Beware the feminist man

In recent decades being a self-declared “feminist” is seen in certain social circles as proof of civility and enlightenment. Many women have been duped into believing that men are allied in an oppressive patriarchy that seeks to stamp out female empowerment. From this skewed paradigm, many women believe a male colleague or suitor can have no higher attribute than proclaiming himself “feminist.”

What is feminism?

First, what is feminism? The belief in equality between the sexes. Depending on one’s vision of “equality,” the general premise is fairly innocuous and even produced societal goods like the women’s vote and ownership of property. We are all required to sign on to these without question (or else). But there is a phenomenal inability for people to dwell in nuance. Once you start to swallow feminism, you can’t stop with the sane improvements to civil society. Feminism must go further. There is a gradual eroding of the difference between men and women until suddenly we are supposed to imagine there are no differences between the sexes. The greater physical strength of the average man is covered over with good feelings about women’s potential. The miraculous ability of women to carry new life is viewed as a force that must be subjected to scientific control to neutralize it.

The trouble with all this androgenous thinking is that it destroys the foundation of Christian marriage. In a context that does not allow for the subordination of a woman to a man who strives to subordinate himself to God, things get rather muddled. What then is the relationship between men and women? What are their common goals and unique contributions?

Into all this confusion steps the feminist man. He is not the hero you might imagine. Rather, he is often an opportunist who exploits the very real difference between men and women while paying lip service to the lofty ideals of feminism.

The original feminist cad

In Henry James’s The Bostonians, the satirical roast of East Coast reformers, there is no greater example of the feminist man than Matthias Pardon. An ambitious young newspaperman, Pardon is intrigued, as everyone is, by the pretty and naïve Verena Tarrant. Verena, who has been sold by her enlightened and, of course, abolitionist parents into the care of the highly progressive Miss Olive Chancellor, is being indoctrinated in the ways of feminism. Pardon clearly sees in Verena an opportunity for newspaper coverage and seeks to woo her. Olive, acting as her protégé’s guardian, tries to sniff out where Pardon’s sympathies lie. Nothing frightens Olive more than the possibility of a man who would quash Verena’s budding feminism. After Olive’s relentless questioning of his support for “the cause of women,” Pardon finally proclaims he has no personal ambition in channelling Verena’s feminist seances. Rather, he proclaims, “Well, I want to make history! I want to help the ladies.”

That’s the ticket. While Pardon gives no substantive indication of sharing in Olive’s fanatic ideas of equity, he will do anything, even play along, to have a chance with the beautiful Verena. For her part, the inexperienced girl claims off-handedly that she is in favor of “free unions,” a term Olive infers she does not understand but is likely a view she acquired from her feminist milieu. We shall see below where the “free unions” can get you.

The feminist man of our time

In more recent years, the feminist man might have been spotted at a women’s political event, dutifully picketing on behalf of the perpetually wronged sex. And, just like Pardon, perhaps open to tangential benefits.

The sad and grotesque story of one of the slain villains of the #MeToo movement justice shows what we can expect from the feminist men of today. In a wide-ranging interview series with victims of Don Hazen’s alleged abuse, one woman described a nightmare getaway to Big Sur for an extramarital tryst. The woman, worldly-wise in all the superficial ways, comes across as naïve as Verena. She’s stunned to learn that a serial philanderer decades her senior has a venereal disease and shocked that he attempts to be persuasive in physical matters. The scorned man rages, “I am the most feminist man you know, and you know it!”

Like Matthias Pardon, he had all the feminist bona fides: the marches, the votes, the social causes, the female staffers. Likely he was sincere in his desire to “help the ladies” by giving them the equal treatment they claimed to want. He also, unfortunately, took their “free union” talk literally.

The woman in the scenario walked away from this vile scene ominously thinking, “They warned me.” Like so many successful girls, she had been raised to believe in her Type-A personality and how much men would struggle to accept a confident woman. She was blind to the deficit of such a thorough-going feminist education: feminist men. If women want a stable, long-term, intimate relationship with a man Christian marriage is a better bet than the flattering attention of a feminist man.

How to understand the mess

How did so many women become duped? Scholar Mary Eberstadt offers insightful analysis in her book Primal Scream: How the Sexual Revolution Created Identity Politics. In an interview about the book, Eberstadt points to the shrinking family as one of the key factors in the rise of ideologies like feminism. She said, “This is again what is behind this hunger to know the answer to the question, ‘Who am I?’ It is partly arithmetic; it’s that the family has shrunk; it’s that it has seen its gravitational pull reduced by a lot.”

With so much less of a secure identity in people and place, more people feel exposed and alone. Uniting against abstract enemies is easier than confronting the enemies of chaos in the flesh. In this context, more women are susceptible to thinking “the patriarchy” is the cause of their listlessness and lack of accomplishment.

Eberstadt explained, “The problem for feminism is not the Catholic Church and it’s not moral traditionalism. The problem is that the sexual revolution has unleashed predation and made it harder to find what most women even now will say they want most which is marriage and family. That’s where the rage is coming from.”

Encountering stories like the one above, Eberstadt asked, “Where in these stories are these women’s fathers, brothers, cousins, uncles, or other men to whom they might have confided what was happening, men who might have tried to intervene in this?… Did no one ever tell them, ‘Don’t go to your boss’s hotel room in the middle of the night’ and other sort of commonsensical things? It never occurred to them that things like this might happen?”

The obvious answer is: no. Absent fathers and living in smaller families have left otherwise well-educated women “leaders” exposed to serious risk of harm through an utter naivete about the difference between the sexes. Girls unacquainted with the obvious fact that men are not united by a secret handshake in oppressing them will be less able to recognize the individual men who may, in fact, want to exploit them.

Beware the man who proclaims too loudly that he is a “feminist.” Not all self-proclaimed feminist men will be exploitative, but all of them will undermine Christian marriage and women’s happiness.