I Blame George Lucas

A lot of socio-sexual red-pill notions came easily to me: someone pointed it out, or I read a certain article, and I said, “Duh, of course, why didn’t I realize that before?”  What hypergamy is, what shit tests are, why the Bratty Little Sister Frame works, etc. — as soon as I encountered such a concept I recognized the truth of it, plus where it came from and how it’s affecting society now.  So I don’t find most of it mysterious, and I keep wanting to move past discussing the What and Why of it, and move on to the How of dealing with it.  (Which I hope to make a focus of this blog in the future, but for now I’m going to ramble about something I’ve been musing on, because it’s been too long since I posted.)

That’s not true of everything, though.  One conundrum that still puzzles me is:  why was I such a blue-pill, pedestalizing, white knight for the first 10 years or so of my adulthood?  The usual reason given is that our society indoctrinates men with it, and that’s certainly true, but I think it’s too simple.  If it were only about environment, I might have been blue-pill, but I shouldn’t have been one of the worst ones around.

I grew up in a traditional family with a mother who stayed at home and a father who was clearly the family authority and disciplinarian.  There was very little divorce in my extended family; I was almost the first to win that award.  We went to Church — post-Vatican II modernist Church, granted, but still Church every Sunday.  We didn’t have a TV for a few years, and when we did, we weren’t allowed to watch a lot of “adult” shows (we’re talking “Dallas” here).  School was liberal, of course, as they all are, but it was a small rural school where the latest novelties run a decade or two behind.

As an example of my parents’ attitude: one time a woman was in the news for something lascivious (I don’t remember whom, but think Paris Hilton 20 years earlier), and I asked my mom something about that “lady.”  She told me in no uncertain terms that the woman in question was no lady, and even became angry (very unusual for her).  I actually argued a bit, because at the age of 13 or so, I somehow already thought all women were ladies, but she didn’t like that at all.  So while I’m sure I ran into plenty of feminist indoctrination, I also had more good traditional upbringing than most kids got.  So why did I completely ignore my parents’ example and wisdom, and treat every pretty girl I took a liking to like The One True Princess?

As I said, this has puzzled me for a while, until the other day when I watched the original Star Wars for the first time in ages.  (The Rifftrax commentary makes it a lot of fun.)  Suddenly I knew where it came from: I was trying to be Luke Skywalker.

For those who haven’t seen the movie or have forgotten, a quick synopsis of the important points: Luke is a farm boy (like me; he even pretty much looks like I did) who gets pulled into a quest to save a beautiful princess named Leia.  He falls in love with her the moment he sees a fuzzy hologram of her, of course.  He gets hooked up with a swashbuckling alpha ship pilot named Han Solo, and they rescue the princess.  As soon as Luke meets her, he starts kissing her butt and trying to be her hero, while Han treats her like a burden and argues with her constantly.  Luke is the one who actually saves her life more than once, while Han is mostly focused on saving his own skin.  Naturally, I was rooting for Luke to get the girl the whole time, and couldn’t figure out why she didn’t respond to his heroism.

Here’s the stupid thing: Luke never gets the girl.  In fact, she turns out to be his sister, and she ends up with Han.  So why did I spend my 20s acting like Luke instead of acting like Han?  I think it was the sister thing — they couldn’t be together anyway, and she probably wasn’t attracted because he seemed too familiar, so that’s why she didn’t respond to his awesome treatment of her and went for the bad boy.  I think that’s how I rationalized it, and assumed that women who weren’t my sister would respond to being treated like princesses.

Of course, now I know that’s not it at all.  The movie’s actually painful to watch at points, when Luke is whining about Han’s rudeness and selfishness or staring at Leia with big puppy-dog eyes.  It’s so obvious that he turns her off with every supplicating word, while the way Han switches between ignoring her and treating her like a stuck-up brat completely turns her on.  I don’t even know if that’s the subtext they were going for, but it’s clearly there — now.  Even princesses love bad boys.

So I blame George Lucas.  Maybe if Luke and Leia hadn’t turned out to be brother and sister, I would have understood the real reason why Han got the girl.  Or maybe not.  I don’t think I’ve gotten this one completely figured out yet.  More on this later, perhaps.

(In case it’s not clear, much of the above was written tongue-in-cheek.)

Should the Red Pill Lead to Hatred or Empathy?

Someone at Dalrock’s recently asked him how taking the red pill caused him to have more empathy for women.  This partial comment inspired me to write a little about that here:

An initial hatred of women after a red pill experience makes sense. A man has learned he has been lied to by those he was taught to trust.

True, that’s often the first reaction: “I’ve been lied to about women, and my ignorance allowed women to take advantage of me in various ways, and therefore women are nefarious.” For me, the empathy came when I realized that women had been lied to as well — with consequences perhaps even more dire than those men experience. I’ve said this before, but a man who discovers the red pill at 40 can still find a younger wife and have a few kids if that’s his inclination. A woman who figures things out at 40 and wants the same thing is typically out of luck.

A man who spends his 20s having sex with every attractive woman who’s willing will have spiritual and relationship issues from that, to be sure. But if he repents and changes his ways, he can put that behind him and be a good husband. A woman who does the same, having sex with any man she finds attractive enough for a decade, will be broken in serious ways, and quite possibly incapable of being a good wife.

Look at what women are taught today, practically from the cradle:

• You’re just as good as a man in every way, except the ways in which you’re better.
• People really like a woman who’s independent, feisty, and doesn’t take any crap from anyone.
• Sex is awesome, and while we don’t want you picking up a pregnancy or STD at 16, being a prude is even worse, socially. Nudge nudge.
• Only weak men want virgins; a real man will appreciate the experience you bring to the bedroom.
• It’s important to establish a career. You’ll have plenty of time for marriage and kids after you get your degree(s).
• The best relationships grow out of bad experiences (drama). If it seems too easy, something’s missing.
• Marriage should be 50/50 in all areas. A good man will do 50% of the housework and never make a decision without you or contradict one of your decisions.
• A good man will trust you no matter what, and if he objects to anything you want to do, it means he’s an insecure misogynist.
• Women are smarter, wiser, and more spiritual than men.
• Men are more violent than women; they alone cause wars and crime.
• Boys are gross.

Now, every single line of that is a lie, and those are just the highlights. Girls today are sold an entire bill of goods that seems designed to get them on the carousel, burn up their best years, and leave them broken, unhappy, and wondering what ever happened to their prince. (Consider also that with some minor tweaks to the lines about sex, this is exactly what most Christian girls are taught too.)

So yeah, I have empathy. That doesn’t mean they’re not responsible for their actions, or that I don’t hold their bad actions against them. It just means I have empathy. You can understand a person and empathize with her without letting her off the hook.

Jesus Christ, Servant Leader?

(Note: The use of “game” terms below is tongue-in-cheek, to make a contrasting point about what Jesus didn’t do. This is not an argument that Jesus “gamed” His followers.)

Dalrock recently posted a quote that included the term “servant leader,” which is being used by modern Churchian preachers who claim that “male headship” somehow actually means letting your wife tell you what to do and trying to make her happy by taking over the household chores.

I thought of that this morning during the Gospel at Mass, as it was the story of Jesus feeding the 5000 by multiplying  fishes and loaves.  It occurred to me that that is a good example of “servant leadership,” but is it what these feminized leaders mean by the term?  Let’s see (selected verses from John 6):

[2] And a multitude followed him, because they saw the signs which he did on those who were diseased.

So first of all, these thousands of people were following Jesus because they saw him doing numerous miracles.  They were so awed that they followed him for miles, forgetting to even think about what they would eat.  Massive amounts of alpha cred built up, in game terms, before we even get to the main event.

[5] Lifting up his eyes, then, and seeing that a multitude was coming to him, Jesus said to Philip, “How are we to buy bread, so that these people may eat?”
[6] This he said to test him, for he himself knew what he would do.

Now he’s basically messing with his disciples, testing them, AMOGing them.  He knows what he’s going to do, but after they say it’s impossible, it will be that much more awesome.

[10] Jesus said, “Make the people sit down.”

He just told 5000 hungry people to sit down, and they did it.  Obviously there’s no question in the mind of anyone present that he is fully in charge.

[11] Jesus then took the loaves, and when he had given thanks, he distributed them to those who were seated; so also the fish, as much as they wanted.

Now, is he being a servant here?  Absolutely.  Not only does he create the bread and fish for them to eat, but it says he distributed them; he didn’t leave that to his disciples.  But it’s a very specific situation, because he’s prefiguring the Eucharist here by giving thanks and distributing bread to the people.  It’s not really about their hunger; if that were the case, then knowing this was coming, he could have made sure they brought enough food.  He’s doing it to prepare his disciples for what’s coming later in the chapter: “I am the bread of life….He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood abides in me and I in him.”  He’s doing it for a purpose much greater than this one event.

[12] And when they had eaten their fill, he told his disciples, “Gather up the fragments left over, that nothing may be lost.”

After that specific, symbolic act of servitude, he goes right back to being the leader, giving orders to his disciples.

[15] Perceiving then that they were about to come and take him by force to make him king, Jesus withdrew again to the mountain by himself.

Then he made himself scarce.  He didn’t stick around to see how well the miracle had strengthened their faith or their love for him; he let his actions speak for themselves and continued on with his mission.

****

So, how does that translate to the normal suburban hubby who feels like his wife is losing interest in him, so his pastor says he should surprise her by doing the dishes and the laundry “because Jesus served his people”?  Well, doing the chores for her may increase her attraction if all the same things are true:

• He’s established himself so strongly as the leader that she willingly follows him anywhere and sits when he says sit.
• He can tease her and ask her rhetorical questions without annoying her at all.
• He does the chore for a specific reason of his own, not to make her happy.
• When he’s done, he doesn’t ask her how she feels about it; he goes on with his own stuff.

If that’s the situation, then by all means give it a try.  But if that’s the situation, you don’t need to!  The guys who are trying this are the ones for whom none of that is true.  Let’s turn the analogy around the other direction:

A crowd of people have been following a guy (we’ll call him Brian) because they thought he was the Messiah, but they start to realize they were wrong.  (Like a married woman starting to lose interest in her husband because he doesn’t fit the fantasy she initially created around him.)  They follow him for miles and start bitching that he hasn’t done enough for them lately.  Brian asks what they want, and they say food.  He says that if they’ll sit down (which they do, grumbling because he didn’t bring any chairs, he never thinks ahead) he’ll cook supper.  (He’d better be able to produce the food at this point, or he might become supper.)  Afterwards, he points out to them how he saved them, and asks if they love him again like they used to.

No one’s going to try to carry Brian off to make him their king.  Sure, they’ll eat the food, but they’ll probably gripe that the bread was dry and the fish needed tartar sauce, and next time they’ll expect sides of baked beans and cole slaw.  Likewise, no wife of Brian’s is going to love him more because he does chores for her in that kind of context, trying to be a “servant leader.”

What’s the lesson from this?  If you want to serve your wife — and there’s certainly a sense in which you should — you have to be her leader first.  Your service must come from a position of strength.  You’re cooking tonight not because you have to, not because she wants you to, but because you want to for your own reasons.  You have to be doing it because it’s the right thing to do.  If you’re doing it to try to make her happy, or because you’re hoping to “earn” reciprocation in the form of sex, you’re doomed.

Is BPD Just Women with Too Much Freedom?

Decisions, decisions.

(This is a concept I’ve been mulling over for a while, but I finally got it down in print in response to a discussion in the comments at The Woman and the Dragon.)

The year is 1952.  Mary is a 16-year-old high school sophomore who lives with her father and mother and three siblings. At school, she pretty much takes the classes all the other girls are taking, and wears the school uniform. Her mother picks out her regular clothes, with input from Mary. She has an allowance, but any significant purchases have to be approved by her parents. Social events are mostly arranged and chaperoned, like school sock hops.  She has a curfew, and she’s expected to tell her parents where she will be at all times.

When she starts dating, boys introduce themselves to her parents for a once-over, and dates mostly take place in the context of arranged social events.  Once she graduates, she continues to live at home and help her mother with the younger kids, but maybe gets a part-time job or takes some classes in something like nursing.  Within a couple years, nature takes its course with one of the boys, and if she’s amenable, he talks to her dad about marriage. Her mother takes charge of most of the wedding arrangements, and they start their new life together. Her new husband makes most of the decisions: what car to buy and when to change the oil, what house they can afford, what form serious discipline of the children will take, and so on.  He consults with Mary on many decisions, but he makes the final call on most everything.

This is an idealized picture of the era, of course.  But the point is that a typical woman in that society, who got married young and assumed her husband was in charge, didn’t make a more critical decision on most days than what to make for the kids’ lunches or how to style her hair (and even that would be done within limits based on her husband’s likes).  She went from following her father’s lead to following her husband’s, with at most a few years of semi-autonomy in between.  Her day-to-day life just didn’t involve a lot of decisions, large or small, and that seemed to work out pretty well.

****

Now the year is 2002, and Jane is a 16-year-old sophomore. She has a lot of choices of classes at school, and she’s already being pressed to choose a career path to work toward. Her parents (or mother alone, in many cases) leave most of her clothing and spending decisions up to her, perhaps within some extreme limits. She may have a curfew and some restrictions on real-life social activities, but her online social life is entirely her own. She decides for herself which boys to date.

After graduation, she goes off to college and lives in a dorm where (if it’s not outright coed) boys are in and out of the rooms regularly (read I Am Charlotte Simmons for a truly depressing account of college life). Now her decisions about sex and relationships are entirely her own, with no oversight from adults at all. After college, she decides what jobs to apply for, what apartment she wants and can afford, what car to get, and so on. She continues to make all her own decisions about sex, drinking, partying, friends, etc. She has to decide whether each expenditure she makes fits in her budget, with no one to set even some basic boundaries.

By the time Jane reaches age 30, she’s been making her own decisions (with the strongest input coming from her peers and TV shows) for at least a decade, basically filling the father/husband role for herself, and she’s shell-shocked. This lifestyle isn’t natural for her, because women are too moody and impulsive, and they need a man to provide stability.  Without that, she makes too many bad decisions, gets herself into emotional roller coasters, and generally develops a me-against-the-world attitude from being burned by too many bad choices.

Now she feels the wall coming and meets a man she’s crazy about, and part of her wants to submit to him — and she does, sexually, with gusto — but it’s been so long since she was under the charge of a man that she’s forgotten how.  So she bounces back and forth, throwing herself into the role one day and then getting scared of losing control and rejecting it the next. More than a decade of being on her own has made it difficult for her to really trust anyone.  On the good days, she thinks her current guy is perfect, but on the bad days she hates him.

****

Now, consider some of the qualifications for BPD (or “emotionally unstable personality disorder,” at it’s being called today):

• impulsive actions
• tendency toward conflict, especially when people try to block her impulsive actions
• unstable mood
• poor or unstable self-image
• intense and unstable relationships
• excess efforts to avoid abandonment
• feeling of emptiness

It seems to me that a woman like Jane is very likely to demonstrate many or all of these qualities.  After years of having no outside rein on her impulsive behavior, it’s gotten out of control, and she resents anyone who tries to curb it.  Likewise, no one ever calls her on her moodiness, so it’s become normal.  A series of relationships and breakups have left her questioning her self-image, and getting more intense and impulsive about each relationship out of desperation.  The many breakups — whether initiated by her or the guy — make her worry about abandonment, that maybe she’ll never find a relationship that will last.  The periods of loneliness between relationships (or during meaningless ones) leave her feeling empty, and her ability to trust people — or even to trust in God’s will for her — dwindles.

So Jane, just by virtue of living the modern, strongandindependent, have-it-all life, could very easily develop the attitude and behaviors that would be diagnosed as a major personality disorder and treated with medication and/or years of therapy.  If she is a strong-willed, feminine woman who had a very good upbringing, maybe she comes out of the experience without too much damage and is able to settle down in marriage and have a good life.  But if she had no father so the fear of abandonment started early, or if childhood abuse gave her a head-start on self-image problems, or if she’s just genetically predisposed to excessive moodiness and impulsivity, Jane’s life may make her a complete basket-case who will never be able to find a reasonable level of contentment.  Mary (remember her?) wasn’t likely to develop something like BPD unless something wasn’t right in her brain from birth.

There have always been people with personality disorders and other mental illnesses.  But these things are being diagnosed so commonly today that something has clearly changed, either in us or in the diagnosis.  Probably some of both: I’m sure they are being over-diagnosed, because that’s where the money is; but I also know too many women who clearly do have a disorder — maybe not drastic enough to be medicated or locked up, but bad enough to make normal life problematic for them.  The fact that BPD is almost never diagnosed before age 18 is significant too.  It develops.

I suspect that Jane’s lifestyle shifts the women who live it sideways on the crazy scale. The ones who would have been crazy anyway are still crazy, and the extremely sane ones at the other end are still reasonably sane.  But the woman whose moodiness would have excited her husband and kept things interesting a century ago now becomes an unstable, hyper-sexualized harridan; and normal women in the middle develop behaviors and tendencies that they wouldn’t have developed if they had spent their 20s and 30s married and having babies while their husbands made most of the decisions.

****

That’s my theory, anyway.  Yes, there are outliers and NAWALT and all that, but I think there’s been a shift here that may be attributed to women being free to run their own lives for far too long.

Non Sola Scriptura

Since I participate on some blogs run by Protestants, I run into the “point to it in Scripture or shut up” mentality now and then.  I don’t figure those blogs are the appropriate place to argue that point, though.  So here’s my simple understanding of why Catholics don’t do Sola Scriptura (Scripture alone).

Our goal is always to follow the teachings of Jesus Christ, because He is, after all, the living Word of God.  He passed His teachings down to His apostles, who passed them to their disciples, and so on.  As the Church grew, the Apostles appointed bishops to carry their authority to new cities and nations.  After a while, they started to realize He wasn’t coming back quite as soon as they originally thought, so they began to write down the story of His time on earth and some of His teachings. But as John tells us, these were only the highlights:

But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written. — John 21: 25

So we don’t expect all of God’s Word to be in Scripture.  Scripture itself tells us it’s not the whole story.  So our primary source remains Apostolic Tradition: the teachings as passed from Jesus to the Apostles to their disciples and down through the episcopal line of succession to today’s bishops.  (Our bishops are far from perfect, but like them or not, they’re still our link to the Apostles.)  We also have the Scriptures, again detailing some of Jesus’s teachings, which have been compiled, translated, approved, and interpreted by that same line of authorities.  Without the Church and her dedication to preserving Christ’s teaching, the Scriptures never would have survived long enough to be translated by anyone else.

So we see the Scriptures as part of Tradition — a very special part to be sure, since the Church has declared them to be divinely inspired Truth — but still only a part, and not surpassing all the rest.

—-

Another part of this is the issue of interpretation.  Look how many different meanings people can get out of the US Constitution, a much shorter document written in English only a bit over two centuries ago.  Extrapolate that to a collection of documents written in Greek and Hebrew 2000+ years ago and translated into the vernacular, generally not from the original sources, and written in the context of a society very different from ours.  Unless I’m a biblical scholar, what are the chances that I, studying at home alone, will always find the correct interpretation?  Yes, I can expect guidance from the Holy Ghost, but I can’t assume that that guidance will always overcome my own ignorance and biases.

So we look to the Church — again to the authority of the bishops passed down from Jesus through the Apostles — to tell us what the Scriptures mean.  That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t read Scripture and have study groups and try to gain a deeper understanding of our own.  We absolutely should.  But we need a guide along the path to understanding, and we need some reason to trust that guide.  I trust my guide — my parish priest, or the study bible I use that has the Imprimatur — because it speaks with the authority of the Church Christ founded.

Edit: Novaseeker had a similar inspiration to write on the same topic.  Check it out; he goes over the history of Sola Scriptura and covers the problems with it more thoroughly than I did.  He uses cool big words like hermeneutics, too.

Annulment 101

There is a lot of misunderstanding about the Catholic concept of annulment, even among Catholics — even among Catholics who have gotten one!  The topic — and the misunderstandings — comes up a lot on some of the blogs I frequent, so I’m writing a little primer here that I can point to when it does.  I should say that I’m not a priest or any sort of authority on the subject.  I’m just a person who has been through the process, studied it, and thinks he knows the score fairly well.

First of all, the correct term is “declaration of nullity.”  The word “annulment” is misleading because it sounds like you’re taking something that used to exist — a marriage — and making it null.  That isn’t the case.  ”Declaration of nullity” means that the Church (usually the diocese, though some cases are passed to Rome) looks at the situation and declares that the marriage was null from the start.  It hasn’t been ended; it never existed in the first place.

This means that the reasons for a declaration of nullity must have preceded the ceremony.  Things that happen after the ceremony can’t retroactively invalidate it; it was valid when it happened or it wasn’t.  Impediments may include:

• A shotgun wedding.  If the vows weren’t given freely, it didn’t happen.
• Marriage between siblings or certain other relationships.  Prohibited by the Church, so it didn’t happen.
• Marriage outside the Church without permission.  This can be done with permission under certain circumstances, but if you didn’t get that, it didn’t happen.
• One or both parties are already married, even if only civilly.  That marriage must be declared null (if possible) before the new marriage can take place validly.
• One party previously has taken a vow of chastity.
• The man is impotent and knew this but did not reveal it.  The primary purpose of marriage is procreation, so while married people aren’t required to have children, a man who speaks the vows without telling his wife about this would be lying about his intentions.
• Too young: under 14 for women and 16 for men, I think.
• One party isn’t baptized.
• One party wasn’t truly capable of taking the vows.  Traditionally, this meant cases of significant retardation, or perhaps someone who couldn’t understand the local language being used.  Today, this is the loophole through which many difficult cases pass: can you convince a tribunal that you or your spouse didn’t really know what you were vowing to do?

There are more, but those are the main ones I can think of.  As you can see, there are a lot of reasons a marriage could be null, and most Catholics don’t know about many of them.  Mixed marriages — marriages between Catholics and non-Catholics — probably account for the majority of them.  They are the most complicated ones, because of the promises that must be made about raising the children Catholic and not interfering with the practice of the Catholic’s faith.  If those promises weren’t made in good faith or weren’t understood by both parties, the dispensation may not have been valid, and that’s where you get some of the grayer-area cases.

Many annulments are quick because there is no question about them.  You got married to a non-Catholic without a dispensation: null.  Your spouse was already married and civilly divorced: null.  Those are easy, and they happen all the time, because people don’t know (or care about) the rules when they’re getting married in the first place.  So the idea that tribunals are rubber-stamping many annulments is true, but justified.  Many are that simple.

Then you get the more difficult ones, where none of the obvious impediments existed, so they’re left trying to figure out whether the people understood the vows well enough to commit to them, and that sort of thing.  It’s easy to see how that could be stretched to accommodate nearly any case — if your husband beats you, did he really take the vow to love and honor? — and yet a significant number of requests are still turned down.

So the system is warped, but not broken.  If we want to reduce the number of annulments, especially in the Catholic Church, part of that will mean getting stricter about the requirements again.  But more important than that, we have to get stricter about the requirements for marriage again.  We need to get back to teaching Catholic children that marriage should only be to other Catholics.  We need to teach them that marriage without a priest’s blessing is invalid.  We need to stop pushing couples through the marriage process because they’re already shacking up or procreating, as if marriage puts an OK stamp on sin.  Couples need to go into marriage with their eyes wide open and all their “impediment” ducks in a row, so that annulments can go back to being for rare cases of real subterfuge again.

Is Wifely Submission Natural?

Sunshine Mary left this comment on her blog recently:

Yes, I’m sure having a natural bent toward submission is helpful. Lucky lady. Wish it came naturally to me.

That reminded me of a discussion I had recently, wherein a friend and I agreed that women do have a natural bent toward submission, but it’s trained out of them, much as a boy’s natural bent toward dominance is trained out of him these days.  Perhaps it’s more natural for some than for others, but I think it exists in all of them at birth, as part of female human nature.

I’m reminded of times when I did get dominant with a girlfriend — maybe out of frustration, because this was before I knew it would work — and it turned her on.  Or the times that a woman would curl up against the couch at my feet, leaning against my knees, to watch TV.  In hindsight, I can see all sorts of submissive body language that women showed when they were attracted to me.  And these weren’t outwardly submissive women — they would have scoffed at the idea.  But something in them still urged them in that direction unconsciously.

It shows up more clearly in women who were raised with traditional beliefs from the start, though.  I know women who actively look for opportunities to follow a man’s leadership.  At my church, we say the rosary before every Mass.  If there are only women there early enough, one of them will lead the rosary; but if there is a man there, they’ll ask him to do it, because they think it’s best for a man to lead.  That’s a small example, but they try to maintain that attitude throughout their lives.

That’s not to say they don’t and won’t struggle with it, or that a man can assume that if he gets one of those women, he can sit back and relax and never worry that she’ll try to dominate him.  We have the assurance of God’s words to Eve on that; every woman will struggle with this and need God’s grace and her husband’s leadership to guide her away from that temptation.  But raising girls with the right beliefs, and surrounding girls and women with a society that once again appreciates the “help-meet” role, would make things much, much easier for women — and men, by extension.