Catholic Family News

How Society Destroys Women

The world has its feminist agenda and it is quite loud in its announcement of it. Two weeks ago, (on January 20, 2018) women were out in the streets of Washington, D.C. with billboards and loudspeakers, crying out that they were free, claiming that they were standing up for woman and her rights. They weren’t really, not most of them. They were actually doing the opposite. They were shouting: “Men and women are the same! There is no difference!” They were, in fact, lessening the value of woman’s role.

No surprise there, really. Society nowadays is all about the perversity of nature; the effeminizing of men and masculinization of women is just a very small issue compared to society’s other disturbed movements, but it is in fact from where these other movements stem.

Society is quite proud in its seeming glorification of women. Thanks to “society”, she now has the right to basically act as a man. Stay at home and care for the children? That’s beneath her now. She should be in the workplace. She’s just as intelligent as men; in fact, according to the world, she is more intelligent than men that are portrayed so often in today’s comics as mere apes. The woman is the domineering one in the marriage now. Separate bank accounts are recommended. Ask your husband’s permission? What? Is she a slave?

The roles are now reversed. More and more often you see men staying at home, or both parents working. It’s no longer a surprise when the woman is the breadwinner. And if she decides, instead, that she would rather stay at home as a mother, society shames her for it. That idea is archaic.

Not to say that women shouldn’t work or get paid the same wage as a man. That is not the point of this article and that idea is also wrong. The point of this article is to show that society only gives women the right to be men, it doesn’t give her rights to fulfill her purpose as woman. It doesn’t uphold her dignity; it doesn’t protect her purity. It doesn’t protect her at all.

In almost every shop in the mall, on billboards on the street, it is not uncommon to see a woman scantily clad, provocatively (not at all artistically) portrayed. Her body is not shown as a beautiful creation of God, but rather as something to objectify. Society claims to give women rights, but then it goes and publicly shames her. Society makes woman a target, it takes advantage of her inborn nature to please; it makes her think that in order to please, she needs to expose herself, she needs to allow her body to be objectified. In movies, in books, society promotes abuse toward these same women it claims to protect.

And to make the issue worse, society then corrupts the masculinity of men. It is very hard to find a man that is truly masculine and not either a brute or effeminate. It should be inborn in men to protect women and children, but in today’s society, many men are selfish, cowardly, or abusive. It seems the chivalry that is every woman’s dream has close to died. Even in Catholic circles it is rare to find a man that is neither indecisive and cowardly, nor overly domineering. Because of this, women then feel the need to make up for what is lacking in today’s men by basically taking on man’s role, which is not how it should be.

Society loves to voice “equality”, but its idea of equality is actually detrimental. Men and women were not designed the same. In fact, nobody is designed the same. We all have different talents, strengths and weaknesses. What makes a good teacher is not their ability to treat all students equally, but the complete opposite: to be able to see what each individual child needs and give them that. One might struggle in math, for instance, and need more one-on-one support. Another might excel in English, and require more challenging material. If every child were treated the same, you would, in fact, be doing them a disservice. Likewise, society is doing their women a disservice by telling them not only they can be men, but should be men. Men naturally see the bigger picture, women the details. Men have an inborn nature to lead; women an inborn nature to nurture. Both sexes are needed; both have a purpose and both do a disservice to themselves if they do not strive to fulfill that particular purpose, which is God’s will for them.

Men and women are by nature very different. G.K. Chesterton once said, “…a man and a woman, as such, are incompatible.” This incompatibility, however, is not necessarily a bad thing. In fact, it could be a very good thing. Men and women were designed differently and yet, incompatible though they may be, were brought together by God for procreation as well as to be each other’s helpmates to Heaven, to make up for the other’s deficiencies. They were made to be a complement to each other. The man and his rough nature was meant to be softened by the woman and her gentleness. The woman and her emotional drive was meant to be toned down by the logical reasoning of man. It makes for a very dysfunctional relationship when men have to act feminine or women have to act masculine because one of them isn’t acting in accordance to their nature.

Treating its citizens generically will not make for a better society; and diminishing the importance of the role of “mother”, whether it be in a spiritual context as a nun or a more literal context in the family circle, will only harm this generation and the generations to come. Let us end with this beautiful quote to ponder by Archbishop Fulton Sheen: “In as much as woman is loved, it follows that the nobler a woman is, the nobler man will have to be to be deserving of that love. That is why the level of any civilization is always its level of its womanhood.”

CaraRuegg