#10: You Can Save Her
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The solar pagans & the trad dads are once again at war over the the Woman Question. As you know, I am an optimist on this & all other Questions.
The substance of the debate is basically whether marriage & chastity are still coherent concepts, given the state of the dating market & mainstream sexual norms. BAP says no: marriage was an arrangement intended to cement the bonds between fathers & children by protecting men from false paternity, so that they would settle down, sacrifice, & take risks for their offspring - & that institution no longer exists.
He quotes from The Twilight of the Idols:
All reason has obviously been divorced from modern marriage: but this is no objection to matrimony itself but to modernity. The rational basis of marriage—it lay in the exclusive legal responsibility of the man: by this means some ballast was laid in the ship of matrimony, whereas nowadays it has a list, now on this side, now on that The rational basis of marriage—it lay in its absolute indissolubleness: in this way it was given a gravity which knew how to make its influence felt, in the face of the accident of sentiment, passion and momentary impulse: it lay also in the fact that the responsibility of choosing the parties to the contract lay with the families.
By showing ever more and more favour to love-marriages, the very foundation of matrimony, that which alone makes it an institution, has been undermined. No institution ever has been nor ever will be built upon an idiosyncrasy; as I say, marriage cannot be based upon "love." It can be based upon sexual desire; upon the instinct of property (wife and child as possessions); upon the instinct of dominion, which constantly organises for itself the smallest form of dominion,—the family which requires children and heirs in order to hold fast, also in the physiological sense, to a certain quantum of acquired power, influence and wealth, so as to prepare for lasting tasks, and for solidarity in the instincts from one century to another.
Marriage as an institution presupposes the affirmation of the greatest and most permanent form of organisation; if society cannot as a whole stand security for itself into the remotest generations, marriage has no meaning whatsoever.—Modern marriage has lost its meaning; consequently it is being abolished.
This seems basically accurate: modern marriage is not oriented toward any particular personal or social good.
The only people who can tell you what marriage even is are radical feminists & reactionaries (who just disagree about whether it’s bad or Good Actually.) Like most Western institutions, marriage has been hollowed out by its enemies, who now wear its skin & demand the deference it was owed.
(That’s why the argument against gay marriage folded almost as soon as the question was asked: nobody was willing to define marriage as anything other than a catastrophically risky gesture of romantic passion - particularly risky for men, but for women as well - aimed at nothing in particular, & with no practical advantages that come anywhere near compensating for the costs. The average American couldn’t see any compelling reason why gays ought not to be allowed catastrophically risky gestures of romantic passion.)
The “trad” argument (according to BAP) is that men don’t need to be compensated - that the intrinsic joys of child-rearing & egalitarian partnership with women are so rich that one doesn’t need legal or social protections - a “good man” should be willing to hazard false paternity, financial ruin, alienation from his children, marital celibacy, etc. just For the Love of the Game. So the collapse of marriage is not a reasonable response to changing incentives, but simply the result of male moral degeneracy, a refusal to “man up” & shoulder adult responsibility.
I haven’t known what to say about all this, because I don’t believe we can abandon marriage & chastity, even temporarily or instrumentally - but otherwise I think the pagans have the better assessment of what has happened.
Most of the married guys I know have slipped into standard 21st-century dual-income “50/50” family norms, & it is absolute hell on them (& their wives). The single women I meet are hard to recommend. Joining the Church helps, but not nearly as much as it should. The culture really is sick, & the fact that some of us have found little oases of happiness is not a solution. It isn’t even a solution for us, because eventually our kids will have to find friendship & love in this culture.
So what can we do about it?
Submitting to eternal celibacy or marriage under modern terms is not the answer - but neither is meditating impotently on the sexual folkways of the BASED TaliCHADs, & smashing what meager tail fate has given you to smash. Perhaps everything will be different When We Win, but I need to prepare for the possibility that my children reach majority before that happens.
(As usual, the choice is framed as either totalizing throat-slitting revolution, or jerking off. It’s a natural response when things seem so hopelessly wrong.)
I’m married to a beautiful, supportive woman who stays home to raise & educate our kids. I’m not going to write you a poem, our situation isn’t perfect, but it’s very good - I wouldn’t trade places with anyone - & when single guys ask me how to make that happen, I generally shrug & tell them to pray for a miracle.
And yes, it was a gift of God, but that’s also a cop-out: there are definitely common features in the happy marriages I’ve seen, & they seem like things most men could execute, & give themselves better chances of personal success. I don’t know what can be done about the broader culture, except to help our people become desirable, & make their lives desirable, so that people want to follow. I am ultimately just a guy with a blog.
Eros is God’s weapon, not the enemy’s.
Have you ever flipped through one of these books? They started as Twilight fanfic (which started as Buffy fanfic) & both series are unbelievably stupid - but taken together, they are easily the most popular works of adult fiction in history.
This got framed in the press as a weird fad - bored professional women “flirting” with a particular “kink” - but you don’t sell 310 million copies without tapping into something universal & archetypal, especially when the book has literally nothing else to recommend it.
The default “trad” response was to denounce this phenomenon as vapid & degenerate (& sure, it is) but it’s also a sign that the empowered independent girlboss regime has plenty of traitors in the camp. They’re not only willing to enter into a more traditional sexual relationship, they’re lighting candles & settling into the bathtub to fantasize about it. They couldn’t lay it out more clearly if they drew you a map.
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Genesis 3:16
This not an accidental juxtaposition - desire & dominion in marriage are causally linked. The social & legal framework of modern marriage is opposed to healthy family formation, but God & nature are on our side.
Poor Sheila has been pilloried for decades for this observation, but she’s a lot closer to the mark than mainstream egalitarian feminists. It’s only “oppression” if you assume (as Sheila would) that all hierarchies are oppressive - but she’s right that hierarchy & submission are baked in, fundamental to the healthy desire of a woman for a man.
“Pair-bonding” is such a bloodless word for what sex hormones can accomplish. You can send your wife’s brain 10,000 years back in time if you learn to lay it down right. (Some PUA types talk about this in a very adversarial, hostile way, & that’s nonsense. You should do this with your wife, whom you love, & you should do it to liberate her. They know better than we do that 2021 Woman Software sucks ass, & 100% of them would escape it if they could.)
The task for our single friends, then, is not to find some weird ideologue or masochist - it’s to awaken a very normal set of desires in a very normal type of woman.
So if they’re buying, & our guys would like to be selling, what’s the problem?
If you actually click through a few of these articles (or have an unusually frank conversation with a feminist irl) you find that this desire for submission is only ever consciously articulated in terms of what it does not mean - what she must never allow anyone to construe it to mean. It’s compressed under mountains of anxiety & ambivalence & self-protection (which is partly why it is so cathartic - perhaps more so than in a healthy society - to imagine that burden lifted.) Some of this is the result of psyops, but the psyops wouldn’t work if there was genuinely nothing to be anxious about.
First of all, she specifically wants to make breakfast & wear heels & tidy up for Christian Grey, a charming chiseled bazillionaire. And this is perfectly understandable: if she’s going to surrender, it should be to someone worthy, who will take her somewhere worth going. It would be humiliating to do this for some pothead, some clown who just wants her to scrub his unrinsed dishes. There’s dignity (for men & women) in swearing fealty to a righteous King, but not a petty bureaucrat.
This phenomenon sometimes get oversold by guys who are mad about it - you don’t have to tick all the boxes - but you will find that as you tick more & more boxes, the world becomes less & less feminist & postmodern in a 20-foot sphere around your person.
Second, they’re afraid of being tyrannized. Nobody actually wants to be humiliated or hurt or exploited. Women enjoy feeling “owned”, but we no longer have any cultural vocabulary for a hierarchical relationship that is not tyrannical, so the idea of being owned & the idea of being abused are deeply connected. There’s a fear that if that desire is ever defined as anything other than “kink” - if it is ever permitted to escape the bedroom - that it would mean literal, actual, unsexy slavery.
There’s a similar idea in some corners of the Right, that before feminism women were essentially domestic servants, kept in line with a strong right hand (& that that was Good Actually) - but marriage has always been a negotiation.
The god of gods in the Greek pantheon is constantly reduced to cajoling & deceiving & haggling with his imperious battleax of a wife. It’s not exactly a reversal of hierarchy - he’s always acknowledged as the sovereign, & the scope of their conflict has limits - but his will is not beyond question, & he doesn’t impose it by force at the first sign of dissent.
Stories about Zeus & Hera weren’t exemplary to the Greeks in the same way that e.g. the Gospels are to Christians - it is obviously not an idealized marriage - but it is representative or archetypal of marriage dynamics that were very familiar to the Greeks. Likewise hard-working Hephaestus getting cucked by Aphrodite; or Njord & Skadi being unable to agree on whether to live by the beach or in the mountains, & eventually calling the marriage off.
The reason for this back-&-forth, even among mighty gods, is obvious: normal people strongly prefer sleeping next to a friend rather than a subdued enemy. They’d like to be enthusiastically oriented toward the same goal, so that they can work together happily, & enjoy each other’s company. Even if a woman can’t subdue her husband physically, the threat of discord & emotional withdrawal is (& was historically) often enough to bring the household under matriarchal tyranny, regardless of what the law says. (Another check on the husband’s power was the bride’s family. Even prior to the 1970s, fathers generally loved their daughters & did not like to see them humiliated or abused.)
The difference between then & now is not that the ancient man’s power in his home was absolute - the difference is that his power was less subject to codified interference from the State. (This gives us a clue as to why someone might be interested in characterizing all hierarchical interpersonal relationships as tyrannical.)
This is good news for us, & for the millions of women who secretly long to unclench.
BAP is right that the legal apparatus of marriage has been poisoned, & is now organized around deconstructing the social order it was intended to sustain - but since it’s still a matter of agreement between a man & a woman, & the neurochemistry is still very strongly on our side, we have the opportunity to rebuild it, starting by showing people a workable alternative to their current situation.
It’s not a small task - a friend recently said that to be a successful patriarch in our time, you basically have to become a cult leader. And sure, that’s not exactly scalable, not everyone is cut out for it - but as far as I can tell, it’s going to have to start there, with the people who can pull it off.
Becoming the type of guy that an attractive woman could submit to without losing her self-respect (going to the gym, making money, being interesting, etc.) is the easy part. The hard part is breaking through her implanted terror & mistrust of patriarchal authority & recapturing her erotic imagination - which is another thing that the trad side of this argument misses entirely.
Our people tend to be less overtly hostile to sex than most conservative Christians, but what has replaced it in common usage is simping to the point of blasphemy.
“My angel wife is gonna drag me to heaven, I just do whatever she tells me”. It’s miserable to listen to, you can tell it absolutely desiccates their poor wives, & God willing our young men & women will be perceptive enough to reject it.
It was not always thus: obviously Joseph Smith and Brigham Young were virile, magnetic figures, but one thing that is lost on outsiders is how insistent they were on making the same of the men around them, & how often they succeeded.
For almost the first century of the Church’s existence, the Mormon missionary was viewed as a bold seducer from whom you had to hide your daughter, or she’d run off & be his third wife. That reputation wasn’t exactly fair, but it was a response to a virility & zeal that was baked into the doctrine, but that is harder to find now.
(I’m not going to post a picture of our current missionaries & hold two real young men up to ridicule, but you know what they look like. You get what I’m trying to say.)
In the Church, all worthy men are ordained to the priesthood, & a patriarch’s authority among his family & posterity is the same as the prophet’s authority in the Church, & the same as that of the Biblical prophets - to give prophetic blessings, to see visions & dream dreams, & to lead in the name of God. There have been seasons in the Church when it was full of men like this - & I believe it is happening again.
The more I think about it, this is a beautiful thing, & “cult leader” is an ugly word for it. We’ve lost the ability to conceive of a good man - a holy man - who can inspire fanatical, irrational courage & loyalty. A “cult” is any group whose members have a consuming mission, a fire in their bones - & we think, how can that be anything but an exploitative lie? (This is the redditor within.)
When we started dating, my wife was not “trad” (to the extent that that category even existed in the 00s).
She wasn’t religious, expected to work a job, wasn’t sure if she wanted kids; neither of us came from believing households. I was broke, & five years away from completing a four-year degree. I weighed 120 lbs, & I was/am an extremely regular-looking fella. Other than being in a reasonably healthy cultural milieu (Provo), I can’t find a lot that I had going for me that would be hard to replicate.
But looking back, the one thing that feels different is that I was lit up with the vision of what I wanted us to build, & I was able to bring her into that vision. (To make someone else see what you can see, that’s a miracle in itself - but I think it’s the sort of miracle that God is more inclined to cooperate in.)
If you can find that union of vision & will, the social/legal incentives become irrelevant. It helps a great deal if you already have a shared architecture of belief to orient that vision around (unless you want to start an actual cult, & find that type of lady.) It’s not fair that that’s what it takes, but that does appear to be what it takes.
Great insight, much to consider!
Great post. I think your point about having a vision is spot on. You don’t need to be a cult leader, you just need to have passion towards noble goals and offer a place for her within them. And those sort of goals will turn-on plenty of feminists. I think BAP and his vision of noble goals for young men fits in nicely.