Men For Equality Of Women

If one reads too much of the so-called "red pill" blogs  he gets an impression that everything bad that happened to the Western world including feminism and liberalism, has been the fault of women. It's not like the 19th century men rebelled against the Throne and Altar or participated in various revolutions, or enacted divorce reforms or anything. No, it was those evil women.

I am also reliably informed that resident feminist lady journalists penning articles in the MSM on how we need more feminism and liberal politicians, male and female all represent the mysterious Female Imperative which demands total matriarchy or at least something close to it, and that all normal women agree and support it.

It's not an impression that I get by looking around. What I see is that too many of Western men seem to be emotionally invested in the idea of equality between men and women. For instance, today I read an article criticising the feminisation of our military. The commenters were about 99% men and more than a half of them fully supported women in the army.

They gave some very valid reasons for it:

First, women look sexy in uniform.
Second, you can go to bed with them.
Third, modern men are weak, so it's better if the women defend them.
Fourth, it will make ISIS scared.
Fifth, women are equal so let them do their share.
Sixth, there was this wonderful female commander fighting terrorists which was like, hot, and better than any man.

For the life of me I can't understand why any man would be proud of the fact that the (potential) enemy is more scared by a country's women than by its men or would proudly declare that he is weaker than a woman and needs defending. Also, isn't it hilarious that the fierce supporters of equality of sexes seem to be motivated by women as sexual objects?

It's just one more example of the simple fact that the Western man lost his will to power.
Not so long ago, they were referred to as lords of creation, now they seem content to play the second fiddle. It's not just that the traditional male authority came with heavy responsibilities and these guys wish to avoid them, it's more like a religious belief. It's really weird. Is it any wonder that the Western world has become such a mess? We survived two horrible World Wars but will we survive the feminisation of society?

Out Of The Mouth Of Babes...

How To Cram More Hours In Your Day

In one of I Love Lucy episodes from Season 1 Ricky puts Lucy on a schedule to teach her better time management. She gets attacked by other women for getting along with this idea. "What are you doing to wives of America?" inquires one of them. "We spent years telling our husbands we just don't have time to do it all!"

Nowadays women appear proud to be able to do it all: working, housekeeping, child care, gourmet cooking, yoga classes, you name it. Of course, if you are fully employed, domestic life will necessarily suffer, but a modern woman is supposed to juggle all these responsibilities with ease.

 And what if she doesn't work outside home? Then she still needs to be engaged in all sorts of  activities, just for the sake of it. Homeschooling, home business, volunteering, ministries, numerous Bible classes...Heaven forbid someone will catch her sitting in the garden with her feet up reading a book - after all, she's supposed to be a Proverbs 31 lady and never have a minute of rest.

Mid-20th century wives took their time to do things. They were proud to look well, to cook delicious meals and to keep house but they apparently didn't feel the urge to be superwomen and could always find time for a cup of tea with their neighbour or for some gossiping on the phone with a girlfriend.

They combined creative housekeeping with leisure and didn't try to recreate an assembly line working patterns in their households. The true meaning of Proverbs 31 wasn't discovered yet and the wives of America (and other countries) didn't have to be examples of efficiency.

The manuals for women on how to cram more hours in your day weren't written yet.

UPDATE: For more information, read this:
Homemaking Is Real Work And Real Ministry

For The King

Links For May

Why Do Conservatives Believe in Order  by Mark Moncrieff

A Mother Pressured To "Work" by Laura Wood

The Minstrel Boy by Will S.

Christian Vulnerability To Liberalism  by Alan Roebuck

A Stay at Home Grandmother  by Roxy

A Literary Poll

Which Jane Austen's heroine is in your opinion the most irritating?

I vote for Emma:)

Western Attitudes Towards Children

There is a story circulating on the interwebz of an Indian lady giving birth in her seventies. Apparently she and her husband had been infertile through nearly 50 years of their marriage but finally saved enough for  IVF treatment and the third one was a charm so they became parents of a healthy baby boy.

Giving birth in your seventies is somewhat extreme and obviously many people will consider it unethical on the part of the doctor, yet it's what the couple always wanted, they financed it themselves and they are paying for the child themselves.They are happy because they have a son to carry on the family name and the husband's bloodline. It's hardly anyone's business especially if they live in another country. Yet, internet busybodies are very upset with it.

The comments demonstrate everything which is wrong with modern Western mindset concerning children. Apparently, the child won't grow in ideal circumstances and there is real chance he'll be orphaned soon. Well, this has been true about children born in the Western countries prior to the appearance of the welfare state and yet people kept having them. However now, the birth rates everywhere in the West are falling despite numerous government handouts and the improved quality of life.

Second, it's somehow wrong and selfish for people to desire to pass on their genes when there are so many orphans. It appears we don't have a duty to our ancestors to carry on their bloodlines but we have a duty to perfect strangers to take care of their kids. Adoption can be a very good thing, but there is no duty to adopt. It's what works for an individual couple that counts.

Then the world is overpopulated in general and India in particular. Again, it's partly true. May be, some third world countries would have less poverty if the families stopped having 10+ kids. Yet, for this couple it's their first and last. It's rather strange reasoning that if someone somewhere is having twenty children than it's your duty to have none to save the planet.

The couple praised God for giving them the desire of their hearts and said God will provide and that insulted the resident atheist brigade even more. It was not God, it was science! Why can't it be both? God gives us means,  we use them but it's Him who ultimately decides the outcome.

Now the story above may not even be true, but the comments perfectly well illustrate what's wrong with modern Western mindset concerning children.

(Here is the link. Keep in mind that it's Daily Mail but if you google the couple's names you'll come across other news reports about them).

P.S. I'm not promoting ART.  One could make a perfectly valid argument against ART from tradition, like Catholic Church does, but they are also against abortion, anti-conception and divorce so they are rather consequent. Western liberals, on the other hand, like to talk about tolerance and right to choose, as long as you choose according to the liberal doctrine.

Pentecost Weekend, 2016

I hope you all have had a blessed Pentecost weekend. We visited Keukenhof on Saturday. My husband's company is one of the suppliers. Here are some pictures:

The weather was cold but we still enjoyed ourselves!

Bad Friends Can Ruin Your Life

Literally.

A study by researchers at UCLA found that stressful friendships lead to significantly high levels of a protein that causes inflammation in the body. Over time that can cause serious health problems including diabetes, heart disease, and cancer.

Read the whole story over here.
Also check Lydia Sherman's post on the same topic.

Who Was Really Emancipated?

It's amazing the things you discover when you start learning more about history. Today, for instance, I spent some time reading a 1930s magazine featuring a story of a guy called Tom, a simple office employee working for the city government. Being unmarried, he still lived at home with his parents and three grown-up sisters, even though he was over 30.

His parents wanted him to get married and thus urged him to go on vacation to search for a bride. This lucky individual had the whole 1 (!) week of paid vacation, which was rather not bad for the period, as some men had even less (or none). Of course, half Saturday was free from work, too, though working hours were in general longer than now. Tom's parents pondered the fact that with his decent salary he could afford to go away for the whole week!

Tom's sisters, on the other hand...weren't particularly doing anything at all. In fact, one of them went to visit an old school friend, just for the fun of it while Tom had to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. Of course, some single women had to work. The whole divide between middle and lower class was whether the daughters had to go out and earn the living. Yet, Tom wasn't anything particularly special, just a clerk, and his parents were born in the country.

If you ever read Anne of Green Gables story, you'll remember how Anne had to go to college to get her teacher's certificate while her friend Diana quit after getting her school diploma. Even though she was only a farmer's daughter, her parents took care to provide for her so that she wouldn't need to bother with earning the income.

Now when I think of it, Tom's life doesn't sound like much fun to me. It's hardly surprising then that men kept voting for progressives in the 1960s, who promised shorter working hours and longer vacations. They also abolished male headship as stated by law and sent married women to the workforce. So now it's often the man of the house staying home with pain in his back or nervous breakdown while the little woman is toiling away.

The most amazing thing is that many women are proud of supporting a never-do-well husband and consider it to be the top of feminist achievement. Me, I just keep wondering as to who was really emancipated???

Modern Sleeping Patterns And Stress

Apparently the new research shows that our ancestors didn't sleep 8 hours straight  but rather had what is called "segmented sleep", which was divided into "first" and "second sleep" with a period in between used for prayer, meditation, writing poetry, making love with your spouse (doctors recommended it for a better chance of conception) and even visiting neighbours in some cases.

The researchers speculate that it was the way our bodies adjusted to the long hours of darkness, especially during those winter nights, when it's dark for about 14 hours. It all started changing when the big cities such as Paris and Amsterdam introduced street lightning and segmented sleep virtually disappeared during and after Industrial Revolution with its cult of efficiency. It was considered wasteful just to spend so many hours in bed doing nothing and moreover, late evenings became a fashionable time for socialising.

The existence of segmented sleep explains something which has always puzzled me, namely the fact that monasteries used to have special midnight sermons (and some probably do now). It also shows that our ancestors probably used to lead a more relaxed lifestyle and enjoyed more rest than we do now.

The interesting thing is that some doctors speculate that the two-hour interval between the first and second sleep was important for stress reduction, as during this period of being not totally awake and not fully asleep the pituitary gland produced high levels of prolactin, a stress-reducing hormone.

If you are interested in this topic, here are some links:

The long and short of bimodal sleep

Your Ancestors Didn't Sleep Like You

The myth of eight-hour sleep

If you wake up in the middle of the night, it doesn't necessarily mean you suffer from insomnia. It can just be that your body tries to revert to the ancient sleeping patterns! 
    

Happy Mother's Day!

The Proverbs 31 Controversy. Updated.

The great Proverbs 31 debate is still going on. Check Lydia Sherman's posts on the topic:

Questions and Answers About the Proverbs 31 Woman

and Proverbs 31 and Servants.

 UPDATE:

Lydia wrote one more article about it, so I'm adding it to the list:

Proverbs 31: Career Woman?

She mentions the lady who sold the purple cloth from Acts 16 and who was also called Lydia. Her story is apparently used to promote careers for wives and mothers, too. Ironically, the very fact that she had to earn an income was seen as proof that  she must have had no husband by the men who wrote Bible commentaries in less enlightened times:

...whether Lydia was a maid, a wife, or widow, cannot be said; it looks, however, as if she had no husband now, since she is mentioned as a trader herself ...

(from John Gill's Exposition of the Whole Bible, vs. 15. Read the rest over here.)

Over The Hills And Far Away