Ultimately, feminists want male protection

I feel like there’s something few people actually say out loud, but it is clearly raging all around us.

The entire feminist premise is that men have something that women don’t, and women can’t be satisfied until they have it.

I’ve often thought that it’s like the ideological expression of an embittered, emotionally immature couple fight:

“You get to go out and see the world while I’m stuck here at home, slaving away!”

With all the radical social change that’s taken place over the last 100 years, with all the aggressive normalization of women in white-collar professional roles and in government, flaunting their promiscuity and abortion in well-funded and illustrious public spheres of society, most women (if Instagram is any indication) still complain to their husbands about how little they’re appreciated and how much better he has it.

If you’ve spent any amount of time in what we might call the “relationship studies” space, you’ll notice that most modern men sound exactly the same way, as a matter of fact.

These women themselves will tell you that their husbands’ response to their complaints is usually blame-shifting and evasion, and the most common negative couple cycle that’s probably occurred throughout human history continues.

This is why it is particularly sick to stigmatize men and marriage as a class and as a tool of patriarchal oppression, and to demand that men change their entire temperaments and personalities to make a woman feel safe in a relationship, rather than treating the relationship in the same way that we treat everything else in life: a common challenge that can be overcome with mutual values and shared compassion for one another, and a willingness to change, take responsibility for our actions, and maintain wise boundaries.

We need to name clearly that modern women, just as “traditional” women, often feel and genuinely are emotionally and physically abandoned by men who are not rising to their expected duty as husbands and fathers.

This is a real, verifiable fact for which I require no further proof than the evidence of human nature and sin and the wide array of types of people out there today, who vary in their degrees of virtue and sin.

Clearly, there are good men out there, and clearly, there are men who should once again be hotly stigmatized by society as no-good, vagrant rascals who abuse their families through abandonment or overt, open cruelty.

It is the good men who feel a sense of disgust at the idea of men abandoning their families and mistreating their wives and children who keep men good. Who raise good men. Who tend to their wives’ needs. Who lead and rule with benevolence, selfless devotion, and a sense of something higher than their own individual needs.

But where do we get men like this in a culture where there is no longer any sense of shared values around marriage, sex, and child-rearing?

How can we expect modern men to have the emotional maturity and discipline to be selflessly devoted to their wives when they’ve been raised in a culture that catechized us into believing that lifelong marriage is unrealistic, casual sex is inconsequential, public achievement is the most glorious aim, and telling other people what to do is antisocial and bigoted?

Women are loudly complaining about how the men they’re not supposed to need to depend on aren’t dependable, and they are never even making the connection.

As much as feminism has been a politically subversive attack on the fabric of the postmodern, formerly Christian world, it has been a personal hysteria of fear, accusation, distrust, and broken hearts.

And at the center, women are still screaming, we need things from men, and it freaks us out when we can’t get them from them.

The basic, guttural, embodied truth of life as a woman, as many a feminist will heatedly explain to you, is the fear of being without male protection.

Of course, what they’d tell you is that it is the fear of being overpowered and destroyed by a man.

But as you can clearly see in the vein of social media content inviting women to complain heatedly about their husbands and ex-husbands, women are also incapable of maintaining intimate relationships with men who do nothing to participate in their households. As a woman with a very devoted husband who was raised by hard-working, aggressively personally responsible midwesterners and had a full-time SAHM for a mother, I can’t even comprehend the degree to which many modern men seem to willingly check out of family life. (While I certainly believe that it takes both men and women to make a relationship work; stop picking sides in the gender wars, y’all.)

Just as the porn and human trafficking epidemics are directly rooted in the ideology of “women’s liberation,” the unshackling of the shared social zeitgeist from the traditional expectations of chastity, modesty, covenantal marriage, and chivalry, the very real existence of so many modern moms bearing the weight of the mental load alone is a product of feminism, certainly not a cause for more of it.

You don’t get to completely untie our shared values from a coherent definition of marriage and then complain that men who married independent women for love don’t know how to husband.

An entire generation’s school system was deliberately organized around giving girls a bigger advantage, leaving boys in the dust. Many men today grew up in schools that prioritized female needs and deviated from the type of discipline and social pressure that little boys tend to need. I highly recommend Christina Hoff Sommers’ refute of Reviving Ophelia, The War Against Boys which provides a heartbreaking look into how this was done (you can find it through my affiliate link here if you’d like).

Our boys were raised to believe that their masculinity was a curse and a threat to the women around them. They grew up in a culture with fragmented values and no real objective sense of what was “right,” let alone how important it is to keep dishes going and laundry moving and the trash taken out regularly in a modern, shared family home.

They married the women who probably didn’t expect that much of them, until the reality of running a household together sank in and these women needed much more from them.

When feminists are demanding things from society, they are demanding things from men. They may have perfectly legitimate reasons to be afraid. Rape. Abuse. Oppression. Abject dehumanization.

But they are, at the end of the day, requesting that men provide them with what they need, and that is the safety and security of good, moral men who will take care of them and not abuse or neglect them.

They think it comes through being treated the same as a man in society. I happen to disagree. Men treat each other pretty badly, too. Humanity is prone to do wicked things to one another, not the least of which is to treat those we are duty-bound to protect and take care of badly.

Feminists want women to not be treated badly, but this requires men to be duty-bound to treat them well.

You cannot do this with feminism. You cannot do this by demanding that men and women are virtually the same. We’re clearly not.

Feminism taught women to call dependence oppression. But dependence was never the problem. The question was always whether the people we depend on are bound by love, duty, honor, and God to treat us well.

Women do not need a worldview that pretends biological sex is irrelevant. We need good men — and a culture that expects men to be good.