There is an attitude I'm running into occasionally among men, even young men who have not had anything terrible done to them, and I think it's highly, highly unfortunate. It seems to be based on this statistic one hears over and over and over again: "Women initiate x% of divorces." Usually the statistic is 80%.
Now, for some reason, the men who cite this statistic are interpreting it as if it means, "Women initiate 80% of the marital breakups." And even, therefore, "Women initiate 80% of marital breakups for frivolous reason." The idea seems to be that pretty much all women have within them an Inner Buffy who is just waiting for the opportunity to dump her husband one day in fit of hormone-driven pique because he fails to put his socks in the hamper. And then ruin his life, ruin the children's lives, break up his relationship with his children, etc.
So what this turns into is a bitter, misogynistic attitude (and believe me, I don't use the word "misogynistic" lightly) which causes the men who cite this statistic to approach any woman, even the most innocent, wonderful, carefully raised, Christian young woman, with an intention to smoke out her Inner Buffy in order not to be "taken in" and ruined like those many men who have become statistics.
It shouldn't really be too hard to realize that a man can leave his wife for another woman and that his wife may then formally initiate the divorce! In our current no-fault divorce culture, it is quite easy for an erring spouse of either sex to initiate a marital breakup and then put psychological pressure on the other spouse to agree to the subsequent divorce. If the other spouse happens to be the one to file the papers, that doesn't automatically mean the other spouse is the guilty party in the marital breakup. There are, of course, other scenarios as well. In how many of those 80% of cases was the husband using, and unable or unwilling to stop using, p*rn, perhaps even the type which made the wife fear for her own safety and that of her children? How about severe and uncontrolled substance abuse?
Now, am I saying that all of these are definitely reasons for divorce as opposed to separation? No, I'm not saying that. What I am saying is that they are non-trivial and are at least understandable and legitimate reasons for separation. It's also pretty much inevitable in the current cultural milieu where permanent separation isn't taken as an option that this will end up meaning divorce. And in any event, if that is what is happening in many of those 80% of cases, this shouldn't go down in men's minds as proof of the perfidiousness of women. Many of the breakups that go into that 80% statistic may be instances of the perfidiousness of men.
It is just incredibly frivolous and even worryingly bitter-minded to take a statistic about the percent of women who initiate formal divorce proceedings and translate that into, "Women want to break up marriages," "Women are untrustworthy," "Women usually abandon their husbands rather than husbands leaving their wives." Anecdotally, I can't help wondering how many of us find this to be true. I certainly don't. I know personally of quite a few more men who determinedly left their wives than vice versa. If the divorce papers say that the wife "initiated" the divorce (I have no idea) in these cases, that doesn't really matter. I know that it would be ludicrous to put these into the Men's Rights story about all the women out there who deliberately destroy their own marriages.
We're doing a disservice to our young men if we're teaching them to be bitter Fred Reed wannabes. If they really meet a great lady who could be, if they wanted her to be, the Christian woman of their dreams, they may just blow their opportunity if they approach her with a high-handed attitude that assumes she is guilty until proven innocent of harboring an Inner Buffy.
It's certainly true that we want to raise our young ladies, our daughters, to be gracious and loving, not to be feminists, to desire to raise children, to be more than happy to allow their husbands' career to determine where they live, and so forth. But the parallel to this on the other side is that we want to raise young men who honor women, who are grateful for a wife's sacrifices, who are prepared to love and respect a wife. They should therefore begin a relationship with a young woman whom they have reason to believe might be that future wife with the kind of respectful and kind attitude they wouldn't be ashamed to look back on later.
Do both women and men need to be careful? They certainly do. When they don't know one another, they have a lot to find out on both sides. There are all too many men who think using p*rn is perfectly okay and who have already damaged their hearts, minds, and (horrible to realize) sexual tastes by that use. All too many of them even (I fear) among Christians. Young women need to be trying to see whether the man they are getting to know is chaste not only in his actual physical relationships but also in regard to what he deliberately puts into his mind. And of course there are many other things to look for in a prospective husband. Young men are, on their part, perfectly within their rights, when getting to know a young lady, to wonder whether she is chaste as well as loyal, kind, and motherhood-minded. Moreover, it doesn't do for either party to be naive about the number of people out there who meet such a description. But care in relationships is not the same thing as initial anger and arrogance in one's approach to the opposite sex. Let's teach both our girls and our boys to pray earnestly about their possible future spouse and to make their friendships among (what we might call) plausible groups for that purpose, with kindness and hope in their hearts.
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Good post, Lydia. It's the attitude that's the problem, no matter how the stat is interpreted. And you're right about alternative interpretations being highly plausible in many cases.
However, my experience has not been yours. I have found that women are indeed more free in initiating divorce for frivolous reasons, and less patient with a less-than-perfect marriage. There are a variety of reasons for this, but it's chiefly that permanent, legally indissoluble marriage is no longer a check on the hormone-driven emotional roller-coaster that is so often the female experience.
Women can master their biological tendencies here, especially with the help of prayer and the sacraments, but few attempt to do so these days. Rather the message of the world to women is to go with your feelings and desires, no matter how irrational and transitory.
Thanks, Jeff. I will say that men leaving their wives for other women is so well-known generally as to be a cliche. The trophy wife. Wife switching, male mid-life crisis, and so forth. At the level of politics, it's now becoming increasingly accepted for a powerful man to be with his third wife, having dumped each of the other two in sequence. And, as you say for women, the message to men is to go with their feelings. And even in the Victorian era mothers told their daughters solemnly that it was not at all uncommon for husbands to be unfaithful. The only difference there was that the wife often just put up with it and did not divorce the husband with a mistress or another woman, and the husband, for his part, was less likely to push for divorce so long as he _had_ the mistress to satisfy his additional sexual desires beyond what his wife gave him.
These things, too, can be called "hormonal," for obvious reasons. The possibility of a mismatch between husband and wife sexual desires is itself cliche, and as women age the problem can become more acute, as female sexual desire can fall off more steeply with age than does male desire. The temptation to dump the aging wife for a younger woman must be there constantly now, especially for men who do not have a strong Christian worldview. And pregnancy, fatigue, etc. can make wives less sexually available than younger women with fewer other preoccupations.
I have seen it quite a bit in an academic context, where professor husbands are surrounded by amoral young co-eds, unencumbered by children and other such mundanities, and also very good at showing (or feigning) a flatteringly deep interest in the husband's intellectual passions which his wife may not share, making the younger woman seem more of a "soul-mate" as well as everything else. I cannot believe that there is no similar phenomenon in the business world. And of course in the world of politics the counterpart to the willing and passionate (in both senses) girl student is presumably the willing and passionate girl intern.
Doesn't the 'superwoman' idea contribute to the fact, if it is a fact, of increasing female dissatisfaction with marriage? Feminist propaganda encourages women to have unreasonable expectations of living a satisfied life. Many educated women now believe they can 'have it all' - i.e. a husband with whom they can share a life of the mind, children, a well paid career, permanent nubility, and so on.
When these expectations are entertained not just by elite women but by the rank and file woman, the difference between hype and reality is bound to create hordes of losers. The trickle down effect of feminist academic theory when it reaches the masses of 'ordinary' married women, produces an anxious sense that life is passing them by and that if they ditch their husbands they might catch up.
Alex, I think that is a real phenomenon and does certainly put additional strain on marriage and raise the probability of divorce. This is especially true if a woman and/or couple does not have a commitment to lifelong marriage or even a concept of lifelong marriage to begin with.
However, something parallel is true on the masculine side. Our hyper-sexualized decadent society presents as an ideal the constant sexual availability of the woman, her needing to be extremely "sexy," to do all sorts of things and techniques her husband or "partner" might desire, and to keep her body perfect and beautiful for him indefinitely. If we want to talk about unrealistic expectations raised by the modern world, these expectations (some of which are outright perverse) given to men by our p*rnified culture and often by outright p*rn viewed by men (which young men are taught is normal) are creating _huge_ strains on marriage.
Why do you suppose the grocery aisles are filled with magazines giving sex advice to women about how to "satisfy his fantasies" and the like? Why all the plastic surgery, the attempt to "be the perfect body type," the eating disorders? There is a definite trend to make women something perilously like pathetic prostitutes, or something even lower, if that is possible, giving out sex of all sorts and varieties at all times to any man they "hook up with" in the completely misguided hope that this will obtain a man's love or keep the love of the man they are with at the moment.
This, along with rampant immodesty, must create very strong confusion and temptation even for many Christian men, including married men. As for non-Christian men or men not truly committed to lifelong marriage, it wreaks havoc.
Lydia, I agree with all the problems you've described on the masculine side, and they have grown worse in recent years. But only marginally. My contention is that the changes on the feminine side have been not marginal but revolutionary. The cliche you describe is outdated in my opinion. I'm sure you've noticed that we don't live in the Victorian era any longer. In a culture of indissoluable marriage men will naturally stray more than women; in a culture of promiscuity, co-habitation, serial "monagamy", etc. women have little incentive to refrain from chasing alpha males or from returning favors for their attentions.
Wow, Jeff. I may be misunderstanding you. But if I'm understanding you correctly I disagree with you rather strongly.
You _seem_ to be implying that the higher masculine desire for sex which makes men (again, as a statistical rule and with individual exceptions) on average less inclined to sexual fidelity than women is purely culturally conditioned!
It's astonishing to me that anyone would think that. The fact that men on average desire more sex than women and that this creates a certain amount of potential tension in marriages is as much a matter of immemorial human observation as is the fact that women on average have more hormonally caused mood swings than men, and that _this_ creates a certain amount of tension in marriage! The mechanism by which this could create a greater temptation to men to infidelity seems so obvious as not to need to be stated.
That (again, as a statistical matter) men tend to think of sex less personally than women and are less naturally monogamous on average seems to me a part of average human gender differences (though perhaps as those gender differences have been shaped by the Fall of man), just like the fact that mothers are on average naturally more emotionally bonded to their own children than fathers is a part of innate human gender differences.
None of this is a mere matter of cultural conditioning. A woman who has found a *naturally* monogamous husband (and there are some), a man whose sexual instinct is naturally fixed onto one woman, who has no appetite for sex outside of that bond, and who cringes from the thought of sleeping around, has been a lot more lucky in terms of "what genders tend to be like" than a man who has a *naturally* monogamous wife.
Certainly it's true that both sexes have less motivation now to remain faithful to marriage. I don't in any way deny that. And our culture is doing all it can to make women as promiscuous as men and to break their maternal instincts. I don't deny that either. But that women are naturally more inclined to bond sexually and to be monogamous by instinct, that the current trends are especially against female nature, also seems to me absolutely obvious. I had thought that this was something moral and gender traditionalists pretty much universally recognized.
This is why, by the way, college girls who have gotten involved in the hook-up culture are even more psychologically devastated by it than college boys.
All of this seems a matter of evident human observation. It has even been cited (possibly accurately) as an explanation for the greater amount of promiscuity among homosexual men than among lesbian women.
There are, by the way, perfectly good physiological causes for higher male sexual desire and on-average higher male inclination to promiscuity and/or infidelity. Testosterone levels are a well-known example.
It's just like anything else in gender roles. The feminists are silly and wrong for trying to imply that men and women are just alike when it comes to things like the tendency to nurture children (for example). It's, I'm sorry, equally silly for any traditionalist to imply that men and women are just alike when it comes to the inclination to infidelity and promiscuity.
There is a reason why even today it is men and for the most part not women who have sex with strangers at rest stops. I'm sorry to have to put it that brutally, but there it is. These statistical differences are simply undeniable.
Again, this does not apply in the same way to every man. Of course it doesn't. Some, thank God, are actually naturally monogamous. Some have no taste for actual wild promiscuity but nonetheless could easily struggle (yes, on average and by nature more than women) with the urge toward occasional infidelity or serial polygamy. Some are simply more tempted on average than women to lustful thoughts about women other than their wives or to the use of pornography.
But physiology and psychology are very tightly connected here. However hard the feminists may try, boys aren't like girls and never will be.
Not much time to respond, but yes, I think you have misunderstood me - and I also admit that my ideas here have not crystallized entirely.
I do *not* believe that the male or female sex drive is "culturally conditioned".
What I am saying is that female sexual *behavior* has undergone a revolution. Men have always been more inclined to promiscuity - that hasn't changed - but women have *not* always been so inclined, and as you say, are not *naturally* so inclined. And yet, today, they are indeed promiscuous to an unprecedented degree in American society, almost at parity with men. Why?
It has nothing to do with the female sex drive: libido drives promiscuity in men but not in women. Female promiscuity is driven by other things - emotional discontent, relationship problems, boredom, hypergamy, status seeking, thrill-seeking, glamour, adventure, etc.
Today women have not only the freedom (men, by contrast, have always had more cultural "freedom" to be promiscuous unfortunately) but also every encouragement not to let marriage interfere with personal "self-fulfillment" and an exciting, glamorous, high-status life.
I blame feminist ideologues very much for the surge in sexual promiscuity among women. Feminists argue that 'equality' between the sexes in every respect is of the first consequence. But given the natural propensity of men to be more lecherous than women, it's ironic that while a 'sexually liberated' woman may think she's an autonomous individual who's affronting her destiny, she's actually delivering herself straight into the hands of men who want to 'play the field'. Lots of men prefer the casual relationships in which so-called liberated women are willing to participate.
That innate psychological differences exist between women and men is something feminists are not willing to concede - or at least not the claim that such differences are 'innate'. Enormous damage has been done by the idea that men and women would have the very same emotional needs and satisfactions if social conditioning could be factored out. Inside a single generation we've seen how the trashing of feminine ideals has coarsened our society. It seems to have been forgotten that the modesty of women and their cautious predisposition towards a romantic but monogamous relationship, make virtuous demands that help to civilize men.
Ah, thanks, Jeff, that's clarifying.
"And yet, today, they are indeed promiscuous to an unprecedented degree in American society,"
that's true.
"almost at parity with men"
that seems to me pretty improbable even still (despite the best efforts of the feminists and the various groups sexualizing our society), especially if one looks *across age groups*. Are 50-year-old women as likely to have sex with multiple people as 50-year-old men? I would doubt it enormously. What about 60-year-olds?
Where parity might be coming close to being "achieved" (sorry achievement) is among single college students, especially those living on campus. Perhaps among 20-somethings generally, though I can't help thinking that if we had a clear definition of and measure of "degree of promiscuity," men would still lead women in that, perhaps substantially, when the pressure-cooker atmosphere of on-campus life is no longer a factor.
What about among married people? here I think it is *almost certainly* false that women have as much extramarital sex as men. Consider just simply the fact that the market for prostitution (whether male or female prostitution) is skewed toward a male clientele. That by itself must represent a pretty strong disparity in the probability that a married man vs. a married woman will be unfaithful.
Certainly, women can be ambitious, bored, and discontented, and no doubt some or even many nowadays do seek to solve those "problems" by means of marital unfaithfulness. (Remember too that a woman can use her sexuality in the service of her ambition by pressuring her husband to be more ambitious. See Lady Macbeth for a precedent.) But I doubt very much that female ambition and discontent are sufficient as driving forces, even in these sexually liberated days, to match the effects of male libido (and male discontent with the satisfaction of libido) on rates of marital unfaithfulness.
Obviously, it's difficult to get statistics on things like this that people are going to be reluctant to report.
Also, of course, if one adds in the epidemic of p*rnography and its effects on and attraction for men, this surely represents a lot of cases where women break off marriages for non-trivial reasons related to their husbands' behavior. And it is a form of unfaithfulness. Again, one can discuss what form that marital break-up should take and whether it should be separation without the option of remarriage, but it is by no means a trivial reason, especially if the husband will not or believes he cannot stop.
"It seems to have been forgotten that the modesty of women and their cautious predisposition towards a romantic but monogamous relationship, make virtuous demands that help to civilize men."
Amen, Alex. Ironically, both in the U.S. and in England, the effect of the deliberate attack on female modesty and monogamy seems to have been to make a lot of women more willing to get involved (whether married or just as girlfriends) with dangerous men who abuse them. Lacking a notion of their own worth, of male chivalry, and of the uses to which they should be putting their sexual assets (namely, to attract and retain a good, civilized husband who will love them), young women squander those assets and all too frequently get themselves beaten or even killed. What an achievement for feminism!
Indeed, a recent pop song has a female singer declaring that she "likes the way it hurts" (in reference to abuse). And judging by the number of young ladies who tweeted that they wish they could get beaten up by Chris Brown during the Grammies, it seems to reflect the attitude of the day with frightening accuracy.
I can't help wondering if girls who would "tweet" such a thing think it isn't real or is just hyperbole or something. Then once they're actually in an abusive relationship, they're emotionally roped in and it's too late.
Someone posted a comment meant for this thread which is still in moderation. I cannot edit comments on this blog; I can only publish or not publish. I decline to publish comments with swear words in them.
If you, the commentator, check back and wonder why your comment hasn't been posted, it's a combination of my disinclination to respond to your wrong-headed comment and the cuss word in it. If you care to try again without any swearing, I'll at least consider publishing it.
I've been getting several attempted comments to this post recently from the so-called "manosphere."
I have independent reason to believe that that group of people has been speaking unpleasantly about me at their own blogs. Luckily, I haven't had to read the specifics of what they are saying.
The comments I've moderated through in this thread have led to interesting and fruitful discussion, even with a person with whom I probably have some disagreements.
The real "manosphere" types, on the other hand, are such utterly creepy people, worse even than I had any idea when I wrote the main post, that I will have nothing whatever to do with them. Nothing. If their attention has unfortunately been drawn to me and to this post, I will thank my lucky stars that I have moderation turned on, and I will not publish their comments.
So don't waste your time, all you "anonymous" misogynists who are trying to post here.
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