A. Sound bite version: cue up Aerosmith's "Dream On" . . .
B. Director's Cut version:
Good evening,
@Bartato. First of all, thank you for your compliments. I appreciate them and would say I was humbled by them if I weren't so arrogant.
I am, though, very sincerely flattered.
I do, though, still have to point out that you've engaged in a little bit of a straw man argument, because the genesis of the back-and-forth you joined in on was my posting a Kevin Samuels video that
@NickF (quite understandably) didn't want to have to watch all the way through, so he asked me to encapsulate the message I intended to share from the video. Thus, taking 2+ hours of various verbal wanderings and pointed interviews contained within, sorting through it to the heart of the matter related to this thread, and creating a two sentence summation in order to encapsulate, I came up with the above two sentences intended to, um, encapsulate the particular messages of the context of one section of Mr. Samuels's video.
You point out that you
broadly agree with them, as do I, but if you'd asked me if I agree that "
virtually all women over eighteen have had dozens of sexual partners," I would have succinctly told you that, not only do
I not agree with that statement, and, while I can't speak for
him, I would seriously doubt that Mr. Samuels would agree with it, either, because neither of us asserted 'all' or even 'virtually all.'
Of course not
all women have had dozens of partners. In my encapsulation, which, due to being an attempt to provide sound bites for those insufficiently interested in all the nuance, caveats and exceptions, was necessarily devoid of the potential to additionally encapsulate comprehensive truth, what I asserted was that Mr. Samuels was attempting to get across the message that "
Men are insane these days if they think they can find any women over the age of 18 who haven't already had dozens of partners," and, in fact, I stand by that assertion -- as well as agree with it. Of course, to use a derivation of the word 'insanity' makes me guilty of a small degree of hyperbole, but, despite your effective demonstration that some (very small) number of females do make it all the way through their 20's with their virginity intact, this is so rare these days as to be like finding a needle in a haystack -- and if one wants to spend one's life hunting for needles in haystacks instead of being married, fine, but it's pretty close to insanity to think one will end up with a wind-driven-snow wife given how many options such young women have. I married the wife of my youth 45 years ago, at 33 years of age married my current wife 35 years ago, and you were dating over 2 decades ago. What I can assure you of is that the virginity pyramid that was in existence back when I was young was already well into the process of being turned on its head by the time you and your wife were getting married -- and probably the only reason
I was aware of that in the late 1990s was because I was running university dormitories, but I assure you that, by 1999, girls were already more sexually active than boys (well, a small number of boys were the most sexually active, but they were active with the vast majority of girls -- I can point to many aspects of evidence of this, but let's start with the fact that, by then, it had become decidedly uncool on college campuses for girls to have steady boyfriends -- and someday I can recount the story about how, at the University of Alaska Anchorage, I was prohibited from hiring a young woman as a Resident Assistant because she openly identified herself as a Christian, which was specifically unwelcome because of the fear that she might shame other 'women' about their sexual lifestyles).
While back in the 1960's a significant portion of females remained virgins until at least close to marriage or into their late 20's, now the majority deflower themselves before their quinceaneros -- whereas back then the majority of boys went all the way before reaching adulthood, and now about a quarter of them don't do so until after they're 30 -- if ever.
Thus, my characterization of it being insane for men to think they can find women over the age of 18 who haven't already had dozens of partners. It isn't that they don't exist; it's that they're tremendously rare compared to the number of men who hope to find and marry them. Those 25% of 30-year-old male virgins are one big hunk of the competition for such female rarities, and then add the more-buff and likely more-successful-in-other-aspects-of-life younger men with whom they're competing, on top of all the established 30-to-55-year-old men still commanding potentially-successful attention from relatively-innocent young things. Not to be boring as all get out, but this is one of those instances of it involving better odds to shoot for winning the Mega Millions lottery. Yes, you
can find inexperienced or relatively-inexperienced young females these days, but they're few and far between . . .
. . . but here you're making one side of a good-point coin argument: I have to admit that, because of my association with Biblical Families (in combination with the fact that I increasingly see pursuit of plural marriage through the eyes of other men more than in the context of believing it's going to be an option for me), I tend to make my observations related to finding mates in the context of what most men seeking polygyny are looking for. I've had countless private conversations with men about personal mating preferences, as well as a healthy collection of late-night-at-retreats group male discussions along the same lines, so it has to be said that it's a very rare man even among we Bible Thumpers that isn't pretty durn picky about how we want our wives to look. So, sure, maybe those committed to pursuing polygyny should train their attention on shy (less than half of all females), introverted (smaller subset still), homeschooled (divide the group by 20), slightly-chubby (at least slightly-chubby), Jesus-loving young women (not even all the homely homeschooled chicks are fully enamored of being members of the Body of Christ) -- but no matter how idealistic we want to get about what standards men
should have about physical beauty, it's still going to be a rare man even among a group such as this with its high piety quotient who will want to set aside the desire for, if not the "smoking hot chicks," at least a better-than-ourselves-looking one.
After all, this is the nature with which our Creator endowed us -- to seek sensual beauty -- which is compounded by the baseline truth that those men who seek polygyny on average have higher-than-average sex drives that propel the possessors of those drives to mate with women who will produce the best-looking children on top of inspiring the most arousal.
Don't make the mistake of thinking I'm asserting that virtually no men will be the exception to this rule; there are definitely some among us who have demonstrated their willingness to be those exceptions, but there is still this: Kevin Samuels talks about the ways in which a woman's body count (number of previous lovers) affects her desirability. Well, let's look at another type of body count closer to home: anyone who wants to can go over to sisterwives.com and discover the number of accepted friend requests any given female profile displays, complete with the avatar photos of those 'friends;' it's not a measure of previous sexual partners, but it's certainly a pretty good indication of how many people would like to
become future partners -- and there's a pretty high correlation between generally-accepted good-looks-and-physical-fitness and the number of photos underneath, many of which are folks we'd recognize from our organization.
Now I'll turn from refuting to my own challenging.
I
increasingly reject that there aren't enough quality believing men to go around, perhaps even if what you meant to assert was that this is the case if monogamy is universally enforced. I'm tired of us men bowing to the feminist trope that men aren't measuring up, and it's even more insidious within an organization like this than it is out in the general male populace. Women aren't some extra-worldly class of creatures innocently entitled to male perfection. The men who are available are of at least as high a quality as the women who are available -- and the reversal of the virginity pyramid is just one piece of evidence. Females continue to mature earlier than males, but the fact that men are willing participants in the general female desire for their marital partners to be older than them turns that into a moot point. Add to that the fact that it's clearly the case that, at this stage of cultural evolution, the number of men willing to take on more than one wife far outstrips the number of women willing to be second wives or the number of first wives willing to refrain from sabotaging plural marriage; therefore, it's a canard that there aren't enough male believers to go around. Women simply don't outnumber men in regard to having relationships with Yah or Yeshua.
Most leftover women remain uncovered either because first wives won't share or because potential second wives won't share, all in the context of women generally failing to recognize that being willing to accept the downside of sharing is a small price to pay for the complete package that comes along with what men are expected to provide for their women.
And, lastly, I'm decreasingly willing to let women off the hook by blaming it on the erroneous monogamy-only teaching. If women don't want to die lonely or callously look the other way as other women die lonely, then they need to get over themselves about their collective worship of social approval. When it comes down to it, the vast percentage of the teaching of monogamy-only is being done by (a)
women and (b) the men who work
predominantly for women in the pulpits (priests and pastors).
Just look around at all the men we know here in this organization and elsewhere who are willing to cover more than one woman -- and how much effort most have put into
unsuccessfully seeking additional wives. I assert that it's about time that we stop letting the women blame us for failing to cover them when their demands are so thoroughly unreasonable, not to mention compounded by being unmatched by any willingness on their part to demonstrate that they're
worthy of having
any man all to themselves -- much less of justifying feeling entitled to a man who makes every effort to rise to the challenge of seeking approval from his Creator.
As each day goes by, I only become increasingly empathetic to the men who are giving up on finding one woman willing to be a true helpmeet, much less seeking two or more.
Samuels is spot-on: what is obviously left to us if we want to create a long-term solution is not so much going through spiritual makeovers ourselves but to start ensuring that we and everyone we know are raising our daughters so they will be prepared to be good wives. Collectively, our culture has been an abysmal failure at this over the past several decades, and if we don't turn that around on top of teaching our sons to have backbones, the rest is likely to become a moot point.
