You may have seen the titles of websites claim that they have important information to share about "what men want" or "what women want". Perhaps you've even read or heard someone who claimed to know just what men and women really want. Well, I'm here to decimate the arguments for such absurd conclusions and to show that the claims themselves do not conform to reason.
All of this bullshit about "what men want" and "what women want" out of romantic and marital relationships or sex is utterly fallacious because it does not acknowledge that what one man or woman wants is not automatically synonymous with what every man or woman wants. People are individuals with subjective desires, and that is all that can be rationally concluded about the matter. What one person wants does not equate to what another wants--irrespective of gender. More fallacious yet is when misguided Christians hijack such asinine generalizations in the name of their Christian worldview, when such statements and beliefs about men and women can be found nowhere in the Bible and logic proves them fallacious at best and incorrect at worst.
I want to show a quote from an article on the website for Intellectual Takeout (or, as I sometimes call the group, Intellectual Fakeout) called Does This Viral Request for a Bride Reveal What Men Want in a Wife? The article examined an ad reportedly put out in a newspaper from a man named David Harris looking for a wife and discussed the nonexistent ramifications it has for what what the site identifies as "feminism".
"In essence, Harris’ post shows a man looking for a mate willing to pull in the harness alongside of him rather than heading down a career path which takes her away from the home front.
Such a desire, of course, is anathema to those touting feminist ideals of equality – or even superiority – of the female sex. And as Christopher Lasch explains in The Culture of Narcissism, this idea gradually begins to wear on men . . .
. . . statistics show a decided uptick in the number of young men who think it is better for a family if the husband is the breadwinner and the wife acts as the chief executive of the home and children.
Today’s society, of course, sees such a mentality as blatantly old-school and wrong-headed. But is it really? Would we see many of the rising animosities between the sexes fade if it became more acceptable for women to once again choose a career of wife, mother, and keeper of the home? Would women be happier, less stressed, and more fulfilled?
Conversely, would men be more willing to settle down, begin families, and work hard if they knew they could have a reliable partner pulling alongside them, rather than off pursuing different dreams and desires? [1]"
Guess what? Any consensus, real or alleged, is irrelevant to reality. Such a consensus as the statistics in question is just trivial and insignificant at most, or destructive and erroneous at worst. And appeals to popularity or tradition have no logical authority whatsoever. Why the damn hell don't more people seem to comprehend this?
The is nothing wrong with a man wanting a wife who assists him in his occupation. The inverse holds for a woman who wants a man to assist her in her occupation, as opposed to the other way around. Any idea that a wife exists just for the sake of helping her husband with his own subjective goals is utterly foreign to the Bible and incapable of having logical support.
I want to point out that the article also seems to throw gender equality and misandrist (misandry is hatred of men by women or oppression of men, just as misogyny is the inverse equivalent that targets women) beliefs all into the term feminism. Sure, different people may mean different things by the term. But gender equality and misandry are obviously not identical concepts! How anyone could confuse one for the other, I don't know, except to suspect that such a person has a severe deficiency of intelligence.
The Intellectual Takeout article also quotes another source claiming that women emphasizing their rights is viewed by working men as a blow to their self-respect. This is laughably invalid as the basis for a claim about gender roles, morality, or alleged differences in personality between genders, not to mention the fact that I honestly don't harbor any concern for empathizing with any appeals to emotion from a fallacious man who thinks that his wife's life and pursuits should revolve around his own arbitrary preferences and personal occupation.
By the way, there is no such thing as a single verifiable non-anatomical (example: men have penises and women don't) or non-biological (example: women give birth and men don't) "masculine" or "feminine" character or personality trait [2]. Anyone who truly seeks reason and Scripture will reject any such claims. Also, any collective behavioral differences between genders do not prove anything except at most that such behavioral differences exist--and their existence does not mean that they are the result of innate "masculinity" or "femininity". Social conditioning remains a very strong factor at the very least, as well as the possibility of a society happening to feature a multitude of individuals who happen to share the same individual traits. Besides, the very fact that people define masculinity and feminist differently shows that they don't really agree in the way that stereotypes sometimes make them out to, because they are spouting inherited beliefs or universalizing their subjective preferences.
I truly have no concern for entertaining illogical beliefs and I have no desire to take it easy on the people who espouse them. I do not care what what idea I must metaphorically trample over to reach truth. If someone's beliefs about gender roles and gender stereotypes contradict reality, then I have no reason or desire to hesitate from systematically refuting either their claims or their petty erroneous arguments.
Logic, people. It is helpful.
[1]. http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/article/does-viral-request-bride-reveal-what-men-want-wife
[2]. https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/05/on-alleged-differences-between-men-and.html
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