R. L. Dabney slinging red pill insights on intersexual dynamics in 1871:
“This suggests a third consequence, which some of the advocates of the movement even already are bold enough to foreshadow. “Women’s Rights” mean the abolition of all permanent marriage ties. We are told that Mrs. Cady Stanton avowed this result, proclaiming it at the invitation of the Young Men’s Christian Association of New York. She holds that woman’s bondage is not truly dissolved until the marriage bond is annulled. She is thoroughly consistent. Some hoodwinked advocates of her revolution may be blind to the sequence; but it is inevitable. It must follow by this cause, if for no other, that the unsexed politicating woman can never inspire in man that true affection on which marriage should be founded. Men will doubtless be still sensual; but it is simply impossible that they can desire them for the pure and sacred sphere of the wife. Let every woman ask herself: will she choose for the lord of her affections an unsexed effeminate man? No more can man be drawn to the masculine woman. The mutual attraction of the two complementary halves is gone forever. The abolition of marriage would follow again by another cause. The divergent interests and the rival independence of the two equal wills would be irreconcilable with domestic government, or union, or peace. Shall the children of this monstrous no-union be held responsible to two variant co-ordinate and supreme wills at once? Heaven pity the children! Shall the two parties to this perpetual co-partnership have neither the power to secure the performance of the mutual duties nor to dissolve it? It is a self-contradiction, an impossible absurdity. Such a co-partnership of equals with independent interests must be separable at will, as all other such co-partnerships are. The only relation between the sexes which will remain will be a cohabitation continuing so long as the convenience or caprice of both parties may suggest; and this, with most, will amount to a vagrant concubinage.” (emphasis mine)
In Dabney’s characteristic prophetic wisdom, he saw where feminism would lead. He saw that feminism would kill mutual attraction between men and women (proved by our collapsing marriage rates and high divorce rates today). Dabney knew sexual polarity drives attraction. Men will not be attracted to or affectionate towards masculinized, politicized women. Women will not be attracted to effeminate men. And here we are.
Dabney understood marriage cannot be a democracy. He understood that feminism would wreck marriage, and children would suffer as a consequence.
Dabney was red pilled long before the rise of the red pill. Most of the genuine insights that men can glean from “red pill” writers or the manosphere about intersexual dynamics would have been commonly known in a 1900s bar. I daresay, they would have been known in 1900s churches as well. They were simply a matter of folk wisdom. Sexual realism was common sense once upon a time. What is scandalous in a feminist age was second nature in more sane times.
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A key principle in marriage: “Headship and respect are romantic necessities.” This can be stated in a variety of ways but the basic point is this: Masculinity and femininity are necessary to maintain marital eros. Sexual polarity drives attraction and creates the erotic bond that help hold a husband and wife together and make marriage a joy. Surely when Scripture commands a man to rejoice in the wife of his youth, it includes sexual pleasure, which means couples should aim to stoke the fires of erotic love throughout the course of their marriage.
Obviously, there is more to a strong marital bind that the sexual tie, but it is certainly essential. Some listeners may have noted that I was actually riffing off of C. S. Lewis. In his absolutely brilliant essay “Equality,” Lewis says,
“This last point needs a little plain speaking. Men have so horribly abused their power over women in the past that to wives, of all people, equality is in danger of appearing as an ideal. But Mrs. Naomi Mitchison has laid her finger on the real point. Have as much equality as you please – the more the better – in our marriage laws, but at some level consent to inequality, nay, delight in inequality, is an erotic necessity. Mrs. Mitchison speaks of women so fostered on a defiant idea of equality that the mere sensation of the male embrace rouses an undercurrent of resentment. Marriages are thus shipwrecked. This is the tragi-comedy of the modem woman — taught by Freud to consider the act of love the most important thing in life, and then inhibited by feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete emotional success. Merely for the sake of her own erotic pleasure, to go no further, some degree of obedience and humility seems to be (normally) necessary on the woman’s part.
The error here has been to assimilate all forms of affection to that special form we call friendship. It indeed does imply equality. But it is quite different from the various loves within the same household. Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up – painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other — that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.”
Lewis is right that the modern woman is deceived by Freud and the sexual revolution. She has been told the key to sexual fulfillment is to liberate herself from traditional rules and roles, and from nature. She should be sexually autonomous and adventurous. She should enter into causal hookups with men as equals. Seeking liberation from the constraints of traditional morality and sex roles will be the key to the woman’s fulfillment since it will mean she can finally relate to men on equal footing. But the Apostle Paul was wiser than the feminists are. Paul was wiser than Freud. When Paul commands the woman to respect and obey her husband, he is not only giving the recipe for a successful, strife-free marriage, he is giving the formula for a supercharged sex life in marriage as well. Lewis argues legal equality is an important outer shell in the marriage relationship (a point I might want to nuance a good bit — but let it go) for now); however, equality is the enemy of romance. As Lewis says, inequality is an erotic necessity. A woman cannot be wooed by a man she will not obey — at least not for long.
Why is this? Legal equality in our marriage laws cannot erase male and female nature, and the reality is that women remain as hypergamous as ever; that is to say, they are erotically drawn to men they view as their superiors, so much that they want to surrender to them, sexually and otherwise. While marital bliss cannot be reduced to what happens in the bedroom, what happens in the bedroom is a very good indicator (over the long haul) of the overall health of the marriage (we can bracket out special situations, e.g., when there are health problems, etc.). A woman who gives her husband the cold shoulder in the bedroom has not ceased to be a sexual creature; she just no longer wants to have sex with him. The way for him to attract her to himself once again is to become an admirable and desirable man in her eyes. In most marriages, submission and sexual chemistry will go together (and, no “submission” in this context has nothing to do with BDSM garbage, but with Paul’s teaching in Ephesians, based on the Christ/church relationship).
Lewis makes the same point in narrative form in his book That Hideous Strength. The Director wisely explains to Jane that her marriage to Mark can only work if she learns that obedience to her husband is an erotic necessity:
“I don’t think I look on marriage quite as you do. It seems to me extraordinary that everything should hang on what Mark says…about something he doesn’t understand.
“Child,” said the Director, “it is not a question of how you or I look on marriage but how my Masters look on it.”
“Someone said they were very old fashioned. But-“
“That was a joke. They are not old fashioned; but they are very, very old.”
“They would never think of finding out first whether Mark and I believed in their ideas of marriage?”
“Well – no,” said the Director with a curious smile. “No. Quite definitely they wouldn’t think of doing that.”
“And would it make a difference to them what a marriage was actually like – whether it was a success? Whether the woman loved her husband?”
Jane had not exactly intended to say this: much less to say it in the cheaply pathetic tone which, it now seemed to her, she had used. Hating herself, and fearing the Director’s silence, she added, “But I suppose you will say I oughtn’t to have told you that.”
“My dear child,” said the Director, “you have been telling me that ever since your husband was mentioned”
“Does it make no difference?”
“I suppose,” said the Director, “it would depend on how he lost your love.”
Jane was silent. Though she could not tell the Director the truth, and indeed did not know it herself, yet when she tried to explore her inarticulate grievance against Mark, a novel sense of her own injustice and even pity for her husband, arose in her mind. And her heart sank, for now it seemed to her that this conversation, to which she had vaguely looked for some sort of deliverance from all problems was in fact involving her in new ones.
“It was not his fault,” she said at last. “I suppose our marriage was just a mistake.”
The Director said nothing.
“What would you – what the people you are talking of – say about a case like that?”
“I will tell you if you really want to know,” said the Director.
“Please,” said Jane reluctantly.
“They would say,” he answered, “that you do not fall in obedience through lack of love, but have lost love because you never attempted obedience.”
Something in Jane that would normally have reacted to such a remark with anger or laughter was banished to a remote distance (where she could still, but only just, hear its voice) by the fact that the word Obedience-but certainly not obedience to Mark – came over her, in that room and in that presence, like a strange oriental perfume, perilous, seductive, ambiguous..
“Stop it!” said the Director, sharply.
Jane stared at him, open mouthed. There were a few moments of silence during which the exotic fragrance faded away.
“You were saying, my dear?” resumed the Director.
“I thought love meant equality,” she said, “and free companionship.”
“Ah, equality!” said the Director. “We must talk some other time. Yes, we must all be guarded by equal right’s from one another’s greed, because we are fallen. Just as we must all wear clothes for the same reason. But the naked body should be there underneath the clothes, ripening for the day when we shall need them no longer. Equality is not the deepest thing, you know.”
“I always thought that was just what it was. I thought that it was in their souls that people were equal.”
“You were mistaken,” he said gravely. “That is the last place where they are equal. Equality before law, equality of incomes–that is very well. Equality guards life; it doesn’t make it. It is medicine, not food. You might as well try to warm yourself with a blue-book.”
“But surely in marriage…?”
“Worse and worse,” said the Director. “Courtship knows nothing of it; nor does fruition. What has free companionship to do with that? Those who are enjoying something, or suffering something together, are companions. Those who enjoy or suffer one another, are not Do you not know how bashful friendship is? Friends – comrades – do not look at each other. Friendship would be ashamed…”
“I thought,” said Jane and stopped.
“I see,” said the Director. “It is not your fault. They never warned you. No one has ever told you that obedience – humility – is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality where it ought not to be.”
Jane is not attracted to Mark because women are never attracted to men that they pity. (The fastest way for a single man to get friend-zoned is to make himself the object of a woman’s pity rather than respect/admiration. Women are not attracted to effeminate weakness but to masculine strength. Men who whine and grumble are not likely to get anywhere because they appear to women as incompetent and fragile.) But the real reason Jane thinks their marriage is a mistake is because they have not lived in marriage according to its design. They have been concerned with equality rather than reality — namely the reality that men and women are different and need something different from each other. Until Jane learns to surrender herself to Mark and obey him, she will not be able to fully love (and make love) to him. Deep down we all know this. A real romantic love story premised on equality would be impossible. One of them, after all, will have to ask the other out. One of them, after all, will have to propose marriage. One of them, after all, will have to lead the dance, while the other follows. Marital love is about many things but it is certainly not about equality, at least not in the modern sense of the term. Indeed, equality is the enemy of romance. Equality kills romance. It is only polarity — sexual differentiation — that can revive it. Dating and romance are nearly dead in our day for precisely this reason. One of the main killers of marriage and the marriage bed in our day is androgyny.
It goes without saying here that not only are men and women not romantic equals, but their roles are not reversible or interchangeable. The man must lead. The woman must respond. Otherwise, the relationship will go nowhere.
The quoted section from That Hideous Strength provides an excellent reason for keeping the bride’s vow to “obey” in the marriage ceremony. There is nothing more essential to the erotic one flesh relationship that is at the core of marriage than her obedience to her husband. He must be admirable, assertive, and confident; passivity, cowardice, and indecisiveness in men are unattractive. And she must be submissive, respectful and obedient; nagging, controlling, and manipulative behavior will drive him away.
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This post reprises material from here: https://tpcpastorspage.com/2022/10/21/find-a-spouse-build-a-house-conference-follow-up/.
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