How the Female Imagination is Being Corrupted

Beatrice Scudeler’s recent essay on the Public Discourse about Gen Z women and the internet fascination with “men who yearn” exposes a rather inconvenient truth for a culture that has spent sixty years telling women that marriage is servitude, motherhood is social death, homemaking is wasted talent, sexual restraint is repression, and masculine devotion is probably one microaggression away from a campus tribunal.

However, she points out that the strange popularity of fictional men who serve, protect, sacrifice, and desire one woman with disciplined constancy reveals that many young women still long for covenantal love even after being trained by the culture to sneer at the very conditions that make such love possible.

Modern feminism began by rightly insisting upon the equal dignity of women, because no sane Christian can deny that woman is created in the image of God with the same immortal destiny as man. Yet much of the movement gradually exchanged equality for sameness, and that exchange has become disastrous because a woman does not gain dignity by being measured according to male industrial categories or male sexual habits (cf. Gen 1:27; CCC, 2334; Mulieris Dignitatem, 6).

Sanity versus ideology

Christina Hoff Sommers, in Who Stole Feminism? How Women Have Betrayed Women, called the older and more reasonable view “equity feminism,” which she defined as “the belief in the full social, legal, and political equality of the sexes,” and her very need to distinguish that sane position from ideological gender feminism shows how far the discussion has wandered into theatrical resentment dressed up as scholarship.

The first lie was that women are the same as men, distinct only by social conditioning. Once that fiction entered the bloodstream of education, law, media, and corporate life, womanhood itself had to be treated with suspicion because fertility, maternity, receptivity, embodied difference, and feminine genius all became embarrassing reminders that nature had failed to get approval from the faculty committee.

Camille Paglia, hardly a spokesman for Catholic domestic piety, understood this far better than most ecclesial bureaucrats. She argued throughout her famous book Sexual Personae that sexuality is bound to nature, power, aggression, beauty, and vulnerability. Meanwhile, a childish feminism that pretends away sex difference leaves women exposed to a world that deliberately misdescribes women.

The second lie was economic and industrial; women were told that their value is determined by measurable contribution to the market, which means that the mother who forms souls, governs the moral atmosphere of a home, transmits language, stabilizes a husband, civilizes children, and creates the first school of love is somehow less important than the woman who answers emails under fluorescent lights for a company that will replace her password before her obituary is printed (cf. John Paul II, Laborem Exercens, 19; Mulieris Dignitatem, 18).

This is where the modern world has become especially ridiculous, because it solemnly praises the care economy in policy papers while quietly despising the homemaker who actually cares, and it funds endless conferences about social fragmentation while mocking the bride and mother whose daily fidelity prevents civilization from becoming a warehouse of lonely consumers with streaming subscriptions and therapy bills (John Paul II, Familiaris Consortio, 42–46).

Mary Eberstadt, in Adam and Eve After the Pill: Paradoxes of the Sexual Revolution, argued that the sexual revolution after contraception fractured the link between sex, marriage, children, kinship, and religion. Her book remains powerful precisely because it shows that liberation produced loneliness, family instability, pornography, relational confusion, and the strange misery of people who gained permission for everything and lost the meaning of nearly everything.

The third lie was educational arrogance. Women were told that schooling would liberate them from needing men for anything, although education worthy of the name should prepare a person for truth, wisdom, virtue, vocation, and service, rather than train women to treat dependence as degradation and marriage as a remedial program for those too sentimental to worship at the altar of self-sufficiency (cf. John Paul II, Letter to Women, 9; CCC, 2221–2231).

The tragedy is that women were encouraged to confuse need with weakness, even though every human being enters existence through dependency, matures through dependency, survives through dependency, and reaches holiness through dependency upon grace. This means that the war against needing men soon becomes a war against the human condition itself (Gen 2:18; Jn 15:5; CCC, 1996–2001).

The fourth lie was sexual liberation, which promised women freedom through availability, although it mostly trained men to pursue pleasure without covenant and trained women to call abandonment empowerment. That must be one of the most successful marketing campaigns ever devised by male irresponsibility under female-approved branding (cf. Mary Eberstadt, Adam and Eve After the Pill, 23–49; Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution: A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century, 1–18).

Louise Perry, in The Case Against the Sexual Revolution, states the matter with admirable bluntness when she writes that men are encouraged into “‘cad’ mode”, pursuing “all of the pleasures of cheap sex and none of the responsibilities of commitment,” and that sentence alone deserves to be printed on every campus orientation folder in the Western world.

Pornography and dating apps intensified the damage because they transformed sexual imagination into a marketplace of restless novelty. The media industry then congratulated women for consuming and becoming explicit content while advertisers monetized their insecurity with the moral seriousness of a casino owner handing out financial advice.

Scudeler’s observation that many millennial women have been desensitized by explicit entertainment is therefore crucial, because the screen has catechized generations into sexual impatience, and once desire is trained by pornographic speed, the soul loses its taste for courtship, modesty, patience, tenderness, sacrifice, and the profoundly human drama of being chosen within covenant.

The fifth lie was anti-masculine resentment, which taught women that masculinity itself is toxic, that patriarchy explains every wound, that marital headship is domination, that male protection is oppression, and that society must be cleansed of paternal structure by experts who somehow never notice that fatherless homes, collapsing marriage rates, sexual confusion, and isolated women have followed their victory parade.

This hatred of masculinity has harmed women because most women do desire men who are strong without cruelty, protective without possession, sacrificial without weakness, and faithful without performative fragility, which is why the fantasy of “men who yearn” keeps returning through fiction after the real culture has spent decades humiliating the very virtues such men require.

The Catholic vision

The Catholic answer is neither nostalgia nor reactionary panic. The Church does not ask women to become decorative furniture inside a male household, and she does not ask men to become domestic tyrants with baptized vocabulary. Scripture gives us a nuptial and covenantal vision in which man and woman are created for communion, fruitfulness, fidelity, and holiness before the living God (Gen 1:27–28; 2:18–24; Eph 5:25–33; CCC, 1601–1605).

Genesis declares that God created humanity “male and female” and blessed them with fruitfulness, while Ephesians reveals marriage as a mystery ordered toward Christ and the Church, and Proverbs 31 praises a woman whose household governance, economic prudence, mercy, strength, wisdom, and fear of the Lord make modern caricatures of biblical femininity look painfully illiterate (Gen 1:27–28; Eph 5:25–33; Prov 31:10–31).

John Paul II gives the final corrective because his Theology of the Body sees the body as a sacramental sign of the person, since “the body, and it alone, is capable of making visible what is invisible: the spiritual and the divine,” and this means the female body is neither raw material for commerce nor a costume for self-invention (John Paul II, General Audience, February 20, 1980).

He also teaches that man becomes the image of God in communion, as the human person images God through the “communion of persons which man and woman form right from the beginning,” and this destroys every ideology that pits the sexes against each other as permanent rivals inside a cold political struggle (John Paul II, General Audience, November 14, 1979).

Therefore, Catholics must lead society rightly again by forming men who can protect without lust and women who can receive love without self-contempt, by honoring homemaking without despising education, by praising motherhood without reducing women to biology, by defending marriage without sentimental slogans, and by proclaiming Jesus Christ as the Bridegroom whose covenant love heals the wounded feminine heart and restores the masculine soul to sacrificial service (Familiaris Consortio, 11–17; Eph 5:25–33; Rev 19:7–9).

The world has lied to women with an astonishingly expensive and powerful megaphone, yet the Gospel still speaks with divine authority. Woman is neither man’s copy nor man’s enemy nor man’s toy, since she is the daughter of the Father, bride within covenant, mother according to nature or grace, and sister in Christ whose glory is found through holiness rather than imitation of the very male vices that feminism once claimed to despise (Gen 1:27; Gal 3:28; Lk 1:38; Mulieris Dignitatem, 11).

The Church must therefore preach again that freedom is ordered to love, love is ordered to covenant, covenant is ordered to life, and life is ordered to Jesus Christ. Only the Lord who came as Bridegroom can restore the feminine genius from the wreckage of ideology and teach a broken culture that men and women were made for communion rather than conquest (Jn 3:29; Eph 5:25–33; Rev 21:2; Mulieris Dignitatem, 30).

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