ask out a woman I work with. I never hit on women I work with or work for my customers. It would be suicide. The best place for you to meet men has traditionally been work. Not anymore. We are terrified to ask you out. Good luck with that.

The deck is stacked against us from start to finish. We can’t ask you out, and we lose everything if we get married. If you are lonely and can’t figure out why try looking at it from a man’s perspective. It sucks to be a man right now in the United States.

The feminist movement is great, power to women. The anti-men movement is horrible. There is a serious backlash against men of all colors in this country. Try to ask a woman out and you could be facing a sexual harassment lawsuit. There is a backlash from all of this man hating.”

The man in the article is exactly what most women are looking for if you can believe him (and we all know a man would never lie). But let’s take him at his word.

 “I am tall, attractive, funny, well educated, I earn more than 95% of Americans, I own my own home and I have over a million in savings. I work in sales and I am great at reading facial expressions. I can almost read people’s minds. It’s a sales thing, you have to be able to read people to be successful.”

This guy talks about how he has had only roughly 20 percent of women respond to his conversations with the statement, “What is your favorite….” In other words, the caring sex, the empathetic sex, when approached by a man who has almost everything a reasonable woman could ask for in a man….only 20 percent of them care enough to ask him anything about himself. Wisely, he says only that 20 percent get asked out on dates. And if I had the wealth and charisma he seems to have, I’d be exactly the same way. Honestly, I was the same way. Every woman I’ve taken on a second date showed interest in me as a person. I actually enjoyed being around them.

I’m afraid I am getting long-winded here, and I want to do this topic justice. So the next topic will be a continuation of this topic, how Feminism no longer serves women, it serves the thousand or two thousand white men who run the world….stay tuned to see if I can back up this claim.