Keeping them contented with nothing
by digby
I knew about Emo-core and lately, Emo-prog (unfortunately.) But until today I didn't know about "Emo-porn" which is apparently wreaking havoc on decent Real Americans' relationships. Via Rightwing Watch, here's Focus on the Family blowing the lid off the latest threat to marriage:
Loneliness strikes at the heart of both husbands and wives, but tends to plunge deeper into the emotional expanse of women. This is one reason why wives are seduced by “emo-porn,” virtual infidelity that is more emotionally satisfying before it physically pleases. But like salt water, it creates a worsening thirst. With emo-porn, fantasy men perform stunningly between the sheets of conversation, emotional understanding, and emotional dexterity. Most mortal men cannot deliver such behavior, the way men do in soap operas and romance novels. Just as wives rightly complain when compared to the artificially created women of Internet porn, men should complain when compared to the artificial men of daytime television. Interesting, isn’t it, how they have such exciting jobs—no Joe The Plumbers. In the real world where real men burn through a lot of emotional battery life to make a real living, being expected to behave like men who don’t exist is more than wrong. It’s cruel.
Emo-porn creates caricatures in the minds and hearts of wives. Most men just aren’t and cannot be that attentive, especially in marriage where responsibilities to provide weigh heavy upon them. Husbands are quietly deemed unresponsive and uncaring when compared to emotionally dexterous hunks of daytime lore, chat rooms, celebrity rags, and romance novels. Thus a secretive and snowballing form of marital discontent is born and nurtured.
You can see the problem. Of course women enjoying stories about men who care what they have to say and think is bound to make them feel discontented with the selfish, domineering boors they're married to. It's telling, however, that this poor fellow seems completely unaware of the major fantasy these stories deliver: good sex. I'm imagining that it's because he doesn't recognize the sort of activities that please the ladies between the sheets --- and is confused by the sorts of things the ladies do to the gentlemen as well. (Not that any of it is beyond the straightest white bread sex by normal people's standards.) He just saw all that talk, talk, talk and assumed that it was a bunch of chicks dreaming about a fantasy man who knows how to do laundry, when they are actually getting off on a fantasy man who knows how to do them.
Poor girls. These men (and their church lady lieutenants) are so afraid of sexual equality, they won't even allow their women a People magazine or a Romance novel because it makes them feel inadequate and weakens the institution of marriage. But then Christian Right marriages must be very weak already. Just about everything threatens them.
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