Welcome to Taken In Hand, a website about wholehearted sexually exclusive marriages in which, to the delight of both spouses, the man actively controls the woman. The degree of control and the way the husband retains control vary from Taken In Hand couple to Taken In Hand couple, but in all cases both husband and wife actively want the husband to have the upper hand. No matter how strong, tough and forceful a Taken In Hand wife may be, and no matter how hard she might try to take control in their marriage, she would be aghast if her husband were to let her get the upper hand. Likewise, no matter how loving, kind and considerate the husband may be, he prefers to keep his wife firmly in hand.
Pretty counter-cultural, I'd say.
It seems to almost entirely consist of contributions from readers, not sociologists or headshrinkers or accredited "experts", but regular people who relate their own experiences.
It appears to be mostly an English/UK thing, but looks a lot like those websites from the US made by evangelical Prods where they talk quite freely about "male-led" relationships and marriage.
It's pretty freewheeling, especially in the comments, and some of it can get pretty racy, but I see that there are rules against vulgarity or explicit descriptions.
I wanted my site to be one in which private information (such as intimate details about what posters do in the bedroom, or wherever) would remain private rather than appearing on the site. I wanted my site to appeal as much to Orthodox rabbis, conservative Christians and readers' parents or grandparents, as to individuals who might also read obviously racy, graphic sites.
A lot of it is about err... "domestic discipline," which I know a lot of conservative Prods approve of, though I have no idea how the Catholic Trads would feel.
One thing I like about it right off the bat is that it will obviously make the feminists' heads come right the heck off and explode.
EHKS-SPLODE!
The first three headlines on the front page are:
"She needs me to be firmly in charge"...
"How to get into the right mindset for taking control of her?"
"How can a laidback man get into the right mindset to take control?"
I have to say, just sitting here fantasizing about the screeching and howling is doing me a world of good...
That faint popping sound you hear...
I am getting the feeling that there are a lot more women writing in to sites like Taken in Hand, and others like the American Protestant male-led relationship sites, but fewer men. I was wondering if this is because more women are coming to resent the limitations that our feminism-dominated western society has placed on them. I think that there is a strong undercurrent in society against marriage that hardly ever gets talked about. But women have always and will always want to get married, and at least nowadays, men seem to have pretty strong resistance to that.
I think more women are finally seeing that they have been sold a bill of goods, that feminism has done nothing but ruin the marriage market. It has turned women into harridans no decent man in his right mind would want to marry, and has turned men into perpetual teenagers who seek nothing in life more than the next quick, meaningless liaison.
The feminist movement has given men the freedom not to marry and made it easier for them to get what they want (sex) without having to “pay” for it with marriage. Feminism has done women this terrible disservice in telling them they can sleep around just like men, and have careers and be “successful”. This would be fine if it weren’t for the fact that women really don't want that. Or are starting to realise that it's not what it was cracked up to be.
I read once that a big reason that Blue Whales are now so rare, is that even after the whaling moratoriums were in place, there were so few of them left that they could not find each other in the sea to reproduce. I get the feeling that some of us old fashioned, traditional sort of people are like blue whales and finding each other in the vast and hostile oceans of the world, (a world, moreover, in which we are now in the position of having to remain strictly closeted) has become very difficult.
Let’s hear it for the internet then!
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I'm thinking that perhaps we ought not replace a 40 year old heresy with a 400 year old one. The feminists were, most of all, combating the Puritan view of marriage and relationship between the sexes. Likely that is why Feminism took root first in heretical countries like Canada, the US, and Britain, and was slower to infect more orthodox countries.
ReplyDeleteThe whole discipline thing can quickly go off the rails. Google "Rule 34".
Don't we have good Medieval, Catholic examples to look towards? Saint Thomas More's family life, perhaps?
I think strident feminists are the exception and not the rule, who, in their militancy, have been able to have their template be accepted as the norm.
ReplyDeleteI think the biology and psychology of this site is normal, more normal than the feminists' offerings, but that the terminology is horribly plebeian.
-Jean
By the bye,
ReplyDeleteThere have long been those voices on the non-corporate right, if you catch my drift, which have insisted that feminism was not a grassroots-based phenomenon, but rather social engineering by influential sectors of America's WASP elite. Electorates that compromise women, they allege, are far more docile, and focused on issues near and dear to home, rather than on foreign policy, monetary policy, and other realms to which the electorate is often all but apathetic, and in which the consensus among the well-informed sectors of the electorate is contrary to the whims of the political class....
Jean
I am so sad about the whales now! Can't we help them out? Tow them to potential spouses? - Karen
ReplyDeleteStrictly closeted? Ain't that a bit of a stretcher?
ReplyDeleteall I can think of is Richard Burton and Liz Taylor! Gee they were yummy!
ReplyDelete