Eve Offering Adam the Apple, Lucas Cranach the Elder

JOHN writes:

What you wrote here about the myth of “balance” for women is so good that I just wanted to write and thank you for it. You have the courage to state truths that others are afraid to say, even those others who to some extent support traditional roles. I wish I had something witty or brilliant to tack on to what you said, but I really don’t have anything more to add except “Wow!” and “Thank you”!

Laura writes:

Thank you very much.

But why does it mean so much to you? I mean that sincerely. This conflict mostly absorbs women.

John replies:

Because life is impossible without these basic fundamental principles like the need to do one’s duty. And the phrase “life is impossible” is not an exaggeration when we see that we live in a dying society, and that the same thing is true all around the world. Women abandoning their duty means death for future generations. It is happening everywhere, most famously in places like Japan, but it is already true of the white population of America.

Band-aid solutions like tax credits for day care are not going to solve the problem of entire societies following a trajectory of suicide. You are proposing the only true solution — that we stop pandering to the self-important, self-pitying self-absorption of women before it’s too late.

And as the original poster pointed out in her memories of being a latchkey child, life is not very pleasant in the meantime in our world of unisex sterility while we wait for the end to come. Life is miserable for men, women and children in our brave new world. Life is miserable for the millions of children chopped into bits before they even were born. Life is miserable for the children who were born, but who grow up without the love of a mother dedicated to their care and consequently find themselves without souls. Life is miserable for the millions of men who came home one day to find that their homes and families and all they owned had been taken away from them at gunpoint and that from now on they would be slaves of their ex-wives and the totalitarian state which is their partner in crime. Life is miserable for the many men in prison who went out on a date with a drunken whore and found themselves charged with rape the next day.

Life is miserable too for the women who have brought this all about by believing the lies of the devil, but while it may be true that those who do evil eventually reap what they sow, they don’t receive their just desserts until they have destroyed the lives of many other people around them. The French revolutionaries who instituted the “reign of terror” eventually ended up on the guillotine themselves, but not before they had killed thousands of others and destroyed the traditional culture of their nation.

You are proposing the only true solution, the only approach that could really work. Your philosophy is radically anti-libertarian. It takes real courage these days to come out and say that the personal happiness of individual women cannot be the deciding factor in our decisions and in our policies. Women must do their duty whether they like it or not. Even if it doesn’t make them happy. Even if it is boring. Even if they would rather abort their unborn child in order to continue their life of care-free promiscuity. They cannot have that choice.

It’s already true that they cannot make that choice without destroying their souls and going to hell eventually. But society has an obligation to insure that choices of that type are not available. Society cannot put a needle full of heroin into every teenager’s hand and then tell them it is their choice whether they want to try it or not. Society cannot put a loaded gun into the hand of every depressed person and tell them it is their choice whether they want to end it or not. A society which fulfills even its most basic fundamental obligations insures that such destructive choices are kept away from people, recognizing that many are too weak to avoid making the wrong choice.

A society which gives a woman the choice to live a life of promiscuity, to murder her own unborn children, to abandon her home and family whenever she is tired of them, to seek her own “fulfillment” rather than the happiness of her children, is a society which is failing in the most fundamental way possible. And you cannot solve that problem with happy-face slogans or with more and greater pandering to the population responsible. You can only solve it with the kind of honesty which you display which unfortunately is nearly unique in today’s world.

The description I wrote above relies on well-known statistics to paint a picture of the bleakness resulting from women abandoning their duty, but the statistics are only the visible indicators of an invisible reality which is that the souls of all the people involved in these dysfunctional relationships are being destroyed. C.S. Lewis in That Hideous Strength does a good job describing how femininity is the wellspring of life and hope, and that once women abandon that for “careers,” the world becomes a horrible, ugly, inhuman place.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

I agree wholeheartedly. I am gratified by your eloquence and that you appreciate what I am saying.

I should add that recognizing duties, engaging in the work of forming human beings, doesn’t in the long run make the vast majority of women unhappy. If it did, the human race would not have flourished as it has. Feminism and the dizzying pressures of “choice” cause them, as you have said, much more grief, something that will become even more apparent as millions of childless or relatively childless women enter old age. That said, the pursuit of happiness in any form is a misguided and sinister obsession.

— Comments —

Teresa writes:

I feel the need to step into this conversation and bring a different view of what’s happened. Nothing, absolutely nothing, has happened because women made it so.

Women did not have access to power, money, authority in any of the avenues to express that: media, politics, economics, higher education, defense. Men, a group of men, who had/have as their goal the disintegration of society for ends one can only imagine, made it so. Quite frankly, the illusion that women have power even today is fanciful.

The Rockefeller Foundation supplied Margaret Sanger with the woman’s voice these men wanted to use. As with any other first, second or third wave feminist, the powers that be are still men. Name the owners of the five large media empires, can we? Name the Wall Street Institutions and who owns and governs these, can we? Name the CEO’s of the huge defense industries, IT patents, bio-chemical firms, can we? Let’s list all these, and stop pretending these men are powerless.

Women being the weaker sex in more ways than ones; always, always do men’s bidding: unwittingly or not. We’re designed that way, contrary to what we think. We, women, have been a tool in the hands of evil men who quite deliberately and with malice aforethought crafted what we see today.

Eve did not make Adam eat the apple. He freely chose that; although, he did what many men are doing today … she made me do it. Stop pointing the finger at ‘her’; remembering three fingers point back at you when doing so.

Men, look to your real enemies; and, it’s not women. Although, we’ll kick and scream for awhile, we’d welcome some Christ-like authority from you men. Men, stop abdicating your position, stop whining, and take control of your homes, your communities. Wage your war against the enemy that’s destroying us all.

“Are wrestling is not against flesh and blood, but against Principalities and Powers, against the rulers of this world of darkness, against the Spirits of Wickedness in the High Places.”

 Laura writes:

Neither John nor I said feminism was caused only by women. I have repeatedly rejected that view. I have never pretended that men are powerless and I have to say I am offended by the suggestion that I have. Feminism is fully systematized and this could not have occurred without the enthusiasm and active agency of men, who first established the philosophical groundwork for modern feminism. Men held the reins of public power and gave them up willingly. Men encouraged women to be feminists and had their own selfish interests at work.

But I also accept the full moral responsibility of women and do not agree with you that women ever are simply the tools of men. You say, “Women being the weaker sex in more ways than one, always, always do men’s bidding: unwittingly or not.” That is not the Christian view, which recognizes the moral autonomy of women. This autonomy is limited but it is real and it is the basis of true equality. Genesis affirmed this deep equality between the sexes. Both Adam and Eve were individuals who made their choices, but they also influenced each other. Hence the limits to their autonomy; being so interdependent, they can never act with complete independence. Adam allowed Eve to go off on her own and did not protect her. But she chose freely within the freedom he had granted her. Neither was free of the influence of the other. Women did not have public power in the past, but they had immense private influence over men.

Hannon writes:

Laura writes:

Society always limits our choices. We cannot possibly know what is best on our own. It especially limits us today from choosing the good. If a woman is exerted all her life by school and family to be a careerist, if all of her friends are careerists and she would be alone in her choice to remain at home for more than a self-fulfilling parental holiday, then her choice to become anything but a careerist is limited.

John writes:

I agree wholeheartedly with your point in response to my diatribe where you say that although it’s true that one must do their duty whether or not it makes them happy, yet ultimately it does make you happy. This is absolutely true, and so is the corollary that doing what makes you happy instead of your duty makes you miserable in the long run.

I happened to stumble across this video the other day, and it reminded me of the beautiful photos and paintings you like to post on your website — simple and charming and reminiscent of a happier time. It is even more relevant, however, in the context of the point you are making about the long-term consequences of doing your duty. Here are two women, 97 years old and 93 years old, who are so evidently happy after a lifetime of hard work and sacrifice that it just shines from their faces.

Laura writes:

Charming. That is very delightful.

One cannot be this beautiful in old age if one has lived a lifetime of resentment.

Paul T. writes:

Thank you for the superb discussion. There is one point I’d like to address, and that is John’s comment about women who “would rather abort their unborn child[ren] in order to continue their life of care-free promiscuity.”

I’ve heard a lot of women’s confidences in my time, and I have to say, I haven’t known many to whom a “life of carefree promiscuity” was an appealing ideal. I don’t know today’s under-30 set as well but I’ve no reason to think they’re much different. The promiscuous women I’ve known have mostly been women for whom promiscuity is a competitive strategy — put bluntly, they feel they have to come across in order to compel a man’s interest and loyalty and to match the bids put forward by other sexually available women. (On the related topic of women’s fashions, C.S. Lewis once said something like “these signs of desperate competition fill me with pity.”) My completely unscientific survey (conducted in supermarket checkout lines) of women’s magazine article titles provides some supporting evidence. For every article about how women can boost their own sexual satisfaction there seem to be three with titles like “Hot Moves That Will Keep Him Wild About You.” Fear, not libido, seems to be the real driver here; a fear which a half-century of feminism has probably aggravated, by encouraging women to turn the bedroom into another forum for mate-competition while misrepresenting this as self-assertion and self-fulfilment. Maybe I’m off-base, but I really don’t see any evidence of the ‘care-free promiscuity’ John describes — I’m guessing it’s about as common as unicorns.

 Laura writes:

I think most women have abortions not because they want to pursue “care-free promiscuity” — often they want to continue a steady relationship with the father — but because a child will interfere with education or career goals.

Paul writes:

Sorry if I was less than clear. I wasn’t actually focusing on the abortion part, but on the suggestion that women (for whatever reason) desire a ‘life of carefree promiscuity.’ I don’t think John was focusing on abortion, either, but on self-focused choices generally, since he went on to write: “A society which gives a woman the choice to live a life of promiscuity, to murder her own unborn children, to abandon her home and family whenever she is tired of them, to seek her own “fulfillment” rather than the happiness of her children….” etc.

 John writes:

You and Paul T. are certainly correct when you say that promiscuity is not truly care-free. Of course it is not. It comes with an entire panoply of cares, as we see portrayed in modern dramas of the lives of promiscuous women like “Sex and the City” and the current darling of the HBO crowd, “Girls.”

The reason, however, why the phrase “care-free promiscuity” is accurately applied to the lives of modern women who use contraception with backup abortion is because the “cares” that come with the consequences of sexual relations seemingly are wiped away. There are no diapers, no late night feedings. There are no sacrifices of your own desires for the good of another. There are no long-term obligations, no duties, no vows of fidelity, no dependency on another. There are no interruptions in your plans for your own self glorification by means of academic degrees, job promotions, etc. There is no societal disapproval –disapproval which use to focus on the immorality of your fornication but which now focuses on the imprudence of wasting your opportunities for money and success. All these “cares” seem to magically vanish.

At the same time it is likewise true what Paul T. says that the erasure of one set of cares brings another set of cares in its wake. Yes, these women are universally miserable and very often suffer from crippling anxiety. Yes, they are often lonely and worried. Yes, they feel the competitive pressure to keep up with all the other women –especially the younger, better-looking women — who are adopting the same strategies they have used. Yes, they feel panic at their inability to get a man to make a commitment to them.

Nevertheless, the reality is that they have pursued a policy which has allowed them to enjoy the benefits of promiscuity while negating the troublesome consequences. While there were unforeseen and unanticipated consequences of their decisions which have saddled them with psychological and emotional “cares” of another kind than those that would have resulted from the natural outcome of their actions, those new kinds of cares are of a different nature and quality and significance.

These women make the same mistake made by Lady Macbeth. They use a self-interest computer in their brains to calculate their own best interest. But this self-interest calculator gives too much weight to visible things and not enough weight to invisible things. It rarely assigns a proper weight to the value of one’s soul. We know what weight Jesus assigned to it, and we know what St. Thomas More said about it in “A Man for All Seasons,” but how many people, men as well as women, give any thought at all to the effect suffered by their souls when they decide whether one course of action or another will be in their best interest? Although we know as Christians that this should be the prime and virtually only consideration in all our decisions, how often do we really make our souls the deciding factor until, like Edgar Allen Poe’s “Tell-tale Heart,” we begin to feel the gnawing of conscience?

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