Agreed, and I suspect that I'm joined by every man engaged in this discussion when I agree with Megan that men should aspire to demonstrate actions that command honor, respect and authority rather than making demanding appeals to receive accolades of honor and respect without first inspiring them.
No one is challenging the fact that men are called (by Scripture --
and by each other) to earn respect.
What
is being challenged is the perception that it might be a woman's place to arbitrate whether men are meeting their marks or not -- or thus whether it's a woman's place to excuse herself from submission because she judges her man worthy of it. What's therefore also being challenged is that men who don't receive a stamp of approval from women don't have
authority. We
do in fact have
authority. It's granted to us by Scripture; it's granted to us by our physiology; it's granted to us by our Creator-intended tendencies to innovate, organize and maintain the world, and it's granted to us by our predisposition to lead. It's not a woman's place to challenge this, because as hypergamous as women are (always wanting more than they deserve) it's inescapable that, for every man who isn't Mr. Perfect or Prince Charming or even just an Average Joe, there is a female counterpart who is miles from being Miss America -- and what
is a woman's place is to challenge other
women to be better
women, which is what you're pointing to here:
As am I. Megan is a tremendous woman, and I would unreservedly declare that any man should consider himself
honored were Megan to marry him; she sets examples almost across the board that we should all be in awe of. Women inspiring women is appropriate; women declaring large swaths of men unworthy of submissive wives, however, is not. Paul said, "Wives, submit to your husbands," and it is well and good for women to challenge other
women to better submit. Paul did
not say, "Wives, submit to your husbands after they meet your female standards," any more than he said, "Men, love your wives, but only after they stop being rebellious." [I can guarantee you I've been loving
@Kristin Martin pretty much non-stop since 1987, but she didn't even begin to submit until 2 years ago.]
Not one voice has been raised to silence
@MeganC from providing women with the lessons they "
need to hear." Not one voice has even been raised to silence
@MeganC from voicing her opinions that men aren't entitled to submission or that parents aren't entitled to be honored until they demonstrate that they've earned it -- in fact, I assert that, when it comes to suppression, some voices have come closer to attempting to silence any voice that
challenges what
@MeganC (by the way, close to my best friend in this organization) has had to say on many occasions on this topic. No one has even attempted to
stop her from offering her opinions, but suppression efforts (your own included) ramp up just because Megan is
challenged on her perspective. Are you asserting that Megan should be exempt from criticism? Do you expect that for yourself? And are you implying that women will stop sharing their inspirational stories if women are sometimes criticized for statements they make?
What's the point of women even offering their opinions if they're not going to be subject to criticism?
This is evidence of the degree to which even Biblical Families, much like 'The Church,' is infected with gynocentrism, a cultural framework within which it is verboten to criticize women or promote something women don't like.
False on both counts.
It's not ironic; it's appropriate -- in fact, last I read from her, Megan
welcomes the criticism. First of all, one cannot logically assert that the exhibition of any particular laudable trait, no matter how righteous or godly, transforms every belief of the person possessing that trait to be unassailable, even when the professed beliefs are on the same subject as the laudable trait. We don't grant that to popes, priests or pastors, so those of us who are mere rabble don't get that pass, either. Secondly, while some among us may come close, I have yet to know a woman either in Biblical Families or elsewhere who has
fully submitted herself to her husband. Some come close, and we would do well to listen carefully when they speak on submission or when they offer insight into the female heart and soul, but none of that qualifies them as experts on men, if for no other reason than that, if they're following Scripture, they're almost entirely exempt from having to trouble themselves with achieving competence in the wide array of human skills and capabilities that are well-known to be part and parcel of the male realm. Thirdly, there's an incongruence between asserting the right to be equal participants in a discussion and expecting a woman to receive kid-gloves treatment.
That one sentence attempts to dismissively invalidate the totality of arguments various of us have with
@Megan's assertion. It most certainly is
not a matter of anyone attacking her for asserting that actions speak louder than words. Of
course actions speak louder than words, but no one challenges that; what is being challenged is an effort to elevate the concept of actions speaking louder than words to a height that would justify ignoring Scripture -- or to grant women the power to be the arbiters of when men will be permitted to be leaders. Men start
off owning the right to be leaders based on what they collectively do for women that women could not do for themselves.
So I have a challenge for you.
As tempting as it is -- assuming that your ad hominem attack doesn't apply to me and should thus be ignored -- to just let the stink of this particular paragraph of yours linger as it wafts on the wind, given that your choice is to attributionlessly invalidate some indeterminate amount of men, I challenge you to identify those about whom you're casting aspersions
Who,
@theleastofthese, are
And, if you can, please explain how you have the power to look that deeply into their (our?) hearts. What leads you to assume that those who engage in disagreements here are not also taking action in their own lives? How do you know that engaging in these values-clarifying discussions doesn't actually
enhance the degree to which men will take such action?
Because what I
see in your writing is assigning virtue to Megan's online challenges while assigning vice to men who challenge
her.
[You're new here, so there's no way you'd know this, but this particular conundrum has been addressed multiple times in the past, one in which simultaneous arguments go on about how we men should be easier on the girls and at the same time how it isn't fair to exclude women categorically from rough-and-tumble discussions. This, always with great support from me, has tenuously been resolved in favor of welcoming women into the fray as long as they don't mind a contusion here and there. It's "iron-sharpening-iron," not "iron-featherdusting-doilies," after all.]
It's amazing to me that you would find that amazing. Can we not agree on the fact that, while sharing humanity, men and women are otherwise alien beings to each other?
This, though,
@theleastofthese, is where your assumptions most go wrong.
Please excuse the strong language, but, if this belief is held by most women, it's best described as delusional -- and many feministized men hold that same delusion.
The safety of a woman -- and not of only a woman, but of a man as well -- is most assuredly
not guaranteed by the presence of
an admirable man. Safety is
never guaranteed, but to the extent that it exists,
the safety of women and men is produced by the existence of an overwhelming collective of admirable men. In essence, every 'right' that women consider themselves entitled to is protected by the willingness of men to do the dangerous and difficult work of engaging in that protection. Even the so-called 'right' to kill one's own children is enforced by
men, not by women. Many dangerous people exist in the world, and it is men in the form of the military, the police, the firefighters, the vast amount of EMTs, who protect everyone else. It's a joke that women also perform those functions.
No one wants two female cops showing up at a domestic disturbance, and an even bigger horror than a house fire would be seeing a fire truck pulling up with nothing but women on board.
Which, by the way, leads me to my final point, one I would be remiss if I didn't make. Your paragraph includes dishonesty by (probably unwittingly ignorant) omission:
What you write that follows that is fruit of the poisoned tree, because men are not at
all unfamiliar with the experience of being physically mistreated. Women frequently forget that men are also the victims of male violence, but that itself ignores the real gorilla in the room. The Census Bureau's National Crime Victimization Surveys have consistently indicated (and have been backed up by a plethora of other unbiased studies) that women initiate 70% of physical domestic violence and over 90% of emotional domestic violence. In fact, on average the most violent interpersonal relationships are between lesbians, and gay men have the
lowest instance of domestic violence.
Wouldn't you consider it worthy of challenge if you read men writing that the existence of female-on-male violence in marriages was justification for adding amendments to the Word of the LORD?
