Yesterday, we looked at some of the Twitter “teachings” of The Transformed Wife, a reactionary pro-am housewife with strong feelings about Jesus, fornication, and witchcraft. (Not all at the same time.)
Last time we focused on her thoughts on the aforementioned witches; this time I wanted to take a look at her rather perverse understanding of love and sex.
Strangely, for someone so obsessed with the benefits of good Christian marriage, she has relatively little to say about love between husband and wife. Love of children, sure. Love of God, even better. Actually loving the person you’re married to? Not so much, unless “love” is paired with the word “submit.”
By contrast, she has a lot to say about sex, both the bad kind (out-of-wedlock fornication) and the good kind (in a Christian marriage). Like the word “love,” the word “sex” is often paired with the word “submit.” Because The Transformed Wife doesn’t think married women have the right to refuse their husbands’ demands for sex.
To be fair, The Transformed Wife thinks wives should submit to their husbands in every arena of life, not just sex.
This submission is essential even if the dude is a real piece of shit.
And it doesn’t matter if you’re not in the mood; God doesn’t want you to say “no.”
When a husband wants sex all the time, she suggests it’s a sort of compliment.
She goes as far as to suggest that saying “no” to your husband is a kind of abuse.
Just as former PUA Roosh V’s “seduction” tips were a formula for date rape, so the Transformed Wife’s Twitter teachings are a formula for marital rape. She denies it, of course, but the evidence is right there in her tweets.
What’s so hard to understand about no means no?
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I don’t have a husband, and have no intention of collecting such a bauble. Criticism is necessary for people to grow – it seems The Transformed Wife thinks men should remain children if they happen to be married.
Disingenuous. In context, she’s clearly referring to a husband asking his wife for sex when it’s clear she does not wish to. That is a sin. Screwing someone you don’t want to screw (If you have another practical option) is sinning against yourself, and demanding sex from someone who doesn’t want it with you is sinning against them. It is the sin of greed.
Peace at the point of a sword is not peace. It is stillness. True peace demands the weapon be laid down – in this context, it demands abandoning the threat of eternal damnation should ye not “submit”. It demands abandoning the false idea that gods who issue commandments that are not in the best interests of humanity should be heeded.
Take your own advice, you hypocrite. “The teachers of the law and the Pharisees sit in Moses’ seat. So you must be careful to do everything they tell you. But do not do what they do, for they do not practice what they preach. They tie up heavy, cumbersome loads and put them on other people’s shoulders, but they themselves are not willing to lift a finger to move them.” (Matthew 23:2 -4)
Shut. Up. You claim to teach, but no one is to be called teacher (Matthew 23:10). Some of the worst contempt in the words attributed to Jesus is for hypocrites and false prophets.
It’s not emotional abuse.
1: Your husband should be strong enough that “It wouldn’t be fun for me right now” doesn’t send them into a fucking existential crisis and if he isn’t then he isn’t adult enough to be having sex with anybody period.
2: Having sex you don’t want to have makes people feel unloved, severs intimacy, increases stress, and creates good Cause for anger. But since women are, according to you, meant to submit to their husbands in all things anyway it doesn’t fucking matter if we’re wound up balls of rage over mistreatment, does it?
3: “Never use sex as a weapon”. Not having sex isn’t using it as a weapon. Forcing someone else to have sex, like the marital rape you advocate, is using it as a weapon.
Jesus christ I really dislike this smug asshole.
@IgnoreSandra
You said it so well.
I can add little other than how utterly vile nonsense inspires me to do EXACTLY what I do. The logistics of the very unconventional life that I lead are not simple and like Alan said in the other thread people who may like the glamour don’t get that. But, by the Goddess, all that I do is SO worth it to answer this vile gross total bullshit.
https://www.theonion.com/horribly-awkward-first-sexual-encounter-worth-the-wait-1819565082
Oh hey, it’s the site my abusive ex-husband used to force me into unwanted sex by threatening to take our child away if I didn’t put out! She can deny promoting marital rape but the marital rapists sure don’t see it that way.
Once again she quotes everyone BUT Jesus. It’s been a LONG time since I even set foot in a church or identified as Christian but I have read the Bible and remember a great deal of it. The Biblical women who are remembered positively AREN’T the submissive wives. They’re women like Deborah the Judge, who led her people during a time of war against the Canaanites; Jael, who killed the Canaanite general with a tent stake during that same war; Esther, a Jewish woman who became Queen of Persia and saved her people from genocide; Ruth and Naomi, who were probably lesbians; Mary Magdalene, who was the first to witness the resurrection and became apostle to the apostles.
Some of these tweets get an extra layer once you find out her husband (allegedly) cheated on her.
Hah! Forget the possible “extreme emotional abuse” for the man involved. What about the real, happens-quite-a-lot, physical dangers for the woman?
Maybe we could send her a checklist.
Menstrual cramps, breasts sore from pregnancy-breastfeeding-hormonal shenanigans, sprained ankle, broken wrist. Just had a miscarriage? Sunburn, scalded hand? UTI – let’s be honest, if the man has no obligation to be “godly” it’s clear from her explanation he doesn’t even have to be halfway decent – any rough sex at all and some women get UTIs as predictably as night follows day. Vaginal injuries or scars or other sequelae of a no-so-wonderful birth experience. Fatigue – from caring for him-the children-the house. Apparently she also has no right to protect herself or her children from the dangers of an exhausted woman driving a car, chopping wood or other risks of mechanical or electrical equipment.
Maybe we could ask her about sex itself.
There’s nothing in what she says about a wife’s role in managing her own sex life – none – that would allow her to prevent, avoid, or even object to, activities that good ol’ tradwife herself would condemn as disgusting, evil, perverted and depraved. ‘Cos my long ago experience with this kind of woman is that she lacks both knowledge and imagination about the bad possibilities of sexual activity (and the fun exciting thrilling ones as well).
Maybe we could talk about daily life.
In the middle of preparing a meal, nursing an infant, feeding a toddler, helping other children’s schoolwork, supervising children in a swimming pool or simply bathing them.
Pah! There’s a lot more to this – I particularly remember some radio interviews about women being instructed by imams about this stuff. Including a local fatwa telling women that they had to accede to husband’s demands for sex – immediately – even though she was in the middle of deep frying food for the family. Talk about kitchen dangers for toddlers, leaving boiling fat unattended or a baby in the bath (or wet and cold out of it) because a man says snap to it.
… once you start down this road, you find it has no ending.
@StaceySmartyPants
Goddess, same. My very existence is anathema to this kind of person anyway, but while I’m at it I may as well wear whatever the fuck it pleases me to wear and do whatever the fuck I want.
One thing that gets me about the word “submit” and how it comes up is usually when it’s said by disingenuous fucks they mean “Let yourself be controlled at every moment” and my rage at that message makes it different to just…idk trust a partner to hold me and stroke my hair and tie me up? There’s this conflation between what someone finds enjoyable in private & how someone lives her life that’s REALLY annoying to me.
I hear you about logistics. I have three long-distance partners and it’s not easy. That kind of thing sounds cute and hot and sweet and it is but I need to have something close to endless compassion to make it work, and jealousy cannot be allowed to take root, and idk. Glamour conceals relentless, endless effort. The results may be worth it, but you get out of something what you put into it.
Reading this stuff makes me sick to my stomach.
Is this a real person or a parody account? Srsly.
I have lived this kind of sexual relationship with my ex for 15 years. I didn’t want to have sex much after three years in my marriage but my husband did so I did. Over those 15 years, I have developed a severe case of vaginismus and sex is so painful I would sob from the pain. It broke my spirit to the point I hated myself for allowing it to happen.
https://my.clevelandclinic.org/health/diseases/15723-vaginismus
If you do not want sex, don’t have sex. No one is EVER entitled to your body.
And meanwhile, because sex workers cannot be allowed any relatively safe and empowering working conditions:
https://www.bbc.com/news/newsbeat-58282653
Apparently some bunch of banksters are behind this. I guess relatively safe and well-paying sex work was allowing too many people to avoid financial precarity, even to the point of being able to shop around for a better offer for their day jobs. Can’t have that! OnlyFans was a threat to Big Capital’s reserve army of labor, to say nothing of puritanical “values”. (But we all know which of those things would have been more important to a bunch of suits at Goldman Sachs, now, don’t we?)
It’s okay if one or two people in 10,000 do well enough selling things online that they can quit their day jobs, or even just not fret about weathering occasional periods of unemployment, but if it becomes commonplace … for the same reason, they undermine any efforts toward a guaranteed basic income, and lobbied for the COVID assistance payments to be chopped in half, then chopped in half again, and then terminated.
Note that other porn sites have no problems getting payment providers and investor support, that have only a small number of stars and likely exploit them nastily. And some of them have been caught skirting the rules without any demands from the money men that they ban all explicit content. Only two things can explain OnlyFans being singled out: “it threatened the reserve army of labor” and “women who are sexual without serious risks or being abused must be punished”. And again, the primary desideratum for the purse string holders is likely to be the former. If wages go up the stock market will go down and we can’t have that, now, can we?
Of course, those who engineered this are probably all men and probably all feel threatened by women having sexual autonomy, so the second of those things will have been a “bonus” to them as well.
Dickheads. The entire lot of them. We’d be well rid of them if only people would get up the gumption in large enough numbers to invade their mansions and gated communities, throw them out of their own party, and start redistributing the means of production …
Do we get to count it as extreme emotional abuse when a husband can’t get it up because he watches to much porn and his chaste Christian wife can’t be tainted by the same acts he watches in porn?
On that one Corinthian fellow (sorry):
Verses 1-2 of chapter 7 argue that people should generally be married, because otherwise fornication is practically inevitable. If it weren’t for that, celibacy would be preferable for Christians.
3-4 make it explicit that both wife and husband have an equal duty to support each other’s sexual needs.
Verse 5 is basically a restatement of 1-2, with explicit assertion that most people attempting celibacy will succumb to Satan’s temptation. At most, you could a try temporary fast from sex with mutual agreement, for the purpose of feeling more holy.
6-9 the author makes it very clear that he considers celibacy (such as his own) morally superior, but only recommendable if you really feel you’re called to it.
10-11 divorce is forbidden for Christians, no explanation.
12-14 don’t dump even a spouse who refuses to join the cult.
15-16 but if the heathen spouse leaves you, that doesn’t violate a Christian’s duty, because they aren’t one.
(Chapter continues on social themes, mostly marriage related)
I suppose if you read all the texts attributed to Paul, you can easily cherry pick verses and verse fragments that emphasize the hierarchical nature of wife-husband relationship. Patriarchy was a major theme of the society of day, after all*. I suppose Transformed Wife actually does this kind of picking, without bothering to check her other various citations.
*I once saw a progressive Lutheran teacher explain it by saying that “equality between genders didn’t exist back then”, apparently meaning it didn’t exist even in God’s eternal mind.
The content of 1 Cor 7 doesn’t really bring up the hierarchy angle. I understand 7:1-9 is really commonly quoted by Christians because it can be twisted into suggesting that Christianity is sort of sex positive, if only within marriage. The actual main message seems to be that regulated sex within marriage is a necessary evil to avoid unregulated sex. AFAIK this relates to how early Christianity adapted from being a doomsday cult to being part of mainstream society.
I suppose Transformed Wife would concede, if pressed, that the marital duty is indeed equal between the husband and wife. However, she focuses on preaching only about the woman’s sexual duty, perhaps ostensibly because men “only rarely” neglect their wife’s sexual needs. She probably strongly avoids acknowledging that women often need more than a quick PIV intercourse for equal sexual satisfaction.
I presume she pays lip service to the idea that neither spouse has any acceptable practical recourse if their partner neglects the sexual duty. In other words, no marital rape allowed. She might deny that the idea of marital duty inherently facilitates marital rape (usually by men), and that in a hierarchical marriage setting women are inherently less able to resist marital rape.
Did she even read her own verse and chapter??? It literally says “I say this as a concession, not as a command” 2 verses later. And also wasn’t supposed to be God saying it, but the Worst Apostle.
So I actually read her “I don’t promote marital rape” post and it is literally just “if you consent it’s not rape anymore and God says you should consent so marital rape doesn’t exist.”
I don’t know why I clicked that link to be honest, I mean it was exactly what I expected.
@Sinkable John
Claiming that because someone agreed it is voluntary without paying attention to the circumstances that led them to agree is disingenuous. It’s exploitation. It’s voluntary only in the most strictly literal technicality of terms.
This person makes my skin crawl.
Sinkable John:
I see. Seems like she actively skirts around the possibility that a dominant husband would need to resort to forcibly raping his wife, and would actually do so. Generally, she barely acknowledges that (even Christian) men can be a bit ill-behaved sometimes. And like I predicted, she doesn’t acknowledge that submissive wives might actually suffer from unwanted sex while being unable to refuse it (better wording for what I originally meant).
(There’s probably a better word than “dominant/submissive” in this context but you all know what I mean.)
@Lumpana (and anyone else who’s interested)
Refraining from sex as a kind of spiritual practice was a big thing in the ancient world which way pre-dated Christianity, and Paul himself was celibate, so this encouraged other people to imitate him. There was also that they thought that Jesus would be returning and the whole world turned upside down in a few years so settling down to start a family right then was not necessarily considered a sensible thing to do. Paul’s point was about how to “do” celibacy as a religious practice in a sensible way (i.e. if you really felt it was right for you, you were up to it and, in the case of couples, it was what you both wanted) and what to do about sex and family matters in the meantime while waiting for the big event. Applying it to 20th Century married life is just silly.
(NB – “Celibacy” didn’t mean just not having / wanting sex but rather a deliberate refraining as a spiritual exercise from a pleasure one would otherwise enjoy. Contra the “Transformed Wife” Paul’s point about “mutual agreement” is that he is saying celibacy as a spiritual practice if you were part of a couple should be done as a couple, not that anybody somehow “owes” anybody else sex.)
Almost everything Paul wrote about social and family obligation was about telling people how to do Christianity whilst still participating as normal members of (1st Century Roman) society. Most of what Lori Alexander the “Transformed Wife” and others are doing is they are taking existing social requirements for 1st Century Rome (which was a pretty horrible place if you weren’t a well-off adult male Roman Citizen) which Paul identified as being difficult to follow and still be a Christian, and for which Paul was therefore advising various necessary work-arounds (which were sometimes quite radical for the time) and then they are telling people that they are not Christian-ing properly unless they follow these (non-Christian 1st Century Roman) social requirements, often while also glossing over Paul’s (Christian) work-arounds which were the whole point of what he was writing.
You’d never guess that these rules were written by old men.
@Not Edward – Thanks for the explanation! That’s interesting.
On a related note, I don’t get why some Christians feel they have to agree with Paul anyway. He’s not supposed to be God.
Me, I’m still annoyed at the whole Romans 1 thing where he’s trying to think of an example of people abandoning the gospel to do selfish, horrible things…and then goes “Hmm…I know…LESBIANS.”
I’m saying this in a joking way and I don’t know the guy (no witchcraft here – sorry, Transformed Wife). My “grudge” is more about the effect the words have on some present-day Christians.
Anyway, as to the topic, let me say “Amen” to the words of @Ignore Sandra here:
BTW, in accordance with more recent Christian tradition, I avoided using the word celibacy for sexual abstinence within marriage. I understand it formally means deliberately refraining from marriage (for someone who otherwise would, and plausibly could, get married) and only implicitly refraining from sex. This usage may be influenced by the tradition of banning/discouraging the marriage of priests so they wouldn’t have legal heirs (and thus would be less motivated in building personal wealth by embezzling church property).
Anyway, in traditional sense celibacy is by definition voluntary. In modern colloquial it tends to mean extended lack of sex for any adult for any reason, hence we get people who complain about being “involuntary celibates”. And of course, the tacky name is the least problematic aspect of that particular subculture.
Specifically her denial of promoting marital rape consists of redefining rape as only when physically forced by violence. So taking advantage in her sleep doesn’t count.
I’m pretty sure she literally doesn’t know what “consent” is.
Without even delving on the morality of male headship in marriage, I hate how this type of Christians completely denature the concept of covenant and oaths to defend abuse. If a woman makes an oath of obedience and love to her husband and in turn her husband takes an oath of love and protection to her wife, both are accountable. A man can fail to protect and love his wife just as much as a wife can fail to love and obey and this renders the covenant null. They betrayed it. A man cannot force his sexual desire on his wife without breaking his vow to protect and love her. A husband who made such a vow cannot demand his wife harm herself for his personal gratification. That would be a gross failure to love and protect. If she constantly refused maybe she could be said to have broken her vow of love, but even that doesn’t grant a man the right to rape. It simply grants him the right to give her the boot and expulse her from his house and rescind his protection and love for her but not the right to seek vengeance or retaliation. Not having sex with someone isn’t attacking someone after all. There is little worst in my mind than “old time” people who adore traditions, rituals and ancient codes of value, but have absolutely zero sense of honor or even understanding of it.
She uses an awful lot of words to tell the world her husband is bad in bed.