951. Submission or Submissive? — Section A: The Difference

First, let’s deal with and clarify term usage: Men expect female submission. Women expect to follow their natural submissive spirit.

• Major differences exist between the terms. Submission is energized by competitive intent. Submissiveness is energized by cooperative spirit.
• Women live by and foster submissiveness, when they like themselves as female, their man as mate, and their relationship for permanency. It helps capture a man, hold him, and prove that women don’t play the male game of submission.
• Submission is what men think they expect. This doesn’t mean they know what they want just because they expect it. It’s a manly argument that men use to win their point, to act and appear dominant, to defend their seemingly invaluable role as provider-protector. Submission sounds like and is used as a male weapon.
• Men expect female submission, because it stops challenges to his superior role as provider-protector. Women offer a submissive spirit, because it reduces competitive conflict and fosters cooperation. The terms are nowhere near the same, except when women forgo their superior position and advantage.
• Men anticipate filling the marital role and expect spouse’s submission to husband’s authority and dominance. After marriage, they aren’t nearly as demanding unless challenged by wife. If they don’t have to prove their worth, they’re much less inclined to seek or require submission.
• However, submission is more a game founded on intentions rather than real life. Women are foolish, if they accept submission as men claim it as privilege or natural right. The females’ best strategy: Ignore the subject, refuse to talk about it with men as it has the same effect as getting in their face. In the final analysis, submission isn’t relevant to her future life anyway, because her submissive spirit nullifies it.

Don’t for an instant presume that I’m contradicting the bible. I believe it whole-heartedly. I can’t help it that biblical injunctions call for women to be submissive to husband, and men convert it to their version, submission.

NOTE: Earlier articles on this subject appear as posts 56, 72, and 73.

783. Double Standard? Bah! Humbug!

At post 780 Her Highness Mary very perceptively questioned me about double standards (DS).

·        She said: “It seems that the female is under a pretty heavy burden here, constantly living up to her man’s expectations while he is free to go about his business.”

·        She claims that DS “can breed great resentment over time when seen from the women’s view.” She’s very right about resentment, because it springs from a one-sided and polarized view.

The DS battle in the home reflects off the legal, political, and economic DS generated outside the home. Feminists developed the DS argument as a virus to fight patriarchy. DS became contagious across society, spread into the home, and the inflammation of resentment arose in relationships.

Why do women bring it home? Once again, male and female natures differ, so I’ll cut to the chase: Women see a DS, when they favor one particular value over other principles of inter-gender behavior.

·        For four decades women have listened to other women about how to handle and what to expect from men. What and how things should be more equal. Male opinions and masculine values were ignored or demeaned during that time.

·        Consequently, modern females adopt equality to guide their sense of right and wrong within relationships.

Choices have consequences. Men don’t buy into it.

·        DS disturbs rather than smoothes or soothes relationships.

·        Reaching for more equal conditions and treatment, women inflame their relationships and demoralize their homes.

·        Equality is theory and impossible to achieve beyond subjective opinion. Reaching for it, something else always gets disturbed out of equilibrium. Striving for the impossible produces unresolved differences that stimulate resentment in both striver and ‘strivee’.

·        Resentment directly weakens her as the relationship expert. She figuratively eats crackers in her relationship bed, and it eats away at her likeability and his heartfelt bonding with her. Except for sex, men instinctively steer clear of beds littered with resentment crumbs.

Why don’t men buy into equality? On this particular issue, males have the better guide for couples to ease discomfort, judge opinions, and settle disputes.

·        Fairness breeds harmony by smothering resentment before it breaks out.

·        Fairness works much better than equality in the competitive world outside of relationships, so why not inside?  Fairness in the man’s competitive world brings out more easily accepted definitions of right and wrong, more practicality, and better justice.

·        Fairness is more than theory. Reasonable common sense can both achieve fairness and promote more of it by minimizing follow-on resentment. 

·        Equality and fairness are contradictions in principle. The theoretical conflict stimulates wives to compete with husband, which has been shown elsewhere in this blog to turn men off.

·        Virtually anything inter-gender can be labeled DS, if one cites differences, seeks excuses, or promotes self-centeredness. On the other hand, every adverse impact can be marginalized, if one seeks to judge right and wrong by fairness and push toward harmony.

What can wives do? They can do better with a game I’ll call Learn and Seek. Appeal more often to husband’s sense of fairness and test it often for softening his natural hard-heartedness.

·        Wives can seek more tradeoffs, blending, and balancing of relationship effort and responsibility. They can do better, if they learn to push for greater fairness-in-fact and forget pursuit of equality-in-principle.

·        Moms can set good examples daily. They can remind kids to play fair; they can forget the modern day emphasis on outcomes. Forget ‘Winning is everything!’ Return to ‘…it’s how one plays the game’.

·        Husband’s primary goal in marriage is harmony in the home. Wife’s is a brighter future for their relationship. The former helps deliver the latter, so who has the greater interest in building harmony?

Summary: Striving for equality erodes harmony, frustrates wife, and can lead to resentment in one or both spouses. Fairness as primary measuring stick of relationship right and wrong can deliver both harmony for him and brighter future for her.

People like to claim that life’s not fair, but it gets fairer when wives flush away DS as ‘not in my home’.

778. The Blessings of Patriarchy — Chapter 7

REWARDS

The previous six chapters show patriarchy natural for females to exploit, and matriarchy has no chance of replacing it. Consequently, women are ‘forced’ to try harder than men up until they ‘convert’ one man to devote himself to marriage, husbanding, and fathering. After that, husbands have to devote harder to provide and protect, while wives devote to holding the relationship together. (It sounds severe, because we’re viewing married life beneath the positive surface and bonding attributes of love.)

God designed and Nature rewards the female. She’s compensated for male dominance and the relative imbalances just cited with an endowment of relationship expertise. Females know who, what, when, where, why, and how to successfully deal with males or a man. It’s their longest and strongest suit, if they play their hand not perfectly but just well.

To pay for the gift of their dominant spirit, God designed and Nature makes males susceptible to capture by sexual relations, by the females’ unique ability to reward males. Capture is one thing, and men don’t mind. Holding one is another, because men do mind suppressing their hunter-conqueror spirit.

·        Men expect continual rewards for swapping their independence for family responsibility. Convenient sex is but a frequent reminder. Other female attributes such as femininity, likeability, and attractiveness seal the deal for holding a man through a lasting marriage. Compared to other women and leaving sex out of the equation, husband perceives wife as extraordinary. It makes yielding his independence worthwhile.

·        Women hopeful of keeping their man reward with male-friendly incentives and avoid most of what incentivizes females. For example, wife makes herself attractive at all times and avoids sloppy appearances and careless grooming before her man. (She saw the need for it in courtship, so why drop it in marriage, why show that she tricked him?) When she puts her laziness before pleasing his eyes, she desensitizes husband to her importance for him.

·        Over and above what they may earn themselves, women want some measure of wealth provided and protected by a help-mate in order to fulfill their hopes and dreams. Only a man can provide it reliably, and husbands do it best.

·        Their relationship expertise tells women to focus on what they have, and what a man can do for them. And focus not on what they lack and particular men can’t or won’t do for them.  

Brightening the females’ future relies on creating and accumulating new economic wealth. Men are naturally endowed to create it, and women are naturally endowed to take advantage of it. Not by gold-diggers in the traditional sense, but thar’s much gold to be mined in them patriarchal hills by women that appreciate the male gender for all it can do and respect it for just being different.

And thus this series ends.

757. Response to Viewer — Item 21a

Her Highness Abigail prompted this article, when at post #751 she wondered that “…marriage seems like a raw deal for women.”

Of course it can be, but women are the relationship experts, so some blame attaches to them. They intuitively know how to manage and maintain a successful relationship. But that doesn’t mean they rely on their nature. She often ignores her man’s faults in courtship and then blames him as husband.

Also, for example, the wife can generate her own raw deal if she:

• Forgets that marriage predominantly serves mother and her children, but it has to be ‘bought and paid for’ by her as wife.
• Promotes equality over fairness in the home, e.g., dividing or expecting chore workload to be equal instead of settling for fairness to generate harmony. (Her relationship expertise endows her for success in knowing and settling differences, if she but drops any semblance of equality.)
• Determines the values to guide living in her home and negotiates requirements and expectations during courtship, e.g., church-going, raising kids, integrity, temporary separations, faithfulness, etc.
• Expects husband to be more like her or some other guy.
• Becomes something different than the gal the husband courted and married, or she expects him to become something different.

Raw deals are made and not born. Both he and she have coarse sandpaper to rub against sensitive emotions. But she’s better equipped than he to soothe the biggest irritations by feathering and nursing the edges into harmony.

P.S. Gold-diggers may have a better idea, as Abigail suggested, but they start with different objectives and values and end up with results different from what most women desire.

756. The Complex Broken Down — II

Perhaps you wonder why so much misery exists in homes today? Generally, women are not doing their best. You’ve seen some of what follows, but togetherness adds context.

Domestic harmony comes from this:

• Wives/mothers dominate the home by recognizing husband as head of family, wife as second in command, mother as third, and father as fourth.
• Females are naturally hard-headed and soft-hearted. Wife’s hard-headedness, however, dominates mother’s soft-heartedness. The wife role takes priority over the mother role. Otherwise, she pushes husband toward somebody else.
• Submissiveness is not about obedience but about rank structure when agreement can’t be negotiated, but decisions must be made on important matters.
• Husbands with frequent and convenient access to sex made delightful by wife spend less time looking for it and more time following their missions in life—job, family, or hobby. Perhaps to a fault, but it’s usually better than his chasing skirts.

Disharmony arises out of the following whether kids are present or not:

• Mother admits her inability to be second in command by repeatedly or exasperatedly turning to father to solve routine, child discipline, or non-critical problems. 
• When husband/father overrules or reverses decisions of wife/mother, her effectiveness declines. Both she and the kids learn that she’s not respected by head of family. Her authority for discipline goes down, and kids learn to play parents against one another.
• When wife/mother overrules or shows disdain for decisions of husband/father, he’s driven to look for another home. Both he and the kids see that he’s not respected, and he swallows that as an escape pill.

Over the past few decades, harmony in the home has shifted toward disharmony. As a result, home life miseries intrude into everyday life. Perhaps not yours, but someone you know.

752. The Majesty of Sex — III

Three factors breed manly devotion and marital longevity, and they build from the mutual exchange of assets, commitments, and rewards. The swapping works far more successfully, when she’s virgin or virtual virgin**:

They swap ultimate assets:

• Her ultimate asset is sex, and especially when unconquered by him. Their first sex together means he conquered and thus ‘owns’ her for sex, if he so desires. If they marry first, then he obviously desires it.  
• His ultimate asset is independence from other women and the ability to devote himself to helping fulfill her hopes and dreams.

They swap ultimate commitments:

• Her ultimate commitment shows up with proof or conviction to him that he’s the only sex object in her eyes. Lengthy courtship without sex goes a long way to convince him, because he tries everything and fails. That other men have known her doesn’t dampen his drive to conquer, but it grossly dampens his sense of significance, if he’s to invest himself in her.
• His ultimate commitment comes with investing himself to help fulfill her hopes and dreams. She has to earn his commitment by showing devotion to him. What displays her devotion better than anything else? Saving her sexual self exclusively for him, whether as virgin or virtual virgin!

They reward each other:

• Her ultimate reward comes when husband needs and wants to stay with her permanently.
• His ultimate reward comes when he conquers her. He gains frequent and convenient sex with ‘his’ female that others have not and will not know. The reward continues in mini-doses with subsequent love making. (He doesn’t know about her greatest benefit: His conquest under her terms taught her how to sustain his investment in her and their future.)

The magic of making majestic rewards work continues tomorrow.

**See CONTENTS for listing of Virtual Virginity articles.

710. Make Mr. Promiscuous Faithful — Part 4

To recap: Conscience is a function of respect for others, and that’s a reflection of how others respect us. Let’s continue with the man.

• Males must be conditioned to be faithful to one woman. The male nature knows no conscience about spreading seed. Either female-driven Nurture compensates for Nature’s shortcoming in his formative years, or wives and families pay for the consequent oversupply of unfaithful men.
• A man’s admirable conscience grows from the infusion of morality, respectability, and mutual respect exemplified by parents and other adults. The absence of such things produces a less admirable conscience.
• Toddlers are first, because their mind has opened and self-interest starts to develop. They learn to respect others by being shown respect for whom and what they are. To greater but varying degrees, the same continues with tweens, teens, and adults.
• After entering adulthood a man’s conscience changes little except in response to traumatic events, the most glorious being acceptance of the Lord into his life.
• Guys treated poorly by females in their life tend to smother their conscience and sometimes squelch it entirely. Guys treated respectfully turn out quite differently and much more reverential of women.
• Mothers are better able to show respect for children than fathers. They have different natural roles in rearing children. Females focus on teaching right and wrong; males focus on obedience.
• A man’s formative years determines what a woman has to build on during courtship. The more diligently and unanimously respected as a male by mother, grannies, sisters, aunts, teachers, and girlfriends, the more indelibly a man’s conscience becomes conditioned against mistreating females.
• In principle, when the females in adult life duplicate or improve on those of his childhood, he’s likely to be faithful. When they don’t, he sees less reason to remain faithful, because his respect weakens.  

In the final analysis, a man’s faithfulness rests on this foundation: He respects the female gender more than his own. Building on that foundation, each woman has a role to fill. That’s tomorrow.

709. Make Mr. Promiscuous Faithful — Part 3

Before we get to wife’s role, let’s explore her first line of defense: husband’s conscience. Like the rest of us, husband wants to feel good about himself and preferably all the time. Conscience alerts him when he shouldn’t or doesn’t.

• Definition: Conscience is the internal message center that backs up the respect we have for our self and others. It provides the uh-oh when we violate our self-respect, respect for others, or both. Weak respect, weak conscience. Strong respect, strong conscience.
• Conscience is the debt we owe to those we respect, including Self. He creates a guilty conscience, when he offends those he respects. Offense without respect stirs no guilt.
• The stronger is one’s conscience, the more earnest the motivation to both prevent and restore lost respect for others and Self. A weak conscience does little to curb husband’s cheating. A strong conscience helps him cope with the natural urge to both conquer and spread seed.
• Conscience makes character count more than good looks when searching for husband candidates. If already married, building greater respect strengthens a man’s conscience and her belief in it.
• Husband’s conscience detects and springs forth from violations of his self-respect, because it stimulates doubt about his self-image. Phrased in reverse, if his picture of whom and what he is crumbles, his self-respect wilts. His natural reaction calls for restoration of it, and the stronger his conscience—which means greater respect for Self and others—the more highly motivated his effort.
• If he lacks respect for females generally, he doesn’t picture himself as wrong when he mistreats one.
• To the extent that he respects females, mistreatment of one causes his conscience to send signals of regret to him more than to her. However, lacking respect for her gender at least equal to or greater than his respect for the male gender means he can disrespect, mistreat, and even harm women with no conscience alerts, no loss of self-respect.  
• To the extent that he respects wife, mistreatment of her causes loss of self-respect. It contradicts his picture of him as husband and his ideals of what marriage means. But worse, if he lacks respect for her, mistreatment doesn’t make him feel bad about himself. It disturbs neither his self-image nor self-respect.

Describing the many roles of conscience has expanded. More tomorrow.