It's all on you guys to set the tone for your families.
It's our place to follow where you lead. And if you don't lead then it falls to us to do so.
Again, it's all on you.
I would disagree hat if a man fails to lead that it falls to the woman to do so. Of a man fails to lead then the family just doesn’t go anywhere.
I’m sorry, but I’ve seen cases where if the woman hadn’t stepped up the children would have starved.
When a man leaves a void it will be filled in some way, even if it’s the wrong way.
Long-attention-span version:
I almost jumped in right after
@MeganC wrote the above, decided against it due to inability to fully focus at that moment, but you two (
@The Revolting Man and
@steve) filled in the gaps in my ability to address this particular subject matter.
About a decade and a half ago, I embarked on 2-3 years worth of comprehensive reverse-chronology research on the intersections among sex, marriage, family, religion and government. The result of that study was my life's biggest shift in worldview. It also ultimately led me into pursuit of understanding about patriarchy, but that wasn't part of the research project, because I went into it firmly ensconced in an egalitarian position. There's no way for me to know how differently my life would have proceeded had I followed just one of the many rabbit holes presented to me during that research to add patriarchy to my set of imperatives; however, currently, I'm immersed in interpersonal, book and online research related to patriarchy and other aspects of the nature of male/female relationships not covered by the previous research, so it's tempting to imagine that I likely would have failed to see the point in completing my research back into antiquity had I undergone a personal transformation toward patriarchy -- and I'm grateful, therefore, if that's the case, that my journey has ended up proceeding along the path it's followed.
Perhaps the biggest reason for my gratitude is having discovered Lewis Henry Morgan's
Ancient Society, because it's the most thorough historical exploration of kinship available to us. In fact, it's so authoritative that it had to be jettisoned in the 60's and 70's from its position as the primary must-read in the field of Sociology to being banned on almost all university campuses -- because, otherwise, it would have been impossible for the critical theorists, postmodernists and moral relativists to have taken over the academy and hypnotized our culture into, for example, accepting the idea that it's perfectly acceptable for a parent to want to 'support' his or her children in chemically and physically changing their gender.
It's not just The Word that asserts that men are to rule over women; the bulk of legitimately-conducted empirical research in the humanities provides confirmation that men are much more equipped to lead than are women. It's also common sense borne out by the evidence of centuries of the world being organized and improved upon almost entirely by male human beings. Women want to marry strong masculine men, and men want to marry feminine women; such unions produce the vast numbers of progeny in the absence of radical manipulations of government structures. It's just a matter of human nature. Men are men, women are women, and together they want to produce the best possible futures.
I believe Megan effectively expresses this in the holistic totality of her message: it's up to men to lead; it's up to women to follow; when men don't lead, women will make attempts to lead, and, in fact, they will be successful to some degree. Megan didn't just leave it there, though; she closed with,
In the crack between (x) asserting that, when we fail to lead, it falls on the women to do so, and (y) asserting that "it's all on" us, Megan leaves unspoken the consequences resulting from women having to pick up the pieces when male leadership is absent. She doesn't have to delineate all of them. Many women will just let their worlds (and their children) fall apart in the absence of male leadership, but many will step up to the plate; however, they're simply not designed to carry that type of weight. Many women have bravely soldiered on in such circumstances, but we don't have to stretch our imaginations to note how, even when it may look like a woman took the place of her children's father, one or more very significant parenting tasks had to be sacrificed in the effort to keep everything from falling apart altogether. And Megan is right: it's still all on us -- individually and collectively. The fallout of a woman simply being incapable of being a woman
and a man is primarily a negative reflection on the
man who should have been there -- and it's further a reflection on the remaining men who collectively failed to step into the breach, which would have included holding that original man responsible for abandoning his manhood. At the very least, it's typically a matter of failing to simply tell him to his face that
he has failed to be a man.
Steve is right -- when a man leaves a void, it will be filled in some way -- and TRM is also partially right, and I'd reword it thusly: to the degree to which a man fails to lead, then, in the realm of his leadership responsibility (family or elsewhere), those in a position to follow his (now-absent) lead will typically fail to that same degree.
It's not an all-or-nothing proposition. Making it personal, my insistence on egalitarianism until last year didn't entirely eliminate my leadership within my family -- all along I violated my own supposed egalitarian principles because I couldn't stand to see
everything fall apart -- but it did very significantly hamper
everyone in my family. I didn't end up with four lazy, drug-addicted sociopaths as children; I don't even have one who comes close to that kind of characterization, but my failure to assert my headship
did result in unnecessary chaos, fractured connections, a near-complete absence of preparing any of my children about how to operate as good husbands or good wives, and passing along my extended family's tendency to have difficulties in interpersonal relationships. This is, as Megan so succinctly put it,
on me. Every bit of it is on me. And, yes, I've made a significant shift in the past year or so, but that doesn't stop the fact that I'll likely watch numerous train wrecks in the lives of my adult children during the remainder of my days -- train wrecks for which I will know I bear responsibility.
