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What Does A Woman Bring To The Table?
I’ve been listening to a YouTuber by the name of Pearl Davis (JustPearlyThings). Pearl Davis is making her bones by pointing out some of the foibles of the fair sex. Specifically she is identifying certain proclivities that today’s women exhibit that are (ahem) counterproductive.
She cites promiscuity, addiction to attention, and a desire to dominate their men among the systemic sins that are driving men away from institutions of marriage.
Ms. Davis says that when women lead families things start to fall apart. Her formulation is that the natural order of things are God, Men, Women and Children. She sells “Women Shouldn’t Vote” T-Shirts.
There is a lot of overlap between her maxims and examples found within the “manosphere” — mostly male social media influencers who advise men on what to look for/what to avoid and how to conduct themselves in the sexual marketplace.
These influencers range from Jordan Peterson to Andrew Tate. The former calls men to be the best possible person they can be by finding courage to embrace responsibility and embark on a life adventure that includes love, marriage, children and legacy. The latter embraces the “love ‘em and leave ‘em” ethos — transactional relationships between the sexes. The Andrew Tate crowd is not into marriage.
Ms. Davis and commenters in the manosphere are asking “what are women bringing to the table?”
Well in my household it’s lots of tasty food that is very healthy. My wife is a fantastic cook, and a wonderful homemaker. There is a maxim that a man can buy a house but a woman makes it a home. That is very true in my case. However, the tasks that my wife performs are physical manifestations of something mystical, at least by my lights.
I have been in houses where men lived. Some are roommates, some gay couples. Of the four or so I never felt the same home-ness that I feel in households of women and wives. Totally unscientific, but if you know you know.
I am raising a granddaughter. I want her to be the best version of who she can be. Children are born wet, naked barbarians with nothing to guide them but their appetites. We parents have to provide the guidance for being civilized. I don’t think “Grrlll power” is going to cut it. I don’t want to raise a narcissistic princess doomed to spiralling discontent and a house full of cats. Her grandma sure isn’t like that.
I asked the AI Chat-GPT 3.5 to turn Proverbs 31:10-31 into this list of characteristics of a virtuous woman. I edited it a bit, because I am a human.
- Worth – She is more precious than rubies.
- Trustworthy – Her husband’s heart trusts in her.
- Supportive – She does him good and not harm all the days of her life.
- Industrious – She seeks wool and flax and works with willing hands.
- Entrepreneurship – She considers a field and buys it; with the fruit of her hands, she plants a vineyard. She perceives that her merchandise is profitable.
- Strength – She dresses herself with strength and makes her arms strong.
- Charity – She opens her hand to the poor and reaches out her hands to the needy.
- Prudence – She is not afraid of the snow for her household, for all her household are clothed in scarlet.
- Dignity – She makes bed coverings for herself; her clothing is fine linen and purple.
- Leadership – Her husband is known in the gates when he sits among the elders of the land.
- Wisdom – She opens her mouth with wisdom
- Kindness – …and the teaching of kindness is on her tongue.
- Diligence – She looks well to the ways of her household and does not eat the bread of idleness.
- Praiseworthiness – Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her.
- Faithful – Charm is deceitful, and beauty is vain, but a woman who fears the Lord is to be praised.
I think this answers the question “What SHOULD a woman bring to the table” — and candidly all these virtues ought to be found in me. Two people equipped with these virtues are going to make a very satisfying life together no matter what the details of that life might be.
My wife was not raised under “X” wave feminism. She wanted to make a home with lots of children. Alas, she was not treated with the honor and respect her conduct commanded. She and I have had to work out our issues, but the basic code and operating system was there. I think she picked this up from her own nature, upbringing and culture. It runs beautifully. I just have to get out of the way.
I said all that to say this. My experience has been that women are usually getting clobbered in the bad partners department. Evangelicals have a robust manhood industrial complex extolling men to be good leaders for their families with an implication being that if you build it they will come, that being a good man will attract a good woman. I am not convinced this is true, and I think that the social pressure is for women to have expectations of their mates without much thought given to the responsibilities of being a partner.
I certainly thank God for my wife.
Published in Feminism
Well, I’m in love.
I’m rapidly losing interest in internet conservative conversations because what seemed fresh and nuanced 5 years ago is now as shallow and polarising as their left wing counterparts.
By the standards of some of these ‘influencers’ including Pearl, I’m a ‘low value’ woman. I never married, have no children and worst crime of all I’m over 40. And I happen to love cats. So be it. I’ll continue to cast my vote and take care of my mother and our farm and finances. But I’m going to be more circumspect about ‘conservatives’.
I have friends who consider you high value.
FWIW I see this more as a conversation about a disconnect between what any given woman wants versus what they get.
If you want to live a life like the Apostle Paul encouraged – unencumbered and able to follow your own pursuits – WOOT! I don’t imagine you got there by being a narcissistic princess.
Friends of mine were unmarried and were perpetual “aunties” to a wide variety of children. Wonderfully valuable to our community. But that’s what they wanted. Never much interest in romance.
I see dissatisfaction out there, at least a melancholy over what was wanted and what has happened.
I love cats too.
These people sound like complete idiots. I wouldn’t pay any attention to them. In fact, I don’t and I won’t.
When I saw the headline, my first thought was, “everything on it.”
Why does every discussion of societal worth wind up denigrating whatever group you’re talking about? Maybe we should stop worrying about societal worth and concentrate on individual worth.
There’s a lot of dissatisfaction, despair actually, out there, among men and women. I despise people with platforms who see this and then demonise one side to enrich themselves.
While I’m intrigued that some women say that all women shouldn’t vote — thinking outside the box, and rather Old testament — or that women generally don’t have the psychological wherewithal to properly vote, while I don’t disagree, I don’t necessarily agree either.
It sounds a lot like men saying that men have no place in determining what a woman can do with her body, even though they are inextricably bound to the opportunities and problems of what women end up doing with their bodies. In other words, claiming incompetency is an excuse for abrogating any responsibility or decision-making.
If a woman doesn’t have the qualifications, aptitude or expertise to vote, how can they say they have these sufficient competency in these qualities to say that they shouldn’t vote?
In other words, if a vote were held on whether or not women were allowed to vote, should women be allowed to vote on the issue.
It’s also reminiscent of the other side of the question regarding the disenfranchisement inherent in a plebiscite for only indigenous people voting on the future of a land that includes the legal framework and an economic base of a country that they themselves didn’t build but do greatly benefit from and wouldn’t want to do without. Should they have the only say in the course of a country they didn’t build?
Do those who did the building get no say?
Personally, I think the voting age should be 26; no one should be allowed to vote who’s still on their parents’ medical insurance.
The OP is a little all over the place. I’m not sure what exactly he is advocating (or opposing).
I suppose I too am low-value: 49, atheist, married, no kids, not much of a career to speak of, enjoy managing the household (which is pretty easy with no kids). I like cats but am presently without one (time to change my profile photo) and not much of a wine drinker. I’m pretty secure in my gender identity but own neither dresses nor makeup and don’t have much time for biblical directives about being silent etc. I do vote but I don’t always love the consequences of the 19th Amendment.
So I’m not sure where I fit on the value-to-society scale.
Yes, having read it only once, I think Tim’s point is a little obscure.
But your and Marjorie’s comments are the coolest, and I’d vote for either of you for Ricochet moderator. It’s a shame you two don’t have any vote in it.
Wouldn’t be the first time. Bad thesis statement I suppose. I’ll work to do better.
But your and Marjorie’s comments are the coolest, and I’d vote for either of you for Ricochet moderator.
Agreed.
I think he hath builded himself a palace of overlapping defensive caveats whence come the stentorian peep in the last paragraph — the modern woman overestimates her value *in the eyes of a mate-seeking man* by advertising in the wrong market. Men are assigned a value *in the eyes of mate-seeking women* just the same, but men tend to deal with the ass-end of things in their twenties, when we are on the Life Is Unfair chopped liver part of the journey — broke dudes with big dreams. Cue Stevie Nicks in Sara, “But when you build your house, then call me.”
To directly address the “value” of some friends here, please bear in mind that the whole manosphere conversation about value is in the context of the dating and mating scene, and is shorthand for “sexual market value”, with market forces operating in their inexorably fair but unpleasant (that is, honest) way to arrange matches between prospects. The only ways to be offended are to A) misunderstand the limited scope of that conversation, or to B) engage in the market with wildly unfounded assumptions about one’s value to a member of the opposite sex who is looking for a mate.
The “value” cited is not some objective measure of worth — it is as always a thing determined by a particular buyer at a time, for a purpose. Many women of bouncy youth but dubious morals can find themselves any number of good-time guys, but mistake this attention for an increasing price signal in ther SMV. Same for smart, funny, handsome guys who are broke.
Glad you phrased it this way. Clarifying. That’s not the manosphere value conversation, but it does sound like what MR may be conflating with the SMV discussion.
Separate issues.
I wasn’t really responding to anything you said Tim, I was just sounding off on my dislike for charlatans like Pearl. Algorithms vomit up content like hers onto my feed because I watch conservative videos . I’m not assaulted by rubbish from the likes of TYT or Hassan Piker but the quality is the same.
IMHO PearlyThing had a couple of interesting things to say, which I seemed to catch onto at about three minutes to her personal midnight, and then she imploded in silliness.
There’s a lot of that with online nonsense. People get internet famous for a few sound bites, and then the rest of the story comes out.
Both my parents impressed upon me the importance of voting. My grandparents were born before Irish people could govern themselves and they understood the value of it. The idea that voting might be reserved to one sex would be as absurd to my conservative grandparents as to any liberal feminist today.
I have watched Pearl’s videos and find them to be so 20-something lame in their nature, I eschew them. But, apparently, Pearl was raised in a conservative mid-western family, in a liberal age, and moved to a new though similar culture in England, and has been exploring the place of women in modern (what I call neo-pagan) culture, and she finds deficiencies and inconsistencies in what it is to be a young woman.
She may be making millions, but I don’t see her as doing any harm, and mildly advocating for time-honored values.
I think everything in life comes down to one fact: Individuals either have financial independence or they do not. How individuals think and act springs from that single point. All relationships revolve around that point.
Attaining financial independence is difficult for everyone, but it is the essence of our work to survive as human beings. It is necessary for true freedom.
We skirt around the issue in conversation because it is an unpleasant truth. If we are independent financially, we avoid calling attention to it because it creates a barrier between us and most other people. And if we are dependent financially, we avoid mentioning it or thinking about it because it puts us at a disadvantage that we hate having.
Healthy relationships including marriage are based on respect. The essence of being a respectable person is being financially independent.
If we human beings could reach the sophisticated point of recognizing what everyone is really dealing with, we could all relax, stop insulting each other, and realize that we are all in this together and trying our best in a difficult situation.
Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is probably all we need to know about each other.
On a more serious note, I think this post was intended to be, and is, delightfully felicitous.
And it and all the comments have the tenor of one of my favorite songs, which includes the wistful words:
Is your mouth a little weak,
when you open it to speak, are you smart?
But do men?
Yes, I barely touched on that. But it opens up a whole can of worms. And things slide down that slippery slope.
Voting based on Age is good. Sex is fair. What then? Race?
Civics exam, good. IQ exam, fair considering the grossly mentally disabled. But what would be the cut off?
Landholder, good. Working and paying taxes, good. Working but not paying taxes, iffy. In between jobs, iffy. Annual income, bad. What would be the cut off? Working while on the dole, bad.
26-year-old male, living in his mother’s basement, and on his father’s health insurance, while doing side gigs as a DJ? Bad.
The same 26-year-old but an entrepreneur working on cold fusion in his mother’s basement? Iffy.
Nobody above 100.
At least you didn’t refer to being ruled by idiots, that’s harder to detect.
Do they still make telephone books?
I had never heard of any of these people until someone at ricochet mentioned Kevin Samuels and I watched a few minutes of a few of his videos and then justpearlythings showed up in the suggested column. I guess there is a whole subculture, Better Bachelor, Whatever podcast, Man Talk and so on. If there is one thread through all of the mess, it seems to be that today’s girls want a “6666+” and won’t settle for less. Their standards are celebrated, but if a guy has a short list of female desirables that includes “low body count”, then he is insecure and hates women. If you say so. I didn’t watch anymore so I don’t know if any of them had anything else to say.
To a large extent this is because marriage has become practically weaponized against men: women benefit financially and otherwise from breaking up families. The more well-off the man is, the more she benefits from leaving. So you would expect the most well-off men to be the least interested in losing it via marriage.
But the problem isn’t with women who definitely don’t want to be married and have children etc, the problem is with women who say they want to be married etc and then seem to go out of their way to make themselves bad marriage candidates.
The main value I would say is trying to get the message to young women that they can’t reasonably expect to be “party girls” in their late teens/20s/maybe into early 30s, and then THEY get to pick some guy who will marry them and take care of them and possibly their other children from the “party years.” The men get to decide too. And most men don’t want women like that, as wives.
Kevin Samuels did a lot of the same thing, mostly regarding black women who he thought – correctly, it seems – had those kinds of problems even worse.
Actually, people like Pearl and many others make the point that really men don’t care about women’s careers, financial independence, etc. To the extent it’s not actually also weaponized against them – makes it easier for women to break up the family if they’re just “unhappy” – it’s still mostly useless to them because while men create resources to share with and provide for a family, women generally don’t. And you see it in those interviews, where the women who earn more than the men still expect the men to pay for dates etc.
Or the way my grandmother would sometimes put it, “what’s mine is mine, and what’s yours is half mine.”
Childlessness is so sad, to me. I have 4 kids, and I think that I would greatly regret it if I had no children. Perhaps not everyone thinks this way.
It is understandable for a childless woman to object to a message promoting motherhood and family. These are Biblical values, I think.
The first commandment in Genesis is for men and women to be fruitful and multiply. The Apostle Paul does limit this in some circumstances, explaining that some men have what we call the “gift of singleness” in order to devote themselves to ministry. Paul doesn’t use this term, but expresses the idea. He does not discuss whether this exception applies to women.
The Biblical requirements for Church leadership require marriage and family. Both elders (or overseers or bishops) and deacons are to be married to one wife, to have children, and to manage their families well.
Obviously, those who are not Christian believers may take a different view.
I haven’t listened to Pearl Davis yet, though she sounds interesting from the description in the OP. I wouldn’t dismiss her ideas as either “shallow” or “polarizing.” There’s nothing shallow about a woman embracing Biblical womanhood and her roles as a wife and mother. This is glorious and admirable work, in my view.
Maybe it is “polarizing,” in the sense that any statement of a moral standard will necessarily divide the world in at least two ways:
I sometimes think that the divide between the feminists and the non-feminists is at the root of our current cultural disaster. It is the principal manifestation, I think, though it is probably rooted in the Liberalism of the so-called Enlightenment, by which I mean the emphasis on individual liberty and choice, which is coupled with a rejection of the concept of duty.