Damsel-in-Distress
Y’all are going to get tired of me talking about The End of Woman by Carrie Gress, but there’s nothing you can really do about it. Sorry, not sorry.
The book states that what the feminists are really reacting against is female vulnerability. Gress postulates that the question being asked as a culture, as the human race, is what do we do with the vulnerability of women? Gress shows through her book how feminism has attempted to answer that question and how their response has played out in the lives of men and women. It is quite the horror show.
Side Note: The feminist answer is to pretend we’re not vulnerable and make us as much like men as possible, thus erasing all that it means to be a woman. They embrace the occult, free love, and communism to enact their beliefs.
What The End of Woman gave me, amongst many other things, was the ability to return to my love of damsel-in-distress stories. Growing up, I loved the damsel-in-distress. I loved the danger, adventure, romance, and final sacrificial rescue. The only part of that trope that bothered me was when the girl stood in a corner hysterically screaming, as if that was the best she could do while her rescuer got the life beat out of him. Pick up a gun, rock, stick, anything! I wanted to be rescued, I just didn’t want to be a wimp in the process.
Looking at this culturally-hated trope in light of the lies spewed by feminists for the last three to four hundred years now, I realized it answers the question of feminine vulnerability. It shows us that the best way to defend a woman from kidnappings, dragons, and abuse is a knight. The upright, good, and virtuous man is a woman’s best defense. We used to know this. We used to love this. And, honestly, most women still want to be rescued. We feel ashamed to admit it. We should be strong, saving ourselves, right? Who needs a man?? Right? That’s what I’m supposed to say, supposed to believe, right?
We’ve been told we need no rescue, we aren’t vulnerable, and there are no knights.
This has left us and our children in abusive hands.
We’ve been told we don’t need a man and we’ve been left exposed. We’ve been told we don’t want children and so we’re barren, while what children we do have are exposed to danger and homelessness from birth. We’re told we aren’t the home and we’ve been left without a shelter.
We started screaming we were no damsels in danger and all that did was remove our protectors. The danger didn’t slink off into the dark. It’s all still there. Dragons still prowl about seeking to eat princesses. The princess is just so busy screaming she doesn’t need the knight that she can’t hear the dragon. Or, she has actively, out of spite, embraced the dragon and is feeding her children to it. Or, even worse, we believe the princess is the knight and the men are the damsels needing heroic rescue… except we can’t actually lift the sword or beat the dragon. And for the cosmic punchline, it's the dragon, the predators, that have convinced us of all of this, and lured the knights away.[1]
No one suddenly becomes strong and safe by refusing to see the danger. It is still there.
We have rejected the truth that it takes courage to wait to be rescued, to trust and hope that your man is coming. We have rejected the truth that we are different. We have rejected the truth that we menstruate, get pregnant, and feed our young. We have rejected the truth that we go softer. We have rejected our femininity. We fail to honor it. We have trained ourselves and our daughters to despise the damsel as stupid instead of humbly accepting that this is who we are. We’ve demanded that the whole world stop thinking of us as needing to be rescued and that they just treat us like one of the boys. Along the way we’ve lost our virtue, our courage, our roots, and even our very personhood. We’ve rejected our own beauty and glory.
The other side of this coin is that with no more damsel-in-distress stories, we’re no longer training knights.
Side Note: ...unless those knights are girls. It’s okay to be like a man as long as you are a woman, and it’s okay to be like a woman as long as you are a man.
Men are left to their base animal nature. They’re told they have no value. Nothing needs fixing, guarding, or help. They’re told that all their strength and protective instincts are stupid, funny, or abusive. They’ve lost their knighthoods, and so they often become the very monsters who used to be put down by the knights because they’ve been told they have no hope of becoming the hero.
Feminists claim that they’re smashing the patriarchy, but, “There still seem to be plenty of cads and boors to go around, mistreating women and neglecting their children, despite the overwhelming effort to reshape and reform the minds of men. Tossed aside, largely because they are not required to win the heart or body of a woman, are the concepts of commitment, self-mastery, self-sacrifice, and family, and many of the practical virtues that accompany them: generosity, patience, wonder, awe, gratitude, perseverance, reverence. In some ways it has been a race to the bottom: a question of who can behave worse, with women behaving just as boorishly as (and sometimes worse than) the men they have criticized in previous generations.
“As Louise Perry explains, ‘A monogamous marriage system is successful in part because it pushes men away from cad mode, particularly when pre-marital sex is also prohibited. Under these circumstances, if a man wants to have sex in a way that’s socially acceptable, he has to make himself marriageable, which means holding down a good job and setting up a household suitable for the raising of children. He has to tame himself, in other words.’ The benefits don’t end there. ‘Fatherhood… has a further taming effect,’ says Perry, ‘even at the biochemical level: when men are involved in the care of their young children, their testosterone levels drop, alongside their aggression and sex drive. A society composed of tamed men is a better society to live in, for men, for women and for children.’ Now ‘tame’ might not be the right word to use. Men aren’t wild animals. ‘Virtuous’ might be better because it respects a man’s dignity and implies he has the interior capacity to direct his life and behavior instead of having it foisted upon him from the outside. It is through a man’s exercising of virtues that he can best protect, defend, provide for, and love those who have been entrusted to his care.” [2] (Italics are mine.)
Stories help us love the truth and they help us be brave before we have to be. When we removed the damsel-in-distress stories from our culture, we didn’t improve. We got worse. Women are still vulnerable and men are still powerful. Instead of encouraging women to be brave and men to be rescuers, we encouraged women to pretend they are invulnerable and men are unneeded.
This is why we must be vigilant. We must man the shield wall. Vulnerable isn’t lesser, it is often more beautiful and worthy of protection. Trying to pretend you are not vulnerable and in need of a knight robs you and the knight of their glory.
What we feed our minds—theology, philosophy, and stories—will affect how we take care of our homes and our people. They will affect our attitudes and our attitudes affect our work. If you want to love your church, love your home, love your husband, and love your children, imbibe good stories that tell the truth about who we are as women, and that help our men be better men.
Stories of tenders, stories of brave men, and the cardinal virtues are vital to us and our homes. We are the encouragers of husbands, the receivers of their protection and provision, and the raisers of the next generation. Let’s dig into the past and rescue some good old-fashioned damsel-in-distress stories! Or maybe write some new ones!
