Quote:
Originally Posted by bishoph
I saw this on another forum and asked/received the author (Pastor Steve Buxton of Hilltop Tabernacle Chula Vista, CA) for permission to post it here.
I guess the war was a pretty good excuse to place women in the work force. But glacing backward it seems to me that we not only took women out of the home but ultimately we lost the men in the process. The children of the WWII generation produced an attitude that explored the difference of the sexes while losing the respect of them. The children of the "make love not war generation" as they have moved into power, have done their best to absolutely destroy any deliniation of the sexes. With that has come this nuetered philosophy of Political Correctness of speech.
The reason for my post is that it seems to me that with the departure of real "Maleness" in our society it has become a seedbed for this PC mentality. It bothers me that men ( and I have seen it on this forum ) have to apologize and try to defend themselves if they speak in a way that some would consider not PC. Were the O.T. Prophets P.C.? Were the Disciples? Was Christ? I think not. Trumpets can be loud, disrupting even alarming but they do give a certain sound. Is not the admonition of Isaiah 58:1 to "lift up thy voice like a trumpet..." I am in the Church today because Men of God, Real Men of God, lifted their voices plainly....and I heard them and understood them..and am thankful for them today. Lift up your voice like a trumpet!! |
Let's not discount the fact that 300,000 very manly men did not return from WWII. That's 300,000 men that were not available to pass along their traits, manners, habits, and know-how to the next generation. The arrival of PC and the "departure of real maleness" have both come as part of a larger gradual cultural shift. Some of the shift may be attributed to the communist-backed cultural revolution of the '60s, but I believe that this shift began with the industrial revolution.
The industrial revolution has made the housewife obsolete. The advent and consecutive prevalence of a plethora of time-saving household appliances easily eliminated countless hours of hard manual processes from the task of housekeeping. There is no such thing in our modern society as a housewife that spends 14 hours a day at manual labor housekeeping chores. As these appliances became available and then affordable, society experienced a surge in freed-up woman-hours of time that these women could use to pursue other interests. The basics of keeping house were no longer of necessity demanding 8 or more hours per day of a woman's time and energy.
World War II also coincides with an increase in the acceptance and effectiveness of birth control. Couples could choose to wait to have children, and childless wives, lacking the obligations of child care, now had the choice to enter the workforce to augment the family income. By now we are all too well-versed in the story of the two-income family. Children or no children, once a family has become accustomed to a certain cash flow, it is nearly impossible to scale back their lifestyle to manage on just one income. Families could choose to limit the number of children in an attempt to compromise between income and "quality of life."
The advent of birth control has also altered society's fundamental views towards sex and marriage. Marriage was once vaunted in manly circles as a laudable achievement to be attained with hard work and maintained as an elevated station in life. A young man's energizing goal in life was to prove himself a marriageable prospect. Men and women alike recognized that raising children properly required two married parents, sex created children, and therefore sex was for marriage. Men who desired respect in society desired family.
Birth control has broken the tie between sex and progeny. Men that pursue sex out of wedlock can do so nowadays with greatly reduced risk of pregnancy. Feminism has convinced women that they are free to fornicate without guilt, to the great detriment of the female sex, but that is another topic altogether. Suffice it to say that liberated women now give away for free what once was the chief enticement to marital commitment. Modern man can now fulfill his sex drive without commitment of fidelity and immensely reduced risk of parental responsibility. And frankly, aside from vestiges of cultural, parental, and peer pressures, I see absolutely no reason why a secular American man would marry. The divorce and child custody laws and courts are all stacked against men in this era. Once a man
does marry, the woman has the upper hand should worse come to worse, and every man knows it. All she has to do is dial 911 and men with guns and government-authorized to use force will arrive to quell the "domestic disturbance." This legal climate in America in our era is undoubtedly responsible for a reduction in male assertiveness.
So a wife has the time free to pursue her own interests, her own money to reduce her dependence upon and gratitude towards her husband, a feminist culture that continually reinforces the notion that men deserve no respect because they are all either incompetent or dangerous, and the upper hand in the court systems. A wife no longer has incentive nor cultural inducement to submit to her husband. The corollary is that a husband no longer has a cultural reinforcement to lead in the home or otherwise assert authority.
Many men have adopted a go-along-to-get-along strategy as a survival tactic. Others have been raised by single mothers and have had little male influence in their upbringing. They simply do not know how to be a leader. When an old fashioned guy tangles with a modern girl, it usually makes the news.
As far as the notion of behaving like an OT prophet goes, it would render a man unemployable in corporate America, where freedom of speech no longer exists. For males, anyway. It would render a man quite objectionable to the vast majority of women seeking husbands for themselves or their daughters. Along with the cultural drift we have adopted a sliding scale of acceptable male behavior. The girls can go wild and it's entertainment, but if the guys go wild it's time to break out the tear gas. The outspoken behavior of an OT prophet would be grist for the mill of the PC police in the news media, and possibly for the actual police if he violated some feminism-inspired regulation or another that the police are required to enforce.
Everything that seems to have been better in the past wasn't always so. Victorian society was riddled with rampant prostitution. Nobody will ever know how many of those respectable family men had mistresses. Male ego, unrestrained by the Holy Ghost, and fueled by alcohol, created a lifetime of hell for many an abused wife in those "golden years" before 1950. Children born out of wedlock were branded as bastards and shunned and tormented. Orphanages were full, and yet those mysterious baskets nevertheless showed up on their doorsteps filled with new clients. Our feminized legal system keeps those would-be philandering husbands counting the costs of adultery, and an abused wife who's had enough can get help in a New York minute. Children born out of wedlock are no longer systematically negatively stygmatized.
The good news is that ladies are beginning to reject the bill of goods that feminism has attempted to sell them, as they observe the perpetually-angry childless bitter unmarried career women crow about their "freedom." More good news is that the socialist feminist anti-family crowd is breeding at a slower rate than the family-values crowd. The bad news is that they are planting their doctrines in our children in public schools.
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