Daleth

I don't agree with you at all on the wrongness of shacking up, but I respect that you want to share your sense of morality with your kids. I think that's absolutely fine as long as you don't extend it to also meaning that you've got a right to tell your sibs or others how they should live so that it fits into your moral structure. Others might believe that marriage is wrong, and wish you weren't setting the example that you are setting.

Part of teaching your kids is sharing the sense of conviction you have. They are going to have to live in a world where people do any number of things that you'd disagree with, small and large. They need to have the conviction to stand by what they think is right even if every other person seems to be setting a contradictory example.

I just used an awful lot of words to say 'live and let live', didn't I? Sorry. I really ought to give up and go to bed. Fever's just getting worse, and I have no idea if what I'm saying makes sense.

Dal

Queen of Swords

Originally posted by yguy
We're talking about a traditional marriage. In some other kind of marriage, it very well might.

This does not answer the question of why the husband does not implicitly agree to grant authority to his wife when he marries her. After all, if it's implicit, how do you know that he hasn't done so, traditional marriage or not?

If I own a machine shop and one of my employees is sick, I may have to do something I'm not good at to get a job done on time. If the woman leaves because hubby won't buy her a Mercedes, she'll make a rotten mother anyway.

So are you saying that under some circumstances, it's OK to have the kids growing up confused about gender roles because dad's doing the parenting?

I have no empirical data to support it.

I'm not surprised.

However, families don't fall apart for no reason. The responsibility must fall on the head of the family, since it can't very well fall on the children.

The responsibility might also be shared by the adults in the family.

If the captain (husband) gets so drunk that an inexperienced helmsman (wife) runs the ship aground, it's the captain's fault, as he is in dereliction of his duty.

And the solution to this is to make the wife as experienced as the husband, so that the ship won't run aground.

People who aren't good at taking orders aren't good at giving them either.

No, people who aren't good at taking orders are good at giving them. One unsupported generalization deserves another.

If that were the case, he'd be marrying an automaton. Why a man would do that other than to secure himself a good lay I don't know.

This does not answer my question : "Why do they both have to have it? According to your reasoning, wouldn't it be enough if just the husband has it, since he's the one who's going to make the decisions?" Unless your answer is "Sex is better for the husband if the wife has intuitive knowledge"?

Depends why she does it. If it's manipulative on her part, yes;

It's manipulative under any circumstances to refuse sex in order to make a man do what you want.

in the case I'm talking about, she'd actually be supporting his natural authority at the expense of the selfishness she'd be rewarding if she slept with him.

How does disobeying a man's command to have sex support his natural authority?

This, of course, presupposes that sharing of decisions is a sign of maturity, a fact not in evidence.

Where have you presented facts to back up your theories about ships, presidents, intuitive knowledge, daddylike love, and so on?

Yes.

What happens if their intuitive knowledge contradicts each other? The wife thinks the husband is bad, but the kids don't? Or vice versa? Whose intuitive knowledge wins the day?

I don't understand the question. How does anybody ever know they're doing the right thing?

Yes, I quite see your problem. The wife has had her husband making decisions for her during their marriage; no wonder she can't be sure if it's all right to do anything for herself.

Can't resist letting this one stand as a monument to QOS's latent egoism.

Well, since you liked it so much, let's have it again : "If it doesn't make sense to me, it probably wasn't that sensible an analogy in the first place.". Perhaps you feel the same way, hence your abandonment of the analogy up to this point in your reply.

No, it means that someone in authority grants a subordinate authority over a certain area of responsibility.

How is this different from, "Delegation of authority means that there are some matters over which she should have a say"? If she has authority, why doesn't she have a say?

Is intelligence not a factor in the man you would have as a mate? If so, the answer is obvious, since you already know that some men are too stupid to mess with, and it would only be a matter of raising your standards. If not, it's irrelevant anyway.

This does not answer the question, "This does not answer my question, "Then how do you propose that intelligent women seek out and find more intelligent men so that these men can wield more authority in the marriage than the women do?" I would like to hear a method by which intelligent women find more intelligent men. By the way, do intelligent men have more natural authority than stupid men?

Who is in authority, the teacher or the student?

This does not answer my point, which is that the man can show the woman how to "steer the ship". In any case, no student stays a student forever, and some of them even surpass their teachers, no doubt an affront to intuitive knowledge everywhere.

A couple of years is good, I think.

Why just a couple of years? Don't you think that intuitive knowledge would work much sooner for discerning problems?

More later...

alek0

This was addressed in my last post to QOS.

I haven't seen specific answer to "what happens if a woman is more competent".


Then one of them is either mistaken or lying.

Why would one of them be lying? On what do you base your claims on "intuitive knowledge"?

They have it but don't use it.

Any proof for that?


The last few decades of seeing teenagers act like brainless lemmings is evidence enough for me.

And this is caused by women sharing the decision making process how? Would you agree that there are also teenagers from "traditional" families who act like brainless lemmings?
Do you think that lack of teenage problems in the past had something to do with the fact that they had to start working a lot earlier and got married a lot earlier?

Lack of respect for a wife's intelligence is hardly endemic to the idea of the man having the authority.

No, but it is more likely to happen under such circumstances.

I would suggest she not marry.

Why? Since you claim that the main thing about marriage is having children as good as or better than oneself, wouldn't it make sense that highly intelligent women get married and have kids?


Obviously not. That's what delegation of responsibility is about.

What is the difference between delegation of responsibility and
decision sharing process (i.e. each of the partners responsible for the area he/she is more competent)? Why would decision sharing be wrong? Why is equality wrong and why do you think that one partner has to dominate?


That's why the husband needs to be able to say no to his wife. If the roles are reversed, the husband becomes the manipulator.

Even when she is withholding sexual favours? You were actually proposing one of the worst kinds of manipulation. If sex should be distributed as reward when husband behaves well and withheld as punishment when he doesn't, that's everything but a healthy relationship.


If they had the kind of authority I'm talking about, they would either never make selfish decisions, or when they did, they'd realize it and do better next time.

Again, what is the proof for this statement? I've seen many examples in real life that this is not the case.

Calzaer

Amazing.

Followed almost immediately by


Why are you the only one who gets to assume facts not in evidence?

melinie007

Eventually, students graduate and are granted respect for what they have learnt. Sometimes students surpass their teachers.

How come the man's 'corrective love' never actually corrects the wife? Even if we accept the superiority of the man, why do you presume the wife never learns?

After years of parenting she is still inferior. She will never graduate from being the student - she is forever the subservient.

Queen of Swords

More now...

Originally posted by yguy
By the way he conducts himself. Of course, he should make it clear verbally that he intends to be the boss, but he needs to show that by his conduct during the engagement.

Previously you said that the woman implicitly agrees to let the man make the decisions when she marries him. Now you seem to be saying that she implicitly agrees to let him make the decisions during the engagement (a different thing). How does she know, during the engagement, if this is a good man to submit to if she is already letting him make the decisions for her? And even if he's not a good man, if he slaps her around during the engagement, she might think that any breaking of the engagement on her part might violate the implicit agreement and go against his natural authority, not to mention confusing any children present.

Any couple intending to have a traditional marriage agrees that the man is where the buck stops. So I suppose if they verbally agree to that, the agreement is explicit as well as implicit. It should be both, I think.

You still have not shown how you know that women make the implicit agreement that they will submit to a man. Please show how you know that all women in all traditional marriages do this.

Likewise should the wife require of a potential husband that he have sufficient training and capabilities for the job of heading the family.

How does she know that he has the training and capabilities? By the fact that he dominates her during the engagement?

That is for the wife to determine before they set a marriage date.

This does not answer my question : "What training has the husband undergone in order to qualify him to tell his wife what to do?"

Let me just say that hugs and kisses are the shallowest form of love that a father can give.

I did not ask you "What is the shallowest form of love a father can give?" Instead, I asked you, "Please provide evidence for your assertion that a father's love is always corrective." I take it you have zero evidence for this assertion?

If Moses could call God to account without getting burned to a crisp, I don't suppose it's too much to ask for a husband to take constructive criticism without pulling rank.

But it's not the wife's place to dole out criticism, is it? According to everything I've read so far from you, she should be the one corrected, not the one correcting. She should be the teacher, not the student. So you would appear to be wrong here as well.

Most are - and most are woman dominated, though not overtly so.

And most of the dysfunctional relationships I've seen have been man dominated. Perhaps it's the domination that's the problem, rather than the gender which deals it out.

I don't know about genetics,

But you said children were born with intuitive knowledge. Could it perhaps be infused into them through amniotic fluid, in a form of osmosis? Or could it be transmitted through breast milk?

but it has nothing to do with memory - it has to do with knowing.

Is knowing transmitted genetically? Also, you have not answered the question of whether intuitive knowledge is inherited equally from both the mother and the father.

They start to the first time they witness a dispute between mom and dad.

They start to what?

If dad wimps out, they lose respect for him. If mom wimps out because dad is tyrannical, they lose respect for him.

I wonder why they never lose respect for their mother. Perhaps because they never had any in the first place for a woman who was so dominated.

seebs

I thought the guy was the one making the decisions. What do you mean "they"?

Daleth

yguy,

There are still some questions you're avoiding. How exactly would you define "natural authority" and what is your basis for believing a man has it? You've said over and over again that it is intuitively obvious to each and every person at birth or at least as soon as the mind is developed enough to grasp such a concept. I hold that it has never been obvious to me.

I grew up in a fairly traditional family. Dad worked. Mum stayed home with the kids. Mum had her ideas about how things should be and shared them with him, but when it came down to making decisions, Dad's word was law. He didn't do a bad job of it. He made some small mistakes but no major ones, at least not until I was a teenager, and the family was fairly well off. No one was abused. There was no violence and little raising of voices (except to the extent that voices have to be raised to be heard over the din of 8 kids). And you know how it seemed to me intuitively? It seemed unfair. It was obviously unfair to me. Mum was smart. She worked hard. She had a lot of gifts. She was a grown-up like Dad. Why did she have to defer to him all the time? Why, for instance, did the kids have to ask Dad whether they could be excused from the dinner table rather than Mum, who cooked the dinner? She wasn't complaining about it, either. I doubt she saw anything wrong with it then or now, so I didn't learn that it was unfair from her.

So was a born a freak of nature who lacked all normal human intuition? Since it is not and has never been intuitively obvious to me, you've got to explain why you believe this to be the case. Bree said please don't say it's because god created Adam first, but I disagree. If that's why, please say so. Please show me that you have some foundation to your beliefs... any foundation whatsoever.

Based on our previous conversation about women's power, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you don't really think that it's intuitively obvious to all and sundry that men have natural authority in a marriage, rather that women at all times have incredible power over men because men are so weak and needy about sex and that men must be given authority in marriage just to counter-balance that power. Am I close?

I'll tell you what leads me to that thought. You don't seem to believe that all men are more capable, intelligent, or knowledgeable than all women. If a man is not "better" just by virtue of being a man, why should a woman submit to a man at all? Well, it's because she naturally has this incredible power over men by virtue of her sex, and it creates this imbalance. So what she should do, as a responsible part of society, is allow her power to be tempered. She should find a man who has greater abilities than her, and should submit to him, thus at least partially correcting the imbalance.

If you like, I could bring quotes from the previous conversation into this thread. If was an off-topic conversation there, but right on target here.

You also haven't answered my question about how you managed to grow up with an ability to understand traditional marriage and without gender confusion even though you were raised by a single mother.

Dal

fatherphil

debate the differnces and reach a consensus which will pass supreme court scrutiny.

i never claimed that the marriage certificate is a magic pill. you still have to find a way to live with this other person without killing eachother. i do think statistics can be helpful but they can lie at the same time.

fatherphil

that is generally the safest bet. too often folks want to help God pick slivers out of the eyes of their neighbors.