Thou Shalt Not Criticise Women

I listen to and read podcasts, blogs and news sites from a variety of perspectives. From hardcore atheists and liberals such as P.Z. Meyer's Pharyngula to secular humanists, scientific skeptics, libertarians and religious right wingers. One person on the right I greatly respect is called Dennis Prager. I do not agree with everything he says but he speaks a lot of truth on many issues including issues pertaining to men and women.

Dennis Prager wrote a two part column recently that set the feminist blogosphere alight with indignation. I want to retell this event to you as it is an important illustration of the reaction one can receive when they take an oppositional stance to feminism.

His column is a two parter called "When a Woman Isn't in the Mood" (part 1 part 2). I shall read you a couple of opening paragraphs in order to set the tone.

The subject is one of the most common problems that besets marriages: the wife who is "not in the mood" and the consequently frustrated and hurt husband.

There are marriages with the opposite problem — a wife who is frustrated and hurt because her husband is rarely in the mood. But, as important and as destructive as that problem is, it has different causes and different solutions, and is therefore not addressed here. What is addressed is the far more common problem of "He wants, she doesn't want."

It is an axiom of contemporary marital life that if a wife is not in the mood, she need not have sex with her husband. Here are some arguments why a woman who loves her husband might want to rethink this axiom.

At the end of part 1 he writes:

I conclude Part I with this clarification: Everything written here applies under two conditions: 1. The woman is married to a good man. 2. She wants him to be a happy husband. If either condition is not present, nothing written here matters. But if you are a woman who loves your husband, what is written here can be the most important thing you will read concerning your marriage. Because chances are the man you love won't tell you.

Allow me to summarise. In these two columns Dennis Prager presents the argument that a wife who cares about having a happy husband rethinks the idea that if she is not in the mood then that means she must not have sex. Prager shines a light on the differences between men and women, sex is far more important to men than it is to women and that a man knows his wife loves him by the fact that she has sex with him. Does mood always determine our actions? No. Are you always in the mood to get up and go to work in the morning? Are you ever in the mood to get up in the night and feed the baby? Take out the trash? Sometimes we have obligations to do things that we don't feel like doing because they lead to good consequences down the road. Prager mentions that, of course, there are times when this advice is inappropriate. It is general marital advice and I agree with it.

Let's see what many feminists had to say about this.

Our first stop is the blog pandagon.net, and a post written by Jesse Taylor. Entitled "Shit you shouldn't say". Where the very first paragraph is:

Dennis Prager says that marital rape is a-okay:

Taylor is not lying here. He truly believes that in an example like Prager illustrates, where a woman isn't in the mood but makes the decision on her own to have sex with her husband is rape. What feminists believe about rape as compare to what most normal people believe is very worrying, most people would agree that it is forced sex one an obviously non-consenting person. The dictionary definition is replete with words like "force", "violent seizure" and "violation.

What Jesse Taylor is actually proposing is that in a situation where a man wants to have sex with his wife and he indicates this need and she although not feeling in the mood has sex with him, is an instance of rape.

What a loving sense of marriage in the 21st century.

I hope that all married men who are listening to this are sure that their wife was in the mood for one hundred percent of the times you had sex, because you're a rapist in the eyes of the feminists otherwise.

For all the women who are listening to this, I have a question. How do you feel about this? That the movement that supposedly represents you as a woman wants to infantilise you to the point where your own decisions are irrelevant?

Taylor's characterisation of Prager as a rape advocate is disgusting and wrong. But maybe it is a one off? We continue…

The next stop is feministing.com with a post by Jessica Valenti called "Dennis Prager: Nothing says "I love you" like marital rape".

Written in Valenti's own juvenile style, she rarely stops blockquoting enough people to write any original material. But here is some of what she says:

It takes a certain je ne sais quoi to unabashedly argue in favor[sic] of marital rape. Of course columnist Dennis Prager doesn't call it that. No no, he prefers to use some sort of bizarre high school logic about how ladies who really love their man will "give her body" on demand.

There is a lesson here about people who have become radicalised filter what they read or see though a dogmatic belief system and re-translate the result and then hold that to be reality. Valenti's comments bear so little relation to what I read in Prager's article that either she mistakenly read something else, is so deep in the fetid pool of fundamentalism as to be unamenable to genuine reflection or change or she didn't read it at all. I suspect the latter.

Our next stop is jezebel.com with a post written by "Megan" called "Conservative Dennis Prager Knows It's Not Rape If His Wife "Submits""

The first paragraph reads:

Conservative pundit and marital rape apologist Dennis Prager has some advice for you ladies with faltering marriages: don't think that just because you don't want to have sex your husband shouldn't try to fuck you.

Again, this bears no relation to reality. At this point I must apologise for the profanity in this piece. I thought, initially, that I would try to mask it but I think it is important to realise how the people on these blogs write about people they disagree with.

The feminist blogs are characterised by their vacuity, indecency and sheepish dedication to radicalism. Is there a more reasonable critique? Yes, in fact there is. Ed Brayton's skeptical blog "Dispatches from the culture wars" featured a post on Prager's column called "Prager: Just Lay There and Take It". Brayton stays away from analogising Dennis Prager to a rape advocate, which I am happy to see, but he has still re-interpreted reality in places by claiming things such as:

…married women should always have sex even if they're not in the mood to do so.

This is not true, in fact Prager specifically says that in certain instances his advice is inappropriate.

All the onus is on women, whom he wrongly presumes want sex less than men.

Are we to presume that both sexes, who are biologically different, want sex in equal measures. Anyone I know from the real world would agree that men have a higher sex drive than women do, are more visually stimulated and have sex drives that drop off at a lesser rate than women's do. Yet Brayton brays at such un-progressive views of human sexuality, he is operating from theory instead and let's not let reality intrude.

The most important part of this statement is the first part, where Brayton states that "all the onus in on woman" this is true, for this particular article. I suspect that none of these writers actually listen to Dennis Prager's radio show. I do. And I can tell you that he has plenty of criticism for men as well.

I'm sure that they would all nod in appreciation when at one time on his show he lambasted husbands who go to sleep immediately after sex. He said that husbands who do this should stay awake, holding and kissing their wives after sexual intercourse has finished. And I agree with that. After all, you might not want to do it, you might want to go to sleep immediately. However, because you don't feel in the mood doesn't mean you shouldn't do it, because you show her that you love her by doing so and a happy wife leads to a happy home. Would feminists argue with that? I doubt so.

What ruffles these people's feathers the most is the fact that Prager's article is an unaffronted criticism of women. And that it actually places responsibilities and obligations upon them, the horror! The writers seem to be tied up in knots of anguish that Prager doesn't have qualifying language at every step that criticises men in equal order. Such an article would be bloated, boring and would lose all semblance of meaning. I've noticed that the feminists themselves don't mind writing articles and blog posts that singularly criticise men above women.

Download the episode of the "pendulum effect" podcast that this piece appears in.