Gender Stereotypes: Are Men Repelled by "Strong and Courageous" Women

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Welcome to Bible Bash, where we aim to equip the saints for the works of ministry by answering the questions you're not allowed to ask.

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Listen and enjoy this latest episode as Pastor Tim answers your sincere questions. Here's Pastor Tim.

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On this episode of Bible Bash, we'll be answering the question, Are men repelled by strong and courageous women because men are weak and have fragile egos?

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Now, this is one of those embarrassing and humiliating kind of questions to answer, but then we will continue to engage in a little bit of foolishness and treat it as if it's a serious question that deserves a serious kind of answer.

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Now, in trying to answer a question like this, once again, I want to return to some of the brute realities of the physical differences between men and women that our society is tempted to ignore.

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So, when you think about the current situation that's happening with the WNBA and the

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NBA, there's plenty of WNBA players who are basically scandalized by the fact that they are getting paid significantly less than the standard man is being paid who plays in the

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NBA. And they accuse the fans of basically being sexist and bigots and everything else and not realizing that the reason that they're getting paid significantly less than the standard male would get paid is because, in fact, they are significantly less talented than the standard male basketball player is.

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It doesn't really have to take a whole lot of knowledge about sports to be able to put WNBA players side by side with NBA players.

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And one of the things you're going to realize is that, in certain respects, the game looks almost unrecognizable as it's played at a

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WNBA level and as it's played at an NBA level. Again, to engage in just a certain kind of foolishness in order to help everyone regain a proper sense of reality.

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When I was a freshman basketball player in high school, I would routinely beat two girls who were varsity players at the same time, and it wasn't very hard.

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The reality is that men are just significantly stronger and significantly faster than the standard girl and have significantly more hand -eye coordination.

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And this shows up in just watching a simple NBA basketball game. Women playing at a

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WNBA level, basically, if you want to compare that to men playing, they could maybe play with the average male high school basketball team or something like that.

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The talent differential is that significant. It's just you can take the best female players in the world and they may give an average male basketball team a run for the money, but that's about it.

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There's a vast difference between the NBA and the WNBA. And when you think about some of these stark kind of realities, then when you have women who are essentially basically looking at men and challenging them and saying, hey, the only reason why you don't respect us is because you're sexist, what they need to realize is that the reason why people don't want to watch their game is because if you compare it to a male basketball, it's almost unrecognizable as a sport as far as that's concerned because men and women are fundamentally different.

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I remember John McEnroe got in a lot of trouble for essentially daring to suggest that Serena Williams was the best female tennis player to ever play the game.

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And the female reporter looked at him somewhat scandalized. And she was scandalized by that.

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And she asked him, you know, why are you say best female tennis player in the world? And his response to that was because, well, obviously she's the best female tennis player in the world because she wouldn't be able to compete with men in that way.

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Men are just significantly better. And this was news and horrified, you know, horrified individuals who have been sheltered from these basic realities.

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But the truth was that Venus and Serena in their prime, they were basically bragging about the fact that they could beat a male tennis player.

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And they said that they could beat a male tennis player in the top 200 or whatever, a male tennis player.

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And there just so happened to be this male tennis player who, you know, was washed out on the end of his career, who was ranked 201.

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He was hung over and had a sprained ankle. And he beat, I think he beat

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Serena six games to one. And he beat Venus maybe six games to two. But it's just that level of difference between male competitive sports and female competitive sports.

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And so if you're thinking about a question like this, are men repelled by strong and courageous women in quote unquote, the truth is that women are just significantly weaker than men.

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And that's something that we've had to try to point out over the course of this podcast. And when women refuse to deny reality and try to portray themselves as being something that they're fundamentally not, one of the things that happens is that it does get kind of awkward and uncomfortable.

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And so part of the reason why men are repelled by the idea of a strong and courageous woman is because that kind of woman doesn't really exist in the main.

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There may be some kind of women out there who are on steroids, you know, the one in a million kind of woman who's on steroids, who actually makes herself look just like a weaker male bodybuilder would look.

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But the vast majority of women are significantly weaker and have significantly less courage than the standard male.

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And so part of the question though is, is like, how do you respond to the type of individual who's constantly, like if you're a man constantly like bowing up to you and trying to prove themselves and has some chip on their shoulder with something to prove and trying to prove that they're strong and courageous when you're looking at them and you're just realizing that this is like we're engaging in crazy talk here.

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So the standard male kind of reaction to this kind of scenario is just to shake their head and be somewhat confused.

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Now at the whole question, it's not about having weak and fragile egos that need to be stroked.

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It's just you're asking them to play pretend in a way that makes their brain hurt. It's almost comparable to, you know, walking into Target and seeing 400 pound women doing model poses.

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When you look at something like that and you're being told that this is attractive and sexy, you just kind of shake your head and wonder what kind of bizarro world you ended up landing in.

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But then the same thing is true in the opposite way. So like men, you know, have a certain reaction to the kind of woman who has been persuaded by society to pretend as if she's strong and courageous.

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The typical kind of man just kind of looks at that, somewhat confused, maybe chuckles a little bit. And then just everything his eyes are telling him contradicts this basic claim to strength and courage.

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And then he has to pretend in order to not be canceled by everyone around him that his eyes are not lying to him.

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It's just a catastrophic joke. But then the opposite thing can happen in the opposite way because I have a bit of an absurd sense of humor.

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One of the things that I try to do sometimes is when, you know, I'm talking with, you know, couples at church or whatever else who are about to get or who've just gotten, you know, the woman just got pregnant and they're about to have a baby or something like that.

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Sometimes I like to tell my stories of my wife's delivery from my perspective.

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So I like to share, you know, how traumatic the experience is to me. And I try to do it with a straight face just to see how far

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I can get away with doing this. But then one of the things that I've always realized in this frequent and painful joke of mine is that, you know,

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I've never encountered a situation where a lady looked at me and gave me any sympathy for the game that I'm trying to play.

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I mean, there is no sympathy that's shown to me. Not only is there no sympathy shown for the ordeal that I had to go through, not only is there no sympathy shown, sometimes ladies can get just straight up angry, like angry at me.

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And so I have to be careful about this because I don't want to provoke people to anger. I'm just trying to get a good laugh. But sometimes ladies can get really angry about how insensitive

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I am and how rude I am trying to equate the ordeal that a woman has to go through in childbirth with my insignificant ordeal that doesn't compare to that whatsoever.

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And the problem with this kind of thing is that I actually understand that impulse and that's why it's such a joke. The reason why it's a joke and why it's supposed to be funny is because I'm taking two scenarios that are in no way comparable.

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And I'm trying to get people to suspend reality for a minute and treat the one scenario as if it's the other.

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But then something similar like that is happening in the opposite direction as it relates to strength and courage in women.

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When women present themselves as strong and courageous, the standard man is just going to look at them.

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And he's being asked to live in some sort of strange fantasy world that doesn't make sense to him at all.

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I mean my goodness, I probably scare my wife like three or four times a night on accident.

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I happen to have a disability I guess where I walk around the house somewhat quietly and don't make a whole lot of noise.

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And as I walk around the corner, sometimes I'm nervous to walk around the corner because I'm not nervous that I'm going to scare myself.

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I'm nervous that I'm going to come around the corner and see my wife and she's going to jump. And she's going to toss her plate full of food or drink or whatever else because she's so frightened.

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I mean there are times where I'm just sitting there laying next to her in bed and I might move a little bit.

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And she sees movement in the corner of her eye and she gets jumpy. And the truth is that as I've interacted with other men, these kind of stories are very, very common when we look at our wives.

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We see that they're much more jumpy than we are. They're much more prone to fear in that kind of way.

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The standard woman, as I've interacted with the standard woman, they have significantly greater concerns about getting kidnapped or getting tossed into a white van somewhere and picked up and carried off and taken off.

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I've listened to ladies talk about their strategy sessions for leaving the grocery store to get to the car.

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And these are the kind of things that I've never once in my entire life had to think about. I've worked in plenty of rough areas.

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I went to school in the ghetto during part of my high school experience.

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I've worked in some tough neighborhoods. I've never feared for my life anywhere I've gone.

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I'm not afraid to go out at night, drive around at night by myself. I don't have any of these kind of worries.

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I'm not jumpy in the same kind of way. I'm not having to think through strategies, exit strategies in case there's danger and that kind of stuff.

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I just go about my life and my life isn't shaped in that kind of way. So when we're talking about the idea of strength and courage, part of what's happening there is that men are repelled by this idea because they're looking at an individual who is claiming to have strength and courage.

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And they know deep down that this is just not real, that we're all playing pretend, that we're all engaging in some sort of fantasy.

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Men have the same kind of reaction as the ladies have when I share my horrific child birthing experiences of watching my wife.

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So part of it's that. But then part of it is that we're made to be attracted to different traits in women.

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So for a woman to get actually objectively man strong, she's going to have to take some drugs.

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To get man muscles, a woman can work out and she can get in shape and she can do things, but she's still going to look like a woman.

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But then you take a woman and these bodybuilding type of women, they're the type of women who are taking steroids or have a lot of chemicals that they're putting in.

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Women don't naturally look like that. Men are made to be attracted to someone that's fundamentally different.

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So the standard woman isn't going to be objectively strong and courageous. But then if you give a bunch of steroids to a woman, she can make herself look more like a man.

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But then no man wants to be married to a man. He wants the opposite of what he looks like. So a woman could work out and she can be in reasonable shape and that would be attractive to a man.

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But she's still going to look like a woman unless she's going to the next level trying to gain man strength. And then she's going to have to be using some harsher chemicals in order to achieve that result.

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But then one of the things we have to talk about though is this idea of men having weak and fragile egos.

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Like if a woman isn't just a submissive woman as the

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Bible describes. Like a submissive woman who's subject to her husband and is characterized by a gentle and quiet spirit.

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But she adopts this fierce woman persona. What about that is off -putting to the man?

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Why is that off -putting? Well obviously it's off -putting because that's not God's design for her. And that's not what

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God calls her to. But if we leave these verses aside and just pretend like they're not in the Bible for a second.

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Is there any other reason why that should be repelling to a man? Other than the fact that the woman is rejecting the very things that God has commanded her to do in the scripture.

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Is there anything else about it that's repelling? And I would say that it's not very difficult to imagine why this would be repelling to a man.

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If you try to compare a scenario that could happen in the opposite. So men and women are fundamentally different.

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And part of the reason why we're so confused at this point is because we see objectively no difference between male and female whatsoever.

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But the problem is men and women are different. They're objectively different. They're made to do different things.

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Now what's actually happening in these kind of discussions is that generally it's like a woman who is trying to prove herself as strong and courageous.

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And it's the woman who has the fragile ego. And it's the woman who needs her ego stroked. She's constantly trying to prove that she's independent.

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And that she's capable and that she doesn't need a man. And that she has it all together. And like this type of woman, she's the one with the weak and fragile ego that needs to be stoked.

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She's the one who's sitting there struggling with the pickle jar for a minute.

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And you're sitting there looking at her wondering, like, hey, why do you think God gave me all these man muscles?

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I could help you out with that. And it's like, well, I don't need your help. I'm strong. I'm independent. I'm courageous. It's like, well, it doesn't look very strong and courageous to me.

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But the thing is that the ladies who adopt this kind of attitude, it's just like they have this deep -seated insecurity.

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They're trying to push on men. And basically, they're projecting on men what's actually happening to them.

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The idea, though, is that what's happening is that there's nothing that you need to prove if you realize that God's made us fundamentally different.

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Now, if you can imagine the kind of scenario in the opposite way, you might understand why this could be somewhat repelling to a man.

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So imagine if a man were to tell his wife basically that he's strong and he's independent and he's capable and he doesn't need her help.

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And just imagine that he were to work a full -time job and then basically he tells her, like, hey, when

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I come home, I feel like I want to show you that I'm capable and strong and able to cook.

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And so then he devotes himself to the cooking and he devotes himself to the housework and he devotes himself to the taking care of the children.

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And then if he were to tell his wife, hey, you know what, like, I just like I feel like in myself,

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I want to show you that I'm able to be our kids' parents. And so please don't talk to our children and please don't ever cook and please don't ever clean because I want to show you that I'm capable of being cooking and cleaning and teaching our kids everything that they need to know while at the same time working a full -time job.

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And all that I want you to do really is just you just sit there and just you have nothing you can do to contribute to our household because I just want you to know that I'm independent and I'm capable and I don't need you.

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But at a certain point every night now, like there's a lot of women right now who basically want their men to do that kind of thing.

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But if the man just totally lets them get away with it, like or if a man were to take all that from her.

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So the thing is, there's a lot of ladies who would like, yeah, you take it all. If you love me, you're going to basically work a full -time job and get up in the middle of the night and formula feed our babies that I refuse to breastfeed and then clean the whole house.

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And then also cook for me because everything's just so hard for me and everything else. So there's plenty of young ladies right now who want their men to basically do all that.

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But if a man were to have the audacity to basically say, hey, I got it all covered.

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I'm strong and I'm capable and I'm independent and you're not allowed to do anything. That woman in that way, there would be something in her that would basically say, why am

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I here? What am I here for? So if you seem like you're on some quest to prove that you're just as good of a decorator as a woman.

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You're on some sort of quest to show that you're just as good of a homemaker as a woman. You seem like you're on some kind of strange quest to prove that you're just as good of a mother as a woman.

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You're on some kind of strange quest. It seems like everything that you're doing is trying to prove that you don't need me in any way.

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And what woman in that kind of arrangement, if they're basically restricted from being helpful in any kind of way, would look at that and think, oh man,

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I feel wonderful here. Would you look at her and say, oh, well, you're just intimidated by me and your weak and fragile ego needs to be stroked.

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You just need to feel like you can contribute something to this relationship and don't you know that I'm just capable and independent and everything else.

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It's just like that's nonsense. When you enter into a relationship, obviously men have strengths and women have strengths.

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And you put those two things together. You put the women's strength together and the men's strength together. And one of the things you're going to find is that both people need each other in order to be helpful.

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So the Bible says it's not good for man to be alone. And the inverse of that is also true. It's not good for a woman to be alone.

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God made men and women different. So this is why the standard bachelor pad is going to look like a standard bachelor pad.

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And then the reason why that's the case is because the standard woman is going to be significantly better at making a home into a home than the standard man.

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Now, if some man gets on some quest to show that he's just as homemakery as a woman, the standard woman is just going to chuckle at that, particularly when she looks at the results of it.

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It's just going to be absurd. The standard woman is just going to look at that and just say, you are going to make this home into a home.

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I saw your bachelor pad, man. I saw what that looked like. But the thing is that men have strengths and women have strengths.

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Women have significantly more domestic strengths if they devote themselves to those things. Men have significantly more physical strength and courage if they devote themselves to those kind of things.

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And this doesn't have to be a competition. If you're the kind of man who is basically married to some feminist kind of woman who is desperate to prove that she doesn't need you in any kind of way, the issue is not that you have some fragile ego that needs to be stroked.

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The issue is that God put you in this marriage for a reason, theoretically. And so it might be that you both have strengths and weaknesses that are going to make both of you need in order to have this family be what

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God wants it to be. And anytime one gender basically runs roughshod over the other gender and basically says,

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I don't need you in any way possible. I'm fine. I have nothing to gain from you. That basically is just telling this individual that they're worthless.

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And it's not about having a fragile ego. It's about saying, I think that this is not the way

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God made us to relate to each other. We don't have to be in some competition to prove that either one of us is better than the other kind of person.

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Why don't we just look at the things God's called us to and the roles that God's called us to and devote ourselves to those roles that God's called us to.

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And it may be that God has designed us to fulfill certain roles. And you know what?

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We might actually feel good and like we're in line with God's purposes for the world if we actually fulfill the goals that He actually has designed for us instead of fighting those roles.

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And so if God's designed you to do a certain thing, so if God's designed men to be stronger and more courageous than women, then there is this sense in which if a man is protecting his wife and using his physical strength to be a blessing to his wife, that means that the world feels better because he's being used the way he's designed to be used.

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And when a woman devotes herself to being nurturing and compassionate and to making a home, like she is doing the kind of thing that God uniquely designed her to do well.

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And the man doesn't have to look at that and that takes away anything from him. And the woman doesn't have to look at the man and think that takes anything away from her.

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Like both of you can just embrace the fact that you're different and God made you for different purposes. And God has different expectations for you in your different types of tools that God is using to accomplish different types of purposes.

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And you can use a screwdriver in order to hammer a nail, but it's not going to work near as well as if you use a hammer to hammer a nail.

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And that's the thing. And so when we're thinking about these kinds of discussion, God's made men to be leaders.

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He's made women to be followers. And when you have a woman who basically is a fierce, independent woman who is trying the best she possibly can to declare her absolute freedom and a lack of need for anything that the man has to offer, then certainly that's going to feel strange.

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And that's certainly going to not feel as attractive as the type of woman who realizes that she needs a strong man to help her in her life.

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This has been another episode of Bible Bashed.

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We hope you have been encouraged and blessed through our discussion. We thank you for all your support and ask you to continue to like and subscribe to Bible Bashed and share our podcast with your friends and on social media.

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Now, go boldly and obey the truth in the midst of a biblically illiterate world who will be perpetually offended by your every move.