To What Should Males Aspire?

I heard Dennis Prager ask to what men would aspire if not marriage and raising a family. He's repeatedly said that guys are not real men if they aren't husbands and fathers. This is something heard from various corners of our culture, along with other assertion of what makes a guy a "real man". [This entry has been bumped up.]

Notice you never hear what makes a real woman. You never hear "What a real woman does, is..."

What is a guy if he isn't a real man? An artificial man? A transgender man? Of course, that's not what people are talking about. They are saying a "real man" as opposed to a man who is somehow lacking, or, as they might say, a "boy". There's nothing wrong with boys, at least not beyond the general thing of humans being fallen creatures. Again, you don't hear this with women. Women will refer to each other and themselves as girls and nothing negative is meant by it.

A real man is any adult human male who isn't fictional. For example, Prince Charming is fictional. Christian Grey is fictional. Jack Sparrow is fictional.

If there was such thing as a "real man" as opposed to an adult male who isn't a real man, that real man wouldn't give a piece of dung what other people say makes a real man. because when someone says, "What a real man does, is...",  what they're saying is "What I like men to do is..." Because real men urinate unless they have kidney problems, real man have weaknesses, and real men mess things up sometimes. But you'll never hear "What a real man does is urinate." But it's true.

Getting back to Prager's question...

Another Joyful Experience With a Wife and Child

Being a married father:

1. Avoid waking your wife so she can sleep in so she can continue her habit of staying up late. (She doesn’t have a job apart from being a wife and mother.) Prepare what she likes to consume when she wakes up so it’ll be ready for her when she wakes up, which could be any time in the next three hours.

2. Give up relaxing on your day off, to take your kid out for fresh air, exercise, and play, because your kid requested it and you believe it’s the right thing to do, and you’ve already paid for the activity.

3. Find yourself in the doghouse* after your wife wakes up and realizes what you’ve done, because you were supposed to know automatically that your kid would be grounded due to acting out in the middle of the day yesterday on the mental conditions said child inherited from your wife.

4. Have wife seclude herself when the two of you return home, probably for the rest of the calendar day, if not longer.

5. Have wife decree specific punishment for the child without consulting you or so much as informing you before issuing the decree.

6. Struggle to prevent your child from self-harming after the degree is issued, as the child recounts being a toddler and witnessing mom having a psychotic break, which itself was a traumatic experience for you back when it happened, and you were an adult.

And that’s just within a span of half a day.

*What does being in the doghouse mean? Hostility. Chances are, we weren’t going to be having sex anytime soon anyway. And there’s not much else she does for me. She’ll be less attentive to the needs of the kids. That will mean more for me to do. Should she be punished for being hostile to the kids? It’s a pointless question because she’s an adult and legally has all the power. But the kids recognize they get punished for doing some of the same things their parent does.

Guys, avoid this. Stay free.

Dr. Laura Asked If Men Are Idiots for Marrying

On her Tuesday, March 22, 2022 program, Dr. Laura read part of something from Jordan Gray found at Good Men Project. It was titled "I Used To Think That Men Who Got Married Were Idiots."

I used to think that men who got married were idiots.

Or, if they weren’t idiots, they were at least undesirable enough that they just had to settle for whoever chose them… because why else would you tie yourself to someone for life if the reason weren’t that you didn’t have any other romantic options?

I mean, seriously… getting married??

Okay so… you get a couple of months of hot sex, in exchange for a lifetime of indentured servitude to someone who eventually takes you for granted and sees you as a walking wallet and then stops having sex with you and makes jokes with her friends about what a dumbass you are? And that’s if you even manage to stay together… because what’s even more likely is that she eventually leaves you, takes the kids, and steals half of your life savings in the process.

Who in their right mind would sign up for such a thing?

Didn’t these guys realize that, if you really break down the benefits of marriage into their fundamental components, you could hire out all of these needs for way less money than what your lifestyle of snotty nosed kids and inevitable divorce would cost you?

And I’m not speaking hyperbolically here!

Here, I’ll prove it to you…

You could hire someone to come to your house to do a deep clean every other week for, depending on the size of your house, let’s say $200/month.

You don’t want to cook for yourself? Okay, you could hire a meal prepping service who could make your lunches and dinners (you can fend for yourself with a super simple breakfast) for $2,000/month.

Okay, cooking and cleaning are taken care of for less than the cost of your mortgage payment… what’s left? Oh right, the big one. Sex!

Depending on how fancy you are and the legality of sex work in your local area, you could see a sex worker every week for the rest of your life and spend no more than $1-2,000 per month on that expense.

So if you tally up the monthly costs of outsourcing predictable, guaranteed, high-quality cooking, cleaning, and sex… you’re looking at no more than $50,000 per year in total expenses. Now, that might sound like a lot to some in the short-term… but if you compare that to the average cost of raising children, and the amount of money you’ll inevitably have to shell out in your divorce, this is an absolute bargain.

That's where she stopped reading. She took calls from men after that, asking them "Are men idiots for getting married?" At first, she wanted calls from married men, but she had trouble getting enough calls, so she took them from any men (who passed the screeners). The thing is, Dr. Laura promotes marriage. When she deviates from her program's usual format for things like this, she wants a specific answer. It isn't really her trying to give people time to say whatever they want. She will deny anything that goes against her point.

Gray's essay was pretty good up until that point. I waited for her to go back to finish reading the piece, but she never did. Let's see why.

The Marriage Seller Pivot

 

 

 

 

 

 

People who try to convince men to marry (marriage sellers) quite often do a pivot.

They usually start their sales pitch appealing to your own self-interest. They say things like:

Married men earn more money

Married men are healthier

Married men live longer

Married men are happier

Married men have more and better sex

But when those of us who know better point out:

• Married men are also taller, meaning that marriage didn't cause men to be richer, healthier, live longer, be happier, have more and better sex, and get taller. Rather, women are far more likely to marry and stay married to men who earn more, are healthier, are happier, more sexually compatible, and taller.
  
• "Married" men are being compared as a group to all "unmarred" men, which consists of diverse groups, including divorced men and men who can't attract a wife (because they are sick, poor, unhappy, etc.) The stats marriage sellers are trying to use to show marrying benefits men never separate out intentionally unmarried men for comparison, many of whom are wealthier, healthier, happier, and having more, better, and more diverse sex than most husbands.
• Over half of everything a married man earns/owns legally belongs to his wife, who can take it away at any time for any reason, and 80 percent of spending decisions in a marriage are made by a wife, often to buy things a man doesn't want and won't use, so my unmarried counterpart only has to earn 51 percent of what I do to be better off than me.
  
• Men have often been conditioned to think they are losers, failures, or sinners if not married, or that complaining about their marriage is a sin or negative confession, and thus might say they are happy (if husbands) and unhappy (if still looking for a wife) as a result.

...marriage sellers will often pivot. They might try an ad hominem attack, call you bitter, ungrateful (if you're married), selfish, loser, immature, incel, misogynist, or even say marriage isn't a bed of roses for women either (which is an odd way to try to sell it).

The more careful ones, though, will pivot from "You'll be so much better off!" to "You have an obligation to get married." They don't lead with the obligation/duty approach because they know it isn't nearly as appealing as the first approach. With the "obligation" approach, they say things like:

Marriage is good for society
Marriage matures men
The Lord wants you to get married

Those are largely circular arguments or, like the first set, involve supposed correlation rather than demonstrable causation in the direction from marriage to positive outcome. If someone asserts something like "marriage is good for society," ask them to explain how. They'll probably say something about fatherless kids being a problem on society. But if you will not create children and then abandon them, where is the issue? They might say that it's better for a woman to have a husband than depend on government. But those aren't the only options. How about teaching and encouraging women to be truly independent?

There simply is no general Biblical command to marry that applies to every man today, especially not to get a bad contract from a secular state or engage in the common behaviors of today's social concept of marriage. Yes, the Lord, according to the Bible, doesn't want you trying to steal away another man's wife from him, so don't do that. Getting married certainly doesn't stop that! Notice the Bible doesn't tell you what steps to take to be married, as in "Do X, Y, and Z, and then you'll be married." That seems kind of like an important thing to be left out if everyone is supposed to marry.

Prager University even tried to teach viewers that married men are sexier.

Pay attention if you hear someone who effectively dismantles the claims of a marriage seller that married men are better off, and you might notice the marriage seller try a pivot.

Stay free, men.