Just 24 hours ago I was at a conference listening to the well-known American Christian pastor and writer Voddie Baucham speaking unashamedly about patriarchy. He assured the audience of men – AND women – that rightly understood, this is in fact not only a good thing, but a fully biblical thing. But we have been ideologically beaten over the head for so long that we actually think that men being men and women being women is somehow a bad thing.
Many brave thinkers and writers have also sought to proclaim the truth about patriarchy. And many of these folks have been women. One of the most recent examples of a female seeking to make this case is Carrie Gress and her important volume, The End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Us (Regnery, 2023).
She argues that feminism and things like the trans revolution have spectacularly hurt women and not helped them. Men, children and society as a whole have also suffered greatly because of feminist ideology. She examines a number of the leading feminists and carefully critiques their thought, with plenty of documentation and referencing along the way.
In her Introduction she speaks to the issue of the vulnerability of women and says this:
Feminists have embarked upon their own two-fold approach to mitigating this vulnerability. The first step is to help women become more like men, independent and unconstrained by nature. The second is to end the patriarchy, which has seemingly kept women in this vulnerable state from the dawn of civilization to the present era. It seems a simple enough solution, but is it working? After over a century of feminist progress and legal victories against “patriarchal oppression,” do women finally “have it all”? (xvi)
But the push to ‘smash the patriarchy’ has led to a number of overlooked problems, such as our society no longer being able to even define “woman;” men are pushing women out of prized positions and awards while wearing dresses and growing their hair; women’s sports are taking a battering; women are growing less happy; and the sexes have simply gone to war against each other.
After 200 hundred years of marketing feminism, the ideology has now become a brand: “Feminism has become a very successful ideological quasi-brand with remarkable staying power. Brands are focused entirely on monetary wealth in sales and revenues; an ideology’s currency is power. Feminism, perhaps second only to Marxism, is currently the most powerful brand in the world.” (xxvii)
The trans war on women
Of course one of the greatest full-frontal assaults on women today comes in the form of the radical transgender ideology. In a chapter on this she writes: “One well-documented current trend – a sort of social contagion among high school and college women – is to venture into the world of testosterone (T) injections and gender fluidity.” Yet she reminds us of this fact: “Prior to 2012, there was no research literature on adolescent girls presenting with gender dysphoria or rapid-onset gender dysphoria (ROGD).” (p. 153)
End of Woman: How Smashing the Patriarchy Has Destroyed Usby Gress, Carrie (Author)
An extended quote on this is worth featuring here:
These girls are grasping at “T” (both testosterone and trans identity) as the panacea that will abate their suffering. The steady threat to parents, mentioned by both the heavily indoctrinated girl, and ideological psychologists and social workers, is that if she doesn’t get the breast binder, the hormones, or the surgery, then she will kill herself, despite evidence that suicide rates go up after girls take these measures. We are supposed to believe that going with “T” and a new name and identity will help girls avoid the suffering associated with indignities of womanhood, such as periods, weight gain, fertility, and unwanted sexual attention. This is the promise of “T” Being trans also has the added cache of being very in vogue at the moment, with praise and attention coming from just about everywhere, including President Joe Biden.
One of the most troubling issues is the unproven record of “puberty blockers” that are sold to work like a “pause” on a girl’s development, but it isn’t as tidy as just hitting a pause button where everything freezes in time. The long-term side effects are not fully understood because no long-term studies have been done. A girl on testosterone will also have her fertility threatened. Testosterone significantly dries out a uterus and risks vaginal atrophy. Other damaging effects include the shortening of vocal cords, significantly changing the girl’s voice, the growth of hair on the chest and face, and male pattern baldness. The unknowns of these supposed “treatments,” and the hastiness with which they are applied to young girls, means that many will become locked forever into a new identity—promised, at least through certain stages, that the side effects are reversible.
Part of the horror of this craze is that psychologists and patients are calling the shots, not parents and medical doctors making a diagnosis, recommending treatment, and making informed decisions. The order of treatment has been inverted by the threat of suicide, but also because of the priority the culture has given to people’s feelings about their gender. Any threat of feeling unsafe is enough to make people act imprudently.
Beyond any kind of desire to serve women, the transgender craze is a cash cow. Vanderbilt’s Clinic for Transgender Health recently ended its gender-surgery program after one of its employees was recorded at a conference explaining just how much money these surgeries, the follow-ups, and recurrent hospitalizations due to infections would rake in for the hospital. Planned Parenthood has added another source of cash flow to their bottom line by administering body-altering hormones, the cherry on top of their history of exploitation and greed.
One might object, If this is what makes these women happy, why not? There likely is a spark of excitement or relief that comes from heading, herd-like, to a Planned Parenthood clinic, receiving affirmations and encouragement from friends and employees, not to mention the ability to be regaled as a hero by the elite, Including the president of the United States. Fashions and trends of dress and thought are like that. There’s a type of satisfaction in joining the crowd and appearing to be “in,” particularly for the young, impressionable, and socially awkward. But these are not the prelude to true happiness.
Girls are making decisions about themselves at a stage of life when peer pressure and the desire to fit in are steepest, but also at a time when it is hard to know who one is, even without the gender questions floating in the culture as an unwanted but unanswerable question. Moreover, the brain’s frontal lobes don’t develop fully until the mid-twenties or even thirties. This is the heart of the “executive functions” of the brain, such as planning, memory, and controlling impulses. (pp. 154-155)
And the branding of all this is now clear to see:
For decades, Marxists have maligned the connection capitalism makes between the bourgeoisie and material goods, such as automobiles or suburban houses. . . . Perhaps unwittingly, Marxist followers in the LGBT+ movement have done something similar. Instead of commodifying products that give people a sense of meaning and identity, they have commodified the body. Like the car manufactured with various options and features, now the body and one’s identity can be tweaked according to various gender options and features. No longer limited to male and female, the latest LGBT+ flag has over 40 different symbols from which one can pick and choose based on emotions and preferences. The exploitation Marxists were critical of in capitalism is now inflicted directly on the human body by those very Marxists. Beyond your grandmother’s feminism, the contemporary movement is branded and marketed to pull in just about everyone, like it or not. The pride flag can be spotted everywhere, especially on car bumpers or woke coffee shops, from government agencies down to grade schools. In the month of June, Pride Month, corporations must find the pride flag colors and promote pride in their marketing, including children’s brands, or face the wrath of the cancel culture. Commodifying the body according to one’s sexual tastes, which can be invented and re-invented at will, like a Frankenstein monster, has become the ultimate ideological brand, blending the powerful – and, some would argue, tyrannical – concepts of reinvention, emotion, marketing, and big money. (p. 161)
Gress concludes her book with these words:
To move forward, women must recognize where our real power lies and understand how to use it well. We must also end the vilification of men and move to restore the family. If we do these things, the world will not come to an end—quite the contrary, like a barren garden, it will emerge slowly, coming back to life, to be reanimated with those elements that we have grasped at but missed.
We can never expect to live in a utopia. There will always be bad men and bad women, because we live in a world where we are given a choice to live according to what we love. But at a certain point, men and women need to abandon their vices and put their faith in God and each other to build a system based on positive, life-building ideals, rather than pursuing a race to the bottom in the battle of the sexes.
It is time for us to come home: to come home and love our children instead of discarding them biologically or emotionally, to come home to husbands and to work with them against a common enemy instead of making them the enemy. And it is time to come home to ourselves, as women and mothers.
If only we could find a way to tell this to every woman. She could choose it or reject it, but at least she would know there is another way to live, to love, and to be made whole. (pp. 186-187)
Of course, one way to tell this to other women – and to other men – is to get this book, read it carefully, and then share its contents far and wide. Thank you, Carrie Gress.
Excellent Bill !
Thanks Rick.