Pick one: Romance or Equality?

You can have equality or romance but not both.

The feminist version of equality killed sexual polarity which in turn killed romance, attraction, and ultimately marriage (as low marriage rates attest). In South Korea, an all out gender war has led to the lowest birth rate in the world, despite great prosperity. In the United States, marriage rates and birth rates are dangerously low and seem to be trending lower. We are setting ourselves up for stagnation and misery.

Many young women have been told to pursue their dreams….so long as those dreams center on college and career. Today’s woman will complain that a great injustice is being done if anything stands in her way of going after the exact same life path that men have traditionally followed. Even an unwanted pregnancy has to be destroyed if it stands in the way of “equality.” The problem is that many young women in society today will not figure out that marriage/family would have made them far happier than “equality” and career until it’s too late. A single, childless forty year old woman, all alone except for her cats and frozen eggs is going to be very angry — and she will want to take her anger out on someone or something.

Meanwhile, too many young men have lost all incentive to make anything of themselves because they sense most social and economic forces are arrayed against them – so why bother? A lot of men think even if they somehow win the rat race and make enough money to support a family, their wives can walk out with the kids and cash at any moment with no legal consequence. So why take that risk? This is an effeminate response — but also a logical one, given the realities on the ground for many people.

Even after the social patriarchy has been smashed, women still naturally want traditional, masculine men who will protect and provide. But women do not want to have to play the traditional, feminine, submissive homemaker role themselves. In the modern world, women have choices while men have obligations (e.g., women can choose can go into the military if they wish, and the entire apparatus of the military will be reworked to accommodate them — but men have an obligation to the military if and when need arises since they can be drafted). This is the situation today: Men have responsibilities but no corresponding authority. Man are expected to be providers even as women get equal pay. Men are expected to protect women, even if they might be arrested for doing so (shout out to Daniel Penny). And so on. Until these forces are balanced, and sexual differences recognized both culturally and legally, it will be hard to get the sexes back together and get the marriage/birth rate up.

Destroying the natural and traditional sexual division of labor has had massive consequences. We can change legal structures to fit our peculiar modern ideology but human nature does not change. The world does not work the way we might think it should work; it works the way God designed it to work. If we continue to reject that reality, there will be a lot of misery in the decades to come. There will be a lot of regret, a lot of loneliness, a lot of pain.

Yes, the church should rise above all of this and be a counter-cultural force for good, but all too often the church has been complicit in failing to tell the truth about these things.