Mainstream Feminism: Loving and Hating Womanhood

In 2018, Notre Dame University’s Church Life Journal published an article criticizing mainstream feminism’s twin pillars of abortion-on-demand and sexual autonomy. The author, Abigail Favale, was a literature professor who converted to Catholicism in 2013. Her article describes how motherhood transformed Favale from a proudly vocal pro-choice “popular” feminist to an equally vocal defender of the right to life and critic of mainstream feminism. Favale’s testimony illuminates the strange, schizophrenic love/hate relationship mainstream feminism has with womanhood — alternately celebrating its difference from manhood and pretending, even insisting sexual differences are socially constructed illusions.

The Elephant in the Feminists’ Room

In “Confessions of a Feminist Heretic,” Favale speaks of attending a feminist panel on sex and theology at the national congress of the American Academy of Religion. “In the entire ninety minutes of discussion, with multiple female scholars presenting and an audience of female academics actively engaging, not once did anyone mention [the] fact that sex can result in pregnancy. It was as if we were operating within a world where that no longer happens, where new human beings emerge out of cabbage patches, or spring from men’s thighs, like Dionysus from Zeus.”

Now, it’s possible that the women took the connection between sex and pregnancy as too obvious to need stating. But I doubt Favale would have found the panel’s silence significant if the fact of the link didn’t directly affect the topics — a bearing which the participants ignored. And in fact, Favale observes, in popular feminism, “pleasure is the ruling paradigm.” I remember a combox brawl I participated in many years ago: An apparently intelligent and educated feminist pushing the pro-abortion argument astonished us all by sneering, “Who said reproduction had anything to do with sex?”

This brings up another gap in feminist thought: If you pay attention, you’ll notice feminist conversation tends to focus on the penis and vagina as though they were the only relevant differences between men’s and women’s bodies. To acknowledge the other reproductive organs, especially women’s, is to recognize that pregnancy is a natural function of the woman’s body.  The elephant will leave the room if you ignore it. A couple of things I’ve seen recently suggest that the feminist “Handmaid’s Tale” mythos has even pathologized pregnancy, making it an unspeakable, deadly disease.

Loreto House, the pregnancy resource center I wrote about last September, was vandalized on May 5. Among other things, the pro-abortion hoodlum spray-painted “FORCED BIRTH IS MURDER” on a wall. I might have dismissed this hyperbole as mere Orwellian doublespeak. However, a few days later, I saw a post on Twitter claiming that pregnancy is “inherently fatal,” a statement that could be most charitably described as gross misrepresentation. We begin to see why mainstream feminism claims that abortion is “healthcare”: They’ve exaggerated pregnancy’s risks beyond reason while dismissing or making light of the dangers in supposedly “safe” abortions.

The “Problem” of Female Biology

In “The Identity of a Woman,” I mentioned that feminists are “reluctant to admit to different mental makeups [between men and women].” However, “this doesn’t stop them from doing and saying things that pay implicit homage to an intrinsic difference.” Favale goes further: She charges that mainstream feminism is in cognitive denial. Feminism, she claims, creates the illusion that “maleness and femaleness are incidental to human existence, rather than a powerful and purposeful reality that tethers us to the created order.” And in the process, feminism’s demand for sexual autonomy “sets women at war with their own bodies.”

The demand for autonomy begins with the observation that men, unlike women, have no physical bonds to children — they can literally walk away from their paternal responsibilities. Whether they do walk away in significant numbers or whether they ought to walk away in any numbers are questions feminists deem irrelevant. Feminists see this capability as an enviable freedom; so long as this freedom is available only to men, they conclude that women cannot be equal. Writes Favale:

The traditional feminist solution to the “problem” of female biology is unfettered access to contraception and abortion: this reveals an ironically masculine bias. Rather than seeking to change social structures to accommodate the realities of female biology, the feminist movement, since its second wave, has continually and firmly fought instead for women to alter their biology, often through violence, so that it functions more like a man’s. Tellingly, the legal right for a woman to kill a child in her womb was won before the legal right for a woman not to be fired for being pregnant. The message is clear: women must become like men to be free [emphasis mine].

Wishful Thinking

Another message is clear: Mainstream feminism doesn’t value womanhood as something unique and distinct from manhood because it views motherhood as limiting women’s ability to do what they want — at worst, as a trap and enslavement. Womanhood doesn’t consist solely of motherhood, but the two are inextricably connected. Feminists resent that their own bodies can spring the trap and impose this enslavement on them without warning or consent (“freedom of choice”). And they can’t accept that, where biology is concerned, “fair” and “just” are irrelevant, meaningless terms.

Feminist theory and social analysis tend to focus on political and economic power to substantiate the narrative of women’s oppression. In doing so, they fail to appreciate the vital importance of the family as the basis of society, “the first and fundamental structure for ‘human ecology’” (St. John Paul II, Centesimo Anno 39). They exaggerate the degree of freedom physical autonomy gives men while diminishing men’s involvement and importance in childrearing. But most importantly, they portray motherhood as having no intrinsic significance or worth.

Consequently, feminists use postmodern criticism to convince themselves that sexual differentiation is an illusion, an arbitrary social construct they can dismiss or change through language and technology. In this light, their narrative is less about women than about “men with vaginas.” It’s wishful thinking, if not repressed gender dysphoria syndrome. And when biological reality asserts itself, as Favale sadly observes, “it is women who pay the price. … The myth of complete sexual freedom, complete autonomy, is based on male biology, and women can only pursue that ideal by doing [chemical and surgical] violence to themselves.”

Autonomy as Freedom

Male sexual autonomy as a biological fact is an irremediable consequence of our reproductive scheme. However, male sexual autonomy as an ideal of freedom is at minimum selfish and irresponsible, at maximum sociopathic. It ignores our interdependence as social, political, and relational animals. Men who evade or abandon their responsibilities as fathers and husbands are jerks. When people refuse to recognize any moral or social obligation to their sexual partners, they do not and cannot truly respect the partners as persons; instead, they treat them as mere masturbation tools. Calling it “freedom” is simply putting lipstick on a shark.

Indeed, the demand for autonomy is one-sided: Feminists demand more social controls on men and greater obligations from society in general. Freedom for them, but not for anyone else. But mainstream feminism fails to see that the need for more social controls on men contradicts and indicts complete sexual freedom as an ideal. One writer has noted that the sexual revolution permitted men to be “the worst version of themselves.” Feminists still believe technology can give us sex without consequences. They might as well still believe in the stork fable.

By no means should the feminist movement end. There’s still much left to be done as well as undone. As much as the damage caused by the sexual revolution needs to be repaired, we still need a feminist movement to keep us on the path to true equality of the sexes. My argument is that true equality has no room for the current love/hate relationship with womanhood in mainstream feminism. There are other feminists besides Favale who see the implicit misogyny behind abortion and autonomy; they deserve to be listened to rather than dismissed out of hand.

I, for one, cheerfully agree men need more social control. Specifically, men need a more humane and authentic ethos of virtuous masculinity. A masculinity that protects women while respecting and cherishing them as persons created equally in God’s image (cf. Genesis 1:27). Masculinity in which strength of will is expressed not by physical force but by restraint and prudence. An ethos in which men challenge each other to take ownership of their social responsibilities, especially as husbands and fathers, and not treat sex as a recreational sport or tolerate a view of women’s sexual favors as entitlements.

Conclusion

Such a masculine ethos is compatible with a society that gives women equal access to political and economic power. But such an ethos can only flourish in a cultural context that provides the procreative function of sex the recognition, respect, and priority it deserves. That context requires feminism that truly respects womanhood as different from manhood and having its own biological and social imperatives — equal but not identical. It requires we respect the family as the foundational unit of community and parenthood as critical to the development of children and the adults who rear them.

“Facts,” John Adams once said, “are stubborn things; and whatever may be our wishes, our inclinations, or the dictates of our passion, they cannot alter the state of facts and evidence.” A culture capable of protecting women and promoting their interests cannot be built on a foundation of self-centrism, self-indulgence, and self-deception. As St. John Paul II said of democracy, that culture “cannot be sustained without a shared commitment to certain moral truths about the human person and human community.” It cannot be built, in other words, on a delusion that women are mere “men with vaginas.”

Women are much more — and much Other — than that.