I’m just saying, it’s how it was.
Everything was bad for women and children.
It is better now. Not enough. I think.
This religious bent on these things, now, rearing its ugly head, is truly scary.
Another example of why we are going backwards.
The "Tradwife" lifestyle: Does anyone else find this appealing, or have personal experience with it?
Men who realized they had chosen the wrong woman to have kids with were also trapped in their own ways, because if they left, there was a very real likelihood that they would never see the kids again, even if that was not justified.
Whoa, that’s definitely a dysfunctional relationship right there! Think about it, were the genders to be reversed!
Of course when women did submit to their husbands as she wishes, their husbands would have had complete control over all of the family’s money, no matter the source and no matter how foolishly they spent it, including drinking it away.
Yeah, that’s why I mentioned it. Not the first time I’ve known a couple where one hid something from the other, usually financial, and I just DO NOT get it. My husband and I consult over any big inflow or any large purchase. I manage day to day finances and budget and he manages investments, but it is 100% transparent.
Her husband is a tool though. He absolutely would spend the money.
It’s funny, her sister really wanted a child and she is deeply religious too, but she couldn’t find what she was looking for in a man, so rather than marry a tool she got a donor and became a single parent. Which is a HUGE statement in her family. But she looked at her sister and thought, “Nope. Don’t want that.” And I really respect it.
Sounds like the stereotypical Romance-Novel approach. Y’know, where the women want a take-charge Real Man™ but it has to be one who will take charge to “Do Right By You” in that Real Manlyness™.
But there is something of a tradition itself that if this is not what’s coming naturally to “your man”, then you do the Necessary Thing to ensure the home and children are properly managed by being the one who keeps him pointed in the right direction by whatever means in your reach.
If I were a red-blooded Homo Eisenhowerus, I wouldn’t want June Cleaver/Allison, etc. No:
I dunno, it depends. Romance novels are fueled in many respects by attraction and sexual desire, and a dominant man can activate the old lizard brain seeking safety for self and future children. But there’s a big difference between “I will keep you safe” and “I will micromanage your entire life.” There is no romance novel that I have ever read that portrays the latter as desirable. In fact that role usually goes to an antagonist.
I wrote a male protagonist that is very dominant, in part because he’s swimming in toxic masculinity and has been socialized into extreme violence. These are not portrayed as good things (except sexually, where it’s good for the female protagonist.) But the upshot of this is he is skilled in physical protection but keeps his mouth shut when it’s out of his wheelhouse, and even in cases where it is, she always has agency. And that’s because he does something really bad in the beginning of the book and has to take accountability. I wrote it because I wanted to deconstruct some of these romance tropes that are presented uncritically. So he’s a weird example.
The challenge here is there aren’t many men who are both skilled in violence and not domineering assholes in every respect. Some military types, mostly. I know some very sensitive Marines.
But yes, I’m pretty sure that people like my cousin want something that doesn’t exist.
My step-nephew got married in an evangelical church in Folsom California. The preacher and his wife were on the stage, she with no apparent official position in the church. She went on and on about the man ruling the house in marriage - and almost never let her husband speak.
It was hilarious.
Sounds a lot like the women want the men to run the show with an iron fist … to her specifications.
That sounds like a lot of non-religious couples, TBH.
@Voyager, was this during the wedding itself, or just during a sermon?
I don’t think it’s that men “could have careers”, they were pushed to have jobs in the same way that women were pushed to marry and have children. If you were one of the lucky ones, you found a good husband, or a good career. On the other hand, some women ended up married to abusive assholes, and some men wound up working in mines and dying with lungs full of coal dust.
Different pressures and different results, but still pushed into traditional roles.
I’m retired now. I cook, clean, and do grocery shopping. My wife wouldn’t let me do that when the kid was young. The same was true for my friends: some of them would have liked to be stay-at-home parents, but their wife took that role. Insisted.
To me, someone particularly concerned with women’s fantasies, it sounds like pure fantasy and not anything realistically achievable.
To be sure, there are women out there who are deeply drawn to the traditional role of mother and homemaker, cool, and there are almost certainly women out there who don’t want to make big decisions and have someone do it for them, and are maybe willing to trade some or most of their agency to not have that responsibility.
But the reality is that the kind of guys that want to dominate a relationship are not gentle shepherds, they are controlling assholes. You know, the best kings are the ones that don’t want to be king.
There certainly are such guys.
But what I hear you writing is women are complicated and individuals, while men are all cut from one or two simple patterns. Maybe you didn’t mean it, but that’s how it sounded to me.
Being willing (reluctantly or otherwise) to take the 60/40 or 70/30 leadership role in a relationship is different from demanding to be the 100% dictator king. There is just as much nuance on the male side as the female side.
Maybe the distribution across the population is such that there are more men who desire A than there are women willing to supply it and simultaneously there are more women who desire B than there are men willing to supply it.
For sure it’s a complicated and fraught relationship world we all inhabit.
In my 30 years of marriage to a man I considered a friend and partner I found the dynamic would change over time. Sometimes I’d be the “lead” and sometimes he would. There probably are couples that are happy with, for example, the man managing the money and making all the financial decisions, and the woman doing all the cooking and cleaning, but I think it’s key that is is VOLUNTARY. That couples with traditional gender roles and division and labor are doing it by choice or preference or perhaps after negotiation of what they consider fair and not because they’re being hammered into ill-fitting boxes by the expectations of society/religion/whatever.
There’s also the matter of transparency. For about 25 years of my 30 year marriage the “man of the house” set the budget and paid the bills because he was better at it than I was. But - and this is important - every two weeks, or at a minimum once a month, we’d sit down and go over everything, decide on priorities, etc. so the “woman of the house” knew what was going on, how to get into the accounts, and so on. So when he fell ill and could no longer do all those things I was able to take them over seamlessly and the bills got paid, and after he was gone the same. I actually learned a lot from watching him budget all those years. But that’s way, way different than one spouse hiding stuff from the other, or taking the rent money and blowing it on booze and poker at the local pub.
Likewise, I did all the cooking. Because I was much better at it. But he was perfectly capable of feeding himself, and did so when I had to take trips or be away for awhile. (We were two adults capable of being completely independent and self-sufficient. So our division of labor was by choice, not because one or the other couldn’t do something.)
Not being familiar with that kind of service, it is hard to say. Not a formal sermon. They seemed to wander all over the stage.
Now the grooms father was Jewish, and the minister used his sermon to tell us we should get right with Christ. Nice guy.
No, I’m saying that someone who wants 100% control in a relationship is probably an abuser and that women who seek this are setting themselves up for a world of pain.
There is certainly room for nuance in terms of how any other kind of relationship plays out but I’m referring specifically to a very religious idea (that is probably a sublimated kink) of wanting a husband to “submit to.” My history as an earnest evangelical Christian teen very much informs this view, as I remember what I was taught I was supposed to want, and maybe I thought I wanted it a little bit but my teen brain had yet to confront that reality, and when I encountered a boyfriend who actually did want to dominate the relationship 24/7 I couldn’t have gotten out of the relationship fast enough.
What we were taught as girls was that we were supposed to find guys who were so righteous and God-fearing that we would happily let them lead according to our biological purpose. We were supposed to put our desires and opinions behind those of these righteous Christian men because that was God’s plan. But I have to say, there was a dearth of these men, and I was smarter than any of them.
My husband of 19 years is very much a leader by nature and as such he’s been a leader through much of our marriage. It’s an egalitarian marriage in the sense that we decide things together, but he’s kind of the guy who takes the initiative in most cases. And he usually gets his way because he’s stubborn as hell. And I trust his judgement on most things (he overestimates risk, but there are worse flaws.) But I am very unlikely to do anything he doesn’t approve of. Does he have more power? I wouldn’t put it that way, but this feminist atheist marriage is probably closer to the fantasy than a lot of religious women get. I would follow him anywhere.
Sounds like you’re doing it right. That dynamic also reminds me a lot of my marriage to my late wife. It may not have filled religious fantasies, but it made two people very happy together.
I’m not at all opposed to individual couples working out among themselves what makes sense for them. It’s just that, coming from a domestic violence paradigm, when I look at these trad wives, all I see is risk. There are abusers that work very hard to get women to the places these women want to be by default - not working outside the home, no control over finances, no work history, totally dependent - that’s dangerous! And they are going to attract predators.
That’s why I think it’s a bad idea to set it as an aesthetic to aspire to.