You keep saying this but you haven't told us what it means or why we should. But it does sound a lot like a feminist talking point I've heard repeatedly.
-
Biblical Families is not a dating website. It is a forum to discuss issues relating to marriage and the Bible, and to offer guidance and support, not to find a wife. Click here for more information.
Meat Patriarchal wannabe catfishers
- Thread starter steve
- Start date
You keep saying this but you haven't told us what it means or why we should. But it does sound a lot like a feminist talking point I've heard repeatedly.
I've considered reorganising the forum in various ways in the past. But the biggest problem with that is that most of us view the "what's new" list, not the forum main page, so we don't actually notice where a thread is located. So you can have the best organisation in the world, but it won't actually help if people aren't navigating to the thread that way.
But while looking around at what is possible, I just found a feature I hadn't utilised before.
How about labelling threads as "Meat"? To see what it looks like, check the title of this thread while open, and while listed with other threads. This appears in the "What's New" list, and even in the alerts, so it's clear the thread is a "meaty" discussion however you get to it.
As an experiment, any thread you've made, you can now apply the label "Meat". Or, if you're creating a new thread, you can do it then. Does this look like a good tool?
This is completely customisable. I can make a list of "thread prefixes" that we can use, and can make them different colours. I'm not saying this is the entire solution, it's just a tool that might be a helpful part of the solution. But I've made this one prefix and applied it to this thread just so you can see what it could look like. Just another tool to consider as you're making suggestions.
We could say that the OP or a moderator can label a thread "meat", and that's a warning that there may be serious thrashing out of theology etc in it, and people can choose to participate there or not as they desire.
But while looking around at what is possible, I just found a feature I hadn't utilised before.
How about labelling threads as "Meat"? To see what it looks like, check the title of this thread while open, and while listed with other threads. This appears in the "What's New" list, and even in the alerts, so it's clear the thread is a "meaty" discussion however you get to it.
As an experiment, any thread you've made, you can now apply the label "Meat". Or, if you're creating a new thread, you can do it then. Does this look like a good tool?
This is completely customisable. I can make a list of "thread prefixes" that we can use, and can make them different colours. I'm not saying this is the entire solution, it's just a tool that might be a helpful part of the solution. But I've made this one prefix and applied it to this thread just so you can see what it could look like. Just another tool to consider as you're making suggestions.
We could say that the OP or a moderator can label a thread "meat", and that's a warning that there may be serious thrashing out of theology etc in it, and people can choose to participate there or not as they desire.
Last edited:
The FAQ really needs to be tidied up, and it's just not going to happen if we leave it only editable by moderators and admins. If there are a few people keen to sort this out, I could give you access to it and let you go for it, assuming the other staff approve of course.
I don't know whether we need a specific "milk" section other than that. We've already got a section for "seeking information on polygamy" and places people can post their personal situations. And as I said above, I don't think people really notice where a thread is when they're reading it, so it's hard to expect people to behave one way in one section and not in others, they'll just forget.
For instance, the ladies only and gentlemen only sections used to be open to everyone, but we just asked people to not post in the wrong one. People just made too many honest mistakes and posted in the wrong threads so often, that eventually I set it up as it is now, with people having to define their gender and then getting access only to one or the other. It just made it a lot easier that way.
In the same way, a bright label in the headline of a thread would be a lot more noticeable for posters than a separate section.
We could make a thread prefix "Real Life" or something like that, for people to use when asking for real-world advice (or for mods to apply as appropriate), with everyone expected to be particularly compassionate in such threads.
While I like the idea of a "meat" label.. I'm not sure it's the best one as many Christians may not even understand the milk/meat concept. It was awhile before I understood, really understood what that meant in a theological sense and I was in a very 'by the Bible' kind of group to start with. No I'm not trying to nitpick here just putting out there that Christians are at all levels including understanding the different levels of understanding that can be reached. Now, I'm going to assume some understanding of PM is hopefully going to allude to a deeper understanding of Biblical theology but I keep seeing where one spouse does and the other doesn't and this is often the cause of dispute.
Not by the end, @rockfox, but (a) I honestly didn't glean that as an obvious point from her initial post -- at least not that it was primarily and definitely not that it was solely about her husband, and (b) I would assert that, had a number of us, including you, not pushed her to self-disclose what was really going on with her, she probably never would have made it obvious -- and then all that would have been accomplished would have been a complete laced-with-her-misplaced-invective waste of time.
This is no feminist/Sensitive New Age Guy orientation coming from me. As a former psychotherapist (and probably my biggest reason for being former is that I considered it out of integrity to associate with a career endeavor that is so frequently one that absorbs precious dollars with so little return), I must admit that I abhor those who need help who waste their time and ours pointing fingers in the wrong direction and create drama where none is necessary. You and I, I believe, would entirely agree that our culture has become one in which victimhood is so thoroughly rewarded that people seek out excuses for seeing themselves as having been victimized in order to get a pass on everything.
If someone needs help and wants others to provide that help, the very least that helpers should expect is that the helpee be willing to make a request for help. A helpee certainly shouldn't berate the helpers or expect the helpers to guess what f***ing kind of help s/he needs (or, worse yet, berate the helpers for not guessing well). So I hope you're not putting it back on me when you ask if I was surprised, because that's just falling into the trap of thinking helpers always have to coddle those they help. I'll admit this, in fact: I'm a bit disgusted when someone passive-aggressively dances all around the real issue, then finally gets to the point in a way that seems to put everyone else in a position of having to feel guilty that they didn't pony up to the table from the very beginning with overwhelming sympathy. That engenders a gag reflex in me, which is why I asserted that I wasn't about to apologize.
If you or anyone else concludes from this or any other isolated incident that I'm an insensitive bastard or that I'm incapable of providing highly useful assistance, I assert with great confidence that you would be wrong. I actually spend a very significant amount of my time assisting others with transforming their lives, but I think that is probably part of why I resent a dynamic that has taken hold in our culture in which the people who help others are made to feel inadequate because they supposedly didn't help in the right manner. Furthermore, most of the time, sympathy is the last thing people need, because it only enables them to stay stuck right where they are. As M. Scott Peck so deftly began The Road Less Traveled, "Life is difficult," so we aren't obligated to make life easier for the lazy or for those who don't want to face up to the fact that they've been bringing their own misery on themselves. That which is rewarded will be repeated, so feeling sorry for such folks only ensures that whatever they're going through will be perpetuated; sympathy's only true advantage is to those who make themselves feel better for offering it. [Anyone who doubts this would benefit from looking into Everett Shostrom’s Three Approaches to Therapy (known better within social services circles as The Gloria Films), in which three mega-gods of psychotherapy are filmed working with the same woman. The only one who was of any assistance was the one who told her what she didn't want to hear and expected her to do something about her problems; Gloria's daughter subsequently wrote a book in which she asserted that one of the others clearly made things permanently worse for her mother -- and Carl Rogers, if you're familiar with Mr. What-I-Hear-You-Saying, was simply useless. (I saw him speak many years later, by which time he was adamantly denouncing the style of therapy that bears his name.)]
Keith
P.S. I'll get to your tendency to see feminist talking points lurking around every corner in another post. But please be forewarned: everything I say will be sung to the tune of, "Rockfox is getting better every day!" I do very much enjoy watching you hone your rhetorical skills -- and find that my respect for you only tends to grow as time goes on.
I think labeling certain threads as 'Meat' is an excellent step in the right direction, Samuel, so, yes, it looks like a good tool. And I'm grateful for it, but will it stop people from thinking they have to tiptoe around the people who choose to go there or even start their own 'Meat' threads who aren't really ready for the rough and tumble? I sincerely don't have a definitive answer to these questions, so I'm not just asking them rhetorically, even though I suspect just having the label isn't going to make much difference in the long run.
I'm still concerned about two different categories of folks who might need an initial shield from the 'Meat' sections:
- Those who start off here inadequately equipped to handle directness; and
- Those single women that we definitely don't want to run off who might be interested in marrying into plural families.
I'm all for a more proactive approach, because if someone is going to be offended by being started off with 'Milk,' they're probably not going to be very useful or amenable to being supported around here, anyway. And those who will become valuable members are going to predominantly be inspired by the structure to rise to the occasion so they can accomplish getting into the 'Meat.'
Don't forget, @rockfox, that the following is being sent to you with Peace and Love . . .
:Repeating what I've mentioned here and in the Poly Isn't For Everyone thread:
Unsuitable male misbehavior:
- Indiscriminately contacting every single woman who appears with flirtatious private messages.
- Indicating that manhood is defined by one's number of progeny.
- Asserting that polygamy can legitimately be forced on a wife in this day and age.
- Asserting that Scripture somehow gives a man permanent control over a woman (or her subsequent husband) even after she leaves him.
- Asserting that it's OK to beat one's wife without making it clear that one is kidding or exaggerating.
- Any circling of the wagons about any of the above (or about any other unsuitable male misbehaviors that I haven't referenced), whether that takes the form of being openly supportive of such statements, making excuses about such statements, or criticizing anyone who confronts a man who exhibits any of the above.
- Because it discourages single women from participating in Biblical Families.
- Because it further discourages single women who might approach particular men from sticking around long enough to do so or from believing they will be safe to do so.
- Because indiscriminately pursuing every female treats each of those females as if there is nothing special about her other than that she has a vagina that isn't taken already by someone else; it's a despicable form of disrespect that none of us would wish on our mothers, sisters or daughters, not to mention that it's also a form of self-disrespect.
- Because measuring one's manhood by his impregnation rate is profoundly self-disrespectful of ourselves as men, failing to acknowledge the myriad of ways in which we cover, provide, innovate, create and sacrifice.
- Because circling the wagons gives the impression (and first impressions are most important in this regard) that, as a group, Biblical Families promotes such unsuitable male misbehavior.
- Because feminism has little to do with why the above 6 categories of behavior are appropriately labeled as unsuitable male misbehavior. I would contest that they were ever acceptable male behavior, but even if they hypothetically were prior to then, they were certainly ruled out as a result of Christ's new encapsulating Golden-Rule Second Commandment: "Love everyone with whom you associate, as you would be loved yourself."
Last edited:
Ok I like that functionality and it looks neat. Though I'm not sure meat and milk are quite the right labels. It does work well for identifying meaty theological 'debates'. But the most problematic scenerio (struggling woman looking for advice) is one of a milky poster that requires responses from experienced (meaty) commentors; so it's a combination of both meat and milk. I like the Real Life label, that probably encapsulates it.
We just need suitable introductory FAQ to initiate people on these labels.
Maybe a numerical system where the maximum amount of autism allowed in a conversation is pre-quantified.
If you don't want me able to post just say so
Well, kudos to you for turning your back on an industry that often does more harm then good.
I'm not asking you to apologize, I'm just surprised it wasn't obvious to you from the start; women often communicate through the subtext, not the literal. Why get mad at them for that? It's just their nature. When a woman comes here complaining 'about men' and lashing out at men in general it's very often about a specific man. Even her avatar name screamed what it was all really about.
Well some of those are clearly problems, some are absurd imaginations, some depend greatly upon how you define the words, some depend on ones priorities and some I just disagree with your objection.
Which is to say, I don't like your list and it's far from an obvious and good list of misbehavior. Oh, and this is an absurd statement...
I'm not asking you to apologize, I'm just surprised it wasn't obvious to you from the start; women often communicate through the subtext, not the literal. Why get mad at them for that? It's just their nature. When a woman comes here complaining 'about men' and lashing out at men in general it's very often about a specific man. Even her avatar name screamed what it was all really about.
Well some of those are clearly problems, some are absurd imaginations, some depend greatly upon how you define the words, some depend on ones priorities and some I just disagree with your objection.
Which is to say, I don't like your list and it's far from an obvious and good list of misbehavior. Oh, and this is an absurd statement...
Actually, I've been thinking about this, and I agree with you. To voice it as an absolute with the word 'nothing' was absurd, which is why I have amended it to read . . .
Here's also where I wouldn't want all this to go: I don't want men to entirely refrain from voicing points of view that may be properly labeled misbehavior, nor (especially) do I want the rest of us to feel compelled to jump all over any man who may misbehave, because that could result in a stifling of discussion that would lead to important opportunities for growth being prevented through walking on eggshells. I do not want men to walk around worrying about whether they're complying with the postmodernist progressive politically-correct reality-inverting dogma.
At the same time, I continue to consider it collective misbehavior if a man asserts that it's OK to beat one's wife, he gets 9 likes from various men, and not one among us questions such an assertion -- because that leads to women on here (especially new ones) to very reasonably get the impression that entering into a Biblical Family or staying in one is the equivalent of requesting to be beat or otherwise abused. Hear me clearly: I'm not talking about voluntary participation in a marital system within which the woman submits to being spanked for misbehavior; I'm talking about situations in which a woman's only outlet for escaping being beaten (as distinct from spanked) or being purposefully verbally beaten down is to leave the marriage -- especially when a number of prominent men in her/our community are high-fiving her husband (perhaps this is the 1 instances to which you referred in a previous post).
Thank you.
I would only quibble with your characterization of psychotherapy by asserting that it more often than not does more harm that good.
I won't argue against the proposition that women often communicate through the subtext, but I will challenge that it is "just their nature." It is most definitely much more significantly a result of cultural programming and thus not based on their nature. They do it because they're taught to do it and because they learn they can get away with it. Then on top of that they complain about being subject to the ramifications of communicating covertly, wanting the rewards but not the punishments (go back and read the trajectory of her posts). It's a child's strategy, one that should be jettisoned as an adult, and we should think more of our women than to excuse them for doing it. So I pretty much refuse to feed into it -- and that's what happens when we dance around whatever indirect nonsense they're providing and then sheepishly express sympathy when they shift to guilt-tripping us for not properly responding to the information they hid from us.
And this is not just something women do. They do it more than men do, because they get culturally encouraged to and excused for doing so, but this is one area in which we'll probably agree (at least, I hope): feminism is now encouraging boys to grow up doing the same thing, and it's becoming increasingly common among young male adults. Writ large, we see this a lot in leftist protests: something happened to a man when he was a boy; e.g., he was coddled instead of being taught to learn how to bear up under the hardship, and now he can be found carrying a placard about how Trump and all Republicans supposedly want to imprison and torture all gays, and after extensive interviewing from a reporter eventually discloses that he was taunted by an authority figure 15 years earlier for liking boys better than girls. It's the same dynamic. Instead of just accepting his sexual orientation, including whatever ways in which it benefits him along with the fact that many people won't approve, he projects the slight of one or a few onto some significant chunk of society, which justifies his offense at not being sufficiently comforted for whatever his real upset it.
And it's disrespectful to women in general to assume that all of them are working under the strategy of having a hidden agenda the nature of which we have to guess. If we're already guessing, we're going to tag women who are really just talking about an issue with being poor, pitiful victims who can't even get to the point. I know I'm not raising my daughters to see themselves as victims, and I hope you aren't, either.
@FollowingHim
Do you have any data about the posting rates per day/week or month as compared with previous years?
Do you have any data about the posting rates per day/week or month as compared with previous years?
I like "meat" because it's only four letters, so doesn't crowd out the title, and communicates a lot in that tiny space. But I agree that
How about using just three labels (keeping it really simple and easy to understand):
- Real Life: Posts calling for assistance with issues in real life. Everyone is expected to be careful to be especially compassionate.
- Meat: Posts that dive into narrow theological matters, or theoretical questions, in a way that could give the wrong impression about the overall views or attitudes of individuals or the ministry if they were considered out of context. It is NOT an excuse to be mean, rather it is a warning to readers that just because Bob says in this narrow context "since you ask, I agree the Bible doesn't technically forbid a man from spanking his wife", does NOT mean that Bob or the ministry would recommend it if discussing a real life scenario.
- General: Same as no label. Means nothing, but gives people who really wanted to use a label a label they can use, that doesn't result in the thread being mislabelled as "Real Life" or "Meat" when it really didn't need to be.
I agree, this is well stated. This sort of thing is a problem.
Are you sure you didn't just find the label on your door scared away the women too much, so needed to be dispensed with if you were to have any hope of becoming a successful polygamist?
Last edited:
Yes, I most certainly do. This is the monthly number of comments on the public forum, and the monthly number of private conversation messages, going right back to June 2016 (as far as the stats I have go for). The first and last months are lower as they're incomplete.
The "Users active" value really means "number of visits to the forum", it does not actually track individual users. See definition below. Again, number of visits is growing month on month.
