Evidently this is something Sheila has never encountered, because she responded with (emphasis mine):

She makes a careful distinction between Christian women like herself and the women in her audience, and those awful nasty feminist women.  How dare Jack insinuate that Christian women are childish and feminist?  How dare he suggest that the Church and Christians in general give women a pass?  She had a similar exchange with Deti on the same thread, who wrote:

There is much talk of how men are to act honorably and respectfully. But there is no reciprocal expectation that women act similarly, with grace, humility and submission. At least that was not mentioned.

It pains me to say this as a Christian man, but the Christian church no longer dominates western culture. It’s been discarded in favor of secular feminism.

Sheila responded (emphasis mine):

Deti, I understand your point, but here’s the trouble I have with the way that it is often phrased: I often hear people in the “manosphere”, or whatever you want to call it, criticizing the church for not teaching women to be submissive or graceful or whatever. But they say “the church” does it. How? There’s a very large female Christian blogosphere, for instance, and Darlene Schacht from Time Warp Wife came out with an ebook this week doing exactly that. All of the women’s Bible studies that I’ve read focus on developing godly character. In my church, godly character development and humility are taught. At the marriage conferences where I teach, run by FamilyLife, one of the largest family ministries in North America, all of these things are taught explicitly.

So I guess I have to ask: who, exactly, are you criticizing? I think it’s an easy criticism to make, but I personally do not see it. I don’t see it in the women’s Bible studies that happen at churches all over the continent on Wednesday mornings, or Thursday mornings. I don’t see it in Christian books written for women. I don’t see it in the Christian blogosphere. But I do see the criticism often.

In another response to Deti, Sheila also wrote:

Of course feminism has eradicated that; no one is questioning that. But I fail to see why we should permit that to happen, or not stand up for honour, that’s all.

Poor sheltered Sheila has never seen the kinds of attitudes Deti and Jack describe in Christian women.  Perhaps it is because such attitudes are so foreign to her that she simply can’t imagine other Christian women holding them.  You know, her being a sheltered non feminist Traditional Christian woman and all.

Except I know for a fact that Shiela runs into the exact attitudes in Christian women and easy treatment of women by the church that Deti and Jack were describing.  How do I know?  Here is what Sheila tells us in her video log Should You Change to Improve Your Marriage? (emphasis mine):

I did one of these vlogs where I was talking about how it is important if you are upset in your marriage not to think about all of the stuff that he is doing wrong, but to look at what you can do to make the marriage better.  And I had a lot of emails after that from women saying:

“Thats telling women that they can’t be true to themselves.  If you say that you need to change in order to be happy in a marriage then you’re not being true to yourself and that is wrong.”

One of my readers pointed out this vlog and I wrote a post about it.  At the time I assumed that Sheila was treating this kind of attitude amongst Christian women so gently because she understood that anything but kid gloves would result in rebellion (emphasis added):

One thing which strikes me about Sheila’s work is how incredibly gentle she is in her pro marriage message to Christian women.  At first I thought she was only lukewarm on the topic of marriage, but after further consideration I am convinced that she is accurately assessing the nature of her audience.  What she considers “harsh” I would consider walking on eggshells.  But as I said I think she has accurately gaged her target audience.  Christian women as a group are not used to being told they have any obligations.  Ever.  Even obligations resulting from a sacred promise they made in the church in front of God and everyone they know.  This simply isn’t the way of the modern Christian church*.

Sheila referenced my blog post in a post of her own back in September.  Commenters Joy and Lori on Sheila’s blog both stated that the bolded part of my comments above were unfortunately all too accurate.  Sheila agreed:

Joy and Lori–I know. That is an OUCH comment, isn’t it? But I do think it’s true. In general, the church is very hard on men and very easy on women, and yet it is women who instigate most divorces. We need to get back to the message that we have a responsibility and an obligation to make our marriages work, even if those marriages do not make us happy. But that goes against conventional wisdom, and seems mean. We really are fighting upstream!

I know this is some heavy quoting to read through, but I wanted to show beyond question that Sheila absolutely has run into the kinds of things Deti and Jack were describing.  When she claims on the WACF post that she doesn’t run into childish entitled Christian women and that she doesn’t see the church giving women a pass, she is directly at odds with what she wrote and said previously.

But it gets worse.  Sheila isn’t the sheltered Traditional Christian woman I took her for.  Readers CL and Anonymous Reader brought to my attention that Sheila has a masters degree in women’s studies (emphasis mine):

I’ve had a ton of visitors from sites lately that have been mocking the Christian view of marriage, and that’s one of the primary lines of attack: I’m telling women it’s okay if their husbands rape them. Give. Me. A. Break. Now, I know where they’re coming from, since I’ve done a Masters in Sociology with an emphasis on Women’s Studies, too. I’ve read all that feminist literature that calls all sex rape, and while it totally messed up my sex life in the early part of my marriage, I’ve thankfully been able to leave it behind and realize how great sex in marriage is.

Unless she was a child prodigy, Sheila spent her mid twenties as a raving feminist.  Not only that, she only tepidly rejects the label feminist today.  We learn this from an exchange she had with commenter Rachel back in December.  Rachel wrote (emphasis mine):

One thing I don’t agree with you on is YOUR generalization of “feminists”. I am a feminist, meaning I believe I have equal rights to a man, I should have equal pay for equal work, I should have a choice about whether I want to have children or what religion I practice, I should be allowed to vote, I should be allowed to choose whether or not to work and in what field. That doesn’t mean I hate all men, think women’s “rights” trump men’s rights and it most certainly does not mean I think all sex is rape…

I don’t know how to determine if this Rachel is the same Rachel on Shiela’s WACF post who argued that women’s lives are worth more than men’s, but it doesn’t seem unlikely.  It would be more than a little ironic if this is the same Rachel on the WACF post Sheila was scolding commenters for implying that she might be a feminist and not a Traditional Christian woman.  At any rate, Sheila replied and clarified why she no longer calls herself a feminist (emphasis mine):

As for the feminist critique, I see your point. I have stopped calling myself a feminist, although I do believe in equality, because the term has become so tainted politically. I believe women should have opportunities and choices, but I do not believe that we are superior. And I was so poisoned in my postgraduate work that I have come to really hate the term. But perhaps I should have qualified that better.

She doesn’t call herself a feminist anymore because the word carries too much political baggage.

Hawaiian Libertarian had Sheila pegged for a feminist back in November with his post To Love, Honor & Vacuum…unless he looks at teh Pr0n!:

Sheila is a feminist….the worst kind. A wolf in sheep’s clothing.

Note:  Don’t be surprised if one or more of the pages on Sheila’s blog I link to above are scrubbed after I post this.  In my Warn Men post I quoted an exchange Sheila had with a woman on youtube who claimed she was emotionally abused.  Sheila responded to the woman on youtube as if emotional abuse was real abuse.  Some time after I wrote that post the comments were deleted from Sheila’s youtube page.  See for yourself.  Now see this google cache page of what the comments for that video looked like on November 10th, 2011, two days after I quoted them.  If you are interested in keeping a record for posterity, you can take a screenshot of the comments in the google cache page or print it to a pdf file.  At some point google is likely to update the cached version to the one with the comments deleted.

Many female passengers this week are disgusted with the males on board, as well they should be.

She offers the Titanic as an example of how things should work on shipwrecks:

When the Titanic sank, the men followed the “women and children” first rule. In fact, you were more likely to survive as a third class female passenger than a richer male one. But that was a century ago.

She is a bit murky on exactly why men have an obligation to do what the men on Titanic did.  She makes vague references to honor and personal responsibility:

In 1912 it was a different world. Personal responsibility was still the main ethos of the day. People took care of their neighbours; they did not wait for government to do it for them. And people had a code of honour that included helping others when you could.

But if the reason men should sacrifice and even die in the place of women is due to honor and selflessness, a woman writing this is being incredibly rude and crass.  If men have no obligation to sacrifice for unknown women but often do anyway out of graciousness, women demanding more of this is quite simply despicable.  Women demanding that men give up their seats in lifeboats is the life and death equivalent to showing up at someone’s home and demanding hospitality (especially if the person doing the demanding knows they will never be in a position to have the same demand made of them).  While Sheila and several of the women commenting on her blog are essentially asking men “Don’t you think you should be brave and selfless and offer to die for me now?”, an uncouth and entitled houseguest might only ask “Don’t you think you should loan us your car?  Don’t you think we should sleep in your bed instead of in the guest room?”  Even if you are a strong proponent of hospitality, once this attitude of unbelievable entitlement by guests takes hold you can no longer be a gracious host.  This profound ungraciousness by women like Sheila is as much to blame for the death of chivalry as feminism is.

It is worth noting that Sheila makes these demands from men while accusing them of being selfish and worrying about what others will do for them:

Somehow we have lost that. It is no longer about honour and what we should do for others; it has become what others should do for us.

Telling others they need to do more for you (or people like you) while lecturing them in this way is the height of hypocrisy.

Another possible argument for WACF is that men owe this to women, and it therefore isn’t a gift men can give any more than paying the rent is a gift to one’s landlord.  This would fit with the unthankful and demanding attitude we see.  Sheila’s syndicated column might not be her being profoundly ungracious, it could be simply a case of the landlord demanding the rent.  A commenter on Sheila’s site named Rachel made this very argument:

Women and children do not go first because they are weaker; they go first because lets face it, you need more women than men to keep the population going (men can make millions of babies in a day, women can only make 1-2 per year at best and our fertility is limited)and children are our future to continue the human race.

She just said that women’s lives are worth more than men’s lives.   It also implies that fathers aren’t all that valuable beyond walking wallets and sperm donors.  This blazes entirely past radical feminist all the way to female supremacist bigot.  Sheila didn’t challenge this assertion, and my initial take was that it wouldn’t be fair to question Sheila’s stance on this simply because she didn’t refute it.  The internet is a big place, and just because someone says something on your blog and you don’t refute it doesn’t mean you agree with them.  However, a reader named Fidel did challenge Rachel on her argument:

Sheila was outraged that Fidel challenged Rachel on her women are worth more than men argument.  Unlike her (non) response to Rachel on the topic, she not only responded but actually scolded Fidel:

Fidel, what is the matter with you? Are you insinuating that Rachel doesn’t know about abortion? Of course she doesn’t support abortion. This is a Christian blog; many here have worked in the pro-life movement. If you want to participate in a conversation, that’s fine, but just insulting people is not helping anything, and is just showing that you want confrontation rather than a real discussion. To insinuate that Rachel is somehow ignorant of abortion is ridiculous. If you want to insult the commenters (and Rachel is a frequent one), perhaps it would be better for you to read more of this blog and see more of what she stands for.

Why should Fidel have assumed Rachel was a good Christian woman?  Rachel’s Darwinian female supremacy argument wasn’t Christian in nature.  And by defending Rachel’s good standing on the blog in this specific context she also seems to be lending her weight to Rachel’s argument.  She actually says Fidel was insulting for the way he challenged Rachel’s men are worth less than women argument.  Does she not feel that Rachel’s original statement was far more insulting than Fidel’s very measured response?

Sheila didn’t just defend Rachel’s comments once, she did so twice.  Commenter Tom directly quoted Rachel’s women are worth more than men argument in his comment:

As she did with Fidel, Sheila scolded Tom:

Tom, this point has already been dealt with. Did you read the comments? This is a pro-life blog, and just because abortion is now practiced (an abhorrence and a tragedy) does not give anyone else the excuse to not do the right thing. It looks like you’re advocating a race to the lowest common denominator.

Elsewhere in the comments Sheila indicates that she isn’t completely sure WACF is merely about Rachel’s Darwinian logic:

I’m not completely sure that was the origin of WACF. I think it was more an acknowledgement that men were stronger, and that honour demanded it. For instance, it applied to older women, too, even those who were past childbearing age. I’ll have to think on that more.

Sheila isn’t sure why women like her shouldn’t be called on to do what she so crassly demands from men, but she’ll rationalize a reason and presumably get back to us.  But this still begs the question;  why does Sheila feel that men owe her this?  She obviously feels strongly about this, or she wouldn’t have made this the topic of her syndicated column.  Does she agree with Rachel that men’s lives are worth less than the lives of women, and that “less valuable people” need to stay away from lifeboats until all of the “more valuable people” have been rescued?  Is her disagreement with Rachel merely on the logic used to determine that men’s lives are worth less, and not the fundamental conclusion?  Or does she believe that men aren’t actually obligated to die in the place of women but have done so anyway out of an extreme sense of graciousness, something she demands more of in a most ungracious way?  If Sheila doesn’t agree with Rachel that men’s lives are worth less than the lives of women, why did she so passionately attack those who criticized this line of argument while not bothering to point out the error in the argument itself?

I still want to give the benefit of the doubt to Sheila on this.  I would prefer to assume that she simply has astonishingly bad manners, and not that she is a female supremacist bigot.  Yet the combination of her own words as well as her selective silence makes me wonder.  She can of course clarify this for us if she wishes to on her own blog.

Where was the chivalry? Describing the panic on board, one passenger said there were people screaming and women and children weren’t given priority

Where was the chivalry?  I would direct them to the story of the man who gave his life to save his wife, but I’m assuming they already know about it since they wrote the article.  Perhaps they would be interested in this story from the New York Daily News:  Drowned violinist on doomed cruise ship helped children to safety before he was lost.

Yet only two men losing their lives after putting women and children first simply isn’t enough.  Another Daily Mail headline shouts:  ‘Forget women and children first, it was every man for himself’: Cruise liner survivors describe nightmare scenes as people fought to escape sinking ship.  In the article they back up this damning claim:

Fabio Costa, a crewmate, said: ‘We were giving priority to kids and women and trying to leave the men until last, but they were not accepting it because it was their families.’

Men wanted to stay with and protect their families during a disaster.  Those bastards.

We also learn of this father:

‘He said, “Take my baby”, Georgia Ananias said, covering her mouth with her hand. ‘I grabbed the baby. But then I was being pushed down. I didn’t want the baby to fall down the stairs. I gave the baby back. I couldn’t hold her.’

Her daughter Valerie whispered: ‘I wonder where they are.’

How many men need to die protecting women and children in a shipwreck before women and white knights will be satisfied?  Clearly two isn’t enough.  As we’ve seen from commenter Amanda on Sheila’s blog, even the thousand plus men who stepped aside so that women and children could be saved on RMS Titanic didn’t do so with enough courage or honor to suit her tastes.

The message to men is clear:

We expect more from you next time.  More death, more sacrifice, more flair.

Please keep this in mind should the ship you are traveling on experience a sudden loss of buoyancy.

Commenter Deti entered Sheila’s blog and had a polite exchange with her:

There’s a difference between a man holding a door for his wife, and holding the door for a stranger woman. He has moral obligations to protect his wife. He has no obligations, moral or otherwise, to the stranger.

It used to be that men came to the aid of women — any women — who obviously needed help. Any man who does this now might find himself scolded, excoriated or even accused of harassment.

No one should be surprised that it has come to this. Feminist society has made sure that men feel wary of ever interacting publiclly or privately with any woman they are not related to. And frankly, the church has done scant little to combat this, instead in many instances joining forces with feminism to promote female “equality” over biblical principles.

Sheila replied:

Deti, I’d disagree with your assessment that he has no obligations to the stranger. By saying that, then you’re giving in to the feminist mentality.

If honour and respect are universal, then we do have moral obligations to each other, even strangers. We have obligations to honour and respect them, and one of the ways to do that would be to hold a door open. If feminists get mad about that, that’s really their problem, because they’re the ones who are forgetting the universal and timeless principles, not the one holding the door.

Yes, feminists have created this society, but that does not mean that we have to give in to it.

The false claim here is that women like Sheila are different than those feminists who want to free women from accountability to men. Because of this, men must still be responsible for women like her. The truth is that Sheila and arguably most traditional conservative women are really just feminist-lite. For example, consider her post When the world isn’t safe for women, where Sheila contemplated the Laura Logan incident:

I think sometimes we forget how vulnerable women can be. I am not saying that Ms. Logan acted foolishly; she likely knew what she was risking, and CBS likely did, too, and she chose to go anyway. That is what reporters do, and it is a risk they are willing to take. Male reporters and cameramen have been attacked, kidnapped, beaten, and killed, too, in the Middle East this year. It’s a dangerous job, but a lucrative and rewarding one, and I guess she took a risk that in retrospect was too much.

Laura Logan is a woman, what’s wrong with a little roar? you might say. After all, women are adults who can make their own choices and accept the accompanying risk.

Not quite. To Sheila women are adults until they need men, in which case they more resemble an unattended eight year old. From her exchange with Deti:

…given how vulnerable women are, I do think that men should watch over women if they’re in a potentially dangerous situation, in the same way that if I see a child under 8 walking around alone in a mall, I immediately stop what I’m doing and make sure there’s a caregiver in sight. That child is nothing to me, but what kind of person would I be if I didn’t check to make sure the child was safe?

Isn’t that just a little bit paternalistic to compare women to unattended children? Why yes, but only if we are talking about limiting women’s choices. Sheila explains in her Lara Logan post (emphasis mine):

…I don’t think we should kid ourselves about women in combat. They aren’t safe; they just aren’t. And women are at a far greater risk when they are in combat than men, because if we are captured, far worse things are almost guaranteed to be done to us than will ever be done to a man.

Should a country allow women to be raped or killed, when there are able bodied men not serving in the military? Even if those women are willing to take the risk?

That’s a tough question. Lara Logan was willing to take the risk, and it didn’t turn out well. But it was still her decision, and to say that she can’t go because she’s a woman seems paternalistic. It’s like saying that a woman can’t decide to be a missionary in a dangerous land, even if she feels called to do so, because it may be dangerous. We applaud women who risk their lives for the sake of the gospel; obviously no gospel is involved in what Ms. Logan was doing, but I don’t think we can say one is wrong and the other right. In both cases, women are taking the responsibility for themselves on themselves.

For those in the TLDR camp, I’ll summarize:

I want! I want! I want!  See, women can do that too!

Blessed is he who expects no gratitude, for he shall not be disappointed.

– W.C. Bennett

Back in 1852 the troop ship HMS Birkenhead sank in shark infested waters off the coast of South Africa.  There weren’t enough lifeboats to save everyone, and the captain made the extraordinary decision to reserve them for the women and children aboard.  The crew followed the captain’s order even though it meant his and many of their own deaths.  This incredible example of men sacrificing for others has made what otherwise would have been an obscure shipwreck a famous event in history.

Even a century and a half later, women still understand the meaning of the profound sacrifice made by those brave men:

Men owe us.

A similar event occurred in 1912 when RMS Titanic struck an iceberg.  Well over a thousand men stood aside and died so that mostly women (and a lesser percentage of children) could survive.  Women understood the meaning of that sacrifice as well:

You got off easy.  The women who survived are the ones who had to suffer.  We didn’t ask you to do this for us anyway.

And of course:

Men owe us.

One of the videos I saw after the sinking of the Costa Concordia had an overweight American woman with a short haircut complaining:

It certainly wasn’t women and children first!

She said this in the form of an indictment, with the obvious expectation that all listening would see it as proof of an outrageous dereliction by the men on the ship.  She and countless other women believe that since some men have volunteered to die in shipwrecks in the past, all men will forever have an obligation to do so.  What men in the past did was an incredible act of graciousness;  it has been met with an equally incredible lack of grace in return.

I’ve searched the web looking for a copy of the video to share, but unfortunately I couldn’t find it.  What I found instead was even more powerful however.  Sheila Gregoire wrote a post/syndicated column shortly after the Costa Concordia went down titled:  Women and Children First?  A Feminist Tragedy (emphasis mine):

In the comments I’ve been reading on the news reports, people seem to agree that children should be given priority, but there’s a heated debate about the women. We’re equal, so why should a man lose a place to a woman? Why should a man have to help a woman when he’s in danger, too?

And, as disgusting as I find that question, it makes sense. In 1912 it was a different world. Personal responsibility was still the main ethos of the day. People took care of their neighbours; they did not wait for government to do it for them. And people had a code of honour that included helping others when you could.

Somehow we have lost that. It is no longer about honour and what we should do for others; it has become what others should do for us.

I assume the irony is lost on her that her response to men having shown incredible selflessness is to be upset that men might at times elect to take care of themselves instead of focusing on people like her.  As I have written before, making chivalry mandatory or expected destroys the very concept.  It isn’t just feminists who destroyed chivalry, but feminist-lite women who view themselves as traditional.

Even so it wasn’t Sheila’s blog post which really startled me, it was the comments from many of the women who read her blog.  Several of the women understood the issue and why men made different choices on that wreck than on certain shipwrecks in the past.  But others took an attitude of incredible entitlement, assuming that men in general exist to serve them.  Commenter Rachel started by explaining that men owe this to women because women’s lives are worth more than men’s:

Women and children do not go first because they are weaker; they go first because lets face it, you need more women than men to keep the population going (men can make millions of babies in a day, women can only make 1-2 per year at best and our fertility is limited)and children are our future to continue the human race.

She then describes how she rudely bumped into a man recently in an elevator because she assumed he would understand that she has a special right to exit elevators first, even though of course she is his equal:

That being said, I was just thinking of this topic last night. I was sharing an elevator with a man about my age. When the elevator stopped, I automatically started to get off and he almost ran into me! I am so used to men letting me get off the elevator first, it hadn’t occurred to me that he wouldn’t. Once I righted myself, I got thinking about it and why would he let me off first? I am his equal. I started to think if there was a scientific reason, and I could not come up with one. In fact, I thought maybe the man should go first to let him see if it’s safe (I’ve watched too much late night drama and seen too many people get attacked getting off elevators).

Even though the uppity man in the elevator didn’t know his place, she graciously suggests that there are times when it is acceptable for a man to enter a lifeboat:

The thought process led to thinking about the “women and children first” policy and I do still think that applies, unless the child who is getting on the life boat is only accompanied by his/her father. I think then the dad should be able to get on the life boat with his child(ren).

I want to back up and remind you that before 1852 there was no such expectation that men should stand by and drown in order to save women who in most cases are strangers.  The sense of entitlement so many women now have because of acts of incredible selflessness by men in the past is astonishing.

Another commenter named Britiney who writes a blog called Consider the Lillies read Sheila’s post and it reminded her of a time recently when men she didn’t know failed to snap-to and be her personal unpaid valet.  It happened when she exercised poor planning while taking her computer in for repair:

Along the same lines and under the heading of “Chivalry is dead” I had to take my computer to the repair shop last week. I took it to the Apple store in our local mall and, not knowing that there was a “secret” entrance close to the store, I lugged it all the way through the parking lot, and then all the way through the mall and then BACK because I decided to take it somewhere else. I don’t know how much it weighs, but by the time I got all the way back to my car I was nearly in tears because it was SO heavy and I was SO frustrated. And here’s my point: I cannot even tell you how many able-bodied young men I passed while I was carrying something that was OBVIOUSLY too heavy for me. When I finally got to my car I called my husband and told him that my boys will NEVER pass someone who needs help and not offer to help them. I was so disgusted that not one single man offered to help me! So so so sad. I can’t influence any of the men who passed me by, but I can certainly influence the 3 young men God has entrusted to my care and if I have ANYTHING to do with it, they WILL put women and children first!!!

It reminded me of a comment Hestia made on a previous post on this topic about a woman who saw a group of servicemen returning from active duty, and was upset that they didn’t volunteer to carry her load for her:

Basically here is a group of largely men who have been sacrificing on behalf of the nation (or so the story goes) who haven’t done enough for this pampered princess. So it seems to go not only with soldiers in particular but men in general when it comes to chivalry.

One thing men need to understand is that in the event that they make the kind of sacrifice women are demanding, not only will it lead to even more entitlement, but many women will still detract from the noble nature of your choice.  Commenter Amanda wrote:

Not to undermine your point, but when the Titanic sank, women and children were NOT put first. Sure, they started the evacuations like that, and there were men of honor, but there were also the men who locked the doors to the third class section so that those people wouldn’t take up lifeboat space, and the coward who pushed women and children aside in their haste to get into a boat.

After Sheila challenged her on the historical accuracy of this claim, Amanda replied with:

Well, it’s been a few years since I did all the reading I did on the Titanic, but I was pretty interested as a youngling, and the picture I got from the books was one of polite, subversive cowardice slowly escalating to outright anarchy and panic.

Understand that if you sacrifice yourself for women you don’t know that most women will simply take your act of ultimate selflessness as proof that men owe them.  A significant number will also deny the bravery of your dying act.

See also:

• Why wasn’t it women and children first?
• Chivalry on the Titanic

I just have to say, as a Christian man, I find it near impossible not to have sex with Christian women by like the 5 date. This is because they seem to expect it and reject you if you don’t make a move. I don’t get it. Most Christian women aren’t better than nonchristian women. I’m dating 3 Christian girls now and one is already inviting me to basically get drunk and stay the night (explicit invite) for the second freakin date. If I tell her no I want to wait, I’ll lose her altogether. It’s similar with the other women. Women want passion, and of you don’t provide it and escalate thy lose interest. It sucks because I just want a Christian wife and I get caught up in banging women who aren’t even my girlfriend yet. I don’t know how to go about this. It sucks being alone and on a carnal level it feels great to sleep with women, but I hate offending God and feel guilty about it. Do I just sleep with 1 then try to artfully escalate to marriage ASAP? Seems like a bad idea but anything beats sinning or being lonely and needy.

This is a tough question.  Let’s consult the wisdom of modern Christian leaders.  Here is what the Purity Bear has to say (H/T Rollo Tomassi):

According to that video, if you find a woman who wants to have sex on the first date, marry her!

I still wasn’t sure, so I thought I’d get a second opinion from he-man Mark Driscoll:

There you have it.  Most men are pigs, and the handful of men who aren’t are tired of picking up after the rest.  Man up and marry those sluts!

Shortly after the sinking of the Costa Concordia we started having a low level grumble in the media about the failure to implement a “women and children first” evacuation policy.  Others including Elusive Wapiti and Vox Day have rightly pointed out that it is wholly irrational for our society to expect men to follow cultural norms which have long been invalidated by feminism. As Brendan put it in a different context:

If liberation for women meant liberation from accountability to men, liberation for men meant liberation from responsibility to women.

It turns out that feminists actively derided this policy following the sinking of the Titanic.  As one article from the Daily Mail points out:

…such an attitude provoked sharp responses from early feminists, who believed that ‘women and children first’ infantilised women, and it gave rise to the slogan ‘Votes not Boats’ for the female sex.

Even worse, feminists of the day denied the unbelievable sacrifice of the men who gave their lives so that mostly women (and a much smaller percentage of children) could be saved.  The Daily Mail tells us of the famous feminist of the day wrote:

…the men who perished in the Titanic disaster achieved a mercifully quick death and instant glory whereas their wives were left to grieve and fend for themselves.

There may well be no constant greater than feminist female martyrdom.

As I wrote in the beginning the complaints strike me as fairly muted.  I think those who are criticizing the male passengers at some level understand the absurdity of their position.  Most of these complaints also tend to conflate the failure of a sufficient number of men to volunteer to be the last to enter the lifeboats with the alleged abandonment of the ship by the captain.  The charges against the captain do appear quite serious.  An editorial in USA Today opens with:

You can say one thing about the captain of the cruise ship Costa Concordia: He’s no stickler for traditions. Women and children first? The captain goes down with his ship? They’re not for him. While frightened passengers scrambled to escape his capsizing ship, Francesco Schettino was safe in a lifeboat, resisting orders to get back aboard.

Mark Steyn is even more damning in his piece:

The miserable Captain Schettino, by contrast, is presently under house arrest, charged with manslaughter and abandoning ship. His explanation is that, when the vessel listed suddenly, he fell into a lifeboat and was unable to climb out. Seriously. Could happen to anyone, slippery decks and all that. Next thing you know, he was safe on shore, leaving his passengers all at sea. On the other hand, the audio of him being ordered by Coast Guard officers to return to his ship and refusing to do so is not helpful to this version of events.

Yet the charges against the male passengers on the ship are much more murky.  They seem to all come back to the same assertion that a few men weren’t entirely courteous in making their way to the lifeboats (again from Mark Steyn):

On the Costa Concordia, in the words of a female passenger, “There were big men, crew members, pushing their way past us to get into the lifeboat.”

The fact I see very little attention being given is that “Women and children first” is an incredibly disruptive way to load lifeboats.  When a ship is sinking time is of the essence.  The captain of the Costa Concordia in all likelihood saved incredible numbers of lives by not implementing this foolish policy.  There were 4,200 passengers and crew on the ship (source), and so far we only know of 11 dead and 21 missing (source).  Even if we assume that all currently missing are in fact dead, this still means that 99.24% of the passengers and crew made it out alive.  Given this incredible survival rate alone, the complaints that not enough men chose to give up their seats on lifeboats is downright bizarre.  I doubt those disappointed that more men didn’t die have really considered this.

We know from historical implementations of the policy that it creates a great deal of additional complexity at a time when there is already more than enough stress and confusion.  The Daily Mail describes the famous original  implementation of the policy on HMS Birkenhead:

Some women did not want to go on their own — they had to be torn away from their husbands, carried over to the bulwark and dropped over the ship’s side.

The original Birkenhead drill was effective because the captain and crew were military and there was a way to enforce the order with lethal force.  The idea that a civilian cruise ship crew could even enforce this kind of policy is laughable.  While there are some accounts of crew members firing into the air on the Titanic to restore order, if a significant number of the men on board had chosen to disregard the policy it seems unlikely that the crew could have prevailed.

Additionally, there is going to be enough confusion on a sinking ship.  This call to add additional complexity to the process only makes sense if one is absolutely wedded to a rule which has only rarely been implemented.  Keeping men off of lifeboats only throttles the lifeboat load and launch process.  Put this practice in place on a sinking cruise ship, and you’ve just created over a thousand heart rending farewell scenes smack in the middle of your lifeboat staging areas.  Unless the crew is prepared to forcibly pick up women and throw them physically into lifeboats as they did on HMS Birkenhead you had better hope you have plenty of extra time.  The same problem came up on the Titanic when implementing this policy.  Many lives were needlessly lost in order to achieve the desired sex ratio of survivors on the Titanic.

The only answer given both the realities of feminism and the logistical nightmare of this policy is to acknowledge that this historically short lived practice is something from the past.  This doesn’t mean that no men will ever sacrifice for women, but that men will not be expected to sacrifice for women, especially those women who have no obligation to the men themselves.  Individual men will continue to protect their own, but the idea that men in general have an obligation to women in general is dead.  Another article in the Daily Mail describes a husband on the Costa Concordia giving up his life jacket to save his wife of 40 years:

‘There weren’t enough life jackets. I can’t swim so he gave me his life jacket. ’He shouted “jump, jump, jump”.

‘I froze and couldn’t jump, but he jumped off the ship and shouted upwards “come on, don’t worry”.
‘I jumped off and the last thing I heard him say was that I would be fine.

‘Then I never saw him again.’

See Also:

• The gift transformed into a debt.
• Chivalry only comes from a position of strength.

Night time and day time photos from Rvongher.

Risks:
1. Dropping the TC may result in it falling on my head and killing me. More likely, it will just leave me in a vegetative state (as in coma, not Florida) trapped within my body, staring out at the world while an underpaid Medicare nurse blows smoke rings in my face for the next two or three decades until a government bureaucrat decides that my quality of life is insufficient to warrant my further care. Or I will die from infected rat bites. I suppose I could reduce this risk by wearing a safety helmet, but then I would look like a dork. I would rather take the risk. I will be wearing gloves and eye protection.

He follows up on this project here and here.  You may also like his post Stupid News.  The other thing I like about the professor is I never know what I’m going to get when I click on his blog.  The topics range far and wide, but I always know it will be some combination of entertaining, funny, and thought provoking.  I don’t always agree with him, but he often makes me reconsider what I thought I knew.

This next bit of linkage is one which I’m guessing Professor Hale would also like.  If you aren’t interested in guns, skip this one.  It is the age old debate between the fans of the M-16 and the AK-47, but done in the form of Dr Seuss on an internet forum and shared on the blog Huey’s Gunsight.  Click for the whole thing, but here is an excerpt:

Would you use it in a pinch?
Will you not budge a single inch?
Will you set aside this dross,
and accept Eugene as boss?
I’m sure if you weren’t quite so crass,
you’d love to cook with DI gas.

And the reply:

I would not use it as a bat
I would not use it to shoot rats
I do not like your M16,
That will not shoot if not kept clean,
Plastic and alloy’s not as good
As rifle made of steel and wood.

I’d like to say that I knew Badger before he was cool, but that would be a lie.  Badger has always been cool.  Check out his post A Reply To Cadence on Sex, Commitment and Spinning Plates, including this insight:

As I see it, “spinning plates” is not about polyamory or cheating, it’s really about not committing until you’ve actually committed. This is a really key lesson for beta men to internalize. Sometimes it’s an active process of not allowing yourself to fall too hard. I can recall times in my life when I was pursuing someone as if they were my one and only, a do-or-die option, while they were fielding the advances of other men. And then I’d get butthurt about it, angry that I’d been more willing to forsake other options than they had been. But as I got older I realized how unfair that was on my part. I had not earned their commitment and we hadn’t discussed it; they had no obligation to me that restricted them from other people.

This is something that causes many beta men to get eaten alive in the SMP.  These men follow the advice that they should play by the woman’s rules, even with women who are so “openly flirty” with every man they meet that it is impossible to tell if she is truly interested.  When men are taught to play the strength of their own hand with flaky women, other women are often outraged.

Also don’t miss Badger’s Bizarre Encounter With A Married Over-Sharer.

Rapid fire linkage:

• Dr Helen:  “…an estimated 50,000 persons are kept in jail or in prison on any given day in the U.S. for child support arrears.”
• Elusive Wapiti:  Bankrupt
• Haley’s Halo:  Boundless blogger considers first anniversary a “miracle.”
• Grerp:  Piece of Advice #99: Don’t expect only adulation when you attention whore
• Do women sin?  (H/T empathologicalism and Kupo)
• Captain Capitalism:  The Lost Art of Cocktailing and (with charty goodness) The Attention Bubble.

While you ponder this, I’ll offer some more Mark Driscoll gold courtesy of Relevant magazine:  Mark Driscoll Says Just Grow Up (H/T Smithborough).  Fortunately for us, he has cracked the code on our epidemic of unwed motherhood.  Thanks to Mark we now know it isn’t the fault of the unwed mothers themselves, and it certainly isn’t due to feminism or our creating direct incentives for unwed motherhood.  Men made them do it (emphasis mine):

The number one consumer of online pornography is 12- to 17-year-old boys. What that means is he’s home eating junk food, drinking Monster energy drinks, downloading porn, masturbating and screwing around with his friends. That really doesn’t prepare you for responsible adulthood. That’s a really sad picture, especially if you’re a single gal hoping to get married someday. You’re like: “Seriously, that’s the candidate pool? You’ve got to be kidding me.” That’s why 41 percent of births right now are to unmarried women. A lot of women have decided: “I’m never going to find a guy who is actually dependable and responsible to have a life with. So I’ll just get a career and have a baby and just intentionally be a single mother because there are no guys worth spending life with.”

What causes these young men to be unsupervised? you might ask, why unwed motherhood.  What originally caused unwed motherhood?  Divorce, which as we know from his Washington Post Op Ed piece is driven by men trading in their 40-year-old wife for two 20-year-old girlfriends, regardless of what the lying data shows:

Part of it is the unintended consequences of divorce. Forty percent of kids go to bed at night without a father. Not to be disparaging toward single moms, but if you’re a single mom and you’re working 60 hours a week, and you’ve got a boy, and he’s home all by himself with no parents and no dad, he’s just going to be hanging out with his buddies, feeding himself pizza rolls.

Phew, I was afraid he was going to disparage heroic unwed mothers.

It would be unfair of me not to mention the defense others have provided for Pastor Driscoll at this point.  Sure he is saying incredibly foolish things now, but if you look at his past writings and sermons he has said some really great stuff.  They touched on this in the interview:

Several years ago, you were regularly in the press for your controversial statements on gender roles, but now it seems like you’re steering away from those conversations. Was that intentional?

I don’t know, I’m always getting in trouble for something. I’m just really focused on, at this point, men and women. It’s really interesting because if you took all the women in my church who were sexually abused, raped, molested, assaulted in some way, I’d still have a megachurch. I’d have a couple thousand victims. So a lot of my time is spent with women who are abuse victims, it’s a huge part of what we do, and guys who are totally responsible and part of the problem. That’s where my focus has gone in part because of the demand that’s in our church and because of the people who I’m dealing with.

Forget all of that stuff he wrote and said in the past.  Now he knows that women are really just innocent victims of mean men, who are driving all of the dysfunction in our sexual marketplace.  They ask him if he regrets “any of those statements about gender roles and Jesus’ masculinity?”  Here is his reply:

Oh my gosh. I have been preaching and teaching now for 13, 14 years. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, he says it takes 10,000 hours of something to become an expert. Preaching and teaching, I’ve gotten in about 10,000 hours. I’ve published I don’t even know how many books, blogs—it’s a crazy amount of content. If I could hit control-alt-delete and go back and do like they used to in Men in Black and just hit a button to make certain people forget certain things, that would be awesome.

My hope, my prayer, my goal is to do better, by God’s grace, to learn, to grow, to be sanctified and mature—to be less shock-jock and more Jesus-centered. I’m turning 40 this fall, so I can’t get away with, “Oh, he’s young.” I’ve got five kids, I’m not young anymore, I’m a tired old man. But I’m hoping God gives me enough years, maybe 30, 40 more years of service, that when it’s all said and done, I will have had enough time to correct some mistakes I’ve made and learn how to more clearly articulate some things I believe. So I’m trying to learn as I go.

She was smart, funny, interesting, successful, attractive, kind, in her 40s, and still single.

A man of biblical wisdom would recognize that this woman had squandered her youth chasing a feminist dream of career and/or fornication.  Were he a wise man, a story starting this way would be a cautionary tale to young Christian women not to make the same mistakes this woman did. However Pastor Driscoll is steeped in the foolishness of our feminist culture and not biblical wisdom.  He finds no fault worth mentioning in this woman’s own choices, and instead looks for a man to blame for her terribly mismanaged life:

After my wife Grace and I spent some time with the woman from our church, we could not fathom why no one had married her.

She has been of marriageable age for over twenty years, yet she never married.  Pastor Driscoll seems to think this is because men have failed her.  It is far more likely that she followed the feminist advice to delay marriage until at least her 30s, while in all likelihood riding the carousel.  As a result she may well have lost the ability to experience love and attraction for a normal man.  Note that amongst the marriageable attributes he mentioned about this woman he left two out;  he didn’t say she was a virgin, and he overlooked entirely the fact that she is almost certainly no longer able to bear children.  In fact, notice that all of the attributes he lists are what one would normally advise a woman to look for in a husband (smart, funny, interesting, successful, attractive, kind).  He seems to have gone out of his way to cleanse his mind of traditional views of the sexes in marriage.  Why else would he refer to a woman using only terms which would apply to a man?

Driscoll then goes on to badly mangle the available statistics on marriage in the US:

And, she’s not alone. For the first time in the America’s history there are more single adults than married. Statistically, the women are more likely than the men to attend college, be working a career track job, and attend church.

What are the guys doing? Often, they’re acting like boys who can shave, getting drunk, watching porn, attending sporting events, and treating responsibility like Superman does green kryptonite.

Statistics on marriage rates vary widely by race, but the fact is that over 90% of white women currently in their 40s have already married.  The decline in the number of adults currently married is driven not by a lack of weddings, but by women following the feminist message to delay marriage as long as possible, by higher divorce rates, and by declining rates of remarriage after divorce.

According to the US Census 2009 SIPP data, 39% of all white women aged 50-59 had divorced at least once.  This works out to 42% of all white women that age who ever married.  For Hispanic women the figures are 27%&30%, and for Black women the figures are 38%&48%.  The problem isn’t a lack of men willing to marry, but a lack of women willing to marry while young and stay married.

But Driscoll is apparently entirely unaware of the trends of the last 40 years.  Instead he coins a new euphemism for the carousel (fools parade) and ladles out a healthy serving of the Apex Fallacy.

Eventually, some get tired of the fools parade and settle for some guy who is more likely to act like a baby than help raise a baby. These guys make the worst husbands: gambling away the money, out late with the boys a lot, unfaithful, can’t seem to fit a full-time job in around his hobbies, and eventually trading in their 40-year-old wife for two 20-year-old girlfriends.

He sees women thinking with their genitals and seeking out men with dark triad traits and instead of holding them accountable for the devastation they cause their children he blames men in general.  Then he trots out the canard that men are driving the divorce epidemic by divorcing older wives when the data proves that divorce rates plummet as wives age.

He ignores the epidemic of women kicking fathers out of their children’s lives committing frivolous divorce and divorce theft and doesn’t warn men to be extremely careful when choosing a wife.  Like any other form of addict, he will do or say anything to get his next fix.

Men are like trucks: they drive straighter with a weighted load. Young men are supposed to load themselves up first by being responsible for themselves and not expecting their mom to fill up their sippy cup with beer and push them in a stroller to the unemployment line. Young men who take responsibility for themselves are then ready to marry and take responsibility for the life and joy of their wife.

Modern churches have turned their backs on biblical marriage.  Instead of holding wives to their biblical marriage vows they preach that it is a husband’s obligation submit to his wife and to make his wife love him more than any other man she happens to be pursuing.  In the place of biblical marriage they now hold up serial monogamy as the key to sexual morality.  Driscoll even touches on this.  He finds fault with women who are fornicating.  Don’t worry, he doesn’t chastise them for sinning.  He just wants them to pressure the men they have sex with into marrying them:

Are you the girlfriend who has allowed one of these guys to be with you although there is no clarity regarding what your relationship is or direction for where it’s going?

Imagine what a real Christian pastor instead of a feminist would say to these women.  I’m guessing it would go something like:

Are you squandering your youth and fertility chasing the feminist goals of career and casual sex?  Are you making yourself less marriageable by not keeping your virginity?  For those who are married, are you refusing to submit to your husband as the bible commands?

If anyone here knows an actual Christian pastor who is serious about biblical marriage and not a feminist wrapped in faux Christianity, please let me know and we can ask him what he would say.  In the meantime I’ll close by posing Driscoll’s own question back at him:

Are you a fool? Was your father a fool? When will the folly stop?