The official web site of A.H. Lloyd

I really like First Things magazine. I started subscribing back in 2020.

At first, it was difficult to read because I had gotten away from long-form essays. I’d spent too much time reading hot takes in e-zines, so holding a physical magazine and working through multi-page articles wore me out.

For the most part, I enjoy it, though there have been some really bad takes over the years. This is to be expected because it is magazine of religion and the public square, which means while it’s generally Catholic, other faiths are represented, though they can be a bit defensive.

The current issue has a couple of bad misfires and I may address the others at some point, but today I want to look at Helen Roy’s review of Something Wicked: Why Feminism Can’t Be Fused with Christianity by Carrie Gress.

I don’t recall encountering Roy, but her review seems to internalize the idea that there was a “good feminism” and a “bad feminism,” and that Gress’ categorial condemnation of it is extreme.

This is a very common belief in conservative circles, particularly among the older generations. This is because they remember a time when feminism seemed to be producing societal benefits and they believe if we can just go back to that culture in that time, things will be okay.

There are two problems with this, the first of which being that it is impossible. We cannot recreate the unique circumstances of the 1950s or even the 1990s (which a lot of them seem very attached to). The combination of demographics, technology and attitude was unique and will not come again.

The other is that it ignores the fact that feminism was at its core hostile to Western society and its traditions. It is explicitly the enemy of orthodox Christian faith. Instead of emphasizing the uniqueness of men and women, it demands that various lines be erased and that instead of seeing a society comprised of families we should instead see nothing but individuals, each driving to maximize their own needs over everyone else.

This was justified by creating a series of tropes regarding the “plight” of women, who by just about every way imaginable were much happier 100 years ago than they are today. Americans in particular love the concepts of “freedom” and “liberty” but there is a reason the word “libertine” is derogatory. It implies liberation from morality, from prudence and of course tradition.

There is a reason Marxism eagerly embraced feminism and made it a cornerstone of its platform for reform. Some women look back at the 1980s when women were in the work place, and more occupations were open to them while families still formed and children flourished, but all the indicators were in the red, and had been for a while. It took a while for the grinding away of society’s foundation to reach critical levels, which is where we are today.

One cannot separate the theory of feminism from its bitter, fatal fruit. Abortion on demand to the moment of birth, the mutilation of confused children, collapse of marriage rates and a generation of women afraid to become mothers – this was always the end state, though few realized it. No-fault divorce effectively destroyed marriage as an institution, making it mere civil contract subject to easy nullification. And if that’s all it is, why not extend it to anyone? Why is the arbitrary limit 2?

If children are a “burden,” there must be ways to free ourselves of them, and so we have euthanasia enthusiasts now targeting depressed teenagers, or children with serious illness or disability that (the claim goes) are better off dead. The same is even more true with the elderly, who from a purely economic level of analysis are a net drag and the sooner they are cut down, the better for everyone else.

One can say “No, it was about letting women vote, or own property, or not be raped,” but again, that begs the question. Is violence against women lower now? Is domestic violence a thing of the past? More to the point, the destruction of traditional family arrangements was always going to have second and third order events. These were mild at first, because while the laws were changed, the people didn’t. They just kept on as they always had.

It was when new generations began to grow up that the problems started because they had fewer guard rails so rather than stay within the old ones, they pushed farther and farther out. Tradition was discredited, the old ways were bad, so it was almost a duty to throw it away, to break the rules and be as transgressive as possible.

Roy clearly does not understand this. She (and those like her) never grasped the the ground was always moving under our feet. It was slow at first, but never stopped and it never will stop until either we reach pure chaos or the entire project is dismantled. There is no middle ground.