Pushing Back Against the Toxic Culture

In an article from the February issue of First Things, Katherine Kersten writes: “The #MeToo movement has made one thing incontrovertibly clear: Contemporary America is confused and conflicted at the deepest level about sex, sexuality, and social norms that should guide men’s and women’s intimate relations.” (p. 22) After providing a few concrete and very sad examples of the wreckage on the highway of the feminism/sexual revolution/#MeToo movement, Kersten notes that feminist ideology undermines the capability of women to come to terms with the sexual freedom they thought they espoused and desired in three ways. First, the feminism movement “reduces male/female relations to a power struggle, and it denies the importance of the physical, sexual and emotional differences between men and women, including the unique nature of women’s vulnerability in the face of the aggressive male libido.” (p. 24)Second, feminism “hobbles women’s abilities to navigate male-female relations by framing them in the terms of ‘rights’.” The problem with such “rights talk” is that it is “political and can never exhaust the richness and nuance of the age-old dance between men and women.” Moreover, “it fails to acknowledge that rights bring responsibilities, and it precludes the notion of contributory negligence by women in any social conflict, including sexual encounters gone wrong.” (p. 24)Third, and finally, “feminism undermines women’s ability to cope with the challenges of today’s sexual free-for-all by conditioning them to think of themselves as victims—weak, bewildered, and lacking in moral agency. By portraying woman as pawns of patriarchal forces beyond their control, feminism suggests they cannot advance, or even grasp, their own interests.” (p. 24)

Of course, men are not without blame; they play a role in this dysfunction. Kersten notes: “The resulting cultural upheaval has changed men as well as women. Today our society lectures men about ‘toxic masculinity’ instead of encouraging virtues long associated with manliness, such as self-mastery, delay of gratification, and protection of the vulnerable.” Thus, men increasingly fear women and distance themselves from them. And pornography makes it very easy to have a sterilized love affair with a computer rather than an authentic encounter with a real person. Kersten concludes: “By decoupling sex from the institutions of marriage and family—with their guardrails of mutual care and fidelity—the sexual revolution eliminated men’s incentive to redirect their powerful sexual impulses to pro-social ends.” (p. 25)

What do we make of all this? It can be overwhelming to ponder the strength it takes to muster to push back against the tsunami of the sexual revolution. But, ponder we must. And push back we must. Often, the push back happens in small, incremental ways. A young man preparing for marriage attends an introduction to Natural Family Planning and realizes that his future wife’s fertility is intricate and mysterious and somehow sacred. He makes the decision to honor it. A young adult in college falls in love with the young woman in his chemistry class and because of her desire to live chastely, for the first time in his life, he learns about the beauty of self-control and authentic communication during courtship. The married man who, in the sacrament of confession, confesses that he is considering asking his wife to be sterilized because they already have three children. The priest, in his fatherly care, gives him the Church teaching and encourages him to be the man that God made him to be, charges him to learn about NFP and exhorts him to protect his wife’s fertility (and his own) because it is part and parcel of his being a man and a husband. If anything, as Katherine Kersten’s article makes clear, the tendency of our Western culture to disconnect sex from marriage and family over the last fifty years, has not made us a happier and healthier society. Only living and loving truly according to God’s beautiful design can do that.