Sunday, April 17, 2016

The problem of male superabundance

This is one of those posts for throwing around ideas. The topic under consideration is "how are women ruined for marriage?". I have been mulling over what happens in a culture when young women are given an abundance of attention and offers from men. Just 60 or so years ago, there was not such a superabundance of opportunity for young women. There was no social media for men to be constantly "liking" women. Sex before marriage was still frowned upon and marriage itself took place much earlier. Women were still more likely to live at home before marriage, making short term live-in relationships less likely.

Most young men won't ever know what it's like for young women today, i.e. to have so many options and to know that if they drop one option a new one won't be far away. I do believe that this helps to ruin women for long-term committed relationships and, for that matter, for deeper forms of committed love. Instead, it sets up women to treat relationships as "play"; to take a more casually dismissive attitude to men and relationships that over time is corrosive of love and of the ability to pair bond; and to orient women more toward serial monogamy, if not casual relationships.

I suspect that men would be similarly affected, if they had the chance. Some men who have mastered "game" and who feel confident in their ability to seduce women on their own terms report that they eventually feel a sense of loss in reaching this stage, as they are no longer able to feel the same love for women that they once did. And when the balance of relationships changes men can also be similarly spoiled for relationships, for instance, in older age groups.

The feminist inspired sexual revolution may have robbed women of one of the deeper experiences of life, namely the capacity to achieve a loving, deeply bonded marriage.

It can seem daunting, though, to envisage a way to reverse the modern trends. Technology like Tinder and even other more sedate online dating sites isn't going to go away. Nor is it easy to control access to popular music and film which encourages a sexually "liberated" culture. The opportunity for young women to enter the workforce and live independently of their families isn't likely to change either.

This can make some people give up and just hope for the best. I do think it's worth trying to be counter-cultural on this issue. Not all young women, even today, are ruined for marriage. The ones who seem to survive best grow up in a loving home and meet their future spouses early, before too much spoiling happens. Parents do still have some control over their daughters before they move out, and in theory churches might still be able to have some influence over the moral outlook of young people.

(I should point out too that it would help if marriage was understood as being based on more than just feelings, but was held to be a sacrament binding two people; and an institution in which individuals were able to fulfil lifelong purposes such as those of being a father, a mother, a husband and wife; and as an institution in which a culture of family life was upheld and transmitted from one generation to the next.)

The culture war is a bit one-sided at the moment, but it needn't forever be so.

P.S. If it's not clear already from the post, I believe that part of the solution has to be ending the "free for all" situation pushed onto Western society by the sexual revolution. It should be replaced with some kind of "intelligent restraint", i.e. a system for the pairing up of young men and women that is intended to foster successful marriage. That is what traditional societies did and I think you can see from the modern Western experiment that traditional arrangements did have a reasonable purpose to them.

8 comments:

  1. Well, I suppose if we cannot look to God for the answers, we at least should look to god for the answers then!

    We should use all that technology has to offer us, all of social science, etc.. and choose the wisest option from the available talent pool, and make binding pre-nuptual agreements the normative.

    Some websites have tried this approach.

    I still honestly think that MGTOW and the marriage strike is really the only way forward. I creates the shortage needed to make change possible.

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    1. I don't think there's an immediate solution. Individual men might do alright by, as you put it, choosing the wisest option from the available talent pool. I don't believe the current situation is sustainable. At the top you have the current trends being taken to further extremes; from below the beginnings of a radical shift in attitude by men. It is going to build toward some sort of cultural blow up. I don't think we'll be waiting more than a couple of decades for it to happen.

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  2. Both women and men are ruined for marriage by having relationships prior to marriage. Both dating and courtship prepare for divorce and not marriage by establishing the principle and precedent that a relationship may be started, developed with emotional involvement and time commitment, tested and then broken at will should difficulties arise.

    Pre marital relationships established on this basis are therefore conditional.They are pursued on the basis that specific conditions be met and if these are not met, the relationship may justifiably be ended. These conditions are generally selfish considerations such as "making me happy" and other narcissistic emotional wish fulfilments.

    The essential point is that a non conditional permanent social institution such as marriage and the family cannot be tested on a conditional basis. The precedent of entering a relationship with an option of breaking the relationship at a later date is a precursor to divorce and a cause of much bitterness, emotional distress and insecurity. Countries with the most liberal attitudes to dating have the highest divorce rates and lowest rates of marriage. There is now no difference between heterosexual and homosexual relationships which is likely the reason that there is no opposition to these in the Anglo countries.

    The sacrament of marriage does not exist in the Protestant religion which reduced marriage to a contract with a church blessing. Hence the Anglo high rates of divorce. However as the Gospel demonstrated, the sacraments alone are not sufficient to prevent family breakdown. As Jesus was lead away, his disciples with whom he had just undertaken the first sacrament abandoned him. Jesus was supported in his last hours by his family blood relations only. The necessity of marriage with blood relations is thus established and revealed in the Holy Family, the model for mankind. As the Orthodox and Catholic Churches teach in Europe, the righteous man marries within his own tribe.

    Within the family there is also the role of the extended family. What is the role of an aunt? of an uncle? History demonstrates their roles as mediators in family conflicts, as providers and supporters in the event of parental death. These are also roles which have to be given serious consideration.




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    1. Dating was very common among my preceding generation in what is the Irish peasant farming class (=Kulaks), the most conservative and traditional in the country, both North and South. Of course, there was very little sex and "shot-gun" marriages were rare enough. However, whatever about pre-marital relationships, there was unquestioning consensus that marriage was until "death do us part".

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    2. Michael, the older marriage culture still held firm here in Melbourne as well amongst the Catholic middle class of my parents' generation. I grew up surrounded by married couples, no divorce. The women were strongly oriented to family and children. A few Catholic families were still very large (say 8 or more), most were large by todays standards (4 not uncommon). By the 1990s it was unravelling.

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  3. The "free for all" did not start with the sexual revolution.It started with the breakdown of the social order long before that. The First World War and the Russian Revolution were the final destroyers of the social order in Europe.

    The devil of the sexual revolution could not have entered into a society unless the house was freshly decorated, furnished and prepared for his arrival. The sexual revolution was therefore the intermediary stage in a total social revolution which started with the Reformation, the Enlightenment, two World Wars, the Sixties cultural revolutions and then the final transgender and homosexual revolution. None of these progressive revolutions would have been possible without the preceding stages.

    You say that the older marriage culture held up until the 1990s. However it must have had a weakness or it would not have succumbed. In a similar way, the transgender and homosexual calls for tolerance would never have been accepted even on a partial basis unless society was not thoroughly corrupted and confused by the revolutions which had gone before.





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    1. Anon, I agree with you wholeheartedly. There was a hollowing out of society well before the sexual revolution took place. It's difficult to pinpoint an exact moment when you can say "it began here" but you can observe moments in Western history when there is a sudden dip downwards, e.g. the period immediately before and after WWI. I know it's going back a long way, but there seems to have been a watershed moment in the mid 1600s when modernism really seems to have secured the upper hand amongst intellectuals and the political class - you then witness the gradual unfolding of modernism without serious sustained opposition from traditionalists - at least in the Anglosphere.

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  4. Writings on Fatima always talk about the 3 stages of the collapse of Christian European civilisation- 1517 the Reformation, 1717 the establishment of Freemasonry and 1917 the Russian Revolution.

    At Fatima, The Virgin Mary talked about the restoration of Russia as a Christian nation being essential to the revival of European Christianity. This seems to be coming about and so there is hope. The hope is that Russia, a revived Christian nation will prevail and will not sit idly by as Europe is consumed in a civil war between native population and Muslim immigrants.

    Russia has saved the Christians of Syria from annihilation and I am told by Egyptian friends saved the Christian Copts of Egypt from certain butchery by the American backed Muslim Brotherhood Government by the instigation of a revolution which brought the military to power and deposed the MB whose leadership has been jailed by the military.

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