Friday, March 15, 2024

A Bit Suspicious That "Heavenly Tourism" Confirms Everything We Already Believe

A comic showing a man in a devil outfit at the gates of heaven. He says, "Sorry about this - I died at a costume party." Image source.

Anyone remember the whole "heavenly tourism" fad?

A few years ago, some "heavenly tourism" stories started popping up. Books like "Heaven Is For Real" and "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven," which were (supposedly true) accounts of people who had near-death experiences, and supposedly went to heaven and then came back. It was a whole thing in Christian culture, back then. (Later, Alex Malarkey, the boy from "The Boy Who Came Back From Heaven" said that whole book was not true.)

These stories were, basically, about proving how right our religious beliefs are. Scoring points against people from other religions and/or atheists. Doesn't that seem... extremely weird? If you really got to go see what heaven was like, shouldn't it be about learning incredible new otherworldly information, rather than confirming that you already were right about everything?

The "heavenly tourism" stories included elements like this: A child goes to heaven and sees Jesus, who looks basically like what Christians expect Jesus to look like. The child sees angels, who are basically what Christians expect angels to look like. The child meets some of his relatives who died a long time ago- and is able to later describe what these relatives looked like, which shouldn't be possible because the child had never met them on earth- and this matches Christians' beliefs about who is in heaven and what kind of existence they would have. And so on.

And there's usually an aspect of the story that's just there to score points for "pro-life" ideology: The child meets another child in heaven, who explains that she's the sister who died in their mom's belly, or something along those lines. And when the child comes back from heaven and tells his mom, the mom is so surprised, because she never told him that she had a miscarriage/abortion. (I say this "scores points" for the "pro-life" side because "pro-life" people wrongly believe that pro-choice people view a fetus as having no value/soul/life/etc at any point of development up until birth. So, if a dead fetus goes to heaven, that means abortion should always be illegal, or something. Uh, okay.)

And there may be a few elements of the story which at first don't seem to match what Christians believe- the child says he saw something in heaven, and the good Christian adults who are listening to this story can't figure out what he's talking about. But, they dig a little deeper and they find that it TOTALLY DOES match something the bible said, or whatever, just in a way they didn't expect. So, see, we were right about everything.

Really? Someone goes to heaven and comes back, and all we get is more confidence that we were already right about everything? We don't, like, learn anything new? Really?

I gotta say, I believe in heaven, but I definitely think I'm wrong about a lot of aspects of it. If heaven is real, probably the first thing that happens to everyone who goes there is they find out it's completely different from what they expected. It must be; we have no mechanism to actually get reliable information on what heaven is like- most of our beliefs are basically folklore that has gradually built up over hundreds or thousands of years, with no way to actually fact-check any of it. A lot of it has got to be just plain wrong. And wouldn't it be awesome, to get a glimpse of what heaven really is, and find out how wrong you are?

Personally, my beliefs about heaven and resurrection come from two main sources:

  1. The world is not just. I want to believe that somehow, someday, all the wrongs will be made right. I want to believe that justice is real. And so I hope that there is resurrection, that heaven is real, and I imagine what heaven would have to be like, to truly create justice.
    But maybe that's just wishful thinking. Just because I want it, doesn't mean it's actually real. Which brings me to point number 2...
  2. There is a long tradition of people believing in various religions because we want there to be more than just this world. (And, in particular, I'm a Christian, so I'm influenced by Christian beliefs about resurrection and heaven.) Thousands of years of people saying the world is not just and we hope for a better world. Okay, maybe that's just wishful thinking too, and there's nothing real to it. But since it's so common, I kind of believe there's something there. I hope there is.

That's, uh, that's pretty much it. That's all the "evidence" we have that heaven exists. (I put "evidence" in scare quotes because honestly neither of those things really adds up to any evidence at all.) That's all we have to go on, as we speculate about what heaven is like. Point 1 is just our opinions on what perfect justice should look like, and point 2 is claims from religions about how maybe a few hundred years ago, God spoke to someone and gave some clues about what heaven is like. That's it. So, okay, that's the broad outlines of what heaven is, but we seriously know nothing about the details. Like, you could say "I believe God will make everything right, but I don't have any idea how that will work" and that's basically it. Beyond that, any details you believe about heaven are just fan theories.

So, wow, how cool would it be to actually go to heaven and see what it's like, and then come back? And likely the main thing that would happen is you would find out how totally wrong you are about pretty much all of it. Very cool to learn new information and find out which things we were wrong about.

Right?

But, apparently not. Because that's not the angle that those "heavenly tourism" stories take at all. They're not about learning something new; they're used as evidence that Christians are already right about everything. They're evidence for the beliefs we already have, something you can bring up in an argument with non-Christians (though honestly I don't think these kinds of stories are at all convincing to non-Christians, so good luck with that!), rather than an incredibly useful tool for examining our own beliefs and getting rid of the ones which are just wrong.

Isn't that a little... strange?

And really it's about the whole concept of certainty, about how when I was an evangelical I thought I was right about everything, because the bible gives us all the answers and that's that. But now I'm like, I don't know, I hope resurrection is real, I believe in it, but I don't know, I could be wrong. I see the ways that my beliefs are based on ... like... what I *want* to be true, rather than things I actually have evidence for. And... I do believe people have a conscience that comes from God, and so it does mean something that we understand this world is not the way it should be, and we want there to be a better world- so, perhaps that means there *is* a better world- so, there's that, but that's not really evidence either. (It's a fan theory.)

Winning arguments. Scoring points. Telling other people why you're right and they're wrong. Imagine you get to go to heaven- YOU GET TO GO TO HEAVEN- and that's all you get out of it.

---

Related:

Sure Of What We Hope For 

Someday Dave Ramsey will have to stand before God and explain why he fired a pregnant woman

And this song, "Heaven is a place on earth." Your kingdom come, your will be done, on earth as it is in heaven. We'll make heaven a place on earth. That's my religion.


Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Blogaround

1. How (Not) To Do Autism Awareness Month (March 1) "I think most people know at this point that autism exists and a few basic traits, and would go 'Oh yeah, I support autistic people' in April, but months later when someone you work with is 'weird' and communicates more directly and bluntly than others, do you just go with it or do you assume they’re being rude to people and complain to someone?"

2. "Complete" Manhood and The Desirability of Becoming Human in Bicentennial Man (1999) (March 7) "I cannot stress this enough. They had the opportunity, right here, to fashion 'Can Andrew open a bank account?' into a central plot point about the legal recognition of his personhood, and the movie just... breezes past it. Andrew gets a bank account and nobody tries to stop him and it's fine."

3. Tom Hanks Mad He Didn't Learn About The Tulsa Massacre In School, And He's Right (March 8) "And it made me mad. It made me mad that somebody had somehow made an editorial process of what was appropriate for us to learn about our own American history."

4. Farewell, OnlySky (March 7, via) Sad to hear that atheist blogging site OnlySky is shutting down.

5. Why is New York Times campaign coverage so bad? Because that’s what the publisher wants. (March 7) "Yes, but sometimes it is obvious what’s right. Defending democracy would age just fine, I assure you."

6. Therapist Reacts to WALL-E (January 10) "I understand that on paper, that sounds ridiculous and kind of stupid. And yet, I kid you not, I think this is one of the most beautiful love stories I've ever seen on film." 29-minute video from Cinema Therapy.

7. This tweet:

8. And this song, if you're into Phil Joel/ Newsboys songs from the year 2000 (I know I am!)

9. At least you quickly know to not bother reading the rest (March 13) Oh ChatGPT.

Tuesday, March 12, 2024

Americans Living Abroad- Time To Register To Vote!

American flag. Image source.

Hi all, just a reminder that if you are a US citizen living outside the US, you have the right to vote in the election. You need to register though, and every state's laws are a little different, but fortunately there is a really nice website that can walk you through it: votefromabroad.org (As far as I know, you need to register every year you vote by absentee, even if you already registered in previous years.)

Some states allow you to vote by email, and other states require fax or physically mailing your ballot back. Also, we're not anywhere close to the deadline for registering to vote in the general election, but if you want to vote in the primaries, you'll have to check the information for your state to find out deadlines for that.

The site, votefromabroad.org, is created by Democrats Abroad, but the site itself is non-partisan. (Though if you don't want to use this site, you can google "FPCA" and find other sites which will also give you the information on how to vote.)

If you have any friends who are Americans living abroad, share the link with them~ votefromabroad.org  

Monday, March 4, 2024

Blogaround

1. Paleontologists discover a 240-million-year-old 'dragon' fossil in full (February 23, via) "It's a fitting discovery in the Year of the Dragon: A team of scientists has uncovered a complete fossil of an aquatic reptile that resembles a 'Chinese dragon' because of its snake-like appearance and elongated neck." Cool!

2. NASA's Mars helicopter Ingenuity has flown its last flight after suffering rotor damage (January 26, via) "The 4-pound (1.8 kilograms) chopper was tasked with demonstrating that powered flight is indeed possible on Mars despite the planet's thin atmosphere — it promptly did so during a five-flight campaign that spring."

3. I didn’t fancy men or women. Then I had a baby (February 13, via) Article about an asexual woman who decided to get pregnant using a sperm donor.

4. What TV Shows Get Wrong (and Right!) About Therapy (November 15) 27-minute video from Cinema Therapy.

5. A ‘Reading Rainbow’ Documentary Is Coming Next Month (February 28) Cool!

6. When Star Trek Confronted Racism Head-On (February 28) 23-minute video about a "Deep Space Nine" episode

7. If Elisabeth Elliot's Marriage Advice was Supposed to Ruin Your Life, This is the First I've Heard It (February 12) "The book is a frankly overheated and occasionally goofy account of two people who, like all young people, have very intense and primarily interior problems that don’t make sense to anyone over twenty-five. Passion and Purity, though, is told through the perspective of a much older woman who actually does seem to agree that these problems are very serious, and that the tortured process of wondering if you’re touching your boyfriend too much or if he loves you too much is actually part of preparation for marriage. How do we make sense of this?"

Saturday, March 2, 2024

Here's How We Do Our Budget

An envelope with US dollars in it. Image source.

So, I had always heard people give advice that "you should have a budget." And I've tried to do that, using various strategies, which had a lot of flaws- until I finally found a strategy that actually makes sense for us. So in this post I basically want to write about things I've tried before, why they didn't work well, and what my husband and I do now for our budget strategy.

In the past, there were times I attempted to make a "monthly budget" for myself. I wrote down all the categories that I spend money in, looked at some data from the previous few months, to estimate what numbers would be reasonable for each category, and set a limit for each of the categories. The intent being, in every category, I have to keep my spending under that limit every month. That's how budgets work, right?

There were a lot of problems with this.

For example, suppose I need to go somewhere, and I'm trying to decide if I want to take a taxi or take the subway. The taxi would be more expensive, and would mean I'm going over budget in my "transportation" category. But, if I take the subway, it takes more time and I'll be late. When I'm in that situation, I feel that it's worth it to me to spend the extra money in order to not be late. But, I can't suddenly change the budget, right? Isn't the entire point of a budget that you have to stick with it, even if it's hard? Otherwise it doesn't actually help you, right?

Also, the previous day, I had bought myself a piece of cake, which cost more than the taxi would cost, but that was in the "eating out" category where I'm not anywhere close to going over the limit, so that was fine. Uh, doesn't something seem kind of off here? Thinking about the "money to happiness" ratio, spending the money for the taxi would give me more happiness than spending the money for cake, but since they're in different categories, I can't trade them off like that. I already set the limits in each category, I can't change them- that's the whole point of having a budget, right? But something seems incredibly illogical about this.

I was giving myself more stress, over small amounts of money which didn't really matter.

And, here's another example, maybe there's some grocery item that I could buy in bulk- but if I do that, I would go over budget in the "grocery" category that month. But, uh, but doesn't buying in bulk result in more savings over the long term? Then why is my budget system telling me that's bad? There's too much focus on each month individually- the system doesn't have any built-in connection between this month and the next month. I mean, *I* can tell myself "oh actually it's a good idea to buy in bulk, even though my budget system says it's breaking a rule"- but I wasn't actually quantifying that in any way. It was just an intuition that I never gathered any data to actually evaluate, because my system wasn't designed to give me that kind of data.

Also, I was thinking about each category in percentages. Like, oh, I only spent 20% of the "clothes" budget this month, wow, only 20%, I'm doing such a great job, I'm saving so much money! And then in the "groceries" category of the budget, I went over by 10%, ah, well, that's not good, but at least 10% is a small-ish amount. I remember at one point I had an app which had a horizontal bar for each category, to show what percentage of that category's limit you spent each month- and every horizontal bar was the same length. This makes no sense. It makes no sense to feel good about saving such a "high" percentage in a small category- because the actual dollar amount is so low it doesn't matter.

And I couldn't understand what people meant when they gave advice like "you should save 10%." So... if this month I spend 90% of my salary, and save 10%, but then next month I use that 10% to buy a new computer or something... that seems like that shouldn't count as "saving 10%." The only reason I'm calling it "saving" instead of "spending" is because of the arbitrariness of where one month ends and the next month begins- that seems kind of illogical.

And there was definitely no way to accumulate long-term savings. Yeah, in theory, I put limits on all the categories, and the limits add up to *less than* my salary, so if I stay within the limits every month, then the extra will keep adding up every month, and that's my long-term savings. But there was no mechanism to ensure that this would actually happen. No way to tell if, when I go over budget in some category, is it fine, or am I spending all my "long-term savings" accidentally?

But the biggest problem with this "monthly budget" system was that it was not cumulative. Every month was treated like a completely separate event, which had no mathematical relation to any other month.

I remember saying at one point "every month I'm only spending 40% of my income" and someone was like "wow that's pretty good!" but it turns out what I actually meant was "in a normal month I'm only spending 40% of my income, and then twice a year I spend THOUSANDS OF DOLLARS on international plane tickets." Yeah, every so often the "travel" category of the budget would just be so completely overwhelmed, when I bought plane tickets which were many times higher than the monthly budget limit for "travel"- but I told myself, "it's fine, it's not like I'm doing that every month." But I wasn't actually *measuring* if it was "fine" or not. It was just... most months I spend very little for "travel", and then occasionally I spend A TON, so, overall that's probably fine, right? Well, uh, you don't know if it's "fine" if you don't do the math with the actual numbers.

Sometimes I would scroll back through several months of data, and observe "oh this month I went over budget in this category, in this month I was under budget in that category", etc, but there was never any sense of ... like... adding up the actual numbers to see if a several-month-long period was over or under budget. I mean, sometimes I sort of added them in my head, but the results depended on what month I used as the cutoff point (ie, am I adding up over the past 3 months? 6 months?) so I didn't feel like that was a well-defined and concrete measure.

Sometimes I would go over budget in some category, and I would kind of feel bad about it... like a little bit of fear that if I continue like that, I'll have financial disaster in my future. Like I'm supposed to be sticking to my budget, and some months I am and some months I'm not, and ... am I deceiving myself by pretending that's fine?

It was just emotions, which didn't have concrete data to say if those emotions were reasonable or not. I was giving myself a lot of stress over small dollar amounts which didn't really matter. (Or rather, small RMB amounts, because I'm in China.)

(And maybe a lot of the emotional aspects of budgeting are my own weird quirks- this is sort of what I saw from my parents- like saying "oh maybe we spent too much money on that" or "we can't buy that because it's too expensive" but not actually having a literal budget to specify what "too much" or "too expensive" would mean, just vaguely feeling guilty about it. And also having a high enough salary that there weren't really any practical consequences from spending amounts that felt like "too much"- just guilt, never "holy crap we can't afford rent, what are we going to do?")

Eventually I came up with a new budgeting system, which doesn't have these problems. Here are the 2 key elements:

  1. Everything is cumulative, from one month to the next 
  2. Don't break everything down into such small categories

This happened when my husband and I moved from a 1-bedroom to a 2-bedroom apartment, just before our son was born. The reason we had to develop a new budget strategy at that time was that the rent was much higher, and we had to have a way to guarantee that the money for rent would always be there and ready to be paid at the right time. In China, typically you pay rent once every 3 months- so yeah, every 3 months, it's a HUGE amount of money you suddenly need to come up with. My husband is the one who handles the actual transaction, and when we were in a 1-bedroom apartment it was less money so it was less of a big deal- every 3 months he'd just ask me to transfer my half of the rent to him, and then he'd pay it. But the 2-bedroom apartment was so much more expensive- what if the time comes to pay rent, and we realize one of us doesn't actually have the money for our half?

We needed to both be transferring money, every month, into a dedicated savings account that my husband has access to. So that when it's time to pay rent, the money is already there, no issue.

So basically that was my inspiration for coming up with a new budget system for us. It was about large things we needed to pay for, but not every month. So the strategy was to calculate an average cost per month, and every month we'd transfer that amount to a savings account, and then when it was time to pay it, the money would be ready.

This is completely different from my previous system- my previous system also had sort of an "average cost per month" for each category, but it was like, if I went over that amount in a particular month, that was "bad," and if I went under, that was "good." Judging myself on how many months I was "good" or "bad." The new system is different- in the new system, every month we transfer that "average cost per month" amount to a savings account, and then if we don't spend it that month, that money is still there, accumulating every month so that it's ready when we need it. Each month just rolls over into the next month, in a straightforward mathematical way. Not like my old systems, where I just vaguely felt bad about sometimes going over budget, but didn't have any sense of whether it was actually a problem.

So we figured out what the big categories are for us, the categories where some months we spend a lot and some months very little. Or categories where both my husband and I have to contribute, so it makes sense for it to be paid out of a savings account that we both are putting money into. Here are our categories:

  • rent and childcare costs
  • travel
  • health care
  • Christmas
  • child's college savings
  • retirement savings

For each category, I calculated an estimated cost per year, and then divided by 12 to get a cost per month, then decided what proportion should be paid by me and what proportion should be paid by my husband (you can decide this based on factors like: whoever's salary is higher should be paying more money into the savings account, or if I bought an international health insurance plan for myself then my husband wouldn't necessarily pay for that because it's not for him, if one person is always buying the groceries then you should make sure they have more remaining money than the partner who's not buying the groceries, etc).

So every month we both transfer money to the savings account, and then when we have to pay for something that falls under one of those categories, we pay it from the savings account. 

[Or rather, that's how it works theoretically but actually in practical terms it's not exactly like that. See, the way I handle this is I have a big excel spreadsheet, and it says the amount of money in the Chinese savings account and the US savings account (see we have 2 different currencies so it's complicated for us), and how much of that money is allocated to each category. And we also have categories "Perfect Number's extra money" and "Hendrix's extra money"- ie, not everything in the savings accounts is allocated to those 6 savings categories I mentioned, some of the money is actually just mine or just my husband's. And in practical terms, when I pay for something that comes from one of those savings categories, I actually just pay from my own bank account, not our savings account, and then I just adjust the numbers in the excel sheet- ie, if I spend 200 RMB on something related to vacation, I spend it from my own personal bank account, and then on the excel sheet describing the contents of our savings accounts, I subtract 200 from "travel" and add 200 to "Perfect Number's extra money"- see actually joint bank accounts aren't a thing in China, so I actually can't spend money from the savings account, I don't have access. Actually I don't transfer the full "average monthly cost" for each category into the savings account every month, because when I pay for stuff from my own account, that mathematically functions the same as a transfer. As long as I write down all the amounts in the excel sheet correctly, it doesn't matter that I didn't literally transfer the entire amount. Okay those are just some details about the practical implementation of this.]

One really cool thing about this system is that, whatever is left over from your salary (after you transfer money into the correct categories) is totally yours and you can do whatever you want with it. You use it for whatever costs you have in your daily life- stuff like buying food, clothes, birthday gifts for family, donating to charity, etc. And your spouse can't judge you for any of that spending! Sometimes I feel like my husband spends money on things that he shouldn't, but, actually, as long as he's paying the right amount into the savings account every month, it's fine! Like mathematically it actually is fine. If I truly calculated the "average cost per month" in each category correctly, then he can do whatever he wants with his leftover money and I know it won't affect our family's financial stability. (I also spend money on things that he wouldn't...)

And the category that you use for your daily expenses and/or extra money isn't subdivided any further than that. It really doesn't matter if I spent a lot of money on clothes one month, and no money on clothes in a different month, or if I took a taxi or bought a piece of cake or whatever- all of that is just summed into one category, for my daily expenses (or, as I referred to it earlier, "Perfect Number's extra money"). You just look at the total in that category, and as long as it's always a positive number, then you're fine. (Or, if you're also conceptualizing that category as your own personal "emergency savings" then as long as it's always higher than whatever you think you need as your "emergency savings" then you're fine. Yes, you should have an "emergency savings"- whether you make that its own category or lumped in with another category is up to you.)

And another really great thing about this system is that, because it's cumulative, you can make corrections for things that happened in previous months. For example, suppose we spent more than we expected on vacation. Maybe this means the "travel" budget has a negative amount of money in it. (That is okay, temporarily, as long as it's in a bank account that is summing it up with other categories which are positive enough that the total is still positive.) So, there are a few different ways we could handle this:

  • We could not make any changes, continue transferring money into the "travel" account like normal every month, and after a few months the amount will be positive. But next time we go on vacation, the amount available in the "travel" category is less than what I planned it to be, so we go on a vacation that costs less. Or wait a few extra months before taking our next vacation.
  • We could transfer money from a different category, into the "travel" category. For example, maybe we found that we spent less on childcare than we expected, so we move money from the "rent and childcare" category to the "travel" category.
  • For the next few months, we transfer more money (from our own salaries) into the "travel" category than we did before.

See? When we go over budget in one category, that is reflected in the number that the excel sheet says is allocated to that category. And it will always be reflected in that number- that number is the cumulative sum of every month, and that "over budget" incident will always be reflected in the history that goes into calculating the current amount. It is mathematically completely quantified in the numbers- you know exactly what it is, you don't have to vaguely feel bad about it and vaguely fear that it's going to cause problems in your future. And then you make a decision afterward about how to correct for it, and then you do that- you correct for it, and you move on. No reason to feel guilty. If, for example, you spend $200 more than expected on travel, but $200 less than expected on utilities (which I also put in the "rent" category), you simply mark in the excel sheet that you're transferring $200 from "rent" to "travel", and then all is good. The problem has been solved. No need to vaguely feel bad about it, or to tell yourself "well we don't spend that much money every month, so it's okay" and wonder if you're just making excuses to fool yourself.

Anyway, like I said, I made an excel sheet myself to keep track of all this, because I didn't find a budgeting software that I liked. Our situation is, we have accounts in the US and China, and both my husband and I are paying in to the Chinese account monthly, and we have other accounts that are our own personal accounts and not related to these savings categories, and my other accounts are my own business and aren't part of the excel sheet- yeah the reason I wrote my own excel sheet is because it's complicated and I didn't find software that did exactly what I wanted. (I also have an app on my phone for all my personal accounts in China, where I record every single transaction but I don't do any higher-level budget stuff, and a different one on my computer for all my personal accounts in the US. Those apps are just very basic money tracking apps, nothing special, I just got them from the app store or wherever. I am one of those very organized people.)

But anyway, if you want to look for a budgeting software tool that does something like this, I'll tell you that this is basically the envelope system. Search for "envelope budget" or something along those lines- there are some software programs that you can get that do this.

I have also seen some banks which allow you to categorize the money in your account into different "savings buckets"- yeah, that's basically the same as the system I'm describing here. 

Overall, my system is about categorizing your expenses, over the course of an average year, into a few big categories, and then making sure that you are putting enough money into those categories monthly. If not, then you need to make changes to your life, like going on less expensive vacations, or living in a less expensive apartment, etc. It's about those big things- I found that there's no benefit to subdividing everything into small categories and giving myself stress about the exact amounts.

The main function of my system is making sure that each big category is funded enough that I don't have to worry about it, and we can have the kind of lifestyle we want to have. Now, there are other benefits to budgeting, which my system doesn't really address- for example, comparing the amount spent on different everyday things and identifying places where the amount you spend doesn't really give you as much happiness as you should be getting for that amount of money (ie, if you regularly spend $X on something, but you find out that spending $X on something different brings you more happiness). My system doesn't really help with identifying those kinds of things, or small everyday things that add up to a big amount that could be reduced, etc. My system is just about the really big things, to answer big questions like "can we afford to go on an international vacation" or "can we afford to move to a more expensive apartment" etc. We are lucky to have a good enough income that we don't need to stress about the small everyday things.

(But also, you can totally use an envelope budget system for everyday things subdivided into smaller categories! Instead of updating an excel sheet once a month, and then making corrections afterward if you spent more than expected in some category, like I do, you could have an app on your phone so that in real time you can check how much you have available in a certain category, and if it's not enough for something you want to buy, then you make a decision right then about either not buying it, or transferring money from a different category before you buy the thing. That's also the envelope system, but being used for a different purpose than how I use it.)

Anyway, that's the overall idea we use for our family budget. I wanted to post it here on my blog because, like I said, I've tried other budget strategies in the past and they just caused me more stress without any real benefit. The current system we use, which is basically the envelope system, is designed mainly to make sure my husband and I are always prepared for large expenses that we can sort of predict but they don't happen every month. I found that the most important thing I need from a budgeting system is it needs to be cumulative- ie, we allocate money to a certain category this month, and then if we don't use it, that money continues to exist in that category and simply rolls over to the next month. This way, there's no need to wonder about "well sometimes we spend more and sometimes we spend less, so... I guess that's fine overall?" It's all right there in the math- you simply look at the numbers that say how much you currently have in each category. 

No need to feel guilty or wonder if it's bad that sometimes you went over budget. It's all right there in the math. If the math says you're fine, then you're fine.

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Readers: Do you have any useful budgeting strategies?

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Related:

Donating to Charity

2 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me About Job Interviews

Sunday, February 25, 2024

We Need Queer Theology

A rainbow, with the text "We're here, we're queer." Image source.

Last week, The Reformation Project published a post called Reform vs. Revolution: Distinguishing Affirming Theology From Queer Theology. A lot of queer Christians are unhappy about this; I am also unhappy about it.

Basically, it's a post (along with an embedded 1-hour youtube video of a talk by Matthew Vines) about why their organization does NOT support queer theology, but does affirming theology instead.

And I'd like to also share this link, which is a response from Billie, a trans woman: The Reformation Project and Queer Theology. Her response is definitely worth reading.

Okay let's talk about this, starting with:

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Who is Matthew Vines/ What is The Reformation Project?

Matthew Vines is a gay Christian. I first heard of him around 2012, when he posted a very long youtube video (which went viral) where he presents a biblical argument for acceptance of same-sex marriage. In 2015, he published a book called God and the Gay Christian: The Biblical Case in Support of Same-Sex Relationships [affiliate link]. And he started an organization called The Reformation Project, to advocate for inclusion of LGBTQ people in the church.

I haven't read "God and the Gay Christian", but I watched his viral video, back then, back when I was evangelical and trying to do the whole "hate the sin, love the sinner" thing. It influenced me a lot. The approach it takes towards reading the bible is thoroughly evangelical, which is how it was able to convince me. And by "thoroughly evangelical," I mean viewing the bible as the inerrant authority over our lives. We have to obey the bible, whether we like it or not, whether it makes sense or not. And therefore, we need to spend a lot of time very carefully studying ancient Greek and Hebrew words, to be really really sure we can figure out what the biblical writers were saying- we need to do this because we are required to follow the rules they wrote for us, those thousands of years ago.

Vines's argument, in that 2012 video, is about carefully analyzing the specific bible verses which mention homosexuality, as well as other bible verses which he also feels are relevant to this issue. Painstakingly going through different possible interpretations of Greek words, bringing in historical references about ancient Roman culture/ ancient near-eastern culture and how they viewed homosexuality, and so on, and finally arriving at the conclusion that, in our modern society, same-sex marriage is acceptable and blessed by God.

That's how you need to make the argument, if you're talking to evangelicals. And back then, it was definitely what I needed to hear.

But, as I've said on my blog many times, I now view this as a really weird way to read the bible. Like, we need to spend a lot of time studying ancient Greek words, to find out if we're allowed to treat gay people decently. Come on. You shouldn't need to do that- you should just treat people decently regardless of what the bible says. 

Like, oh, good news everyone, we spent an incredible amount of time studying ancient Roman homosexual practices, and we've come to the conclusion that you actually ARE allowed to accept your gay friends. Phew!

Come on.

You shouldn't need to read the bible to figure that out. You should just be able to see with your own two eyes how good and life-giving it is when queer people are accepted for who they are, and how harmful it is when they are required to repress themselves.

So- and this is something I've said a lot in my review of "The Great Sex Rescue"- I believe it can be a very helpful and valuable first step, for people coming from an evangelical background, to present arguments like "The bible wasn't actually saying [oppressive teaching that evangelicals believe]. It was saying [something much more just/feminist/inclusive]." It's a first step, but I hope that after that, people can move past that kind of thinking. Quit being bound by what the bible says, and trust your own God-given conscience to tell you what's loving and what's not. The bible is wrong sometimes!

Anyway, I haven't been following what Vines has been up to in recent years. Maybe he has moved beyond that evangelical way of reading the bible, the "same-sex marriage is okay because I studied a lot of ancient Greek words."

Oh. No. Oh. Well we can look at the statement that The Reformation Project put out, along with the embedded video where Vines gives a talk about why he opposes queer theology. Oh. Has he moved on from that evangelical way of reading the bible? Nope, he hasn't.

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What The Reformation Project has to say about queer theology

(The article itself is pretty short- I'm getting most of this from the embedded video.)

Vines explains that "queer theology" doesn't just mean "queer people doing theology" or "theology that is inclusive of queer people" or something along those lines. No, it specifically means queer theory being applied to theology. And queer theory is a specific field of study which isn't simply about accepting queer people; rather, it's about questioning all of society's rules about what's "normative" and what's not. It's about breaking down boundaries, questioning lines that society has drawn about what kinds of behaviors are okay or not okay.

And, yes, he's right, that's what queer theology is.

He gives a lot of examples which are shocking and/or offensive. Queer theologians saying that the Trinity is like an orgy. That anonymous sex is an example of hospitality. Etc.

And he says, no, this is NOT what Christians believe. This is NOT what most LGBTQ Christians believe. He says The Reformation Project opposes queer theology. They do affirming theology instead. (I suppose "affirming theology" is that evangelical-style "we've studied a lot of Greek words and we've concluded that same-sex marriage is okay." Yeah I'm not here for that.)

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Here's what I have to say about queer theology

In 2018, I published a blog post reviewing the book Radical Love: An Introduction to Queer Theology by Patrick S. Cheng. My post was called Queer Theology (is not about being right), because that was how I made sense of what the book was saying: It isn't about "here's the correct interpretation of the bible", but instead, "here's a loose analogy between the bible and queerness, if you feel it's meaningful then good for you, but you don't have to believe it if you don't want to."

Coming from an evangelical background, I had obviously been expecting the "here's what the bible Really Means" kind of approach. Instead, the book "Radical Love" was a bunch of extremely flimsy analogies like "the Holy Spirit is like gaydar" (???????? what on earth).

It's not about putting forth logical arguments to support doctrines which you then expect everyone to be convinced by. It's about questioning for the sake of questioning- why would God have to be male? why would sex in marriage be more moral than sex in other contexts? what if Jesus and Lazarus were lovers? etc. You don't have to agree with any of this stuff- but the act of questioning is itself valuable.

And yes, there were A LOT of things in the book "Radical Love" that I very much did NOT agree with. (Many of the same things that Vines mentions in his talk- he included a bunch of quotes from "Radical Love.") And I found it to be not inclusive of aces. There were parts that were very sexually explicit, there were parts that assumed that emotional intimacy is necessarily sexual, there were parts that made analogies between sex and religious concepts- and I'm way too asexual to understand what those analogies were trying to say.

But my takeaway was, Cheng wasn't saying that we have to agree with all those things. He's saying, for some queer people, this is a way they interact with their Christian faith, and, good for them. 

And it's good that people are doing this work, questioning the things that society views as normative. It's good that queer theologians want to take things farther than just "gay people can have monogamous marriages, just like straight people" which is where The Reformation Project is.

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Why I'm not happy with The Reformation Project's statement

To me, it's not a problem that The Reformation Project is taking an evangelical approach toward bible interpretation. I mean, it's a problem in the sense that it's a really bizarre way to read the bible and/or figure out morality- but hey, I understand that's how evangelicals think. Vines seems to be evangelical and thinks that way. (To clarify, I don't actually know if he identifies as evangelical. But watching his embedded video, I feel like, I actually really like him, he's the best kind of evangelical.) Sure, okay. It's good to have some queer people in that space, making those kinds of arguments in ways that will matter to an evangelical audience.

As I see it, the problem is that they're putting out a statement specifically to say that queer theology is bad and they don't agree with it. Like, why? Why even bring this up? Why not just keep doing what they're doing, and let queer theologians keep doing what they're doing too? Why not just accept that we're all advocating queer inclusion, and we use different strategies which enable us to reach different audiences?

It comes across like he's saying "don't worry, evangelicals, we're not like that." Like some evangelical Christians are going to read about queer theology and then they'll think all queer Christians believe those things, and OH NO we can't have that. We have to make sure evangelicals know we're the *good* gay Christians. (I've seen people on twitter calling this out as being about respectability, and, yeah, it does come across like that.)

Weirdly, this comes back to what I was saying about the authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" in my post What do we do with Christians who are never going to accept queer people?"You need to throw queer people under the bus, in order to be seen as a good evangelical." Weird, because Vines and the Christians at The Reformation Project are queer- but they're making this statement specifically to separate themselves from other queer people who are seen as going too far.

Not cool. 

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Related:

Queer Theology (is not about being right)

What do we do with Christians who are never going to accept queer people? 

It Doesn’t Actually Matter What Jesus Said About Divorce

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And (under the "Read more") some insightful tweets responding to The Reformation Project's statement:

Saturday, February 24, 2024

Blogaround

1. Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project (via) "In response, the Campaign for Southern Equality has launched the Southern Trans Youth Emergency Project (STYEP), a new regional effort which provides rapid response support directly to the families of youth who are impacted by anti-transgender healthcare bans in the South. Through STYEP, and in close partnership with state and local organizations, we are providing grants, patient navigation support, and accurate information to impacted families to ensure that youth can access the care they need and deserve, even in the face of oppressive laws."

2. At a Loss for Words (2019, via) Wow this is WILD- apparently there is something called the "three-cueing method" for teaching kids to read, and it tells kids that when they come to an unfamiliar word, they shouldn't ACTUALLY READ THE ACTUAL WORD, they should use other incidental information to kinda guess what the word could be (picture, first letter of the word, etc). !!! WHAT!

The article is from 2019- maybe the situation is different now? Anyway the article says that instead, kids should be taught phonics. I guess that's how my school taught it when I was little- I remember spending a lot of time on how this letter makes this sound (or sometimes makes this other sound, etc) and how combinations of letters together would make a certain sound. I guess that's phonics. Mostly, though, I didn't need to use the "sounding it out" strategies, after memorizing how all the words are spelled. I just sometimes can't remember the spellings of "choose" and "chose" and so then I have to think to myself that the "oo" makes an "oo" sound and the "ose" has a silent e at the end that causes the single o to say "O".

3. Air Canada must honor refund policy invented by airline’s chatbot (February 17, via) "Air Canada 'does not explain why customers should have to double-check information found in one part of its website on another part of its website,' Rivers wrote."

4. Death, Lonely Death (February 19, via) "Voyager kept going for another 34 years after that photo.  It’s still going.  It has left the grip of the Sun’s gravity, so it’s going to fall outward forever."

And more about Voyager: NASA's interstellar Voyager 1 spacecraft isn't doing so well — here's what we know (February 16)

5. Reflecting on interdisciplinary journal clubbing (February 21) "While some of the [ace] journal club participants have backgrounds in social science, more broadly, we’re experts of a different sort, in that we’ve been directly experiencing it and have been discussing it with other people who directly experience it. We can tell when an argument doesn’t ring true, or if there are additional factors that the authors ignored."

6. "A man will say he's a feminist but he doesn't wipe the counters": Lyz Lenz on the beauty of divorce (February 20) "So who does that work when he 'forgets?' It was me, always me, coming in and being hit with the smell of rot and garbage. Sometimes it would fall, and there would be trash on the floor. We would have these fights and he would say, it's just a bag of trash, let it go. I cannot let it go. You show complete disregard for me as a person because you're not thinking about who has to do this."

7. Supreme Court Ethics: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO) (February 22) 30-minute video from John Oliver.

8. The Reformation Project and Queer Theology (February 24) "But to take revolution permanently off the table is—I don’t see how to avoid this conclusion—to chose the system over the wellbeing of individual marginalized people and that strikes me as contrary to the Way of Jesus."

Matthew Vines and The Reformation Project put out a statement that they do "affirming theology" rather than "queer theology." I am not a fan of this (and I'll probably write my own post about it). Here's a really good response from Billie, a trans woman.

Wednesday, February 21, 2024

The Great Sex Rescue: Obligation

Stock photo of a woman picking up laundry from the floor while a man sits there doing nothing. Image source.

Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue"

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We are now in the second part of chapter 9 of The Great Sex Rescue: The Lies You've Been Taught and How to Recover What God Intended [affiliate link], pages 162-178. This section is about obligation sex- when a wife feels that she is obligated to have sex with her husband, because "men need it," and that is more important than any of her needs or desires.

I'm really glad to see "The Great Sex Rescue" speaking out against "obligation sex"! It's a very bad teaching, and it's EVERYWHERE in evangelical marriage ideology.

This section starts off by talking about the authors' focus groups, where they talked to women who had been harmed by the "obligation sex" message:

Almost all of them said that their husbands never gave them the obligation-sex message themselves. Their husbands didn't see sex as something they were owed or entitled to take, but instead as a gift for them to share together. Their husbands saw the importance of honoring their wives' no-- they just never knew she didn't feel free to say it! Each of these husbands empowered their wives by saying what they had been thinking all along: "You are allowed to say no, and in fact, I want you to say no if you're uncomfortable, because I don't want sex to be something you don't want to do."

Yeah, this is very real. Women are the ones being taught this "obligation sex" ideology in church, and a man might not even realize this teaching exists or how much of an impact it is having on his wife.

And... yes, I agree with the advice that men should explicitly say that they don't want their wife to feel she is forced to have sex- but I think it's more complicated than that. It's very likely that a woman from an evangelical background simply won't believe her husband when he says that. She may interpret it as "he's saying that if I can't fake like I'm enjoying it, it ruins his experience of sex- so I need to do a better job of faking my enthusiasm." Or "he actually thinks 'you're obligated to have sex with me, because of my manly needs, and if you don't do it good enough, you're not holding up your end of the deal' but he's a good person and he knows he can't say that out loud because it sounds rapey." Or "he wants to be the kind of loving partner who is okay with not forcing me into painful sex, but he underestimates the reality of his manly needs- even though he says it's okay for me to say no, he doesn't realize that that's not sustainable for him in the long term, that it's just not going to work."

Yes, evangelical women have been taught for their entire lives that "this is how men are." Then they marry a man who turns out to be a way better person than that- and it's just unbelievable. (Or, alternatively, they marry an abusive man, and they believe that's totally normal, that's how men are.)

From an asexual perspective: Yes, this is something that is debated in the ace community and/or debated by people who may or may not be supportive of aces. Some people argue that "if you're ace and your partner is not, then your partner *needs* sex, so you need to 'compromise' and have sex with them." It's a very similar argument to the Christian ideology about "men need sex, and women JUST CAN'T POSSIBLY UNDERSTAND, because women don't really like sex- so a wife is obligated to have unwanted sex with her husband."

I basically already gave my opinion on this in the previous post- basically, my advice is DON'T have sex if it's a bad experience for you. Just totally refuse. Draw the line there. If it's a positive experience, that's great. If it's a neutral experience, that's also okay- I know that's the reality that some aces are in, and it's not necessarily bad. And also, you have more options than just "have sex" or "don't have sex"- you should discuss with your partner what kinds of sexual or intimate actions you want to do together, to create a good experience for both of you. (For example, if PIV [penis-in-vagina] is painful, then don't do PIV. If you want your partner to give you a non-sexual massage, well definitely tell them that, and add that in to your "scene.")

But... speaking from personal experience, I didn't actually believe "if PIV is painful, then don't do PIV" was an actual option. It just didn't seem possible, that I could be in a hetero relationship, where we love each other, where we've already had sex (so there aren't any "purity" concerns), and I just refuse to ever do PIV.

And I took on the challenge of learning how to do it, how to work with my vaginismus (though I didn't know at the time that it was vaginismus), and I'm glad I did that because it led to me understanding my body better. But at the same time, one of the motivating factors was obligation- "men need it"- and I wish it hadn't been that way. Anyway, it's complicated, but that's what happened in my actual real life, and I don't have a tidy conclusion about "this is what I should have done instead."

Moving along to the next section I want to quote from "The Great Sex Rescue":

Sex is not the only need in the marriage relationship, and sometimes other needs must take precedence.

Much current teaching, though, elevates his need for intercourse above any of her needs. ...

The message that "whatever you are feeling doesn't matter, you need to have intercourse with your spouse" erases you as a person. It says that who you are, including your wants, desires, and feelings, doesn't matter. Then sex, which is supposed to be this deep knowing, becomes something far different. It's saying, "I don't want to know you, because your needs and desires are actually unimportant to me. I only want to use you."

Okay, yeah, this is a good point. Generally I don't agree with anyone saying that "sex is supposed to be" this or that, because everyone has their own life and it can mean different things to different people- so I would put this differently, but yeah.

Here's how I would put it:

When I was a teenager, and I heard about controversy about teaching sex ed in school... Well yeah, basically my understanding of sex ed was "we don't want you to have sex, avoid it if possible, but if you do have sex, at least use a condom." The background assumption was that it's so easy to have sex, so obvious how to do it, and of course we all desire it, so there's no need to actually talk about any details about how to do it- we only need to talk about how to NOT do it, or how to minimize the risk of pregnancy and STDs.

Years later, as a feminist, I found a whole different concept of what "sex ed" is: There's so much to learn and discover. There's so much potential for pleasure. Your body belongs to you, and it's good and wonderful to explore your body and understand your body. Go read about all sorts of things: orgasms, masturbation, sex toys, BDSM, etc. Maybe you'll find something you want to try. 

Instead of "don't have sex, but if you do, at least use a condom," it was viewing sex as a variety of potentially-positive experiences which could enrich your life, if you have access to good information about how to do them in a way that's enjoyable and healthy. (And a VERY IMPORTANT part of that is learning about CONSENT.) Like a positive thing to learn about, rather than a negative thing to avoid as much as possible.

And, yeah I'm asexual, so I understand if some aces aren't really interested in learning about any of that. That's fine- don't let anyone pressure you into reading about stuff you don't want to read about. And, of course there's a difference between reading vs seeing images vs actually doing things. And a difference between intellectual curiosity vs fantasy vs actually desiring to do something in real life. 

(I'm a sex-favorable asexual; I would be interested in hearing from sex-repulsed or sex-indifferent aces because they probably have a different perspective on this.)

Anyway. As I've said in other posts about "The Great Sex Rescue," the way I view it now is to know yourself and know what you want, and communicate with your partner to invent some sequence of intimate/sexual acts which are going to be a good experience overall for both of you. It should be positive and enjoyable. It should be about saying what you want, and believing that that matters.

And then I think back to how marital sex was presented in the Christian marriage books I read, years ago... how extremely negative it sounds to me now. Like "yeah you're a woman so you won't really like it, but just remember that you really love your husband, and that should give you the strength to power through this painful experience." [That's my paraphrase, not a quote from anywhere.] Like sex was this one specific thing- not something you could have your own preferences about, and customize to fit your own desires- and wives must do it even though it's not enjoyable. And that's what marriage is.

("The Great Sex Rescue" definitely talks about how sex can and should be so much better than that, but doesn't give any useful practical tips for how to get there- only that the husband should do more foreplay. They don't say women should masturbate to figure out what feels good. They don't say sex doesn't have to be PIV. They don't say you can maybe try sex toys. It's just "he needs to do foreplay" and that's it. So, I don't find that useful.)

Good Christian girls are taught that that's what sex is. But since I'm queer, I've found out that sex can be so much better than that- when it's something that you choose, something that you make the way you want it. And the farther I get from that ideology, the more I'm shocked at how extremely ****ed up it is. How bleak a picture they paint of sex- even though they also say it's "a beautiful gift from God" and if you follow all the rules correctly (be straight, don't have premarital sex, etc) then your sex life will be perfect.

You know I don't like it when people say "sex is supposed to be" whatever, but: sex is supposed to be a good experience that you create together with your partner. Not something that some authority figure sets the parameters for, and then you're required to do it to be a "good wife", even though you won't like it. Oh it can be so much better than that.

Okay, I realize this blog series is supposed to be my asexual take on "The Great Sex Rescue," and this stuff I just said about "sex can be so much better than that" probably doesn't sound very asexual, but yeah that's how I really feel, so there it is. Obviously if you're ace and you don't want to have sex at all, I totally support that. I support everyone knowing themself and figuring out what they want, and confidently believing that their feelings and desires should matter.

So, back to "The Great Sex Rescue." This section is mainly about the idea that men's "sexual needs" are more important than any need that a wife may have, and there are a bunch of anecdotes along those lines. I'll highlight a few things from these anecdotes:

Rebecca Lindenbach, one of the co-authors of the book, talks about how she experienced pain during sex for a long time after giving birth. Her husband supported her and gave her the time she needed to heal, and didn't pressure her into sex. When she pressured herself into sex, because of her concerns about his "needs", he said "I'm not interested in anything that causes you pain" and he didn't consent to sex then.

Here's a good line about Lindenbach's husband, Connor:

In fact, as he says, he never even viewed it as "his" sexual needs that were put on hold, but "our" sexual needs.

Yes, this is what men should do. If sex is painful for your partner, then don't do it that way. Find some workaround that you both can enjoy, and/or just don't have sex for a while.

Conservative Christian marriage ideology teaches that it's not possible for a man to love like that.

Here's a section from another anecdote, also about a woman who had postpartum sexual pain:

[content note: her husband is coercive and doesn't care about her pain]

My husband has a very fundamentalistic view of the Bible, and I think he would like me to suffer through the pain and fulfill my duty for his sake. ...

It is interesting to me that when it is my body that got injured during birth (pelvic organ prolapse) and my body that now experiences pain during intercourse-- he acts as if he is the only one hurting. I know he loves me, but I feel so objectified. The fact that my husband wants me to have sex with him despite intense pain disgusts me, and I really question who I chose to marry.

The authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" say this about the above anecdote:

How did we get to a point where the husband thinks he is biblically justified to expect her to "suffer through the pain" to "fulfill my duty for his sake"? Maybe because books have intimated exactly that when they give the obligation-sex message with no caveats.

Yes, they are exactly right. This is exactly what Christian marriage books teach- wives need to have sex with their husbands. Even if you don't want to, even if it's painful, men need it, so you have to. Of course this results in horrible situations where a woman is in extreme pain and nobody cares about her, they only care about if her husband is having enough orgasms.

And even as I read these stories, I feel like... I've internalized this obligation-sex ideology so much, that I'm not even confident I can argue that a man's "sexual needs" are NOT more important than a wife's need to not be in pain. I ... I'm not a man, what do I know... what if it *is* true that a man's need to have an orgasm is more of a big deal than women's sexual pain? That's what all the good Christian role models said- how can I claim that they're wrong, since I don't have the experience of being a man? How can the authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" argue for that?

I mean, it's misogynist bullshit, is what it is, and that is really obvious... and yet... this is what I've always heard from Christians, and I've internalized it to the extent I'm like "but how do we really know it's wrong?"

Ugh.

Anyway, another anecdote from the book. This one is from a woman with a high-risk pregnancy, who was ordered by her doctor to be on bed rest, but she's concerned about her poor husband's sexual needs. And, yeah, the authors of "The Great Sex Rescue" point out how ridiculous it is. Everyone's first priority in this situation should be the pregnant woman's health, and the unborn baby's health. The husband's "sexual needs" don't even come close to that level of importance. But women in this ideology feel like they have to put their own health at risk, and their unborn baby's health, because "men need it." It's so ****ed up.

Then there's a section about the "do not deprive" verses in 1 Corinthians 7, which are some of the key bible verses that are always used to argue for this "wives are required to have unwanted sex" ideology. The book already addressed these verses in chapter 3, so I won't go into a ton of detail here, but I like this quote:

Can you imagine any other area of life in which God would tell a person, "You have the right to use someone else for your own gratification, even if it causes physical or emotional pain"? Or in which he would tell a woman, "It pleases me when your husband acts selfishly toward you"?

PREACH!

So, that sums up the second part of chapter 9 of "The Great Sex Rescue." Basically I agree with what the authors are saying here. It's extremely messed-up that Christian marriage advice teaches that women are obligated to have unwanted sex because men's "needs" are SO IMPORTANT.

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Links to all posts in this series can be found here: Blog series on "The Great Sex Rescue" 

Related:

Conservative Christians Teach That Wives Are REQUIRED To Have Sex Even When They Don't Want To. Here Are The Receipts.

He Just Loves Me (a post about Sex, Pregnancy, and My "Wifely Duty") 

6 Ways Purity Culture Did NOT Teach Me About Consent

Let me tell you about a fanfic that reminded me of my marriage

So this is new

Saturday, February 17, 2024

Blogaround + Happy Chinese New Year!

Chinese dragon, with the text "2024 Happy New Year." Image source.

Happy Chinese New Year! New year's eve was on February 9 this year, and February 10 is the first day of the year of the dragon. 龙年大吉!

Some links related to Chinese New Year:

1. 3 Surprising Things From This Year’s Spring Festival Gala (February 10)

And here's the video of the French song mentioned in the article: 法语音乐剧首登春晚!《巴黎圣母院》选段《美人》太动听 「2024央视春晚」| CCTV春晚

2. 舞蹈《锦鲤》搭配周深的《大鱼》演绎生命的灵动与绚烂 「2024央视春晚」| CCTV春晚 (February 10) Video of the goldfish dance performed at the Chinese New Year gala. The dancers fly around on cables, very cool.

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And links about everything else:

3. Psychology of a Hero: ALADDIN (February 7) 25-minute video from Cinema Therapy. "Aladdin's best self is the one who helped the street urchins and who promised to set Genie free, but then out of fear of losing everything, he rescinds his promise to Genie, he lies to Jasmine, and he just keeps hurting people."

4. 'Obviously Sudokus Only Use Integers'... Hold My Beer!! (January 16) 1-hour-18-minute sudoku solve video. Wow, this one is amazing- it needs algebra. My favorite part is when Simon tries and fails to remember the word "epsilon"- "Oh gosh I used to be all over that stuff when I was young." So relatable. 

5. Tracy Chapman & Luke Combs Deliver Gripping Performance Of "Fast Car" | 2024 GRAMMYs I posted about this last time, but here's the full video.

6. Eyesores or Heritage? Shanghai’s Ubiquitous Laundry Racks (February 13) "Walk around any corner in Shanghai and you will likely see these clothes racks, especially outside traditional lane houses and high-rise condos built in the 1990s." This is so real.

7. Banana Prices (February 9) xkcd comic.

8. Elisabeth Elliot, Flawed Queen of Purity Culture, and Her Disturbing Third Marriage (February 6) [content note: abusive marriage] "Domestic abuse addles the brain. A victim may begin to believe she deserves this kind of treatment, that she could perhaps stop the abuse by her own efforts—if only she were better, prettier, smarter, holier. Through this lens, I have begun to understand the complexity of this elderly woman whose livelihood depended on her teachings about marriage and whose theology shifted so that it matched her reality of suffering, obedience, and surrender. Perhaps she feared the consequences of divorce on her career or reputation."

9. Georgia Senator Vows to Protect Girl, But Then Runs Away After Learning She Is Trans (February 17) "That’s when Kotler spoke to Senator Summers about how she was there with her kids to 'talk to legislators about keeping her kids safe.'"

Sunday, February 11, 2024

Wedding Traditions They Don't Have in China

Maroon 5 playing at a wedding. From the music video for "Sugar." Image source.

The topic for the February 2024 Carnival of Aros is "The Meaning of 'Romance' Across Time and Place." I haven't written for the Carnival of Aros before, because I am totally the opposite of aromantic, but I'm an American living in China, married to a Chinese man, so I have some things to say about this one.

So, as I said, I'm the opposite of aromantic. In college I used to dream about the kind of wedding I wanted to have, because I had SO MUCH romantic desire, and wanted to find one magical romantic partner I could be with forever to fulfill that romantic desire, and I viewed the wedding traditions as important symbols of getting those desires fulfilled. 

Fast forward a few years, and I got engaged to a Chinese man (Hendrix). We had our wedding in the US, so we did all the American wedding traditions that I wanted, but we live in China so I had the chance to talk to Chinese people about Chinese wedding traditions, and I've attended weddings in China, and the traditions are very different! It was sort of surprising to me, how these traditions- which I viewed as big important romantic milestones that I couldn't live without- just totally DO NOT EXIST in Chinese culture. They have different traditions instead.

In this post I'll list a few of the traditions that were very important to me, and how they are TOTALLY DIFFERENT in China.

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Getting engaged

So, Hendrix proposed to me with a diamond ring and big romantic gesture, just like the American traditions say you should do. It was great! Very happy with that!

When I told my friends in the US, they were all like "How did he ask???!!!" expecting to hear a grand romantic story- and yes, I told them the grand romantic story. And my relatives were calling on the phone, telling him "welcome to the family!"

Then when I told friends in China, none of them were like "How did he ask?" And Hendrix's family members didn't really act like anything was different.

Nowadays in China, because of influence from western countries, people do propose to their girlfriends with a ring and romantic gesture. But this is kind of new thing; it's not at all an established tradition in Chinese culture- seems like the older generation doesn't have much of a concept of it.

No, in China, instead of getting engaged, I would say the sort-of equivalent thing is getting the marriage license.

See, in China, getting the marriage license (ie, getting legally married) is a completely separate thing from the wedding. What?! I was shocked when I found out about this. In the US, the wedding is the event at which you get legally married- that's the definition of a wedding. In China, this is not the case!

We ended up getting our marriage license in China (because of immigration reasons that made more sense than doing it in the US) and then having our wedding in the US. I was a bit worried... if my relatives knew that we were already legally married, would they think our wedding was not "real"?

I remember asking a Chinese friend how you define which day is your anniversary- since the day you get legally married is different than the wedding day. She didn't seem that concerned about it. She said you can decide for yourself which one is meaningful to you. She said she felt like, getting the marriage license was about just you and your partner, and then the wedding is something you do for your family, so for her, getting the marriage license was more important.

And since I was raised in purity culture, which made a big huge deal about how you can't have sex till marriage, I was super confused about "how do you know when you can have sex?" Is it when you get the marriage license, or is it after the wedding itself? (Fortunately I quit believing in "purity" and decided we can just make our own decision without having our wedding be the way we announce the world that we're about to have sex, eww.)

And the day we got our marriage license, Hendrix's relatives took us out for a fancy dinner. See, turns out that's the "welcome to the family" moment, from a Chinese perspective. Not when you get the engagement ring. (There are also Chinese traditions about the bride and groom's family negotiating about how much money the groom's family is going to give the bride's family, but we didn't do any of that.)

I remember a Chinese friend asking me about getting engaged and what it means in US culture, and he asked, "Do some people get married without getting engaged first?" And I interpreted that to mean if a couple just goes and elopes without telling anyone- and their family and friends would probably be unhappy about not being invited to the wedding. But actually I don't think that's what he was asking. I think he wasn't aware that it's not really possible to invite people to your wedding without being engaged- like, if you're planning a wedding and sending out invitations, you ARE engaged. He was probably thinking you get the marriage license, then you plan the wedding, then you have the wedding- and getting engaged sounded like an unnecessary step before that.

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The wedding dress

In US culture, shopping for the wedding dress is a big deal. Finding that one perfect dress- THE dress. And then there's a tradition that your partner isn't allowed to see the dress until the wedding day.

In China it's totally different.

First of all, at Chinese weddings, the tradition is that the bride wears a bunch of different outfits. The traditional color for weddings is red, so basically she wears a series of different red dresses- but now that China is borrowing [the appearance of] some traditions from western culture, many brides add a white dress to the mix too. So there's not like a "THE dress" - you wear a bunch of dresses, and I don't really know what the romantic/emotional significance of it is.

And here's what really shocked me: In China, the couple gets their "wedding photos" taken as a completely separate thing from the actual wedding itself. Really, "wedding photos" is not the right translation of "婚纱照"- I would translate it as "wedding dress photos." Because these are NOT photos from the wedding, they are photos of the couple wearing wedding clothes. This is something that's done before the wedding.

Totally shocking to me, because, what about the tradition that your spouse can't see your wedding dress before the big day? (Yeah, not a thing in China.) And also, the dress that the bride wears in the photos isn't even THE dress. You go to a photo studio and pick from the dresses they have there, and you wear that in the photos, and that has no relation at all to the dress(es) you actually wear on your wedding day. (In fact, I've been to weddings in China where they show a slideshow of photos of the couple, and these "wedding dress photos" are part of the slideshow- making it really obvious that they were taken beforehand and aren't photos from the actual wedding. This is completely normal in China.)

I remember when I found out about this, it made me feel like the wedding photos in China were "fake." Because it's not your actual wedding day, and that's not your actual wedding dress. But it's not "fake"- it's just that they have different traditions for this.

We went and got photos taken in China when we got our marriage license. We wore the traditional red clothes that the photo studio provided. My mother-in-law also wanted me to do photos wearing a white wedding dress, but I totally refused. I can't be wearing a white wedding dress if it's not my wedding day and it's not my wedding dress- that would be a lie! The only reason I would ever do that would be maybe if I was shopping for dresses, trying on different ones, sending a photo to my sister to get her opinion- but beyond that, no, no way am I letting anyone see me in a white wedding dress if it's not my wedding day.

So we just did the photos with the red Chinese clothes, and that was fine.

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Dancing

Dancing is my FAVORITE part of weddings. But in Chinese tradition, there's no dancing at a wedding at all. To some extent, for Chinese weddings that are more "westernized", they kinda-sorta add some dancing to it- the bride and groom have their first dance on stage, and the bride has the dance with her father, on stage- but it's basically just a performance on the stage, not something that you eventually get all the guests to join into. There's no dance floor, there's no hours and hours of everyone dancing.

Really surprising to me, because dancing with everybody was one of the things I looked forward to the MOST (and our wedding was in the US, we had a DJ and dance floor and everything, it was great) but in China it's just not a thing at all.

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And there are so many other wedding traditions which are completely different in China- I just discussed these 3 here because these were the ones that were most surprising to me, because they were extremely meaningful to me but just aren't part of Chinese tradition at all.

I'm writing this for the Carnival of Aros because it shows how romance is so culturally constructed. To some extent, there are things that will be the same in all cultures- most people have romantic feelings, most people fall in love- but the specific ways that those feelings manifest is super-dependent on the unique cultural symbols of romance, and those aren't universal at all. I spent so much time dreaming about my first dance at my wedding- there are cultures where people simply don't do that, because they don't have a first dance. They may have similar romantic feelings to me, but it doesn't cause them to dream about their first dance. It comes out in other ways.

So if you're aromantic and don't care about romantic traditions, well, whatever, billions of other people don't care about those specific traditions either. And even if you have romantic feelings, that doesn't mean you have to care about roses or diamond rings or whatever. All these things are just cultural symbols- there's no intrinsic reason they need to be viewed as "romantic."

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Related:

Getting Engaged Isn’t Exactly a Thing in China 

My Chinese Marriage License

Wedding Posts Round-Up

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