Consumeristic Sex is a Form of Transgenderism

This summer, as part of my involvement in a Christian apologetics group, I gave a talk on modern issues in human sexuality. In a bar.

As nerve-wracking as it was to plan a presentation that would connect with the general public, the population of the bar that night, and the pastor and elders of my church, I realized I could address all issues likely to come up with the simple premise that “male” and “female” are not social constructs, but rather determinable identities which are crucial to our humanity.

And so they are. As I explained over limp pita chips and German beer that night, “male” and “female” are not descriptions of lifestyle or vehicles for expressing individuality. “Male” and “female” are descriptions of collaborative, productive creative capacities and roles – reproductive roles.

A man is a person with a body designed for the creative capacity to sow or seed life, a woman is a person with a body designed for the creative capacity to incubate life.

This means that whether in the prime of fertility, or too young, old or sick for reproduction, we can look at our bodies — the indentation of a woman’s waist, her breasts, the depth of a man’s voice or the broadness of his shoulders, and understand that humans are not primarily consumers but producers – not defined by isolation but by collaboration. We have a creative relationship with the land, ourselves, and each other.

To define maleness or femaleness as anything less is to make it too slippery to hold – and so it now is. Male and female are quickly warping into products for consumption instead of tools of production — synthetic hormones, silicone ornamentation, hairstyle and makeup.

I explained this all so that I could explain the Christian stance against “Transgenderism” and homosexuality – that those identities represent the unravelling, the reversal of the creativity and collaboration we were meant to participate in.

Where the thread began to pull, however, was with non-creative sex.

For most of human history, “non-creative sex” was an oxymoron. Of course sex was creative, give it a whirl and you’d soon find out! It’s only been since contraception entered the scene quite recently that sex could ever be a tool primarily for consumption instead of production.

That’s a problem, of course. Using the parts of our body that were meant for creativity with each other for consumption of each other instead may seem like a cool “hack” — but it’s dehumanizing, and beyond that, it’s the first stage of Transgenderism.

Yes – I said it, engaging in non-creative sex is the first stage of Transgenderism. It’s where your identity as male or female starts to slide away – where the creative sexual identity you were born with is chemically or prosthetically quieted for the sexual consumerism that beckons instead.

That’s all Transgenderism is. Sexuality as a product. Sexuality as a choice, an individualistic pursuit.

It’s not black and white. I’m not actually against birth control – I take it! For me, birth control is a tool that heightens my sexual collaboration with my husband and our productivity – it helps us guide the “production schedule”, as it were, for maximum creative benefit.

Nor does all sex have to literally result in a baby to be creative – the sex a couple has in the newlywed years, while they’re still getting to know each other – that can be creative by building the bond that will one day blossom into a parenting partnership, and sex post-fertility can certainly be creative as well – a celebration of collaborative roles, even as they fade.

You don’t have to have creative sex to be human, to be healthy in your maleness or femaleness. In some cases, the wait for the right collaborator is the most sexually creative thing you can do. Sometimes, people may want to use their bodies, lives and relational capacities to engage other types of creativity in such a focused way that sexual creativity isn’t simultaneously possible – that’s alright.

What’s not healthy or human is non-creative sex –- that is, habitually engaging sexuality with a consumerist, self-focused mindset, aided by chemicals or latex prosthesis.

That’s Stage I Transgenderism. Be careful pulling up the anchor of what your own body tells you about who you are – you don’t know how far you’ll drift away.

The Neighborhood Party

This is the story of a how a sad joke turned into one of the best nights of the summer.

Recently I was talking to a woman who had lived in different parts of the country on the differences between the north and the south. She related to me that when she moved into a neighborhood in a small town in the south, she didn’t cook dinner for a full month because her neighbors brought her so much food to welcome her.

This conversation filled me with despair. We just bought our first home in the spring, in a small town in the north — no one brought us food, and few of our neighbors even formally introduced themselves.

My husband and I started joking about the idea of sending out cards to all our new neighbors that read, “We will be sitting in our living room from 1-4 pm on this date if you would like to come in and meet us.”

We related this goofy idea to a few friends and were surprised when they reacted like it was actually a good idea.

One friend said she actually did throw a party for her whole neighborhood when her family moved to a new house, with fairly good results. Another friend said she hosted “Taco Night” every few weeks in the wintertime for her immediate neighbors.

So we picked a date.

I made up flyers – a cute family photo with our names written by our faces. I called it a potluck so I wouldn’t end up cooking for 40 but having 5 guests. The kids and I walked up and down the street stuffing flyers in mailboxes a few weeks before the party.

I didn’t ask for an RSVP on the flyer because I had been warned by my friend with neighborhood party experience that she found out some people hadn’t come to her party because they thought they couldn’t since they forgot to RSVP in time. Still, I had put my phone number on the flyer and I thought I would hear something from someone —

But I didn’t.

The day of the party came. I went out and bought 18 bottles of beer. I made baked ziti for 20. At the start time of the party, I set out paper plates and cups, put on some music, and went and sat with my family.

The clock ticked. 5 minutes, 10. “What if… no one comes?” My husband asked. I thought maybe we could watch a movie to pass the time just in case someone showed up. “Should I start drinking now?” I joked sadly.

There was a knock at the door.

Neighbors from two houses on the block were standing on our front steps, holding potato salad, wine and balloons! We had barely finished introductions before more people were coming through the door, and they didn’t stop!

Before I knew it, the entire surface of my giant dining room table was crammed with wine bottles, bowls of picnic salads, eggplant parm, pizza, corn on the cob, deviled eggs, pie. My house was full too, with groups of friendly, laughing neighbors talking about recent bear sightings, the neighborhood coyote, high school memories and the history of our town and my house.

My husband passed around a piece of paper and pen for people to write names, addresses and phone numbers on.

Three and a half hours later, after a crazy, joyful whirlwind, we said goodbye to the last guests and stared at each other like, “Did that actually just happen?”

In the end, we realized that almost everyone on the entire street had come – far beyond my wildest hopes for the party.

Our family got so much out of this experience – my kids learned how to take social risks for big payoff right by my side. They learned about how to take the first step of fulfilling God’s command that we love our neighbors.

We got invited to use our neighbor’s gorgeous in-ground pool anytime we want. I met a 90 year old little Italian lady who told me I was her new granddaughter and invited our family over for homemade cheesecake. We met a young couple our age who looked like potential friends.

And there were promises of more parties, new neighborhood traditions.

There’s a sense of peace and connectedness looking around my neighborhood now, and knowing who lives in each house. I pray that this is just the beginning, that I’ll be able to go deeper into some of these neighbor’s stories, learn how to meet their needs and care for them.

I’m sharing this story because I hope you’ll do the same in your neighborhood! I never would have believed something like this was possible if I hadn’t first been encouraged.

Red Pill Doubts

Apologies to all my readers wondering where I’ve been the last few weeks. The truth is, I’m not totally sure where I stand in the Red Pill world lately.

The first thing that happened is I started exercising way too much. Like 4+ hours of High Intensity Interval Training a week, plus weight training and other stuff… my whole world pretty much clamped down around that and I found myself unable to write, think, read among other things for a few weeks.

I cut the HIIT to once or twice a week and my world started opening up again. But I still didn’t gain back the desire to write or revisit the Red Pill blogs I love, and I’ve been trying to figure out why that is.

Okay, what I’m thinking right now is this – the Red Pill is like one of those 12 inch wooden rulers they give you in first grade. It’s true and it’s right and it’s good – but it’s not the only way of measuring something. If you try to measure the width of a ball with it, you won’t understand the ball very accurately. If you try to measure your bodyweight with it, you’ll be left in the dark. It’s good, but you need to be able to measure in other ways.

Let me explain this a little more.

I’ve mentioned before that relationships haven’t been my strong point for a few years, to put it mildly. That’s changing now.

Some of the friendships I’ve been cultivating with women over the last year are starting to take root and grow, and I’m going deeper with other women, getting a closer look at their lives and marriages – and I’m having this problem where what I’m seeing isn’t matching up in any way with popular Red Pill “truths”, laws or maxims.

I just feel like at this time that I can’t keep one foot in the world of real life and one foot in the Red Pill blogosphere without deliberating shutting my eyes and refusing to see in at least one of those places.

I can’t refuse to see how many of the women around me actually are, how they in no way approximate the dire descriptions of female nature found on Red Pill twitter or the Manosphere. I can’t refuse to see how they sacrifice their bodies, dreams, ambitions for their families. I can’t not see how devoted so many of the women around me are to serving, loving and respecting their husbands, often at great personal cost.

At the same time, I have to admit that there those dire descriptions aren’t a misogynistic farce. There are women out there who really are utterly debased and morally corrupt, and they are often encouraged to be that way by our culture. It’s not that those descriptions of female nature aren’t descriptions of reality… it’s just that they’re like the 12 inch ruler — good for measuring certain things, not everything.

I went to a Christian mini-conference for stay at home moms this morning. How do I use the Red Pill to measure my experience sitting through workshop after workshop on putting yourself second, caring for your husband’s needs more, living life as a servant, being thankful and faithful… a group of women got together to put on this event, put the program together for no pay, just to encourage women to be better wives and mothers… tell me, how does that in any way match up with what you read about female nature on the manosphere?

It doesn’t.

At the same time, there are other things I can’t not see. My husband hosted a poker game last night and I “had to” get out of the house and go to the movies by myself for a few hours – one of the most delicious experiences for me. Anyways, I’m sitting there in this dark, almost empty movie theater and here comes a preview for ‘Bridget Jones’ Baby’ – a movie which basically seems to be promoting female-led open relationships… something I read about on a Red Pill blog months ago and is popping up left and right now in women’s magazines and apparently mainstream movies.

Okay, I can’t unsee that. And I’m so thankful that I can take my Red Pill ruler and hold it up to that and understand it a little better.

But… what do I do when the only polyamorous relationships I’m hearing about happening in real life are the traditional kind, with one man and several women? Because that’s the actual case for me. I’m going to need more than 12 wooden inches to figure this cultural development out.

There are other doubts. Like how much of the Red Pill is just a movement teaching men to maximize their selfishness and self-interest? I get why that’s a message in some ways needed, for many reasons, in our culture right now, but if that’s the case how much involvement do I really need to have with that? I don’t agree with the imbalance in our legal system or the morality of our culture, but I also don’t agree with living a totally self centered life.

I guess where I’m at right now is this – I want to love my husband well and raise my kids to lift burdens instead of creating them, and I want to create and offer up more than I consume and I want to do this in intimacy with the people around me.

I don’t want to be a part of something that’s about getting yours and screw the wreckage left in your wake. I get why that’s an attractive message, especially for hurt men who were persuaded to live the unhealthy opposite to that rule for a long time, but I don’t have a place in that, because that’s not what I believe is healthy or wise living.

So that’s where I’m at. I invite you to push back against this, against me. How do I keep one foot in each world? How can I see everything, how can I see clearly and not just one angle, just one measurement, but the whole?

What I’ll Never Say About Alton Sterling On Facebook

This is everything I want to say on Facebook, but can’t, either because I have too much wisdom or too little courage.

I watched the Alton Sterling shooting video. What strikes me about the video is that this man had been apparently unsuccessfully tasered, had been brought to the ground, had guns drawn on him, and was still resisting. He was still armed. When the officer on his legs yelled that he was reaching for his gun, it looked to me like he might have been right.

This is the most important question of the case. Don’t let the media cause you to forget that.

I looked up Alton Sterling’s criminal history. I bought into all the hype and outrage of the Michael Brown case. I seriously remember reading on CNN that Michael Brown was walking to his grandma’s house after church when he was stopped by police. Of course, it later came out that he had actually just robbed a store. And then the autopsy, backing up the officer’s story that he was reaching for the gun.

Now I’m reading that Alton Sterling was a gentle giant, a laid back father of 5 who would never hurt a fly, who was shot simply for selling CDs.

This time, I won’t be falling for the narrative of outrage that the media tries to sell me.

Alton Sterling had a long history of disregarding the lives, well-being, and safety of other humans. He got a 14 year old pregnant at 20. He sold drugs. He scuffled with the police in the past. He broke into people’s homes and threatened their lives. He beat and choked an old girlfriend. (1)

I don’t need this information to determine whether or not he deserved to be shot in the street. He didn’t. We have a criminal justice system for addressing all that. I do need this information to determine whether or not it’s likely that he was threatening the officer’s lives or not, which is what this case really is about.

I used to work for a Police Department. I was a dispatcher for a brief time. This means I took emergency and non-emergency calls from the community and sent officers out to respond to various situations. Most of what police do all day is very down to earth and not glamorous at all: lifting an elderly woman who got stuck in her bathtub. Responding to a home where a teenager is having a crippling panic attack. Mediating family disputes. Checking on people’s homes when their crappy alarm system trips for the 100th time while they’re at work.

I have a ton of respect for police officers. They literally spend their days serving the community in the most gritty ways possible, all while wondering if they’ll be leaving work in a body bag at the end of the day.

At the same time, putting the police on a pedestal isn’t really honoring them. They’re human beings, and beyond that, the job is very attractive to people looking for a power trip or an adrenaline rush.

Black men make up about 13% of the population but commit more than 50% of homicides. Black men are committing much more than their “fair share” of the crime in this country – and the police are the ONLY people dealing with it. Remember, the vast majority of these homicides are against other black people.

I don’t find it surprising at all that there would be enormous tension between the police and the black community when protecting black men from themselves is such an oversized job.

I could post some smug, faux-outraged bullshit in support of Black Lives Matter on Facebook like a lot of my white friends have, and get a lot of likes and social brownie points. The truth is, that would be the most stupidly self-serving thing I could do as a white person.

Black crime doesn’t affect me. I live in a white neighborhood where there are pizza parties and potlucks instead of shootings and robberies. Fueling the tension between black people and the people who risk their lives everyday to protect them would be wildly irresponsible. It would cost me nothing and cost black people everything.

I remember when BLM came to an urban community near me, after the police had to shoot a black man. Tensions rose between the police and the black community, and what followed was a tidal wave of black-on-black shootings. You can say there’s no such thing as “the Ferguson Effect”, but I’ve watched it in action.

The most important thing I can do as a white civilian is probably listen to and validate black feelings. This might come as a surprise after the tone of this post, but I actually think the rage of black people as displayed by Black Lives Matters is valid – emotions can be very valid while the reasons given for them are often not.

Black people have been through a lot that they should be angry about. White people forget that it really wasn’t that long ago that police enforced segregation and other humiliations against black people. The ghettos where these shootings are happening weren’t the design of the black community, they’re the outcome of greed and dishonest practices like “Redlining” committed by mortgage companies and real estate agents decades ago.

It’s no surprise that after trying to slap suppressive Band-Aids like “tolerance” and “color-blindness” on these problems, that rage and out of control behavior is bleeding through. Our country is just aching for these things to come to the surface and be addressed.

Caring about other people’s feelings and experiences and showing that is one way to go about it. Bloodbaths are another.

Aftercare

It seems that many people were shaken up and upset by my assertion that people are objects – meaning that there is no real separation between our bodies and “us”, and the things we feel, do, think and say with our bodies are the things that make us who we are, and so can add to or diminish our value.

The people who were upset by my post were in all likelihood people who realized on some level that if this was true they may have devalued themselves in a serious way. Obese women, women with a history of promiscuous behavior and/or abortions, etc.

I need to balance what I wrote with a reminder about who I am, and what my story has been about.

When I met my husband 10 years ago I was about as close to completely devalued as a person could be. I saw myself as only a sexual object – life had taught me from the moment my body began to develop that I existed to please men, that I deserved to be humiliated and degraded, that I was only useful when I was making myself sexually available.

I didn’t read books anymore. I didn’t cook, write, workout, or connect with the people around me. I spent most of my days wandering around and by and by falling into bed with strangers. I numbed myself with alcohol and sex.

I didn’t know how to be a person. I was barely existing, my spark was going out more day by day. When my husband met me, he chose me because I was pretty and wild and exciting, and honestly because my brand of crazy fit well into patterns of brokenness in his own life.

Our relationship moved fast, and as it did I failed to keep pace. I was deeply loved and accepted by someone, but I continued to inwardly collapse. I gained weight while simultaneously developing a fear of food. I became afraid to leave the house. I watched the world outside my window, shivering and filled with inexplicable dread, wondering how they did it, how they could endure life, what it would be like to be so normal.

I started to want Jesus. I’m not sure how or why. It was a little longing that grew bigger and bigger, and one day I realized I believed in him and I could just feel that in a strange way on the day I finally believed that I had become a different person. I went to a Bible Study for college students. I didn’t connect with anyone. I was a Christian like they were, but I wasn’t quite as human as them.

I had a long way to go.

The journey wasn’t linear. It wasn’t a Kendrick Brother’s movie. I went to church, studied the Bible, and tried out different inhuman ways of life for many years. I wore strategically ugly glasses. I pissed my husband off. I alienated him. I concealed my past. I watched porn. I developed surface level relationships.

God didn’t leave me or abandon me in my confused, broken, pseudo-human state. Year by year he was there, feeding me what I could handle, and when the time was right he moved in for the kill. I went to therapy. I started telling the truth about my past. I found that I didn’t have to wear ugly glasses or be chubby anymore. I lost weight. I started to ache for real friends.

I realized that I loved writing and that was something I could share with other people. I realized that I loved working out and it made my body feel good in a way that porn never could. I realized I could be vulnerable and open to my husband and it wouldn’t be humiliating or degrading.

My body which was once abandoned for the use of strangers has now born children. My mind which was once empty and numbed by alcohol is now full of questions and ideas. My heart which was flat and broken now throbs for deeper intimacy with family and friends. My spirit which was dead is now alive and flushed with love for God.

I am experiencing the reversal of decay, degradation and death. This is the heritage of every person who calls on the name of God.

My story is beautiful not because I wasn’t so bad and Jesus wanted a player like me on his team, my story is beautiful because I was an utter wasteland and by his intervention alone that wasteland has become a fruitful garden.

That’s just what he does. He is a redeemer. He’ll buy out your broken down mess and turn it into beauty that sings his name.

Of Course Women Are Objects

(You’ll want to follow this post up with Aftercare)

A feminist left a comment on my Brock Turner post the other day that really got me thinking. Here it is:

It was the absurdity of the statement that got the wheels in my head turning. Of course women, as human beings, are objects – we’re physical beings, blood and skin and hair and cartilage.

The most ethereal things about humanity; the arts, great works of fiction, poetry, scientific discovery, etc. issue forth from our very object-ness; our brain matter, neurons, hormones, etc.

We are objects. Human beings are objects. That feminists like Nikki deny this fact testifies to how much feminism has evolved into a religion. The dogma of feminism is that women possess a brightly burning, otherworldly spiritual value that cannot be extinguished or even diminished by any negative choices, attitudes, or behaviors – except for the heresy of denying feminism itself.

Let’s be clear: If you are a human being reading this post, whether you have a penis or a vagina, you are an object. Your value isn’t lurking somewhere outside of your physical existence, it’s located solidly within it. What you do with the raw material of your body – your thoughts, your face, your voice, your emotions, your hormones, your muscles, your sexual organs — this is where you produce value, or lose it.

What feminists hate about this glaringly obvious truth is that it means women have a burden of performance – just like men do. Of course, feminists are glad to evaluate men as objects with the potential to add or lose value. Are they utilizing their physical strength to protect women while they’re out drinking themselves into incapacitation? Are they misappropriating the raw material of their minds on video games and porn? Are their emotions in line with what feminists like to see, or are they ensnared in “toxic masculinity”?

While feminist perception of what men’s burden of performance is is as absurd and baseless as the rest of their dogma, they’re not wrong that men have a burden of performance. They’re wrong that women don’t have one too.

The female burden of performance is sometimes just as heavy as men’s. We’re expected to provide beauty for this world – to be beautiful, to be thin and lovely and stylish, and to create beautiful spaces. We’re expected to be kind and people-oriented, and so provide a kind of social glue. We’re expected to be quieter and more gentle, and so add a restful balance to the roughness of masculinity. We’re expected to be mothers, and use our reproductive capacities well to literally propagate our heritage.

When we misuse our reproductive capacities in the forms of casual sex, multiple partners, abortion and the like, we hemorrhage value — because our existence as objects is so heavily tied to our bodily capacity to create and sustain human life. But to acknowledge this thread of common sense that has run through human history would get in the way of feminism’s goal of expanding female power ad infinitum, regardless of the consequences.

The truth? By failing to live up to the burden of being an object – by being fat, slovenly, loud, aggressive, slutty, or selfish – women truly can lose value. Just like men.

Why We Applaud Masculine Women

Did you know that there are 3x more male-to-female transexuals as there are female-to-male? My husband and I were recently discussing this interesting fact, and he pointed out that women in our culture have no need to deal with the rigors of transgenderism if they want to live as men.

In America, a woman can buzz her hair, dress in men’s clothing, work a job in construction, and even date women all while still being considered solidly female. She certainly won’t be lauded as feminine, and she may have a difficult time being included in circles of female friendship, but no one will think of her as a transsexual.

Compare this to a man who puts on makeup and a dress – unlike the woman who dresses in men’s clothing, a man in women’s clothing immediately crosses the boundary out of manhood and into womanhood. Men who want to participate in female behavior must actually become female in order to do — the boundaries of masculinity are much tighter.

To talk about this in our culture is to invite much hand-wringing over “toxic” masculinity and urging that men should adopt a more female-style fluidity of sexual expression. If you’re a regular reader of my blog, you can probably imagine that I do not concur, but this is not what I want to focus on right now.

I want to explore why we allow women such fluidity in the first place.

I’ve been reading a book by historian Laurel Thatcher Ulrich called Good Wives: Image and Reality in the Lives of Women in Northern New England 1650-1750. It’s a great book and the title really tells you all you need to know about it, doesn’t it?

Ulrich lays out the expectations of wives in early American society (almost all women married, so in this context “women” and “wife” can be used interchangeably.) Women were expected to specialize in female work around the house like cooking, textile and clothing production, cleaning and gardening. They were expected to be “consorts” – sexual and emotional companions, mothers who produced and nurtured offspring, active and supportive participants in the community of women, and Christians under the authority of God, their husband and their church.

There’s one more role that really stood out to me. Wives in early America were expected to be “deputy-husbands” — that is, they were expected to be able to stand in for their husband wherever necessary and helpful. A farmer’s wife may have been expected to help him plant. A merchant’s wife, to keep shop. As widowhood was a common fate, women needed to be competent to manage and maintain their husband’s estates until sons came of age to take over for them.

A good wife was one who could help her husband by flexing into male roles and responsibilities.

Rollo Tomassi has often pointed out that feminism cherry picks from the “old rule book” of traditional gender roles to serve the interests of modern women. For example: traditionally, men have been expected to provide for and protect women, and in exchange for this they received primacy and authority over women. Feminists will take the provision and protection, with the part about respect and authority crossed out.

This strategy is applied across the board in feminist theory. Female sexuality is to be considered as sacred and sacrosanct as it was 100 years ago when it comes to judging the gravity of rape over other types of assault, but not when it comes to judging a woman’s plans for a drunken one night stand on Saturday night.

Here too, when it comes to female access into male roles, space or behavior, women are interested in the provisions of the “old rule book”, but with all the caveats crossed out. In this case, the caveat crossed out is the one stating that women can assume male roles only in the name of service and help to her husband, and only as he requires.

Remember that the heart of femininity is being “for men”, and there is much flexibility in this. When men react positively to a sexy girl who can shoot a gun or find her way around under the hood of a car, or when we praise women who are competent in traditional male fields of expertise like home repair, we’re instinctively hearkening back to our culture roots – the idea that a good woman is one who is capable of assisting her husband with his responsibilities.

Understand that feminists capitalize on this instinct with sinister motives. They want to preserve that pathway for women into masculinity, but not as helpers — this time, as competitors.

Book Review: Never Done, A History of American Housework

Centuries ago, the American home was primarily a place of production – the family grew their own food, cooked all their own meals, chopped down their own fuel, manufactured candles for their own lighting, soap for their own hygiene, cultivated fields of flax and flocks of sheep for their own textiles, sewed their own clothes – and the housewife was at the center of this production activity.

Being a housewife once meant grueling, sustained physical labor – chopping and hauling wood for fuel, hauling all household water both inside and back out again, building and sustaining fires.

Susan Strasser’s book Never Done: A History of American Housework will submerge you in this lost world, lavishing the imagination with intimate details, all while taking you on a journey through the last few centuries, carefully detailing how the industrial revolution, mass production and mass marketing brought us from where we were, to where we are today.

Honestly, I feel a little lost as a homemaker sometimes, and judging by the forlorn Facebook posts and murmurings of other homemakers around me, I’m not the only one.

It can feel a bit meaningless and empty, just looking after the kids all day, running the dishwasher, wiping up crumbs, moving the laundry. Whereas the typical Christian encouragement for these feelings is, “chin up, mama, your work is so very important!”, reading the history of my “profession” actually dignified and gave context to those emotions in a much more profound way.

Being a housewife is no longer about production, it’s about consumption – and consuming more than you produce is a recipe for emptiness and depression. Today’s housewife shops, she judges products and uses them, she buys clothes for her family, she buys food, she buys fuel and water, she buys light, and much more.

She produces very little, and for good reason – for example, making your own clothing might be fun, but it’s not at all time or cost effective.

Beyond an uncomfortable imbalance between production and consumption, as a housewife I’ve always struggled with trying to fill an entire day with child-rearing activities, and so it was fascinating to me to read how it was advertisers selling modern utilities and time-saving appliances who dreamt up and promoted the idea that child-rearing ought to be the main focus of the housewife.

Despite how much the subject of Never Done piqued my interest, I was hesitant to read it when I saw it described as a “women’s studies” book. I didn’t want to have to grit my teeth through uncomfortable, opinionated commentary – and you know what? I didn’t. Though Strasser certainly is a feminist, she really was an excellent guide through history and let the material speak for itself without asserting herself into it.

Rather than immerse me in feminist ideas, this book opened my eyes to the ways social conservatism actually promoted female superiority over men – leaders like Harriet Beecher Stowe and her sister Catherine urged veneration and respect for the role of the homemaker, because they believed that women needed a separate sphere in order to reign supreme and morally influence men, who were sullied and degraded by being out in “the world”.

Never Done is the most important book I’ve read all year. It helped me understand the problems I face in my own life, and the problems women are facing now as a whole. It gave me more respect for women historically, while possibly lowering my respect for modern women, and caused me to search my heart and mind to figure out how I can make my home a place of production and connectedness to the land and other people in the midst of modern challenges.

If you’ve ever wondered if “women are children”, if you’ve ever felt lost and lonely in modern life, if you’ve ever been confused about what a women’s role really is, I highly recommend this book to you.

How Feminism Makes Rape Look Less Wrong

“Rape culture” has been an especially popular topic of Facebook posts and news articles this week, as controversy rages over the sentence handed down in the Brock Turner rape case.

I’ll summarize the facts of the case as reported by the victim herself in her well-publicized statement:

A 23 year old woman went to a frat party with her sister. She drank a lot of hard liquor very quickly, and while that hadn’t been a problem for her in her college days when her tolerance was high, she hadn’t been drinking as much lately and became extremely intoxicated to the point of passing out.

Drunk college freshman Brock Turner, attending the same party, somehow took the victim behind a dumpster where he removed her clothing and violently penetrated her with his fingers, but ran off when he spotted by passers-by. The girl woke up at the hospital bloodied and confused, with no memory of the attack.

The student was found guilty, and sentenced to 6 months in jail and 3 years probation. This sentence has drawn outrage, as many feel it is much too lenient.

I have some thoughts.

The reason rape is taken much more seriously than other forms of assault is that it damages the victim’s sexuality, and sexuality is a core part of our humanity.

Sexuality is sacred, and the censure of rape honors it’s sacredness. Not only that, but sexuality is a necessary tool for building a healthy identity and healthy relationships – rape takes away a person’s ability to do that.

Taking rape seriously means taking our sexuality seriously – but what happens when it’s the only way we take our sexuality seriously?

Traditionally, repudiating rape has only been one way among many of protecting and defending this most delicate, vulnerable, beautiful piece of our humanity. Up until a few decades ago, most cultures recognized that sexuality was so precious and important that it ought only to be handled by one’s spouse.

Now, it’s considered a rite of passage and a means of personal growth to offer your sexuality up to be consumed by strangers for a night or two.

Traditionally, people honored the sexual parts of their body by covering them and allowing them only to be seen privately, intimately.

Now, young women’s clothing is about how much nakedness they can get away with in public.

It’s not surprising that the more we abuse and devalue our own sexuality, the more our culture complains about “rape culture”. Anti-rape hysteria is the dying gasp of the idea that sex is sacred, as we deny with all other personal actions and values.

So I would like to compare rape to arson.

Raping a person who has drunk themselves into unconsciousness is like burning down an abandoned building.

Raping a lucid, struggling victim is like burning down a family’s home.

A person who has drunk themselves into unconsciousness has made themselves like an abandoned building, and this too is by matters of degree. Is it a 16 year old at their first party, inexperienced and desperately naive?

Or is it a 23 year old college graduate? I became a mother at the age of 23, responsible not only for my own life and welfare but the welfare of another. To literally poison yourself into incapacitation at a frat house of all places, as an educated adult, is to treat your sexuality with the same contempt as a house you had cared badly for and could no longer afford – it is to abandon it.

Now, someone might come along and burn the house down. This person who commits arson against your abandoned house is a criminal. They are fully responsible for their actions– they are immoral, they are bad. They deserve prison time, they deserve censure.

But what they did, and what you experienced, is not the same thing as arson against a family’s lovingly cared-for house.

A person who takes responsibility for themselves in life, who respects their body and takes seriously their actions and choices, is like a well-tended house – similarly, to a matter of degree. When this person, who is just living their life, is suddenly raped, it is like the house is set on fire while the family sleeps inside.

Unlike the abandoned house, this house was full of life, it was full of value and creativity that could have nurtured and built up so many. Both houses were damaged, but not in the same way.

Rebuilding will not and should not be the same for the owners of either house. The owner of the abandoned house is not at fault for the arson, but before they rebuild they have to account for how they treated their house in the first place. Why did they value their house so little, how can they care for it better in the future?

This is not for the purpose of heaping guilt upon themselves, but to help them rebuild or own for the first time a healthy sexual identity – the very thing that makes rape more serious than most other crimes to begin with.

So I understand the sentence in the Brock Turner case. A college freshman who molests a drunk adult at a frat party is a dangerous criminal, but not at all the same kind of dangerous criminal who lies in wait for an innocent woman jogging in the park and attacks her.

By trying to make them the same thing, we’re losing our sense of what makes rape so hurtful and wrong to begin with.

Stop Calling It “White Culture”

In America, 72% of all black children are born to single mothers. (1) 82% of black women are overweight or obese. (2) Black men make up 6% of the American population, but commit about 50% of our homicides. (3)

How do these statistics make you feel? They make me feel disgusted, horrified, and frightened for the future of our country.

I used to try to suppress those feelings. I thought that noticing these trends and feeling negatively about them made me a racist. I tried to focus on individual black people in my life who made me feel good, while ignoring the larger picture around me- I thought that made me a good Christian.

The truth is, it’s monstrous to close your eyes and heart to the horrors of urban black culture. It’s monstrous not to feel something over the fact that 93% of blacks are murdered by other blacks. It’s monstrous to default to thoughts of “body love” when you consider that 4 out of 5 black women are subject to the devastating health effects of excess body fat. It’s monstrous not to fear for the generation of almost uniformly fatherless black children rising up.

Denial is ugly.

So is suppression.

The alt-right venerates “white culture” but can’t seem to account for the fact that black people are only here in our midst having a cultural apocalypse because white people brought them here in the first place. If white people ever valued having a snow-white country, our first mistake was importing black people into it.

We didn’t invent the African slave trade, but we did choose to bring that darkness here.
We did choose to treat human beings as chattel to prop up our economy, and after we were done doing that we did stifle their educational and economic growth.
We did isolate them into literal and cultural ghettos through policies of “separate but equal”.
We did finally undo them by bestowing on them victimhood status and enacting devastating welfare policies that ripped their families apart.

We can’t pretend that whiteness is something that exists completely apart from blackness, or that “white culture” is a neat little package we can put on a pedestal.

We like to focus on one sliver of white culture, the kind you see in the wholesome, neighborly American Midwest — while ignoring the hulking white liberal elite whose wisdomless intelligence brought us gay marriage, radical feminism, and fat acceptance.

The problem isn’t black people. The problem isn’t white people. The problem is suppression and denial – just as it opens the door to chaos in the mind and personality, so it opens the door to chaos in society.

Honestly, I can connect with the rage I see in BLM protestors – not the reasons they give for their rage, but the rage itself – because they aren’t integrated into our culture, so they can’t really communicate with us — we push them to the shadows by treating them as either fallen beyond redemption or as helpless children.

I can also connect with the anger I see in the alt-right – enough denial. Enough blaming the police when they’re already stretched beyond comprehension trying to serve the entire population plus a highly criminal 6%. Enough of the patronizing pageantry of cultural relativism – it’s clear that the culture white people have is far healthier and more beneficial than the horrors of the ghetto. Acknowledging that fact isn’t racism, it’s compassion.

Denial, suppression, denial, suppression – is there anything else we can do?

Integration. Alt-right – stop calling it “white culture”. These values that you cherish? They aren’t magically bestowed through white skin – that kind of thinking is the same stream of senseless entitlement that elite liberals swim in. White skinned people across the world have cooked up many divergent flavors of culture, some insane and some beautiful. It’s not the skin, it’s the values.

The things I love about “white culture” — the way we throw ourselves in holistic parenting, the way we approach food and fitness, the way we value education and the arts, the way we create and innovate – I love those things just as much when I see them in my brown friends.

I love my white beauty, I love my white husband and my white children, but I don’t believe whiteness is magic – I believe the primary values of our culture are fundamentally good and worthy of honor – worthy of being disseminated across racial lines in our country.

We can’t have race-based fragments of culture and expect America to act whole for us while her skin becomes browner. “Separate but equal” was just Multiculturalism 1.0 – and multiculturalism doesn’t work. You might think “white girls are magic”, but you can’t hold black America like a beach ball under the water and expect it not to fly up angrily in your face.

We can’t suppress and deny the actions that brought us into this situation – we have to deal with them, the consequences and the opportunities to learn from them. We have a mess to clean up, and emotions to deal with, cultural corners to dust and shadows to shine light on.

LeeLee in Babylon

Girly Thoughts on The Red Pill