owlectomy | Rage.

There is nothing that's "Christian" about advice like "If you dress like a piece of meat, you're gonna get thrown on the BBQ" or "Girls, giving your affection to a guy right away... just gives him a prize without making him fight for it. He didn't have to make an effort. He didn't invest any money. And now you give him a prize" or "Every new sexual experience when you are not married puts another ding, another scratch, another scar on who you are."

Justin Lookadoo and Hayley DiMarco, you suck. Revell Books, Hungry Planet, you suck, go away. You want to tell someone who's been raped that she's now a "beat-up old used car"? You freaking suck.

And this is why the Twilight books are so popular, you know?

Because girls don't want to be told that they have the sole responsibility for not letting anyone have sex with them, for not getting treated like a piece of meat. They don't want to have that job. Twilight -- it's all the passion and none of the guilt, and it's the guy who's put into that gatekeeper role. And as much as I hate those books, as much as I think they have poisonous attitudes about men and women and romantic relationships, it's better than what's in "Dateable."

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Yes. This.

I'm not familiar with your examples, but agree about Twilight and how much girls like those kinds of safe romance books. I like them too!

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Are you suggesting that there are times in history when the pendulum has swung to women having more power than men, or am I misinterpreting you?

I don't think you can get into either of those aspects without going into the larger societal context that's brought to bear. In marriages, it's traditionally the mother who does more of the parenting. So, divorce sucks for everyone, but I think it sucks least if the person who has been doing more of the parenting continues to do more of the parenting, especially when the gap is large. I don't see it as a huge problem except when judges make judgements based on preconceived stereotypes rather than the specific situation at hand.

Breast cancer is a trendy money-attracting disease specifically because of the sexual associations of breasts. It would be great if testicular cancer got more funding -- but also things like heart disease, which kills a lot more women than breast cancer and only has gotten attention for that in the last few years.

All of this is happening under a patriarchal system. And I'm absolutely willing to argue that patriarchy hurts men too, but it doesn't work to pull out the particular ways in which the patriarchy hurts men and use those to pretend the system doesn't exist.

I'll amend that -- breast cancer gets the attention because it so often strikes pretty young or young-ish wives and mothers. But it's the same thing. The patriarchal system has a "protect the women and children!" mode, but it doesn't get out from under that system.

It's actually untrue that women get custody more then men. When men ask for custody, they are more likely to receive it than be denied. More often than not, they're not asking for custody.

There's a lot of reasons for that that would take a very long time to untangle properly.

As for testicular cancer being underfunded, perhaps it's because women's groups, cancer survivors, and the like have done a lot of campainging for it and pushed it into the lime light? In Australia, there's a great deal of attention paid to prostate and testicular cancer, because men worked to make it so. Just like women worked to make breast cancer important.

Everyone suffers, but the metaphor of a pendulum is incredibly ill-fitting, and, quite frankly, pretty offensive to me, when there has never been a time in history when men as a group were denied the right to vote, or a time when women controlled the vast majority of government and corporations. (NOT that this would be a good thing- it would not- just trying to illustrate what a pendulum swinging easily between two points would actually look like).

The metaphor of a pendulum suggests that sometimes men have more of the power, sometimes women have more of the power, but hey, it pretty much evens out in the end.

To me, it's much more like a very heavy box... which started out (at least in the dominant Western civilization) very, very far on the men's side, and which countless people (mostly women) have been pushing, pushing, pushing for hundreds of years. And it's not in the middle yet.

You see how the title of this post is "rage"?

You see how maybe you don't want to step in this right at this moment?

You see how this was originally about some painful, dehumanizing, and heartless dating advice marketing itself as "christian"?

"Men have problems too!" is a total derail.

Thank you for that.

Rage.

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