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January 28, 2024 |
| A Funny Thing Happened on the Road to Feminism | ||
This study is focused on a particular unexpected consequence of Feminism that is now being recognized. We'll also look at Feminism generally, from a Christian perspective.
I have no knowledge in this area; this is not my area of expertise at all. I'm also not a follower of the happenings in Feminism, so I only became aware of this unexpected consequence when it popped up in YouTube videos. Now there are many videos about its aspects. It seems like Feminism is stuck in this situation, and there isn't anything that can be done about it. It doesn't get any coverage that I've seen on any of the major media sites. That may be because they do not want to show the slightest smudge on Feminism.
Feminism has created a really serious problem in secular society. The attitudes that are driving it should not exist in the church. In the world, though, this problem is causing a lot of unhappiness and dissatisfaction with life.
This study is based on many YouTube videos that I've watched about this, videos from both the pro and the con sides, and also from a scholarly side. We'll hear from a psychologist who seems like a pretty sensible guy, and also from a Christian lady. The large number of videos shows that a large part of society is affected, but I don’t know just how large that is.
Along the way, I learned many new terms for things, and I'll present a few of those here.
Feminism was never about equality with men, or having a career, or having your own money that would make you independent. Those are just the selling points, the sizzle for the steak that the salesman sells. Feminism did not begin in the 1960's, not even close.
Feminism is the story of Eve being played out once again by the daughters of Eve. In the garden, there was God at the top, then Adam, then Eve. If you remember that story, Satan says to Eve that God is keeping Eve down; he's keeping her from being all that she could be. She has to act to protect herself; otherwise, God is going to continue to take advantage of her. Satan entices Eve with the idea that she can be equal to God, that is, ahead of Adam.
And Eve bites on what Satan is saying, but it doesn't turn out the way that she thought it would. God dumps her and Adam into a harsh world where they would struggle to survive. She would need Adam, and she would be kept busy with children.
There were unintended consequences, a theme that we're going to see in this study. Eve hadn't thought through what would happen. The Feminists have not thought through enough to see what is happening now. There were some women authors in the 1800s who did think it through and predicted where Feminism was going to take us.
At its heart, feminism is the rejection of God and his plan, though it's not consciously that way. Parts of that are a stated hatred of men and the desire to destroy all men. That may be a shock to many people.
The promise of Feminism was that women were being held back by men and could have the same lives that men had. They didn't need men. That lasted until reports became common that women who lived like men discovered, after living that life, that they were not fulfilled.
The promise of feminism now is that you can have a career, and when you're ready, you can get married and have children, but that isn't happening. This is the unexpected consequence. Women who reach that age where they're saying, "I've had my career, and now I'm ready to have children," are saying, "We did that stuff, why won't men marry us?" They're finding that few men are getting married anymore.
Orion Taraban, the psychologist that I mentioned before, says, "Getting married, getting into a relationship, and even hooking up, are at historic lows right now in society. There are very few people getting married."
I'll remind the readers that I'm talking about non-believers. I'm not talking about people in the church here.
So there are very few marriages happening, and very few relationships at all happening. Dr. Taraban gave a statistic to back up what he was saying, "25% of women aged 40 or older are not married, and that number is rapidly growing."
At age 40, many of the women who chose this path have done their career thing; they've achieved what they can achieve in business, management, or whatever they were in. Now they're ready to have children, but a large number of them are finding out that there's no husband for them.
Many of the men, especially younger men, have given up on dating entirely. They have little interest in marriage anymore.
There are multiple factors involved. These kinds of things always have more than one factor. Feminist ideals are definitely a part of it.
Feminist ideals lead women to have an unrealistic view of women. We'll talk about that in more detail in just a moment. They present an extreme view of what women are, what women deserve, and how they should be treated. Most of the men cannot meet the standard that is being set for them. That's part of the problem.
They also have a negative view of men, which is kind of strange when you think about it. If you want to have children and have a husband to be with you, to take care of the children and yourself, how can you also hold a negative view of men? The answer goes back to not thinking it through. Nonetheless, they try to make that work.
They have this negative view of men because Feminism has told them men are oppressors, the ones who are limiting women, who are keeping women down, and keeping women from achieving all that they could achieve. These are the echoes from Eve.
Along with these feminist ideals, there's a bunch of impossible expectations for what women should have and should be able to do, which just doesn't work.
A lot of groups are saying that Social Media is contributing to the problem. Psychologists are talking about the damage that Social Media is doing to women, telling them things they like to hear to lead them into places they shouldn't be, and feeding them with self-destructive ideas.
Social media is mostly promoting the Feminism ideals, and Feminism is being portrayed as a wonderful thing. Voices that counter that message are only now being heard. These voices uncover what Feminism proponents have been covering up.
Western culture generally is a big problem. It is a highly sexualized culture, which means that everyone is taught that sex and beauty are the most important things in life. That's an odd thing to believe.
Our culture teaches ideas like finding your own morality. Morality is no longer a fixed standard set by God or society. From a young age, children are told to discover morality for themselves. People don't succeed at doing that, and the Bible explains why.
Our culture is also producing an entitlement mentality: I deserve something. The new generation who are coming into the workforce right now is a very entitled group of people. They have a lot of high expectations about how they should be treated and what they should expect.
This comes from their schooling, which has been teaching them that each one of them is a great and wonderful person, independent of what they have done or not done. There are no losers or bad people, only people who are equal.
This entitled view leads them into the job place and into other areas of society with unrealistic expectations, things that just can't happen the way they want them to happen.
Along with that, a lot of psychologists have talked about a definite increase in narcissism, which is a complete self-absorption. No one else is really important.
The pill is also involved here. It enabled promiscuity without consequences many years ago. That has made it possible to engage in lifestyles that were not possible before.
There's a secondary effect to the pill that I learned in science magazines 30 years ago, and they're still talking about it. The Estrogen in the pill goes into a woman's body and then comes out of her body unchanged. Because of that, the Estrogen is building up in the water that we drink.
Testing the effects of Estrogen is difficult when everyone is exposed to it. But scientists have been able to show that men are different now than they were back in the 1960s and 1950s. There are measurable physical differences. Scientists think that this might be related to estrogen, but no one has been able to prove it.
Another factor is the nature of women.
It is well established in psychology that women have a much harder time with accountability than men. Accountability is accepting that they did something wrong. The Bible touches on this in a couple of places.
This is the way of an adulterous woman:
She eats and wipes her mouth,
And says, “I have done no wrong.” (Proverbs 30:20)
The problem for us is that women are rejecting accountability, and they're blaming men for not being available as husbands for them. They don't accept any idea that this is because of them. At the end of this study, I'll show you some people who give a different view on that.
Another aspect of the nature of women is called hypergamy. A woman wants to marry a man who is at a higher social level than herself. This comes out of her subconcious desire to provide for her future children.
The problem with that should be obvious. The average woman wants an above-average man, but there are fewer above-average men than there are average women. Also, the above-average man wants a match, an above-average woman. This results in many women having to "settle" for less than they want, which means they are still on the hunt for Mr. Right.
The Feminist movement tells women that sexual relationships are something you can have and then walk away from, and they will mean nothing. That's true of men, but the psychology of women is different. Each sexual relationship "means" something to women. They were built to have one and to bury themselves in it, not be ripped out of it time after time.
Because of the views they have been given, women are treating men as disposable now, as something that they can pick one and then if that doesn't work out, they can throw that one away and get a new one, even if they are married. They're treating relationships as disposable, as well.
That attitude is dangerous for men right now because in the divorce court, men always lose. A woman has to do something pretty horrible for her to actually lose in divorce court. Usually she gets alimony and custody; the man gets the bill. With women having this disposable attitude, a man doesn't have the same interest in getting married because he's taking a bigger risk.
Along with this, there is one of those new terms I mentioned, a high body count, which is a history of having a large number of sexual partners, a trail of bodies. We talked about the pill making promiscuity riskless. All these factors have encouraged a lot of women to live a life that produces a high body count, which is also called "living on the street." When men see a woman who has this high body count, they're concerned about her because she can be a greater risk if you marry her. "If I take her off the street, will she go back to the street, because the street has become part of her?”
A secondary consequence of that is that women have learned not to tell their men what their body count is, or to lie about it, on the low side.
Another consequence for women is that they have gotten the idea that they are all prizes that men should chase after, and that they deserve a great-looking, educated, wealthy man. I saw a study on this that asked a group of women to rate their own appearance on the usual scale of 1 to 10, with 5 being average. The result was that no woman rated herself less than 5, and most women rated themselves as 8. A randomly selected group of women would have mostly 5s.
I first heard of this 1 to 10 attractiveness scale with the movie called "10." There aren't standards for that scale. It is quite subjective. Each person looks around and says the average person is a 5, Bo Derek and super models are 10s, and grades people from there.
What we're really talking about here is how a person views themselves on that scale, and whether that is an honest assessment.
Another consequence is that studies have shown that this promiscuous lifestyle that many women are living now is actually causing psychological damage to them. I mentioned the nature of women above. This business of changing partners frequently does damage to them, and in fact, the studies have shown that it rewires their brain in a different way that's likely related to a lot of these problems.
I heard a radio announcer long ago say that she could turn off the attachment part and do it just for the fun of it. In truth, she was denying that the attachment existed and was lying. I think that what she said stuck with me all these years because it sounded strange.
Another consequence for women comes from the hypergamy that I mentioned above. A woman wants a man who is wealthier, more educated, and at a higher social level than she is. The problem with that now is that many women earn more, are more educated, and are at higher social levels. This again limits the pool of men that they would consider as husbands.
Another consequence for women comes from desiring to have both Feminism and the best of Chivalry. Chivalry was the idea that men would put women on a pedestal and treat them like delicate flowers. The man would go out of his way to do special things for his woman. He would always pay the bill. Women don't want to accept that Feminism killed that, or more accurately, it killed the kind of woman who deserved that.
Orion Taraban says, "Women are essentially the sellers and men are the buyers." Women are the ones who dress themselves up to make themselves look pretty and attractive to men, and it's the men who are the ones who are supposed to go up to the women and initiate contact. Chivalry was based on that.
The women of today, although they consider themselves feminists, still want that, but it doesn't make sense anymore. Women have a lot more money now, so why should a woman who earns as much as her date be the one who is not paying?
This also leads to problems in a marriage. These women want to have "their" money kept separate from their husbands' money. This approach is usually reserved for the case where one spouse is incompetent with money. If keeping money separate isn't acceptable to the man, the woman will often hide her money from him.
Sometimes this hiding is done because the woman is still hunting. She isn't fully committed to the relationship and is somewhat expecting that the marriage might not work out. By hiding the money, it doesn't wind up in the divorce settlement. That attitude pretty much guarantees the relationship will end.
I said before that social media is also a big part of this. I found a number of people talking about its effects on all people. But it has some terrible effects on women, in light of the factors and consequences mentioned above. One particular woman said that women should just get rid of social media … for their own good.
There are two areas that I want to talk about and focus on women. That doesn't mean that men are not affected.
Generally Social Media promotes bad examples for women to follow. It also provides opportunities for them to live out the bad examples.
TikTok brain is another phrase that I didn't know before. Here's the definition of TikTok brain from a report from our own KSAT.
“The never-ending bite-sized videos on TikTok and other social media platforms are apparently harming brain function” (KSAT - Sep 5, 2023)
The problem is the short videos that TikTok specializes in, and now YouTube does as well. With each video, the viewer gets a little dopamine rush. There's something in your brain that produces that as a reward. This dopamine rush is pleasing to us. The more videos you watch, the more of these dopamine rushes you get.
The result of that is that you are exposed to a lot of dopamine, which isn't good, but there is another effect on the viewer's attention span. A long attention span is discouraged because, in a long presentation, you only get one dopamine rush. So it conditions the person to choose short attention span activities and to lose interest during long attention span activities, and therefore avoid them. The product is people who have a very short-sighted view of life.
TikTok brain is a common term phrase now in discussions of Social Media problems. Everybody recognizes that this is happening, but of course, Facebook and others like that don't want to believe that that's true or happening. But there are studies that say it is happening.
I had heard the phrase "Only Fans" before I started this research, but I didn't know what it was. OnlyFans is a site that no Christian should be on.
I haven't been there, but the idea is that you get a page, much like you do on Facebook, but you post videos that people pay to view. Unlike Facebook, there are no restrictions on the content of the videos. Mostly it is women showing themselves. To get the big bucks, the women show themselves naked or even performing sex acts.
My attention was caught by a video of a woman who had been a porn star on OnlyFans. She would probably call herself a sex worker, but that's just playing games with words. Her video gave me the most information about what goes on at that site.
She did that lifestyle for a few years, and then turned to Christianity. I thought that was very interesting and wanted to know how that came about and how her viewpoint had changed. She talked about what had led her into this and what led her out.
She said that she was brought up in a family where there was no moral foundation at all. She was never taught right or wrong or anything like that. Therefore it was easy for her to fall into this situation, where she would begin selling her body in small ways and then in larger and larger ways.
At first, she liked the idea, she liked the attention that she was getting, and she especially liked the money that she was getting. She also liked that she didn't have to do an awful lot to get the money. Therefore she got deeper and deeper into it until she was what anyone would call a full porn star.
After a few years of doing this, she began to feel really bad about what she was doing. I think that was the Holy Spirit working. As a result, she went out and bought a Bible and started reading it. Later she got involved in a church, came to Jesus, and quit OnlyFans.
She really turned her life around. That's plain, but it's still plain that there are remnants of that life in her. I think that is important for the church to understand. A new Christian can still have a lot of ideas, attitudes, and expressions that remain from their previous lives. There is too much to change in one moment, and wisdom is required to deal with it.
Those things that she did before are still clinging to her. It's hard for a new Christian to find a place to put away what was done.
She doesn't fully accept accountability. You can see that because she tends to blame men for the things she did, saying, "Well, if the men hadn't been there to watch those videos of hers, then she wouldn't have done that or wouldn't have been able to do that. It may be a while before she accepts that she made the decisions.
She still wears provocative clothing. This shows she hasn't gotten all of her moral sense back. Of course we will let the Holy Spirit do his work there.
She still likes to be seen by lots of people. That was probably one of the factors that pulled her into OnlyFans. I'm pretty sure it was she who went to a Charlie Kirk event and announced herself as a former OnlyFans star who had turned to Jesus. She'll need to put away that old life and not define herself by it.
When you get involved in things like this, it changes you in ways that are hard to change. Some may be irreversible. Drugs and alcohol leave similar marks, probably other things as well. Once you sear your conscience, as the Bible says, it takes a while for your conscience to fully come back. Sometimes people have to point out things to the person because they're blind to them.
It was wonderful to see that she had turned away from all of that, but it was a shock to see that it exists at all and that girls are being dragged into it.
So far we've talked only about women and what they are becoming in our society. Men have a different perspective.
Men are finding themselves in a situation with women where they look at their own families and particularly their grandmothers, and they say, "My grandmothers were way better women than you will ever be. You are horrible people."
All of the things that they see in modern women are things that they don't see in their grandmothers, and they say, "You're not somebody I want to marry." Along with that are all the factors I mentioned before. Men are concerned about the high body counts and what that will mean for the relationship and what that says about the woman.
They are concerned that these women aren't safe to marry. If they marry a woman with a high body count, if she gets bored, is she going to start looking around for other partners and throw away or destroy the marriage?
Because of the risk that a divorce brings to a man, this motivates men not to marry. If they aren't going to marry, why bother dating? Even dating some of these modern women is difficult. So men are really turning away from relationships with women to a great extent, not entirely, of course.
Men are built differently from women. It's possible for a man to make a good life without a woman. It seems God has made men that way because some of them would never be able to have a relationship with a woman. So it’s possible for men to get into this minimalist male-bonding mode where their life consists of working at a job and doing guy things with the other guys. They're going to the football games, they're fishing, hunting, doing whatever guy things they want to do with all their guy friends.
When men get into this mode, they really don't have a need for women. Of course they “bang” them when they can, if they can. Some make use of prostitutes.
That's the situation we're in now, men are finding other ways to have a life that is good for them. It's not a fully satisfying life, but men are afraid of the women who are available to them right now. Social Media has made it possible for them to hear all the stories.
I've mentioned psychologist Orion Taraban before. He has a YouTube channel called PsycHacks. Though not a Christian, he has a number of good videos on this problem.
He says that, at age 30, women have become more "expensive" and have less to offer. He doesn't mean expensive only in terms of money. He means whenever you start a relationship with any person, either gender, there are changes you have to make in your life. There are sacrifices you have to make. You have to give up some things and make some compromises, doing some things that aren't your favorite things to do. That's just part of building a relationship with another person. So the anticipated value has to be greater than the cost.
Women over 30 have less to offer than when they were younger. They don't have the energy. They don't have the beauty. They don't have a lot of the youthful characteristics that make them attractive to men. Also, older people are less mentally flexible.
So men are seeing these 30-year-old women who now want to have children and have that life as being "expensive" for them. The men see that they have to give up an awful lot, and they don't have the energy they had when they were younger. So they don't see a good deal in this.
Dr. Taraban says the men who are attracted to women are not found attractive by women. I mentioned women and hypergamy. The women who are the 7s, 8s, and 9s, on that 1 to 10 scale I talked about before, or the women who think that they're the 7s, 8s, and 9s on that scale, are looking to marry up. They are looking for men who are 9s and 10s, but the men who are 9s and 10s are very rare. They're 1% of the population, and they're looking for women who are 9s and 10s like themselves.
So the women want to be found, but they aren't acceptable to the 1% men who are out there. So these 1% of men find that they're awash in all these women who think that they deserve a man who's a 9 or 10 on that scale, and because of all these opportunities, a lot of these 1% men are just choosing not to settle down at all. Instead, they're going to go for those short-term relationships I talked about, and they're going to live that lifestyle.
When a man finds a woman with about the same attractiveness as him, he gets rejected because she is looking for something better. A lot of that kind of rejection is also not what men are looking for in their lives.
Back to Dr. Taraban, he says, in this situation, the best strategy that a woman can do is to find Mr. Right as young as she can, while she's still young, energetic, beautiful, when all that stuff is going for her. The problem, though, is that this conflicts with the feminist agenda, which, as we saw, is that you should have a career first, and after your career, then you can go on and look for that life of having a husband, a family, and children. Marrying young is his strategy for dealing with the current situation.
But how do we fix the current situation? What's the solution for that? He says that women need to start taking the initiative. They need to take that role of men from chivalry that I talked about earlier.
When I heard him say that, I said, well, that doesn't make any sense. But I thought about it some more, and it does make some sense in a worldly way. Currently the women are the sellers, and the men are the buyers. If you switch that around, women becoming buyers would cause them to have to value themselves realistically. They couldn't be calling themselves a nine when they're really a six, for example. The men who are really nine's would say, "No thanks." That’s a hard way to return to reality.
So I think he is really saying that the problem is this Feminist driven delusion of attractiveness and entitlement is the problem, and this is his solution.
I still don't think that's a good solution. It makes the same mistake that got us here - the unintended consequences. The Feminists thought they were making a small change that would make the world better, but now it's worse. What if this new role changes women in other unexpected ways? If women were to take on this new role, what else would change in women?
Another term that I came across in this study is "Trad Wife" or "Tradwife." This is now a thing. Even my spell checker knows how to spell it. A tradwife is a traditional wife. It is a counter-Feminist person and movement. There are a lot of women who are choosing that life now. They've seen or found that the whole feminist, modernist thing is just not working. They are looking for a husband when they are young, as Dr. Taraban suggested, and they are taking on the role of a traditional wife. They find that they are happy that way.
Obviously the Feminist movement is horrified by this. They don't like these tradwives because their happy existence is a declaration that feminism has failed.
Here's a quote about tradwives from The Guardian UK, which is a lefty newspaper in Britain.
“So a ‘tradwife’ is a woman who doesn't work so as to look after her husband, their children, their home and then talk non-stop about how great her life is” - The Guardian UK
So these Feminist liberals hate the idea that she's having this great life that she's enjoying and finding satisfaction and fulfillment.
A statistic came out: 75% of lesbian relationships end up in divorce, a far higher number than for other relationships. The woman in the video with this info was probably a lesbian herself, but she never said that.
She said that she used to believe that it was the men who were at fault for the problem that women can't find husbands. When she saw this statistic, she realized, no, it's the women. She admitted that women can't even stand themselves, because they've become such a mess.
Another person in a YouTube video was talking about what women want. She was a feminist. She was saying that women want men to be more effeminate at times and more masculine at times.
The women are going to be the one who decides when these times are, and the men should be perceptive enough to know which time is which. So this is really just another attempt by Feminists to be the boss over men.
Even so, it would not likely work. Men are not very perceptive in that way, and they are not malleable (changeable) in that way. So here's another case where women are expecting things of men that most men just can't do. Also, effeminate men tend to be the ones who turn towards homosexuality, not towards women.
God set up a system that works. That system has a role for women and a complementary role for men. The woman's role isn't limited to bearing children and raising them. Especially in our society, there are many other things that a woman can do. That includes having a career, but there are tradeoffs that go along with that and similar choices.
The role is fulfilling as long as you don't convince yourself that you're being kept down. That's the trick that Satan played on Eve. Once you're convinced that you are being cheated, you're not going to be happy or fulfilled, no matter what you are doing. That's the consequence of coveting what someone else has.
Another thing to pull from this study is that people are just not smart enough to understand all the consequences of their actions. That is true of all things. We try to look ahead and ask, "Well, if we change this, what other things are going to change?" Experience after experience tells us that nobody ever sees all the consequences of their actions.
Feminism and its ideals are poisonous to society. I'm afraid we are just now seeing the big effects. Its fruit is promiscuity, adultery, and unhappiness.
