Despite the relentless proclamation of female superiority at present, I believe men and women to be essentially equal, both possessed of foibles characteristic to their gender; the masculine abuse of sexuality tending in the direction of rape, the female toward prostitution. These, however, are the grosser perversions of human sexuality, and there are all sorts of unhealthy attitudes and practices between these two extremes; but human sexuality itself is blessed of God. It is a temporal virtue; we are told in the Fathers that sexuality exists because of God's foreknowledge of Man's fall, that it is a provision for Man in his fallen condition, and even that the close association between the procreative and urinary organs are an indication that sexuality comes of the corruption of mortal life. Nevertheless, it is a provision, and almost a necessity; it is very difficult for most to turn away from the yearning for a sexual relationship even to pursue a higher virtue, for the pleasure associated with it, even in its most corrupted forms, is very intense and poignant. Therefore it must be guarded by discipline from taking over and dominating the life of a human creature. Because of the pleasure associated with it, Modernity elevates sexuality to the very pinnacle of priority, and aggressively promotes a sexuality that is unfettered and insatiable, but it is Pleasure that Modernity worships; it has very little use for fecundity or any other aspect of sexuality. If it did take these things seriously, it would produce inhibitions in its singleminded pursuit of pleasure. The Paganisms of the past did seriously worship sexuality, and so set bounds on it (though they were inconstant observers of these proprieties). True Christianity, though, does not worship sexuality; fecundity is for a purpose higher than itself, and must be directed toward those ends to be truly good. Consequently, it is set in an environment structured to promote these purposes.
Marriage is the form of discipline sanctioned by God for governing the passion of sexuality. In explaining these things to my daughter when she was on the eve of Young Womanhood, I compared marriage to a fireplace, which is the only safe place in the house to build a fire; if you elect to build it in the middle of the living room floor, it will likely spread uncontrollably, reducing the entire house to ruin, and possibly even involving the neighbors in the catastrophe. Marriage is the only way I can truly love my neighbor in the context of sexuality; apart from it, the fires of my lust will spread perpetual grief in my community. In marriage a man and woman moderate each other's characteristics, bringing one another closer to balance.
What is marriage, essentially (apart from the sacramental aspect introduced by Christianity)? It is the recognition by a human community of the relationship between a man and a woman, and a public sanction of this relationship. In this light, it is apparent that what most modern people practice is not marriage, but a kind of conventionalised fornication, because we're not asking anyone's permission for anything; marriage is no longer an expression of obedience, but of self-will. In the past it seems like marriage generally worked; in our time, though, we seem to be in a condition in which marriage generally does not work, even if the couple, for whatever reason, never does actually separate. This was brought to my attention when I was attending an Evangelical church in Denver; I could remember (I'm such an old fogey) a time when married couples seemed like a single entity. Though there were still older couples in the church where that seemed to be the case, most of the married couples in our community seemed more like loosely associated individuals, each with their diverse interests and activities, with a broad demilitarized zone between them of issues that they realized couldn't be approached without conflict. This was even in couples which would generally be characterized as having a "happy" marriage. Every once in a while, the equilibrium a couple had maintained for years would fall apart, almost always resulting in the termination of the relationship. It seems like we should be looking to older marriages for information on how to heal contemporary marriage; why could they survive anything when we can survive nothing?
Perhaps it is really so that marriage has a particular structure which makes it work, like any other aspect of reality, and to conform to that structure produces a working arrangement, and to depart from it results in friction, the overheating of the components, and the resulting breakdown of the arrangement. I think especially of the imagery of the husband as the head of the family; I know lots of women bristle when that is referred to, but why does everyone need to be a head? This can arise only out of the perception that the head is the only important thing, assisted mightily by the fact that we all really want to be in control. It shouldn't be a threat to female dignity to recognize the man as the head of the family, so long as it is clear that she is the heart of the family. The Family has traditionally been viewed as a corporate unity. A body needs a head and a heart, but it does not need two heads or two hearts, neither are they interchangeable; each part must function where and how it was meant to, or the integrity of the system breaks down. A favorite mantra of the Feminists of the last generation was "Biology is not destiny". Excuse me; for a human creature, biology is destiny. To affirm the contrary is simply to say "I do not have to be what I was created to be"; at the extreme edge of this attitude toward life are those who hate their own gender, and either act out sexual roles appropriate to the opposite sex in one way or another, or even, with the aid of modern surgical technology, seek to physically alter their gender.
An image of the Family that has helped me in thinking about the issue is that of a wheel; the Father being the rim of the wheel, built to handle the shock of contact with the world's rough exterior, the Mother being the hub of the wheel, possessed of a different kind of toughness, which absorbs the stresses generated by the operation of the wheel, and children the spokes which bind them together. Obviously the hub must be in the center to function, and in order to function well, it has to be a real piece of work. It is clear to me that a woman is a more complicated piece of equipment than a man; this does not confer superiority either (modern people being always ready to assume that when you are saying that two things are different you are saying one of them is superior), for a thing need be only as complex as it needs to be to perform the function for which it was designed (excessive ornamentation might interfere with the flight of an arrow). Referring to the analogy of the fireplace, in another way the Mother herself is the fire at the center of the home, the source of warmth and comfort. Femininity is a vital energy, badly needed in our homes and communities; I think the social fabric of communities has begun to decay since women's flight (or, in many cases, forced march) to the workplace. There is hollowness in the community since women have abandoned the home; the one who formerly tended the domestic fire is gone, and the convivial glow of communal life has gone out as well.
Another necessary thing for the integrity of the family is that all its components be moving in the same direction; this, it seems to me, is the primary way in which families in past and present differ in their observable operation. When man was the breadwinner and woman the homemaker, their tasks were different, but their goal was the same; they were both working on the same project. Now, the tasks are the same, i.e., to bring in a bit of income by working for someone else, and come home tired in the evening to try and pull together the neglected and disordered strands of domestic life, (now largely consigned to weekends), but their careers pull them in different directions, producing many conflicts of interest, and the children are also all going different directions between school and various activities; even those who intend to be stay-at-home mothers end up going in a hundred different directions a day, just trying to ferry everyone to their various social activities. This is not a Family, but a boarding house for detached individuals who happen to be of the same blood. News Bulletin: the "Soccer Mom" is not a traditional mother, just at the opposite pole of the corporatist social economy from the working mother. The assumption that everyone must be perpetually entertained is destructive of family life, for a family is designed to be a working community. More on this theme in my next post (when and wherever that may be).
Here we arrive again at the question of authority. In order for any group of people to move in the same direction, it is necessary for a single hand to be on the tiller. Also, (a small snippet of reality here) all effective social authority is established by force; sad, but true. You simply can't get people to do as they should consistently unless somewhere there is a strong, forceful figure who says, "If you cross this line, there will be painful consequences.". The reason why we still have Police forces and Armies is that we still know this, in the back of our little democratic, egalitarian, anarchistic minds whenever it comes to a question of an authority we believe really must be preserved (such as the idea that strangers shouldn't be permitted to sack my house). Now, as a Christian I believe that somewhere in the insanely complicated workings of the Universe, there is reason behind everything. I believe the reason Men are made larger and stronger than Women, and Parents larger and stronger than Children, is that this is a conference of physical force to bolster the natural authority dictated by God for the ordering of fallen human society. Obviously, large measures of injustice and pain have sprung out of this arrangement, just as they do from the exercise of all earthly authority; injustice and pain are the fruit we elected to eat as our daily bread when we tasted the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Obviously, the more godly a couple becomes, the less onerous is this authority; the more obedient the wife, the more responsible the husband, the more gentle, and almost invisible become the bonds of authority. I cannot understand why any woman would surrender to me the intimacy of her body if she felt she couldn't trust me not to tyrannize over her.
When I say that a Wife is under authority I do not take it to mean that she is a child, and not an equal partner. A woman has her characteristic insights and influences necessary for the health of the Family; a woman under tyranny is one unable to do her part in the functioning of the God-given entity of the Family. In Modernity, we labor under mistaken ideas of authority (well, we labor under mistaken ideas of almost everything). The only possibilities present to us seem to be Tyranny and Anarchy, but classical philosophy knew both of these to be aberrations of authority, not examples of the good exercise of authority. Before the Modern period, the idea of good monarchical government (examples of perfect goodness being rare to come by in History) was of King ruling in Council; this Council was not a modern Parliament which abrogated kingly authority, but an assembly of wise men who used their talents to bolster and uphold kingly authority by their sage advice. It was understood that a king is probably not the wisest man in the kingdom, and so for a king to habitually disregarded the advice of his council would likely lead his kingdom to ruin. So in the Family; a man disregards his wife at his peril. Many foolish men have been saved from ruin because they heeded the council of their wives; does this mean that the wife should become the authority if the husband is foolish? Any medieval person would tell you what results if a Council rebels against the King because he does not follow their advice; years of social disorder and bloodshed. Obviously, something to be considered in only the most extreme circumstances.
Both Masculinity and Femininity have their specific powers. A good father strengthens the character of his children; a good mother soothes her children, reconciling them to their duty. A bad father alienates his children; a bad mother spoils her children. Here is a long-standing argument. At a church I used to attend, some of the ladies, when disagreements arose on how to handle the children, would accuse me of suffering from "Testosterone Poisoning" (that favorite diagnosis of Feminists). I, in turn, would shoot back, "Motherhood is a Sinful Passion". Well, there we have the conflict in its essence. It is possible for men to let their characteristic reactions run away with them; Motherhood is a passion, and it takes not very much of a push to turn it into a sinful one. Both Men and Women need each other to moderate the characteristics of their gender, and they need to be held together in a stable relationship to give one the chance to act on the other. My maternal grandparents were very different people; my grandmother was a very vociferous woman, who would loudly and often voice her opinions. My grandfather was a taciturn individual, accustomed to uttering about five sentences a day. My grandmother had a lot to say about every issue, but when my grandfather finally said "This is what we're going to do, and that's the end of it" my grandmother would accept this. Women need to actively advocate their viewpoints, and they have; women in the past were not the brow-beaten, downtrodden caricatures presented to us by Feminists, but at the end of the day, someone has to make a decision, or there will be no peace. I think if my grandmother were a woman of our generation, she would have made herself and everyone else miserable by ceaselessly clamoring for her own way; because she had the good fortune to be born before the revolution, she was able to live a relatively happy and productive life. There are, of course, also men whose character is stabilised by their wives. There is this difference; I believe Men are somewhat prone to be influenced by Women. After the initial infatuation, I do not believe the same can be said of women generally; an "equal" relationship between the sexes is dominated by the woman, nine times out of ten. There are people I know who illustrate this perfectly; she rules the husband, the kids rule her, and the result is perpetual chaos. All my experience tells me that a Woman must be the moderating, not the controlling influence, or there will be no moderation, and the influence of the masculine gender, just as badly needed as that of the female, will be lost. The energies of femininity are too fierce to be permitted to rage uncontrollably; if the Mother of the family is the fire, the Husband is the fireplace. If properly contained, the whole family may draw close to the warmth of maternal love, nurtured by the feminine sensitivity and care for those she loves; if not, everyone gets burned. Only in the Insect World is the Female made larger and stronger than the Male, and the entomological romance typically ends with the male being devoured by the female; there are a lot of Insect marriages in our time.
I think we should make some effort to remember exactly what are the problems of sexual fulfillment in the course of nature. First of all, the idea that the order of society reflects Patriarchal domination is sheer, raving lunacy; just look what kind of order you get when men are left to themselves. That's right, male oriented society is just a glorified hunting camp. Once this is understood, it becomes obvious that ordered society is a response to the needs of women; for order to exist in society, it is not only necessary for men to make peace among themselves, it is necessary to make peace with the women, a much more arduous task.
What are the needs of the normal man and woman? The needs of the man, it appears to me, are simple; he requires various diversions, male comrades to share it with, and sexual/romantic encounters with women. These can be brief; a few evenings at home, and he can gallop back to the hunt, fully satisfied. The needs of women are more complicated, and harder to satisfy; for one thing, she needs for men to be something beyond their superficial nature. She needs to access and call forth a deeper nature in men that usually will not emerge independently, at least not until later life; she needs for him to be a husband and father. The problem is that it is perfectly possible for most men to meet their needs by a series of unentangling romantic encounters; a man must be seduced into domesticity, if he is not socially trained for it. This is something the women of the past knew that present-day women have forgotten, or have rebelled against; in our utopian mindset, we tend to think that everything ought to happen as we think it should, or that there should be some simple social adjustment that will make everything work. Welcome back to Reality, folks! It really isn't working. I read that in Japan, in particular, large numbers of men do not wish to marry, because Japanese women have abandoned traditional roles; it is hard enough to get your normal young man to give up his independence even when it means having a nice home, a "girl to come home to", and a variety of domestic comforts. When marriage typically means having a wife that you see mainly on weekends, housekeeping chores when your day at work is done and a woman to insist that you do them, plus a house full of noisy, uncontrolled children at all times, then marriage can begin to seem like selling yourself into perpetual slavery on singularly unattractive terms.
When the family presented itself to the world as a united front, the man was seen as the public representation of that unity, and husband and wife were bound together by economic necessity. I'm not quite sure we are better off with these bonds being loosed; bonds, of course, by their nature are confining, but before loosing any bond, it seems one should examine exactly what it is that is being bound together. It may be that we are destroying the raft which keeps human society afloat. So, welcome to life in the 21st century; our families are scattered and divided, fewer are electing to marry, and autoerotic and homoerotic alternatives are endlessly promoted. The government will act as the husband of any woman who is tired of her current relationship; a woman I used to know somewhat intimately now proclaims she doesn't even desire a man. The government provides the needs of she and her children, (though not lavishly) and this way she gets to make all the decisions.
Ochlophobe made a point over at his blog about the kinds of relations we have pretty much following and being dictated by patterns of technological development, but alteration in the patterns of social relations appears to me mainly to have been accomplished deliberately as a way of preparing the ground for further socio/political developments; I guess I don't really believe social change has been dictated by technological development so much as that technology has been used as giant earth-moving equipment to sculpt human society into a previsualized pattern.
Marriage today, along with all other aspects of life, has been severely damaged by utopian thinking; this causes us to believe that if there is a non-ideal aspect to something that we should scrap it and try to invent something better. Chesterton characterized many modern innovations as going out in a rainstorm with an umbrella and a watering pot and watering the garden; in other words, creating an artificial device for meeting a social need which doesn't, in fact, accomplish the purpose nearly as well or as completely as the natural processes we are interrupting in order to interpose our devices. Unfortunately, we sometimes don't recognize the deficiencies in our machinery until we have already disabled the natural systems; having induced universal drought, we find that we just can't keep up with our little watering cans. Men and women today, I believe, are in a condition of almost universal frustration; being told by society that they must modify their sexual behavior in response to certain social theories, they have become awkward and conflicted in their responses. Men are told to curb their chivalrous instincts so as not to appear sexist, and so develop in a way in which they really respect women much less than they formerly did; Women, on the other hand, really seem to, in the depths of their being, want a strong man, but they are trained to strenuously resist anything that looks like male domination. So they go from the strong man to a more "sensitive" type, and have only contempt for him because he is not strong.
So men and women rebound off one another in confusion and pain, going through their serial divorces looking for the one that will meet all their needs, but the thing that men and women most need to discover is that they can't completely meet one another's need; there is this tendency in the West, with our influence of romanticism, to build a shrine to human love as the summit of all earthly beatitude, but only God can completely meet our needs, and we are all sons and daughters of God, no matter what our relations to one another on Earth. I think the person who drifts from relationship to relationship never learns this; he says, "This woman didn't make me happy; maybe that one over there will". Much divorce springs from these romantic ideas; when we find our spouse does not make us perfectly happy, we decide the marriage was a mistake, but marriage is not supposed to be a picnic in a field of flowers, but a mission-field, and yes, it does sometimes resemble a battlefield (perhaps the close affinity between the words Marital and Martial isn't entirely accidental).
These things should really be unspoken; sexuality only functions normally when its operations are unconcious, but in our time, under influence of the presumtuous utopianism which regards all conventions as machines that can be pulled apart and reassembled in superior configurations, they do need to be discussed. The true pattern of sexuality as it has been from the beginning must be archaologically unearthed and carefully preserved against the rampaging hordes of barbarism, for it is the primordial and most basic unit of social order, and if it is ripped from us, then night will indeed fall upon our world.
Human sexuality is like a pool in the middle of a desert, which is unfortunately somewhat polluted. There is a sign on the banks of the pool which warns travellers of the pollution, and suggests it might be best to wait until out of the desert to slake one's thirst; however, if one feels he must drink, for whatever reason, instructions are given as to what parts of the pool have the purest water, and suggestions for filtering procedures to remove most of the contaminants. Through centuries, thousands have drunk with safety from this pool by carefully following these instructions, but many have also set their sights hopefully on the far side of the desert where they know are rivers of the purest waters, and rather than risk ingesting poison trudge hopefully on. In our time, however, tons of festering garbage have been dumped into the pool by the enemy of souls, and I think it is a real question now whether any can drink these waters without damage. Nevertheless, if one lacks the stamina to walk out of the desert, he is still safest in following the instructions governing human sexuality, and entering into the discipline of Christian marriage.
What is marriage, essentially (apart from the sacramental aspect introduced by Christianity)? It is the recognition by a human community of the relationship between a man and a woman, and a public sanction of this relationship. In this light, it is apparent that what most modern people practice is not marriage, but a kind of conventionalised fornication, because we're not asking anyone's permission for anything; marriage is no longer an expression of obedience, but of self-will. In the past it seems like marriage generally worked; in our time, though, we seem to be in a condition in which marriage generally does not work, even if the couple, for whatever reason, never does actually separate. This was brought to my attention when I was attending an Evangelical church in Denver; I could remember (I'm such an old fogey) a time when married couples seemed like a single entity. Though there were still older couples in the church where that seemed to be the case, most of the married couples in our community seemed more like loosely associated individuals, each with their diverse interests and activities, with a broad demilitarized zone between them of issues that they realized couldn't be approached without conflict. This was even in couples which would generally be characterized as having a "happy" marriage. Every once in a while, the equilibrium a couple had maintained for years would fall apart, almost always resulting in the termination of the relationship. It seems like we should be looking to older marriages for information on how to heal contemporary marriage; why could they survive anything when we can survive nothing?
Perhaps it is really so that marriage has a particular structure which makes it work, like any other aspect of reality, and to conform to that structure produces a working arrangement, and to depart from it results in friction, the overheating of the components, and the resulting breakdown of the arrangement. I think especially of the imagery of the husband as the head of the family; I know lots of women bristle when that is referred to, but why does everyone need to be a head? This can arise only out of the perception that the head is the only important thing, assisted mightily by the fact that we all really want to be in control. It shouldn't be a threat to female dignity to recognize the man as the head of the family, so long as it is clear that she is the heart of the family. The Family has traditionally been viewed as a corporate unity. A body needs a head and a heart, but it does not need two heads or two hearts, neither are they interchangeable; each part must function where and how it was meant to, or the integrity of the system breaks down. A favorite mantra of the Feminists of the last generation was "Biology is not destiny". Excuse me; for a human creature, biology is destiny. To affirm the contrary is simply to say "I do not have to be what I was created to be"; at the extreme edge of this attitude toward life are those who hate their own gender, and either act out sexual roles appropriate to the opposite sex in one way or another, or even, with the aid of modern surgical technology, seek to physically alter their gender.
An image of the Family that has helped me in thinking about the issue is that of a wheel; the Father being the rim of the wheel, built to handle the shock of contact with the world's rough exterior, the Mother being the hub of the wheel, possessed of a different kind of toughness, which absorbs the stresses generated by the operation of the wheel, and children the spokes which bind them together. Obviously the hub must be in the center to function, and in order to function well, it has to be a real piece of work. It is clear to me that a woman is a more complicated piece of equipment than a man; this does not confer superiority either (modern people being always ready to assume that when you are saying that two things are different you are saying one of them is superior), for a thing need be only as complex as it needs to be to perform the function for which it was designed (excessive ornamentation might interfere with the flight of an arrow). Referring to the analogy of the fireplace, in another way the Mother herself is the fire at the center of the home, the source of warmth and comfort. Femininity is a vital energy, badly needed in our homes and communities; I think the social fabric of communities has begun to decay since women's flight (or, in many cases, forced march) to the workplace. There is hollowness in the community since women have abandoned the home; the one who formerly tended the domestic fire is gone, and the convivial glow of communal life has gone out as well.
Another necessary thing for the integrity of the family is that all its components be moving in the same direction; this, it seems to me, is the primary way in which families in past and present differ in their observable operation. When man was the breadwinner and woman the homemaker, their tasks were different, but their goal was the same; they were both working on the same project. Now, the tasks are the same, i.e., to bring in a bit of income by working for someone else, and come home tired in the evening to try and pull together the neglected and disordered strands of domestic life, (now largely consigned to weekends), but their careers pull them in different directions, producing many conflicts of interest, and the children are also all going different directions between school and various activities; even those who intend to be stay-at-home mothers end up going in a hundred different directions a day, just trying to ferry everyone to their various social activities. This is not a Family, but a boarding house for detached individuals who happen to be of the same blood. News Bulletin: the "Soccer Mom" is not a traditional mother, just at the opposite pole of the corporatist social economy from the working mother. The assumption that everyone must be perpetually entertained is destructive of family life, for a family is designed to be a working community. More on this theme in my next post (when and wherever that may be).
Here we arrive again at the question of authority. In order for any group of people to move in the same direction, it is necessary for a single hand to be on the tiller. Also, (a small snippet of reality here) all effective social authority is established by force; sad, but true. You simply can't get people to do as they should consistently unless somewhere there is a strong, forceful figure who says, "If you cross this line, there will be painful consequences.". The reason why we still have Police forces and Armies is that we still know this, in the back of our little democratic, egalitarian, anarchistic minds whenever it comes to a question of an authority we believe really must be preserved (such as the idea that strangers shouldn't be permitted to sack my house). Now, as a Christian I believe that somewhere in the insanely complicated workings of the Universe, there is reason behind everything. I believe the reason Men are made larger and stronger than Women, and Parents larger and stronger than Children, is that this is a conference of physical force to bolster the natural authority dictated by God for the ordering of fallen human society. Obviously, large measures of injustice and pain have sprung out of this arrangement, just as they do from the exercise of all earthly authority; injustice and pain are the fruit we elected to eat as our daily bread when we tasted the fruit of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Obviously, the more godly a couple becomes, the less onerous is this authority; the more obedient the wife, the more responsible the husband, the more gentle, and almost invisible become the bonds of authority. I cannot understand why any woman would surrender to me the intimacy of her body if she felt she couldn't trust me not to tyrannize over her.
When I say that a Wife is under authority I do not take it to mean that she is a child, and not an equal partner. A woman has her characteristic insights and influences necessary for the health of the Family; a woman under tyranny is one unable to do her part in the functioning of the God-given entity of the Family. In Modernity, we labor under mistaken ideas of authority (well, we labor under mistaken ideas of almost everything). The only possibilities present to us seem to be Tyranny and Anarchy, but classical philosophy knew both of these to be aberrations of authority, not examples of the good exercise of authority. Before the Modern period, the idea of good monarchical government (examples of perfect goodness being rare to come by in History) was of King ruling in Council; this Council was not a modern Parliament which abrogated kingly authority, but an assembly of wise men who used their talents to bolster and uphold kingly authority by their sage advice. It was understood that a king is probably not the wisest man in the kingdom, and so for a king to habitually disregarded the advice of his council would likely lead his kingdom to ruin. So in the Family; a man disregards his wife at his peril. Many foolish men have been saved from ruin because they heeded the council of their wives; does this mean that the wife should become the authority if the husband is foolish? Any medieval person would tell you what results if a Council rebels against the King because he does not follow their advice; years of social disorder and bloodshed. Obviously, something to be considered in only the most extreme circumstances.
Both Masculinity and Femininity have their specific powers. A good father strengthens the character of his children; a good mother soothes her children, reconciling them to their duty. A bad father alienates his children; a bad mother spoils her children. Here is a long-standing argument. At a church I used to attend, some of the ladies, when disagreements arose on how to handle the children, would accuse me of suffering from "Testosterone Poisoning" (that favorite diagnosis of Feminists). I, in turn, would shoot back, "Motherhood is a Sinful Passion". Well, there we have the conflict in its essence. It is possible for men to let their characteristic reactions run away with them; Motherhood is a passion, and it takes not very much of a push to turn it into a sinful one. Both Men and Women need each other to moderate the characteristics of their gender, and they need to be held together in a stable relationship to give one the chance to act on the other. My maternal grandparents were very different people; my grandmother was a very vociferous woman, who would loudly and often voice her opinions. My grandfather was a taciturn individual, accustomed to uttering about five sentences a day. My grandmother had a lot to say about every issue, but when my grandfather finally said "This is what we're going to do, and that's the end of it" my grandmother would accept this. Women need to actively advocate their viewpoints, and they have; women in the past were not the brow-beaten, downtrodden caricatures presented to us by Feminists, but at the end of the day, someone has to make a decision, or there will be no peace. I think if my grandmother were a woman of our generation, she would have made herself and everyone else miserable by ceaselessly clamoring for her own way; because she had the good fortune to be born before the revolution, she was able to live a relatively happy and productive life. There are, of course, also men whose character is stabilised by their wives. There is this difference; I believe Men are somewhat prone to be influenced by Women. After the initial infatuation, I do not believe the same can be said of women generally; an "equal" relationship between the sexes is dominated by the woman, nine times out of ten. There are people I know who illustrate this perfectly; she rules the husband, the kids rule her, and the result is perpetual chaos. All my experience tells me that a Woman must be the moderating, not the controlling influence, or there will be no moderation, and the influence of the masculine gender, just as badly needed as that of the female, will be lost. The energies of femininity are too fierce to be permitted to rage uncontrollably; if the Mother of the family is the fire, the Husband is the fireplace. If properly contained, the whole family may draw close to the warmth of maternal love, nurtured by the feminine sensitivity and care for those she loves; if not, everyone gets burned. Only in the Insect World is the Female made larger and stronger than the Male, and the entomological romance typically ends with the male being devoured by the female; there are a lot of Insect marriages in our time.
I think we should make some effort to remember exactly what are the problems of sexual fulfillment in the course of nature. First of all, the idea that the order of society reflects Patriarchal domination is sheer, raving lunacy; just look what kind of order you get when men are left to themselves. That's right, male oriented society is just a glorified hunting camp. Once this is understood, it becomes obvious that ordered society is a response to the needs of women; for order to exist in society, it is not only necessary for men to make peace among themselves, it is necessary to make peace with the women, a much more arduous task.
What are the needs of the normal man and woman? The needs of the man, it appears to me, are simple; he requires various diversions, male comrades to share it with, and sexual/romantic encounters with women. These can be brief; a few evenings at home, and he can gallop back to the hunt, fully satisfied. The needs of women are more complicated, and harder to satisfy; for one thing, she needs for men to be something beyond their superficial nature. She needs to access and call forth a deeper nature in men that usually will not emerge independently, at least not until later life; she needs for him to be a husband and father. The problem is that it is perfectly possible for most men to meet their needs by a series of unentangling romantic encounters; a man must be seduced into domesticity, if he is not socially trained for it. This is something the women of the past knew that present-day women have forgotten, or have rebelled against; in our utopian mindset, we tend to think that everything ought to happen as we think it should, or that there should be some simple social adjustment that will make everything work. Welcome back to Reality, folks! It really isn't working. I read that in Japan, in particular, large numbers of men do not wish to marry, because Japanese women have abandoned traditional roles; it is hard enough to get your normal young man to give up his independence even when it means having a nice home, a "girl to come home to", and a variety of domestic comforts. When marriage typically means having a wife that you see mainly on weekends, housekeeping chores when your day at work is done and a woman to insist that you do them, plus a house full of noisy, uncontrolled children at all times, then marriage can begin to seem like selling yourself into perpetual slavery on singularly unattractive terms.
When the family presented itself to the world as a united front, the man was seen as the public representation of that unity, and husband and wife were bound together by economic necessity. I'm not quite sure we are better off with these bonds being loosed; bonds, of course, by their nature are confining, but before loosing any bond, it seems one should examine exactly what it is that is being bound together. It may be that we are destroying the raft which keeps human society afloat. So, welcome to life in the 21st century; our families are scattered and divided, fewer are electing to marry, and autoerotic and homoerotic alternatives are endlessly promoted. The government will act as the husband of any woman who is tired of her current relationship; a woman I used to know somewhat intimately now proclaims she doesn't even desire a man. The government provides the needs of she and her children, (though not lavishly) and this way she gets to make all the decisions.
Ochlophobe made a point over at his blog about the kinds of relations we have pretty much following and being dictated by patterns of technological development, but alteration in the patterns of social relations appears to me mainly to have been accomplished deliberately as a way of preparing the ground for further socio/political developments; I guess I don't really believe social change has been dictated by technological development so much as that technology has been used as giant earth-moving equipment to sculpt human society into a previsualized pattern.
Marriage today, along with all other aspects of life, has been severely damaged by utopian thinking; this causes us to believe that if there is a non-ideal aspect to something that we should scrap it and try to invent something better. Chesterton characterized many modern innovations as going out in a rainstorm with an umbrella and a watering pot and watering the garden; in other words, creating an artificial device for meeting a social need which doesn't, in fact, accomplish the purpose nearly as well or as completely as the natural processes we are interrupting in order to interpose our devices. Unfortunately, we sometimes don't recognize the deficiencies in our machinery until we have already disabled the natural systems; having induced universal drought, we find that we just can't keep up with our little watering cans. Men and women today, I believe, are in a condition of almost universal frustration; being told by society that they must modify their sexual behavior in response to certain social theories, they have become awkward and conflicted in their responses. Men are told to curb their chivalrous instincts so as not to appear sexist, and so develop in a way in which they really respect women much less than they formerly did; Women, on the other hand, really seem to, in the depths of their being, want a strong man, but they are trained to strenuously resist anything that looks like male domination. So they go from the strong man to a more "sensitive" type, and have only contempt for him because he is not strong.
So men and women rebound off one another in confusion and pain, going through their serial divorces looking for the one that will meet all their needs, but the thing that men and women most need to discover is that they can't completely meet one another's need; there is this tendency in the West, with our influence of romanticism, to build a shrine to human love as the summit of all earthly beatitude, but only God can completely meet our needs, and we are all sons and daughters of God, no matter what our relations to one another on Earth. I think the person who drifts from relationship to relationship never learns this; he says, "This woman didn't make me happy; maybe that one over there will". Much divorce springs from these romantic ideas; when we find our spouse does not make us perfectly happy, we decide the marriage was a mistake, but marriage is not supposed to be a picnic in a field of flowers, but a mission-field, and yes, it does sometimes resemble a battlefield (perhaps the close affinity between the words Marital and Martial isn't entirely accidental).
These things should really be unspoken; sexuality only functions normally when its operations are unconcious, but in our time, under influence of the presumtuous utopianism which regards all conventions as machines that can be pulled apart and reassembled in superior configurations, they do need to be discussed. The true pattern of sexuality as it has been from the beginning must be archaologically unearthed and carefully preserved against the rampaging hordes of barbarism, for it is the primordial and most basic unit of social order, and if it is ripped from us, then night will indeed fall upon our world.
Human sexuality is like a pool in the middle of a desert, which is unfortunately somewhat polluted. There is a sign on the banks of the pool which warns travellers of the pollution, and suggests it might be best to wait until out of the desert to slake one's thirst; however, if one feels he must drink, for whatever reason, instructions are given as to what parts of the pool have the purest water, and suggestions for filtering procedures to remove most of the contaminants. Through centuries, thousands have drunk with safety from this pool by carefully following these instructions, but many have also set their sights hopefully on the far side of the desert where they know are rivers of the purest waters, and rather than risk ingesting poison trudge hopefully on. In our time, however, tons of festering garbage have been dumped into the pool by the enemy of souls, and I think it is a real question now whether any can drink these waters without damage. Nevertheless, if one lacks the stamina to walk out of the desert, he is still safest in following the instructions governing human sexuality, and entering into the discipline of Christian marriage.
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