Communication & sex hacks
A bitter truth for many is…you can be happily married to a faithful spouse for your entire life.
“But do you know the divorce rate and how often women initiate the divorce and how if you were skydiving you wouldn’t take that risk and so on and so forth.”
Yeah man, we do.
But many men are still happily married to a faithful wife, and more can be added to their number.
Men are designed to give their strength to a woman because a good wife is a strength-magnifier. The man is the house-builder; the woman the home-maker. She takes that house and she appoints it and furnishes it, until it becomes a home: a place of rest and comfort and hospitality.
The man is the supplier; the woman the refiner. She takes the raw materials that he provides through the sweat of his brow—whether food, or cloth, or money, or whatever else—and returns them as a good meal, a fine garment, or some other resource of greater value.
This is most exemplified in child-bearing itself, where she takes her man’s seed into her, and returns it to him as an offspring and an inheritance.
Understanding this is key to improving your marriage in all kinds of ways. For example, it directly connects to how men and women think and communicate—and when you grok this, it will make intentionally building a stronger relationship much simpler. Marriages get stronger when wives don’t expect their husbands to think/act like women, and husbands don’t expect their wives to think/act like men.
Many marriages have trouble because of underlying androgynous assumptions here.
Men tend to speak in shorter, linear, and direct patterns, with the goal of communicating specific information. Women, on the other hand, tend to speak in longer, circular, and indirect patterns, with the goal of holistic communication.
In other words, for men it is about the explicit content; for women it is about the implicit context.
Men tend to think that the entire purpose of the conversation is to exchange information that moves us towards some action. This is because we are made to be outward-oriented, subduing the world. So we’re always looking for the punchline.
But for women, many conversations simply have the purpose of enriching the relationship through shared experience. This is because women are made to be inward-oriented, establishing social bonds. So the conversation is the punchline.
Communication in marriage gets much better when each sex acknowledges the differences in how and why they talk.
But it’s not the only thing. Sex gets better too.
Here’s a teaser of our most recent Tyrannus Hall panel on this topic:
Men have a tendency to apply their direct, efficient, goal-oriented conversational strategy to the marriage bed. Hence, a linear approach.
Women have a tendency to apply their indirect, inefficient relational-enriching conversational strategy to the marriage bed. Hence, a circular approach.
For men, sex is about releasing the sexual tension that is easily “dammed up” within them. For women, sex is about building up the sexual tension to achieve a release.
Women take 5–10× longer to orgasm than men; just like they take a lot longer to “get to the point” in conversation. Embracing this as a fact of nature allows the man lead/steer her to deep connection and trust with his headship. And improve their sex.
New members get access to all previous panel recordings. If you’d like to join the Hall, sign up here.
Understanding the differences between male and female design is also important to raising boys who will build up and reform society, rather than tearing it down further—even if unintentionally.
Intemperate men pose a very real danger to society. Especially at the moment because there are so many of them.
There is a reason that “boys don’t cry” was once an important part of preparing boys for manhood. Males are both more powerful and aggressive than their female counterparts. We have a greater potential for violence and destruction. Therefore, it is crucial that young men learn how to master their emotions.
Men must know how to keep a cool head when calm turns to chaos all around them.
Men must know how to defuse or redirect their anger towards something constructive.
Men must practice emotional restraint.
If men are to be leaders, they must be temperate (1 Timothy 3:2, Titus 2:2).
There is a place to weep. Jesus wept.
And there is a place for anger. Jesus overturned tables.
But there is no place for whining, moping, bitching, sulking, or having a tantrum.
Men must be taught the difference and live accordingly. More emotive men will mean more destruction. Not less.
So many men are apprehensive about pushing down hard on the gas pedal, because they’re afraid they might actually succeed—and then everyone will discover that they’re a fraud.
This is sometimes referred to as “imposter syndrome.” It’s especially prevalent among the unfathered.
It plagued us both in our 20s through 30s.
But we slowly realized that it was just a mixture of pride, and the fear of men.
What’s the answer?
It’s simple. If you are a believer, you are beloved by God despite your many shortcomings and sins. You have God’s approval. So get over yourself.
Think less about yourself and more about your Father’s mission.
You’ve been saved by grace and not your perfect performance. And yet you were “created in Christ Jesus for good works.” There is work to be done. Few of us measure up to our “hype,” but even fewer step up to the plate.
So go big. Push the pedal to the metal. God can draw straight lines with crook sticks. He’ll work through your imperfect efforts.
T.D. Roosevelt said it well:
It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.
From Tyrannus Hall: #
[Name Withheld]
I’m not sure if this is the right place to ask or not but how do you guys deal with conspiracy theories in the church? By that I mean things like flat eartherism, geocentricism, and the host of political conspiracy theories like the stuff around Trump earlier this year.
[Goring Stallion]
Press them on what practical benefit the information has provided them.
“So what have you started doing differently since you found that out?”
The right posture is not “you’re wrong about that” but instead “unless I can actually act on this information in a concrete way, then I don’t really care.” Inevitably there is no actual action involved, except maybe “raising awareness” which is a fancy way of saying talking about it while doing nothing. Most conspiracy stuff is really just a form of entertainment.
[Michael Foster]
For example, this happened this weekend:
“Pastor Michael, God revealed to me the woman I’m suppose to marry.”
That’s interesting. First catch me up on how the job search is coming."
Weird stuff is usually a way to coverup failures or justify that lack of acceptance by the powers-that-be or the local Christian community. Just pivot the conversation to the real issues whenever possible.
New content this week: #
The final version of our book is finished, and handed over to Canon Press.
You might think, who needs another book on biblical sexuality? Sure.
Except…our book doesn’t refute feminism. That’s already been done.
We spend very little time addressing the issue of women pastors or careerism. That too has already been done.
Matter of fact, those seem to be the only issues most complementarians want to talk about. It was our judgment that a complementarian v. egalitarian paradigm for addressing sexuality is a foolish and reductive one.
It’s a losing paradigm.
Our goals with our book were twofold:
Shift the nature of conversation into a broader and more biblical frame. Hence, we talk a lot about:
Good and evil manifestations of patriarchy
How Satan plays the sexes against each other
How androgyny is the actual enemy of our time
help men understand and live out the goodness of their God-given masculine design. Hence, we talk a lot about:
The goodness of a properly-ordered sex drive, ambition, and desire for a tribe
How to get unstuck and overcome fatherlessness
Practical steps to developing a godly, masculine mission for your life
We hadn’t seen a book out there that did this, so we decided to write It’s Good to be a Man. We aimed for a timely book, not a timeless one. Here’s the table of contents:
*It’s Good To Be A Man: How Clueless Bastards Can Start Taking Dominion As Sons Of God *
Foreword
Chapter 1: The War Between Patriarchies
Chapter 2: Masculinity Is Very Good
Chapter 3: Sex Is Very Good
Chapter 4: The War on Sex
Chapter 5: Spiritual War & Spiritual Worship
Chapter 6: Toxic Sexuality
Chapter 7: The Church Effeminate
Chapter 8: No Father, No Manhood
Chapter 9: No Gravitas, No Manhood
Chapter 10: Gravitas Through Duty
Chapter 11: How To Bear The Weight
Chapter 12: Manhood Through Mission
Chapter 13: The Necessity of Fraternity
Chapter 14: The Excellence of Marriage
Afterword
You’ll be the first to know when the book is available for order.
Notable: #
Religious exemption forms for covid vaccines – Gab News. We haven’t validated this, but Torba says, “The Full Document is everything necessary for a US Army Soldier to submit a religious exemption request to his immediate commander, with only certain portions needing to be edited to include your name, unit, and details.” Also seems to cover civilians in any other job.
An Introduction to Vaccine Passport Defiance | Doug Wilson - YouTube.
Joe Rogan & Jonathan Haidt - Social Media is Giving Kids Anxiety. The title doesn’t do the discussion justice. Includes mind-boggling stats, like the 184% increase in self-harm with girls in the 10-14 year age bracket since social media became ubiquitous.
The challenge of church leadership is maintaining the careful tension between:
Authority and Accountability
Transparency and Privacy
Counsel and Liberty
There are a thousand ways to get it wrong, and only a few ways to get it right. Lately, David Platt at McLean Bible Church has been demonstrating an especially obvious way to get it wrong. Aaron Renn breaks down the power politics that are going on there, and A.D. Robles exposes Platt’s big lie with mountains of evidence. The quote of how Platt answers a direct, explicitly yes/no question is a paradigm example of how false shepherds talk. Bnonn saw this repeatedly with Ryan Vinten, the pastor of Trinity Reformed Baptist in Hamilton, NZ.
Culture war:
Talk again next week,
Bnonn & Michael