• Worldwide, Girls Are More Likely Than Boys To Be Illiterate, To Experience Higher Levels of Physical and Sexual Violence, and to be Targeted For Infanticide – by Gospel For Asia

Worldwide, Girls Are More Likely Than Boys To Be Illiterate, To Experience Higher Levels of Physical and Sexual Violence, and to be Targeted For Infanticide – by Gospel For Asia

Sometime during or shortly after the uproar over the “Toxic Masculinity” Gillette Ad, I was watching conservative Tucker Carlson on his nightly television program on Fox News, and he had a lady guest on (I don’t recall her name).

The point of the segment was for Tucker to allow his lady guest to sit there and say that men (at least in American culture) have life so much more difficult than women.

This is a recurrent theme among many conservatives: to complain about the “Me Too” movement or about concepts such as “Toxic Masculinity” by actually arguing that men are victims in our culture (victims of systemic sexism and of other things), not women:

You Say You’re Against Victimhood Culture Yet You Depict All Men As Victims

The fact remains that American women (despite strides made in some areas of life) still, never- the- less, end up enduing a lot more sleazy or dangerous situations than most men do, even in a more “liberated” and egalitarian nation such as the United States.

For example, as a woman who goes on jogs, I sometimes worry about being raped by a man as I’m out running in the morning or evenings. I  am guessing that most of you men who jog outdoors don’t worry about being raped by a man (or by a woman).

When I am walking through a store’s parking lot (especially at night), I worry about a man jumping out and mugging or raping me – another typical thing women have to worry about that men generally do not.

And my mother was warning me from the time I was quite young to always be vigilant while walking through parking lots so I could possibly avoid being raped or mugged (by a man).

Then there is this news article which explains that, “Worldwide, Girls Are More Likely Than Boys To Be Illiterate, To Experience Higher Levels of Physical and Sexual Violence, and to be Targeted For Infanticide”

By the way, one section on the page, which is entitled, “you should have been a boy,” is the SAME message that many Christian gender complementarians give to girls, whether they intend to or not.

Christian Gender Complementarians also convey to girls: “you should have been a boy.”

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• Grief Support Gone Wrong: When You’re Beyond Second Chances – from WYG site

Grief Support Gone Wrong: When You’re Beyond Second Chances – from WYG site

The one thing more difficult than losing my mother was the lack of emotional support I received after she died – that plus the insensitive comments and platitudes I got from other people.

I’ve been thinking of writing about my experiences with how horribly extended family, immediate family, online friends, real life friends, and church people hurt me or totally let me down in my time of grief, for this blog.

In the meantime, there is this page, linked to below, from WYG (“What’s Your Grief”) which outlines many of the ways you will be mistreated during your time of grief: you’ll either be ignored, wounded, insulted, or offended by the people in your life who should be emotionally supporting you (and perhaps offering practical help to you) during your time of grief.

I completely related to several items on this page.

I’m only going to place a portion of the WYG article on this page; if you’d like to read the entire thing, please use this link:

Grief Support Gone Wrong: When You’re Beyond Second Chances

Nothing puts a person’s support system to the test quite like a crisis. When the clouds of hardship dull the glare of more happy and carefree times, a person often sees their support system accurately for the very first time.

For some people, this is a reassuring experience, as they find their support system is similar to what they had assumed it would be. For others, it’s a bit, shall we say, disconcerting.

Many grieving people find that changes and disappointments within their support system become a secondary loss. They had assumed a certain type of support would be given and they feel hurt and angry when it isn’t.

• Nine Ways Therapists Personally Deal With Grief by A. Drucker

Nine Ways Therapists Personally Deal With Grief

Nine Ways Therapists Personally Deal With Grief

Snippets (I’m not going to reproduce all nine steps from their page on my blog):

From a death to a job loss to an ended relationship, here’s how experts handle loss.

By Ali Drucker

While there’s no right way to grieve, there are a number of strategies that can help you get through loss.

When you think of grief, the first thing that comes to mind is likely mourning the death of a loved one. But grief can surface around any major life transition, like ending a relationship, dealing with an illness, or even losing a job.

As Melissa Fisher Goldman, a licensed clinical social worker and member of the Association of Death Education and Counseling puts it, “we don’t get over grief; we get through it.”

For a little help getting through it, HuffPost chatted with Goldman and other therapists for practical advice on how they personally deal with grief. Here’s how they handle it:

Allow Yourself To Cry

This method may be obvious, but it’s important to point out. Danielle Forshee, a licensed clinical social worker in New Jersey, said that during times of grief, she makes an effort not to suppress her tears.

There’s actually some science that supports the benefits of a good, cathartic sob.

• 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.

• Christian Tells SC Lawmakers Not to Hang “Evil” Photo of Female Legislators

Christian Tells SC Lawmakers Not to Hang “Evil” Photo of Female Legislators 

I’m surprised that this news story didn’t make more inroads on Twitter or on some of the abuse survivor blogs that sometime cover sexism against women by men in the church.

Even when I was a very devout Christian, I never wanted to live under a Christian theocracy in America (as some Christians fantasize about having) precisely because of kooks like the one mentioned below.

Even when I used to be a Christian gender complementarian, I did not agree that the Bible limits women as severely as some male complementarians teach.

When I was a complementarian, I saw nothing in the Bible  that taught that women were less intelligent than men, that women were more naive, more easily deceived than men, or said anything that prohibited women from holding public office or taking on other roles for all time (many of the Bible’s apparent prohibitions on female behavior in the church, and so on, were cultural and not intended to be timeless). But complementarian interpretations, as taught to me by complementarian pastors and web pages, told me, or gave me the impression, that God felt that women were lesser than men.

Speaker at Hearing Who Says Women Not Fit for Office Stopped

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A panel of lawmakers stopped an activist from speaking at a public hearing after he spent three minutes saying women are not fit to run for office and called feminism “destructive and evil.”

Christian Tells SC Lawmakers Not to Hang “Evil” Photo of Female Legislators

Snippets:

by Hemant Mehta

[Women members of South Carolina’s legislature wanted to put up portraits of women members on State House grounds to inspire other women to enter politics]

…Columbia Christians for Life director Steve Lefemine argued that women are unfit for public office because something something the Bible. Even South Carolina legislators thought he went too far in pushing his faith and ranting against “destructive and evil” feminism.

Just as Lefemine began to explain Tuesday why the “Biblical doctrine of the headship of man disqualifies a woman from civil office,” state Rep. Russell Ott interrupted.

The Calhoun Democrat said he also is a Christian but has found nothing in the Bible that “backs up anything that you are saying.”

• A Spot On Analysis of Narcissism by L. Dorn

 A Spot On Analysis of Narcissism by L. Dorn

 A Spot On Analysis of Narcissism by L. Dorn

A forthright essay written by Jim Can’t Swim offers a spot on analysis of narcissism. He explains that the narcissistic individual lives in a constant state of insecurity, is a master manipulator and their perception of the world is through the lens of how other people see them.

While admiring one’s own selfies on social media may appear to be narcissistic, actual narcissists at varying degrees have a distorted perception of reality that causes them show little to no empathy, even to those with whom they are close.