Posted on 09/04/2026 7:35:03 PM PDT by Morgana
In the 1970’s, famous feminist Gloria Steinem said: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.”
The message: Women are self-reliant, and men are superfluous. Men are unnecessary and incompatible with women. Her cynical view was, no doubt, colored by her father’s abandonment.
At our core, human beings are relational. Attachment to others is a basic human need. Our first attachment is to our parents. From our mothers we absorb what it means to be a woman. From our fathers, we learn how women ought to be treated by men. These kinds of lessons cannot come from classroom lectures, but through the intimacy of daily living.
When Gloria Steinem and other feminists belittle men, marriage and family, they are denying a basic truth: women need male relationships.
But in adopting the flippancies of the Gloria Steinems of the world, what is ideal for women has been set aside as unnecessary or unrealistic. Instead, full attention and resources are devoted to what is far less than ideal, and even harmful to women and society.
We are faced with two competing views:
1. The first is: Women are complete by themselves. Men and women are different only in the area of reproduction. Men are like ladders, useful only to support a woman as she climbs through life.
Here is an example: In the draft resolution on “Fertility, Reproductive Health and Development” for the Commission on Population and Development, the only significant mention of men is:
OP14. Urges Member States, the United Nations and civil society to include in their development priorities programmes that support the critical role of men in supporting women’s access to safe conditions for pregnancy and childbirth, contributing to family planning, preventing sexually transmitted infections and HIV, and ending violence against women and girls.
This minimal list is silent on the critical role that women need men to play in family life, as if there is no need for men to be intimately invested in providing companionship, security, protection and care for their wives, and a father for their children. There is no room here for a husband’s masculine, life-long embrace of his wife and their children. And there is certainly no expectation of fidelity.
Frankly, this is the kind of man that women don’t want. Distant, non-committal, giving only the bare minimum, but not giving himself. In their very low view of men, the Gloria Steinems teach men to treat women poorly – which, when men do, naturally leads women to believe that they’re better off without men. It’s a self-fulfilling expectation.
Demeaning either men or women, treating either as utilitarian, or dismissing marriage as irrelevant damages us as human beings and destabilizes society.
2. The second view is that: Women and men are complementary. We are different in marvelous and various ways, yet in our differences fit together to complete one another. The most profound relationship is marriage — because it perfects the purpose of the two sexes, male and female.
While women may list professional accomplishments when presenting ourselves to the world, we find our primary identity in our relationship with our family — particularly, as a wife and mother. The most influential relationships, the ones that impact us the deepest, are those within our family.
It is these relationships that complete the purpose of what it means to be a woman. And marriage, in which both husband and wife completely give of themselves to the other, provides the security to fully live out this identity of womanhood.
Too often women and sex are viewed in isolation — Women are separated from men and from family, and sex is seen as a mere physical act that has nothing to do with relationships.
When policies are shaped by this view, they produce programs and laws that end up isolating women from real relationships and encouraging extramarital sex— which is the source of many diseases, pathologies and heartaches.
The transcendent wonder of femininity, marriage and sexuality is difficult to describe when crafting policy documents. However, we can point out the benefits of marriage and the rightful place of sexuality.
Humans are relational. We need to belong to others. This is particularly true for women. It is within family and marriage that we are most likely to find safety, security, selflessness, and satisfaction. Marriage joins two families together and creates a new one, enlarging our relationships.
The sexual encounters promoted in comprehensive sexuality programs are the opposite — fleeting, insecure, unsafe, self-centered. The programs deliberately separate children from parents, leaving children vulnerable to adults who would exploit them. Non-marital sex damages a person’s ability to bond to another in marriage.
At the demands of the Gloria Steinems of the world, we’ve accepted a very low standard. Women have paid the price of devaluing marriage. Sexual partners are so interchangeable, and the unique nature of womanhood so denied that now we’re told that men can replace women in marriage.
What an insult to women.
Yet there is hope. Gloria Steinem — the woman who didn’t need a man — came around. In 2000, at age 66, to everyone’s surprise, Gloria Steinem got married.
In the Genesis account of the beginning of mankind, the Creator announces, “It is not good that man should be alone.” Even these many years later, women still need men and marriage is a definite good for women.
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Thank you very much and God bless you,
Jim
Nope. Just taller than me.
Regards,
You mean they didn't rely on what women say?! Remarkable!
So, do tell: What did the "red pill community" ultimately determine?
Regards,
Basically, they want the Chad’s to fool around with and the non-chads for finacial stability.
Women lie, they won’t tell you what they want. You have to observe.
It is more likely that a lot of what we take for granted was either invented or nurtured and developed by women in prehistoric times.
Cooking, sewing, weaving, ceramic and other containers, diapers, herbal medicine, gardening, preserving food
Men were busy hunting, while women were spending much more time at shelter where they could care for helpless young. They were gathering food, remembering where certain things grew at certain times, and some women probably decided to try to grow some of what they gathered closer to home where they could keep and eye on it and care for it.
It is likely that men decided some of what women were doing were good ideas, and expanded on the size and scope of such activities with their greater strength and free time.
I spent most of the first 44 years of my life married to one man, who was a very mixed bag as his Korean War PTSD grew and worsened as the Vietnam war became a more social relevant topic. Eventually I learned enough about alcoholism to try to put together and intervention for him. One of his drinking buddies I invited to participate took him to an AA meeting. A number of his disappeared drinking buddies were at the meeting. He started attending meetings and working his program and never got drunk again. We had 3 or 4 good years and then it became evident he was developing Alzheimers and I cared for him the remaining years of his life and final death at home.
At his memorial service, an old friend of ours came and asked to see me again. A year later we made a life commitment, and the past 20 years have been the best of my life. His capacity for total thereness when we are together is a very rare capacity. Unfortunately, a capacity which far too few couples ever succeed in developing and enjoying.
They prefer Shwimms
Once one fish has a bicycle, they all want one, whether they need one or not.
At some point, the bicycles figure out that they don't need fish, either.
Regards,
When my wife & I were married, I was a low-ranking man in the USAF, so she surely knew even woithout asking that I did not have a big ,thick wallet. We had very little when married. I have more now, but am in my late ‘80s & worked after 4 yrs. in the military until age 75. My house is about 50 yrs. old & my car is 21 yrs. old. I had this much when my wife died, so you can see it wasn’t a lot. Oh, I would suppose that she would liked to have had more, but so did I. We quietly got along with what we had & lived together succesfully for 59 years until her death. Some would ask how we managed with so little. I really don’t know, but we managed.
True story (maybe):
On a flight over the Atlantic the plane experienced a severe mechanical malfunction, pitched left and right and started to lose altitude.
A frightened women in 1st Class stood up and shouted she needed someone to make her feel like a women before the plane ditched.
A strapping young man in back stood up and started taking off his shirt as he made his way up towards 1st Class.
He gets to where this woman was standing, tosses his shirt at her and says: "Here, iron this".
My guess is that is because you valued each other over things and neither one of you were selfish or entitled.
A marriage can only work well when BOTH spouses work at it together, instead of one being demanding and selfish, man or woman.
For all the kvetching about women on these threads by the women haters, men are not innocent either and I know plenty of women who can attest to that from their trips to the ER due to the beatings he gave them.
“a soy-boy who wets himself at the mere mention of AR-15s”
Daughter just had her 25th birthday, said she got a bottle of Jack Daniels from her brother and a day at the shooting range from her best friend (hopefully not used at the same time). She was so happy.
Ask the same women, “what do men really want in a woman?”.
Crickets....they don’t know.
“There is no room here for a husband’s masculine, life-long embrace of his wife and their children. And there is certainly no expectation of fidelity.”
IOW: a baby daddy. They have seen how well that has worked in the hood, so now they are moving the phenomenon to include white women.
You forgot: tall.
Sounds like you picked a wonderful woman, who also picked you, and together you gave each other what each of you wanted. Congratulations on 50 years with the woman you love.
Women just want and need mens stuff.
Gloria Steinem said
“In the 1970’s, famous feminist Gloria Steinem said: “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle.” Gloria, I’d tell you to make me a ham sandwich, but you’re dead.
Well Steinem sure found she and other women needed a man in 1998 to continue their murder of babies in the womb when she took to the pages of the NY Times to defend Bill Clinton’s sexual assault of Kathleen Willey, dismissing Clinton’s unwanted groping of Willey and forcing her hand on his privates by saying it was okay because “President Clinton took ‘no’ for an answer.”
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