When I think about contraception, my thoughts generally run to things like this:
“Is this condom on inside-out? Oh, crap.”
“I guess IUD’s aren’t necessarily a good idea for some women unless they like bleeding from their vagina every day for six months.”
“Has anyone ever actually used a female condom?”
Over on Complementarian Loners, an MRA-adjacent “relationship” blog written by a couple of Catholic converts, the bitter divorced dude who calls himself 7man has some more, well, advanced ideas about contraception. By “advanced” I mean, of course, “odd and terrible.”
He starts off with this proposition:
A man and a woman cannot develop a great relationship if contraception is part of it or if they met while she was using hormonal artificial birth control. REAL committed, trusting, exclusive sexual intercourse is essential.
Oh, it gets weirder from there:
Birth Control is a misnomer since this is her speaking through her body saying, “I control when I will give birth, not God, not a man.” It doesn’t require any respect for fertility since fertility is subverted. This puts the woman in the dominant position and she then determines when and under what conditions she will ACQUIRE his seed rather than being open to RECEIVE. (Is woman not a vessel?)
I’m pretty sure a woman is a person, dude.
Usually the contraception is done by the woman, it messes with her body; she blocks the ability to receive and the whole exercise becomes taking pleasure from the other. Of course, she can always lie about taking it or not taking it. This is in essence lying with the body. A man can lie too if he withholds his gift by vasectomy or by condom.
In his profile on the blog, 7man refers to his ex-wife as “BatShitCrazy” (apparently that’s just one word now), but I think she demonstrated some pretty clearheaded and rational thinking in getting herself away from a guy who can refer to his semen as a “gift” without giggling.
[I]t is women acting as succubi. And so the ultimate end of a failed attempt to block PROCREATION is abortion. After all, God surely did not do his part and create a soul for the life that she did not intend to receive, right? Does her hamster prevent God from fulfilling his part of creation? Not likely! …
I am left with the impression that subverting fertility may be just as much an abomination to God as is divorce.
I hope you mention that right up top in your Match.com profile, dude, because that’s the sort of shit women need to know right off the bat before they send you any misguided “winks.”
Oh, and apparently men and women can’t have good sex unless the man controls everything and the woman cannot leave:
Can men and women have what they so deeply desire (in a relationship) while withholding the central gift of self? Have Christians stopped to consider the word PROCREATION? We participate in the CREATION of God in our act of sexual intercourse. We assist in CREATION of a body, but God provides the soul. CREATION is intended to occur in conjunction with a COVENANT. Can intercourse be unitive if this element is totally removed from the act of marriage, in the one-flesh-union?
A COVENANT is an OATH, a BINDING and a COMMITMENT. This is more than a contract or a whim. The sublime pleasure of sexual intercourse cannot happen when such aspects are blocked. The kind of fulfilling sex that every person longs for and rarely experiences is also precluded when the woman endeavors to control the relationship. In order for her to feel the fullness of the union, she must be claimed in a COVENANT to one man PERMANENTLY.
I can only imagine Mr. 7man explaining all this very earnestly to his date as they munch on breadsticks at the local Olive Garden, after which the unfortunate woman excuses herself to go to the ladies room and, as soon as she is out of his eyesight, slips out the back door of the restaurant and literally runs the entire way home.
7man closes with this little puzzler:
[S]uccumbing to passionate desire is easier without the risk of pregnancy and therefore commitment is not essential prior to the parting of thighs. Does this ever turn out for the good?
Yes. Yes it does.
Well at least she’s stopped being tacky and trying to involve us in her D/s relationship by telling us how 7man has approved her comment and/or added something every time she posts. That’s something, I guess.
Well that’s interesting. I think I’ll leave it because personally I’m not particularly interested in controlling anyone and having them do whatever I say/have a lot of babies or whatever it is you think is so ideal. It’s kind of creepy that you think everyone would be happier in that kind of relationship because that’s a pretty specific kink and not everyone (or even most people) is into that.
Man, I occasionally have my partners give me orders about routine parts of life (occasionally my mental illness kills my basic decision-making ability, and I need “go take a shower now” so I don’t break down crying about how I could do LITERALLY ANYTHING and I DON’T KNOW WHAT TO DO), and *I* wouldn’t be up for the sort of relationship described herein.
@ CL
So you can’t even blame religion for your sexism, really, you just shopped around until you found a sect that was as sexist as you were. Figures.
“and the whole exercise becomes taking pleasure from the other”
Change “the other” to “one another” and you have a pretty good working definition of what good sex looks like. It makes me sad that there are people who think this is a bad thing. I mean hey, you’re entitled to think that way, but it does make me very sad for you.
Ozy – my ex-husband and I both have an illness and we would do that for each other, too. I know how it feels!
CassandraSays 12:50am – you have explained everything I was wondering about!
Well, I prefer to be the D rather than the s, so I’m up for relationships where I sometimes tell the other person what to do. If faced with a sub who literally refused to even post a blog comment without my permission, though, I’d lose my patience with them very quickly. I’m your domme, not your mommy, you know?
My husband is a submissive person. I am a dominant person. As such, I tend to make final decisions and he often checks with me before making certain important decisions. However, he is a fully capable person who I respect and love very much, and just because he is more submissive than I am does not mean that I walk all over him- I simply know that sometimes, I need to read him and gently prod him when he’s being quiet about something that I know he has an opinion on, but he’s preferring to defer to me.
And he generally is very relieved at taking direction and getting shit done that I know needs to be done but I don’t have time to directly oversee because of my work schedule (he works nights, I work days, so most “day stuff” that needs to be done when I’m at work falls under his jurisdiction).
And yes, my husband is awesome. But I realize that when I tried to make him be more dominant or make myself be more submissive to “equal” things out, it caused more arguments, tension and frustration. Relating to one another the way we do helps create harmony and works for us.
But I would never say that anyone else should have this relationship dynamic as a baseline. Your mileage may vary, after all.
Is that an actual picture from what appears to be the 1890’s?
Now I’m wondering what these people would recommend if there was a dude who had the same kind of crazy I do. Can you order someone to give you orders? 😛
I think you’re both supposed to be miserable as a punishment for disobeying God’s plan for you. Truly it is a philosophy full of love and compassion.
If God has a plan, fuck if I know what it is. I’ll be over here, assuming that everything is going according to plan and by that I mean living my life the way that I want. As far as I know, this is the only one I’m going to get, and to be honest- even if I’m wrong and I do exist after I die, both eternal hellfire and basking in the glory of God for the rest of eternity sound boring as hell.
Whenever fundies try to threaten me with hell I point out that all the best bands will be down there, and I don’t really like harp music anyway.
Isn’t that what submissives do?
PUPPY POWER!!
Supposedly hell is the devil’s realm, so for all we know it’s pretty awesome. I never understood the idea of the devil hanging out in a horrible place of suffering for all human kind. I mean, he just wanted to be God and failed at it and God supposedly gave him his own bit of real estate, so wouldn’t he logically try to make a more awesome place than heaven?
After all, heaven is not a place where you get to live your life but with wings and a harp- according to most holy books, heaven is standing around like a zombie basking in the light of God for eternity. So you’re basically a vegetable, reverently standing around like a putz while God shines his light on you. Pass.
Christ died for his own sins, not mine.
An interesting thing is that Satan doesn’t really have a backstory in the Bible. If you think the accuser in the book of Job is Satan, he basically just pops up without explanation. In the book of revelations there’s a story of a “war in heaven”, but it’s told in the future, not the past, tense.
Anyway, I think it would be horrible if there were an after-life which is basically a version of this life with wings. It’s not that I hate this life, but to keep on living FOREVER AND EVER AND EVER just seems like a terrible CURSE to me. Eventually, you’d be fed up with EVERYTHING. Just basking in the glory of God, if it means being in a state of bliss with no feeling of time passing or the like (why would there be passing time in Heaven anyway?) seems way better. I’m just saying.
Nana-you see through a glass darkly. You know what the means? Think about it.
I’m banking on the notion that Satan knows a thing or two about incentivizing his followers; not only would he not torture them for eternity, he would make sure they had some pretty swanky digs in which to debauch until the end times.
Also, masturbation is nice.
Only if you’re a very lonely Dalek.
Eventually, you’d be fed up with EVERYTHING.
Not if you had the special drugs they give you in Heaven that are infinitlely stronger than heroin and keep you blissful forever with no sense of time 🙂 Time is an illusion and doesn’t exist and there is no beginning or end to time. You are not in the physical dimension of the Universe. And how could you feel boredom because boredom is the product of a physical brain and nervous system which you no longer possess.
After all, heaven is not a place where you get to live your life but with wings and a harp- according to most holy books, heaven is standing around like a zombie basking in the light of God for eternity. So you’re basically a vegetable, reverently standing around like a putz while God shines his light on you. Pass.
Ha, this reminds me of my ex. He grew up in a fundie family and was quite devout until one day he had an epiphany and walked away. He told me two things that stuck in my mind: 1) “Have these people actually read the fucking Bible? It is very clear what you do in Heaven. You sing to the glory of God all fucking day. You are in a choir forever. Hope you like singing!” and 2) “If I ever become religious again, run away. If there’s kids, grab them on your way out the door.”
I’ve never really believed in any religion so i don’t have this animosity like people here who have belonged to one do and I just find religions amusing. But where does all of this stuff come from about playing harps and singing all the time? I doubt that it’s in the Bible and was probably just made up by some boring goofball.
But if I was going to join a religion I’d join one where they drank poison,let snakes bite them and spoke in tongues. That sounds cool 🙂
And how could you feel anything because everything is the product of a physical brain and nervous system which you no longer possess.
FTFY
Well, the editted Christian version, that’s how it works. In the original Jewish books, he’s basically YHWH’s prosecuting attorney; the reason he talks smack about Job is because he’s trying to force Job’s goodness to be proven, not assumed. Christians made him into their antagonist deity sometime in the 600s, IIRC.
And, before I head off to work, the relationship between a commander/executive isn’t as depicted in the movies. 1: There can be no romance (in my career I’ve had no period of time where I didn’t see a mixed sex command, and I’ve been in five commands where the exec was not the same sex as the commander).
2: The Exec and the Commander aren’t the hip pocket relationship you see. It’s a bit more like that for the Navy, where the conn has to be overseen 24/7, but even there the exec is rarely (on any ship larger than a destroyer) assuming the helm from the Captain.
The XO is there to see to it there is continuity if the CO is killed. But the chain of command actually excludes him/her. It’s CO, Unit Commanders/Division Chiefs. The XO is in a little sidebox, taking care of other things; most of which the CO is told of in passing.
The Relationship isn’t subordinate, so much as it’s parallel, with veto powers.
The Army/Navy is a terrible metaphor for a marriage.