Trans teens typically reject the boy-girl dichotomy…They make little effort to adopt the stereotypical habits of men…They flee womanhood like a house on fire, their minds fixed on escape, not on any particular destination.
Abigail Shier, Irreversible Damage
Can we talk about how it has come to be politically incorrect to automatically refer to a woman as “she”? Or why we’d rather refer to an individual as plural than identify him as male?
The battle for definitions of what a woman is – which never did require a biology degree – happened without a significant fight and without significant contradiction two generations ago with feminism. Without feminism pushing down the slide, we’d have never ended up here at the bottom, which turns out to be a mudpie and not a utopia of “equality.”
The only thing feminine about feminism is that women pushed for it as an ideology – and it caught on. After all, women are the makers and pushers of culture.
Feminism was a con. They said women wrote different kinds of books in the past than men because they were oppressed and men weren’t. It couldn’t be because men and women are actually different, with different perspectives which should both be heard.
Boys and girls are different by design.
Women, they said, ought to play the men’s game and win. That’s what being equal is, they said. Anything a man can do, a woman ought to be able to do just as well or better.
And now we have the extreme consequences of that belief system wreaking irreversible damage on its adherents and the rising generation.
Modern America says that women should be able to have the same careers as men and be paid the same, and we’ll ignore actual performance because we’ve blamed any lack of performance on society, not on the different desires of men and women.
We’ll also ignore the harm caused to society by women abandoning homes and families and insist that the worst harm to society is that there are too few women in combat and in C-suite corporate offices – jobs that generally rule out having a tenable family/life balance. Women who care about tending their family are oppressed; they should hire a housekeeper and a daycare so they can succeed in 15-hour-a-day jobs.
They assume the greatest value of anyone’s labor is its economic contribution and pressure women to give up the more rewarding and higher value work of raising up the next generation. After all, we have metrics to achieve in the name of equality.
And what happens to the next generation? Much of the next generation doesn’t exist because women chose not to have families at all. Much of the next generation doesn’t exist because women have been told for a generation that higher education and career advancement is worth murder.
Much of the next generation that does exist was not raised in a functioning family, where mom took seriously her role of raising her children into responsible, capable adults.
Much of the next generation doesn’t think it’s a big deal that women don’t want to be women anymore. Who’s to say what they are, anyway? Shouldn’t each person be able to choose for themselves and be whatever they want to be?
Why did we let them call themselves feminists? It makes no sense. It is an anti-woman ideology.
Women as the glory of glories
In the beginning, God created man. Male and female, He created them in His very image. In the beginning, God made humans as male and female, together, with unity in diversity, to reflect Himself in the world. He created marriage to proclaim the gospel. He instituted the family to rule over property. He commanded that societies be formed and the garden spot spread over the as-yet-untamed earth.
Before the fall, there was a mini death-and-resurrection. The husband was put into a coma and his wife was brought forth, his own flesh, glorified so that he might be whole in a better way than he was before he was cut open.
Before the fall, there was love poetry. There was a husband sacrificing for a bride. There was a bride that made everything now, finally, “very good,” where it had not yet been.
Doesn’t that sound like a view we could call feminism? Where women are the crowning glory of creation, worth dying for, because of the wholeness and true productivity they bring?
If you were flesh formed from flesh, why would you be jealous of the one formed from dirt? Just because he came first? But the first shall be last and the last first in God’s order.
No, it’s because to deny creation is to deny the difference between men and women at all. It’s to deny the existence of the family as a thing beyond social convention. It’s to deny any supernatural power in a marriage bond.
These denials are logical necessities from a denial of creation. Previous unbelieving cultures existed, but they were not foolish enough to deny that there was a god who made everything and imposed limits and definitions from outside the society. That’s a special kind of modern insanity that should have been called out and mocked out of existence before it got so brazen.
Women are different from men because God made them different. God gives callings, and God doesn’t define equality as sameness.
Women are not simply the behind-the-scenes backup, feeding and cleaning up after the men doing all the big, important work out in the world. That’s the picture that the feminists painted to win their first round of arguments, and it’s the picture some “conservative” circles embraced because in saying the feminists were wrong, they actually lived like the feminists were right.
The home is a battlefield, too.
“The homemaker has the ultimate career. All other careers exist for one purpose only – and that is to support the ultimate career.”
C.S. Lewis
Is Lewis playing word games so that women can feel better about their little lives? Not at all. Neither was Chesterton.
And many of the phenomena which moderns hastily condemn are really parts of this position of the woman as the center and pillar of health. Much of what is called her subservience, and even her pliability, is merely the subservience and pliability of a universal remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with the disease. … How can it be broad to be the same thing to everyone, and narrow to be everything to someone? No; a woman’s function is laborious, but because it is gigantic, not because it is minute.
G.K. Chesterton, “The Emancipation of Domesticity”
Yes, woman’s function. It’s a thing, and it’s a thing socially, culturally. A woman’s function is much more than the ability to have babies. Women have a function because they were created by God with a purpose.
The creation purpose given to mankind – male and female – was to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and subdue it. Every one of those commands requires both the male and the female together, working in concert, in harmony, unity in diversity.
The new covenant has a new expression of the original creation mandate:
Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.
Matthew 28:19-20
A purpose is exactly what secular women (and men) don’t have, and it’s why they are prey to today’s follies.
Say the obvious.
We live in a cultural moment where we need to say the obvious.
Men can’t have babies. The world needs babies. Families require both a father and a mother. The father was made to provide and protect. The mother was made to nurture and increase and glorify her household.
That is to say, there are things women can do – by design, creationally, intentionally – that men can’t do. There are also things that men can do that women can’t – or shouldn’t.
Let’s not get embarrassed by reductionists trying to mess with our confidence in Scripture. Men are the heads of their households. That does not mean that women don’t lead. Women are heads of households when single, when widowed, when abandoned.
Women don’t preach because our marching orders come straight from our Creator and not from our politics or feelings.
Women lead and men lead. It is the nature of their leadership that is qualitatively different – not that one is a higher quality, but that they have different qualities, both of which are needed in the world.
Women aren’t the subservient class, created to do all the chores because someone had to and the men were too important for stuff like that. It’s not that women are important because without them, there’d be no sons. The value and contribution of women is not in being breeding machines who can also do laundry and make dinner.
That view isn’t only a low view of women, it’s a low view of the home and it’s an unbiblical understanding of leadership, value, persons, and chores.
Jesus did the menial work. Menial work isn’t demeaning. Menial work ought not be what we outsource as quickly as we can to the lowest person on the social totem pole – that’s basic worldliness across time and cultures.
Christians live differently because we are living in light of the reality of Creation. We ought not make accommodations or caveats to allow that there is any validity at all to false metaphysics, because it just takes 20-50 years of a society abandoned to false metaphysics by a silent church and you get millions of dead babies and weird cuttings (surgeries) to satisfy lusts and false ideals and no one willing to even define what a woman is. Some kind of feminism.
Women lead when they embrace the feminine.
Feminism thinks all leadership should look the same. Women should lead the same way men do; or maybe men should lead more like women do. However you slice it, or at whatever point in the middle you want to meet, feminism abhors a difference in function between men and women.
Instead, if we want women who truly lead in a godly way, we will embrace the structure of creation.
Women lead by radiating life and joy. Women are the contagion of society. What they have, they spread, they propagate, they cultivate.
By starting in the very heart of the home, where people are created and disciplined and brought up, to serving the community and creating goods and businesses, women are the lifeblood of the family, the church, and the community – and they’re supposed to be.
They are so vitally important that they must be protected. Men fight and kill the dragons, build walls and defenses, stand guard. They also build and create and love, but their energy and attention is focused outward so that there is space and opportunity for the inward cultivation which can’t help but spread and overflow, increase and attract.
Fruitful Leadership
All fruit is female, after all. It never grows or develops all by itself, but the strength of the male is turned into fruit by the female. Likewise, the male alone cannot construct anything, cannot prosper generationally. This is a creation pattern, a reality to exult in wherever we see the pattern playing out.
We can glory in men being men and in women being women, because to do so is to glory in the way God made the world. We ought to overflow in praise and gratitude for His wisdom on display, for His reality is as Real as His truth is True.
Squabbles over an equal division of chores severely misses both the point and any chance at glory.
Self-pity over a perceived slight is myopic and self-destructive.
And when women go into self-destructive mode – as they have been for two generations – the world goes into self-destruction mode, because women are contagious to society.
Women are the backbone of society
Women are the civilization. They bring the civilizing life. They inspire the great art. They create home base and ground zero for the basic building block of society, the family. Women nurture. Women mother. Women mother more than children. They mother schools, communities, churches, missions, businesses.
Families, schools, churches, communities, missions, businesses, governments, societies, civilizations – all need mothers and fathers. They need women who are mothers and men who are fathers.
It is with both male and female together that mankind images God.
Look to the Word for definitions and for standards. Nothing good ever came from envy, resentment, and lies.
Truth, goodness, and beauty are all realities, found in God alone, reflected in His creation because that’s what He created it to do.
As women, civilizing our band of barbarians, giving our lives in service just like our Savior, demonstrating to a watching world the glory of the gospel by being a bride who submits to her husband – this will be more effective and contagious in the world than any barren social agenda based on falsehood can ever hope to be.
The best answer to the insanity of the day is to embrace being a woman on God’s terms – fully engaged, fully in tune with God’s Word, fully dependent through prayer, fully enjoying God by enjoying the assignment He has given each one.
God does all things well.
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