I recently received a newsletter called Dinoscopus which had an interesting story in it. (For those of you who know that Dinoscopus is SSPX, rest assured that I not number among their ranks.) It follows, herein:
ELEISON COMMENTS CXXIII (Nov. 14, 2009) : FEMININITY REDISCOVERED.
When a walled town is being besieged, and the enemy are continually attacking one part of the walls, the townspeople must continue to defend that part of the walls. Today the Enemy of mankind, Satan, is continually attacking true womanhood, because without true women there can be no true mothers, no true family life, no truly happy children and finally no truly human beings. I wish I could quote the complete testimony of another ex-feminist who wrote to me several months ago to thank me for, as she now sees it, “affirming and supporting our true nature as women”. The following is a cruelly brief summary of her classic letter:–
Born in the mid-1960′s, I had a violent and abusive father, and I have lacked a father figure ever since. After he died when I was 14, I rejected my Catholic faith and left the Church – it is difficult to believe in a loving God when you are not loved by your own parents. Away from the Church I embraced radical feminism and paganism, and I came to hate dresses because they were portrayed as an inferior form of clothing to what boys wore. I wonder where I got the idea that women are weak ? I now understand that women aren’t weak at all, but we are strong in different ways from men.
I went to college determined to prove that I could do anything a man could do, but in my next seven years as a police officer I realized that the aggressiveness and dominance needed by the job just did not come naturally to me, and that I could never be as physically strong as the men. So I equated any sign of femininity in me with weakness. At the same time, as a radical feminist, I hated men, and wanted not to need one, and because of all that feminist garbage, I almost never married. But in my mid-thirties I realized I ran the risk of being alone for the rest of my life, so I decided to date. Soon afterwards I met my future husband.
When he asked me to wear a dress because it was more attractive, I exploded ! However, I did try it just to please him. Then my behaviour slowly changed, and as I began to act and to feel more feminine, I discovered that I liked feeling feminine because it felt natural to me. When after some time we married, my priorities changed and I wanted so much to stay at home. At work I can be assertive, but I don’t enjoy it. I now understand that it is normal for me as a woman to prefer not to lead, because that is the way God designed me. I have spent my entire working life trying to compete with men and to be like men, and it has made me unhappy and feel like a failure because try as I might, I am not like men and never will be, because I am not a man.
It was my husband’s love that enabled me after 26 years to return to the Church, kicking and screaming, but God was calling ! There I found everything somewhat different from what I remembered, and to begin with I disagreed with the Church’s position on all questions involving women. But as I read more, my eyes were opened, and I realized amongst other things how the way I dress shapes my feelings and even my personality. When I wear dresses or skirts I feel gentle and feminine, more natural. My on-going education on the Church’s teachings on the role of women, which includes “Letters from the Rector”, has helped me to gain respect for myself as a woman and not as a pseudo-man. It is to the detriment of everyone that feminism has become ingrained in our culture.
In its own right, this is a stunning defense of traditional womanhood, and an excellent attack on feminism for its bankrupt and pernicious ideology. However, it also got me thinking about manliness and politics, so I wrote a short little essay expressing some ideas, many of which are from the book Manliness by Harvey Mansfield. You must now read it:
It is a fundamental expression of manliness to attempt to assert your principles on a universal scale. That is to say, men take the personal and make it universal, while women take the universal and make it personal. Let me explain.
What is always a women’s motivating force behind their political views. Ask one and it will invariable begin with “My friend is gay, and….” or “What if I get pregnant, and I don’t feel I am ready…”, etc., etc. The reason this is because women have a difficult time thinking about abstract principles, and therefore must take personal experience and extract a truth from it in order to make principles intelligible. Men, on the other hand, decide on the truth of a principle and then apply that principle to individuals. However, in men, there is the other impulse to dominate. Taken together, it is in our God-given nature as men to decide what is best for everyone and attempt to enforce it universally. (Of course, God also calls us to be prudent about it.) Whether it is among a nation or just among the nuclear family: the instilling of universal principles is a masculine mandate.
However, what has happened to our society? It has become feminized, not just in terms of the pernicious political insurgency, but in the way it thinks, acts, and feels. Too often, men make decisions based on feelings, not only in life, but in political matters as well. We are unable to think about difficult situations, such as war, without flinching. We must repeat ad naseum how brave our soldiers are, and how horrible things are in Iraq or Afghanistan, never realizing that, in fact, we could stay there for a hundred years at this rate and still not lose half the amount of people we lost in WWI or WWII, or the Civil War. Why? Because women run the terms of public debate (Who else would come up with political correctness – the concept of never letting anyone’s feelings be hurt.) But it gets worse: men have become mere appendages in so many modern families, rather than the king he is meant to be. A certain amount of egalitarianism in the family is inevitable with democracy, and that is fine, but it has gone far beyond that. I could go on and on about this, but neither you or I have the time. Let it suffice to say that if you agree, great, if not, then we can speak further. Women must not run the family, or the world for that matter. All that is required to stop it is for men to assert themselves and re-establish the natural order. This is one reason that we, as men, must take an interest in the world and its happenings, to understand the issues involved and all the rest of rigmarole – it is our duty, obligation, mandate and best it is in our nature to do so.
Lastly, let me say that there is always hope. Every inch gained is an inch that will not have to be retaken on Judgement Day. Does it seem as though we fight a rear guard action sometimes? Yes, certainly. Yet, sometimes we retake ground, and a great awakening seems right around the corner. The fact is, that we cannot know what success we will have until we join the battle. Are we, or are we not, the soldiers of Christ? If we are the soldiers of Christ something as inconsequential as whether or not we will win has no bearing on whether we should fight. However, we have the right to hope, because we are God’s soldiers and our side, ultimately, ALWAYS wins. The war is, I suspect more for our benefit and growth than for anything else. This is our society, our civilization, and we must fight to keep it. Get into the fight – our souls are not made to hide our talents in the ground:
“Three things are necessary for the salvation of man: to know what he ought to believe; to know what he ought to desire; and to know what he ought to do.” - Saint Thomas Aquinas
But we must do!
Recent Comments