Femininity (Part 2)
Because our world is ruled by feminists, and because I’m a tomboy at heart, I’ve spent far too much of my life trying to truly understand femininity. In my previous article, I explored the idea that motherhood is what it is to be feminine, and that that can be broken up into growing, nurturing, seeing individuality, and remembering.
I want to add two other things to Motherhood that I think are equally important to defining femininity in a way that embraces both the girliest of girls, the tomboys, and everything in between: vulnerability and wifehood.
Vulnerability: In The End of Woman, Carrie Gress makes an argument that what the feminist movement is trying to do is solve the problem of female vulnerability. Instead of asking what we can do about our vulnerability, they’ve asked how we can get rid of it. The answer: you can’t. No matter what the world tells you or shows you, we women are vulnerable. We are physically, sometimes mentally, and emotionally vulnerable. We are the life bringers, the mothers of the next generation, and that makes us vulnerable even if we have no children.
Our vulnerability demands a certain humility and willingness to ask for and accept help. Our vulnerability can put us in unsafe situations and requires a certain level of dependency. The feminist would have you believe this vulnerability is a lie from men to make you a second-class citizen, slave, and plaything. We have embraced this entirely. Girls grow up thinking they can be it all, have it all, and take out anyone who would hurt them, no man required. Bossgirl. Warrior woman. We are several generations deep into believing that God has misled us, that we aren’t the weaker vessel, and that men need to just get out of the way or be actively taken out.
But if we believe that we are vulnerable, with trust, it will open our hearts to great tenderness and calm. If we see we are weaker and we embrace it, we will be much better equipped to be tender towards our churches, husbands, children, and people. We won’t be hard, cold, mean, and constantly out to prove we’re tough and one of the guys. We will be tender because we are tender. We will rule our homes with gentleness because we are vulnerable ourselves, even if we like guns and climbing trees and dirty feet.
If we embrace our vulnerability as a gift, we will gain some calmness in our hearts because we won’t constantly push against the truth. Have you ever had a burden you didn’t even know you were carrying lifted? Acknowledging our vulnerability removes the burden of trying to be this all-powerful woman that we surely are not. Cut away the burden placed upon you by the world and embrace being a woman, which is to embrace needing help and not doing it all and moving more slowly but longer than a man. You aren’t a man. Toss aside the burden of trying to be. Embrace the freedom of being a woman. Stop seeing your vulnerability as a lie, a cage, or a trap, and start seeing it as beautiful, a gift, and the truth.
Unfortunately, we see this vulnerability as some sort of lessness, some commentary on our value, some sort of put down, and yet the butterfly is more vulnerable than the roach, the wren than the grackle, the flowers than the grass. And most of us would rather have butterflies, wrens, and flowers.
Being the more vulnerable side of humanity isn’t demeaning, it’s a privilege. Embrace vulnerability.
“True flourishing requires that something act in accord with its nature…Women continue to chase to the ends of the earth after any trend that promises happiness, yet we continue to reject the very things for which we are made.”[1]
Wifehood: Whether you’re married or not, like it or not, we were created as a companion for men. God said it wasn’t good in His perfect garden for man to be alone, so He created a woman.
Now, before everyone gets their panties in a twist, this doesn’t mean all women submit to all men in some of the strange ways complementarianism has turned down. This also doesn’t make men the great high priest of the family. (We are fellow heirs, fellow priests, fellow sons.) This also doesn’t mean you’re sinning or somehow less female if you’re single, widowed, or even divorced within certain bounds. (The same is true of the motherhood side. Not having children doesn’t make you less female.)
What this does mean is we have to take seriously that God created us to be wives. There is an individuality to this. I’m Price’s wife. I was made by God to be his wife specifically. (Yes, this can mess with our small, finite brains a bit, see Ever After.) I was not made to be anyone else’s wife, at least at this point in time in my life. But there is also an element of general wife-ness that makes up who we are. What does this look like?
· Loyalty: Chesterton and Tolkien both observed in different places that women tend to have this loyalty about them that makes them better students and employees. The problem is that we give that loyalty to our teachers and bosses, but often deny it to our husbands. Chesterton observed this many times. We think it is slavery to serve our husbands and freedom to serve our bosses. Sin is astoundingly dark and diabolical and subtle.
We are often the backbones of our homes and communities. We are tribal. All this is wrapped up in being a wife. We were designed to tie ourselves to this man, this building, this community, and our children and extended families. We use this to the great benefit of our churches as well.
· Followers: Oh, how we hate this one, don’t we? We want to be the leaders! We’re women, we are the boss! And yet, stepping back from all that the world tells you, Eve was made from and for Adam. When she took the lead, things went wrong.
We were made to follow.
This doesn’t mean we never talk, think, or develop our own opinions. This doesn’t mean we don’t firmly raise our children. This doesn’t mean we aren’t queens in our castles. It means we’re not the king. Get over it. What it does mean is that we should face ourselves with a certain self-doubt. We should not get cocky and proud as if we have all the answers. We were made to follow, not lead.
Because of this trait, we must guard who we follow. For all our screaming about independence, we are all following the feminist lead. Ladies, we are going to follow someone. We can’t help it. We were designed to follow, to be tribal, to grow communities. We must guard who we follow. We must follow our husbands, so for all that is holy on this good green earth, take care who you marry. Let this aspect of our being be carefully guarded. Pay attention to who you are following because I promise you, you are following someone. Denying we are followers only makes us even more vulnerable than we already are.
Oddly, we tend to follow other women. As I’ve said, we’re tribal by nature. It’s what keeps families and communities together. We’re very sisterhood, knitting circle prone. This isn’t a bad thing itself, but it has been highly tainted by sin. The feminists are using it. If you aren’t saying, doing, and wearing the same thing as the pack, you’re out, and being out is to be vulnerable. Pick your tribe with great care. Follow your husband. Be aware of how you’re being influenced.
Single ladies, this part of femininity is even more important for you to guard because you don’t have a husband. Take seriously the idea of marriage. Have a standard. Get comfortable talking with your pastors and deacons. Follow them as they follow Christ and be hyper-vigilant about who you’re taking direction from.
· Helper: Somehow, being a helper has turned into some sign of mental illness. The world tells us it is demeaning to help, to want to help, to love helping. Some off-shoots of Christianity have turned it into some weird one-dimensional aspect of womanhood as if it is all that we are. Even with these two problems, we are helpers. It is just part of our nature to want to help. We were made to help our husbands.
Don’t be afraid of your desire to be helpful. It is good and natural. Put it to work. Your husband, children, home, church, and extended family should be your first priorities and the ones who benefit from your desire to help.
Helping is to “assist or support, to make more pleasant or bearable, to be of use.” These are such wonderful gifts we have. Why do we shirk from helping as if we’ve been put upon when this is what we’re made for? This is why we’re good at tending homes, raising kids, and being wives! We’re the helpers!
Single ladies, you’re a helper whether you like it or not. Watch who you help, willingly, and who you help begrudgingly. Watch your priorities.
“Feminism also sold women on the belief they ‘can have it all,’ that whatever they want can be acquired and that life should be fun, pleasurable, lucrative, and exciting. But the piece of life that has been left out is what is real and inevitable: suffering. Sociologist Philip Rieff says there is an ‘instinctual renunciation’ that most of humanity has understood about suffering. Much suffering occurs because we are renouncing something that we want for a greater cause: the soldier in the midst of battle, the mother laboring to birth a baby, the parents sacrificing for their children’s education and future, these are the ‘instinctual’ kinds of sacrifices that people make for other people, for the greater good. But feminism has wiped away this ‘instinctual renunciation’ and told women that they shouldn’t have to renounce anything. This is how Whoopi Goldberg can say with a straight face that a baby in the womb is ‘a toxic thing’ to a mother, or Gloria Steinem can say the desire women have to serve others is ‘codependency,’ or Elizabeth Warren can accuse pregnancy resource centers of ‘torturing’ women.
The net effect of woman’s sense of entitlement, envy, and rage has been to turn us into a type of man that women hate, the negligent, narcissistic, aloof, unengaged man, like players and cads.”[2]
Ladies, we must realize we have been robbed of everything that defines us by the feminist movement. They’ve erased all that is good, all our natural gifts and graces, and left us with only the worst of ourselves to carry into the night.
The world says there are no differences between doves and hawks and so we send doves to war. Not only that, but the world told the doves that hawks are better and so stripped away the soft gentleness of the dove.
“The feminist movement has eviscerated our homes, our children, our lives as wives, our fertility, and now finally our bodies, leaving us in a strange no-man’s-land—or rather a no-woman’s land—where we are simply a generic ‘human being,’ a traumatizing blank slate imposed over natural realities.”[3]
Do not let the world tell you that the way God made us is wrong. All the vulnerability, loyalty, following, and helping are good. Being a wife created for one man, being his helper, and being a mother are all good gifts. They are what we were made to be! Stop believing we were made wrong and stop letting the darkness define what the Light made.
This is what it is to be feminine.
Consider the pride of the feminist movement. It's saturated with a rebellion against how God made us.
Psalm 131
A Song of Ascents. Of David.
O Lord, my heart is not lifted up;
My eyes are not raised too high;
I do not occupy myself with things
Too great and too marvelous for me.
But I have calmed and quieted my soul,
Like a weaned child with its mother;
Like a weaned child is my soul within me.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
From this time forth and forevermore.
To be weaned is to reconcile yourself to the loss of anything. We must wean ourselves off the pride-nourishing lies that feminism has fed us and rest calmly in the humility of being women as God made us, with faith, hope, and love.
This is my personal experience. Weaning myself off the pride feminism subtly built in me has brought calm and quiet to my soul.
God said we were needed. God said man being alone wasn’t right. He needs a woman. Embrace that. Trust that He made us exactly how He wanted us to be. Forsake pride, forsake constant striving, forsake competition, and be calm in the Lord.
