Here it is: my next post about one of the sixteen MBTI types! I’ve already profiled ESTP and INFP, from my unique, rather personal perspective. (INFP is me — and Frodo –, and ESTP is the antihero of my first novel, so he has a special place in my heart, even though he would drive me CRAZY in real life.)
If you don’t like the MBTI, please skip this post. I’ve already shared my caveats about it, and noted that the same territory is covered, just as effectively and probably more data-based, by The Big Five. However, I still enjoy the MBTI, and if the Lord wills, I will eventually make a post about every one of the sixteen types. I just don’t think it should be woodenly applied. It’s descriptive, not prescriptive.
The ESTJ
ESTJs are people who are Extraverted and prefer Sensing (they build up from sense data rather than getting an intuitive big picture in one fell swoop), Thinking (they aren’t overly concerned with their own or others’ feelings when making decisions), and Judging (they like to organize their time and environment rather than going with the flow).
According to the website sixteen personalities,
ESTJs are classic images of the model citizen: they help their neighbors, uphold the law, and try to make sure that everyone participates in the communities and organizations that they hold so dear.
Strong believers in the rule of law and authority that must be earned, ESTJ personalities lead by example, demonstrating dedication and purposeful honesty and an utter rejection of laziness and cheating. If anyone declares hard, manual work to be an excellent way to build character, it’s ESTJs.
This is the type that loves to play games (Monopoly, Uno) because they can remind everyone of the rules … and maybe even make up some rules, too!
I have an ESTJ
Being as it is the opposite of my personality type, perhaps God knew that I would not learn to love ESTJs unless I gave birth to one.
It started from the womb. My ESTJ baby wasn’t comin’ out until he was good and ready. We went to the hospital three times with false alarms, which left us embarrassed and worried about the cost. Finally, when I did really go into labor, we stalled out and got sent home again. But finally, some time the next day, we had our precious little ESTJ. (Also, by the way, I had a very quick labor with my first, but a more normal length of labor with my ESTJ. Remember, they like to do things in the way that is socially acceptable.)
It’s hard to be an ESTJ when you are little and don’t have anyone to direct or keep in line yet. This is the kid that you are always having to remind, “You are not the parent.”
However, when they get older, the ESTJ’s unique gifts start to shine. My son’s coaches love him, because he follows instructions and always practices and plays with all his heart. (Remember, ESTJs are model citizens.) As a Judging type, he is super organized and always lets me know about upcoming events, fees and assignments due, and so forth. On the whole, this is a lovely type and society needs a lot of them. They are almost 9% of the population according to estimates, but since this is a type that is likely to be involved in social institutions (and getting others involved), they may be setting expectations out of proportion to their number. They may be unpleasantly surprised when weirdo types like myself can’t just easily get with the program.
Things my ESTJ has said
“Do it!” (He used to say this a lot at the age of about two. It is quintessential ESTJ.)
“C’mon, Spidey, let’s go up to the Celestial City.” (This is one of my favorite quotes from him.)
“[The guy opposite me in the football game] got mad ’cause I was doing my job.”
“Why are you such a libertarian? What’s a libertarian?” (He’ll often accuse me of being a new word in order to find out what it means.)
“I don’t have a personality. I just do what makes sense.”
This painting is me in twenty years. I hope. Note my cottage in the background.
Our Friend Mary Harrington
I want to talk about another lovely gift that I have been given by reactionary feminist author Mary Harrington. I reviewed her book, Feminism Against Progress, here.
In the video below, Jordan Peterson interviews Harrington. She gets to talk a lot. I don’t know whether this is because Peterson is mending his monologuing ways, or because Harrington is confident, articulate, and not afraid to take long turns, but in any case, we definitely get to hear her thoughts. They are not the exact same thoughts as the ones she expressed in Feminism Against Progress. You can see that her thinking is still developing, particularly the terms she likes to use to describe things.
It’s a very long video, and well worth the listen if this topic interests you, but for your reading pleasure I have transcribed the section that I want to talk about. Here it is:
At about 46:24, Peterson says, “The thing about women is that their mythological orientation is multidimensional and complex.” He mentions Beauty and the Beast, and Woman and Infant, as two possible hero myths for women, but notes that “our society does not hold sacred the image of Woman and Infant as a fundamental unit of female identity” (so we’re really only left with Beauty and Beast, which gets us into trouble).
Then at about 49:00 he asks Harrington, without asking a direct question, what she thinks is the woman’s Heroic Journey. And she’s got an answer for him!
After a detour into why she felt lonely as a young mother, Harrington answers at 51:45,
“In my observation, there is a hero’s journey for women, it just doesn’t follow the same track as the male one. And in fact, it has three parts, which correspond to a very ancient female archetype, which is the Maiden, the Mother, and the Matriarch. The triple goddess. And anecdotally, it stacks pretty closely to me with actually what a majority of normal women’s lives look like.
“You know, as the Maiden, you’re free, you do have more of a warrior aspect. The Mother is more oriented towards home and the domestic sphere, and probably bluntly just doesn’t care about [outside] work as much.
“But then, later on – and this was something I found very interesting when I did therapy training in the late aughts and early tens, was just how many of the trainees on that course were women in their 50s and 60s. So these were women who had pretty much done the motherhood arc, and they were moving into a new phase of life. They were moving into the Matriarch space. I mean the classic, three-part-goddess term for this is Crone. But they were some way from cronehood. These were lively, vital, energetic, public-spirited women who had some life experience. They had a lot of connections, they had a rich social life, they had met lots of people, and they were ready to give something back.
“And in my observation, there are a huge number of women who reach the end of the Mother part of that journey, and will then re-train. And those women are a huge, rich force for deepening reflection in the culture, for public service, for all manner of incredibly productive, usually quite self-effacing, but incredibly productive, life-giving contributions to the social fabric. And they’re incredibly marginalized. They’re almost completely invisible in terms of the liberal feminist narrative, which really centers the Maiden. And it wants to foreground the Maiden and to tell women that the hero’s journey means essentially being the Maiden for their entire life. At best, if the Mother is noticed, it’s as a problem to be solved. And the Matriarch doesn’t really get a look-in at all, and if she does, it’s only so that she can be denounced for being a TERF, or in some other way spat on for being a dinosaur or obsolete or old-fashioned or out of touch, or in some other way irrelevant or ridiculous.
“And in fact, these [older] women are the backbone of the social fabric. I mean, those are the women who are making weak cups of tea for slightly traumatized new mothers like I was in small-town England. (laughs) And telling me I’m doing fine. And really, that mattered a lot at the time. I mean, those are the women who are running Brownies groups for no money every Wednesday because they can and because they want to give back. Those are the women who are re-training as counselors and helping traumatized people for free. Those are the women who keep things going. (laughs again) And yet, somehow, the liberal feminist version of the hero’s journey just doesn’t see them at all.”
About that word “Crone”
I love what Harrington has to say here. But I must make a note of how she shies away from the word “crone” in favor “matriarch.” Based on the qualifications she puts around even mentioning the word, it’s apparent that Harrington thinks crones are women at the very end of their lives, who are listless and isolated: the opposite of “having a lot of energy” and “lots of connections” and “a rich social life.” The word crone in Harrington’s mind apparently conjures up a bedridden hospice patient who enjoys her only social interaction when the pastor visits once a month.
I got a similar reaction out of my editor when I went to describe Zillah (one of the main characters of my trilogy) as a crone. The word crone, said Editor, reads “old and ugly.” I convinced her to leave it, because I wanted to broaden the meaning of the word, or perhaps recover some of its original meaning.
Zillah, in my series, is in her sixties when we meet her in The Long Guest. I’m cheating a little with having a protagonist in her 60s, however, because my books are set in the immediate post-Flood era, when people lived into their 250s, and a woman in her sixties could still be fertile. Zillah has grown children in The Long Guest, but she still looks like a young woman, and in fact she gets her own romance arc.
In later books, Zillah gets older. By The Great Snake, when I was calling her a crone, she was over one hundred. By the standards of the time, this is only middle-aged, and in fact she is strong enough to hike all day, do dryland farming, and so forth. However, her role in the community is definitely what Harrington describes above as Matriarch. She practices emergency medicine and herbology, innovates in farming maize, counsels her family through crises, and brings potential problems to the attention of the patriarch (who is not her husband but her son). She can’t do everything, and in fact she has had some costly failures. But my trilogy would be much darker without Zillah.
I’m not saying my books anticipated what Harrington is saying, but … my books anticipated what Harrington is saying.
Hats off to Grandma! Or are they?
Of course, she is not the only one saying it (though she may be saying it the most eloquently, and with the biggest platform), and she is not the only one thinking it. Every woman is thinking through these things, whether she realizes it or not, and most women come to some kind of resolution. You have to, if you don’t want to live your life with a pathological fear of aging. This is not an attractive look, and most people figure this out and make some kind of effort to “age gracefully,” that is, to embrace their status as an older person.
This task is made more difficult in modern Western society, where we as a culture don’t value our elders at all and don’t really have any special role for them in the community. This is true of old men, to a lesser degree, but it’s really true of old women. Has anyone heard the phrase, “old women of both sexes”? It’s usually used in the following context: “I want to do bold plan XYZ, but when I said so, it really upset the old women of both sexes.” Old women, we learn, are fragile, risk-averse, set in their ways, and prudish. Probably bureaucrats. Also, they are not athletic or healthy (two other things our culture really values).
Our culture’s disdain for old women traces back to its disdained for motherhood and family life. If you don’t value mothers as such, then you are less disposed to respect your own mother when she is old. Further, if a culture does not have a lot of young moms who need help at home, then there really is no job for the old ladies to do other than go to work in an office, where the hours, tasks, and working conditions are often uncongenial to their nature and where admin would really like to push them out before they develop a bunch of expensive health problems.
On the other hand, if your culture prioritizes a large, thriving household of the kind described in Feminism Against Progress and in Proverbs 31, then there is plenty of useful work for Grandma to do. Furthermore, it’s exactly the kind of work she has spent decades becoming good at. She’s baking her famous dessert, she’s sewing outfits for the little kids, she’s quilting, she is babysitting. She’s answering Mom’s panicked questions about how to garden, get that stain out, and how in the world do I manage everything. This is work that is actually useful and needed (which is the kind of work that keeps people alive and happy). But it’s not like going to work in a shop or office in your fifties. There is more variety, and the schedule is freer. There is room for Grandma to go home and be by herself for a few days. There is room for her to take a nap. And unlike admin at the office, your grown children will not fire you and wash their hands of you when you develop health problems (not ideally, anyway).
Of course, all this is the ideal, and we all know that reality is different. Not every family relationship is a happy one that would allow this kind of close community (especially 60 years after the Sexual Revolution began its relentless campaign to break up families). And even in ideal circumstances, we can get on each other’s nerves. That’s why, in the painting, I am living in a cottage in the woods, where I can garden, paint, and keep a library. Ya gotta’ know your limits. But there is a world of difference between having some tension with your children in a context that values and honors older people for their wisdom and experience, and having to get a 9 to 5 job that really calls for a younger person, just to prove you’ve still “got it” and to justify your existence. This is the difference between Zillah’s world and ours.
Looking forward to being a Crone
I have been fortunate that I was a given a husband and children. I’ve moved through the stages and am now standing on the threshold of matriarchy/cronehood. And I’m liking the view.
Don’t get me wrong … I’m frightened as well. What scares me most is the prospect of chronic pain or disability — my own, or a loved one’s. But I’m not scared of aging itself. I like the idea of less pressure to look beautiful, of a lightening of parenting responsibilities (in exchange for others), and of time to keep getting better at my various crafts.
As a Christian, I am surrounded by a world that despises motherhood, families, and old women … but I have access to a world that honors them. I am in the world but not of it.
Also, I realize that I need to do a better job appreciating the older women who have surrounded me since I was small, my own mother included. I didn’t ever like being taught new things, because of the amount of correction it involved, but now I see how much we must listen to these ladies, honor them, eat the food they cook for us. Send in the crones!
I did not need to look this up in my Falcon Guide to Central Rocky Mountain Wildflowers. Husband identified it, and kids immediately started throwing it at each other.
Snarky review, cross-posted at GoodReads, incoming!
This is a Message book.
Abortion is good. It doesn’t kill a baby. The baby is not a baby. Or, it is, but if you abort it, its soul goes back to heaven and comes back to you in the next child you have. (Yes, really.)
No one should force a 15-year-old to have a baby. People who help the 15-year-old sneak behind her mom’s back to get an abortion are heroes. People at Planned Parenthood are super nice, professional, and caring, and never put pressure on the 15-year-olds or rush them through. The abortion process itself is super safe.
Blue states good, red states bad. Ohio is a red state. (Actually, it’s purple.) Pastor from red state is, of course, a televangelist and the only reason he preaches against abortion is because he doesn’t sufficiently love his daughter.
Also … we shouldn’t stop sleeping around if we want to. If you are 33 and don’t want kids yet, you can “just freeze your eggs.” Look, here are two elderly couples who have been spouse-sharing for 30 years and it hasn’t wrecked their friendships and no one has gotten jealous and they’re perfectly happy!
This other guy is extremely promiscuous, but that’s only a problem because it’s part of toxic masculinity, and he isn’t being self-reflective enough. This habit in no way damages his ability to want just one woman and be faithful to her when he decides to do so. He also doesn’t have an STD.
Jennifer Weiner always writes spunky, usually plus-sized female heroines who realize they have been wrong about the thinner woman they judged, whether it was their mom or their college roommate or their sister. This might lead you to think her books are cozy or relatable. Or that they actually contain life wisdom of some kind. In fact, they’re extremely radical.
And, when the heroine starts healing and growing as a person, here’s what it sounds like:
She couldn’t stop herself from thinking about him, but she didn’t let herself call or text. For the first month, she crossed each day off her calendar, getting through them hour by hour. She started a gratitude journal and a skin-care routine.
ibid, p. 372
I mean, this is just sad.
I’m giving this three stars because, as always with Weiner, the writing is really good and compulsively readable. I stuck around and finished the book for the romance. Actually, the fact that Weiner’s writing and characterization are so good make this book that much more of a menace. If you read without paying attention, you could come out of this thinking that abortion, spouse sharing, and freezing your eggs are No Big Deal, and that by getting girls secret abortions and starting a gratitude journal you can save your own soul.
In the last few years, quite a few actual headlines have sounded like jokes … but I think this one is the jokiest of all. In fact, I once saw a comic where a kid, dressed as the back half of a camel at a Nativity display, is “liberated” by PETA.
Him: I’m not really a camel.
PETA activist: Don’t tell me they’ve brainwashed you too!
Now that joke has become a reality.
“Animal-themed carousel sets reinforce the notion that these sentient beings are simply here for our entertainment, rather than individuals with the same capacity to experience fear, pain, joy, and love as any of us,” the letter added.
PETA President Ingrid Newkirk said in a press release, “Children learn through play, and teaching them to have respect and compassion for all living, feeling beings can help create a more just and merciful world.”
actually from this article
Right. Kids will never learn to love animals if they are allowed to interact with … portrayals of animals. They will never want to ride on or care for real horses if they are allowed to ride on artificial horses. We should remove all references to animals from their environment, and then they will become animal lovers.
I picked this up in the new-to-us section of the public library. This is a really well-chosen title, really lets you know what you are getting.
From the back:
If you’re struggling to stay on top of your to-do list, you probably have a good reason: anxiety, fatigue, depression, ADHD, or lack of support. For therapist KC Davis, the birth of her second child triggered a stress-mess cycle: the more behind she felt, the less motivated she was to start. …
Inside, you’ll learn to: See chores as a kindness to your future self, not a as rejection of your self-worth; Start by setting priorities; Stagger tasks so you won’t procrastinate; Clean in quick bursts within your existing daily routines; Use creative shortcuts to transform a room from messy to functional.
With KC’s help, your home will feel like a sanctuary again. It will become a place to rest, even when things aren’t finished.
I really wish that I had written this book, or that it had been written by Allie Beth Stuckey. This book, or a version of it, needs to be written by someone who understands human sin nature, grace, and the freedom that is found in Christ Jesus. It’s so, so close, but because of the author’s wokeness, there are jarring notes.
The Practical
To some, this book might sound as if it was written by a sloppy, disorganized person, to sloppy, disorganized people, to help them justify their sloppiness. On the contrary, it was written by a naturally distractible person, to distractible people, to help them achieve the level of organization that they actually want to, without letting the perfect become the enemy of the good.
KC went through rehab as a teenager. She has ADHD, is married with two small children, and is a therapist, which means that people talk to her about their frustrations with themselves and their inability to get their houses in order.
Consequently, the intended audience for this book is people who are responsible for keeping house, but have some major obstacle such as chronic pain, being in the midst of grieving, ADHD, depression, or having “issues” around cleaning due to the way they were raised … or all of the above. The goal is to help these people develop strategies to get over the mental (and sometimes physical) blocks so they can maintain their houses in basic livability. And I am there for it!
People in these situations might not have the time, energy, or attention span for a long book, so this little gem is written in short chapters, each of which gets right to the point. To accommodate people who might be very literal-minded (such as those on the autism spectrum), KC re-states all figurative language very literally. For example: “We are going to flex our motivation muscle” becomes “We are going to practice this skill until we get good at it.”
While I don’t believe that ADHD is a literal, physical brain disease, nor that it should be treated with drugs, I do believe that what we call ADHD is a good description of how some people’s minds, bodies, and sensory-processing work. And while I’ve never been diagnosed with ADHD (and have no desire to), their descriptions of how their minds work, and the strategies they use to get things done, usually sound so familiar and relatable that I find myself asking, “Doesn’t everyone experience that?” So, I could probably get a diagnosis if I wanted to. I just don’t think it would help me. I’m an older person and I’ve learned how to set up systems that work for me.
With that in mind, many of the aphorisms and strategies that KC presents here, are ones that I’ve come to myself, over years of keeping house, in season and out of season, through small children, international moves, unemployment, depression, the lot. Things like this:
“I have a responsibility to make sure my family always have clean clothes. I don’t have a responsibility to make sure that they never have dirty clothes.”
Any cleaning is better than no cleaning.
Better a less efficient method or system that you can actually do, than a perfect system that never gets done.
Doing “closing chores” the night before is a favor to your future self.
Most people don’t have a motivation problem (since they do actually want to be able to do the task and enjoy the clean result). Instead, they have a task-initiation problem.
And the like.
The Spiritual
Of course, there is not a firm frontier between the practical and the spiritual in our everyday lives. As Solzhenitsyn has said, the line between good and evil runs “through every human heart.” Which means that, even as we face mundane choices like do I do the dishes, the laundry, or take a nap, we are interacting with issues of bondage to sin versus freedom, and grace versus shame. So it’s not really possible to talk about practical things like task initiation without also addressing the spiritual.
KC does a pretty good job of this in her book. She starts out by saying (page 11), and this is in bold, “Care tasks are morally neutral. Being good or bad at them has nothing to do with being a good person, parent, man, woman, spouse, friend. Literally nothing. You are not a failure because you can’t keep up with laundry. Laundry is morally neutral.”
Now, since I can hear howls of objection, let me address this. What she is trying to express here, is that shame does not energize people. It paralyzes them.
Yes, moms do have a duty to keep on top of the laundry cycle and yes, (contra KC Davis), there IS such a thing as laziness, and laziness IS sinful.
But when it comes to “care tasks,” many people (most people?) grew up being shamed not for character flaws such as laziness, but for lack of technical skills in the tasks, for not doing them up to an adult’s standard, for not doing them perfectly, or for not knowing where to start. Consequently, many (most?) people have a huge burden of shame and failure around household tasks. And this burden of shame, and this perfectionism, makes it much, much more difficult to get these tasks accomplished (or in some cases even started). See? KC is not saying, “Let’s get rid of the shame because it is 100% OK to never clean your kitchen.” She is saying, “Let’s get rid of the shame associated with these tasks because only then will you be able to do them.”
In other words, KC in her self-examination and her work as a therapist has stumbled upon that biblical truth: “the law kills, but the Spirit gives life.” The only people who are free to act and move in this world are those who are not paralyzed by shame.
It’s at this point that I wish this book had been written by a Christian, because this point really deserves to be developed further. How does one set others free from shame? Certainly, if people have indeed been shamed over things that are morally neutral (such as being slow at doing chores, or doing the dishes a different way than your parent), then this needs to be clarified. But this is not enough, because not all our shame is spurious. We actually are sinners, and we actually do know it. It is not enough to say, as KC says, “I don’t think there is any such thing as laziness.” Even when we have gotten rid of the spurious shame over morally neutral things like being naturally untidy, even if your particular client is not actually lazy … what about the other shame? What are we going to do about that?
In other words, the only way that people can truly be set free from shame is when they turn to Jesus, the living Christ, who alone has the power to free us from shame, so that we can “do the good works that He prepared in advance for us to do.” I think Allie Beth Stuckey could do a lot with this. In fact, I’d love it if she were to have KC Davis on her podcast.
But then, she proceeds to shoot herself in the foot
The other problem I have with this book is as follows. For the most part, KC does a great job of being gentle with her readers and treating them like responsible human beings. But every so often, she turns around and sucker-punches them with identity politics.
Many self-help gurus overattribute their success to their own hard work without any regard to the physical, mental, or economic privileges they hold. You can see this when a thin, white, rich self-help influencer posts “Choose Joy” on her Instagram with a caption that tells us all joy is a choice. Her belief that the decision to be a positive person was the key to her joyful life reveals she really does not grasp just how much of her success is due to privileges beyond her control.
pp. 14 – 16
It’s hard to know where to start with this paragraph. Does KC really think that a “thin, rich, white influencer” posts “Choose Joy” because she is already joyful? That such people have no insecurities or struggles? That all that is necessary for joy is having circumstances line up in your life such that you avoid three major conditions which the Identity Crowd considers to be disadvantages? This is so dehumanizing as to beggar belief.
I’m not saying “Choose Joy” is advice that would be helpful to anyone, really, but I at least recognize that most people who say things like “Choose Joy” obviously mean “Choose joy in spite of all the awful things that are happening in your life.” If people are happy, at peace, and free from shame or struggle, they don’t go around saying stuff like “choose joy.” And based on the practical wisdom in the rest of her book, I think KC actually knows this. But, blinded by identity politics, she considers it OK to lay aside what she knows and take a swipe at some of her readers in a misguided attempt to build up others of her readers. Unfortunately, this undercuts her message that she doesn’t want to shame anyone. You see, this book is not for you if you are rich, thin, or especially, white. And as we know, those always go together.
In the very next paragraph, KC says what she was actually trying to say, but in a much more sane and humane way, namely that different things work for different people:
Different people struggle differently — and privilege isn’t the only difference. Someone might find a way to meal plan, or exercise, or organize their pantry that revolutionizes their life. But the solutions that work for them are highly dependent on only their unique barriers but also their strengths, personality, and interests.
p. 16
Really, that paragraph would have been sufficient, excepting the word privilege. I do wish people would stop using the word privilege — which is a legal term — when what they actually mean is “advantage.” But that’s a rant for another day.
Out of Babel Books 