Notes from the gender wars. [quotage]

The world wants us tame. It wants us safe, nice. It is frightened of anger, of confrontation, of opinions.

My husband is ready for the protest! Fully expecting Big Red to show up sans deodorant. pic.twitter.com/UlPVVHuw1a

— JanetBloomfield (@JudgyBitch1) June 1, 2014

Sod that. The Orthosphere, speaking to any man who has squandered his masculinity. Who is not doing his mission. Who is trying to be nice. Don’t be nice, be righteous. Don’t be nice, be effective.

Revisit that first question: “I’m a nice guy; why can’t I get a girlfriend?”

You cannot get a girlfriend because you are not especially manly.

Most women do not especially want a “nice guy”; certainly I have never heard one say that she wanted one. They want a man. Most women who want a man want one who is good to them (and, note, “good” and “nice” overlap but are not interchangeable), but in no case is it desired that manliness be sacrificed in the service of niceness.

You see, “niceness” is not a theological virtue. It’s a basic, minimum requirement for normal, human social functioning in most circumstances. Since it is so basic to social functioning, women can get niceness literally anywhere. They can get it from parents, siblings, friends, mail carriers, waiters, and so on. Hence, they don’t need it, exclusively or even primarily, from you. What they need from you (if they need anything from you at all) is masculinity, to complement their femininity. This isn’t an earth-shattering insight: man and woman are literally made for one another, after all. If “niceness” is all you offer — if you have no masculinity to offer — than you are not attractive as a man. You might still be attractive in other ways — as a friend, a confidante, a study partner, a convenient chair, or a free-of-charge toenail painting service — but not as a partner or a lover. “Nice” is cheap, and she can probably get it better from somewhere else.

In the second place, you are probably not an especially nice person, either, so in fact you probably have nothing to offer at all. Certainly, Elliot Rodger is not a nice person nor the “supreme gentleman” he imagines himself to be. Nice people don’t feel entitled to sexual or romantic validation by virtue of their niceness. They certainly don’t murder people.

If you really want to be a nice person, I suggest doing something uncontaminated by self-interest. I’m sure there is a soup kitchen or a homeless shelter nearby in need of volunteers. If you volunteer, do it without telling any of your friends about it.

“But then how will my crush know that I’m nice?”

Maybe she won’t. But that’s the point: it’s not about you.

And stick at what you do. Sometimes you will fail: (Lord will you fail). This is Matt talking about divorce parties. He’s angry, me? Well, when I got divorced I looked at the wreck of two decades effort and the last thing I wanted to do is party.

Divorcing someone because they change? You might as well divorce them because they breathe. I’m not making light of it. I know that sometimes people change in a painful and inconvenient manner. I know that my wife could change in ways that don’t cooperate with my projections of how she should be and feel and think.

I guess that’s what people really mean when they say they want a divorce because their spouse “changed.” It’s not change itself they oppose, but changes that challenge them and make them uncomfortable. What they should say is: “I want a divorce because she changed in a way that doesn’t fit inside my comfort zone.”

It’s hard, I know. Every day I’m relearning this one basic truth: my wife has her own brain, her own feelings, her own soul. We are linked now through the bond of matrimony, but she is still her and I am still me. She is a force, a hurricane, a wildfire. She is not a puppet dancing on a string. She is a self — her own self — powerful and mysterious.

What Matt forgets is that the chances are that he will not be the one who pulls the trigger. Seven times out of ten it is the women. And they are the ones who want the parties: the men (given the ways the laws are structured) can barely afford a beer. But that celebration has a high chance of ending in dust and ashes. Dalrock has been working on the epidemiology of divorce again, and it’s not good reading.

So folks, pray for us all, for it is tough in the trenches. And if you do not like it, you can choose godly celibacy. Perhaps the reformed need to rediscover monastic orders, for they can act as a shelter.

There is a religious community for women with Down Syndrome. No seriously LOOK HOW PRECIOUS THEY ARE pic.twitter.com/WZiHA2GsiL

— Joyful Catholic (@CatholicJoyful) May 31, 2014