I applaud
@FollowingHim2,
@Foxlily,
@WifeOfHisYouth,
@Lili,
@RainyLondonFog,
@Well loved wife,
@Sonshine,
@1stWife@Home,
@julieb,
@Joleneakamama,
@windblown and
@rejoicinghandmaid for your contributions to this important discussion.
I am a little worried that what we are talking about is a nascent "white knighting", establishing an infantilizing protectorate for women that insulates them from truth and reality. I am completely in agreement with
@PeteR on authority and the respect thereof but I am completely against giving any class of person immunity for their ideas. Truth is absolute and sacrosanct and if an idea can't stand up to harsh criticism then it can't stand up. Women should be completely respected and protected in their sphere but if they want to come out of that sphere then they need to be able to stand on their own two feet, as
@Joleneakamama does so well.
@windblown is an incredibly smart, fierce woman. She could stand up to anyone here intellectually and go toe to toe with you in any debate. She has won against me more than once. She doesn't engage on the men's forum because it's not her sphere, not because she's scared of the men. We don't scare her.
In the Marines Corps we trained with women Marines. We derisively referred to them as WMs. They got to wear the Eagle, Globe and Anchor but they never had to meet the standards the men did. They got longer to accomplish runs. They didn't have to do pull ups. They always ended up in some administrative position. When we could on long field operations they would get taken back to the rear to shower and change their clothes while we would stay out for weeks at a time. They would almost never have to do the long "humps" with full weight. They were never in the infantry or combat arms job fields that we called the "tip of the spear", those areas that epitomized the mission of the Corps and carried the greatest risks and the most hardships. Things are almost certainly different in the other branches of the service but in the Corps those WMs got very little respect and were never counted on. There are very few women who can live up to the standard of the Marines but those that could didn't get the respect they deserved because they were lumped in with the gender normed women who didn't belong.
I freely admit that the old testosterone can get a man's fighting spirit up and an argument can get out of hand or have it's focus shift from the philosophe to the philosopher, but that is a firewall that brings a very important protection. Anyone who cares about the truth should rather have their ideas subjected to that gauntlet than not.
I get offended when y'all WON'T argue with me.
Forgive me if it feels disingenuous to me for ladies to say the only reason they don’t post much on the forums is out of fear that men will attack them, when they have section of the forum where they can post anything they want without any man being able to say a word, and they rarely post there.
I guess what I’m trying to say is, ad hominem attacks shouldn’t be used against anyone, man or woman, but if your fear is that someone might disagree with you, then you probably shouldn’t post. If nobody is allowed to disagree with you, you are the bully.
I have personal experience with ladies who have written me who just don't want to hear "fix yourself first by building your relationship with your Heavenly Father and then pray for your husband." They want him to just change his mind about this awful idea of plural marriage. The funny thing is that Nathan has said many times you are too direct with people, not compassionate enough, when I correspond with ladies.
I've just been lurking on this thread, doing my best to adhere to the request
@FollowingHim made early on that, as men, we allow this to be a mostly female-response-only discussion. Elsewhere I have argued that particular unsuitable male misbehavior should be called out for what it is. I also believe that men should be chivalrous toward women and generally treat them differently from how we treat men. However, that is a lesson I learned in what is now a very different bygone age. In the meantime, as men we have been asked to grant women almost every privilege that was previously reserved mostly for men, but we have been asked to do that without expecting women to take on the
responsibilities that went hand-in-glove with those privileges (the granting of full Marine status being just one of a myriad of examples of how this plays out) while continuing to be stigmatized if we want access to privileges and responsibilities that have until recent times been considered the purview of females.
Therefore, aside from those unsuitable male misbehaviors I identified (which mostly center around promoting or providing tacit support for promoting actually being abusive of women), I consider it unfair for women to expect to be treated with kid gloves if they want to go toe-to-toe in an intellectual discussion. I'm
highly concerned that any woman who truly wants to be part of the Biblical Families community and/or who truly wants to become a second wife in a plural family would be driven away from these forums, and I suspect
@rockfox would agree that I've made that clear recently, but I really have to wonder how
often that happens compared to the number of women who complain about the 'atmosphere' who actually are also
always going to be
opposed to plural marriage, a group that probably includes some women who just
think they want to become second wives.
Being a professional who deals with many different types of people day in and day out, my skin is thicker than it used to be. I've had to learn to let some things roll off. In-your-face name calling or labeling or stereotype accusations based upon one's world view towards another brother or sister in any setting--personal, email, phone, forum, letter, social media, etc. doesn't pass the Litmus Test. These things ought not so to be.
Your post,
@rejoicinghandmaid, contains two truths, but they are somewhat incongruent. On the one hand, it is almost automatic to agree with that no one should make ad hominem attacks, name-call instead of addressing the issue at hand, or make stereotyped accusations that belittle another person's worldview -- here, there or anywhere. However, you point to something else just before that: as a professional, you've had to develop a thicker skin.
@ZecAustin is also addressing this issue of having thicker skin. Here's what I can promise you is part of why men resist being told to tone it down across the board: women are requesting to be on the playing field, but they want the option of keeping their thin skin. Please, women, recognize this: men also didn't start out with thick skin. It is honed through a lifetime of being
required to develop thick skin, and it is not just the men and other boys who require it of us -- probably most of it is inspired by what is expected of us growing up by our mothers and other female authority figures. Discipline may come more from fathers, but what that discipline was enforcing are values that may have originated from our fathers but were interpreted and implemented by our mothers . . . and (mostly female) teachers. I am regularly grateful that I'm not a young man who has grown up recently, because they're getting one witches brew of mixed messages: from "suck it up, cupcake," to "masculinity is toxic."
Personally, I want to be as gentle as a woman wants me to be, not only in forum discussions but in almost every aspect of life, but certain aspects of life simply aren't amenable to being gentle. It's OK with me if some women prefer to avoid the discussions we're now labeling as Meat. To me, that is for them to determine, just as my own wife has thus far determined that she doesn't want to have anything to do with the online portion of Biblical Families. I feel the same way about the military: I don't mind if women choose to avoid military service, but, when they do participate, all that is accomplished by feminizing the standards is diminishing the effectiveness of the endeavor they assert they want to be part of. I also don't mind, for example, if a woman who wants to criticize patriarchy, polygamy or her husband who wants to be a polygamous patriarch comes to Biblical Families to start a thread to assert her views, but I just as thoroughly don't mind if she runs away from Biblical Families altogether after first guilt-tripping thread-participants for failing to recognize that her attacks on polygamy were a covert cry for help because of some still-undisclosed supposed abuse from her husband who isn't here to defend himself. Such behavior wouldn't be tolerated in a junior high debate class, so why would we worry about losing someone who wants to run that kind of a scam with us?
I have this further thought, some of which I'll expand on when I contribute to a couple of now-dormant men's threads on the Myers-Briggs: it turns out from shared M-B test results on this platform that very few of the men who regularly post here qualify for any of the three of sixteen M-B personality categories that are most associated with alpha males. Which makes me shudder to think what kind of blowback we men might be getting if Biblical Families were predominantly populated by
alpha alpha males.
I guess my point is that, while it is always worth self-assessment to see if we're being polite to the women, it's also reasonable to expect that the women who gravitate to Biblical Families and assert that what they're seeking is a strong man who will be their head should expect that the kind of men they'll encounter here will not only have strong opinions but be willing to stand very tall in support of those opinions. If one is looking for diplomacy or Sensitive New Age Guys, perhaps a better place to look for support or for a husband would be Starbucks or Whole Foods.
In the discussion with Jennifer, the men generally believed they were debating with Jennifer and her husband (I'm not going into the specifics of the discussion, that's not the point).
But the other women reading it saw it as "how I'll be treated if I speak my mind and the men disagree". This discussion did not just affect Jennifer. It dissuaded ALL of the ladies from speaking. That was not the intention of the men - but it was the result. Multiple ladies have expressed this to me and Sarah over the months since that discussion, I know very well that this had deep, serious, and wide-ranging impacts well beyond what the men involved intended.
That is a fundamental misreading of the situation. But if we can't talk about it, we can't get to the root causes of where that mistaken perception comes from and the problems will continue.
Samuel, I agree with Rock in this instance. First, as he points out, if we can't talk about something, we can't get to root causes, so it's
essential that this discussion be conducted out in the open, to address both mistaken perceptions
and actual unsuitable behaviors. Rock is right in my opinion: despite the fact that so many women cite the manner in which Jennifer was treated in the "Just an observation" thread as evidence of why they don't speak up or of why they don't participate in the forums, to some extent you have fundamentally misread the situation in that overall discussion. It might seem that I'm about to argue with myself, because I actually generally loved and respected what Jennifer wrote in her original post in the thread, because it reflects my own preference in the typical discussions on forums about submission -- and couldn't wait to read her prescriptions for persuading other women to accept polygyny -- but it's also inescapable that Jennifer threw down the gauntlet from her beginning post in opposition to one of the more prominent viewpoints on female submission held by men on Biblical Families forum threads. By the time those who were engaged in the discussion got to page 12, though, Jennifer was labeling her opponents as making "accusations" about her not being submissive, but that's something of a bait-and-switch tactic. I do realize that negative comments were made that I can't read now due to them having been removed, but Jennifer
started out by stating that she came from a not-to-be-identified significantly different religious perspective (which starts off the discussion inspiring people to wonder on what religious basis they will engage) and detailed her oppositional viewpoints about submission (again, which I personally appreciated), but as soon as one man asked her one question challenging her at-length stated viewpoints, she used it as an occasion to elaborate further on her position -- so one could say she was publicly inviting verbal combat. By definition, her clear intention was to challenge the legitimacy of another way of looking at submission, but when men declared that they thought
she wasn't being submissive, she labeled their statements as accusations. I would assert that, using her definition of 'accusation,' one could very reasonably label her original post as a lengthy 'accusation.'
Isn't the saying, "What's good for the goose is good for the gander?" I'm not saying that we should ignore that women tend to be more sensitive to heated arguments, but it does make it tempting for me to just agree in a blanket sense to the earlier assertions that what the 'offended' women are really running away from is that they were disagreed with. In essence, though, this means that it is imperative for us as a loving community dedicated as
@Asforme&myhouse references in that first questioning post to adhere to Christ's Second Commandment, and in doing so it becomes crucial for us to rigorously distinguish between disagreement and being disagreeable. Clearly, it's inappropriate to be disagreeable, and it's understandable that anyone, much less women, would prefer to avoid people being disagreeable. However, it's no more appropriate to define disagreement as disagreeableness and then use it as an excuse to justify why one flies the coop.
Then I would submit that from this line of thinking follows the idea that all women deserve to be treated harshly by men because all women live in a "men's world"! "They just need to hang their heads, stay out of sight, keep their mouths shut, be the door mats, yada yada! Hmmm---it wouldn't take a whole lot of looking around in this world today to find a whole lot of guys who really do believe and live this exact same philosophy--inside and outside of the church--BTW!
