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June 18, 2023

Women in our society have traditionally been treated with a unique honor and respect. Were we always treated fairly? Not entirely — there was a time when we couldn’t vote. There was a time when women couldn’t own property. True. But since forever men have been showing us, even in small ways, that what we have to offer society is paramount. We can make babies and without babies, mankind cannot fulfill even the most basic mandate — multiply and fill the earth.

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In my misspent youth I found Gloria Steinem inspiring and myself ill-used. This phase petered out quickly because my life as a stay-at-home, go-to-night-school wife and mom was really pretty nice. And the more history I read, the more of the Bible I digested, the more I came to appreciate that I was doing the most important thing I could be doing — raising amazing children.

We humans seem to have done that “filling the earth” thing well, and for the most part, at least in western civilization, we have raised our children well.

But things changed during the 60s and 70s. The birth-control pill followed by Roe vs. Wade in 1973 set off massive alterations.  Yes, those alterations gave us the freedom to bear only as many children as we wanted, when we wanted, but it also left us dealing with a different mandate — to have sex whenever with whomever. Our precious place as God’s assistant in the giving of life evaporated.

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Time was when a woman had a valid and compelling reason for saying “No.” It was an understandable reason.  Time was when marriage was necessary to provide for the inevitable pregnancies in a long-term relationship, but now it’s just a cultural quaintness, a last vestige of romantic protocol. 

In fact, romance in general (once the headquarters of feminine thought) has shriveled in this atmosphere of sexual immediacy. Romance thrived on sublimation, on hesitation, on a sense of the significance of such intimacy. But no more. Women are now just a partner in a game called coitus and gone is the mystery, the anticipation, the delight.

Since people could have sex without the burden of children, without the blessing of children, we no longer see that act as particularly important, personal, or affectionate. It lost its mystique, its romantic panache, its profundity. Women went from fertility goddesses to buddies who could play the sex game — a purposeless game.

The game is now purposeless because life, with the mandatory Darwinian mindset, is just happenstance and nothing more. In fact, Darwin’s misapprehension of our origins may well be at the bottom of most, if not all, of our societal and individual malaise. It can be argued that Darwin and his attitude about the superiority of the male has leaked into masculine condescension toward women in the workplace. Was the glass ceiling of Darwinian origin?

Nevertheless, in the past, women have been the recipients of male deference. Men have opened our doors, taken off their hats, pulled out our chairs, and walked on the street side of the walkways. Those are little things, but they blossomed out of a concern for female abilities and weaknesses, from a recognition of our special place in the scheme of things, from male tenderness and respect.

We women have robbed ourselves of those tiny privileges. Too many of us felt that these politenesses demonstrated a contempt, a condescension that couldn’t be tolerated, but by rejecting these niceties, we have offended those who would have been our protectors, and, even worse, in so doing we have robbed men of their manly identity. It’s no wonder that men now wear skinny jeans and man-buns, carry purses and sip lattes. I recently heard a news clip of a modern woman bemoaning the fact that all manly men were conservative. Well, of course. A conservative man still sees women as special and precious and essential. A leftist rarely does.