Yesterday I posted on the lies that men have, and today I want to start with the distaff gender, and a comment that SSM made, for it is true, and I think I need to expand a bit on why the church has bought into this and how it has affected men and women.
For those who do not follow this place, this includes some things you have not seen. Like the Bible, and an assumption that women are (thank God) different from men. In particular, women have a season of fertility, and it is much shorted than most think: it starts falling in your late twenties and drops off a cliff in your mid thirties.
Feminists have sold young women a bill of goods, that they can live like men, work like men, have sex like men, and then turn back into women when they feel like it. We laugh at a woman like this sometimes and make fun of her and say, “Didn’t she know that she’d end up like this?”
No, she didn’t know that. That’s because when you are 17 years old, you don’t know much, especially in this culture of extended adolescence. And when you have been told from a very young age that, as a girl, it is your destiny to Have It All exactly When You Want It, I’m sure it is very baffling to find yourself in your thirties with no husband and none in sight, with the dawning realization that your job and lonely apartment are not nearly as fulfilling as being a wife and mother would have been.
Now, the passage we have is a warning on this day: its new years eve and we are all being encouraged to make resolutions for the next year. To lose those pounds. To get fitter. To be a better Christian. Some o these things are worthy, but we have to recall that things can change. This was driven home yesterday. I sitting in a funeral, and the presiding pastor, the brother-in-law of the deceased started off by saying “Death is no respecter of seasons”. The wife had gone to work before Christmas and come home to find her husband, some years her senior, dead. After five decades together. In the midst of Christmas preparations.
It would be fair to say that I was blogging as a distraction yesterday.
13Come now, you who say, “Today or tomorrow we will go to such and such a town and spend a year there, doing business and making money.” 14Yet you do not even know what tomorrow will bring. What is your life? For you are a mist that appears for a little while and then vanishes. 15Instead you ought to say, “If the Lord wishes, we will live and do this or that.” 16As it is, you boast in your arrogance; all such boasting is evil. 17Anyone, then, who knows the right thing to do and fails to do it, commits sin.
7Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains. 8You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near. 9Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors! 10As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord. 11Indeed we call blessed those who showed endurance. You have heard of the endurance of Job, and you have seen the purpose of the Lord, how the Lord is compassionate and merciful.
If the LORD wills, we will do this. We still need to plan. It is not inshallah — implying we have no responsibility, and James notes that if we see a need we better do it: we must do what is right. As the confession notes, we have sinned by what we have done, and what we have not done.
So we cannot plan. We work in hope. and this is a reason we should pray for those we love, and for those we are responsible for. Then get on and provide for them.
But back to the issue from yesterday, and the bill of goods we are sold. It is a double lie: women can do what they please at any time without consequences, and that men will not act as to their nature, but as women please.
This is a lie.
Young women need to be told that their beauty is but a flower. The ugly stick will get them. All of them — the stunning beauty of the 50s, Liz Taylor, was not beautiful in her last years. And Marilyn Monroe would have aged if she did not get a lethal dose of barbiturates. (It’s worth noting that the Benzodiazepines, which have many problems, were a lot safer than the anxiolytics and soporifics that preceded them. Hence they sold like hotcakes). They need to be taught to discern a man who they will feel comfortable helping and obeying, if they want to be a wife and mother. If they want to be a single woman, they have to learn how to be safe — it’s worth noting that Camilla Paglia, who was quoted in Legal Insurrection, chooses to dress in a suit in part because it is safer, and she lives alone.
And we need to teach men to lead. Here is where the church failed my generation: we were told that women were are equals and we must equally submit: that we should do the chores and she would like us. That we should meet her needs, even the irrational ones.
That we should not lead. That we should not say no. And we said yes, yes, yes… until we were held in contempt and lived in chumpdom. The older rules were harder, but more realistic.
To begin with, men in the old days were told to keep their pants zipped until marriage. Take that cold shower. Ride that horse. Hit the gym. They were literally kept apart from their beloved: the assumption was that if went of a ride together things would happen because horniness. And this leads to a frame. The idea of withholding sex was taken from the table — because the church explicitly taught this was wrong, and because men had, by the time they had married, learned how to control it.
Attached to this was the morals code — certain activities were not portrayed. Starlets where photographed with clothes on. Men are visual enough: we will help them. Instead of women dressing like strippers and demanding that men ignore them (not realizing, given the rate of obesity, that half the time we want mind bleach, not a cold shower).
Finally, in the old days, people died. Many men died young: either in farming or industrial accidents, or like de Brun’s first husband, of infection. Conversely, women died of infection, and child-bearing. James reminded his audience, who were more familiar with death than we are, that we cannot predict when our time ends.
This led to people valuing love when they can find it. It led to shorted engagements — Calvin wed his bride two months after meeting her — because everybody knew their time on this planet was short. That the joys of this life were fleeting. Marvel notes that coyness is a crime, for our time is limited.
Had we but world enough, and time,
This coyness, lady, were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk, and pass our long love’s day;
Thou by the Indian Ganges’ side
Shouldst rubies find; I by the tide
Of Humber would complain. I would
Love you ten years before the Flood;
And you should, if you please, refuse
Till the conversion of the Jews.
My vegetable love should grow
Vaster than empires, and more slow.
But the Puritans knew the time was short, so advocated moving to the marital ceremony with some promptness, and the marital bed after the ceremony: that night, if not before. They were realistic about lust, or desire. They were also realistic about the limitations we have in this life and in our place in life.
The big lie in feminism is that we are vegetables: that we live like the trees, over the centuries, and that our growth continues for the millenia. This is wrong. Our lives are but seventy years if we are lucky, eighty if we have strength. The periods when a woman can bear children are brief. And men and women are different: boys and girls are different, for this is good. But we are not blank slates, nor are we of elven extraction. We must not assume we have all the time in the world, but instead do today what needs doing.
So we should get rid of the idea that we are the masters of our lives, or that we can micromanage our life: that we plan how to make ourselves into anything we want to be. It is a delusion, and there are more important things to do. For until the LORD returns or we are taken, we must do good. And one of those events could happen today, or tomorrow.