Effeminacy is the lack of masculinity where it ought to be. In that sense, only men can be effeminate, and in classical discussions of this vice that’s how it was presented. Effeminacy is a softness in men that prevents them from fulfilling their peculiarly masculine responsibilities. The term could also apply to speech or mannerisms, but I’m most interested in its ethical usage here.
Imagine a group of guys and girls are watching a horror movie (not something I recommend, but bear with me). If the one girls get scared, no one thinks she is somehow less of a woman. No one tells her she has to “tun in her woman card.” But if one of the guys gets scared, the other males will probably give him a hard time and the girls are likely to be repulsed by his fear. And that’s because he is acting effeminate. Men are not supposed to get scared at horror movies because men have responsibilities that require bravery. Women can and should be brave at times too, but bravery is not part of femininity *in the same way* that it is part of masculinity. Courage has classically been considered a masculine virtue. All people should be courageous, but especially men, and its absence in men is a much greater problem.
If a husband and wife are walking down a dark alley, and a mugger jumps out to rob or otherwise harm them, we expect the man to put himself in harm’s way, to confront the mugger or otherwise position himself between his wife and the source of danger. If he fails to do so, we call him a coward and say that he was effeminate. But if the woman instinctively jumps behind her husband so that he can protect her, we do not call her effeminate because we do not expect her to be his protector and we do not expect her to be the one to confront the danger.
If a married couple is sleeping in bed and they hear a noise in the basement, whose job is it to go check it out? A man who sends his wife to see what’s going on is being effeminate. But a woman who waits in the bedroom while her husband goes to find out the source of the noise is not being effeminate because checking out scary noises is not her job.
And so on. Calling a man effeminate is NOT an insult to women, it’s an insult to the man. And it does not mean that femininity is bad because effeminacy has nothing to do with femininity. We want our women to be feminine – femininity is women in glorious. But we also want our men to be masculine. Effeminacy in men is terrible – and it’s terrible precisely because it keeps them from fulfilling their obligations to women and children. Effeminacy in men causes women and children to suffer.
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Did you know there is a place in Scripture where a woman presides over and serves the communion meal? Yes, it’s Genesis 3. Eve serves the sacramental food to her husband. When a “church” has a female “pastor” administer the Eucharist, the Satanic role reversal of the fall is being reenacted. Getting male/ female roles right is a big deal.
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More on Genesis 3:
Adam should have guarded the garden and crushed the serpent’s head as soon as he contradicted God’s Word. But the result of his effeminacy was role reversal in the sanctuary. The same pattern plays itself out in many ways today, where men passively abdicate, and the includes women taking on roles/offices that do not belong to them.
Effeminacy is when *men* lack masculine virtues needed to fulfill their responsibilities towards others. Technically, a woman cannot be effeminate. For example, in Scripture when God judges a nation, he says their soldiers will become like women (eg, Nahum 3:13). This is not an insult to women because men (not women) are responsible for the defense of the nation. A man who acts as a coward on the battlefield is effeminate – he has failed as a man. A woman who fled in similar conditions has not failed as a woman because it was not her responsibility to begin with. In Genesis 3, it was not the woman’s job to guard the garden. She did not fail as a woman by not crushing the serpent’s head. Adam had the responsibility to guard the garden and failed – that act of cowardice, that failure to fulfill his particularly masculine responsibility, was an act of effeminacy.
Adam’s passivity was effeminate. He should have gone to war with the serpent but acted like a coward. He stood by while the serpent committed spiritual adultery with his wife (cf. 2 Cor. 11:2-3). He probably wanted to see what would happen when she ate – if she died, he’d ask for another wife (he had more ribs after all!), and if she didn’t die, he would eat too. (That last bit is speculative.)
I take the view that Adam and his wife are not just the first husband and wife, but also the first pastor and congregation (which is why Paul can draw lessons about ecclesiastical order from the text in 1 Timothy 2). God gave Adam the law about the forbidden tree, so he had to be her teacher (cf. 1 Cor. 14:34). If the garden of Eden is the original sanctuary, then the special trees are sacramental, Adam is her priest/pastor, and by implication he is the one who should preside over and serve the sacramental meal since serving holy food is a priestly work the husband (priest) does for the bride (congregation).
Eve handing the fruit to him is a problem because she is acting as a priest. But it becomes a problem only because of Adam’s prior failure to protect her, as he should have. God had commanded him to guard the garden before she was created so he had to know eventually there would be an intruder.
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Effeminacy is when *men* lack masculine virtues needed to fulfill their responsibilities towards others. Technically, a woman cannot be effeminate. For example, in Scripture when God judges a nation, he says their soldiers will become like women (eg, Nahum 3:13). This is not an insult to women because men (not women) are responsible for the defense of the nation. A man who acts as a coward on the battlefield is effeminate – he has failed as a man. A woman who fled in similar conditions has not failed as a woman because it was not her responsibility to begin with.
In Genesis 3, it was not the woman’s job to guard the garden. She did not fail as a woman by not crushing the serpent’s head. Adam had the responsibility to guard the garden and failed – that act of cowardice, that failure to fulfill his particularly masculine responsibility, was an act of effeminacy.
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Effeminacy is the opposite of manliness. Overall, I really like this article. But notice that Wedgeworth repeatedly says that accusing women of effeminacy “sounds strange.” Yes, it does, and for a reason. I’d like to avoid strange language when possible. The classic discussions of effemimacy (whether Christian or pagan) do not generally use the term “effeminacy” when speaking of women. I do not think “effeminacy” is the best term to use for women when they sin by, e.g., pursuing an overly luxurious or “soft” lifestyle. It’s true that women are also commanded to “man up” (cf. 1 Cor. 16:4) in a certain sense. But “manning up” or being courageous will look different in men and women. Women can distort their femininity in various ways (e.g., by becoming “butch” or being overly passive in the name of submission or femininity). Just as we use a different term for women when they commit same-sex sexual acts (lesbianism), so we should use different terms for effeminacy in women.
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The church is called to submit to her husband, Christ. This is obviously an active submission – it consists in the church actively obeying Christ’s commands, using all her strength and gifts and wisdom to do his will.
Wives, go and do likewise.
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Living by Titus 2:3-5 would solve many problems modern women face, particularly feeling overburdened and overworked by trying to pursue a career and mother children at the same time. In such cases, she has taken on provisioning burdens she shouldn’t carry, she ends up trying to get her husband to bear household burdens she should carry. There is no way to have a happy family life under such conditions.
Modern women have to stop thinking of their husbands as their helpers and start thinking of themselves as their husband’s helpers.
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The modern evangelical church is generally allergic to biblical application. There is very little teaching on practical Christian living that pushes the principles of Scripture to the edges of life. The problem is that this lack of teaching leaves a void in the lives of Christians that gets filled by the world.
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If Paul’s teaching on a wife’s submission to her husband is just a reflection of a cultural convention, then his command that husbands love and cherish their wives must be a cultural convention too. This is sheer madness, obviously. The Bible is the Word of God. Its authority and applicability transcend time and culture. It says what it says, and it means what it says.
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Women in the church who complain about the Bible’s verses on wifely submission are usually not actually complaining about the Bible but about the men they are married to. Intentionally or not, they are revealing more what they think about their husbands than what they think about Scripture.
To put it another way, women in the church married to men of high character and competence almost never complain about the submission verses.
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Marriage operates with a kind of feedback loop: A man’s desire to be the best man he can be, to serve and sacrifice for his family, and take responsibility for his household is tied directly to his wife’s expression of respect for him. And a wife’s loving submission, her desire to glorify her husband and her home, and her admiration for her man is directly tied to the cherishing love her husband expresses towards her. If a marriage is in a downward cycle, in which the man is not loving his wife because he feels disrespected and she is not respecting him because she does not feel loved, the way to break out of the cycle is for one spouse to start to do the right thing even though they are not getting their tank filled by the other. It only takes one spouse to spearhead change in a marriage. (Frankly, it is better if the man leads the way since he is responsible to lead, but wives can do this too.)
Obviously, our spouse’s sin against us does not excuse our sin against our spouse. A man who feels disrespected is not justified in failing to love his wife, and a woman who feels unloved is not excused for disrespecting her husband. But we should also recognize that our actions have a tremendous impact on others we are close to, especially in marriage. We are all provoking our spouses — but are we provoking them to righteousness or rebellion?
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If you go against the grain of reality, you are going to get splinters.
Feminism has promised women that liberation from their divine design – from marriage, from submission to a husband, from children, from home – would make them happy.
It was a lie.
The data proves it.
Harrison Butker was right: women have been lied to most of all.
Women who pursue equality with men rather than their divine calling are going to be unhappy – and there’s not any pill, therapy, or career success that can alter that for the vast majority of women.
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If Satan’s plan is for us to have lots of sex before marriage and none after marriage, God’s plan is the opposite.
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The pulpit is a male space. Always has been, always will be. Women can no more be pastors than they can be husbands or fathers. The pastorate is intrinsically male and masculine.
Obviously there are plenty of domains that are open to men and women (though that does not make us androgynous beings in those domains – some degree of sexual differentiation will still be present). But there are also sex-segregated spaces and roles and offices. If there are no male-only spaces, there can be no female-only spaces. If women can enter male spaces, justice requires us to allow men into female spaces.
So again: the pulpit is a male only space. The session meeting and presbytery meeting are male only spaces. The seminary, insofar as it exists to train pastors, should be a male only space. If women are allowed into pulpits, it logically follows that men must be allowed into women’s restrooms. And perhaps that is a big reason why denominations that allow women in the pastorate have generally also gone along with the transgender ideology.
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The roles and duties God assigns to men and women are not merely “cultural” or “traditional.” They are divine commands, grounded in his will and in our created natures. Those who reject the Bible’s teaching on headship and submission, on husbands as patriarchs and wives as homemakers, are not merely rejecting tradition or a cultural custom. They are rejecting God’s will. They are rejecting nature. They are rejecting the divine design.
Paul teaches in Titus 2 that wives who refuse to be obedient to their husbands will cause the Word of God to be blasphemed. We can conclude the opposite is also the case: wives who do obey their husbands will cause the Word of God to be honored.
The world often looks to the lives of Christians, especially Christian marriages and families, to determine if the Word of God deserves ridicule or respect. The world assumes that what they see in our lives is what the Word must teach. Happy and holy families are a powerful form of witness.
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The biggest trouble makers in the church are not alpha males but females married to beta males.
These women are insecure about their own husband’s leadership which makes them anxious. They project that insecurity on all males in positions of leadership. They become anxious about male rule in general.
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How women in the church react to preaching on “wives submit to your husbands in everything” generally tells you a lot more about how that woman feels about her particular husband than it does how she views, say, the authority of Scripture. Women who know they married men of high competence and high character virtually never complain about teaching on wifely submission. These women are married to masculine men and so they naturally settle into their feminine.
Sadly, churches today are mostly beta male factories.
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A recent tweet of mine used the categories alpha and beta to describe different types of men.
To be honest, I really don’t like those categories, though I still sometimes use them as shorthand.
In the sense I was using them, alpha = confident, competent man, and beta = insecure, people pleasing man.
In the post, both men are obviously church members and can be assumed to be men of high character but one man leads his wife well and the other doesn’t – the variable is not character per se but competency in leading.
I’ve been in pastoral ministry for 30 years, and the dynamic I described is one I have observed repeatedly.
It’s obvious from the responses, a lot of other people have observed this as well.
The tweet does not blame the women for problems in the church (though women are accountable for their actions) but serves as a reminder to the men that they are responsible and their failure to lead in the home has implications elsewhere.
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Lewis correctly observed that feminism destroyed the romantic dance between the sexes.
The reality is that sexual polarity drives attraction. When that polarity is minimized because men are feminized and women masculinized, the bond of attraction between the sexes weakens.
One of the most strikingly unnatural developments in our day is that (outside of conservative Christian circles where the old ways are upheld) men and women simply don’t like each other very much. Women cannot find a man they’re attracted to. And men find modernized “independent” women intolerable. This is completely different from past generations where the magnetic pull between the sexes was obvious from puberty onwards and all too enjoyable for all involved. It is a disastrous situation, not just for the individuals involved but for civilization as a whole. Untold misery awaits.
Again, Lewis nailed it: a man’s headship over his wife and a wife’s respectful submission to her husband are not just practical necessities in marriage, they are erotic necessities as well. God knew what he was doing when he assigned these roles. They are not arbitrary; they are rooted in our natures. The man was built to lovingly lead a woman as her protector and provider. And the woman was built to respond to a man, helping and glorifying him. But if she won’t call him lord, she doesn’t get to be a lady. If she won’t crown him as her king, she doesn’t get to be a queen.
Feminism has brought modern women to a fork in the road: Do you want equality or romance? Equality or a family? Equality or grandchildren? Sadly, all too many women want to be boss babes in their 20s and 30s, and so they won’t get to be grandmothers in 50s and 60s. It will prove to be a bad trade off in the long run.
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Feminism is another manifestation of the serpent deceiving the woman.
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Feminism killed the family wage.
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Feminism is the original transgenderism. LGBTQ is really FLGBTQ.
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While feminism has led many women to reject marriage and motherhood, women’s in-built maternal instinct does not just go away. Nature is too stubborn for that. When multitudes of women are no longer having children, they tend to redirect their maternal instinct towards progressive causes, particularly those that promise to rescue the latest class of victims identified by social justice warriors, e.g., this is why so many women hop onboard the transgender train. A lot of the leftwing/progressive radicalization of women politically in our day is due to the sublimation of motherhood into political causes. But the problem is that the maternal instincts that serve women so well in the domestic sphere are an unmitigated disaster in the public/political sphere.
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Because feminism goes against the grain of the created order, it requires the force of the state to prop it up. This is why feminists push for birth control (so women can be sexually promiscuous without consequence), abortion (so women’s careers are not penalized by having to care for babies), government-funded daycare (so women don’t fall behind men in the workplace, but can get back to work as quickly as possible), and socialism (so that Uncle Sam can be the surrogate protector/provider and thus compensate for the father/husband that feminist women usually lack).
Feminism pits the sexes against each other. Instead of mutuality, where men and women depend on each other, feminism aims at a society that has moved “beyond” gender into androgyny. Feminism trains women to think that dependence on a man, financially or otherwise, implies inferiority and inequality. Feminism trains women to think they are not equal to men unless they do what men do and live like men live.
All of this is contrary to God’s good design embedded in nature. God created women to be life-givers and life-nurturers. Her womb is a home for her child, place of hospitality. She’s oriented to the home because her body is a home. Further, a woman naturally wants to nurture her people by feeding them because her body is the original source of food for her children (Prov. 31:15); she thrives in the kitchen because her body was made to feed her offspring. She feeds and nurtures by nature. These vocations are inscribed into her body. Form and function go together. The woman’s more domestic role (Titus 2:3-5) is not arbitrary but suited to her design.
By contrast, the man’s center of gravity is moving outward from the home into the world, where he becomes the protector and provider of his family. Again, form and function go together. The man’s bodily, mental, and emotional design equip him for work in the world. Just as the woman experiences the curse in her central vocation (child-bearing), so he experiences the curse in his primary area of vocation (provision). When the man and woman work together, complementing one another with their differing proclivities, glories, and life orientations, there is harmony, fulfillment, and maturation in the human race. But when this design is violated, civilization grinds to a halt and frustration becomes commonplace.
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“The war and the years afterwards confirmed the doubts I always had had about the ideas I was brought up on….[I judged] that liberalism, feminism, nationalism, socialism, pacifism, would not work, because they refused to consider human nature as it really is. Instead, they presupposed that mankind was to “progress” into something else—towards their own ideas of what people ought to be.”
— Sigrid Unset in the 1930s
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The serpent in the garden got the woman to question God’s goodness, to view God’s commands as oppressive, to believe that God could not possibly have her best interests in view.
Interestingly, feminism does the exact same thing to modern women, telling them God’s design for womanhood is oppressive and true liberation will be found in casting off God’s commands to women. The voice of feminism, like the voice of the serpent, contradicts God’s word and breeds discontentment in women.
One might be tempted to conclude that feminism is Satanic, that is participates in the spirit of anti-christ.
Meanwhile, Adam bought into the “happy wife, happy life” myth in Genesis 3. Instead of standing up to his wife and commanding her to not eat of the fruit, he gave in to her. He decided it was more important to please his wife than please God. He did what she wanted rather than what God wanted. He feared her more than God. He abdicated his position of headship and submitted himself to his wife – just like the feminists would want a man to do. And unsurprisingly, it resulted in disaster, spiritually and maritally. Adam fell because he became an effeminate simp, unwilling to fight the serpent on behalf of his wife and unwilling to stand up to and challenge his wife’s participation in Satanic deception. This is why we read later in Scripture that the effeminate will not inherit the kingdom of God (1 Cor. 6).
The fall in Genesis 3 involved role reversal between the man and the woman. It involved the woman turning away from her femininity and the man abandoning his masculinity. Satan struck right at the heart of God’s sexual design because nothing is more foundational to God’s purposes for humanity (and to human happiness) than properly relating the sexes to one another. Satan loves to bring chaos and confusion in place of God’s creational order. Anytime we see a culture sinking into the ruin of sexual confusion (cf. Romans 1:18ff), we know far too many people are heeding Satan’s voice rather than God’s. Feminism is a form of Satanic revolution, a revolt against God’s good design.
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Making America great again requires a strong and capable and masculine military, not one compromised by DEI or feminism.
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The thing that’s shocking about first wave feminism is that women were able to gain so many new privileges without adding any new responsibilities.
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If sex does not matter in marriage, then it does not matter in bathrooms or sports or anywhere else. The only way to undo the transgender madness is to undo Obergefell.
Of course, feminism stands behind Obergefell since it argued for androgyny, the view that men and women are basically interchangeable. Feminism provided the basic presupposition of Obergefell. The whole FLGBTQ movement has to be unwound.
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You cannot defeat racial identity politics with more racial identity politics. All racial identity politics can do is produce the nihilism of Nietzsche’s will to power. It will devolve into the all the worst features of democracy that our founding fathers warned us about, including the tyranny of mob rule. Racial identity politics is the politics of anger and resentment; it cannot produce the righteousness of God.
“All politics are identity politics” says nothing. It’s empty, unless we begin to specify which identities matter in which contexts and to what degree.
Remember that feminism was the first form of identity politics to emerge in American history. The metoo movement and “believe all women” are just modern manifestations of feminist identity politics.
Marxism in its various forms is always based on identity politics – whether class (classical Marxism), sex (feminism), or race (CRT).
Politics in the civil sphere is about civil justice, and within that we can properly order and align our various identities and the loyalties that should go with him.
But the focus on and prioritization of racial identity is a mistake. If Joe Biden was running for office against Clarence Thomas, would you vote for Biden just because he shares your racial identity? That’s an extreme example, but gets at the kind of issues we need to think through.
Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird is the classic test case for racial identity politics in a court of law. If you’re not satisfied with the outcome of the trial in that book, you need to forcibly reject racial identity politics.
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Calvinists have obviously always been patriarchal, but it should also be noted Geneva in Calvin’s day was one of the first places in the world to make domestic violence a crime. Wife-beating or any other form of domestic violence was dealt with swiftly in Calvin’s Geneva. Numerous other pastors, ethicists, and theologians in the Calvinist tradition made it very clear that a man’s headship did not give him carte blanche to do as he wished in his home – and headship could certainly not be used to underwrite physical violence of any sort, even with an unsubmissive or rebellious wife. Calvinists leaders such as William Gouge and Cotton Mather were very clear that abuse was not to be tolerated by church or state.
So far from being a source of abuse, Christian patriarchalists countered abuse and criminalized it, especially in the Calvinist tradition. Christian patriarchy holds men to a high standard and has ways of dealing with men who are irresponsible or abusive. Those who caricature headship (or patriarchy) to suggest the Christian tradition has countenanced the abuse of women in the name biblical teaching are slanderers and false accusers – and bad historians.
Some historical evidence:
“Calvin recognized that violence could be counterproductive in family relations, and in Calvin’s Geneva spouse beating became a crime (Gottlieb, 1993, p. 91). The English Puritan William Gouge in his popular manual Domesticall Duties(1622) argued that it was immoral for a husband to beat his wife (Gouge, 1622, pp. 389–392). In one of his sermons, the famous Boston minister Cotton Mather preached that for ‘a man to Beat his Wife was as bad as any Sacriledge. And such a Rascal were better buried alive, than show his Head among his Neighbours any more’ (Koehler, 1980, p. 49).”
Excerpted from:
tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.10…
The data actually shows that women are far safer with Christian patriarchs – provided the men are not nominally Christian, but are serious about their faith and church membership. Women are far less safe in anti-Christian patriarchal contexts (eg. Islamic societies) or anti-patriarchal contexts (such as Hollywood and university campuses).
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Women shaving their heads after Trump’s victory is shameful rebellion against their own nature. They are hurting themselves more than anyone else. These are women whose entire identity is wrapped up in feminism, which means their entire identity is wrapped up in hatred of their own femininity. They are so brainwashed, their entire identity revolves around the “right” to kill their own babies. They have no concept of feminine beauty so they make themselves ugly. It’s sad.
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Opposition to abortion does not flow merely out of a gender identity (eg, a conservative version of feminism for women), but out of the injustice of destroying life in the womb. I’m opposed to treating women as their own identity group, with their own political interests, whether those interests are framed in a progressive or conservative way. I’m in favor of justice, which is ultimately good for everyone.
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Trump actually is something of a feminist, as are all promiscuous men. The sexual revolution and feminism became two sides of a single coin.
Feminism is bad for both sexes. But on the issue at hand, you proved my point: Trump is a kind of male feminist. Not as virulent as some male feminists at this point in his life, but he has obviously lived a post-sexual revolution lifestyle for much of his life. I don’t think anyone questions or disputes that fact.
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Patriarchalists know that men are responsible for the rise of feminism.
Feminism arose in response to the failure of men to be good men.
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Feminism has slain its thousands, egalitarianism its ten thousands.
Thankfully there are signs that some women are waking up to what the feminist revolution has done to their lives.
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Male friendship has been sacrificed on the altar of feminism.
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Governments are at a loss when it comes to encouraging people to do one of the most natural things in the world – have children.
Feminism and the sexual revolution rejected God’s design for sex, the sexes, marriage, and family – they are forms of civilizational suicide.
The only way out of this fertility death spiral is repentance.
Only when we embrace God’s good design for men and women, celebrating fatherhood and motherhood as God ordained them, will things change.
You cannot put a political patch on a spiritual problem and somehow fix it – the problem is deeper than that.
If people are going to embrace having children at a high rate once again, they need a worldview that will make them want to invest in and hope for the future – and no form of secularism can do that because secularism teaches people to reject sacrifice and live for pleasure in the moment.
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Marxism is inherently divisive.
Classical Marxism is about class warfare, pitting rich vs poor.
Critical race theory is really just Marxism applied to the races, pitting whites vs blacks and others.
Feminism is just Marxism applied to the sexes, pitting men vs women.
Marxism claims that all human relationships are defined and dominated by power differentials, with the more powerful oppressing the weaker.
Those defined as oppressors are guilty no matter what they do.
Those defined as the oppressed are righteous victims no matter what they do.
All of this is a misplacing of the antithesis.
The human race IS divided – but biblically, the fundamental division is not between classes or races or sexes.
The line that runs through humanity divides those who are in Adam by natural generation from those who are in the new Adam (Christ) by Spiritual regeneration.
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Look at collapsing birth rates in Western nations. Feminism is genocide.
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Feminism is the cause of declining female happiness. It’s well documented:
nationalreview.com/2021/08/why-do…
americanmind.org/salvo/the-fals…
americanmind.org/salvo/what-wom…
frontpagemag.com/marxist-femini…
eviemagazine.com/post/feminism-…
eviemagazine.com/post/how-i-wen…
Etc.
It’s all in Yenor, really. He’s the one to read on this.
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Neo-Nazism is to young men what feminism is to young women.
Note: The idea that Nazism is somehow Christian (or even right-wing) is a play from the left.
This myth is a tool of progressive control, a way to discredit and marginalize Christian faith.
It’s sad that many young men are falling for it today.
There is a better way forward.
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When my kids were a lot younger, I once asked them during one of our dinner table discussions if they were glad to have grown up with a mother who was with them at home, and who was always available when they needed her during their growing up years. Or as I put it, “Aren’t you glad your mother was not a feminist?” My kids were thankful. I am too. The mother who gives herself to homemaking for her husband and children is giving her family a wonderful and irreplaceable gift. She is laying a solid foundation for her children to build their lives upon.
In the aftermath of COVID policies shuttering the country’s economy, President Biden lamented on Twitter that “nearly 2 million women in our country have been locked out of the workforce because they have to care for a child or elderly relative at home.” The political left sees mothers at home with their children as a social catastrophe, a great injustice, a waste. They want women in the office or the factory, not at home with the children. The answer to this “problem” from the left is an expansion of government into more and more of life, e.g., heavily subsidized daycare, public preschools, etc. The state took over paternal roles starting in the 1960s when welfare programs displaced husbands/fathers as providers. Now the government is seeking to displace maternal roles by taking over the care of children from infancy onwards.
But Biden’s whole way of framing the issue is morally repugnant. Why glorify wage slaving over caring for our most vulnerable and needy loved ones? Why treat women who are home with children instead of in an office as if they were suffering an unbearable fate? Why such disregard for motherhood, for children, and for home?
Feminism is full of ironies, and this is one of them. Feminism does not escape the patriarchy, it just serves an evil patriarchy (which is to say, it serves evil men). Feminism trains women to despise building up the house of the one man they have pledged their lives to (their husband), and instead tells them to build up the “houses” of other men (in corporate America or the government). As Chesterton said, feminism “is mixed up with a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
If our society is going to flourish, we must see how praiseworthy the devoted and diligent stay-at-home mom is. She is not “just a mom.” She is one of the keys to a healthy civilization, as she nurtures the next generation, and passes on the baton of truth and wisdom. As she fills her home with love and glory, she fills the world and the future with love and glory. We simply must recover the vital importance of motherhood. We must recover the sacred bond between mother and children. We must see the glory of a mother raising her own children in her own home. There is simply no substitute for mothers.
But this is not just a “culture war” issue in the way we usually think of the culture war. The war on motherhood does not merely come through political channels; according to the apostle Paul, it is demonic. Motherhood is not only the site of a political battle, it is the arena of a great Spiritual battle. Motherhood is not only hotly contested in Washington, DC and other centers of political power; it is involved in the great cosmic conflict in heavenly places Paul described in Ephesians 6:10ff. For the Apostle Paul, faithful, productive, and devoted mothers in the church are a crucial witness to the truth of the gospel. In Titus 2, Paul instructs older women in the church to mentor younger women, teaching them to “be reverent in behavior, not slanderers, not given to much wine, teachers of good things — that they admonish the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be discreet, chaste, homemakers, good, obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God may not be blasphemed” (Titus 2:3-5).
To be sure, a small group of Christian women are called and equipped to live lives of celibacy/singleness, and thus will not have family. Others who do marry will sadly not be able to have children. These will be “spiritual mothers,” but not physical mothers. However, most women should follow this pattern Paul lays out here, embracing their domestic vocation as wives and mothers, learning to love their husbands and children. Paul specifically says women are to be trained in the art of homemaking — what we might call the skill and craft of managing a productive and well-ordered household, under the oversight of their husbands. When women cheerfully fulfill this calling to wifely and maternal nurture, the gospel is magnified. But when Christian women reject it, as Paul warns in this text, the Word of God is blasphemed. In other words, faithful and content Christians wives and mothers, who obey their husbands and raise their children, are essential to the mission and witness of the church. When they wander from these roles, the mission of the church is hampered.
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Feminists say they want to smash the patriarchy. They attack the Bible’s teaching that a man is the head of his wife. But if women were made to respond to male leadership, why is this? Why do feminists act contrary to their own best interests?
Anytime a woman moves in an egalitarian/feminist direction, I know it is because she has been let down by a man who should have taken responsibility for her (typically a father or husband). If a married woman attacks the idea of male headship, I know that it is at some level because she does not respect/admire her husband. And to be honest, when I look at the men these women are married to, it is often understandable why they rebel against the idea of male headship, though this is not justification for their rejection of God’s design.
Feminism in general, as a societal wide movement, and particular women moving in a feminist direction, is inseparable from the emasculation of men. But feminism is a destructive response to the failure of men. If men are insufficiently masculine, as C. S. Lewis pointed out, it is no cure at all to call in those who are not masculine at all. If men are bad husbands, attempting role reversal will not solve the problem since women will make even worse husbands.
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Feminism has infected both men and women, so it is at the root of a lot of marital strife, unnatural role reversal, etc. It is also possible for a very faithful husband to have a rebellious wife – his high character does not guarantee she will do the right thing. I’m just making a general observation: when I hear a woman in the church complain about the requirement that she submit, it’s often easy to see why; she filters her reading of the text through the shortcomings she sees in her husband. By contrast, women who happily submit usually have pretty capable and competent husbands.
It’s really not any different than other situations where submission is required. It’s easier to submit to a good boss than a bad boss, or a good coach than a bad coach.
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Women in the church who complain about the Bible’s verses on wifely submission are usually not actually complaining about the Bible but about the men they are married to. Intentionally or not, they are revealing more what they think about their husbands than what they think about Scripture.
To put it another way, women in the church married to men of high character and competence almost never complain about the submission verses.
Feminism has impacted men just as much as women. A lot of men are feminized and are weak leaders precisely because of feminist influence.
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It’s interesting that conservative men were very gentle in critiquing Aimee Byrd a few years ago when she began drifting left (I addressed that here: tpcpastorspage.com/2020/06/27/dox…).
One could argue they were too gentle, given the magnitude of her errors.
But now more progressive evangelical men have no problem bashing Megan Basham (even though it’s very undeserved) for her conservative stances.
It shows that these men are capable of attacking women when it suits their tribal purposes.
They’re not chivalrous, they’re highly partisan and bring gender politics to bear only when it suits their purposes.
It’s a great illustration of the punch right, coddle left dynamic.
In this case, they’re punching a woman to their right with some pretty harsh language.
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Heather MacDonald, explaining why feminism can never work in the world God made:
“Feminists cannot acknowledge the divide between men and women when it comes to sex and sensibility. Doing so would violate what Steven Pinker calls the blank slate doctrine, a foundation stone of modern liberalism. One of that doctrine’s core tenets is that “differences between men and women have nothing to do with biology but are socially constructed in their entirety,” in Pinker’s words. Ignoring biology, feminists recast difficult sexual interactions in terms of power and politics.”
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Aristotle taught women are defective men, feminism teaches men are defective women. Both are wrong.
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Feminism and socialism go hand in hand.
Both require the state to be a surrogate husband/father
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The entire LGBTQ movement is a downstream consequence of feminism. Feminism was all about men becoming women and women becoming men. The LGB part is all about men pretending to be women and women pretending to be men sexually. The T part is about using clothes, makeup, chemicals, and surgeries to accomplish what feminism always wanted – to turn men into women and vice versa. The Q part is just a summary of all this sexual confusion and gender bending feminism produced. I believe we should rebrand LGBTQ as FLGBTQ to make sure feminism gets “credit” for the misery and chaos it has created. If you accept feminism, all the other letters and the perversions they represent must also be accepted.
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Feminism has been a civilizational-wide test that men have failed.
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FLGBTQ+
It’s all downstream from feminism.
Feminism was the original transgender movement.
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C. S. Lewis, explaining why egalitarianism is bad for your sex life (especially the wife):
“This last point needs a little plain speaking. 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, is an erotic 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 tragi-comedy of the modem 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 erotic pleasure, to go no further, some degree of obedience and humility seems to be (normally) necessary on the woman’s part.
The error here has been to assimilate all forms of affection to that special form we call friendship. It indeed does imply equality. But it is quite different from the various loves within the same household. Friends are not primarily absorbed in each other. It is when we are doing things together that friendship springs up – painting, sailing ships, praying, philosophizing, fighting shoulder to shoulder. Friends look in the same direction. Lovers look at each other — that is, in opposite directions. To transfer bodily all that belongs to one relationship into the other is blundering.”
Lewis’ That Hideous Strength puts this truth in narrative form
“I see,” said the Director. “It is not your fault. They never warned you. No one has ever told you that obedience – humility – is an erotic necessity. You are putting equality where it ought not to be.”
My TLDR summary: “Headship and respect are romantic necessities.”
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Lewis correctly observed that feminism destroyed the romantic dance between the sexes.
The reality is that sexual polarity drives attraction. When that polarity is minimized because men are feminized and women masculinized, the bond of attraction between the sexes weakens.
One of the most strikingly unnatural developments in our day is that (outside of conservative Christian circles where the old ways are upheld) men and women simply don’t like each other very much. Women cannot find a man they’re attracted to. And men find modernized “independent” women intolerable. This is completely different from past generations where the magnetic pull between the sexes was obvious from puberty onwards and all too enjoyable for all involved. It is a disastrous situation, not just for the individuals involved but for civilization as a whole. Untold misery awaits.
Again, Lewis nailed it: a man’s headship over his wife and a wife’s respectful submission to her husband are not just practical necessities in marriage, they are erotic necessities as well. God knew what he was doing when he assigned these roles. They are not arbitrary; they are rooted in our natures. The man was built to lovingly lead a woman as her protector and provider. And the woman was built to respond to a man, helping and glorifying him. But if she won’t call him lord, she doesn’t get to be a lady. If she won’t crown him as her king, she doesn’t get to be a queen.
Feminism has brought modern women to a fork in the road: Do you want equality or romance? Equality or a family? Equality or grandchildren? Sadly, all too many women want to be boss babes in their 20s and 30s, and so they won’t get to be grandmothers in 50s and 60s. It will prove to be a bad trade off in the long run.
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The man’s competent and loving headship and the wife’s obedient and humble respect are not only practical necessities to a happy marriage, they are romantic necessities.
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Rebellion against grace is also rebellion against nature and vice versa.
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Liturgical leadership is masculine.
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Just as transgenderism is a social contagion among middle school-aged girls, so divorce can be a social contagion among middle-aged women. Women are far more susceptible to social contagion than men, which is why it is important for women to be under masculine leadership. Toxic forms of femininity spread like a virus amongst females.
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A married couple who had spent most of their lives on the mission field was being interviewed. At one point the interviewer asked the wife, “So when were you called to the mission field?” She replied, “I never had a call to the mission field. I had a call to be my husband’s helper. He had a call to the mission field, so I went along to help him in it.”
There’s a lesson in there.
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