Thanks for that Russmeister. Also for the link which was very interesting.
Can I recoomend the following discussion on the sola scriptura issue; even if you havn't read the Keith Mathison book it is discussing its still worth a glance. Alternatively there seems to be a raft of stuff on which is where this discussion is now located. We really should have a long chat about some of these things, I'm quite open about orthodoxy these days, it just hasn't crossed my path much. Maybe this needs to be in a different thread though.
Meanwhile here at last is the Lewis quote that started this:Men have so horribly abused their power over women in the past that to wives of all people, equality is in danger of appearing as an ideal. But Mrs. Naomi Mitchison has laid her finger on the real point. Have as much equality as you please – the more the better – in our marriage laws: but at some level consent to inequality, nay, delight in inequality as an e r o t i c necessity. Mrs Mitchison speaks of women so fostered on a defiant idea of equality that the mere sensation of the male embrace rouses an undercurrent of resentment. Marriages are thus shipwrecked. This is the tragic-comedy of the modern woman; taught by Freud to consider the act of love the most important thing in life, and then inhibited by feminism from that internal surrender which alone can make it a complete emotional success. Merely for the sake of her own e r o t i c pleasure, to go no further, some degree of obedience and humility seems to be (normally) necessary on the woman’s part.
From Equality. Originally published in The Spectator August 1943
In the Four Loves Lewis says that the sexual act ‘can invite the man to an extreme, though short lived, masterfulness, to the dominance of a conqueror or a captor, and the woman to a correspondingly extreme abjection and surrender. Hence the roughness, even fierceness of some e r o t i c play; the “lover’s pinch which hurts and is desired”.’
Furthermore Lewis notes that this attitude was common to most, though he believed not all lovers. Obviously he had been conducting research of some kind. I can sort of imagine him and Joy sitting with the Lancellyn Greens in Italy and Lewis saying coyly . . . no actually I can't quite imagine it. Maybe I should do a poll on this one.
Commenting on this A. N. Wilson observes that ‘In his typically self-revealing way he advanced a generalization . . . about what can only be specific to certain cases; and of what case other than his own could he have been aware?’ So there you go.