Anyone who sees feminism as one of the major philosophical errors of the modern age often finds it necessary to keep his own counsel. What is the
point of getting into an argument over this sacred cow of the educated elite,
this prejudice so installed in people's minds that they are unable to reflect
objectively about it, this dogma that supposedly marks out the civilized from
the ignorant?
But the feminist error is so damaging to human beings and their
relationships with each other that here I would like to look at why it is an error
and how, far from being a touchstone of enlightenment, it actually alienates us
from our true selves and from God. Of course, to say such a thing in polite
company nowadays would be sufficient to be shown the door, yet I persist in thinking that
deep down everyone knows the truth about this but covers it up for various
reasons to do with power, personal advantage, a misconceived sense of justice or simply seeking to fit in and look good.
Let's get something out of the way first of all.
There was originally a need for some kind of readjustment between the sexes.
The balance certainly had tipped too far on to the masculine side. But to go
from that to what we have now, where the essential difference between the sexes
is dismissed as cultural and the feminine apes the masculine to grab a share of
male power, is altogether another matter.
The starting point of any discussion of this topic
should be the statement in Genesis. 'Male and female created he them'. I say
that is the starting point not in the sense that Biblical authority cannot be
questioned but because, as statements go, it contains so much in so little.
Unwrap it and it points to the truth that the sexes are different,
complementary and, because not the same, not equal. All that is contained
inside those six words. And the order in which the two sexes are mentioned is
also important. They are two halves of a whole but one comes before the other
in the context of their creation even though both are of equal worth. Now I
submit that everybody knows this. It has been the universal human belief across
all cultures and all times until the last couple of hundred years which
coincides, not coincidentally, with the rise of materialism and atheism. It is one of the few beliefs that pretty much all humans have ever shared. What arrogance to think that we
have discovered something that nobody else could see! To say that women have
been suppressed for all that time and in all those places and have only
recently been able to shake off that suppression rather implies a stupidity and
ineffectiveness on the part of the female sex which would be a
counter-productive argument for feminists to make. It's more logical to think
that everyone simply recognised a natural state of affairs that wasn't always
perfectly expressed but, on balance, was seen as correct. Of course, there has
been injustice at times, I don't think anyone would dispute that, but that is the
result of the abuse of male power. It is no reason to conclude that the
traditional basis of the male/female relationship is wrong.
I want to approach this matter by asking what are
the qualities that the ideal male should demonstrate and what are those of the
ideal female. I think that if we understand these then we should have a good
idea of what men and women are and what they ought to be to each other. Those
schooled in the ways of relativism and materialism might reject this notion of
ideals or archetypes, and assert that anyone can be what they want to be, but
all I can really say to them is that they are wrong. They don't have, or won't
acknowledge, the full facts. And they are not only rejecting spiritual truth.
They are rejecting nature too. In fact they are rejecting everything except
theory based on wishful thinking, and they need to address what it is in them
that is making them do that. It is not reason and it's not intuition so it must
be something else.
I have come up with three main qualities for each
sex. These are not meant as ultimate qualities above all others. You could
probably come up with different ones which would be equally valid. But they
are, I consider, fairly fundamental and they do capture something of the
archetype of male and female. And it is the archetype of our sex that each one
of us should be attempting to manifest, expressed through the unique form of
our own individuality. We are most ourselves when we do this. We all have a
pattern to which we should be true and to which we should be attempting to
conform. Only when we do this will we achieve real fulfillment and the sense of
being what we should be. The pattern of our sex is only one such but it is a
very important one. Inevitably in this world which has long gone astray there
are always going to be exceptions but these exceptions have to be seen in the
light of the rule and cannot be given equal authenticity. They must be known as
exceptions and treated accordingly, with justice and fairness but not with
equal significance or the whole balance and order of nature will be disturbed.
And when the balance of nature is disturbed and the order of creation
disordered there will be a reaction and it won't be a happy one.
The pre-eminent male qualities are nobility,
authority and courage. Men should conform to these. The female equivalents are
beauty, purity and gentleness, and women should incarnate these. This tells us
that leadership is largely male and the compassion that balances and humanizes
that leadership is largely female. Not a popular thought today but nonetheless
true. However at the same time each sex should include the qualities of the
other, though expressed within the context of their own nature which is primary
and determining. Thus a woman's intellect manifests in the context of her
femininity and a man's emotions should work in the context of his masculinity.
Similarly for will and love which will be expressed differently in each case. I
repeat that all human beings have to develop the full panoply of human
qualities but each sex should express these within the reality of their
maleness or femaleness. If that is not the case then there is an imbalance and
that leads to disorder. Of course, this is an ideal and the human race is a long
way from living according to any ideal, but we should at least recognise and
aspire towards it as the template for what we should be. The nearer we get to it, the better we will be. And vice versa.
There are those who claim that this erosion of
difference we are witnessing today points towards a kind of divine androgyny of
the future, and so is progressive in evolutionary terms. This ignores two
important facts. One, in the beginning God created humanity as man and woman,
and this duality reproduces that of spirit and matter, subject and object,
life and form, which lies at the heart of creation and without which there
could be nothing. And two, just as Jesus came to fulfil the law not abolish it
so life proceeds in an organic evolutionary manner, building on what came
before not eradicating it and starting anew. Violent revolution is contrary to
the divine method. Duality is central to manifestation and so are man and woman
who are the two poles of existence and the expression of the purpose of
creation which was relationship.
The war between the sexes, in which feminism
represents a major battle, came about as a result of the Fall. Unfortunately
the idea of the Fall, a rift between Creator and created brought about by the
misuse of self-will, is not recognised in today's secular world and so the
symptoms of it are not acknowledged either. This is why feminism is seen as a
good instead of the evil it actually is. Why an evil? Because it is essentially
a war against femininity and an attempt to unbalance creation. That's what is behind it. Feminism makes women
abandon their femininity and become parodies of masculinity, and so the
civilising, softening, spiritually receptive, nurturing aspects of true
womanhood are lost. It is fundamentally egotism and the lust for power
disguised as a search for equality. And that tells us why many women support
it even though it denies the deepest part of their nature which is left to
atrophy. Or perhaps that is only true of the feminist leaders and many women
are actually victims of it, going along with it because the world tells them to
and its supposedly egalitarian aspect, egalitarianism being regarded as the
basic truth of the modern world even though a child should be able to see it as
a completely false doctrine. The child would see through it because of natural instinct but an intellectual fails to see it because he is too tied up in theory. A wise man, though, sees it because he perceives that life is not just one thing, unity, but two things, unity and plurality and in the context of the latter there is always a hierarchy. Nowhere in the entire universe is there equality.
But why do so many men support it? From my
experience the reasons range from a desire to seem fair and just, to go along
with the status quo, to gain sexual advantage, or even self hatred or loss of
confidence or resentment at more successful or powerful males. And of course there
are also many who logically must support it because of their materialism and atheism of which feminism is a product. And there are too those whose
understanding of past injustices towards the female sex leads them into the
opposite error. So a mixture of good and bad motives but all still lacking in
wisdom or insight.
St Paul says that the man should be the head of the family. This is in line with the perception that natural authority is a masculine attribute, a deeply unfashionable view nowadays to say the least. But what if we extended this to say that woman should be the heart of the family? Would it seem so unjust then? The head should rule the heart but it should also allow itself to be guided by the heart when appropriate. That way lies harmony. Of course, a man has a heart and a woman has a head but each sex should still conform to its prototype if the natural and spiritual order is to be sustained. When what should be the heart tries to become the head, as now, what becomes of the real heart? Spiritual chaos ensues as it most certainly has done in our prideful and foolish times.
There is much more to say on this subject but I'd
like to conclude this piece by pointing out that when the differences between
men and women are eroded as they are now the relationship between them becomes
much more a matter of crude sexual attraction on the one hand and competition on the other, and the possibility of
real love, which depends on being fulfilled by the complementary other, much
harder. That is why I have called this piece feminism and love for feminism
destroys love between the sexes just as surely as any aggressively male culture
in which women are treated as inferiors does. It is in fact very close to being a mirror image of
that.
So feminism is fundamentally an anti-love ideology. Insofar as it drives women to usurp the masculine it is destructive of a proper complementary relationship between the sexes. It is actually a product of the rebelliousness of adolescence and a sign of the end times when values are inverted. You could say it is Eve once again succumbing to temptation and having another bite of the apple in the attempt to become a god. You could also say it is misogynistic because it rejects and devalues what women really are and what they uniquely have to offer in the attempt to make them more masculine.
You might regard that as a rather one sided appraisal so I want to end on a slight note of optimism. We can't see the wood for the trees but if we could then it might, it just might, be that this present state of distortion will balance out into a more genuine and complementary partnership between men and women. After all, no one could pretend that the balance between the sexes has ever been exactly what it should be. Now it has shifted far too far in one direction but there may be a reaction to that and true harmony eventually be realised. Through experiment comes truth would run an argument along these lines. I must admit, though, I'm saying this more in hope than anything else for the truth is I can see no indication of it at the moment. The current distortion has gone too far and is too clearly being orchestrated by forces who do not have humanity's spiritual well-being at heart.
Note:
A counterargument to what I have written here could run like this. Everything has the defects of its qualities and you have concentrated on the dark side of feminism, ignoring its positive side.
To this I would reply as follows. Setting aside that you could say this about almost anything, you have to see where something leads before pronouncing it as on the whole good or bad. Obviously there have been some perceived benefits coming from feminism. If not it would have been doomed from the start, but on the whole what are its effects? And what is the real aim behind it? And I would say that its effects are largely destructive on an individual level, a cultural level and a spiritual level. By reducing archetypes to stereotypes it limits men and women to purely material beings, cutting them off from their higher nature which, if approached at all, is approached from the false position of a material being trying to bend the spiritual to its own pseudo-reality instead of conforming itself to the reality of the spiritual. As for the real aim behind it, it is very clear when looked at with the eye of spiritual vision that this is the separation of man (as in the human being) from his spiritual nature hence from God. It is the materialisation of man through the deformation of the human archetype, the destruction of the family and the fermenting of competition and conflict between the sexes. When all is said and done it is the work of hatred not love and its results are the fruits of that.