• The Miseducation of the American Boy – Toxic Masculinity and the Brokeness of Boyhood by P. Orenstein

The Miseducation of the American Boy – Toxic Masculinity and the Brokeness of Boyhood by P. Orenstein

The Miseducation of the American Boy

Snippets:

…I’ve spent two years talking with boys across America—more than 100 of them between the ages of 16 and 21—about masculinity, sex, and love: about the forces, seen and unseen, that shape them as men.

They [the boys and young men the author interviewed] considered their female classmates to be smart and competent, entitled to their place on the athletic field and in school leadership, deserving of their admission to college and of professional opportunities.

They all had female friends; most had gay male friends as well.

That was a huge shift from what you might have seen 50, 40, maybe even 20 years ago.

They could also easily reel off the excesses of masculinity. They’d seen the headlines about mass shootings, domestic violence, sexual harassment, campus rape, presidential Twitter tantrums, and Supreme Court confirmation hearings.

A Big Ten football player I interviewed bandied about the term toxic masculinity. “Everyone knows what that is,” he said, when I seemed surprised.

Yet when asked to describe the attributes of “the ideal guy,” those same boys appeared to be harking back to 1955. Dominance. Aggression. Rugged good looks (with an emphasis on height). Sexual prowess. Stoicism. Athleticism. Wealth (at least some day).

• Even Breadwinning Wives Don’t Get Equality at Home by H.A. Rao (2019)

Even Breadwinning Wives Don’t Get Equality at Home (2019) by H. A. Rao

Even Breadwinning Wives Don’t Get Equality at Home 

When Americans think about fixing gender equality, they tend to focus on the workplace. But gender equality for women still lags in another realm: their own houses.

Americans are making major strides toward gender equality. Women have surpassed men in obtaining college degrees.

Women have flocked to many formerly male-dominated occupations such as law and medicine.

In 2018, a record number of women candidates were elected to Congress. And high-school seniors today are more likely than their counterparts 40 years ago to say they strongly believe that women should have the same opportunities as men to succeed in school and at work.

But gender equality for women still lags in another realm: their own home.

• D-Day’s Forgotten Woman by Cal Thomas

D-Day’s Forgotten Woman by Cal Thomas

Oh, complementarians and other sexists won’t like this. They don’t like real-life and biblical examples of women who don’t live live the way they think women should live life. Examples like these are so inconvenient to their worldview and prejudices.

D-Day’s Forgotten Women by Cal Thomas

Snippets:

Without the daring and heroism of Virginia Hall, the war might have been prolonged

by Cal Thomas
June 5, 2018

Observances of the 75th anniversary of D-Day are properly focusing on the troops and the architect of Operation Overlord, Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower, who freed Europe from Hitler and his Nazi hordes.

One person — a woman — has not received the credit she deserves for her efforts with the French Resistance. Without her daring and heroism, the war would most assuredly have been prolonged and many more lives would have been lost.

Her name was Virginia Hall and her story is told in a new book by Sonia Purnell titled “A Woman of No Importance: The Untold Story of the American Spy Who Helped Win World War II.” The title does not exaggerate Virginia’s contributions to the Allied victory.

• Feeding A Family Isn’t A Job For Mothers Alone by B. Wilson

Feeding A Family Isn’t A Job For Mothers Alone by B. Wilson

Feeding A Family Isn’t A Job For Mothers Alone

Snippets:

by Bee Wilson

In an era of processed food, wholesome home cooking is more important than ever – and men need to share that burden

May 2019

… For too long, women have been fed the idea that the task of feeding children is all on them. This does not always work out well, for either mother or child.

… I somehow got it in my head that the job of feeding the children was all mine. It is still too easy for the mother to become the only one who plans the meals, shops for ingredients, schelps them home, lovingly cooks them and watches anxiously for a child’s reaction to his or her first taste of something new.

No wonder many families in the modern world opt for convenience foods instead. As the food writer Deb Perelman observed, “There are many good reasons to never cook at home.”

Only now that it is ceasing to be norm for mothers to stand laboriously stirring a pot can we appreciate just how much we owe to the heroically thankless, everyday cooking of our own mothers.

• Are Facts More Important than Feelings? Ben Shapiro, Rationality, and Gender Stereotypes

Are Facts More Important than Feelings? Ben Shapiro, Rationality, and Gender Stereotypes

Ben Shapiro is a conservative pundit who Tweets quite a bit, and he’s sometimes interviewed on cable news programs. He frequently likes telling liberals something along the lines of “facts don’t care about your feelings.”

I’m a conservative myself. Yes, I know that some liberals on some subjects can allow emotion out-weigh reason. That is true.

However, I’m not a supporter of this tendency of some people – usually conservatives and men who uphold sexist gender stereotypes – to trash talk emotions. I do not support the false dichotomy of Fact Vs. Feeling (or Logic Vs. Emotions or Rationality Vs. Emotions).

A person can be logical, factual, rational AND have emotions and show those emotions in a debate. There’s nothing mutually exclusive about it.

• A New Documentary About the Victims of Dr. Larry Nassar Indicts Both the Specific Culture of U.S. Gymnastics, and the More General Disinclination to Believe Women, Sophie Gilbert Writes

A New Documentary About the Victims of Dr. Larry Nassar Indicts Both the Specific Culture of U.S. Gymnastics, and the More General Disinclination to Believe Women, Sophie Gilbert Writes

A New Film Reveals How Larry Nassar Benefited From a Culture of Silence

The sports doctor was able to assault so many athletes for so long. Erin Lee Carr’s HBO documentary, At the Heart of Gold, explores the environment that protected him.

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What’s hard to comprehend, now, is how much of Dr. Larry Nassar’s sexual abuse of more than 300 preteen and teenage girls was conducted in plain sight.

Erin Lee Carr’s new HBO documentary, At the Heart of Gold, includes excerpts from instructional videos Nassar posted online for other sports doctors to observe.

In them, he runs his hands over girls’ bodies clothed in leotards; points out (and touches) one athlete’s gluteus muscle; massages one girl’s chest; pats yet another on the butt. Nassar went even further in private sessions with athletes, giving procedures he called “intravaginal adjustments” with ungloved hands and without prior warning.

Often, when he did this, the girls’ parents were standing in the same room, watching while Nassar abused their daughters, listening as he talked nonstop the whole time.

Nassar, as At the Heart of Gold documents, was uniquely positioned to get away with what he did.

• Hello, Complementarian Greg Morse of Desiring God Site: Actress Says (Vintage) Disney Films Made Her Question Her Sexuality When She Was a Kid

Hello, Complementarian Greg Morse of Desiring God Site: Actress Says (Vintage) Disney Films Made Her Question Her Sexuality When She Was a Kid

This is too funny.

Just a couple of weeks ago, complementarian Greg Morse of the “Desiring God” site wrote a moronic essay lamenting how women in contemporary Disney films – such as Brie Larson in “Captain Marvel” – are moving away from playing the usual passive Disney Princess types of decades past.

Those very same sort of women characters who were nothing but accessories to the male characters in the movies.

Morse thinks that Disney women characters of yester-year are ideal feminine prototypes for women of today.

(Note: Complementarianism takes its cues from secular culture, as I’ve said in months past on this blog and at others.

Complementarianism is a capitulation to culture, because our culture has always been patriarchal. Complementarianism is not counter-cultural, it’s cultural.

But Complementarians insist that they are following the “Bible only,” while they argue that Christian Gender Egalitarians are “capitulating to culture.”)

Well, well, well.

Now we have actress Cara Delevingne saying that some of those very same depictions of women (and of men) in older Disney movies caused her to question her sexuality, to the point she is now “gender fluid.”

Here’s a link to that:

[Movie Actress] Cara Delevingne Says Watching Disney Films As A Child Made Her Question Her Sexuality

Does Morse still want to point to older Disney movies as ideals women should be emulating today, after seeing headlines such as that one?

• Captain Marvel Movie – More Rebuttals By Others to Sexist Essay by Morse (and Related)

Captain Marvel Movie – More Rebuttals By Others to Sexist Essay by Morse (and Related)

A few days ago, complementarian Greg Morse wrote a laughably bad essay where he was attempting to criticize the Captain Marvel movie (or women serving in the military, I’m not exactly sure what his essay’s ultimate point was).

That essay resulted in a few rebuttals, which I will include below.

I myself have done a couple of blog posts about all this on this blog, located here and here.

There is one essay I am linking to below which I may want to discuss further in a future, separate blog post.

Also, before the Captain Marvel movie even premiered, sexist fan boys all over the internet were complaining online that the movie is supposedly biased against whites, or is misandrist, that actress Brie Larson (who portrays the Captain Marvel character) is a man-hating harpie.

I am not a liberal, feminist, SJW, but even I could tell that a lot of sexists and conservatives were grossly mis-characterizing Larson’s comments pre-release to make her sound like an anti-white person, or a misandrist.

• So Really, Complementarians Would Rather Little Girls Emulate Male Actors as Male Characters than Women Actors Who Are In Women’s Roles – Very Strange

That hideous post about Captain Marvel by Greg Morse of the Desiring God site got me to thinking. There may be one or two more posts coming up by me on this blog after this one, also inspired by the dreck he wrote.

(I’ve already written one post about Morse’s awful “review” of Captain Marvel.)

For many years, many protagonists in American movies where white, young men.

Certainly, when I was growing up – 1970s and beyond – that was the case.

There were one or two strong female characters in movies here and there as I was growing up, such as Princess Leia.

However, for the most part, if I, as a kid or teen, wanted to have day-dreams or fantasies about going on exciting adventures, I had to mentally insert myself in the place of the male characters in the movies or television programs I watched.

• Complementarians Threatened by Movies Featuring Strong or Independent Women Characters – A Response to the Editorial by Greg Morse

Complementarians Threatened by Movies Featuring Strong or Independent Women Characters – A Response to the Editorial by Greg Morse

A minor stir was caused online a few days ago, when someone at the pro-complementarian “Desiring God” site wrote an editorial critical of the latest MARVEL movie Captain Marvel, which pertains to a former Air Force pilot, Carol Danvers, who is also known as super hero Captain Marvel.

If I understand my MARVEL nerd culture correctly, Captain Marvel is supposed to be the strongest or most powerful character in the MARVEL comics universe.

(By the way, I once read on the Wikipedia page for Wonder Woman that Wonder Woman is physically stronger than Superman.)

The guys at “Almost Heretical” tweeted this at the Desiring God tweet:

If you want to get free of all this crap, we did a series walking through every verse Piper used to defend his view of women. Might change your life…
[Podcast program] 30: Jesus ended hierarchy

Here is the Desiring God page in dispute (it was written by the same doofus who incorrectly declared that being introverted is sinful):

Behold Your Queen The Real Conflict in Captain Marvel – by Greg Morse

Here is what Morse opines in his article at the Desiring God site:

So, did the movie [Captain Marvel] live up to the hype? Did it come close to being “the biggest feminist movie ever,” the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the movement? Squint as I might, I can’t imagine how it did. The film was not the worst movie I’ve seen, but it stood galaxies away from the best. Maybe suitable for Redbox.
—end quotes–

DC studios gave the world “Wonder Woman” starring Gal Gadot in the title role about two years ago, and it was a smash at the box office.

Captain Marvel is now also a smash hit, according to news outlets.

Here are a few headlines about that:

“Captain Marvel” made history over the weekend as the biggest worldwide opening for a female-led film with $455,000,000 in ticket sales

And:

Captain Marvel Is Now the Highest Grossing Movie With a Female Lead Ever

‘Captain Marvel’ Ends Box Office Myths About Female Superheroes

I’ve not yet seen the Captain Marvel movie and don’t know if I will go to the theater to see it or not.

Many movie reviewers have said it is not bad, but not great, either – it is middling, seems to be the movie critic consensus. I’m not interested in reviewing how good, bad, or middling the movie was. That is not the purpose of my post here.

• Family of Pedophile Pastor Now Spreads the Word on How To Prevent Abuse by Heather Sells

 Family of Pedophile Pastor Now Spreads the Word on How To Prevent Abuse by Heather Sells

The following article also addresses CSA (Clergy Sex Abuse) and how Celebrity Pastorhood contributes to sex abuse cover ups in and by churches. I also comment towards the bottom, briefly, on how Christian Gender Complementarianism, plays a role in those things as well.

Family of Pedophile Pastor Now Spreads the Word on How To Prevent Abuse by Heather Sells

February 2019

SOMERSET, Pa. – Jimmy and Clara Hinton don’t want others to miss what they didn’t see for years: their father and husband, a respected pastor for years in his rural community, was keeping his flock in the dark while he molested young children.

Today, the elders at Somerset Church of Christ have moved intentionally to protect children. Empty classrooms are locked.

Adults working with children operate in teams of two or more. On Sundays, monitors conduct random building sweeps and each Sunday School room has a walkie-talkie in case of an emergency.

Church policy also protects children from potentially unwanted physical touch like a hug. “None of us can walk up to a kid, pull a kid in and initiate that physical contact,” says Pastor Jimmy, who has served as the pastor at Church of Christ since his father left in 2009.

He thinks that’s important because abusers often groom children to become used to them initiating.

• Gender Complementarian Vs Gender Egalitarian Song Lists

Gender Complementarian Vs Gender Egalitarian Song Lists

This first song is how gender complementarians envision marriage and relationships between men and women.
It’s unbiblical, insulting, and why even so many Christian marriages with “traditional values” fail and end up in divorce.

1. Put Another Log on the Fire by Tompall Glaser

2. Strut by Sheena Easton

Complementarians often teach pure male entitlement (and lie and say it’s “God’s design”) – they also have a lot of false ideas about women’s sexuality.

Namely,  complementarians assume that only men want sex, and women don’t want it, don’t like it, and don’t need it. (Think of, for instance, complementarian morons such as “preachers” Mark Driscoll and Doug Wilson.)

Complementarian pastors, who are male (of course), therefore never (that I’ve heard) address the topic of husbands sexually pleasing their wives. Pastors never address what women want and prefer in sex.

Complementarians value women only as brood mares: for wifey-hood (i.e., doing housework), sex, and having and rearing children.

Also, hypocritically, a lot of Christian men use pornography, including pastors, and some of them commit fornication (see again: Mark Driscoll for one), some of them are molesting teen-aged girls who attend their churches (see: Andy Savage), but every Sunday, they are paying lip service to being chaste or staying a virgin until marriage.

Anyway, the assumption with these sexist ass-hats (complementarians) is that a man’s sexual needs and preferences are paramount, so they coach wives in their sexist, stupid books, sermons, and blog posts, that the wife should always have sex whenever and however the husband wants.
Which results in this song:

Read the lyrics to the Strut song here or here.

• Conservatives Still Misunderstanding and Misrepresenting the Concepts / Terms Toxic Masculinity and Traditional Masculinity – The Christian Post Editorial by M. Brown

 Conservatives Still Misunderstanding and Misrepresenting the Concepts / Terms Toxic Masculinity and Traditional Masculinity – The Christian Post Editorial by M. Brown

A very brief reminder of who I am or what I believe:
I used to be a Christian gender complementarian, but I left complementarianism years ago, and I now question (but did not reject altogether) the Christian faith.
I do not identify as a feminist for reasons I explain here.
I remain a conservative but left the Republican Party approximately three years ago.
(In other words, I am not a liberal, I not a feminist, and I am not an atheist.)

In the past few weeks, debates and conversations about the concepts and phrases of “Traditional Masculinity” and “Toxic Masculinity” broke out once again thanks to the APA and a television commercial by razor company Gillette.

A few days ago, I was skimming the headlines at The Christian Post site and stopped to read this, by a Michael Brown:

Is it harder to be a man or woman in America today?

In that editorial, the author, Brown, discusses Traditional Masculinity and Toxic Masculinity (in this post of mine, I will pretty much use both phrases interchangeably).

In that editorial, Brown linked to a Tweet he made, in which he inserted a Twitter poll, asking ‘who has things worse, men or women.’

After I finished reading Brown’s editorial on The Christian Post site, it was evident to me he has a flawed understanding of what the term “Toxic Masculinity” means, so I tweeted at him to say as much, and I was very polite through the entire exchange.

I did not use profanity, lose my temper, engage in name-calling or personal attack (ad hominem) when tweeting to Brown.