by Carrie Gress
Jesuit priest Fr. James Martin furthers the error when he recommends that homosexuality no longer be referred to as intrinsically disordered but rebranded as “differently ordered.” He is, yet again, trying to tweak human nature to include naturally sterile and supernaturally prohibited sexual acts.
Both of these ideologies—radical feminism and homosexuality—are committing the same error of negating the necessity and goodness of the opposite sex. Neither has a use for healthy, ordered, loving men and women, parents, and children. They want the world and the Church to be ruled by “the new men and women” with a “new human nature” who are sterile in word and in deed.
Russia’s errors are reverberating through the highest levels of the cultural and clerical elite. Like the demons before them, they are determined to destroy the faith and the fundamental building block of a flourishing society: the family.
More Lies: Women Aren’t Mothers
The Soviet Revolution and the subsequent sexual revolution presented the world with another new idea, another lie based upon the original lie that human nature can change. They introduced into society the notion that a new kind of woman could exist, the anti-Marian woman. No longer was every woman required to accept motherhood of some sort, but women were given the capacity to somehow step out of the confines of motherhood. This break from motherhood freed a woman to finally be who she truly is—she could be a reporter, a CEO, a Marine, or even morph into something altogether different: she could become a he. For women to consider themselves mothers was no longer part of their biological hardwiring or of their thinking because it was no longer part of their being. Motherhood was accidental to what it means to be a woman—it could happen or not, but it didn’t touch the core of who a woman was.
In the book The Great Mother, psychologist Erich Neumann digs deeply into myths and ancient stories that depict women and goddesses. One of the main themes that emerges about women is that we are vessels. We have wombs that carry and protect children and we carry in our hearts and minds the needs and being of others. The physical reality of pregnancy and childbearing is duplicated in our souls on a spiritual level. So even if a woman is not a biological mother, she is still naturally oriented toward “mothering” others—by gifting herself for the care and welfare of others.
As Neumann discusses, women carry the needs, hopes, fears, anxiety, and love of others. We also marinate and ruminate about our loved ones in an effort to make their lives better. For this reason, in stories and myths, women are symbolized by such things as a vessel, a ship, the ocean, an oven, or even a coffin. Cities, too, the place where people gather for care and safety, are mostly thought of in the feminine, as is evident particularly in the romance languages. Even the Church is referred to as a she. Architecturally, the largest space in a church is called a “nave,” referring again to a ship. Throughout human history, this element of “containment” has been inseparable from what it means to be a woman; that is, until the last century.
In light of this essential capacity of women to contain others, Neumann evaluates female figures drawn from across history on how they manage the charges put into their care. Are they gentle and loving mothers or murderous and dangerous? Do they help others grow, or do they cut them down and dissolve their personality? Neumann concludes that we can characterize a woman based on how she treats those entrusted to her. The terrible mother, according to Neumann, is that woman who abhors life and tries to destroy it when she can, including by dismemberment for ritual sacrifice. The bad mother is the one who controls those she is given power over. She manipulates her children, leaving them in a state of dependency so that she is always in control and they are locked in an infantile or undeveloped state. The good and great mothers are on the sliding scale of nurturing those in their care. Like a steady gardener, this mother knows the correct balance of love, affection, and engagement to allow a child to ultimately become free of her. Her job, when done well, is to make herself all but obsolete. The difference between the good and the great mother is a woman’s capacity to raise a fully mature and flourishing adult.
Neumann provides an amazing circular chart where major female types and goddesses are placed respectively in the position of a terrible, bad, good, or great mother. All women can be considered within this circle. There is a place for Lilith, Circe, Astarte, Kali, Demeter, Sophia, Isis, and even the Virgin Mary. Again, each has a place based on her tending to human souls.
The comprehensive nature of Neumann’s analysis helps reveal the lie that, somehow because of contraception and abortion, women can evade their innate maternal nature. The true reality is that these elements do not mean that we have stepped out of motherhood. But contemporary women, because of their active efforts to destroy the life of their children, have gone from good or great mothers to mimicking the bad or terrible mothers. Perhaps we are too close to see this sorry state, but future generations who have recaptured some sense of sanity will see clearly that our age was the age of the terrible mother. We didn’t step out of our fertility (because that is ontologically impossible), we just stepped into a terrible way to manage that which we were tasked with “containing.”
Although Neumann does not lay his analysis out this way, there is added clarity in understanding his point by using Aristotle’s ancient criteria of a virtue. Aristotle saw that the way to establish a virtuous act is to find the “golden mean,” that spot in the middle of two extreme vices. If we look at the two kinds of extremes that women are tempted to—over-control, on one side, and negligence, on the other—then we can see that the virtuous woman is the one who balances these two extremes. It’s easy to think of the domineering and manipulative mother, on one hand, or the negligent and narcissistic mother, on the other, who can’t be bothered with her family’s needs. In the middle of these two is the good or great mother who is nurturing, supportive, attentive, and selfless.
Despite our contemporary misreading of human nature, there is simply no way for a woman to take herself out of motherhood. Everything she is or does is, in essence, somehow related to her embrace or rejection of it. Women are made for motherhood, so our stewardship of life and the quality of our character can be judged on how we engage in it. This is the way human nature is hardwired, and everything in our bodies speaks to this truth—in our hips, in our wombs, in our arms that are bent at the elbow (instead of straight like men’s) to better cradle a child, in our breasts which offer nourishment, and so on. We can reject this reality, we can wish it weren’t so, but we cannot escape it.
Even that woman who undergoes surgery to transition into a “male,” at her core, is still a woman made for mothering. One hundred years from now, her bones will tell the real story, and there will be no sign left that she was a he because her hips and arms are still those of a woman, and her proportions will still be female. Try as we might to change her sex, or “unsex” her, as Lady MacBeth dared request, we cannot truly succeed. The natural order simply cannot be changed, no matter how sad or angry that fact makes some.
The Lie that Traps
Communism, Marxism, socialism, and radical feminism all share a remarkable pedigree of failure when it comes to human happiness, and yet we continue trying them with the expectation that the results will somehow be different. The newspeak may be different, the language and the laws enacted by it may be different, but their appeal is based upon the big lie that human nature can be changed, and once it is, the world will be perfect.
What few realize is that the actions associated with changing human nature have a built-in trap. They have a secret capacity to enslave their adherents with the mental-handcuffs of collaboration. The communists controlled party members by making them complicit in seizing property or betraying friends and family. The abortion movement, too, is counting on men and women who have been complicit in abortions to defend it. Intellectually and morally trapped, followers are stuck defending their own actions, wittingly or not, because they have been engaged in the destructive behavior that fuels t
heir movement.
These are the errors of Russia that now enslave us the world-over.
____________________
1Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, “The Message of Fatima,” Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, http://www.vatican.va/roman_curia/congregations/cfaith/documents/rc_con_cfaith_doc_20000626_message-fatima_en.html.
2Warren H. Carroll, 1917 Red Banners, White Mantle (Front Royal, VA: Christendom Publications, 1981), 120.
3Sharon Smith, “Women’s Liberation: The Marxist Tradition,” International Socialist Review no. 93, https://isreview.org/issue/93/womens-liberation-marxist-tradition.
4Quoted in Kengor, Takedown, 39, Aleksandra Kollentai, “International Women’s Day,” International Socialist Review, January-February 2012, 29–34.
5Kengor, Takedown, 34.
6Ryszard Legutko, The Demon in Democracy (Encounter Books, 2018).
7Ibid.
8Fr. Mike Driscoll, Demons, Deliverance, Discernment, Catholic Answers Press, 2015, Kindle Edition.
9Shulamith Firestone, The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (New York: William Morrow and Company, 1970), 11.
10A famous quote attributed to feminist Gloria Steinem, although first coined by Irina Dunn.
A not unimportant piece of information about the women who think the “future is female” is that almost all of these “mothers” of the feminist movement had deep issues with their own mothers, as we will see in the next chapter. And homosexual men, as psychologist Joseph Nicolosi and others have pointed out, generally have deep issues with their fathers. While not entirely reducible to parenting, there is a piece of the problem that is largely overlooked: healthy and good moms and dads.
CHAPTER 5
The Anti-Marian Architects
“A housewife’s work has no results: it simply has to be done
again. Bringing up children is not a real occupation, because
children come up just the same, brought up or not.”
—Germaine Greer
There is something striking about the speed at which the sexual revolution happened, which feminists often considered to be a sign of divinity behind their effort. The swiftness parallels the rapidness with which the Russian Revolution happened; in just a few short months in 1918, the tsar and his descendants were gone, and the Bolsheviks took over. As if overnight, everything changed. A small mob of communists, or in this case, feminists, turned everything on its head.
The 1960s were heady days for feminists. Phyllis Chesler argues that feminism happened overnight, saying, “We—who only yesterday had been viewed as cunts, whores, dykes, bitches, witches, and madwomen; we who had been second-and third-class citizens—had suddenly become players in history. The world would never be the same, and neither would we.”1
Elite and savvy women arrived on the scene at the same time television was swaying the hearts and minds of Western culture. Women like the fiery Betty Friedan, the bold Gloria Steinem, and the saucy Helen Gurley Brown became the “it” women. They came along and filled the vacuum that had been left by the disintegration of true religious faith in the lives of everyday women. These elite women learned to control and manipulate the message that went out to women in such a way that their legacy holds strong today. There is not one major power corridor inhabited by women in the West—from Hollywood, to the fashion industry, to politics, to book publishing—that is not controlled by radical feminist women.
There is much more to their story, however, than just savvy media marketing and a timely message. The darker side to feminists’ meteoric rise to stardom is rarely discussed. Despite appearances, these women who looked to be healthy, sexy, happy, and rich weren’t all that the cameras made them out to be.
Feminism Didn’t Come Out of Nowhere
Radical feminism isn’t something that happened quite as overnight as it appears. Its roots reach back a long way. Two world wars prompted the collateral damage that harmed the basic structure of the family and led to the abandonment of God and the “eat, drink, and be merry” attitude. In some ways, it is hard to overstate the role the world wars played, killing off roughly thirty-seven million people in the Great War, followed by an estimated eighty million in World War II. In addition to the great loss of life, there were also famines, disease, and massive destruction and annihilation of huge swaths of public and private property. This is the backdrop for the lives that emerged in the 1950s. Many people believe that those of us who reject feminism and all its empty promises merely want to return to the 1950s. It’s true that the 1950s, unlike any decade since, at least made an effort to keep the veneer of life looking good as the Christian culture that had held society together for centuries began to wane. But the 1950s were no idyllic Camelot; they were simply the initial consequences of the great wars and the radical social upheaval and destruction they caused. This incubator of radical feminism is hardly a time to be coveted.
A brief look at the women who emerged as the goddesses of the Feminist Movement makes it clear that none of these women had a happy and carefree childhood. Gloria Steinem had a doting and loving father, but he was ever chasing the next get-rich-quick deal, leaving young Gloria as the caretaker of her bitter and mentally ill mother for many years. Meanwhile, Germaine Greer’s attention-loving mother, while her husband was away fighting in the African theatre, entertained the troops in Australia. When the doting father returned from the war, the handsome man was so disfigured from battle and starvation that his family had a hard time finding him on the train platform. Germaine described her mom as “mean as cat piss” who would beat her, not often, but with passion, even though Germaine was a good child. Germaine concluded that her unaffectionate mother simply didn’t like her.
Phyllis Chesler has perhaps been the most outspoken about the resentment she held toward her own mother. “She criticized me constantly, yelled at me a lot, hit me sometimes and always threatened to turn me over to my father for more serious discipline.”2 Later in life, Chesler realized that her mother suffered from mental illness.
Betty Friedan and her mother would rage at each other. Her mother, a rare beauty who looked like she stepped out of a magazine, was frustrated with Betty, who seemed to work at being ugly. “I was very dominated by my mother. She was very critical of me and made me feel very insecure.”3 Betty hated her mother’s phoniness, so she did the opposite, developing acerbic and rough ways of communicating with just about anyone.
A psychologist and author of seventeen books, Chesler seems to have dismissed a remarkable piece of evidence about feminism’s source: the embattled relationship almost all of these women had with their parents, especially their mothers. These founders of feminism, whom Chesler dubs the Lost Girls, were women from broken homes who carried around deep mother wounds inflicted by little to no emotional support and physical affection. They matured physically, but somewhere on the inside they remained little girls. Their thirst to fill this gap was displayed in their rampant homosexuality and in their infantile effort to ignore the problems they were creating through their “groundbreaking” behavior. “We are the women our parents warned us against, and we are proud,” boasted Gloria Steinem. Yes, the era was full of sexual abuse and social inequalities, but their answer to fix them didn’t help. “We picketed, marched, protested, sat in, and famously took over offices and buildings; helped women obtain illegal abortions; joined consciousness-raising groups; learned about orgasms; condemned incest, rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence; organized speak-outs, crisis hotlines, and shelters for battered women; and came out as lesbians.”4
The appearance of trying to help every woman who is treated unjustly provided much of the fuel to the cause. Who wouldn’t want to help battered wives or a single mother who struggles to make ends meet? Their problem solving, however, through promiscuity, abortion, lesbianism, goddess worship, astrology charts, divorce, and drugs was like adding gas to the fire of these social problems. Because of their brokenness, as Chelser explains, they found i
t intoxicating: “Radical feminist ideas and activism were a bit like LSD. So many women became high at the same time that suddenly the world became psychedelically clear, and all the Lost Girls found ourselves and each other.”5
The sisterhood bonded these outcasts together, linked by common mania, but also because they needed each other, particularly in the darker days before the matriarchy had any success. Gloria Steinem once said, “Any woman who chooses to behave like a full human being should be warned that the armies of the status quo will treat her as something of a dirty joke. … She will need her sisterhood.”
More than just close friendships, the sisterhood became a place of proliferating lesbian relationships, a cabal to solidify the groupthink of the women’s movement, and even operated like a coven because of the rampant witchcraft and goddess worship among members. Like everything else in the women’s movement, these were not typical types of sisterly love and affection. “We were all lost in a dream—but we had never been so awake. Women who were once invisible to each other were now the only visible creatures,” said Chesler. “Women—who used to see one another as wicked stepsisters—had magically transformed into fairy godmothers. … I was as foolish as only a young dreamer could be,” she added, “I—but I was no longer alone; now there was a we—and we wanted to end the subjugation of women—now!”6 Because of their broken relationships with their mothers and the radical break they made with any type of tradition—even first wave feminists—Chesler said that “psychologically, we second-wavers had no feminist foremothers and no biological mothers. We had only sisters.”7