Fragility of Feminism
Evelyn Whitehead, writing from Budapest, charts course for a post-feminist era.
Evelyn Whitehead is a Senior Fellow with the Hungary Foundation and conducts research for the Axioma Center in Budapest. She graduated from Ave Maria School of Law in 2020 and clerked on the U.S. Court of Appeals for Veterans Claims. Prior to that, she was the Associate Director for the Freedom of Thought Project and for Practice Groups at the Federalist Society. Evelyn is a Fellow of the Good Counselor Project with Napa Legal Institute, Americans United for Life, and the Dietrich von Hildebrand Project of Franciscan University of Steubenville.
A generation of women has grown up believing in emotion supra mundi, to largely disastrous effect. It has created an unassailable emotion-based power dynamic that has frayed the relationship between men and women and corroded the social fabric. Tracing out the effects of this dictatorship in the modern world is important work because it is the only way for society to craft a realistic post-feminist philosophy.
In The Privilege of Being a Woman, Catholic philosopher Alice von Hildebrand describes various parts of the feminine character. Her candor is refreshing — and her observations are unsurprising. Alice notes that as an “innate trait,” women “have much less control over their emotions … have greater sensitivity … [and] are more intuitive.” These “innate traits” are not bad on their own, but without proper guidance, they can lead to “partisanship, [and] subjectivism in judging situations and persons.”
Women are also more inclined than men to romanticism and sentimentality and thereby can “become prey to an unhealthy exaltation, to escape into the world of their dreams, and to be dominated by their imagination.” Those innate traits have their attendant dangers: “emotionalism, dreaming, illusions, [and] self-centeredness.” Further, “women grieve more than men, and worry about possible dangers before they become actual. If they yield to this tendency, their behavior can easily become irrational.”
Frankness like this is unusual in modern discourse since we have developed a generalized distaste for weakness which codes as imperfection. That distaste doubles when assigned using sex-based lines. Evidence backing Alice’s account of the feminine is easy to spot.
For instance, political commentators noted the way that the former first ladies interacted with each other at President Jimmy Carter’s funeral earlier this year. Presidents past from both sides of the aisle — all men — greeted each other with general good humor. Their wives’ behavior was decidedly icy, bearing out the point that women take the slings and arrows flung on the campaign trail more personally than their husbands.
So long as emotional sensitivity does not devolve into pettiness, it can remain a good thing, closely tied to women’s ability to comfort, to empathize, and to console. The beautiful complementarity of marriage shines in moments like these: sensitivity and emotional resilience both have their place, but weakness requires a counterbalance. Unfortunately, feminism has pushed complementarity and emotional self-discipline completely out of the secular zeitgeist.
Just last week, Selena Gomez sobbed on camera over the deportation of illegal immigrants, even those who have raped and killed innocent young women in the United States. She shed no tears (at least on camera) for Laken Riley after she was murdered by an illegal immigrant. Tears are “the proper response to brutality, injustice, cruelty, blasphemy, [and] hatred.” Yet, broadcasting an emotional breakdown as clickbait (in response to the just removal of a criminal element) is irrational behavior.
The willful inability to understand why our country must enforce its immigration policy against violent criminals savors of sentimentality. Women are more easily moved by the suffering of others than men tend to be because we are more sensitive than men. That is as it should be, but sensitivity must be guided by reason so that it does not become disordered romanticism.
So too, romanticism about the nature of woman is a growing social problem. Many pretend that women are above suspicion — above the law and even above sin. Thinking that way ignores reality and leads to social breakdown. Examples are legion.
At the end of last year, Crystal Magnum, the women who accused three young men on the Duke Lacrosse Team of rape, recanted her story and admitted that she lied under oath to get attention. In 2023, text messages revealed that Lindsey Hill, a young woman who had accused an MLB player of nonconsensual sex, had planned the sexual encounter to try and get a financial settlement.
Neither woman faced repercussions for lying even though their victims suffered irreparable reputational damage. Clearly, women can (and do) tell lies to get ahead or to get revenge. Many are well versed in playing the victim. Despite the believe-all-women mantra, it is becoming ever more apparent that a legal system that sacrifices the presumption of innocence for the sake of so-called empowerment cannot survive.
Sadly, even beauty itself can be misused. Some women resort to “the sad art of seduction” to get what they want, unmoved by the fact that “it is a shameful thing to use and abuse another human being.” This is the era of OnlyFans after all — an era in which young women get rich on lust, facilitate deviant behavior, and accost young men in real life with apparent impunity. Then there is the all too familiar storyline that has played out in American courtrooms dozens of times in the last few years: “disgruntled single mother castrates son” in a twisted attempt to get even with a hated ex-husband. It is no coincidence that the storyline just doesn’t play the other way.
I am not one to blame all the travails of the modern world on women. Men have their vices, but they are (broadly speaking) not the same as ours, and the post-feminist world will require honesty. All bastions of emotivism must come crashing down. They are inapposite to a healthy, well-functioning social order. Women need to lean into complementarity so that they can grow in virtue and “purify [their] God-given sensitivity.” As Alice notes, “women need men whose mission is to help them to channel their emotions, to distinguish between those that are valid and those that are tainted by irrationality, those which are legitimate and those which are illegitimate.”
Good men — priests, confessors, fathers, and husbands — need to step up to the plate, encouraged and helped by women who believe that strong masculinity is a good thing. Society needs to revisit the incentive structures that discourage women from relying on men and leaning into mutual complementarity. Some of those incentive structures include no-fault divorce, widespread sexual activity outside of marriage, contraception, abortion, and those economic and social pressures that force young wives and mothers to work outside the home.
Alice emphasizes the privilege that it is to be a woman. As she notes, “the very frailty of women can turn out to be their strength”: something “particularly fine” and “particularly capable of heroic donation.” Women are keenly tuned to the personal, quick to place the concrete over the abstract, and gifted with a rich emotional life.
The facility for feeling deeply is a special gift because “the greatest and deepest religious and human experiences are related to the heart.” However, beauty can only be enhanced by honesty, which is especially needed now. Creating a healthy post-feminism means women must know about and embrace our femininity. Candor on that score is a necessary first step.
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