Insensitive

In the discussion of What is closeness? I pointed out that the Sensitive Elliot clip does an excellent job of showing that what we culturally think of as “sensitive” really isn’t sensitive at all.  Elliot is oblivious the entire time, missing very obvious mostly non verbal communication from her from the very beginning. Even the man who kicks sand in his face is communicating very clearly, but Elliot is oblivious and wants to “start a dialog” as if one hasn’t been occurring. The only person Elliot is sensitive to is Elliot. He is sensitive to his feelings about sunsets, dolphins, etc. He is fully inwardly focused, yet he has convinced himself that his inward focus is proof that he is really sensitive to others.

This is an old film/theater technique, where the audience is in on a joke that one or more of the actors on stage aren’t privy to.  It works so well in this case because of the underlying truth.  Sensitive Elliot represents something very common in our society.

You can see the same thing in a post by Dallas area Christian blogger Steven Nelms.  Nelms gained worldwide notoriety with a groveling blog post he wrote about his wife: Fathers, you can’t afford a Stay-At-Home Mom.  In many ways this is standard fare for modern Christian culture.  It is an excellent example of what Empath has coined “lift chasing”, in the form of a passive-aggressive attempt by Nelms to place himself above other husbands and fathers by publicly out groveling them.  It also has a feminist frame* complaining that it isn’t fair that stay at home wives don’t get a paycheck they can point to for the value of their work.  None of this is especially noteworthy, as it is the very air that modern Christians breathe.  However, Nelms’s post is an excellent example of an attempt at sensitivity which is strikingly insensitive.

Nelms explains why he wrote the post:

My wife sometimes feels patronized when I ask her permission to buy something for myself. She feels like it’s my money and my name on the paycheck so I shouldn’t have to ask permission to get myself something every once in a while.

His wife clearly communicated to him that she doesn’t feel comfortable with him deferring his leadership to her in this way.  But Nelms isn’t interested in how this impacts her, because he is focused on his own feelings.  His very next words are:

The truth is, I’m ashamed of any time I’ve ever made her feel guilty or humored when she’s purchased something for herself. I’m ashamed that she has ever felt like she doesn’t have just as much right to our income as I do. The fact of the matter is that our income doesn’t even come close to covering what she does for our family. I would have to make over 100K to even begin to be able to cover my living expenses as well as employ my wife as a Stay-At-Home Mom!

She tells him she wants him to lead, or at least to stop deferring to her, and he writes a blog post doing the exact opposite.  This is not about her, it is about his feelings of being unworthy as a leader, his discomfort with headship, and his desire for approval from women.

In abdicating his headship in such a public fashion Nelms is placing an unfair burden on his wife.  For her part she seems to be responding very graciously.  However, even if she did want to assume headship, it would still be wrong of Nelms to abdicate it.  It is even worse that he has set out to teach this abdication and feminist viewpoint as being the Christian view of marriage.  Nelms may feel unworthy to lead, but this doesn’t change the fact that the Bible teaches us that as the husband he is the head of the family.

Related:

• Update from Ann
• Untethered

*The very title of the post is crafted to avoid offending feminists.  The argument he is really making is that he couldn’t afford a career woman for a wife, but this has the problem of offending feminists.

Choosing last sucks

Vox Day has a post up today on an article from Lauren Martin at Elite Daily:  Ladies, The Smarter You Are, The More Likely You Are To Be Single

The Elite Daily article is truly a target rich environment.  Cane Caldo has already covered the true meaning of Easter, so I thought I’d use this piece to host a (belated) manosphere Easter egg hunt.  Astute readers should be able to find all of the following, and perhaps several others:

• Hypergamy (see Vox’s post)
• Ugly feminist
• Weak men screwing feminism up
• Sailers Law of Female Journalism
• The Writer
• Women with plenty of time to think about how men should treat them
• Rollo’s chart
• Choosing last is a terrible strategy

I’ve touched on the last item here and here, but Martin describes the fundamental problem for women who select a strategy of allowing other women to choose first:

Unfortunately, for all those women who thought a man would come later, other women capitalized on their youth, snatching up all the boyfriends and husbands while they focused on building their careers.

Women went into college with an intent to come out wives, slowly but steadily snatching up the number of available men for all those women who chose to attack their professional dreams.

Eva Mendes said you can’t keep a man.

A few weeks ago Eva Mendes caused what the Telegraph characterized as a “fierce online row” with a seemingly innocuous statement about sweatpants:

You can’t do sweatpants… ladies, number one cause of divorce in America, sweatpants, no!

The controversy wasn’t really about sweatpants, but about framing divorce*.  The ugly feminist narrative is that divorce is empowerment as well as a tool to acquire power within marriage.  Mendes in her joke reframed divorce as ugly and a failure for women.  This predictably touched off a fury of mound rebuilding, and Mendes ended up offering a sort of apology.

What is noteworthy here is that Mendes accidentally stumbled upon a weak spot in the feminist narrative, and this weak spot remains.  Feminism has recast something ugly as something positive, but the reality remains.  We could have another 100 years of feminism, and there would still be the risk of someone pointing out the obvious;  divorce means failure, and a woman who is able to remain married, especially to the father of her children, gains status over other women.

Note:  I was curious if sweatpants had anything to do with Laura Lifshitz’s divorce.  Given that she makes a habit of airing every last bit of her personal life on the internet, I suspect this won’t come as a surprise for my readers.

*That Mendes herself isn’t married doesn’t change this fact.

Was it real?

I happened to come across the “In the Air Tonight” scene from the pilot for the old TV series Miami Vice the other day (below).  For those who aren’t familiar with the show and the scene (and yet still care), there is of course a wiki page for it, as there is for nearly everything involving pop culture.  What struck me when watching the scene was the bizarre stop off in the middle of the lead up to the climax of the pilot.  One minute they are cruising along in Crockett’s Ferrari with Tubbs loading his shotgun, and then suddenly they take a pit-stop into the land of divorce drama:

During the long drive towards the inevitable confrontation with Calderone and his goons, Crockett pulls over at a desolate phonebooth to call his ex-wife Caroline, asking her if their relationship was “real”, knowing this may be his last chance to speak to her. She confirms that it was. As the climactic drum crash of the song kicks in, Crockett and Tubbs pull away, their minds now focused on the impending showdown with their nemesis.

This is just a cheesy TV show, but it does give a sense for how immersed our culture is in the embrace of frivolous divorce and the elevation of romantic love (with the accompanying obsession over accurately identifying “true love”).  These themes weren’t new 30 years ago when the episode aired, and of course now we have Christian movie makers picking up the mantle teaching the same themes, only darker.  Still, it struck me that a scene I had enjoyed so much as a teenager had this painfully awkward chick crack moment welded into the middle of it and I hadn’t recalled that this was the case.

There is a bit of irony here as well, since Phil Collins wrote the song while going through a divorce:

What exactly is ‘In The Air Tonight’ about?
I don’t know what this song is about. When I was writing this I was going through a divorce. And the only thing I can say about it is that it’s obviously in anger. It’s the angry side, or the bitter side of a separation.

Why can’t I write without being written about?

Laura Lifshitz fails to honor my right to write without being written about in What It’s Like to Be an Evil Jewish Divorcee:

A group of supposed “Christian” men bantered back and forth under a blog written with the sole intention of saying that women divorce so they can profit off of it by writing about it and I Laura Lifshitz, am one of the most evil women profiting off her dissolved marriage. Oh and by the way, the article is categorized under “ugly feminists.”

As I suspect Lifshitz understands all too well, the ugly feminist tag refers not to outward appearance, but to the profound ugliness of the feminist mindset.

I will never understand why women don’t have the right to write, perform, be, exist, divorce or lead without a man feeling the need to judge, lord and criticize us at every turn only to end the battle against us with, “Oh and she’s very ugly.”

If I have this right, The Writer writes about being written about while writing.  This is navel gazing taken to new heights.

Commenter Judy Higgins rationalizes that Lifshitz is doing her daughter a profound favor by continuing to profit from the pain Lifshitz is causing her:

Good for you to keep writing to show your daughter that there are people out in the world who are ignorant and not letting that stop you from sharing your voice.

Indeed.

Must a professional divorcée lack talent?

Commenter silverpie asks on my post The Writer writes:

Question about the Venn diagram. What does one do if one pretended to commit for life, wants to be a writer, but fails to lack talent (i. e. does have it)?

In theory a writer with talent could become a professional divorcée.  However, if a writer has talent they won’t be forced to make airing their dirty laundry and their failure to honor their sacred vows the foundation of their writing career.