The thing about the word “feminism” is that it denotes in the mind of average modern Westerners the idea that “society should be good to women, and stuff.”
Now, society should indeed be good to women, and stuff. You’ll get no arguments from me. Women, like men, are made in God’s image and thus given by Him certain unalienable rights.
But here’s the thing — the entire basis of negative rights in our republic is this immutable fact: It will always be inconsistent with not only our nation’s founding values, but the very code of the universe, to treat women as though they are the same as men.
Men and women are created equal … and we are created differently. Can we have a proper understanding of “women’s rights” that neglects to consider this inescapable fact?
As the writer behind an Instagram account that routinely criticizes feminism from an orthodox Christian worldview, I have received the same basic objections from laypeople again and again:
“But feminism is just about equal rights.”
“But feminism just gives women a choice.”
“But feminism just makes it so women don’t have to depend on men.”
And on and on.
What most people who hold these views often fail to consider is the premise undergirding these arguments. After all, what are “equal rights” when men and women aren’t the same?
What sort of “choice” does feminism “give” women? What choice, exactly?
By what means does feminism free women from dependence upon men? By what means would they be freed? Is this even possible?
These are all points we need to consider when we have these discussions, especially if we are to arrive at a coherent understanding of whether or not feminism has indeed been good for women.
And here’s my main contention: The natural conclusion of the idea that men and women should be treated as “equals” in society is that women are ultimately deprived of the right to be treated as women.
Again, I will not pretend to be able to sum up the vast nuances involved in a discussion on feminism and women’s rights. But we cannot escape the fact that postmodern feminism, as it took root and expanded throughout the 20th Century, challenges the very nature of what makes us male and female, and thus, it will always be very bad for women.
Now, I think you and I can agree that society is currently grappling with the alarming question, “What is a woman?”
As author and apologist Nancy Pearcey explained, “To protect women’s rights, we must be able to say what a woman is. If postmodernism is correct — that the body itself is a social construct — then it becomes impossible to argue for rights based on the sheer fact of being female. We cannot legally protect a category of people if we cannot identify that category.”
What those of us living in the post-industrial, postmodern 21st Century often fail to grasp is that before we came along, reality itself and the whole of the lived human experience always affirmed that men and women are inherently and fundamentally different.
The feminists claim “the patriarchy” is responsible for social norms ordered around the differences between men and women, as well as the ubiquitous dominance men tend have over women.
Celebrated feminist Shulamuth Firestone famously wrote that “the end goal of feminist revolution must be … not just the elimination of male privilege but of the sex distinction itself: genital differences between human beings would no longer matter culturally.”
This is the natural conclusion of feminism: To overthrow the patriarchy, you must overthrow realities proven unchangeable by basic biology, life science, and basic human common sense and also underlying to our understanding of human rights.
Women are distinctly vulnerable to bodily threats from men and distinctly dependent upon men for their bodily survival. What’s more, there are no creatures more vulnerable to exposure in harsh environments or states of civilizational instability than women and young children.
Firestone’s premise is that the patriarchy was established to define woman “as a different species due to her unique childbearing capacity.”
She assumes that patriarchy was established to distinguish these differences — instead of considering that perhaps it was to honor them.
So we must consider, allowing for all the necessary requirements we must put on men to protect the dignity of women, who else, for the whole of human existence, has seen to the safety and protection of women and children other than men?
Why else have women always gravitated largely around home and hearth while men build and defend? Is it really subjugation? Or basic biology and masculine human compassion?
Yes there have always been bad men among them — but we consider them bad because they abuse or neglect this duty. Not because they have this duty, as feminists claim.
After all, how on earth did civilization ever spring up with such beauty, grandeur and civility without men committed to doing right by women and children?
So by the time feminism made its advent on the heels of the Reformation amid the intellectual fervor of the Enlightenment, of course it made sense to argue that women ought to be treated fairly — kindly, with decency and dignity — by men.
Unfortunately, the irony is that this came at a time when much of the world was rejecting the social norms long derived from Holy Christian Scripture, it has always been inextricably linked with a rejection of a created humanity.
Can women recover from feminism’s attack?
Mary Wollenscraft, an easy candidate for the title of feminism’s foremost foremother, can be admired in her earnest attempt to argue for the rights of women using the same ideas as her 18th-century contemporaries, such as Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine.
Yet even she acknowledged that wives and mothers had duties at home, arguing for career advancements for upper-class women and even then, employing the feminist premise I believe is most worth rejecting — that women would only be “equal” if they could be regarded as being more like men.
After all, due to our sex differences, many women would go on to find that the male sphere isn’t always exactly “empowering.” It’s merely the male sphere. Meanwhile, women still often prefer the traditional feminine sphere, opting for more “feminine” careers like teaching, psychotherapy, or family medicine or staying home with their children, a fact that’s goaded feminists for years.
To say nothing of all the working-class women who have unglamorous low-wage jobs they can’t survive without.
As author and social critic G.K. Chesterton noted, feminism is “a muddled idea that women are free when they serve their employers but slaves when they help their husbands.”
Or, put more humorously, “Ten thousand women marched through the streets shouting, ‘We will not be dictated to,’ and went off and became stenographers.”
Wollenscraft’s daughter, Mary Shelley, married a man who exemplified the far more sinister way that feminism frees men from their responsibility to remain faithful to women via the institution of marriage.
Poet Percy B. Shelley would be inspired by Wollenscraft’s then-revolutionary writings on the “rights of women,” going further by arguing for the eradication of the institution of marriage, as well as swooping young Mary away as a teenager while he was still married to another woman.
Despite his anti-marriage views, he did eventually wed the young Frankenstein authoress … after his previous wife killed herself in despair. He would go on to bring his second bride through heartbreak and infidelities, even involving her sister in their marriage bed, as it is rumored.
All in the name of a starry-eyed and maliciously selfish version of the 1960’s “free love” as it would become.
So, when this style of “free love” would fuse with “equality in the workplace” in the middle of the 20th Century, it sadly did not produce a glorious utopia of male and female equality.
Rather, the Sexual Revolution destroyed the barriers that protected a woman’s right to live in a society that regarded her uniquely different design and, thus, the fundamental right to be protected by men.
And I’m here to tell you from personal experience as a millennial woman raised in the wreckage of this social revolution, if we are to believe it was “good for women,” I beg to differ.
No one epitomizes the sickening satire of womanhood that left-wing feminism has wrought on the human consciousness as Dylan Mulvaney.
The transgender TikTok star has become a household name, in large part because his entire existence is everything most inflammatory, controversial, and utterly chaotic to the consciousness of a generally moral people.
Feminism completely caves in on itself in his performative femininity, which plays on all the worst stereotypes about women and cherishes the role as the perpetual victim.
Yet the lyrics of a recent song he produced truly bring me to tears as he describes what he says out loud is the American female experience in shocking honesty:
Monday, can’t get out of bed
Tuesday morning, pick up meds
Wednesday, retail therapy
“Cash or credit?” I say yes
Thursday, had a walk of shame
Didn’t even know his namе
Weekends are for kissing friends
Friday night, I’ll ovеrspend
Saturday, we flirt for drinks
Playing wingman to our twinks
Sunday, the Twilight soundtrack
Cues my breakdown in the bath
“These are the days, these are the days, these are the days of girlhood,” he sings.
The twisted message he has internalized about what it’s like to be a woman and described is the life of a one who has been told she can do it all entirely on her own, without men — and is absolutely collapsing and breaking under the weight of being nothing more to a man than a cute costume and casual sex partner.
Women rely on men to make us feel safe in the world. This is a biological reality whether we like it or not.
When society tells me that men can say they’re like women, society is telling me that men don’t have to respect the fact that I’m different from they are and need them to respect this.
When society tells me I can be happy working to support myself, putting off starting a family, sleeping around with whomever I want, and not relying on men for protection or support, it is telling me that I can’t actually trust men to do these things for me.
What feminism sold me, millions of other women, and even poor, confused Dylan Mulvaney was an utter, wanton and backwards lie about who we are and why we were created.
It’s time to honor this design, so we can truly protect “women’s rights” — and honor God’s design.
