Who wants to be the next indentured servant? C’mon, ladies, don’t claw each others’ eyes out!
Thanks to Rebecca for sending me this segment from the Australian version of “60 Minutes” on women who’ve decided to cope with husbands who can’t take any signs of life in a woman by embracing the “surrendered wife” lifestyle, based on the book. Believe me when I tell you that it is worth sitting through all 13 minutes of this video. It’s easy to defend this wifely submission on paper, but when you see the actual behavior going on in marriages, the true horror of wifely submission becomes undeniable. That said, the tinkly music and good-humored framing makes the whole thing even creepier.
But there is a transcript, for people on dial-up, and lots of jaw-dropping quotes. First off, wifely submission, as you can imagine, means that a woman’s consent or desire for sex becomes irrelevant to the couple’s sex life. It’s not technically rape, I suppose, if your victim-esque believes that she has no right to say no, but it seems close enough to me.
PETER HARVEY: But these rules don’t stop at the bedroom door, no, sir.
SKYE: One of the basics of surrendering is that your husband always takes the lead when it comes to sexual intimacy. And another thing is that the woman always says yes to sex. And sometimes you might not feel like it but then when you start being together and kissing and hugging and just being together and getting that closeness, then, generally, I want to anyway.
PETER HARVEY: Oh, that’s okay then, isn’t it, Frank?
FRANK: Right now when they say, ‘No’, that might be true. But women are very much in the moment and what is true right now might not be true two minutes from now.
SKYE: He knows he will just keep pursuing me, you know? And he knows I’ll give in eventually.
FRANK: Nowadays guys are kind of like — they’ll bump up against a little bit of resistance with their partner and if there’s a little bit of resistance they back off. And that’s not what she wants, she wants me to pursue her to the end of the planet.
Now I’m not going to diss on people who have some sort of consensual dom/sub relationship, because I do believe strongly that people can use sexual games and fantasies as a catharsis. But that’s not what’s going on here. This submission is real. The wife doesn’t get to say, “Okay, playtime is over, I’m not your servant anymore.” She’s always his servant.
PETER HARVEY: This is Pepita’s second marriage. She gave up her career as a prison warden three years ago to look after Leo full-time. Her daughter, Danielle, can’t believe what she’s seeing.
DANIELLE: She’s in the bathroom and stuff, when he’s having a bath, she’ll go and shave his face for him and shave his head and puts his toothpaste on his toothbrush and she’ll spray him with his aftershave.
The last couple, Chip and Caroline, is the most interesting. It seems from the video that Caroline is skeptical and only trying out this “surrendered” thing because she’s at the end of her rope with a tyrannical husband and figures she’ll just see if this saves her marriage. (I’m guessing no.) While it’s probably minor compared to a lot of this surrendered wife crap, I found this one section significant—Caroline wears a blindfold when Chip drives so she won’t be tempted to criticize him if he takes them off-course or gets lost. It doesn’t work, which is kind of funny, but Chip seems to enjoy making her look like an idiot anyway. Chip also picks out her clothes and shoes for her, and she pathetically tries to justify this to herself by noting that he picked out what she would wear, information he clearly finds tedious and irrelevant. In other words, she’s undermining the “experiment” every step of the way, rebelling against the idea that she as a woman is obliged to give up her desires and opinions for a man, even as she’s trying really hard to accept that. All I could think was, “Run away, Caroline!”
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Oh, I couldn’t bring myself to watch the video. The portion of the transcript I read was already creeping me out. I mean, stuff like this really does send a shudder down my spine.
Cue Bryan’s defense and derailment in 3…2…1…
Seriously, this is some fucked up shit. What makes you hate someone so much that you force them to have sex with you?
That was one of the most disturbing things I’ve seen in quite some time. I feel dirty. I just can’t understand why a “relationship” with a man who doesn’t want an actual woman is so important that these women are willing to give up independent thought and action (not to mention deciding when they want to have sex).
And what makes you hate someone so much you basically assure them that they’ll have to pursue you to the end of the earth in order to fuck you?
Yanno, some shit offends me because it’s degrading to women. Things like making them out to be the ‘weaker’ sex or what have you - generalized bullshit. Or not taking their personalities into account when assigning what they’d be good at or not.
Then some shit offends me because it claims the guy needs to act a certain way in order to be “male” as opposed to, yanno, a freakin’ human being.
This offends me BOTH ways.. Both sides of this little arrangement are acting like fools. He’s “husbanding” like animal husbandry and she’s acting like a spineless idiot in response. Guess these people deserve each other. I’d never, ever, ever, ever date someone who felt like that (again lol). Fucking weird!
Ahem.. carry on
“Fuck you” sounds not like what I meant.. I was irked.. I meant perform a hostile takeover in order to earn affection/intimacy.. oh blah why do I bother? lol
Wow, I really feel sorry for Danielle! To see her mother going from a role model to essentially a slave… man.
At least there’s some hope- both she and Caroline look like they might see the light here.
oh crap, the surrender people. Scary. I had some friends in high school, one of whom had a cousin who was into that sort of thing, and they all just stared at her like she was insane.
Let’s pass around the hat and take up a collection to buy Caroline a gun.
I swear to god, if I ever got married and someone gave this book to me as a gift I’d smack them in the face with it, assault charges be damned.
It doesn’t make sense to me but then again it’s not suppose to. I guess I was “happy” that that one woman said women should draw the line at being beaten and cheated on, at least they will give you THAT ladies.
I’d like to see the video, but apparently I have to be running Windows and Internet Explorer to see it. Oh well.
OH goodness. Like I didn’t have a low enough opinion of marriage before that nightmare video. It is beyond depressing to see life wasted on such a worthless pursuit.
Let’s pass around the hat and take up a collection to buy Caroline a gun.
Let’s not encourage or make any form of violence seem acceptable, okay?
Gedanken experiment:
Part I:
Follow these couples for 20 years. Interview them. Measure them.
Assume five, ten, fifteen, twenty years from now you find this “surrender” has worked for them, in their circumstances.
Is there a problem in their behavior?
Part II:
Follow a representative number of these couples for 20 years.
Find that more or less their stability (breakups) mirror the stability of the larger culture.
Is there a problem in their behavior?
Question: Are these women not rational adults capable of making their own decisions? Are they somehow not informed of their alternatives?
Question: If they are married, and the behavior is consensual, and it is working for them, is there some reason we should not say, kenehora, and congratulations?!
Hahahahahahahahahahahaha!
I just don’t get it. What kind of worthless waste of a male do you have to be to want that kind of a relationship? How insecure of a human being do you have to be to get off on that shit?
I am really, truly sick. Hubby is still laughing his ass off.
So it starts with a cute bunny sitting on this person’s lap. The person is holding an envelope. The envelope is sealed. The person holds the envelope in front of the bunny a few times. At first the bunny seems uninterested.
Eventually the bunny takes hold of the envelope and neatly chews off the very edge of the envelope all along one side.
The person says “thank you,” then pulls the letter out of the envelope. The people around giggle and say “yay” and the person pets the bunny.
The End.
I haven’t read the transcript, but if “Gorean” isn’t mentioned, these people are plagiarists.
plugh wrote:
Question: If they are married, and the behavior is consensual, and it is working for them, is there some reason we should not say, kenehora, and congratulations?!
—
Well, plugh, for one thing, it says right there in the “the man can make the woman have sex whenever he feels like it” bit that it’s not consensual happy D&S with religious overtones.
And, because, by their behavior, these relationships[1] promote the degredation of women. Danielle can see it, and so can we; her mother has become a servant. The law doesn’t have the power to stop it, and it probably shouldn’t. But it’s still awful.
[1] Both the men and the women are trapped in a very bad version of the patriarchy. My heart bleeds for the dudes, it really does.
Actually what is tragic about all this is the impoverishment of life that it implies. It is as if the world simply cannot tolerate too much human personality, without the result of chaos and disorder. So the females subsume themselves under the personalities of the male. Is this better? Or just a terrible travesty which seeks to destroy the human spirit?
Ugh. I feel dirty now, and I couldn’t even bring myself to watch the video. The transcript was bad enough.
Yes, Plugh. There is an inherent problem with a system/marriage that denies the full humanity of one of the participants and impoverishes the soul of both - whether they themselves are happy with it or not. Should it be illegal? No. But it should absolutely not be something we approve of. Would you approve of a surgery that dropped somebody’s IQ 50 points if it made them happy?
One of my sort-of co-workers was telling us at lunch today about how she grew up in a creepy fundy cult in College Station (a bit reduntant, I know). Arranged marriages, a sequestered cult compound, sanctioned spousal rape, the whole nine yards. She got out before the arranged marriage was forced on her, but most of her family is still there.
Creeped me out just listening to her. This does, too.
Would you approve of a surgery that dropped somebody’s IQ 50 points if it made them happy?
I’d probably sign up for that surgery. I think a lot of people drink for similar reasons.
:(
This “Surrendered Wife” set seem a bit like certain other groups. For example, the people who decide to run their lives according to what L. Ron Hubbard or John Norman or similar wise men say.
On the other hand, the book does have other uses. I bought this for my mother two Christmases ago…
I survived the Stares of Death from the female Chapters staff while buying this. I can figure they had certain opinions of men who would buy this book.
I gave it to my mother, and she would read passages out loud to my father, and then fall over laughing. She would also read bits to her friends, just to have a good howl of mirth.
The next Christmas she showed it to my brother’s new wife, who had much the same experience, being very much amused. My brother was regaled with my sister in law’s pick of funny passages, to a backing track of peals of laughing glee.
Then my mother signed the book and gave it to my sister in law, who was also going to sign it and pass it on when she was done with it. It’s possibly making the rounds of Montreal to this day, to similar screams of uncontrollable female hilarity.
And then you have the Christian Domestic Discipline crowd.
Ew.
Like you, I’d be just ducky with this stuff if it were simply a consensual 24/7 kinky dominance/ submission relationship. But when you start bringing in the idea that this is what all marriages are supposed to be like because God wants it that way, which we know because the Bible tells us so… then you start veering away from a freely chosen lifestyle and into indoctrination territory.
Jesus Christ, does she also wipe his arse for him, while she’s at it?
If it’s 24/7 it’s not really consensual, I’m sorry. It’s moved beyond play with domination into actual domination. Then it’s the same thing these folks are engaging in.
I can’t laugh over this book.
I was a Hare Krishna for several years, from my mid-teens to mid-twenties. That particular cult strongly believes in submissive, chaste wives who surrender fully to their husbands as their authority. A book that was making its rounds at the time was Fascinating Womanhood, which sounds a lot like this one. It was horrible to see bright, intelligent women poring over that book, desperately trying to become “better” wives by finding that perfect mix of their angelic selves and child-like selves.
The Krishnas have an 80% divorce rate, by the way.
That is messed up.
That last woman featured is so not going to be able to pull it off. And I see running away to New York City somewhere in that other’s woman’s daughter’s future.
A few years ago my ex went to therapy. At her bidding, he tried to get me to read The Surrendered Wife, the idea behind this move of wisdom being that if I wasn’t…fuck, I still don’t remember what the reasoning behind having me read that waste of tree matter was, especially considering that they were supposed to be discussing his anger issues. The whole thing was random and upsetting.
It’s also pretty fucking offensive, too, and not just to women. The entire premise - that the man is supposed to guide the relationship, and by extension, his partner’s life - fucked up, but the course of action provided by the book is a model of passive-aggression and manipulation. the idea is that a woman can get everything she wants by making the man feel like he is always right and always smart, even when he’s nt. I mean, fuck, what kind of insecure prick wants to be with a woman like that? If we are to assume that the whole ’surrendered wife’ thing is an ideal way to live, then aren’t its advocates basically saying that men are whiny little babies who need to be protected from the reality of themselves?
Any guy who thinks this sort of thing sounds like a good relationship is exhibiting some serious character flaws, and needs to be sent far, far away so that he is not allowed to inflict his sad little self on the womankind of the world any longer.
I mentioned here before the “surrendered wife” lecture that was given to a dear friend of mine at her bridal shower a few months ago.
Again: One of her relatives had turned to submission (and to fundamentalist Christianity) as a last-ditch effort to save a troubled marriage. So when we went around the group and gave “advice” to my friend, she started out saying relatively nice things like “Forgive each other, don’t let the sun go down on you angry.” But within a couple sentences it had turned into “And submit, because that’s Biblical. Let him be the head of the household and make the decisions.”
We sat there with frozen grins on our faces. I knew my friend didn’t want to have the argument with her relative, for various good reasons, so I held my tongue, but God it was hard to sit there and listen to that. My only consolation was that every other person there was thinking the same thing as me.
And oh, Caroline, you share my name, I feel almost related to you because of that. Please get the hell out of there.
I doubt most readers here will be sympathetic to my view, but here goes: speaking in a very broad sense, I think guys and gals have different needs. Most of the guys I know, for example, are more concerned about “keeping face� than are the women in their lives.
For that reason, I really don’t think wives ought to gainsay their own husbands in public. I don’t think women should casually speak ill of the men they’re with. Those little jibes about how incompetent a husband is at some chore or how easy it is to control a man by withholding sex – they grate on me when I hear them from female relatives and acquaintances. They strike me as disrespectful and cruel – totally out of place from either side of the most intimate earthly relationship a person can have.
And what’s more, there is absolutely nothing wrong with a woman drawing her husband’s bath or serving him breakfast in bed.
I part ways with the “Surrendered Wife� crowd, however, in that I think it’s disrespectful of a woman to infantilize herself around her husband. It’s insulting to both her and her partner. She should be clothed in strength and honor, and her husband should be able to trust her implicitly to make sound decisions. This bullshit about itemized lists and “no control� dates is creepy and stupid.
And that ridiculous thing about a woman’s ‘no’ actually meaning ‘yes’ – yuck.
I also don’t think the intimate sharings of a loving marriage should be paraded before the world in such a careless fashion. I hate that these women wear their status like a badge of honor; as if they have an ulterior motive - seeking respect from outsiders – for offering what they perceive as tokens of love to their husbands.
I feel as sorry for fragile guys as I do for the women who keep enabling them.
Degrading.
Your therapist gave that to you? Good lord. Though I can sort of understand it—what amuses me about all this is the sort of mundane details that create so much strife. One huge mistake people make about male dominance is thinking it’s big and dramatic, when it’s more small and in the details. The idea that a man can rag on his wife’s driving but not vice versa is widespread and unremarked upon, which makes it harder to eradicate. I know that I can suffer quite a bit of criticism and yet it takes a lot of work for me to offer even a little, having had it drilled into my head that women exist for men and subsequently, women should suck up criticism and never offer it. What freaks me out is I’m actually kind of bitchy by “mainstream” standards, so god help a woman who doesn’t actually see this is fucked up. Well, you see what happens—women wearing blindfolds rather than keep themselves from spending an hour driving around lost lest they, god forbid, make a man feel less than superior to them in any way.
For that reason, I really don’t think wives ought to gainsay their own husbands in public.
So, you’re fine with men humiliating and dressing down their wives in public?
Why does this have to be about “difference” unless you’re excusing men who get pleasure out of making their wives look bad in front of their friends? The idea that respecting someone means keeping criticism private is not even remotely what we’re talking about. It’s wretched for anyone to make a fool out of his/her partner in public. And I strongly include men who dress down their wives for offering pleasant, unoffensive criticisms like, “Ah, the turn’s coming up here.” It’s not a fucking indictment of your manhood if she can read street signs more quickly because you’re looking out for other cars.
Was there some debate about whether or not its unkind to say nasty things to someone you ostensibly care about? Because if there was, I missed that.
It’s sick and twisted because it seems that most of these women turned to this “Surrender” bullshit as a last resort. They didn’t wake up one day and say “Gosh, my life is great, but now I think I’d like to spend the rest of my life toadying up to a lazy prick with control issues…” I would assume that these women got so tired of the constant bickering, insults and passive-aggression that they thought that it would be worth becoming subservient handmaids if it meant five minutes of peace. That is sad. Sad that a marriage can go there and sad that these women would rather sacrifice their own self-respect and autonomy than get out of a marriage that obviously isn’t working….
Oh no, women, do whatever you want, but don’t teach the two year old. NONONONO. Poor kid.
And the men- goddamn bastards. I could never, ever, ever understand their mindset, or agree to this shit.
I feel so dirty. Not in the good way.
(cue to the singing:
“There’s room for everyone in this world, Everyone make some room…”
Yeah, it’s kinda sad that that was the first thing that popped into my head after reading that.
And yet, strangely enough, some people consider drinking to be immoral. In fact, a lot of people consider it to be a Bad Idea when done in excess - for any reason. Especially when it’s done persistently and repeatedly. And in front of the kiddies.
(And, strangely enough, mainstream culture tends to give a half-hearted nod to the patriarchs who say this, but scorn the scolding women who do. Right down to the damn textbooks that give simplistic explanations of the Temperance movement - and then turn around and work really hard to scare the shit out of kids in health class.)
Since the whole “surrendered wife” idea definitely seems to include a whole lotta excess, I’m not seeing how your analogy is even a remotely decent defense. And that’s before we get to the part where the analogy - like all analogies - has serious fundamental flaws.
Not to be a suck-up or anything, but I have mentioned lately how completely awesome you are, Amanda?
I damn well WILL “gainsay” my husband in public if I think it’s called for. Because he’s my husband and I love him, I will correct him nicely if he’s mistaken…as I would for a friend. And as he would me, without either of us hurting the others’ feelings.
Because we’re fucking ADULTS without some fucking insecurity gender role complex that is designed to protect his fragile masculine “face.”
I could never respect a man whose self image crumbles because a woman DARES to contradict him…Jesus. If he wasn’t strong enough to deal with me pointing out that he’s mistaken Daniel Day Lewis for Jerry Lewis, then i never would have married him in the first place.
Women are not the Upholders of Your Masculine Identity, guys. Uphold it yourself. We’ve got better things to do. Sheesh.
Nope, but – and this is obviously anecdotal – I haven’t seen men do that nearly so often as I’ve seen women do it. I wonder how often women are raised to believe that henpecking their husbands is a good way to ensure they get all the equality to which they’re entitled in a marriage – a kind of salve for the tension they experience in presenting themselves as independent women while still lusting after the ring, the dress, the nice house (on his income), and all the other ‘patriarchal trappings’ that attend weddings and marriage.
If it helps at all, I think dyed in the wool feminists are far less likely to treat their male partners like this than are women who want to acknowledge a distant debt to feminism even while gathering all the ‘traditional wife’ cred they can get.
And besides that, my failure to add a caveat – that no, men shouldn’t upbraid their wives and embarrass them – should never have been construed as an endorsement of men humiliating women.
But this iswhat we’re talking about. I think the “Surrendered Wife� thing appeals most to women who can’t perceive a middle ground between being emasculating control freaks – this is pretty much how Laura Doyle describes her “former self� – and mindless doormats who exist merely to serve their men.
The idea that good, solid criticism can exist in private when it has no place in public is foreign to them.
It isn’t enough just to slam this book and the converts it has spawned; one must also offer an alternative way of living.
My favorite quote:
SKYE: One of the basics of surrendering is that your husband always takes the lead when it comes to sexual intimacy. And another thing is that the woman always says yes to sex. And sometimes you might not feel like it but then when you start being together and kissing and hugging and just being together and getting that closeness, then, generally, I want to anyway.
PETER HARVEY: Oh, that’s okay then, isn’t it, Frank?
FRANK: Right now when they say, ‘No’, that might be true. But women are very much in the moment and what is true right now might not be true two minutes from now.
What does he think women are, goldfish?
There was an article in Australia that came out when the book was originally released–a reporter from a woman’s magazine interviewed the woman who came up with the whole “Surrendered Wife” schtick. Turns out the woman was a control freak extraordinaire with other issues— this was the only way she could think of to save their marriage, get herself to turn herself off and actually listen to what her husband was saying. (The description made me think that the husband was actually a decent, normal human being who didn’t take advantage of the “control” he had over his “surrendered wife”)
And you could tell the reporter was thinking:”this woman is an absolute lunatic.”
I used to feel sorry for women who decide they want to “be a Surrendered Wife”, but have gotten too old and too misanthropic to really empathize any more. Everyone is responsible for the consequences of the belief system they chose to adhere to–the “Surrendered Wife” schtick is just another form of cult with similar consequences.
I’m mystified by the idea that some women are turning to this in order to save their marriages, since it seems to me that any marriage that would require this isn’t worth saving.
Wearing a blindfold in the car is an awesome idea… passive aggressive, but she deserves kudos for coming up with it.
I once dated a man who was a complete controlling douchebag that never paid much attention to the fact that I didn’t actually fit all those stereotypes he was so fond of.
We were driving one day, back from Sydney to Canberra (Australia, its about a three hour drive south). At some point I noticed that we we had been heading North not South for about 15 mins. I told him so.
“Oh, don’t be silly, baby. Everyone knows that the sun sets in the East, so we are heading South. Its ok.”
“No, seriously, it sets in the west, and you are going the wrong way.”
“This is what happens when women try to read maps, they get confused.”
Two hours later we arrived back in sydney, and he turned the car around.
henpecking their husbands
Quick: what’s “henpecking” called when a husband does it to a wife?
Quick: what’s “henpecking� called when a husband does it to a wife?
Putting the bitch in her place, if you’re a misogynist.
No debate; just an extension of my comment that men are more generally concerned about “face� that women are. My motive in this was to demonstrate how someone can hold views in common with Laura Doyle even while holding her work in contempt.
I wouldn’t do it to a friend in public either. What? Is hubby gonna die if I don’t immediately correct small details of the ‘honeymoon tale’ when he shares it with his friends? Or will he be harmed in some way if I don’t prick his ego by correcting, in front his parents, the tale of his promotion by revealing that he essentially got that grueling job because no one else would touch it?
In the same way, I’m not going to go through a litany of alternative driving routes with him when his friends are in the car. I don’t care enough about whether we’re on-time to pick at him like that.
You frame this as a “protecting the fragile masculine ego� issue, whereas I frame it as a “not being a condescending jackass� issue.
My overarching point is that those “Surrendered Wife� types seem incapable of telling the difference between those things which should be said in public and those things that shouldn’t; much in the same way as they can’t tell the difference between treating their husbands with respect and treating their husbands like big babies who need their every need met.
Cockpecking.
Yet another instance of asshole guys not wanting a woman, but a mommy/sex slave. I, for one, would prefer a world with fictional robot wives, because it would weed out the creeps who might otherwise try to make real women do that degrading shit. Ugh, these people all need their heads examined.
Wow, this makes me sick to my stomach. There is nothing consensual involved in this sick stuff. This is just utterly disgusting. Now I’m transgendered, but I was born with the whole external male genitalia, and I can’t understand why any man would want this… Except I can, and it sickens me to no end… To want a toy, a barbie, not a real person to spend time with, its the ultimate in living in a fake world, where one can imagine that one is in control of all that one surveys. Heh, kind of the way the current administration. I could never do this, heck, even the whole BDSM is hard for me… But of course I can see the difference, BDSM, is consensual, this sick crap, isn’t remotely consensual, there is no negotiation between the partners as their is in actual real relationships, no give and take, no surrender on the male side, nothing. If guys want to do stuff like this, play video games in god mode, don’t try to force your wife into this crap!
Devil’s Advocate:
I know the kind of comment you’re referring to, and I have actually noticed it coming as often from men as from women; however, I’ve also noticed there are different methods of delivery, and not necessarily across gender lines, either. One is an affectionate teasing; the other is a passive/aggressive put-down. It’s the latter, coming from either a man or a woman, that makes *me* squirm; and you’re right: they have no place in a loving marriage.
Nope, but – and this is obviously anecdotal – I haven’t seen men do that nearly so often as I’ve seen women do it.
Well, I think there’s a lot more social space for men to pick on their wives than vice versa. The idea that women are “pussy-whipped” is so out of the loop that we don’t notice it. Doesn’t mean it doesn’t happen, just that it’s less remarkable because it’s so socially acceptable. For the same reason it’s just assumed that marital conflicts are resolved by women giving it, it’s easy to disregard all the various ways that women are put down by men in their lives.
God knows shit that used to make me flinch in the past with regards to being dressed down by boyfriends in public went unremarked by friends. If anything, I got lectured about being nicer to my boyfriend when I visibly blanched at being made the fool. But the idea that men are the judge of women is so ingrained in our society that we rarely, if ever, stop to worry about a woman getting publicly criticized the way we wring our hands over a man suffering that fate.
Oh, in regards to the whole saving face, who cares! One can not grow, unless one takes criticism. Really, if I can’t admit I’m wrong, then I’ll be stuck the same, and who wants that shit. To all men who can’t admit they’re wrong, and get all whiny when they are shown that they are utterly wrong, GROW UP!!! Really. My girlfriend tells me I’m wrong quite a bit, and I go ooopppss, I’m wrong again, sorry, and move on. *fumes* Anyway, I’ll stop ranting.
What does he think women are, goldfish?
He may believe they are creatures that require love, attention, and sufficient foreplay.
I think the “Surrendered Wife� thing appeals most to women who can’t perceive a middle ground between being emasculating control freaks – this is pretty much how Laura Doyle describes her “former self� – and mindless doormats who exist merely to serve their men.
Dude, she was wearing a blindfold in the car. Having given up in emotionally abusive relationships completely on offering my opinion because everything I said was taken as an affront to my man’s what-the-fuck-ever, I can assure you that the “surrendered wife” thing is mostly appealing to women who can’t fo the life of them understand why innocently offered opinions (”Ah, that street on the left looks like Pine St.”) are taken as reasons to be berated and screamed at and quite possibly beaten. There comes a point where you are desperate for a moment of peace. Nothing you can say will be “right”, so you hope that by voiding yourself of personality and opinions, you will avoid berating. You are wrong. Leaving is the only choice.
The idea that a gently offered correction is the end of the world is something that comes straight out of the male entitlement handbook. I submit, gently, that a woman should be allowed to offer that her choice of clothing, music, or memory of a good route should be something she can offer peacefully without being told straightaway she’s completely out of line for suggesting it. Again, I’ve been rather beaten into submission. I’ve had bizarre quarrels with current boyfriend when I quietly let him miss an exit because I’ve had so much experience of the unnecessary berating that follows, “Ah there’s the exit,” that I gave up completely, and current boyfriend doesn’t get why I don’t speak up when I know something. Good point. Why not? These are the pathetic levels that women will sink to. The jokes about men who won’t ask for directions lose their funny when you’re the one trying to stay awake at 4AM while he drives in circles, scared to death that if he takes your suggestion and finds the hotel, his balls will fall directly off.
“cockpecking”? really? and how often have you heard that term used in any kind of daily conversation?
I googled it and found five whole references to it - all of them discussing whether it was a word and comparing it to “henpecking”. However, i have found no evidence of it actually existing as a “real” word.
correcting someone (nicely) in public is not a federal offense, and any person who would freak out over it to the point of seeing their significant other as being a “jackass” needs to LIGHTEN THE FUCK UP.
I do agree with others in regards to the difference between light-hearted teasing & mean-spirited putdowns.
That is a much more succinct way of putting it…must be late…need to sleep.
The Devil’s Advocate wrote: Nope, but – and this is obviously anecdotal – I haven’t seen men do that nearly so often as I’ve seen women do it.
Which could mean that they don’t do it as much, or could mean that you don’t notice when they do it.
Society’s bias can be a real sneaky thing that way. It’s entirely possible that we don’t “see” men criticizing women because we’ve been conditioned to think of criticizing women as normal—whereas there are any number of epithets, both for a woman who criticizes and a man who takes it. It’s like that study which found that men generally talk more than women, not to mention interrupt more, but perceive women as chatterboxes.
Again anecdotal: I once watched my father put down and dismiss his new girlfriend, many times during the course of one lunch—and turn every instance into a joke, skillfully enough that even if she had known what was wrong, she probably would have felt like a fool objecting to it. There are plenty of ways to make someone feel two inches tall without ever saying, “Look, darling, you’re too stupid to breathe without being reminded, ‘kay?” So another reason one might notice female criticism more is if women feel uncomfortable, for whatever reason, objecting to it—whereas men are trained, quite early, that “being a man” involves standing up for yourself and not taking crap from anyone. In other words, we might notice women criticizing men because it leads, not to bashfulness or resentful silence, but to a good rip-roaring argument.
(Which is not to say that women can’t cut someone down obliquely—many women are masters of it—but in my experience, the retaliation is likely to be oblique as well. In my experience, men are rather more likely to come back with a straightforward, “No, I’m not, screw you.”)
In summary, I’m not entirely sure your anecdotal evidence means what you think it means. And I realize I took way too long to say that. But, hey, I’m sort of a curve-breaker as far as the female conversation statistics are concerned.
Irene
Aargh, left out a phrase in the fourth paragraph. “But in my experience, the retaliation from women is likely to be oblique as well.”
(I live in the South. Your mileage may vary.)
Irene
I think you’re right about this- and it’s particularly to do with when a woman criticises a man- men don’t emasculate men with criticism, only women do. Which suggests that emasculation is akin to being criticised/made not to be superior by/to a woman/women. Or something. And what’s the reverse word? I don’t think there is one, for the process of taking away a woman’s femininity- defeminization? Aside from the fact that it’s not applicable in this context (it only applies to physical characteristics and has nothing to do with self-esteem etc).
Rhian, I have to chime in and agree with your affection for passive aggression. Oh, passive aggression is a Bad Thing, but sometimes it’s indistinguishable from culture jamming. I remember one night out on the town when my then-boyfriend informed me that I was boring and needed to shut up. Hurt beyond belief, I would have been wise to dump him, but stupidly, I thought I needed to hang in. So instead, I embraced the art of passive aggression and literally went dumb. I refused to speak, no matter what he said, and the more aggravated he got at my vow of silence, the bigger and dumber my smiles got. It was horrible and unwise and I wouldn’t do it now, but it had something artful to it.
Don’t follow my example, ladies. But I have to admire, from the distance of time, my spirit.
Okay, plugh? I really hope I don’t know you IRL. If I do, and figure it out, you’ll know because I’ll be the woman who carefully stays at least 50 yards from you at all times. If the solution to being happy in your life is to become deliberately stupid change your life.
Also, hell yes to the perception of women talking and critiquing vs. the reality. The perception of women as chattering fools is entirely unrelated to their actual behavior. Once, at a family get-together, my brother accused me of dominating the conversation and not letting anyone else’s opinions be heard. I was hurt, and quite convinced it was untrue, so I said nothing for the next twenty-four hours. I literally didn’t open my mouth except to eat (though unlike Amanda, I went out of my way not to draw attention to my silence). The next day my brother complained again about the exact same thing. He had completely failed to notice my silence, and when I informed him quite acidly that I had in fact said nothing in the conversations I had supposedly dominated, he refused to believe me. Anecdotal, yes, but also striking in its illumination of the discrepancy.
Both of my brothers view themselves as feminist (and to be truthful, both are in many ways), but that doesn’t render them immune to viewing male/female communication through the lens of what ought to be that the larger society provides.
Thank you, Amanda. There’s a subtantial difference between “Honey, I think we’re going the wrong direction” and “You are a pathetic loser” in the pantheon of wifely critiques.
Devil’s Advocate may think that by characterizing the Surrendered Wives and Insecure Asswipe Husbands as overreacting that he/she is showing awareness of that. But the comment that men have more ‘face’ to lose is telling. All DA is proposing is Surrendered Wife Lite. Not quite as embarrassing for everyone involved, but the end result is the same.
Substantial! Sorry, I blasphemed before spell-checking.
“…are taken as reasons to be berated and screamed at and quite possibly beaten.”
This is the main theme according to me. There is no consent, aside from the consent of the defeated. I surrender, I am your chattel, please don’t beat me. In none of these examples have I seen anyone say that a husband and wife said beforehand, Let’s have this fucked up relationship mkay? The wife surrenders because of the fear of overwhelming force. Consent implies a choice, and these women have been backed into a corner over time where all opportunities for free will and resistance have been systematically cut off. Surrender becomes the only viable option. Because what happens if she changes her mind and decides she doesn’t want the role that has been assigned to her?
Why has this now stuck me as a metaphor for the how BushCo thought it was going to go in Iraq? Violence and subjugation.
[curls up in dark corner…]
THe last few comments have been illuminating as to why mr tog and I sometimes freak other people right the hell out.
Recreational debating about nitpicks is our hobby, and we do it at the drop of a hat. It’s friendly, and no yelling or belittling, but neither of us defers to the other unless unarguable logic is unleashed. Obviously, to some other people, this looks like I am attacking him in a horrible way, and they think he’s about to explode, yet instead we’re still smiling at each other and enjoying the joust and it creeps them right out.
I always knew we were weird, but I hadn’t realised just why that particular hobby of ours looks SO weird to some other people.
I use it, and I think everyone else should use it, too! This is my stand – my Alamo!
So the end result of what I’m saying will be that women wear blindfolds in the car to keep from noticing their husbands’ mistakes? Come on!
Isn’t that first wife featured in the clip, Crystal, an anti-feminist blogger? I can’t remember the name of her site just now, but the names Crystal and Jesse sound really familiar. Does this ring a bell with anyone?
The way I see the bias playing out is not so much in direct criticism of particular women. It’s more in the way men will lavishly, and publicly, praise the more compliant women. Guys are given leave to acknowledge the ones they think are Teh Hawt or have good domestic skills or what have you.
Don’t kid yourself, if he’s doing it in front of you, it’s his way of letting you know that you are not up to par and you are damn lucky that he deigns to remain in a relationship with your sorry ass.
But comment on how much money your neighbor’s husband makes and you’re a castrating bitch.
How much do you want to bet that the husbands of the Surrendered Wives feel free to compare them to other women? “Bob’s Surrendered Wife sure has a nice figure and keeps a nice house, doesn’t she?”
For that reason, I really don’t think wives ought to gainsay their own husbands in public. I don’t think women should casually speak ill of the men they’re with. Those little jibes about how incompetent a husband is at some chore or how easy it is to control a man by withholding sex – they grate on me when I hear them from female relatives and acquaintances. They strike me as disrespectful and cruel – totally out of place from either side of the most intimate earthly relationship a person can have.
I guess I can kind of see what you mean about guys caring more about saving face, though I don’t have any personal experience to suggest that’s true, but in my experience women tend to be more sensitive (probably not true across the board, and even if it is I’m sure this is tied to the different ways men and women are trained to see relationships). So, a guy might get more pissed off and embarrassed, but a woman in that situation is more likely to give a wan smile and then excuse herself to go to the bathroom and cry in a stall. Again, in my experience.
I actually have a somewhat reflexive habit of correcting people on little anal things like facts and figures and, yes, sometimes, grammar (I’m getting better, I promise!) I dated a boy who didn’t react to this well–he was never mean exactly but he’d usually get sarcastic in a non-fun way and I figured out pretty soon into the relationship it bugged him, so I stopped doing it because the world doesn’t end if he thinks Titanic won in the wrong year. I’m not going to automatically not do that to the next guy I date, because maybe it doesn’t bother him. (I don’t blame my ex for being bothered by it by the way; everyone has their own pet peeves and I got bothered by some random stuff he cut out for me too. see? teamwork! And he is still one of my best friends).
I object to the Devil’s Advocate’s assertion women don’t care that much about face. Does anyone else here who isn’t a troll agree with that? Even the surrendered wives care about their image, in that they try to idealize their marriage style, or at least justify it. No, neither person should be rude in public, of course. Neither should a parent show their teenage child’s friends baby pictures. Nor should the child tape record the parent snoring and bring it in for show and tell. It’s important to respect boundaries and privacy with people you are close to.
But it has to be true for both sexes. No locker room talk about wives if a hen party can’t discuss husbands. No giving commands or insulting each other in public. Correcting a person, however, shows a high regard for truth– which seems to be less important to Devil’s Advocate than it is to me.
If you haven’t completely lost your appetite yet, horrify yourself with a few minutes on the Christian Domestic Discipline site, the all-purpose resource for husbands and wives who believe that Jesus wants women to be spanked into submission. They’re not kidding and they’re not playing. Be sure to visit the “HOH [Head of Household] Connection,” where you’ll find articles on the specifics of turning your naked, crying wife over your knee; the importance of speaking to her in a “command tone”; and the benefits of “maintenance discipline,” in which a wife gets beaten daily for no reason except to ensure that she stays humble and subservient.
The site is full of assurances that “all women crave this masculine energy,” and tips on how to hide bruises and welts. And there seem to be dozens of other websites, books, and CafePress items (e.g., the “I love my HOH!” T-shirt) available to those who embrace this “lifestyle.”
Be warned that there are no words for how disturbing and disgusting this is.
Oh, plugh. I shouldn’t have to explain this to you; you should already know it. But if she doesn’t actually want the foreplay, that’s called sexual assault.
YES.
Surrender is what happens in a battle, in a war, when one side is beaten down so badly they can’t fight back anymore because they don’t want to be killed. And it always, always entails giving up whatever they were fighting for.
The concept of surrender has no place in a loving relationship. None.
DANIELLE: She’s in the bathroom and stuff, when he’s having a bath, she’ll go and shave his face for him and shave his head and puts his toothpaste on his toothbrush and she’ll spray him with his aftershave.
That turns my stomach, and I’m a man.
Is the Crystal in this documentary Crystal Paine from the Biblical Womanhood site? I remember a while ago that she was saying that the Lord had guided them to participate in such a film in order to defeat feminism. Or something. Because her Husband is King.
Ditto what everyone said about how disturbing this is.
Often when the “submissive wives” speak (you know, to agree with whatever their husbands just said), you can see and hear the resentment and desperation just under the surface (I was rather reminded of women who try to justify abuse by their husbands/boyfriends).
So two minutes of foreplay is ’sufficient’, then?
Also, and more pertinently, what slythwolf said.
Jennifer thank you!
Actually what is tragic about all this is the impoverishment of life that it implies. It is as if the world simply cannot tolerate too much human personality, without the result of chaos and disorder. So the females subsume themselves under the personalities of the male. Is this better? Or just a terrible travesty which seeks to destroy the human spirit?
Worth screaming from the rooftops, that.
CPP, it only took a few minutes to download the software, really is worth it. I burst into tears 2 minutes in, a new record.
Ach, paragraph belongs in blockquotes, messed it up.
He may believe they are creatures that require love, attention, and sufficient foreplay.
But not, apparently, respect.
Hey, thank you for going through this so that I don’t have to.
The thing is I run only Mac and Linux. But now that the Mac has Parallels installed, I can run Windows + IE.
(…later…)
Well, actually I still can’t. Needs WMP 10, which only runs on XP (I have Win2k installed in Parallels). So now it’s Windows XP + Internet Explorer. I can’t win.
Doh! Should have also said, thanks for the tip though.
“Leadership.” “Being the HOH.”
Hey, I’ve got a Gedankenexperiment [hey, if you go Deutsch, go all the way Deutsch] too!
If cavemen and astronauts got into a fight, which ones would win?
‘Cause that’s about as well-defined, and as relevant, and more fun.
This isn’t a friggin’ experiment, it’s people trying to live their lives, which they only get one of each. “Surrendering” to someone else implies one has lost a war. I think the whole theory of slavery in Roman times was that slaves were in principle people who had lost in war and could therefore be killed with impunity–that their conqueror might choose to let them live was at their whim and so legally their lives henceforward belonged to him.
People do all kinds of things, and we shouldn’t just intervene uninvited in other people’s business without knowing something about it. But people do the things they do for reasons, and typical reasons include complying with the demands of other people who make threats. It’s so damn common in our society we might well fail to recognize the network of systematic terror we are all enwebbed in for what it is. This kind of thing looks to me very much like desperation. So no, the forces that pen these women in might not all be visible, in fact they might not be so much a function of their particular relationship with their “HOH/King” as the larger social matrix they live in. But if one of these women were to take even a tenative step away, I’d immediately offer her any help she wanted from me and encourage her all I could to keep on walking away, or to run if that’s what she needs to do. By that same token I’d expect threats and worse consequences to be directed at me too for assisting the fugitive, and that if they “choose” to stay it might be just because they judge that the cost of leaving will be too high.
The purpose of pseudo-abstract twittery like plugh’s is of course to distract from the real factors that people are considering when they make their decisions.
So,
Save your money, plugh, you don’t need either the surgery or the booze.
Count me as one who isn’t anyway, and so far it looks like you were dead right on this point.
I’m agnostic about this myself “in a very broad sense.” But I know for sure that we live in a society which attempts to define these “different needs” itself for obviously invidious purposes.
And so, for example, is there some good reason why women should accept “losing face,” or vice versa if “face” is a stupid thing to get emotional over, why men should not generally be called upon to grow up and get over it already? Why just take as given that it is right and proper that men should demand and receive respect but women can get along just fine without it? Doesn’t that already signal a serious problem?
If it were all a matter of silly, harmless scuffles or displayes of tail feathers or the like, we might all just laugh it off and live with it, but we are talking here about conflicts that affect how people actually live their lives. That’s when we need to take a serious look at what is going on and get to the bottom of the reasons that are in play.
Friends “gainsay” friends when they are wrong. It’s how we share our knowledge and generally accomplish the advantages of cooperation. If your idea of masculine “face” implies that men need to be shepharded around inconvenient facts with extra care not to bruise their vulnerable egos, then I guess properly masculine men are in your view mentally disabled, less able to handle reality than women or wusses. So if that’s some kind of fundamental truth, or desireable social construct, let us by all means put women and womanly-minded men in charge of things in general, and let the macho dudes preen themselves in their vainglorious cages.
The last thing a woman should do in that case is “surrender” herself to such a mental peacock.
Respect is a thing earned, by being someone whom another person appreciates for positive reasons. Or its facsimile is extorted by threats and intimidation and the occasional exemplary actual battering–hence the “Christian Domestic Discipline” debate about whether husbands should “spank” their wives periodically even when the wives are being “good,” just to remind them of their respective places.
If two people are in fact having an intimate earthly relationship, one founded in something like love and chosen with a reasonable degree of freedom, then a little bickering may be a form of masked affection–or it may be a way of demanding mutual space, giving each breathing room to be themselves and thus continue to bring what the other one actually does value in the other to the relationship. Or it may be that one or both of them does not feel free, but rather tied down in roles they wish were otherwise, and a certain degree of disrespect and cruelty is actually there.
What you are proposing, Devil’s Advocate, is indeed Surrendered Wife Lite(tm). I can’t imagine a good relationship among mortal, fallible human beings, that did not include dissent, and in which one party was always right and the other wrong in their disagreements. (Unless, of course, one asserted a right to be the Deciderer, with no backtalk or Gainsaying–that would be a surefire recipe for said fool to become more foolish and ignorant and infallibly choose wrongly for everyone he (or she) may be HOH over.)
So,
No, it’s worse. You’re saying they should carry binoculars and take a careful look around to make sure no one can witness their lips move when they whisper their polite, diplomatic suggestions to their fragile-egoed husbands, lest they cruelly undercut his social position. They shouldn’t gossip about manipulating their men, because that’s disrespectful and cruel to say, but be on full sentry duty 24/7 to actually manipulate the silly oafs, thus fulfilling their (apparently God-given) duty to their most intimate earthly relationship. Wives of the world, unsung diplomats-at-large. And secret masters of the Universe.
The woman with the blindfold was much more forthright.
I use it, and I think everyone else should use it, too!
Yes, except for that to happen, we’d have to get past ridiculous ideas like the one you have about women not caring if they save face. In my experience, the need to save face is actually used by abusers to isolate their victims, in fact. Women are so ashamed of how they’re treated—and they know they’ll be blamed—so they give up showing their face in public.
So the end result of what I’m saying will be that women wear blindfolds in the car to keep from noticing their husbands’ mistakes? Come on!
If “Turn left here,” is considered hen-pecking and an affront to the male-only desire not to be corrected, yes. After all, she can’t be humiliated by being blindfolded, since women don’t need to save face.
Besides the security issues of downloading random software, some of us have moral objections to using that windoze stuff.
For the record, neither goldfish nor dogs “surrender” to their human caretakers. (Can you see it? “Make me a smoothie, Lassie!”) And neither goldfish nor dogs “are just in the moment.” They both have very long memories and they will not forget when they’ve been abused or mistreated.
By the way, goldfish can live 40 years and they absolutely “know” their people. Each goldfish has it’s own unique swim, just like each human has an individual gait. Goldfish and koi were domesticated and admired in China because of their resemblances to humans. They have individual faces and personalities.
This human/non-human dichotomy is false. Like the male/female dichotomy, we have MORE in common than not in common.
In the immortal words of Cool Hand Luke:
“Some people, you just can’t reach”
There is so much wrong with this “movemement” (if you can call it that) just on it’s face that trying to argue it is pointless. Normal people would never even think something like this up. Only those with insecurity and control issues, or those with so little self identity would even think that living like this would bring “happiness”.
I can only imagine what happened to people like this in their lives to bring them around to this sort of arrangement…then men wanting it and the women even entertaining it.
God, I feel ill just reading the transcript. I refuse to watch the video.
Do these beaten down, er surrendered wives have a safe word for when they’ve had enough?
Ick. This kind of stuff turns my stomach. Unfortunately I got to see it played out on a day to day basis as a child. My mother totally bought in to the whole submission thing and all of the churches (cults really) I attended growing up supported turning women into mindless drones. Super creepy and disgusting.
Wow. reading the transcript made me throw up a little bit in my mouth.
I can’t bring myself to watch the video. Just got this new monitor at work, and they’ll be cheesed if I put my fist through it.
Yes, that is indeed Crystal Paine of Biblical Womanhood fame. Filmed quite some time ago, apparently, since she’s supposed to be giving birth to her second mini-fundie next week… should I admit that I know that? Oh well.
So, lessee here… Shorter Idiot Husbands from the video: “Our marriage sucks ass because I, the dude, can’t stand the fact that I am not always right, always in control, and you, the lady, don’t always do exactly what I say without question and with a damned smile on your face too. I, the dude, in fact can’t stand the idea of your having a will of your own, lady. So ok, now you’ll just do whatever I say and be my enslaved- oopsies! I mean surrendered wife and everything will be peachy! Because I’ll be happy! And when I, the dude, am happy, the marriage is happy! Because the only thing that counts is my happiness!”
SICK. Yeah. What you guys all said. This is worse then the Mars Hill church (or whatever, I can’t stomach googling it again) where the men have all their counterculture fun AND the great joy of a totally enslaved wife kept neatly deprived off all that modernism. JOY. We are truly one effed up species. Or rather, we have a deeply effed up culture, so bad that I really wonder how any of us ever manage to be happy at all.
Here’s Crystal’s website- for those that are curious. She does speak briefly about how she felt she was portrayed in the documentary. I will say that despite having lurked at her blog for almost two years, I have never been more scared for that woman as when I read the transcript. Yikes
http://biblicalwomanhood.com/blog.htm
Actually, I’ve been looking at this the wrong way. If this kind of nonsense is what creates a “happy marriage,” then why the fuck would anyone want to get married? Feminism, FTW!
That turns my stomach, and I’m a man.
Well, that’s it exactly. You’re a man, not a small boy in need of a mother or a tyrannt in search of someone to dominate or a rapist looking for a victim. I can’t see how a normal, adult man would want or even be able to tolerate a “surrendered” wife. I’d hate it if my partner started acting like one of the wives in this clip and he’d hate it if I started acting that way too. Because an adult relationship is about being partners, not being owner and chattel.
It’s no surprise that the women profiled for the news piece appear to all be motivated by religious indocterination as well as that ridiculous book. Fascinating Womanhood was written by a staunch Mormon, and the cult of Fascinating Womanhood that emerged in the 60s was mainly among Christian women who were, it seems to me, searching for a myth of the past onto which they could hold during the social and cultural changes at that time.
I wonder if a similar thing happens with the Surrendered Wife cult. Given what they feel are too many choices, they retreat into a world of pretend that creates the impression of happiness in the absence of choice, and perhaps of yelling, as well.
I doubt Chip and Carolyn will make it. He’s the sort of asshole who will intentionally take a wrong turn just to show who’s boss.
Do these beaten down, er surrendered wives have a safe word for when they’ve had enough?
Yes. Specifically, “I’m leaving. My lawyer will call your lawyer about the details of the divorce.” Of course, since these guys are kind of by definition abusers, it’s probably not the safest thing to say to them.
I wish I could send these women to a marriage counseling session with my mother: “And if he’s being bitchy with you, then you go ahead and call him a bitch !”*
*Actual piece of advice given to me before my wedding.
I suppose one aspect of “surrendered wife,” as highlighted by the blindfold woman, is indeed the kind of “passive aggression” that characterizes slavery in general. One might cynically wonder, why is slavery economically irrational as well as immoral? It’s because slaves generally sabotage their work, by setting a lower standard of accomplishment than they are capable of, and as a humane person I can only applaud that show of spirit amid appalling circumstances. The “surrendered wife” must inflict severe limitations on her own potential humanity, but she does also deny her Lord of the Manor that potential.
But slavery and other obviously forced forms of labor has been common throughout history, because extorted service may be inferior to freely given cooperation, but still beneficial to someone ruthless enough to extort it, and such a person would not of course merit or earn help freely offered. It’s bizarre to see women who seem to be free to walk away offer this, but I think we all understand here better than some people profess to the way our arms tend to be twisted by society in general. What takes this beyond pitiful and unnerving to scary is the prospect of society getting behind enforcing this kind of mentality more openly and forcefully.
The tool of enforcement, Mark, is the way that divorce is considered a failure. It’s all over how these women talk about their motivations. They’re not overly interested in love, but every single one talks about preserving the marriage. What needs to happen is that people need to talk about divorce as a good thing, a reasonable and perfectly honorable escape from a bad marriage.
The saddest thing in that video was that two of those women had daughters.
But I want to take note of the men. Weightlifting guy, the one married to the Scottish woman - ping, ping, ping, am I right? Plus both he and the one married to the blindfolded woman both had shit-eating grins on their faces - the smirk of the smug teenage boy. They aren’t men. They are toddlers in a man’s body.
This is Crystal’s site and you’ll find all kinds of crazy stuff. Do you think King Jesse has put enought time in the schedule for the new baby they’re expecting?
http://www.biblicalwomanhoodonline.com/blog.htm
I worry less about the extreme surrendered types and more about the vein of truth they represent in the cultural programming of the everywoman and everyman.
We were at a crowded event and this genericwife pitched a fit because I kept her from shoving her stroller in front of my son for the nth time and simply blocked her progress while he slid in front. I later saw genericwife’s ringer-for-tweedledum husband off to the side with her and the heyeveryonelookwebefertile mobile beside them.
#2 Son: why didn’t she just leave that stroller with the dad while she got her food?
Me: because his dick might fall off
#2 Son: No it wouldn’t - you left #1 son with dad and I’m here!
Me: laughing
I then looked around at the periphery. There were plenty of dads with strollers - like Marial Arts Dad, Tattoo Dad, Slightly Balding Excellent Posture Dad, Golf-loving Executive Dad … in other words SECURE dads who treated parenting like a partnership relay, not “her problem”.
Telling. Quite telling. Not extreme as all this, but it shows where the pervasive ideas come from and why the whole surrendered wife thing is simply a perfectionist’s expression of what is already all around us.
Devil’s Advocate:
Well, this is a forum for feminist discussion, so your comments have come off as kind of “what about the menz”-esque, you know, seeing as you haven’t really talked about what women should do if they find themselves with a nagging, controlling partner, just that they shouldn’t be that partner. It isn’t about failure to add a caveat, it’s about failure to talk about the women who the topic is actually about. In a feminist forum, you shouldn’t ignore women.
If you take your suggestions in a gender-neutral fashion, I think they do make sense (”people shouldn’t nag eachother, or be controlling/condescending jerks”), but they’re wildly out of context. The assumptions you make about these “surrendered wives” aren’t very well-grounded (the idea that they can’t discern a middle-ground doesn’t, frankly, seem that well-backed-up to me). The reason you’re getting a lot of flak in this discussion is because there’s a tremendous disconnect between what you’re saying and the actual specific situations we’re talking about.
I’m a dude, and I have dudely needs, yet if I’m driving a car and don’t know where I’m going, I appreciate if someone points out I’m on the wrong track. Most sane people do. Not being able to take that isn’t about “saving face”, it’s about being hypersensitive. I think the husbands of these “surrendered wives” propably have some serious deep-seated self-esteem issues.
Yes, some women (and some men) say really mean things and act like their partner is inadequate if they can’t remember the right way to drive. This is, frankly, not normal, I don’t think. A relationship with excessive nagging ain’t a healthy relationship. My advice to a woman or a man who finds themselves in a relationship where there’s constant nagging and belittlement coming from either partner isn’t to try to find ways to stop it, it’s break the fuck up.
Politely correcting someone in public is way different than telling them they’re stupid for making a mistake.
This “movement” is so scary! The woman in the video who said that you can’t be a surrendered wife with an addict or abuser for a husband had it right. What she didn’t get is that any man who is willing to have his partner submit to unwanted sex and total control is by definition an abuser.
I do have a small confession to make, though: watching that video reminded me to be more appreciative of and kind to my husband, rather than doling out knee-jerk criticism so much.
I noticed quite a few hits to my blog coming from here, so I had to come over and check out what the ruckus was.
Since I was one of those in the documentary, I thought you might appreciate hearing why I felt it was a very botched media job full of much spin and completely taken-out-of-context statements - at least anything they aired of us. You can read a really quick synopsis which I just wrote up for my blog here:
http://www.biblicalwomanhood.com/2007/06/brainless-subservient-doormat.html
I don’t expect that most or any of you would agree with me in my beliefs, but since feminism is supposedly about women’s rights, I would hope that those of you who consider yourselves feminists would support the choices I am choosing to make for my own life. I’m blessed, happy, and fulfilled.
Both the husband and the wife in “surrendered” marriages are pathetic examples of adult homo sapiens. Most women don’t want to baby their husbands 24/7, which is what squeezing out toothpaste puts me in mind of, they want Men, ie, adults. Most men don’t want 98.6 degree blowup dolls. Get out of the cult, folks, and start living!
Was it just me or did anyone else think Jesse Payne looked a little effeminate? Maybe he’s having issues and that’s why he has to dominate his wife so he can feel more like THE MAN. If you read down in Crystal’s blog she makes such crazy statements as Daddy is the KING and she tells women to be very careful with how they spend their husband’s money! Aren’t these fundemental types not supposed to make idols out anyone? They sure do make idols out of their husbands. Or how bout braggin over Jesse taking care of her while she’s preggo? Well duh! That’s what any man would do who cared a whit for his wife - she acts like it such a big deal which must mean that when she’s not knocked up he must do nothing for her. Just shaking my head at these crazy women. The thing is that for people who believe the Bible - they forget the part about the man’s responsibilities to his wife and focus exclusively on the wife’s role. A man loving his wife like Christ loved the church would not be standing back while the wife is making him a smoothie for breakfast. Puleazzze. Oh wait they completely misrepresented the little family!
Yes. And then if you find yourself in a string of relationships with the same pattern, break up and get some therapy because at least part of it’s you!
I’ve been thinking, too, about Devil’s Advocate’s ridiculous assertion that these women are asshole control freaks who can’t see a middle ground and are doing this as a last-ditch effort to be better wives. That has to be bullshit, am I right? After all, every single person I’ve met who has legitimate control freak tendencies knows exactly where the middle ground is and how many steps away from it they are at all times. And would never, ever, be able to stand giving up that much control for even a second. So, in fact, it’s actually the men in these “relationships” who are asshole control freaks, because they had the middle ground and couldn’t take it.
I mean, we all knew that already, right?
I don’t know why I followed the link to the CDD site.
I’m glad I’ve not eaten breakfast yet, and a strong tot of whisky in my coffee seems in order.
Daily beatings to show how great one’s love is?
Oh. My. God.
It’s times like this I hope my desires for a redemptive, but judgemental, afterlife are valid. Let them into heaven, but only after they have managed to truly repent of the evils they did. Make them crawl to the depths of hell, before they get to purgatory.
Makes me want to beat them.
Must go find some mental floss… stories of attack squirrels and fluffy bunnies.
we are talking here about conflicts that affect how people actually live their lives.Exactly. In my (limited but relevant nonetheless) experience, men who have the Submissive Wife/CDD lifestyle at home expect that it extends to ALL women, no matter where they run into them or what circumstances. It sets up some really bad expectations, and winds up being hugely problematic. The men in question tend to be nasty, Napoleonic little bastards when the rest of us — who DON’T subscribe to their philosophy — won’t “get with the program.” The problem is their unrealistic expectations that ALL women will kow-tow, refrain from constructive criticism, and fawning.
The astronauts would totally kick the cavemen’s ass. It’s all about ranged weapons.
Now pirates and cavemen, there’s a Gedankenexperiment.
Devil’s Advocate:
I strongly suspect that by “different needs” here you are trying to assert something about biological differences. *puts on Actual Evolutionary Biologist™ hat.* This is clearly preposterous. Even superficial knowledge of Japanese society or American junior high schools will tell you that human females are at least as sensitive to social hierarchies as human males.
However, you might actually have a point if you look at the situation as an anthropologist & feminist.
Like most human societies, we tend to have parallel & distinct male and female hierarchies. In America today, one of the big factors males use to rank each other in the men’s social hierarchy is control over women. That’s why, for instance, women are much more likely to hear harrassing come-ons from passing men in groups than from guys on their own. The point of these come-ons is not to actually get sex, it’s to impress *the other guys*.
Women do not use deference from men as a counter in the women’s social hierarchy in the same way. That’s why “henpecked” or “pussy-whipped” are insults for men, while “abused” or “over-submissive” aren’t equivalent insults for women. But it’s certainly not because women don’t get insulted as easily, or because we aren’t any good at insulting each other. We just use *different* insults — and I cannot believe you don’t know that.
From the BiblicalWomanhood synopsis: They missed the point we made over and over and over again in that a Biblical marriage is not just about the wife loving and serving her husband, it’s about the husband laying down his life for his wife.
Caroline to husband: “Drop dead!”
(emphasis mine)Great. can someone show me an example of how that works, then? because in that transcript, i’m not seein’ a whole lot of “laying down” of hubby’s life -unless that part only comes up in case of alien invasion - and a whole lot of grown women giving up their autonomy.
And to Crystal’s comment above. Hey. Whatever works for a person, but my mom and so many other women like her fought hard to be treated as intelligent adult human beings in the workplace and beyond. They didn’t call it feminism yet, but that’s what it was. A philosophy that tries to reinforce a hierarchical structure that inherently assumes a woman is incapable of making her own decisions would seem to be antiethical to that, y’know?
Exactly. And that, Crystal, is why feminists are talking about this issue. Not because we want to restrict your choices (because we ARE about women’s rights) but because not ALL choices are feminist choices. We don’t have to agree with your choice. That’s not what feminism is about.
And your choice to live this lifestyle affects ALL women. It affects the way the world views women as a whole.
Crystal, here’s what I don’t understand. Your husband runs errands and brings you Gatorade when you’re sick (and about to have a baby!) and you sound like he deserves a cookie for that. That his doing the kind, humane thing is going above and beyond the call of ordinary decency. I would feel comfortable asking for those kinds of things from people I’m not even married to.
How is that giving you greater honor and respect than you give him?
SarahMC hit it better than I did, admittedly. If that’s what works for you, go for it.
Hell, paint yourself purple and green with yellow polka-dots, and call yourself an ass-spanking kangaroo, for all I care. Just don’t expect YOUR choice to be mine — and if you are the man in question, don’t be a pissy little worm when I refuse to do so.
If you DO behave in such a manner, expect to get called on it — loudly and publicly.
Crystal, here’s what I don’t understand. Your husband runs errands and brings you Gatorade when you’re sick (and about to have a baby!) and you sound like he deserves a cookie for that. That his doing the kind, humane thing is going above and beyond the call of ordinary decency. I would feel comfortable asking for those kinds of things from people I’m not even married to.
Crystal doesn’t seem to understand that by holding up hubby doing what any compassionate human being would do for a sick pregnant woman she shows us what a real jerk her husband must be when she’s not knocked up. No wonder these women like to be pregnant so often - it’s the only time hubby will do things like “run errands and watch his own daughter for a little while.”
Speaking of the danger of raising daughters in an environment like this…the single most disturbing thing I saw on the CDD site (and this is saying a lot) was in the discussion of the “Over-the-Knee Position” and its utility on teenage and college-aged daughters. Nothing female must be allowed the tiniest scrap of dignity or self-esteem ever.
Wow. Excellent thread. I’ve been taking notes, but some of them have become irrelevant as those much more artulate than I have responded, but some I just can’t resist:
I may be way off base here, but I think that the answer is quite possibly “no.” This whole thing smacks of Stockholm Syndrome to me.
I couldn’t agree more - IF it’s her choice to do so. As soon as it becomes an expectation regardless of her feelings in the matter, it becomes “wrong.”
Dude, you just lost all credibility with that statement. It’s so wrong on so many levels that I don’t have the energy to address them all.
Mark Foxwell, not that the opinion of a random stranger should mean a damn thing to you, but every time I read something you’ve written, I love you a little bit more.
Good point about there not being a female equvalent to “emasculate.” I would say that “infantilize” and “dehumanize” come closest, but they don’t really have the same je ne sais quois.
I’d love to get an “I love my HOH!â€? T-shirt and append “I have about three more years of him in the freezer” to it. I’m perverse like that. Of course, being fat, some of those who know what it means might take me seriously.
The word “Gedankenexperiment” made me literally laugh out loud.
Ms. Kate, your son is how old? He may be a genius, but he’s still a child. If is able to pick up on the illogic of this nonsense, you’d think that adults would be, too. Give him an extra hug from me tonight.
May I add a resounding “AMEN” to this? FTS!!!
Talkabout proving one’s point! “artulate” should have been “articulate.”
*sigh* i Cn:t tipw urth sh8t.
Devil’s Advocate your analysis also ignored the fact that women are not encouraged to publicly have self-regard and respect they are expected to be self-effacing if not self-derogatory.
This casual disregard for oneself is not de riguer for men and would probably be considered infuriating to most people if they were subjected to it for any length of time. I find it infuriating when it comes from women, many women seem to call it conversation and bonding.
I do not believe there is anything inherently humiliating in being wrong or having it pointed out but there is something wrong about being an ass about it and making some sort of lame Everybody Loves Raymond style joke out of your relationship.
Felagund, one of the conditions of the contest is that the astronauts don’t have any weapons. The idea is a basic reason vs. passion sort of contest. The cavemen have animal instinct on their side; they hunt and kill for a living. The astronauts have empirical thought and the advantages of thousands of years of technological know-how (but not the technological devices themselves).
Who wins?
I wonder how often women are raised to believe that henpecking their husbands is a good way to ensure they get all the equality to which they’re entitled in a marriage
DA, I think you’re confusing feminism with the logical end result of heterosexual relationships in a sexist society. Feminists do not tell women that in order to be “equal” they have to take away from their husband’s/boyfriend’s humanity — I don’t know any feminist that would tell a woman to belittle any man in her life in order to build herself up.
Sexism and patriarchal standards, however, maintain (as you seem to) that men and women are inherently different. Namely, that men are emotionally-stunted, irresponsible, unreliable, egomaniacle asshats whose lives are saved by a gentle, loving, uber-responsible, pseudo-mothering figure once they get married. Our sexist society tells women that boys will be boys, and we just have to gentle them as best we can and deal with what we can’t fix. So obviously, it’s the woman’s job to “nag” her husband and peck at him to get what she wants, be it if she wants him to vacuum the living room, pick up the kids, or reward her efforts with appropriate jewelry.
I have female relatives who do this to their husbands, but to me it’s less a woman being a nagging bitch and more two people fulfilling the gender roles for which society groomed them. Do I agree with the fashionable saying, “oh, you know how men are”? Fuck no. But telling women to be quiet and stop henpecking their husbands doesn’t help. Change the paradigm. Expect BOTH men and women to be whole human beings who treat each other with respect and hold up their end of the relationship. And, in fact, this is what feminists usually aim for: expecting more out of men than the stereotypical workhorse who can’t be expected to help out around the house, who can’t be expected to be emotionally mature, and will instead scratch himself while watching the news and ask for short, bad sex at the end of the day after you’re done cleaning up the dinner dishes.
Personally, I think the Devil’s Advocate just doesn’t see that - he’s taking what these women are saying about it at face value when there’s a lot of reason to believe that they’re being convinced by their abusers and themselves that they were just too controlling before. I do not think that the Devil’s Advocate is arguing in bad faith. He (or is it she?) has taken some stances I think are pretty silly in the past but always seems to be willing to engage in honest discussion.
My toddler acts like that and he gets a time out. I recommend it.
SarahMC, where do statements such as your “affects all women” end and statements like “your being a gay family affects all families” begin?
In other words, choice feminism may be bankrupt in some ways, but I hear many of the arguments made about women choosing traditional roles hurting all women and I hear very similar logical and grammatical structures in arguments about how what happens in the gay families being important and damaging all families and children.
If it works for Crystal and Jesse, and there is no violence or coercion, I’d far rather be sure that Katheryne has honest choices that her mother didn’t make than condemn families for their structures when I see others condemn the families of my friends in similar ways but for different reasons.
The problem is that this philosophy is wholly based on a selective, pre-decided ‘literal’ reading of the Bible. This verse SAYS what we (men) say it does, ergo God commands it and there can be no doubt or discussion. Anything else is ‘feministic’ or ‘humanistic’ and the cause of all evil in the world. (BTW, what’s with the ubiquitous ‘ics’? Grammar, people.) This cannot be labelled ‘choice feminism’ because there is no true choice involved.
I’m steadily losing faith (pun intended) that there can be any meaningful discussion between our different worldviews. I’m sure that for many a rigidly structured, black-and-white, no choices allowed lifestyle can feel comforting. I personally don’t see why, but if you are brought up to fear the world, perhaps it becomes a matter of psychological (and economic) survival. Why wouldn’t you feel happy to escape all the horrible freedom out there? And of course, their daughters will in turn be raised the same way.
I agree that it’s so very sad to see the praise these women lavish on their husbands for, oh, occasionally making them a cup of tea. That really says everything you need to know about the true nature of submission and the Husband-High Priest-King dynamic. And since Crystal blogs with her husband’s permission and under his supervision, I assume that we are reading about his philosophy. AFAIK, Jesse is a lawyer who worked for AG Phil Kline in Kansas, the anti-choice fanatic who was ousted in 2006. When these people have a political agenda I feel entitled to criticize their intention of making my choices for me.
In other words, I’ll respect their choice to be submissive when they respect my right to use contraception and have abortions if that’s my choice. Oh, and throw some respect for my pro-choice, egalitarian wonderful feminist husband in there too.
So glad you asked.
It defines the part of speech. In most cases “ic” turns a noun into and adjective. A “mysogynist” is person who hates women. “MysogynistIC” describes how a mysogynist views women, the world, wev. (I cringe a little when I see the “ic” left off, but haven’t felt it’s important enough to point out.)
Hahahahaha - the term “Grammar Nazi” in my previous post name chucked the response to moderation!
Kate217,
Haha, I’m a [term excluded for moderation purposes] too!
I’ll disagree with you though - ‘feminist’ and ‘humanist’ ARE the adjectives most frequently used for said terms. Ergo, adding the ‘ic’ has another function that is not grammatically common, at least not in the oodles of academic literature I plow through weekly. I’m reminded of how Republicans will say ‘the Democrat Party’ rather than ‘Democratic’, because polling shows that the former creates a more negative response towards Democrats.
I think this ‘ic’ has a similar function - it comes off as clinical, academic, intellectual, modern - all things that the target audience will intuitively dislike.
I’m a grad student doing philosophy of language - can you tell?
Crabby has it exactly. This isn’t just about some people who can’t get it on without their spanking or domination fetish, and have to wrap it up in religion to justify it. Actual adults have to deal with these jerks out in the real world.
I have been amazed to run into some of these “men” professionally, and it’s educational to see how they struggle when they have to “submit” to a woman when I have the authority in a situation.
It would be funny, except that I’ve seen a few who have deliberately subverted a task important to their career because they can’t get past a perfectly routine work situation that involves a woman taking the lead. I’ve learned to spot it happening and quietly slip in some backup, just in case. (What century is this?)
Now I have to wonder it any poor woman had a particularly vicious “maintainence” beating that night. Yuuck.
Thank god for my secure, loving husband, who considers a good challenging discussion to be life’s breath, and would be rather unhappy if I let him miss that exit out of concern for his masculine ego.
Isabel:
I don’t have much to add, except that the male example is displaying the same, if not more, sensitivity to criticism here. Being angry or embarrassed is as much a emotional response as crying — regardless of the twisting and circular patriarchal logic that renders male emotional responses to criticism as somehow not emotional or sensitive since women are the emotional and sensitive sex. The difference between reacting in in public (and often by lashing out against the voice of criticism) and reacting in private goes back to belief (and point of the thread/post) that men are entitled to act free of criticism while women are not - so the women grins and bears criticism rather than giving any sign that she considers the criticism at all out of line.
I’ll respect their choice to be submissive when they respect my right to use contraception and have abortions if that’s my choice. Oh, and throw some respect for my pro-choice, egalitarian wonderful feminist husband in there too.
I’ll respect their choices. I’ll demand they respect mine and my husband’s too, and draw the line at my doorstep and theirs.
Sinking to their level of intrusion does not demonstrate the central MYOB principal, nor does it establish appropriate policy boundaries.
I guess I was “happy� that that one woman said women should draw the line at being beaten and cheated on, at least they will give you THAT ladies.
My cousin in North Texas near the OK border divorced her husband for both those reasons(he even had her buy presents for his girlfriend), and she had to move to California to avoid the stigmata of being a divorced woman, which sin outweighed all the shit her 1st husband did to her during the marriage.
Acckkk, back after some browsing their sites. They don’t call them Authoritarians for nothing.
Just in case (mis)citing the bible isn’t authority enough, they go all modern and point a skeptical woman to the authority of Internet message boards.
Do they question whether all those posts from happily submissive, reverantly sore-bottomed women might actually be posted by - men?
Like classic abusers, I notice the advice that it is not enough to abjectly humiliate your beloved, adult, life partner by telling her it is God’s will that she regularly pull down her panties, lay down across your lap and and let you spank her. It must be painful enough that she cries “real” tears. And that’s not even the serious “punishment” spankings that she must learn to “avoid at all costs.”
Reminds me of that evangelist’s book where he talks about beating his disobediant dashund dog into submission to his will with a belt (the Focus on Family guy?). It’s good to know some of the darkness that’s behind some of the “anti-feminist” crowd.
They really have no shame.
They put holes in the hands of divorced women in North Texas!? Holy Crap!
I think what is more disturbing even than the transcripts is the very real confusion displayed by the “pro-submissive side” like Devil’s Advocate and plugh that bad marriages, angry and unhappy people, abusive relationships are
a) characterized primarily by bad women married to good men
b) characterized primarily by some kind of feminist women married to “normal” unfeminist males.
Devil’s Advocate’s “typical marriage” in which women “gainsay” their men and humiliate them in public and (I believe this was DA) henpeck and withhold sex may be typical. I don’t know, I’ve never seen anythign like it, bugt the one thing they aren’t is *typical of adult feminist relationships.* Why is that? Because being in a marriage with someone you don’t like but can’t leave, being in a marriage with someone you aren’t sexually attracted to, or being in a marriage with someone who is so out of touch with your needs that he and you can’t agree on when you both want sex are typical of old fashioned, pre-feminist, authoritarian/submissive marriages and not of egalitarian relationships.
Its wrong to hurt and humiliate people *full stop.* whether you are married to them or not. Its extra wrong to hurt and humiliate someone you are married to but even more than that its really, really, a sign you shouldn’t be married to them. If you don’t like them, even their little foibles, then you shouldn’t be married to them.
Of course the freedom to choose your own spouse, to experiment sexually before you get married, to decide on contraception and the number of children, and to decide when and whether to get divorced–these are all feminist and progressive ways of handling the issue: how to get married and stay married to the right person. To a woman these “submissive wives” are saying that they made a mistake and chose someone they actually couldn’t get along with and now, instead of ditching the marriage they are ditching some part of themselves in order to create a new self who is more pleasing to their husbands.
My husband, and the other happilly married men I know, would be truly shocked and disgusted to think that I or the other women in their lives needed to learn to wear a blindfold, or a scold’s bridle, or any other submissive thing just to pump up a false sense of masculinity and masculine perfection. I’d say, au contraire, that they are all confident enough in their own selves and in our relationships to value a little criticism, if that is what is needed and to dish it out too. I’m really sorry for DA that he or she can’t seem to imagine how very healthy and open and happy people can be and how little of this pathetic handholding (or self binding) an adult couple needs.
aimai
I kind of think it’s ironic that my Christian upbringing brought me to feminism since so many Christians are against feminism. I really only paid attention to the “judge not lest ye be judged”, “do unto others”, and “love thy nieghbor as thyself” parts of the Bible and ditched the rest. Hey, if fundies are able to ditch ‘my’ parts of the Bible and focus on God knows what, then I ought to do the same. ^^
I’m a tad surprised that the church is against divorce, even though nothing should surprise me about fundies. My mom’s Baptist church has a single’s sermon thing. I think divorce is a legitimate option (partly because my own parents are divorced and they function much better together in their spaces).
And I do agree with a majority of the comments on here: I don’t think anyone would choose that kind of life.
I’m so glad that there are people out there with some intelligence. These men want servants, not wives. They don’t deserve to be in a marriage. They don’t deserve to be with women. The only remotely healthy relationship they could consider would be a gay one. Which we all know is what is causing the moral decay of the country. *rolls eyes*
Random babbling/ blasphemey over.
Oh, something odd about my mom’s church: the school which is connected to it will give a student a referral for saying “I love you” as it is considered PDA.
They are toddlers in a man’s body.
That’s the reason patriarchy exists, no?
I am a wife in a D/s marriage, and I am happy. I’m a feminist, and I deliberately choose to live the way I do. I don’t say it’s a choice every woman should make - far from it. Most women probably wouldn’t be happy in this sort of relationship, but I’m sexually (and in other things) a submissive and I enjoy it. He is a dominant and enjoys that. I support a woman’s right to choose what to do with her body, and volunteer for Planned Parenthood to put my own body where my beliefs are. I wholly support the right for a man, woman, couple, or moresome to use contraception if they so choose, and I have vigiled for the ERA. My beliefs are very much those of a feminist and a liberal. Nobody raises a hand to me, and we do not use spanking or other forms of corporal punishment. I don’t wait on my husband, and I don’t do all the housework while he sits down and relaxes. He does more of it than I do. He does his own laundry as well as the dishes and fixing more than half the meals, cleaning the bathroom, and much more - well over half the housework, as I don’t have much energy these days. I often feel like he’s waiting on me, especially when I am sick in bed or have a very low-spoons day, but at other times as well.
For the most part, our relationship looks like a partnership between equals, and for the most part, it functions that way. We have extremely lively discussions, and we both respect the other’s intelligence, insight, and input. I am a very opinionated person and not afraid to express my opinions forcefully. But when there is a disagreement about something such as what movie to go see or what to have for dinner, the ultimate decision of what to do rests with my husband. My opinions and desires are completely taken into consideration, and usually he decides to follow them, but the decision is still his.
I am expected to participate as a member of the community; when it comes to things like political activism, I’m the main one who does such things. I often get him to drive me around when I need to go precinct walking, because it’s a lot easier for me to just hop out and go up to the voter’s door with literature that way. I would never wear a blindfold while he was driving; he’d be shocked if I offered.
I do get put up on the rack and flogged, because we both enjoy BDSM. I have a safeword in scene and out of scene, 24 hours a day 7 days a week. I can safeword at any time and whatever is going on then, stops then and there, and we talk about it. There’s a big difference between dominant, which my husband is by both of our choice, and domineering, which I would call him on instantly if he did it. We chose this not to reject feminism, because we both believe very strongly in women’s rights, but because this is who *we* are. It’s not for everyone. It’s the choice we both made, free of coercion, and if it stops working for one or both of us, we can be equal partners in every way, because we respect each other.
D/s is not slavery. I’m a submissive, not a slave. I know plenty of slaves through the BDSM scene, and I know I’m not one of them. M/s is where you don’t have that safeword, where you can’t stop it except by leaving. That’s not what we have. We will be D/s as long as it works for us, and if it ever doesn’t work for us, we’ll talk about it as equals, because we generally talk as equals now.
so glad someone identified which Crystal and Jesse this was - those are my cousin and her husband’s names, and i don’t know if I could handle knowing that a loved one had fallen into such a horrendous situation. that, and I can’t even imagine ‘my’ Crystal letting someone talk to her like that, let alone marrying the guy that tried it.
but yes. omg. the mind boggles.
Please, like pirates didn’t have ranged weapons. Pistols and cannons! Plus sail technology. Pirates win.
(Of course, cavemen had ranged weapons too. They had spears.)
I have nothing to add except: Really fucked up and creepy.
And this, O my sistren and brethren, is the philosophy of date rape. Just keep at her, and eventually she’ll “give in.” Because she really does want it, she just doesn’t know it yet.
EXactly. That is the first thing that popped into my mind when I first ran across these “surrendered” types.
Eek.
I do wonder about the passive-aggressive aspect of this stuff. One of the reasons I love my spouse is that we get to discuss the way we order our lives. A repeated diet of “Whatever you say, dear” would freak me the heck out. I have to wonder about the stability of men and women who practice these kinds of relationships.
(Which brings me to the other point: No, it’s not incumbent on feminists or liberals or queers or anyone who preaches tolerance to support asshat lifestyles just because they’re ostensibly someone’s individual choice. And the fact that you can draw logical parallels between “advocating marriages where the husband regularly beats his wife can endanger other marriages” and “advocating marriages where both partners are of the same sex can endanger other marriages” doesn’t mean we should give the second sentence any credence. Is there a good rant about false symmetries at Feminism101 yet?)
anon - I don’t think that’s the same thing at all. You’re doing it because you know you like for him to be dominant. You have 24/7 safewords, which means that you both know in some way that you’re acting the role of being submissive/dominant. For the people in the story, it’s not about what you like - it’s about what God ordered, whether you like it or not. It’s not a role to act, it’s the way you absolutely have to be in order to win favor with your man and with your God. There is no safe word, because in that world that’s how reality is. It may look the same superficially, but in your case you have actively chosen to act a certain and in theirs, after they made the initial decision to buy into this “ideal” of marriage all choice has been removed from them.
Fercrissakes, anon, nobody was knocking consensual BDSM relationships where both partners are free to leave if they wish.
Cannon and pistols (and muskets) are ranged weapons.
Spears, as a rule, aren’t really (because the effective distance of a spear is short, and the loss of penetrating power is severe, as well as the slow speed at more than a short distance making them avoidable).
Javelins and darts and arrows, those are reanged weapons, as are slings and boomerangs/throwing sticks.
Take the “cavemen” and remove them from their known evironment, (as much as for the “astronauts) and the edge is, slightly, to the cavemen; because they have stealth and practice.
But if it takes more than few days, the odds probably shift to dead even.
Our ancestors weren’t any stupider than we are, but they had less time to collect information.
I’ve got a wealth of, semi, theoretical knowledge; which makes my survival, anywhere on the planet, a reasonably likely outcome. And I know how to make a lot of weapons; from all over the world.
So, if I can make it past the first few days, I have millenia of tactical knowledge, and survival information and food storage, etc., on my side.
The same is probably not true for the “cavemen.”
I remember when this segment aired a few weeks back. Then, I couldn’t watch it all, I was screaming in utter rage at the TV. I still can’t watch it. Even my kind-of fundie parents were mystified at this ‘Surrendered Wife’ bollocks. I’d laugh at this complete tripe, but I’m far too busy having an aneurysm over it.
Paul, you think too much and feel too little.
The reason beatings are not allowed because assault is illegal regardless of context - gay, straight, biblical, etc.
HOWEVER, if a couple chooses to design their relationship in such a way that suits them, even if I think it is stupid and stinks, they are free to do so so long as it doesn’t involve otherwise illegal activity.
Tough shit.
If a gay couple does the same (and don’t kid yourself that strange relationship structures are necessarily het), it ain’t my fucking business either.
Watery tarts saying EWWWWWW is no basis for a societal evaluation of marital relationships.
Anon–Sounds fun to me. I suppose there’s all kinds of questions people ask about your lifestyle, but what I’m really wondering is: what the hell is a “low-spoons day”? I have never heard this phrase. (And congratulations on hyphenating your phrasal adjectives correctly; so few people bother these days.)
MizDarwin: As I’ve heard it, using “spoons” as a unit of measure refers to the way in which people with energy disorders (chronic fatigue, etc.) describe their energy levels. It comes from an essay that went around in which a woman with an energy disorder (and I’m sure there’s a better name for it) described how she felt to her friend using nearby props, which happened to be spoons. I’m not terribly familiar with all the details, and anon may be using it in a different way, but I figured I’d jump in and mention what I’d heard.
The Spoon Theory. A useful metaphor for all kinds of disabilities, physical or emotional.
Thanks for clearing up the mystery of the spoons. Good essay, too.
Surrendered Wives…
Just nauseating. I bet their marriages do go better, though. Presuming that better is measured by the mere absence of bickering. If you’re married to someone who wants a slave, then being one will surely make them happier. And that……
i never really liked the spoon theory.
Even before I was sick I knew there were limits to what I could do in a day.
Now I have different limits, but it’s not that I get to spend “spoons”. I don’t know where my limits are, and won’t until I hit them.
I know that they are more closely defined than they were, but from day to say when I run out of energy is still unkown.
No, it’s not as clear as it ought to be but there you go.
Terry Karney
“I’ve got a wealth of, semi, theoretical knowledge; which makes my survival, anywhere on the planet, a reasonably likely outcome. And I know how to make a lot of weapons; from all over the world.
So, if I can make it past the first few days, I have millenia of tactical knowledge, and survival information and food storage, etc., on my side.”
Oh yes, homo superior are we ? The cavemen would eat you, their woodcraft would be light years (humour !) better than yours. Just your odour would probably do you. How good are you at staying still and quiet ? And when is this challenge occurring ? Knowledge of fauna and flora would be vital. And a spear is a distance weapon,
light spears a blood loss weapon, short spears a shock weapon. The stoicism and toughness of the caveman are probably just a bit better than yours.
And, what are you wearing ? Are you nekkid ? etc, etc etc.
The thing about healthy D/s is, at least the way I want it is, it’s about what the /submissive/ wants, not what the dominant wants, though the dom consents to it.
You know how sometimes, people are lazy, or just, expects a lot, which includes, expecting someone to already know what you want so you don’t have to work for it to be done? D/s /plays/ on dominance, where the D is the one who moves the s, but only doing so in ways that the s wrong, while paying close attention that the s is enjoying it. I like both the idea of being able to relax completely and trust that it will be good (sub), and being given the power to please someone who trust me.
The Christian D/s thing, creepy. The husband is not using his given authority to please his wife, he’s using it to please himself. So really, he might as well get a blown up doll. The wife isn’t relaxing when she is expected to wait on his wishes always eh
omg, typo:
What the s /wants/, not wrong.
Since the dom can pay attention, but still can’t read minds, safewords exist. I don’t think the Christian D/s thing allows that.
Failure, Criticism and “Saving Face”…
Though I can’t find the book I read it in, I once read something Benjamin Franklin wrote about a seminal experience of his youth. It went something like this: An older acquaintance of his came up to him one day……