Carrie Gress - The Anti-Mary Exposed: Rescuing the Culture from Toxic Femininity

W omen have been a mystery since Adam encountered Eve. But sometime over the last fifty years, a dark change has taken place in the lives of women and the men who love them. There is much confusion today about what it means to be a woman and even more confusion about how to treat them. The definitions of womanhood seem as numerous as there are people, with each woman trying to work out for herself who she is and how she ought to live her life. Meanwhile, men live in a constant state of shadowboxing, trying to stay in sync with the new progressive demands of womanhood.

Most of us, however, dont know the full story of the battle lines drawn in the 1960s that form the backdrop of what women think about themselves today. It is a story that is told by the victorsas most history iswhere the events of the last fifty years unfolded as something chic, empowering, glamorous, important, and progressive. Or so goes the narrative. The reality, however, is something quite different. The clues, dropped like crumbs, can be seen along the way, though hastily covered up so that few can see the full underbelly of the movement.

One such crumb came from the early 1970s. Twelve (not an insignificant number) highly educated, upper class women sat around a table in New York City and chanted this litany to express what they wanted to see happen in the world:

Why are we here today? the chairwoman asked.

To make revolution, they answered.

What kind of revolution? she replied.

The Cultural Revolution, they chanted.

And how do we make Cultural Revolution? she demanded.

By destroying the American family! they answered.

How do we destroy the family? she came back.

By destroying the American Patriarch, they cried exuberantly.

And how do we destroy the American Patriarch? she probed.

By taking away his power!

How do we do that?

By destroying monogamy! they shouted.

How can we destroy monogamy?

By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion and homosexuality! they resounded.

These women had a very clear goal in mind and became the vanguard to what would become the womens liberation movement. Among them, perhaps, there were those who doubted they would succeed, but for those of us looking back, we know they succeeded. What they wantedto promote promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion and homosexualityhas come to pass quite thoroughly in our culture today.

How is it, then, that the womens movement became such an unwieldy force that demolished so decisively the moral and social structures of American society? While many have suggested that it was the sisterhood that pulled radical feminists together, their grassroots effort cannot explain all of their success. The stories of the era tell of division and discord among second-wave feminist women and of heated debates over such things as Cosmopolitans exploitation of women, lesbianism, and the politics of the groups leadership, which all threatened the project. That is, until they all found one topic to which they could hitch their wagons: abortion.

Sue Ellen Browder, author of Subverted: How I Helped the Sexual Revolution Hijack the Womens Movement

Second-wave feminism made it clear that children were the enemy, preventing women from fulfilling their dreams. Thus, abortion became a necessity and was legalized in 1973 as the Vietnam War was coming to an end. Fatalities of that war58,220 US servicemen totalwere quickly dwarfed by this new kind of killing, mothers killing their own children (sixty million and counting; three thousand daily in the US alone). Today, abortion is by far the leading cause of death in the United States annually, significantly outpacing heart disease and cancer. It kills more than the equivalent of total US fatalities in Vietnam every three weeks.

What happens, then, when you have generations of people that have willfully killed their own children through abortion? The medievals were against abortion because it takes an innocent life, but also because they knew it was mortally damaging to the human soul of those who engaged in it. It isnt just a child that dies in an abortion, but something in the mother and the father and the whole family that dies as well.

As St. Thomas Aquinas said, bonum est diffusivum sui, the good spreads itself out. Similarly, evil spreads itself out. The grave evil of abortion has reached into every area of familial life and left society morally threadbare. Our news feed confirms this daily with headlines like Abortion Activists Kill Baby Jesus in Graphic Abortion on Virgin Mary Outside Catholic Church, or Teen Vogues Anal Sex: What You Need to Know. The layers of confusion, twisted thinking, decadence, sacrilege, and viciousness descend ever-deeper with each passing day. Rage, obscenity, sexual license, nudity, erasing of gender differences, and the cheapening of life have all become commonplace in the public square. Women havent just listed a bit to the wayward side of the moral compass; they shattered the compass. Almost overnight, our once pro-life culture became pro-lifestyle, returning to an epicurean paganism that embraces everything that feels good. Like a wildfire blowing through dry tinder, these dramatic changes burned through the lives of millions and millions of women, men, and children, with little to nothing to stop it.

Outside Influence

The scale and scope of the evil we see in our culture begs us to ask: could there be something behind this? Are there outside pressures, like a roaring lion, seeking some one to devour (1 Pt 5:8), that have been influencing humanity, particularly women, over the last five decades? Paul Kengor, in his book Takedown: From Communists to Progressives, How the Left has Sabotaged Family and Marriage, lays out the political and intellectual pieces that have led to the destruction of the family. He concludes at one point, however, when talking about the influence communists and progressives have had upon young people through universities, that there has to be more to the story than just rhetoric. Why do people in our universities fall so easily for this vapid claptrap so contrary to their human nature? he asks. Their impressionable youth alone is not a sufficient explanation. Kengor makes clear that the pieces just dont add up to the sum of their partsthere must be more to it.