So today I finally realised that women and men are blaming one another for systemic issues

I’m trying to work out how to correctly phrase this: I mean that women are blaming men and men are blaming women…This post is (still) in very rough state, as these ideas have literally just occurred to me.

So once again I have stolen some time from my daily routine to write this post…I guess this is the way it works, some posts have been stewing over in my mind, and I will be procrastinating about finally typing them out, then I will read or watch something which compels me to write a post right there and then. Which is what I am doing now!
[A means to an end or an end in itself? How are you preparing for marriage?]

So I have been watching a few videos about “decentering” men. [I’ve seen that term written down so many times lately that I instinctively spelled it the US way – oops!] And so many women are saying in essence what I have been saying for years:  they are not turning down the idea of a man altogether, but a man has to prove his worth to make it worth their while to embark upon a relationship.  Since I have been saying literally the same thing, you’d think that I would be in agreement with this. And I am! All the same though, it got me thinking…actually it combined with some thoughts that were just hovering at the periphery of my mind, starting to take shape, and this is what I have realised:
So I have been watching videos created by women essentially ranting, just like I do, about their various travails in relationships, and I have also been watching videos “from the other side”, as it were, talking about male loneliness, the fact that so many men are single, far more than women (!) and also the fact that many men seem to be dropping out of society altogether… and so this finally occurred to me, and actually I don’t know how I managed not to see this for so long, it is just so obvious! In fact, I think I did see it, I just have not been able to pull the different strands together like I hope to do in this post:

These issues which mean that women are ranting about men, and men are also dropping out of society or foregoing relationships, are all systemic.  They are all symptoms of our society and frankly they are all expressions of the cancer that is capitalism or rather profiteering. The term “capitalism” is confusing because it means different things to different people. Some people use capitalism to mean any system of private ownership, ie as opposed to communism. When I say capitalism, when I decry capitalism, I mean the avaricious, profiteering and greedy system of making money by trying to make a profit off of each transaction.  What it means in practice is this: say that you are a completely uncapitalistic person and you just want to live your life in peace, which I imagine is what most of us would be naturally. In an uncapitalistic world where people are not driven by the profit motive, your landlord might offer you a home at cost price or just over.  The price of rent would remain stable year on year, maybe rising slightly, but in a way that is closely linked to inflation. Transport is linked to cost price.  You know what has just occurred to me literally just now as I have been typing this out?  Living in this sort of world would not necessarily mean that everyone could afford everything, even everything that they need. What it would mean is that life is stable. You know what you can afford, you stick to it, you can either accept your lot in life or you can work to improve it. Because they are not constantly working just to afford their current life, many people would have the time, energy and money to invest in education, or doing their business etc, hoping to move up through that.

In our world though, where people are constantly chasing a profit motive, even if you are an uncapitalistic person, the fact that your landlord is trying to make as much money as possible from their property empire means that rents are constantly increasing, in a way that is not necessarily consistent or predictable, and in a way that is definitely not tracked to wages.  This has been happening for years, and somehow people have managed to keep on top of it. However, from all the YouTube videos I have been watching I believe we have now reached a point where ordinary people simply cannot afford it any longer. And because rent is a basic and unavoidable component of life for those who do not have a mortgage, even those renters who are uncapitalistic then need to go out and similarly adopt an attitude of trying to make as much money as possible for the sake of paying their rent, plus transport and food and all the other essential aspects of life which are also increasing in.  In practice this means that many people are having to dedicate more and more time to mere survival. So, many people have full time jobs, but also have side hustles.  I see so many YouTube videos about how to easily make money, because it is a constant preoccupation for all of us!

So this is a systemic issue. This is how it affects relationships: time and stress.
Women are complaining that men are not “putting in the work”, that is, that they are not investing enough time into their own selves, OR the necessary effort into the relationship. Well it takes time to invest effort into relationships. Meanwhile many men are saying “OK, well we don’t need you either!”, and often too complaining that women hare unrealistic expectations. Perhaps it is also true to say that men carry internalised financial stress associated with their culturally prescribed role as the “provider”, meaning that they simply do not have the necessary headspace to invest into working on themselves? Perhaps as women we fail to appreciate just how acute this stress is for men? If people are living in survival mode, then they might know that they are not giving their best, they might be aware of their shortcomings, but they might decide not to beat themselves up. From other other side, women consistently shoulder more of the day to day effort for running homes and families.  This has always been challenging, but the time pressures of capitalism make this even worse. So you are a woman, you are struggling to keep everything running, and you keep appealing to your husband for support. But you feel that he is not being sufficiently responsive or pulling his weight while your life just gets more and more stressful.  Eventually you get to the point where you feel sufficiently fed up to leave. And that is the point that many of the women in the videos I have been watching found themselves at.  But I thought to myself: “Surely men themselves are not inherently worse than they were twenty, thirty, forty years ago.”  So it must be something else that is making so many modern marriages seemingly intolerable.

Additionally both partners have lost social support structures, once again largely due to capitalism, as the people in the support circles themselves face their own time pressures and need to dedicate more time to working.  These support structures would have helped to reduce the pressure felt by each partner in the marriage by offering support, or giving a safe place to vent. But as time becomes more pressurised for all of us, now we are also becoming more critical of our friendships too, myself included, and demanding that like our romantic relationships, our friendships also have to be “worth our while”. This transactional attitude then causes the erosion of many of these support networks which in my experience often sprung out from non-transactional commitments to love trust and sacrifice. So capitalism is making us all more isolated from one another and frustrated with one another, and our friendships are growing increasingly transactional. And we are all often blaming one another, rather than the structure of society which is actually causing much of the problem. [Writing this paragraph I have finally realised something about my university experience that I was never able to even identify, much less articulate. I tried so hard to make friends with people there, but it was like I just did not get it; how to fit in, how to speak their language. Now I realise what I did not get: their attitude to friendships was deeply transactional whereas I had the privilege of coming from a real community. This was a posh university so many of these people had money. However, other than 4 people I honestly could not tell you who had money versus who did not. However this was an early lesson in the way rich people or aspiring rich people interact with one another – little true sincerity, repeating socially accepted platitudes. Honestly “fashion” went beyond what people wore, and also prescribed the way people spoke, their favourite exclamations. In fact, it was far, far more about the way people spoke than about clothing. I’m so glad I managed to go through all that without losing myself. If I am honest it was never really made available to me, but I sincerely did not even understand it to start with.  When I was desperately trying – and failing – to make friends at university, I did not realise that the fact that I come from real, loving community was actually an expression of my own privilege. With the passage of time I have come to see that actually, in so many ways, especially my faith, I was the one who was truly privileged at university, despite my then financially precarious background and being so broke at university.]

You know there is a pastor that I have been thinking about for a while. This is not going to turn into a rant – I promise! I was so disappointed by what I experienced at his church, and since I left that church I just have not been able to think favourably about him at all. But then today for the first time it occurred to me that this man was doing his best within the [weak, unreliable, unbiblical] structures of modern church life. The thing is, no-one is perfect, except Jesus. Even the Apostles Paul, Peter etc – none of them were perfect. Well the socially accepted structures for modern church life within this bloodsucking context of rapacious capitalism may as well have been designed to magnify any pastor’s existing weaknesses. In the New Testament, the church in Jerusalem was presided over by a board of elders. The other churches in other cities such as the ones Paul wrote to would often have been a lot smaller. For instance, there is a reference to Chloe “and the church that meets in her house.”, indicating that some churches were small enough to be contained in someone’s house.
In our days, a single pastor tends to take responsibility for a church, and some of these churches can be so big,with thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of members. This then creates a lot of stress for that one person, especially when set in our capitalistic society. So even if you were well-meaning as a pastor, the set up means that the focus on you is magnified, and all your flaws are more visible for anyone to see and there is more stress on you as an individual where in the new Testament that stress would have been spread out among several people. Because of capitalism and the need to financially survive within this capitalistic context practically every single pastor I have been aware of within the last twenty years or so has been utterly preoccupied with money.  They are constantly preaching about money, asking for money, and you know what, whether they deliberately mean to or not, they start deferring to people who give more money to the church, or even people who appear to give more money. And that was my sad experience with this particular pastor. He let his heart and his judgement get skewed by financial considerations, because it is practically impossible not to.

Because these issues are systemic, it would take real effort for someone to break out of them.  So the kind of man who does put in the necessary work is increasingly likely to be an outlier.