The Chelsea Handler Childless Woman Upset: Other Conservatives Wrongly Conflating Married Motherhood with Womanhood or Happiness, Meaning, Purpose

The Chelsea Handler Childless Woman Upset: Other Conservatives Wrongly Conflating Married Motherhood with Womanhood or with Happiness, Meaning, or Purpose

After entertainer Chelsea Handler uploaded (Link): a Tweet with a video of herself listing the numerous ways she enjoys life due to being childless – I didn’t see anything in the video mentioning abortion – a lot of other conservatives jumped to shame and scold Handler for being happy about being childless and publicly expressing that happiness.

Others have said that Handler had two or three abortions in the past. The fact that Handler previously had abortions does not change the substance of my problems with conservative reaction to Handler’s video.

I am pro-life, not pro-choice, so I don’t agree with Handler’s actions to terminate her pregnancies.

However, again, I don’t recall Handler’s “happy to be childless” video advocating abortion or mentioning anything about abortion.

I don’t think her video criticized or shamed women for being mothers or for wanting to be mothers.

The only possible, even remotely “anti motherhood” take away one can get from her video is that mothers – assuming they are good, non-abusive mothers – invest a lot of time in child-rearing, but Handler doesn’t frame it in an anti-motherhood way.

It’s Okay For Women to Be Childless at Any Age and to be Happy About Being Childless, Just Like It’s Okay For Mothers to Be Happy About Being Mothers

Handler was just showing ways she has more free time because she doesn’t have to participate in childcare – which is not the same thing as being “anti-motherhood,” or telling other women they are wrong to be mothers.

It’s perfectly fine for a woman to be single and childless and to be happy about it.

Women can and should find meaning and purpose apart from marriage and motherhood. It’s unhealthy for any person to wrap up all their happiness, meaning, or purpose into one identity, station of life, or role.

If you are a married mother, your children will grow up, move out, and seldom visit you once they’re gone. Your husband may develop dementia, abuse you, or cheat on you, so that you will be without emotional support or you will have to divorce him.
In all these situations, you will be left with yourself, by yourself, and god help you if you never forged purpose, identity, happiness, or meaning apart from a spouse and children.

There’s no reason to criticize or shame an adult, man or woman, for being single and childless and for being happy about it and posting about it.

My fellow conservatives often push motherhood (via podcasts, tweets, magazine articles, church sermons, blog posts, etc) to a loopy, creepy, fevered pitch, about how super awesome, fulfilling, and wonderful motherhood supposedly is – but goodness forbid a childless woman lists or publicizes the ways she’s happy with being childless – and do so without criticizing motherhood or mothers. That’s a huge double standard.

I also didn’t agree with Handler’s mockery of single women who choose to remain virgins until marriage or to remain chaste (I blogged about that (Link): here a few years ago).

Unfortunately, in the midst of criticizing Handler, a lot of conservatives today were conflating “womanhood” to married motherhood. 

However, a woman remains a woman regardless if she has a child or is infertile, childless, or childfree, or whether she wants to have children or not.

They Put Their Faith in a God-Fearing Man Selling Them Tiny Homes. Now They’re Suing Him For Fraud – Christians: Please Learn the Red Flags, Research Cluster B Personality Disorders

They Put Their Faith in a God-Fearing Man Selling Them Tiny Homes. Now They’re Suing Him For Fraud – Christians: Please Learn the Red Flags, Research Cluster B Personality Disorders

Before I get to the links way below about a self-professing, devout Christian man who was allegedly swindling customers out of their very expensive purchases:

For any of you super trusting people out there – especially if you consider yourself kind, decent, empathetic and/or a Christian (though what I say below is also applicable to kind-hearted Non-Christians as well):

Please, please educate yourselves and accept reality.

There ARE people out there with what are called “Cluster B” personality disorders (such as NPD, malignant narcissism, or, they’re on the narcissism spectrum, or they are sociopathic or psychopathic) who cannot, or will not, have empathy (and on top of an empathy-deficit, sociopaths lack a conscience, too).

Not all of these Cluster B personality disordered persons are serial killers, as is often assumed(*) – but they all lack remorse and empathy and will use and abuse those in their paths, even their own spouses and family members! (*Some Cluster B personality disordered persons love to financially scam other people or financially exploit them, for instance.)

The primary drivers and motivations of Cluster B persons are control and dominance of other people.

These people can be your neighbor, sibling, parent, spouse, a friend, your boss, or a co-worker.

These dangerous persons can work as church pastors, doctors, school teachers, veterinarians, psychologists, therapists, plumbers, IT professionals, UPS delivery persons, mailmen, hair stylists – any and every occupation, even “care based,” charity based, or church ministry related ones!

These people have learned to “pass” as normal. They will pretend to be normal. Many will act as though they have compassion and empathy for others, but they do not.

Just because someone is working in a care-based occupation doesn’t mean they have empathy and are warm, nurturing, and have your best interest at heart.

Some narcissistic or sociopathic persons who work as therapists or as social workers INTENTIONALLY undermine their patients or others in their care. That’s one reason you must be careful when shopping around for a mental health professional, should you want to see one for treatment.

Some of these personality disordered persons will do things like say they are a “Jesus-follower,” a Christian, they will even volunteer for charity work, attend church regularly, and “play act the part” of loving, devoted Christ follower while simultaneously committing financial fraud (or other sins and crimes) against you or others.

And they do NOT CARE AT ALL how much it hurts your feelings or hurts you financially.

They are not sorry, and they never will be. They do not experience remorse or sorrow for how they hurt others.

Even the non-personality disordered abusive persons out there have very large entitlement attitudes, so their view on relationships is that being mean, lying, nasty, and controlling of or to you is getting THEIR needs met for them, their abusive behavior of you is working well for them, so why bother to care about you and your needs and how YOU are being hurt by them in the process?

They feel they have no reason to change for the better (this is from their perspective).

There is nothing you can do to fix, change, save, or help such persons (even most therapists agree such persons are beyond help or fixing), nor is it your responsibility to fix or change them.

Avoid them as much as possible. No amount of compassion, love, attention, pity, or empathy from you or someone else will change or fix such persons.

No amount of church attendance, Bible reading, or exposure to the Gospel or the teachings of Jesus will heal, change, or fix them.

This includes the marriage context: a wife being “more submissive” or “loving” towards a narcissistic or sociopathic husband will not “heal,” change, or fix the husband and cause him to stop hurting his wife.

Please do some research, and stop allowing people to take advantage of you! Look for the red flags.

Perhaps start out by reading books such as “The Sociopath Next Door” by Stout

(though, caution: in an otherwise very good and educational work, I think she sugar coats her descriptions of narcissism in her book too much – narcissists, especially at the moderate to high end of the spectrum, are essentially watered-down sociopaths, so far as I am concerned,
but, in her book, Stout makes narcissists sound more lovable, redeemable, reachable, and friendly than they actually are,
which contrasts what I’ve read in a lot of research by other mental health professionals and accounts by narcissistic abuse survivors who all specialize in the topic of narcissism),

or “Husband, Liar, Sociopath – How He Lied, Why I Fell for It & the Painful Lessons Learned” by O. N. Ward,
or “Becoming the Narcissist’s Nightmare: How to Devalue and Discard the Narcissist While Supplying Yourself” by Shahida Arabi.

There are many other books – and free online articles and videos – that describe all these issues.

Just because someone claims to be a Christian and acts really sweet, caring, and nice does NOT mean they will NOT abuse you financially, or will not abuse you physically, verbally, or sexually in private.

Because such people do exist, and they will abuse or exploit you.

Stop thinking the best of people, stop being so trusting, stop assuming that because someone talks favorably of Jesus that this must mean they are trust-worthy, and stop giving people third, fourth, and more chances if they’ve already hurt or lied to you twice!

Stop rationalizing their behavior, stop excusing it on the basis they told you they are having a bad day, they’re under stress, or they were abused as a child (whether they were or not still does not excuse their abusive or dishonest behavior).

Such attitudes and behaviors on your part, where you keep forgiving, pitying, trusting, and grant repeated chances and do-overs, is what enables alleged frauds like the guy in the article below to scam you in the first place.

I am not victim blaming anyone who has been abused or targeted by any of these abusers or scammers.

Here is where I am coming from:
I just want to pull my hair out in frustration in particular at how Christians, in their sermons, books, social media, blogs, and their attitudes, frequently encourage or pressure behaviors or attitudes in believers that encourage them to be very susceptible to attracting abusive people or con artists, or from eliminating them from their lives once they encounter them.

Christians are setting other Christians up to be attractive and easy targets and prey for sociopaths, narcissists, and other troubled and dangerous people.

Misguided Christian teachings about grace, forgiveness, compassion, helping one’s neighbor, turning the cheek, the “no divorce for any reason” teachings, and giving second chances, and Christian complementarians especially are really bad about this.

Christian gender complementarians promote “gender complementarianism,” where they strongly condition girls and women to adopt beliefs and actions that are indistinguishable from Codependency (ie, which includes things like lacking boundaries, being passive, etc), which makes girls and women reluctant to engage in perfectly healthy and normal actions, such as standing up to abusers or bullying behavior, and leaves them vulnerable from recognizing abusive behavior as being abusive in the first place.

Secular culture of course also re-enforces such harmful beliefs and behaviors in girls and women as well, via traditional gender stereotypes (see the book The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker for some examples; research by others has also been done in this area going back years with the same results being shown).

(Link): They Put Their Faith in a God-Fearing Man Selling Them Tiny Homes. Now They’re Suing Him For Fraud

People around the country who have paid Matt Sowash thousands of dollars for the small dwellings after seeing him on TikTok say he never delivered on his promises.

by Sept 20, 2022

By Deon J. Hampton

DENVER — A man who had been convicted of bilking investors out of thousands of dollars and who professed his love for God while selling tiny homes online swindled homebuyers out of their life savings for dwellings that were never delivered, three alleged victims said in lawsuits filed in federal and state courts.

Developer Matt Sowash, founder of the Colorado-based nonprofit Holy Ground Tiny Homes, promoted the small residences on social media, including to his 80,000 TikTok followers, with short videos portraying an upbeat, God-fearing man selling the American Dream — affordable homes with financing and no credit checks.

“For people that can’t pay for a house all at once, we can finance you. Holy Ground Tiny Homes. Get yours today,” Sowash said in one TikTok video.

“Great house, available now, around $45,000 is what this goes for. Come in and take it away,” he said in another video, wearing a T-shirt adorned with “Faith Over Fear.”

Sowash said in an interview that he never set out to take advantage of homebuyers, but he’s not sure he’ll be able to build the 250 homes already paid for, in full or in part.

…A plaintiff in one of three lawsuits filed against Sowash said in an interview that the builder’s persuasiveness and Jesus-loving persona convinced her to part with her hard-earned cash.

“That’s part of what sold me. He’s charming, convincing and I believe in God,” said Clara Virginia Davis, 24, an elementary schoolteacher in upstate New York.

I Guess The Southern Baptist “Biblical Womanhood” Site Is No More – Many Other Complementarian Blogs Now Inactive – and I’m Not Sad About It

I Guess The Southern Baptist “Biblical Womanhood” Site Is No More – Many Other Complementarian Blogs Now Inactive – and I’m Not Sad About It

I wrote about this Southern Baptist site a few years ago, here:

(Link): Southern Baptist’s New Sexist “Biblical Woman” Site – Attitudes in Total Face Palm of a Site One Reason Among Many This Unmarried and Childless Woman Is Saying Toodle-Oo to Christianity

Biblical Womanhood mast head screen shot

That site was hosted here at one time:

(Link): Biblical Womanhood (Southern Baptist site – www.biblicalwoman.com)

However, as of February 2022, the site is not loading. I guess it was taken down?

I’ve done some web searching, but I cannot find another site about Biblical Womanhood like this one by SWBTS, or written by them.

Their site was an off shoot of Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary (their site: swbts.com).

Their site’s affiliated Twitter, account, @BiblicalWoman still exists, but they removed all Tweets – well, the Twitter account must’ve been newer than the site, because the Twitter page says they started their account in 2019, but their site goes back to at least around 2014.

Apparently, the last that site was active was May 15, 2021, if the (Link): Wayback Machine site: Biblical Womanhood Site Archived is any indication.

On another look, 2015 was the date on Wayback Machine’s last available date for them, but a few of their blog posts are time stamped 2019.

Edit. I think somewhere on the archived “Biblical Womanhood” site is a notice that says they will be shutting their Christianized Martha Stewart site down and moving content over to Facebook.

Let me see if I can find them on Facebook. Their archived site states that their Facebook group address is (Link): facebook.com/BiblicalWoman. I tried that link, but it goes to a blank page, except for this text:

This Page Isn’t Available
The link may be broken, or the page may have been removed. Check to see if the link you’re trying to open is correct.
— end —

So even their Facebook presence was deactivated at some stage.

But where ever, and how ever, will I get content to shame me for being single into my adulthood (the TGC or Desiring God sites maybe)?

Where else will I get content like, “55 Feminine, Biblical Casserole Recipes with Hamburger Meat as an Ingredient,” -?
or, “17 Feminine, Godly Handi-Crafts Using Popsicle Sticks Glued Together” -? Where?! 

Can I make it through life without gender stereotyped dating, cooking, and arts- and- crafts advice from complementarians?  What ever will I do?🤔🙄

From the Southern Baptist Biblical Womanhood’s (Link): archived “About” page:

Whether it’s parenting your teenage daughter, finding purpose in your singleness ….
— end excerpt —

Oh please. 99.9% of the time, 100% of complementarians are only interested in three, four areas areas in regards to women(*), and NONE of them have to do with single women, because complementarians, beyond giving their presumptuous “practice being a good homemaker NOW, while you’re living alone in your own apartment, to prepare yourself for the day, when you’re 25 and get married and have children!” articles (presumptuous because some women never end up marrying), they never have anything meaningful to say about adult female (or male, for that matter) singleness.

The areas most complementarians harp on 100% of the time include:

• convincing women it’s not biblical for them to preach,
• brainwashing them to think the complementarian form of codependency (“submission”) is good and godly,
• and constantly harping on “marriage and motherhood.”

The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake – by David Brooks – and Related Links

The Nuclear Family Was A Mistake – by David Brooks – and Related Links

If you want to get right to it, here’s the main link:

(Link): The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake by David Brooks  – via The Atlantic (off site link)

Before I paste in excerpts from that editorial by David Brooks below, I wanted to say a few words, and I will be pasting in any relevant links about the Brooks piece even farther below that.

I’ve been saying on this blog FOR YEARS many of the same things that Brooks has outlined in his essay.

Some of what I’ve been saying on this blog for years now includes:
that Christians and conservatives have turned Marriage and The Nuclear Family into idols,
that they have placed weight upon both that the Bible never did, and in the process of advocating marriage, these conservatives and Christians have marginalized the never-married, the divorced, the widowed and the childless or childfree among them, and this is wrong.

The Bible does not teach that marriage – or parenting – are going to “fix” society, or that being married or becoming a parent is necessary to make a person into a moral, upstanding, responsible individual.

If you’re a conservative or a Christian who keeps sounding the alarm about falling marriage rates, you need to accept reality for what it is: most people now are either single and childless by choice or by circumstance.

The United States is simply never going back to the June and Ward Cleaver family structures in mass droves that existed in the 1950s; (Link): so get over it already, and stop trying to punish or guilt trip anyone and everyone who doesn’t marry or have children.

Women Are More Interested In Sex Than You Think, (2016) Studies Show – Men underestimate their wife’s or girlfriend’s sexual desire; read the signals

Women Are More Interested In Sex Than You Think, (2016) Studies Show – Men underestimate their wife’s or girlfriend’s sexual desire; read the signals

The majority of Christians will disregard this study, because it does not fit their culturally- based gender stereotypes that men are sexual animals and visually oriented while all women are supposedly, basically uninterested in sex and only interested in emotional closeness, weeping at beautiful poetry, and knitting scarves.

It is true: for all their bloviating on how they adhere to “sola scriptura,” many Christians take their secular-cultural based assumptions about women and read them back into the Bible. The Bible no where teaches that “God designed men to be visual” or that “men are more interested in sex than women are.” Christians get those assumptions from their culture or perceived personal experiences – not from the Bible.

(Link): Women Are More Interested In Sex Than You Think, (2016) Studies Show

Excerpts

by E. Bernstein

Men underestimate their wife’s or girlfriend’s sexual desire; read the signals

Rarely are researchers’ findings so satisfying. Women may want more sex than their husbands or partners think.

New research by psychologists at the University of Toronto and the University of Western Ontario, (Link): published earlier this month in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that men in long-term relationships often underestimate how often their wives or girlfriends want to be intimate.

The research consists of three studies, following a total of 229 long-term couples, most of whom are heterosexual. (The sample of homosexual couples was too small to be statistically significant, the researchers say.) Participants ranged in age from 18 to 68 years old; the couples had been together six years on average, and they reported they had sex an average of one to two times a week.

….All three studies showed the same thing: Men consistently underestimated their female partner’s desire, while the women had an accurate read on whether or not their partner was interested in sex. And on the days when the men thought their partner was less sexually interested than she actually was, the women reported being more satisfied in and committed to the relationship.

Baptizing “Masculinity”: The Real Reason Men are Leaving the Church by Luke T. Harrington

Baptizing “Masculinity”: The Real Reason Men are Leaving the Church

The link to the page by Luke T. Harrington is farther down the page.

Churches sure do invest a lot of time investigating why men are supposedly fed up with church and churches then bend themselves into pretzels trying to cater to men to retain them.

If churches cared as much about women and appealing to them, perhaps more and more women would not be abandoning churches or the faith (I’ve seen studies come out the last few years saying more and more Christian women are either leaving churches, or leaving the faith itself, because they are not being welcomed due to their gender).

Churches need to be just as concerned they may be offending or excluding women as they are men, but they don’t. Most of them remain stubbornly fixated on soothing the egos of injured males, but don’t care how they are hurting or alienating women.

Hyping “masculinity” to appeal to men alienates a lot of women.

One way in which this occurs is that churches think the way to build up the masculine is to mock anything and everything feminine, so by extension, Christian women, who are taught to express so-called (stereotypical) feminine traits in the extreme (be nurturing, passive, quiet, sweet, etc) end up feeling even more like trash.

The very characteristics Christian women are told by pastors to possess (such as be passive, gentle, meek) are the very same ones that the churches denigrate week in and week out, and that they try to stamp out in churches, and at that, in order to attract men.

This is not a winning strategy for keeping women active and involved in a church.

It also turns off “normal” men, the ones who are maybe Non-Christian, secure in their manhood, who find the super “cave man,” manly man antics of some churches totally bizarre and irrelevant.

(Link): Baptizing “Masculinity”: The Real Reason Men are Leaving the Church by Luke T. Harrington

Excerpts:

• …The dominant narrative at the moment is that, while church attendance is down across the board, men in particular are staying home on Sunday mornings ( (Link): some stats here). And while there has been much hand-wringing over this reality, there has, to my knowledge, been very little serious introspection over it.

Men Are Attracted to Nonconformist Women (Scientific American article)

Men Are Attracted to Nonconformist Women

(Link):  Men Are Attracted to Nonconformist Women

• The popular idea that women should try to conform or be submissive around men is outdated
•  by Matthew Hutson
• September 1, 2015
• Men are often advised to stand out from the crowd to attract women—there can be only one alpha male.
• Women, on the other hand, are told not to be too weird.
• This advice has sunk in: a 2006 study found that when in a mating mind-set, men become less conformist and women become more so.
• A paper in the June issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, however, reports that we have it all wrong.

Woman raised in the Bible Belt by religious parents says she ended up in TWO abusive relationships – because being banned from dating made her ‘ignorant’ about men

Woman raised in the Bible Belt by religious parents says she ended up in TWO abusive relationships – because being banned from dating made her ‘ignorant’ about men

(A link to a woman’s testimony about how Christian or religious dating advice as a kid hurt her as an adult is linked to farther below in this post.)

As I’ve written of before on my blog, much Christian teaching about dating, gender roles, and marriage – especially if espoused by Christians who believe in and teach something called “gender complementarianism” – can often leave marriage-minded singles single far longer than they wish, or perhaps permanently.

Christian teaching on dating, while intended to help singles date “safely” (i.e., to prevent pre-marital sex)  ironically erects obstacles for singles who’d like to get married.

One problem of Christian teaching about dating and singleness is to teach singles, to teach men and women, to be afraid of each other; never spend time alone with an opposite-gender person, lest it lead to fornication.

Well, the only way to marry is to first spend time with an opposite-gender person (assuming you are hetero), via dating.

If you are a lady, in order to discover if you are compatible with a guy, you need to spend time alone with him on dates, especially if you are an adult. (Group dating is for teens, not people over the age of 21.)

This woman’s testimony I link to farther down this page is yet another example of this situation, of how damaging the usual Christian dating advice and gender complementarianism is to singles, especially women.

The things she was taught growing up by her religious parents – things about dating, modesty, gender roles, etc – caused her relationship problems later in life.

Christian Gender Complementarianism infantilizes women, causes them to be naive, and teaches them it is wrong, unladylike, or selfish to have boundaries and to be assertive.

As you can see in this article, this was certainly a problem for the woman author, Lorens.

When she was confronted with vulgar, strange male clients at her job in a store, she did not know how to assert herself and tell them to shove off – or even if she could do so in the first place.

Church must avoid becoming Fight Club to attract men by H. Coffey

Church must avoid becoming Fight Club to attract men by H. Coffey

(Link): Church must avoid becoming Fight Club to attract men by H. Coffey

Excerpts.

• Jan 21, 2015
• When I saw the latest statistics suggesting that the majority of British men don’t believe in God, I wasn’t surprised. Saddened, yes. Shocked, no.This is an issue the Church of England has been struggling with for years.
• From a purely anecdotal perspective, wander into any Anglican church these days and you’ll likely as not be struck by the gender gap, with females accounting for the majority of the congregation. Dig a little deeper and you’ll probably also find that a core of thoroughly capable women are quietly but determinedly running the joint and keeping the whole place afloat.This is backed up by various reports over the last 10 years, which indicate that women outnumber men at UK churches by up to 15 per cent.It’s a headscratcher, and, like with all sets of data, you can read into it what you will. Around the time the people in this specific study were coming of age (they’re all now in their early 40), there was a bit of an influx of what are jokingly referred to as “Jesus is my boyfriend” worship songs – the type that go something like:
• “Ooh, I love Jesus so much, I give my heart to him, he is sooooo dreamy.” Admittedly, having to sing this type of nonsense in church might have felt pretty emasculating for a young man, maybe even enough to put him off our Lord for good….What worries me far more about statistics like this being released is the potential response from Christians and the Church.
• They’re always grist to the mill for dyed-in-the-wool traditionalists who like to wave them around shrieking: “See! We told you this would happen if you let women have opinions, and stand at the front of church, and be vicars. We told you the men wouldn’t like it. You’ve feminised the Church! Of course the men are leaving!”
• This sexist hysterical crew seem to think that, in slowly but surely embracing equality, the entire Church is being transformed into one long episode of Loose Women. That by letting women lead, it naturally follows we’re creating an environment that is “toxic” to men. What a load of tosh.However, there has been a far darker reaction when we’ve seen reports like this before: a move to create a toughened-up, more masculine Church.