This little piggy went to the duckstack
The “every other week” publishing schedule continues to work better for my family, but does have the problem of much longer articles. Some guys just love to hear themselves talk, amirite?
Would you consider yourself “Duckstacked”? No? Read on. Would you consider yourself “Duckstacked”? No? Read on. Would you consider yourself “Duckstacked”? No? Read on. Would you consider yourself “Duckstacked”? No? Read on. Would you consider yourself “Duckstacked”? No? Come on. Surely by now. Okay well if you’re serious you can try reading on I guess.
NEW Duckstack Gym
The grand opening! Please adhere to the rules.
You can run, but you can’t hide. Those are the treadmill rules. Time is a flat circle. Those are the track rules. I am a human trebuchet. Those are the bench press rules. What walks on four legs in the morning, two legs in the afternoon, and three in the evening. Those are the leg press rules. curl https://duckstack.substack.com. Those are the rules for the free weights. Survival of the fittest. Those are the yoga rules. Nobody lives forever. Those are the basketball court rules.
Just check in at the desk and go to your normal gym. Its all the Duckstack Gym now1.
Sermon: The Human Element
The husband is the head of the household. The wife is the other head. Your household is growing heads at an alarming rate
In every partnered dance style I know of, the man leads and the woman follows, and with only a couple of male-abusive outliers, most marriages I've personally watched break down have featured a strong woman wearing the pants.
The ideal marriage is, probably2, one with men and women taking roles that play to their natural strengths and cover each other’s weaknesses. Women like a man who is competent, driven, and thoughtful, and men like women that are effusive, sensual, and loyal3. Not that either sex is going to necessarily be all that performant at these roles. Or even particularly happy to take those roles. If you understand the principles behind orthodoxy you can rotate those principles to your unorthodox circumstance and see dramatic improvement though. In theory.. Once you grasp the rules, you can often color outside the lines quite a bit and still make a beautiful painting.
In a recent General Conference, our apostles talked about the divine nature of “The Family: A Proclamation To The World”, a document produced by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints about 30 years ago which states marriage is between a man and a woman, gender is an eternal trait of spirits, procreation is a commandment, divorce is sin, kids should be raised correctly, sex should be kept within marriage, and so on, a whole laundry list of highly cancellable politically incorrect doctrines. It says one of men’s duties is to preside.
What it means for men to “preside” is, I think, poorly defined, and a poor definition is no definition at all. In any domain of life, a poor definition is first and foremost an excuse for inaction. Which is convenient because both women and men react strongly against the suggestion of giving men privilege over women.
The Family Proclamation itself is strongly anti-abuse. It lists abuse in tandem with breaking the law of chastity and failure to fulfill family obligations, something which I've said is also a form of abuse. But if you’re always talking about abuse abuse abuse, then I think its natural for people to come away with an oppositional message: That letting men “preside” might be more trouble than it is worth! This puts people at war with God and nature as they come to view this doctrine as an adversary to overcome rather than an ideal to strive towards or a framework to work within. In dancing, women can certainly try to lead, but they run into several constraints- The structure of “dance position” does not allow for it, as women’s grasp doesn't allow for full-body cues, the woman is shorter and not strong enough to do lifts or dips, the woman needs the man to pre-emptively be providing certain kinds of support to accomplish many moves, and keeping a huge list of possible dance steps in her head to constantly select from runs into the female “where do you want to eat” problem, to name just a few. Women do not enjoy leading4.
Women have been told by academic feminism for decades that traditional marriage is mostly a vehicle for men to abuse them. I’ve seen enough cases of abusive men to know this is absolutely a legitimate concern, far more than many of my manosphere friends give it credit for, but I also know… like quite a few non-abusive men. Like if you gave him comical tyrant levels of enslavement power over his wife , nearly every guy I know would still be nice to his her5. However I believe even if you could magically guarantee a husband would be perfectly non abusive, or even perfectly righteous, most women would still have a huge problem with the idea of “submitting” to him. This plays out immediately within the first 10 pages of the entire Book of Mormon6.
Nearly every man in the church probably feels 1 Nephi 5 on a visceral level. To believe in something so much, and your wife thinks you’re just wasting the family’s resources or worse, delusional. Husbands care about their wives, and for their wives to tell them that they are chronically untrustworthy strikes at the very core of a man’s being. Not just that his values are useless but that he also isn’t even capable of serving them; for you- the wife- are also one of his values, perhaps their most crystal representation even. Its poor form to “label” your spouse in any way, ever, but the “loser” accusation is particularly deep. You might as well cut off his balls with a physical knife. A house divided against itself cannot stand.
Christian women are usually actually fine with the idea of the husbands leading the marriage or being the head of the household. Men don’t really need to “protect” their households anymore (at least here in Utah lol) but women will say like “yeah sure, husbands should lead the family in prayer and stuff.” lead in planning family activities, lead in chores, and so on. The question I ask is: Why? Are men naturally better at calling families to prayer? Is it a respect thing? Is there a principle behind this that might generalize to more things than just the things wives find tedious?
Of course, the Family Proclamation does clarify husbands are to preside in “love and righteousness”, which means they aren’t to preside in resentment or unrighteousness, domination or compulsion, etc. But what if the husband is kind of inept, as all men are? What if you’re not sure he’s following God? How much self justification is excused by this asterisk? The common cop out to someone asking for your respect is “I’ll respect you once you’ve earned it”, which is an extremely reasonable attitude I’ve seen ruin more than one marriage.
Unlike God, the husband is flawed7, but in a utilitarian calculus you, being most intimate with him, have the most to gain from him. More than any other human except God, theoretically. So sure, as a flawed human you properly should take the husband’s ideas with a grain of salt, but in this framework there should be a causal effect on your orientation: Out of everyone, your husband’s opinion should matter the most, before others. That when some external idea major or minor puts you at odds with your husband you should double check the world’s work first, not him. He actually cares about you, and random meme morality of the world does not. In this perspective, the idea of a woman “submitting” to a husband is more about loyalty, or more specifically it is about avoiding the insidiousness of “familiarity breeding contempt”. Those you are close to should be the least taken for granted, not the most.
If we buy that “objectification” of people is wrong, it follows that treating the husband as merely a workhorse (or for some couples, a wallet) violates the principle of respect. In some ways, giving the husband authority works as a form of payment, or a “check” against unbalancing the relationship. For certainly responsibilities without power is the definition of a slave. Its a “technique” to keep the husband from feeling used.
What we’re trying to avoid here is feminism, the female-led failure state of marriage. I have seen many marriages where the woman legitimately does “know what’s best.” Men are doofuses about a lot of things. This leads to her railroading her husband, who now feels like he has no freedom and has given up on all the boyish things he cares about in life just to serve this girl in hopes of getting sex or admiration sometimes. In a correct marriage, both spouses are sacrificing and working for each others happiness instead of their own, so that both can gain more happiness than they could have achieved singly.
I’m off track. Returning to marital duties. The word “preside” is secularly defined as:
Exercising guidance, direction, or control
Being in a state of authority or prominence
Moderating
So you can see, its not just about ordering women around. The Bible does say wives should “submit” to their husbands (the KJV, anyway) which is I think where that idea comes from, but for the husband’s role outlined here, this seems a little more like “principal counselor”. Its a little more like the role of a therapist, priest, or the role God himself plays in our lives. Certainly the prophet “presides” over the church. But he doesn’t do this through micromanaging. As members we “submit” to him all the same. But I would say, few Latter-Day Saint women are willing to “follow your husband” the way we “follow the prophet.”
Technically, the Greek does not use the word “submit”. How the greek puts it is: “wives should have the same relation to their husbands as the husband has to the Lord.” This is probably a higher standard, but is a little clearer on what the ideal orientation should be, because its fairly easy to mentally model an ideal disciple of the church. Be ye converted to your husbands. If this is the correct interpretation, then the problems are much more straightforward. When I sustain the brethren in church, I’m not pledging to be their slaves, I’m pledging to make their burdens easier, and this doesn’t at all preclude me both having, and expressing, reservations about church doctrine or policy or any such thing like that. I don’t even have to obey other than major things like chastity. You can even reject callings outright. Members of the church are very free in this respect. We don’t have papal infallibility.
As with most feminist arguments, the objection is less about any particular case and more about a desire to preserve a degree of Freedom In Case Of Emergency. Basically the same logic you get when you say “should we outlaw divorce?” Its pre-rational, but it comes from a real place. Since the sexual revolution, the law has been modified and the law now prevents the vast majority of bad men from ever facing consequence for their actions. Most people do not know that adultery is not acceptable material in a custody argument. I would say, If women were in more frequent contact with the punishment of wicked men, perhaps the idea that every traditional marriage might hide a lurking demon could be discarded, or at least somewhat abated.
Even so, I think men are not appreciated in modern culture. They are more seen as defective women, and this presents a barrier to more marriages than I’m comfortable with. A common cry of feminism is “women don’t need men!” I do not believe this. I believe men need women, and women need men, and religiously I believe it is impossible for either to be exalted to godhood singly. What does fathers day mean to any man in the church? Well, I haven’t actually done a survey. But I have seen society without men and it doesn’t look good.
Women enjoy getting mad about politics as much as anyone, but women do not enjoy doing detailed research on every candidate choice before voting and so on.
Mothers are somewhat more fickle in disciplining kids than Fathers- kids raised by single mothers often become neurotic from unstable enforcement; they grow up feeling like the way the world works is not predictable
Women are much more sensitive to peer pressure (one or more standard deviations, if I recall8), so husbands “leading” can provide a check against “bad memes”. (this trait conversely means women are significantly better at providing cultural stability within a household. The problem is that external/worldly forces consistently exert pressure to drive marriages apart)
Women that achieve majority in organizations tend not to attempt to stay faithful to the original mission. You can observe this in the decline of exterior liberal churches that begun ordaining women to their respective priesthoods. The softening of doctrine leads to a freefall in church attendance. There have to my knowledge been no exceptions to this in any denomination where attendance records are public.
Men require responsibility to grow up. A generation of men who have not owned things has led to a dramatic wave of immaturity that has caused countless heartache and destruction. Giving men “leadership” has a strong correlation with mitigating the bachelor problem.
In conclusion, I would say men’s call to leadership is by divine design. Its requisite to the top functioning of both men and women. I think individual men and women have different needs, and for any given couple learning the ideal balance of sacrifice to service is probably the journey of a lifetime, but I think it makes both men and women better for it.
Trade Goods: Some Rights Are More Equal Than Others
We’re tired of talking about equal rights. Its time to talk about equal wrongs
Bennett’s Phylactery writes about the end of the liberal experiment, and why politics has become so dramatically polarized through an examination of case law and culture. Many people do not really believe in the constitution anymore, but the loss of the framework that upheld that constitution was a process of deterioration over decades.
This case law, taken together, effectively bans public expression of right wing ideas (all of which create Hostile Work Environments by suggesting policies that would by definition inflict a Disparate Impact on one protected class or another).
To make it more concrete: I know a former Assistant Attorney General who was fired for privately-expressed right-wing opinions, expressly because those opinions exposed the state to liability under US civil rights law.
No such liability is created when Jay Jones expresses a desire to murder white children — and that fact alone should be enough to disabuse anyone (who is paying attention) of their Moderate Liberal Consensus beliefs about the nature of the American state.
Read the rest here:
Tongue Twisters
things to say five times fast
She shells she shells by the she shore
bloody mary bloody mary
The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dogs
I am a beautiful human unit
Big Brother cares about me
I have to subscribe to The Duckstack9
History
Note: Due to developing concerns, the “toddler” shall now be referred to as “the kid” and our baby shall now be referred to as “the toddler”
The kid is trying out his horror stories. He tells us there’s a pumpkin monster in our wall. THAT DOESNT TELL JOKES.
He also tells us his food is scared. Scared of what? Of me eating it.
He’s adopted the habit of talking to himself in third person. To himself: “Do you need to go potty? Yes, I am on my way!”
“dad do you have cool.” I guess so kiddo
Fun fact: “eating fire burns our tongues”
My wife went to step out during church to go to the bathroom or something only to be stopped by little hands on her belly: “um, my dad needs you to stay where he can see you.”
Last one from him, he accused my wife of getting the shower mirror all wet because it was fogged up due to the steam. So my wife trying to teach him is like “Well that’s not from a splash that’s steam” and he climbs up onto the sink, drags his finger across the mirror, and shows it to her. “Look. There was water underneath the white. I was right, and you were wrong.” he did not have to go that hard
The toddler has this thing where she will bring you her sippy cups and hand them to you and expect you to drop what you’re doing to hand feed her
Ducksnax
Sprinkler
this is how we get around zoning regulations
Roll a dice, if its 2 or below do the opposite of everything I say
It occurs to me that many will think “oh loyalty just means not divorcing him”. That is absolutely extremely high priority to modern men (just ask nearly any of them) but if you picture a more medieval definition of loyalty it becomes apparent that there could be a lot more to it.
They want you to want what they want, which is reasonable, since you want her to want what you want (sexually)
As a deeper example, the desire of men to make their wives orgasm during sex is so strong many (promiscuous) women learn to fake climax to make the man happy. A healthy man’s deepest desire is for his wife to just, be happy with him.
In the ~500 pages of the Book of Mormon, it mentions approximately 8 women. These women run an extremely diverse spectrum of female archetypes, but each are startlingly lifelike, which I believe is a strong evidence Joseph Smith did not write the Book of Mormon. Most fantasy doesn’t at all portray such realistic relationships.
citation needed
Salesmen are taught to try to talk to women if possible
This is only for illustration, you do not actually have to subscribe to The Duckstack. You only have to say it.