The Rhetoric of Singleness Blog – Links, Comments, Thoughts

The Rhetoric of Singleness Blog

Warning: I discovered through further reading that the author of the blog is a complementarian. I disagree with complementarianism; more on that below.

Had I known from the start she is a complementarian, I may not have started composing this post. I am leery of pointing anyone to a complementarian resource, but here we are.

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As of today, I see only a small number of posts on the The Rhetoric of Singleness blog, dating from April 2017, and this blog appears to be from a Christian perspective – but then, her blog does not display a list or pull down menu of all her posts.

Even though the blog looks to be on hiatus, I’ll link to it on the off chance the blogger resumes writing again.

The person behind this blog says she’s single, in her 30s, and has yet to marry but would like to.

(Link): The Rhetoric of Singleness Blog – main page

Some of the only posts I am seeing on this blog include:

(Link): Pursuing Marriage

In that “Pursuing Marriage” post, she says she is a believer in gender complementarianism.

For example, here’s part of what she writes:

So, what options does that leave me, a woman with a complementary view of gender roles, of pursuing marriage? I know for some women who see no options left to them there is a strong temptation to bitterness, resentment, and to denigrate our single brothers who are called by God to the leadership role in the pursuit of marriage.

// end excerpt

Oh no. I (Link): used to be a complementarian myself but ditched it by my mid 30s.

I heard all the same stuff from conservative Christians growing up, as this other blogger likely did, such as, how (Link): men are supposed to be the heads in marriages, God supposedly created women pretty much to exist (Link): only to wait on men, and so on.

(And I remained a conservative, even after I realized that complementarianism is false and actually quite sexist – it doesn’t just teach that men and women “complement” one another but that there should be a male hierarchy, of men ruling over women.

Contrary to what complementarians would have you believe, abandoning gender complementarianism will not turn you into a left wing, abortion-supporting, man-hating feminist. I am still right wing, even after leaving complementarianism.)

I am no longer a complementarian, but can pin point complementarianism, among a few other things, as being (Link): one reason as to why I am in my 40s and never got married.

When Newsweek ‘Struck Terror in the Hearts of Single Women’ – Bogus Study Said Women Over 40 More Likely To Be Killed By A Terrorist Than to Marry

When Newsweek ‘Struck Terror in the Hearts of Single Women’ – Bogus Study Said Women Over 40 More Likely To Be Killed By A Terrorist Than to Marry

I was maybe a teen or in my 20s when this study came out. I remember at the time thinking it sounded pretty questionable and stupid.

(Link):  When Newsweek ‘Struck Terror in the Hearts of Single Women’ by M. Garber

Excerpts:

• Thirty years ago, the magazine declared that single women over 40 are more likely to be killed by terrorism than to get married—prompting a nationwide crisis whose anxiety still lingers.
• …Thirty years later—the publication date of the article was June 2—it’s easy to forget that the so-pervasive-as-to-be- (Link): Ephroned marriage-and-terrorism stat was plucked from a single piece of journalism that was in turn based on a study that was, at the time of the story’s publication, unpublished. It’s also easy to forget, given its resonance, that the stat comes from an article that has since been so (Link): thoroughly (Link): debunked, by demographers and sociologists and media outlets alike, that Newsweek, 20 years after the fact, (Link): retracted it.

Salvation Army Bans Duggar / Quivering Cult’s ‘Retreat’ (Called ‘Get Them Married’) that Promoted Arranged Marriages for Teen Girls – Quivering Advocates Are Anti-Adult Singleness and Anti-Celibacy

Salvation Army Bans Duggar / Quivering Cult’s ‘Retreat’ (Called ‘Get Them Married’) that Promoted Arranged Marriages for Teen Girls – Quivering Advocates Are Anti-Adult Singleness and Anti-Celibacy 

Before I present you with the links to the news reports about this story (which are much farther down the page), I wanted to make some introductory comments in general, and a few specific comments refuting a few points from a pro-Quivering page about celibacy.

In regards to the specific news story I am blogging about today, this Quivering group is completely overlooking Apostle Paul’s comments in (Link): 1 Corinthians 7 that it is better for people to remain single than it is to marry – and Paul does not say that this teaching is in regards only to “a few,” or only a “minority” of people.

The Bible nowhere states that marriage is “a norm,” or that God expects or wants all, or most, people to marry.

It just so happens that in other cultures thousands of years ago, most people did happen to marry – one should not deduce from this cultural situation that God supported it or wanted it to be so. It just was what it was.

If the Bible said that all or most ancient Jews painted their bodies green once a year and balanced weasels on their heads while jumping up and down on a watermelon one week out of a year, one should not assume from this that

• 1. God created that cultural practice and/or that
• 2. God wanted Americans in the year 2016 to practice these things as well.

The Quivering group’s position on marriage, celibacy, and singleness is unbiblical, not to mention disturbing.

According to this article (linked to much farther below), the Quivering group was going to call this event, (where they set up marriages for little girls to marry), “Get Them Married.”

Why not have an event called, per 1 Corinthians 7, “It Is Better To Stay Unmarried”?

Am I opposed to marriage? No.

Is the God of the Bible against marriage? No.

But the Bible does not say that being married is better or more holy for girls, women, or culture, than being single, but a lot of Christian groups, and these wacky Christian cults, insist otherwise.

Christians need to do a better job of recognizing adult singleness and celibacy as legitimate, godly, biblical lifestyles and choices for all persons (and not only meant for a small minority of people who were supposedly “gifted” with it), instead of promoting marriage and natalism as the only legitimate avenues or as ways of fixing culture, the nation, or as pleasing God.

Woman Book Author – Andrea Tantaros – Suggests That Single Women Are Miserable And Can’t Get Husbands Because Feminism. My Critique of Her Article / Book

Woman Book Author – Andrea Tantaros –  Suggests That Single Women Are Miserable And Can’t Get Husbands Because Feminism. My Critique of Her Article / Book

(This post has been edited to add several new comments and a link or two)

Aug 2017 – (Link): Author Claims Andrea Tantaros’ Book About How Feminism ‘Made Women Miserable’ Was Ghostwritten by a Man

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If you are new to my blog: I am right wing, I don’t agree with most secular feminism, but I do think secular feminism is correct on a point here or there.

This article I link you to farther below is about a book a woman wrote (I believe she is right wing), and it reads like one of those “blame feminism” type works. The book is by Andrea Tantaros, and its title is “Tied Up in Knots: How Getting What We Wanted Made Women Miserable.”

I have not read the book; I have only read the author’s article about the book, which you see linked to farther down the page. I take it that her article is a sort of preview about what one can expect to see in the book.

This article argues that most women got what they wanted (via feminism), and they are miserable as a result: they are not getting men. Women want marriage and are not getting married. The women want to have great careers, but they also want a manly- man who will marry them and sometimes take care of them; they want a partner to share life with.

Women Are Still Being Told To Lower Their Standards / Stupid Sh*t People Say to Singles by S. H. Weiss

Women Are Still Being Told To Lower Their Standards / Stupid Sh*t People Say to Singles by S. H. Weiss

One thing the author of this page brings up is something I have as well: women are just as visually oriented as men are and do care about what men look like. However, women are conditioned by secular society and religious groups to think they should not care about a man’s physical attractiveness.

Women are conditioned to look past a man’s ugliness to consider his other traits – is he smart, financially stable, and so on.

Now, I do think some people are in fact way too judgmental or picky regarding physical appearance in dating or whom to marry.

But, on the other hand, there is absolutely nothing wrong in wanting to date or marry someone you consider attractive. I don’t think people of either gender should be super picky about looks, but it’s okay to have some preferences or standards.

The woman who wrote this says she caught some guy she knew lying in his dating site profile – he was 35 years old but claimed on his dating profile he is 25 or 30 years old. She asked him why he lied about his age.

He claims it’s because he wants to start a family and a woman in her 20s is guaranteed to be fertile.

First of all, women in their 40s (and 30s) still menstruate and get pregnant, so you don’t need to marry a 20 something to have babies. Some women in their 20s are childfree or infertile.

Secondly, as I noted before, I advised single women who read this blog to lie on their dating site profiles about their ages, to make themselves younger than they are.

As so many men are this very shallow and particular about age in a woman (many of them have a cut off age of 29, while for others, it’s about 35), go ahead and cite yourself as being 20 or 30 something on your profile if you are over 40 and want dates.

The worst thing that will happen once the guy gets to know you after he meets you via a dating site is that he will decide to stop dating you. Big whoop.

I have seen or read about a lot of men ages 45 and older who lie about their ages on dating sites. I’ve had guys who are obviously 65 or older (they have all white hair) who contact me on dating sites, who claim to be 41 or 42 years old. Men lie out the ass about their ages (and their height, according to other women) all the time on these sites.

(Link):  Liberated Shmiberated!: Women are Still Being Told to Lower Their Standards (& it’s messed up!) by S. H. Weiss

Excerpts:

• February 2016
• …It is Traister’s message that I would like to share with the women I have spoken with lately, women who feel they need to defend themselves to others about why they are not married, why they are not “just settling down already” and why they are “being too picky.”
• The women I speak of range from early 30s to early 40s. Some of them have never been married, while others were married briefly. A third of them are divorced and have children. The one thing these friends have in common is that they all say that are not “single by choice.” They express the desire to find their perfect life partner.
• ..However, there are Yentas everywhere, some well-intentioned and others questionably motivated. This is especially true for those who are part of a tight-knit or religious community (ranging from the Mormons to the Modern Orthodox Jewish).

All The Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister – Various Links to Reviews or Commentary About the Book and Its Issues

All The Single Ladies by Rebecca Traister  – Various Links to Reviews or Commentary About the Book and Its Issues

There are currently a million links about the new book “All the Single Ladies” by Rebecca Traister

Up til now, I have made individual blog posts about that book – reviews, commentaries that reference it, or interviews with its author.

I no longer feel like devoting that much effort into blogging about it, so here is a lone thread crammed with links about it.

This post may be edited in the future to add new links about this book as I find them.

Some of these links might only be tangentially related to the book. I only have one life to live, and I don’t want to spend it blogging about this one book.

It sometimes takes me a long time to put a single blog post together – especially hunting through the “Categories and Tags” area of the blog area, having to skim through a long list of tags. It’s a time consuming pain in the ass.

One thing you will notice in many of these articles is how often Traister points out that men do not usually face as MUCH social stigma or penalties as often in life -or employment- as single women do for being single. Which is true.

As I have written of before, (Link): Men are not hounded, judged, or shamed nearly as much as women are for remaining celibate, single, and/or childless.

The fact that a woman author had to write a book discussing singleness among women speaks to how much singleness is different for women than it is for men – it is far more socially acceptable (and among Christians) for a man to remain single and childless than it is for a woman.

Do some segments of culture harass men over being single or kid-free or question their manliness? Yes.

I am not saying that life or church is a cake-walk for never married or childless or childfree men. But as a matter of comparison, on a scale of one to ten, with one being “awesome and great” and ten being “terrible and hellish” single and childless men get treated to about a, I don’t know, a four on that scale, while women get a nine or a ten.

Because women have vaginas, they are expected to have babies. There is far more stigma attached for a woman to be single and without children than there is a for a man, because church and society do not expect having babies to be necessary for a man to be fully a man socially or biologically. Not near as much as it is for women.

Women get pressured for more often and more severely to marry and have babies than men ever do or ever will.

I am not saying men get ZERO pressure, only that they get a 1 or a 2 in pressure, where-as women get a 9 or 10 in pressure on the scale of marriage and natalism.

It is far easier to drift thru life as a single bachelor dude with no kids than it is for a woman to go through life with no husband or no kids – you won’t get judged as much by family, church, politicians, conservative think tanks, over this stuff as a woman does over it. And it’s sexist bullshit.

Here are the links (more might be added to this post in the future as I find them):

(Link):  The Single American Woman via NY Magazine

(Link):  Review: Rebecca Traister’s All the Single Ladies is a reassuring balm to the rhetoric that surrounds us 

• Yet in spite of these harsh truths, All the Single Ladies is celebratory, the stories of real women who are single a reassuring balm to the rhetoric that surrounds us. Traister asks, by outlining the ways women can succeed when their societies support their choices, to consider what we really mean when we tell women to marry for better or worse.
• Her argument – that our public policies are what need to change, not the rate at which we marry or the age we do it – prioritizes equal pay over joint accounts, better health-care provisions over shared plans, comprehensive child care instead of Mommy-and-Me clichés, and other tangible solutions instead of abstract platitudes.

(Link):  Rebecca Traister’s ‘All The Single Ladies’ is a singularly triumphant work

(Link):   Single Women are Quietly Remaking Our World

• By Emily Simon
• “Single women are taking up space in a world that was not designed for them.”
• That sort of statement – at once radical and obvious – is characteristic of Rebecca Traister: a happily married mother of two who is currently encouraging us to recognize the cultural and political power of single women.

‘Marriage Changes When You Don’t Just Need A Warm Body and a Paycheck’: A Talk With Rebecca Traister

‘Marriage Changes When You Don’t Just Need A Warm Body and a Paycheck’: A Talk With Rebecca Traister

(Link): ‘Marriage Changes When You Don’t Just Need A Warm Body and a Paycheck’: A Talk With Rebecca Traister  by Jia Tolentino

Excerpts:

• After two months, my [Jia Tolentino’s] copy of Rebecca Traister’s new book is already dog-eared, wine-stained, and train-battered. All the Single Ladies is essential, careful, bold, and rigorous; it’s a warning and a celebration, and I loved it. Traister and I talked on the phone last week.
• [Rebecca Traister said]… I always hated it when my heroines [book characters] got married.
• … but I took in the message that Laura learned, and then taught us: that marriage was the end of fun.
• …one of the interesting things that’s happened coterminously with the decline in marriage rate is the rise of the wedding industrial complex and the fetishization of marriage as the signal achievement of female life.
• That’s happened even as women have been marrying less and less, and for a couple of reasons.
• One, the economic strata of women who still most consistently marry are the wealthiest women: you have a whole industry that’s built up around selling them very expensive weddings, and this industry now crosses classes. There’s a diffuse but very strong pressure to correct women’s move away from marriage by fetishizing it.
• This, in turn, is possible in part because marriage is no longer the thing that kicks off a woman’s adult life.
• As sociologists put it, marriage is now a capstone event instead. It’s the thing you do when your life is in shape, when you have the right amount of money —and particularly in middle and lower-income communities, when you know you have the right partner, and in many cases, when you already have a kid. Marriage is popularly a sign that your life is in order, which contributes to this renewed positioning of marriage as aspirational.
• [Jia Tolentino said] Right. It’s the fairytale narrative run through a late-capitalist filter. You make your money, you formalize your ambitions, and then you still get rewarded with the kiss and the ring.
• [Rebecca Traister said] Despite all this, women are still not marrying at the same rate they were. You can bombard women with messages that they should be aiming for this; that they should be doing that. But you know what? They’re still not doing it. You might be able to make them feel bad about it—but this mass behavior no longer applies.

The Single American Woman via NY Magazine

The Single American Woman via NY Magazine

Pretty long article, but very interesting.

Please use this link I’m giving you if you’d like to read the entire page (it’s a little bit farther below).

I am a right winger, have been a Republican my whole life (though the GOP has been annoying me more and more the last few years, but no, I am not fine with the Democrats), and I am a single woman who was raised in a Christian home.

My parents were Christians who had very traditional values.

The one thing I dread when reading articles like this one I am linking to in this post is imagining how my fellow right wingers will react to what it discusses.

Typically, rather than help single women where they are (which is what they should be doing), they will more likely, instead, complain and yell about singleness, about what a shame it is people aren’t marrying as much or not as young as they did decades ago, and yell at single women to run right out and get married immediately.

(One thing these types of idiots overlook is that marrying is not that easy. I’ve always wanted to be married, but I never met the right guy. I am not going to marry just any guy with a pulse just for the sake of being married.)

Anyway, following that initial reaction of my fellow right wingers, they will then, at that point – by “they,” I refer more specifically to the conservative marriage concern trolls among the secular right wingers and the conservative Christians – will write fear-mongering articles (like (Link): this one) to scare single women into marrying the first man they meet who has a pulse.

The fear mongering and pressure by conservatives to scare or cajole women to marry has gotten so bad with right wing marriage concern trolls, that some of them are even directing Christian women to marry (Link): known pornography addicts.

The majority of my fellow conservatives don’t give a rat’s ass about doing anything to assist single women so long as those women are single.

Many conservatives would prefer to sit back in their rocking chair on the front porch, sipping on lemonade, smoking on their pipes, complaining about how times have changed for the worst, and how the nation was so much better back in 1952. They would rather pine away for the so-called “good old days” than to help people in practical ways in 2016 where ever they find themselves in life.

Though I am right wing, I think this author makes a few good arguments against conservative views about singleness and marriage and the roles of women.

(Link): The Single American Woman via NY Magazine

Excerpts:

• The most powerful voter this year, who in her rapidly increasing numbers has become an entirely new category of citizen, is THE SingleAmerican Woman
• By REBECCA TRAISTER
• ….In 2009, the proportion of American women who were married dropped below 50 percent. In other words, for the first time in American history, single women (including those who were never married, widowed, divorced, or separated) outnumbered married women.
• Perhaps even more strikingly, the number of adults younger than 34 who had never married was up to 46 percent, rising 12 percentage points in less than a decade. For women under 30, the likelihood of being married has become astonishingly small: Today, only around 20 percent of Americans ages 18–29 are wed, compared to nearly 60 percent in 1960.
• It is a radical upheaval, a national reckoning with massive social and political implications. Across classes, and races, we are seeing a wholesale revision of what female life might entail.
• We are living through the invention of independent female adulthood as a norm, not an aberration, and the creation of an entirely new population: adult women who are no longer economically, socially, sexually, or reproductively dependent on or defined by the men they marry.
• This reorganization of our citizenry, unlike the social movements that preceded it and made it possible — from abolition and suffrage and labor fights of the 19th and early-20th centuries to the civil-rights, women’s, and gay-rights movements of the mid-20th century — is not a self-consciously politicized event. Today’s women are, for the most part, not abstaining from or delaying marriage to prove a point about equality.
• They are doing it because they have internalized assumptions that just a half-century ago would have seemed radical: that it’s okay for them not to be married; that they are whole people able to live full professional, economic, social, sexual, and parental lives on their own if they don’t happen to meet a person to whom they want to legally bind themselves.
• The most radical of feminist ideas—the disestablishment of marriage — has been so widely embraced as to have become habit, drained of its political intent but ever-more potent insofar as it has refashioned the course of average female life.

Why Single Women Have Baby Fear Of Missing Out – via Daily Beast

Why Single Women Have Baby Fear Of Missing Out – by L. Crocker – via Daily Beast

Fortunately for me, I never cared much if I had any children or not, so I’m “meh” about not having kids.

(Link):  Why Single Women Have Baby FOMO by L. Crocker

Excerpts:

• Single women have more power, influence, and freedom than ever before—but that freedom is still complicated by child-bearing.
• It’s not easy for single women of a certain age to revel in their singledom. There comes a time—one that varies depending on cultural, geographic, and socioeconomic backgrounds—when the single woman in America feels like an anomaly among her peers, regardless of whether she’s single by choice or not.
• In reality, the opposite is true: There are more single women now than ever.
• In 2009, the number of American women who were married fell below 50 percent, and the number of women younger than 34 who had never been married climbed to 46 percent.
• The numbers reflect a broader cultural shift that has allotted single women more power, influence, and freedom than ever before.
• We’ve seen the single woman’s rise touted in books like Kate Bolick’s (Link): Spinster (2015), about how the author has managed to live independently for 39 years, taking cues from other unconventional women. We’ve seen it in television shows about powerful single women, too, like Liz Lemon in 30 Rock.
• Now, feminist writer Rebecca Traister shows us just how far we’ve come in 50 years in her new book, All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation. (New York magazine ran a cover story adapted from the book last week, a viral essay about the (Link): value of the single woman’s vote in this election cycle.)
• All the Single Ladies argues that single women, “untethered from the energy-sucking and identity-sapping institution of marriage in its older forms,” have long played crucial roles in our country’s defining social movements, from abolitionism to suffragism to feminism.

The Rise of Delayed Marriage and Female Friendship – article from The Atlantic

The Rise of Delayed Marriage and Female Friendship – article from The Atlantic

Speaking of friendship: there is an account on Twitter whose owner sticks up for friendship and sometimes blogs against the Christian obsession with marriage or the stupid Billy Graham Rule. That account is (Link): Forbidden Friendships (@MenWomenFriends)

The Atlantic has a very long article about societal shifts concerning the delay or demise of marriage and the rise of female friendships, as they discuss it in the context of some television show called “Broads” that is about two lady friends. I’ve never seen the show.

(Link):  Broad City and the Triumph of the Platonic Rom-Com by Megan Garber

Excerpts:

The show’s new season asks what its heroines, Abbi and Ilana, are to each other: friends? Partners? More?

….Abbi and Ilana share, basically, what a lot of young women—and young men—share in this age of delayed marriage and emergent adulthood and platonic roommates and geographic peripateticism and economic prosperity and economic uncertainty: a friendship that occupies the psychic space that used to be devoted to spouses and children.

While the (Link): marriage plot may still, dissolved and distended, drive many of Hollywood’s cultural products, Broad City reflects friendship’s age-old, but also new, reality: The show is suggesting that its heroines are already, effectively, married. To each other.

…The women’s partnership [which is platonic; they don’t have sex with each other], crucially, is not merely a matter of social circumstance; they aren’t simply keeping each other company until their respective dudes carry them along to their Happily Ever After. They are each other’s Happily Ever After. The pair, as Ann Friedman (Link): put it, are “more obsessed with each other than they are with men.” They are very probably the loves of each other’s lives.

Which makes Broad City, on the one hand, yet more evidence that we are living, as The Washington Post’s Alyssa Rosenberg (Link): put it, in “a golden age of female friendship.”

Lonely Sunday: Single Christians and the Church’s Opportunity by K. Beckert

Lonely Sunday: Single Christians and the Church’s Opportunity by K. Becker

(Link): Lonely Sunday: Single Christians and the Church’s Opportunity

Excerpts:

• … As a pastor who happens to be single right now, I think I can speak for the 45% of the U.S. population who is single right now and say it’s not an easy place to be.
• … And some of us listen to the culture around us for advice on what to do with that desire. This culture echoes a duplicity of voices, of ways to “handle” singleness, and it shines at us on small screens and big screens.
• … Marriage is marketed to us as a blissful, everlasting date – not as the covenant it’s supposed to be, but as an item on a shelf to be paid and bartered for. We fall in love with a wedding.

Five Unhelpful Things Singles Are Tired Of Hearing by R. Duncan / Eight Things You Should Never Say To Your Single Friends by K. Wilkinson

Five Unhelpful Things Singles Are Tired Of Hearing by R. Duncan / Eight Things You Should Never Say To Your Single Friends by K. Wilkinson

There is also a link below to “Eight Things You Should Never Say To Your Single Friends”

(Link): Five Unhelpful Things Singles Are Tired Of Hearing

Excerpts:

by Ryan Duncan

Life as a single adult (Link): can be difficult. Life as a single Christian, on the other hand, can be just plain exasperating. While never short on community, single Christians often find themselves bombarded with well-meaning, but unhelpful advice from their married peers.

In response, (Link): Krysti Wilkinson of Relevant Magazine decided it was time to compile a list of things you should never say to your single friends. Coupled with a few of my own favorite gems, here are five things your single friends are tired of hearing.

“Wow, You Must Have So Much Free Time!”

“This is usually an attempt to point out the silver lining. But this sometimes implies that your single friend’s schedule, and life, must be empty (and void of anything meaningful) when there isn’t a significant other in it.

True, those of us who are single have just one person’s schedule to keep track of instead of two, but there are so many other important parts of our days that have nothing to do with our love lives.”