One of the biggest benefits of our relocation was that running a family farm absolutely demands teamwork or it very quickly falls apart, and I've always found that to be one of the places where our relationship absolutely shines. We make a great team and are way more attracted to each other when we get to work as one.
My sweet husband died 14 years ago, but I have so many fond memories of being a team. He knew I could do most anything if I needed to. He was extremely strong physically and emotionally. We had each other’s back. So glad for couples who know they are blessed and that find their perfect match. Congratulations on your happy team.
That is what I miss the most about my husband. We were a pretty good team. We worked together on jobs, play and at home and managed to create a lot of good things together. I'm glad you have that. I've been constantly surprised by the numbers of people who don't.
The forever war we call the ‘battle of the sexes’ probably began about the same time homo erectus developed language. But I suspect the blame for much of the increase in hostilities in the last fifty years can be attributed to the deliberate, malicious efforts of those sufferers of that filthy, ugly, loathsome psychological disorder we label “socialism”. In every facet of society, in every aspect of our lives, the ‘Left’ seeks to divide us. Their goal appears to be to destroy all that is good. I don’t believe; and very few of our female friends and acquaintances believe, that there is a rapist behind every tree. Or that all men are wife-beaters. The primary targets of the early feminists were men. (One of my sisters was an early convert to that cult – over fifty years of misery - but she’s still a believer.) That group of disturbed souls has been emphasizing the differences between the sexes for decades. Hard core feminists DO seem to see all men as evil. Or potentially evil. And tend to say so. At great length. Fortunately, most of the ladies in our world do not subscribe to that theory. When they were younger they had kids. Now they have grandkids, and great grandkids. And they make it worth going home at the end of the day. Major urban centres may be ‘shitholes’ populated by single parent families, but there is still a world where married partners raise crops and kids – where life is worth living.
I have some arguments that the real destructive impact of how our communications technologies have evolved are because they have eroded this trust to disastrous levels, and that there is no going back because we can't unlearn those techs.
Trust is much more straightforward if your entire communication infrastructure is physical, face-to-face communication where intent and meaning can't be obscured by anonymity, crafted misinformation, or imprecise tools. It's orders of magnitude easier to understand if a person is lying, being sarcastic, or has strong emotional content to their words with direct interpersonal contact as opposed to basically every "modern" means of interaction.
Gwendoline Christie (the actress that played Brienne) is actually 6 inches taller than me! Chick is HUGE.
I had a friend in college, also Danish, she was 6'2" and bench pressed me as a gag (I was admittedly very skinny in college). Straight as an arrow, totally normal woman. Just a big girl.
"only 5'10." I have never understood the weird extreme criteria for dudes' heights. There's SO much variation in modern adults' heights. 5'10" is a perfectly normal height for a guy, IMO.
i think you over read into that, i didnt even register it that way, just as a comparison. im a big dude in breadth that i can easily intimidate others if required and seem to do by accident sometimes, like i have with a new work colleague who keeps going on about the martial arts he used to do like i should be impressed (eyeroll)
I guess I read it that way because I've talked to LOTS of genuinely tall guys that worry they're not tall enough for women and are still several inches taller than most women they date. It seems like a weird societal fixation.
I was always attracted to men around 5’8 that are muscular. No thin guys need apply. Three boyfriends and my husband all fit in this category. None of them looked like small men. They were all very masculine. I like men masculine men. I admit it. Lol
Rates of homicide in the Americas is amazing to Europeans. It is also on an axis with Latitude so Mexico is worse than Canada. uS is also 10° further South than Europe on average.
GeoViolence aside, you may not know but the UK in a relatively low rate of murders had a huge narrative last year which culminated in a woman in the House of Lords suggesting a curfew for ALL men in London after 6pm. This was after a single (albeit awful) stalking and murder of one lady. And nevermind the hundred or so man on man murders that year.
What the end game of every boy over 16 being curfewed would be is mind-boggling, but more anxiety, division, and derision the short and medium term is exactly what whoever is calling the shots wants I assume, having given the world ever more helpings of it and put any bi-partisan efforts into the realm of the untenable. Again in the UK we had 6years of solid Brexit, 2 years of plandemic, and now Slavi Ukraini or die. What next?
We can only hope the pendulum somehow through a multitude of ways swings back to sanity rather than breaking apart in an attempt to break the laws of physics, biology and sociology.
I'm aware of the ridiculous "no men after 6" statement and saw the video the day she proposed it.
I honestly did not imagine it being taken seriously by anyone. If it represented a mainstream POV, Britain has become even more fascist than I imagined.
Men and women are meant to complement each other. I came of age in the "all men are evil" era and confess that it affected me for a time. When we were dating, my now husband made the mistake of calling me "baby". I didn't respond well, so he asked if he might call me "Precious Lotus Blossom" (PLB for short). LOL. How could I object? At one of my early jobs, the women I worked with started calling each other 'Doll' or 'Hun' as a joke. My husband started calling me 'Doll'. I was older and wiser and didn't object. When our children were little, he asked them what my name was. Of course, they answered, "Mommy". He asked them what mommy's real name was, and they said "Doll".
I know plenty of women who have adversarial and competitive relationships with their husbands. I've never understood it.
As Warren Farrell put it so well, 'Studies are studied when studies are funded, and when the topic is gender the funding is feminist." The above studies show what happens when you just do the damn studies, without so much feminist funding.
This is a fair point, and I'll have to consider how to address it in rewording that phrase.
I've been exposed to some of this literature in the past by so-called "men's rights activists" when graduate schools had a little more open climates, and to be honest, I found some of this research as biased and cherry-picked as its counterparts.
But your point is well-taken: there is a cultural assumption and a great deal of momentum in assuming all data points to a single, incontrovertible ideological point.
I will ponder a more nuanced replacement for that sentence in the next day or so.
During the scamdemic, I happened to click on an interview with Margaret Atwood (bad idea, I know) and the interviewer was asking her how would we know when fascism was here and she replied that when religion was part of politics. I threw up my hands and yelled at the screen, "Science has qualified as religion for decades!" Even as people were being vilified for opposing vax mandates, there was no consciousness of the broader picture in the interview.
I've heard the social engineering crew deliberately brought out feminism as a further divide for the population and as a way to have access to children for more of the day for social programming (look how compliant the most recent two generations are to power). Added bonus - taxes from the formerly untaxed population! Yes, there are benefits to having more personal autonomy, I'm a fan of that. While an unpopular rabbit hole, it makes a lot of sense in the grand scheme of things.
Without a moral frame regulating male/female interaction, females are now exposed to the horror of being a male, and a physically weaker one too. Since there's no third gender outside grammar, and no way a human can lack gender/sex, this 50 year long drive about "we're all equal" has gone off a cliff. We are equal, as in equal right to try and apply, equal before law and so on - but we are not equal in the sense second-and-a-half, third, and pomo feminism wants, since they mean "we are the same" when saying equal. Take this quote from your essay:
"If confronted alone by a competent, fit male combatant and didn’t have a firearm or superior weapon to hand, I’d be in a lot of trouble."
This applies equally to me, or any man even if they are a close combat fighter. I'm 185cm, 100kilos, and I'm not fat or flabby. Nor am I any kind of backwoods-superduper pyjama fighter either. I've got a friend who's been down the rabbit hole of "the world's most bestest martial arts" (to me the marital arts are danger enough, my father in law taught my wife to throw knifes when she was a girl...), he's 155cm, 70kilos and he can drop me like Obama dropped Biden the other day. Total brush off, tap out and cry Uncle.
As you allude to, there's a reason we have rules for sports and games. Having been in fights as a young man (funny how those two goe together, right?), and learned when to hold, when to fold and when to run like her father saw you climbing out of her window I much prefer games with rules.
Which loops back to my initial statement: we have as a society removed the rules for interaction male/female, and tried to replace them with a genderless "we are all equal"-humanoids dogma.
What should have been done, and was the initial intention of any equal rights ideal, was to removed coercive restrictions unless absolutely necessary from an objective standpoint: I don't need to see a gynecologist or be checked for breast cancer, the wife doesn't need to check her prostate, so to speak.
Boys grow up learning that on some level, violence force and might are the cornerstones of all rules, all justice and any societal order as far as boys and men are concerned. Women used to have their own system, just as flawed and perfect as ours. Now, for fifty years women have been taught that this was wrong and that they should "free" themselves from being female. Lacking a natural identity, an instincitve and intuitive intrinsical sense of self? That's psychosis.
And my sympathies on the septic tank issue. It doesn't flow towards an aquifer or anything, I hope?
As usual, Marxist (or Marxist-esque) "thinkers" take a grain of truth and "violently" inject their horrific ideology of "groups" engaged in pitched battles for power over zero-sum resources.
Internal gestation is unfair on women (if you're cynical and only see motherhood as some kind of excise of power and money, and hate children) and, OMG! produces inequality, but no amount of feminists dying their hair blue and hating on men will ever change that. They aren't going to let them stop trying, though.
>> Internal gestation is unfair on women (if you're cynical and only see motherhood as some kind of excise of power and money, and hate children) and, OMG! produces inequality, but no amount of feminists dying their hair blue and hating on men will ever change that.
This is true and accurate, but there ARE points to be made that we can improve on that inequality. Just not in the ways we've been doing.
Also, my g/f is obsessed with "taking me down one day", even I'm bigger, stronger and have vague memories of karate and kick boxing training from 20 years ago.
She keeps trying, bless her, but I ain't getting "beaten by a girl". Lol.
For the record, neither of us absolutely needed the other to deal with that pump. But it sure was way nicer to do it together.
I would contend it was more about needing more than one pair of hands than needing a lot of brute strength.
But yes, it was way nicer as a team.
You are so right. It’s so much fun to do projects with your honey. That’s one thing I really miss.
One of the biggest benefits of our relocation was that running a family farm absolutely demands teamwork or it very quickly falls apart, and I've always found that to be one of the places where our relationship absolutely shines. We make a great team and are way more attracted to each other when we get to work as one.
My sweet husband died 14 years ago, but I have so many fond memories of being a team. He knew I could do most anything if I needed to. He was extremely strong physically and emotionally. We had each other’s back. So glad for couples who know they are blessed and that find their perfect match. Congratulations on your happy team.
Sounds like an amazing guy.
"We had each other's back." That to me is what love is. Bless you for having lived it.
Thank you!
That is what I miss the most about my husband. We were a pretty good team. We worked together on jobs, play and at home and managed to create a lot of good things together. I'm glad you have that. I've been constantly surprised by the numbers of people who don't.
The forever war we call the ‘battle of the sexes’ probably began about the same time homo erectus developed language. But I suspect the blame for much of the increase in hostilities in the last fifty years can be attributed to the deliberate, malicious efforts of those sufferers of that filthy, ugly, loathsome psychological disorder we label “socialism”. In every facet of society, in every aspect of our lives, the ‘Left’ seeks to divide us. Their goal appears to be to destroy all that is good. I don’t believe; and very few of our female friends and acquaintances believe, that there is a rapist behind every tree. Or that all men are wife-beaters. The primary targets of the early feminists were men. (One of my sisters was an early convert to that cult – over fifty years of misery - but she’s still a believer.) That group of disturbed souls has been emphasizing the differences between the sexes for decades. Hard core feminists DO seem to see all men as evil. Or potentially evil. And tend to say so. At great length. Fortunately, most of the ladies in our world do not subscribe to that theory. When they were younger they had kids. Now they have grandkids, and great grandkids. And they make it worth going home at the end of the day. Major urban centres may be ‘shitholes’ populated by single parent families, but there is still a world where married partners raise crops and kids – where life is worth living.
Thank goodness.
Trust. That's the point of relationships from two to two billion. Without it, failure is the ultimate outcome. With trust, anything is possible.
I have some arguments that the real destructive impact of how our communications technologies have evolved are because they have eroded this trust to disastrous levels, and that there is no going back because we can't unlearn those techs.
Trust is much more straightforward if your entire communication infrastructure is physical, face-to-face communication where intent and meaning can't be obscured by anonymity, crafted misinformation, or imprecise tools. It's orders of magnitude easier to understand if a person is lying, being sarcastic, or has strong emotional content to their words with direct interpersonal contact as opposed to basically every "modern" means of interaction.
I'm not sure what can be done about it.
so now i will picture you as Brienne of Tarth
Gwendoline Christie (the actress that played Brienne) is actually 6 inches taller than me! Chick is HUGE.
I had a friend in college, also Danish, she was 6'2" and bench pressed me as a gag (I was admittedly very skinny in college). Straight as an arrow, totally normal woman. Just a big girl.
im only 5'10 and dated a 6'2 chick, she had great legs! but actually a little bit violent so that didnt last, its a 2 way street
"only 5'10." I have never understood the weird extreme criteria for dudes' heights. There's SO much variation in modern adults' heights. 5'10" is a perfectly normal height for a guy, IMO.
i think you over read into that, i didnt even register it that way, just as a comparison. im a big dude in breadth that i can easily intimidate others if required and seem to do by accident sometimes, like i have with a new work colleague who keeps going on about the martial arts he used to do like i should be impressed (eyeroll)
LOL, I love those people that don't shut up about martial arts. It's like veganism and Crossfit.
I guess I read it that way because I've talked to LOTS of genuinely tall guys that worry they're not tall enough for women and are still several inches taller than most women they date. It seems like a weird societal fixation.
i have heard from a few women in my time that will only date 6' +
their loss!
I was always attracted to men around 5’8 that are muscular. No thin guys need apply. Three boyfriends and my husband all fit in this category. None of them looked like small men. They were all very masculine. I like men masculine men. I admit it. Lol
Rates of homicide in the Americas is amazing to Europeans. It is also on an axis with Latitude so Mexico is worse than Canada. uS is also 10° further South than Europe on average.
GeoViolence aside, you may not know but the UK in a relatively low rate of murders had a huge narrative last year which culminated in a woman in the House of Lords suggesting a curfew for ALL men in London after 6pm. This was after a single (albeit awful) stalking and murder of one lady. And nevermind the hundred or so man on man murders that year.
What the end game of every boy over 16 being curfewed would be is mind-boggling, but more anxiety, division, and derision the short and medium term is exactly what whoever is calling the shots wants I assume, having given the world ever more helpings of it and put any bi-partisan efforts into the realm of the untenable. Again in the UK we had 6years of solid Brexit, 2 years of plandemic, and now Slavi Ukraini or die. What next?
We can only hope the pendulum somehow through a multitude of ways swings back to sanity rather than breaking apart in an attempt to break the laws of physics, biology and sociology.
I'm aware of the ridiculous "no men after 6" statement and saw the video the day she proposed it.
I honestly did not imagine it being taken seriously by anyone. If it represented a mainstream POV, Britain has become even more fascist than I imagined.
Men and women are meant to complement each other. I came of age in the "all men are evil" era and confess that it affected me for a time. When we were dating, my now husband made the mistake of calling me "baby". I didn't respond well, so he asked if he might call me "Precious Lotus Blossom" (PLB for short). LOL. How could I object? At one of my early jobs, the women I worked with started calling each other 'Doll' or 'Hun' as a joke. My husband started calling me 'Doll'. I was older and wiser and didn't object. When our children were little, he asked them what my name was. Of course, they answered, "Mommy". He asked them what mommy's real name was, and they said "Doll".
I know plenty of women who have adversarial and competitive relationships with their husbands. I've never understood it.
Hope your septic tank nightmare is resolved soon.
My husband always called me hon. If he actually called me by my name, I’d drop everything and look at him.lol
Appreciate the article, but need to point out this bit is false: "domestic violence typically features a male perpetrator".
Nope.
DV which is reported and prosecuted does, but the actual initiation of violence is around equal or leans towards the female.
Obviously such things are heavily censored, so allow me to dump a huge copy-pasta for you... Actually this wayback link should be enough:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190607102158/https://web.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
As Warren Farrell put it so well, 'Studies are studied when studies are funded, and when the topic is gender the funding is feminist." The above studies show what happens when you just do the damn studies, without so much feminist funding.
This is a fair point, and I'll have to consider how to address it in rewording that phrase.
I've been exposed to some of this literature in the past by so-called "men's rights activists" when graduate schools had a little more open climates, and to be honest, I found some of this research as biased and cherry-picked as its counterparts.
But your point is well-taken: there is a cultural assumption and a great deal of momentum in assuming all data points to a single, incontrovertible ideological point.
I will ponder a more nuanced replacement for that sentence in the next day or so.
Isn't it shocking and disgusting that anyone might stand up for men's rights? Ewww.
I'm not going to respond to this.
I did, however, adjust the sentence in question. I hope it conveys sufficient nuance to acknowledge your point.
Appreciated 😃
And thanks for that list of studies.
During the scamdemic, I happened to click on an interview with Margaret Atwood (bad idea, I know) and the interviewer was asking her how would we know when fascism was here and she replied that when religion was part of politics. I threw up my hands and yelled at the screen, "Science has qualified as religion for decades!" Even as people were being vilified for opposing vax mandates, there was no consciousness of the broader picture in the interview.
I've heard the social engineering crew deliberately brought out feminism as a further divide for the population and as a way to have access to children for more of the day for social programming (look how compliant the most recent two generations are to power). Added bonus - taxes from the formerly untaxed population! Yes, there are benefits to having more personal autonomy, I'm a fan of that. While an unpopular rabbit hole, it makes a lot of sense in the grand scheme of things.
Without a moral frame regulating male/female interaction, females are now exposed to the horror of being a male, and a physically weaker one too. Since there's no third gender outside grammar, and no way a human can lack gender/sex, this 50 year long drive about "we're all equal" has gone off a cliff. We are equal, as in equal right to try and apply, equal before law and so on - but we are not equal in the sense second-and-a-half, third, and pomo feminism wants, since they mean "we are the same" when saying equal. Take this quote from your essay:
"If confronted alone by a competent, fit male combatant and didn’t have a firearm or superior weapon to hand, I’d be in a lot of trouble."
This applies equally to me, or any man even if they are a close combat fighter. I'm 185cm, 100kilos, and I'm not fat or flabby. Nor am I any kind of backwoods-superduper pyjama fighter either. I've got a friend who's been down the rabbit hole of "the world's most bestest martial arts" (to me the marital arts are danger enough, my father in law taught my wife to throw knifes when she was a girl...), he's 155cm, 70kilos and he can drop me like Obama dropped Biden the other day. Total brush off, tap out and cry Uncle.
As you allude to, there's a reason we have rules for sports and games. Having been in fights as a young man (funny how those two goe together, right?), and learned when to hold, when to fold and when to run like her father saw you climbing out of her window I much prefer games with rules.
Which loops back to my initial statement: we have as a society removed the rules for interaction male/female, and tried to replace them with a genderless "we are all equal"-humanoids dogma.
What should have been done, and was the initial intention of any equal rights ideal, was to removed coercive restrictions unless absolutely necessary from an objective standpoint: I don't need to see a gynecologist or be checked for breast cancer, the wife doesn't need to check her prostate, so to speak.
Boys grow up learning that on some level, violence force and might are the cornerstones of all rules, all justice and any societal order as far as boys and men are concerned. Women used to have their own system, just as flawed and perfect as ours. Now, for fifty years women have been taught that this was wrong and that they should "free" themselves from being female. Lacking a natural identity, an instincitve and intuitive intrinsical sense of self? That's psychosis.
And my sympathies on the septic tank issue. It doesn't flow towards an aquifer or anything, I hope?
As usual, Marxist (or Marxist-esque) "thinkers" take a grain of truth and "violently" inject their horrific ideology of "groups" engaged in pitched battles for power over zero-sum resources.
Internal gestation is unfair on women (if you're cynical and only see motherhood as some kind of excise of power and money, and hate children) and, OMG! produces inequality, but no amount of feminists dying their hair blue and hating on men will ever change that. They aren't going to let them stop trying, though.
>> Internal gestation is unfair on women (if you're cynical and only see motherhood as some kind of excise of power and money, and hate children) and, OMG! produces inequality, but no amount of feminists dying their hair blue and hating on men will ever change that.
This is true and accurate, but there ARE points to be made that we can improve on that inequality. Just not in the ways we've been doing.
Also, my g/f is obsessed with "taking me down one day", even I'm bigger, stronger and have vague memories of karate and kick boxing training from 20 years ago.
She keeps trying, bless her, but I ain't getting "beaten by a girl". Lol.