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Notes -
Trouble in Paradise
A guilty hobby of mine is to follow up with the trad dating scene. Not so much the 'Real Housewives of Alaska' style, but in a more terminally online way where various trad talking heads air out their honest opinions on substack or X that then turn out to be dirty laundry to the opposite sex.
A part of the draw to this is the fact that outside of explicit gender warriors, a lot of the online right has ceded ground to the idea that traditionalism is the way to fight against the modern gender war. We need forgiveness and to look at the broader picture. 'The opposite sex can not be your adversary', 'we are in an age of strife and suffering' and so on.
That sounds good on paper. What are things like in practice?
A Dating Crisis in the Orthodox Church? A Woman's Perspective. Archived link.
tl;dr: A Church going Orthodox woman voices a complaint as old as time: The men aren't good enough. They need to step up.
Let's see the results:
Now... This all feels awfully familiar. Hanging a cross over our problems didn't make any of them go away. People who flock to a place that promises solution to their issues, usually have issues to be solved! It's clear that Traditionalism does not neutralize ordinary mating-market dynamics.
Yeah. But great men and women don't need a church to get together, though. That's kind of baked into what makes them great. They also meet and make families living as radical left/liberal/progressives, for example.
It feels as if the Traditionalist sphere did not have many solutions to any problems. The initial thrust of 'we must rally behind the cause!' similar to other slogans like 'workers of the world unite!' sound good to those who buy into the group pathology, who implicitly believe that we could solve every issue if everyone was but sufficiently devoted to the cause. But there's a seeming lack of realism to what the problems actually are and how one can solve them outside of a faith based cultural revolution, which the author of the article proposes:
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country!
The contradiction here seems clear enough. People who have their stuff together don't need any of this. Confident, socially adept well put together men with good jobs and a vision for the future, as desired by the author, are not going to spend their time wallowing around an Orthodox commune filled with incels being bossed around by babushkas. It's just ridiculous to expect successful well adjusted people to saddle themselves with such things in the modern world. Same goes for well put together women that know how to attract men. The real world operates on a 9-5.
Now, that might definitely be to our overall detriment. A key issue with modernity is a lack of real world communities, of course. But a community of needy weaklings is largely what the church has become and it has not made it stronger. And more pertinently, real world communities fall apart in modernity for a variety of reasons. Saying that they would be good to have, which is most likely true, isn't doing much to solve that problem.
This entire thing feels like a giant knot of contradictions and conflicting interests. Much like... nay, exactly like the old gender war. There's a reason why the 'Based Pastors' are doling out "weird" repackaged Red Pill material to try and meet the needs of young men. There's a reason why this woman is regurgitating utopian communalism and anti-red pill platitudes in an attempt at finding men who meet modern standards. Both might very well be correct in their observations. But it's clear they are not seeing eye to eye.
Edit:
I said I was not into this topic for the 'Real Housewives of Alaska' dynamic, but I wanted to see why the article got deleted. Turns out our author deleted the article and much of her online presence after it was alleged that she was sending men nudes. Well... I guess she can now better focus on praying for a husband.
Articles like this can be really interesting windows into small subcommunities, but they aren't really a replacement for broader data, which does show that faithful religious attendance does correlate with a lot of modernity-resistant behaviors. (For instance, Haidt found that practicing religious teens handled the onset of smart phones well compared to irreligious ones, even if they were still negatively affected.) So reading this and drawing the conclusion that religion doesn't in fact have good effects that protect against modernity is wrong.
I don't think it's all that original of an insight to say that in real life the modernity-resisting "trad wives" aren't wearing long dresses and posting shots of themselves in fields on social media, right now if they aren't asleep, they are probably wearing jeans and a t-shirt and cleaning up some sort of bodily excrement or cooking food. They may not conceive of themselves as "trad wives" at all, they go to an nondenominational, Baptist, or Catholic church and probably not a particularly "trad' one, listen to podcasts and contemporary music, have an iPhone, enjoy watching Marvel movies, and probably do not live on a farm. They might not particularly feel like they are winning the battle against modernity now, but over the long run they are having more kids, longer, happier marriages, and a more satisfying life precisely because they aren't posting glamor shots or snippy Substack posts.
However, I do think this post highlights a potentially real problem: people turning to "trad Christianity" (or any other religious practice) because they want to post about it on Twitter or Substack or because they want to find a hot wife/tolerable husband and not because it's true, looking to get something out of it for themselves first, probably aren't going to find what they are looking for, and they're likely going to undermine whatever community they are going to be a part of. I'm not saying religious groups can't work with these types: they can and they should. But it makes one wonder if the future of religion is more gatekeeping, not less.
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