Barbie and the Impossible Burden of Feminism
More on Patriarchy
Last week we looked at why Christians have to get over their aversion to the word “patriarchy.”
But any time we overcome an aversion, it takes some time to acquire the new taste. The head needs a lot of reassurance to go along with the convictions that prick the heart.
To that end, I contend that deep down we all know there’s something wrong when we see traditional roles erased.
Watch woman pastors speak and see if you can find one who has the voice to oppose wolves and boldly call out sin.
Watch the misery of a family led by a pants-wearing woman over her emasculated, passive husband (and look up statistics on relationship survival, adultery rate, and house chore shares when she’s the breadwinner).
Notice the unsettled feeling that comes with seeing women in military or police uniform take on truly wicked, strong men—particularly when the women are pregnant. “Does not nature tell you…”
We know just as well that something’s off when Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene, AOC, and Ilhan Omar are the boldest members of congress while their male counterparts hide their own backbones under strict lock and key.
Unsurprisingly, Scripture directly confirms that one - “women rule over them” is a curse on a nation (Isaiah 3:12).
The funny thing is, the nonreligious world is waking up to all of this.
I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: Jordan Peterson vs. Cathy Newman is the Rosetta Stone of modern anthropology and internet dialogue. Dr. Peterson continually gives documented proof that men and women are happier when pursuing different, more sex-specific purposes, and Newman repeatedly interprets this hard statistical data as an attack on women. You may think these articles are a similar attack. But the statistics are what they are. God didn’t get it wrong.
Further, you can survey the rise of masculinity gurus and see that young men are realizing the “take a back seat, women will love it” theory they were raised with is bankrupt and destroys intersexual dynamics. Even “evolutionary psychologists” are stumbling on to the truth that men and women were wired as polar opposites in purpose, sexuality, weaknesses, depression, love, and more.
They insist humans took up these roles as survival instincts in cave man days. We know the roles were wired into us from the start by a God who’s far smarter than we are. Thus, it should come as no surprise that raging against our Creator and insisting “you made me wrong” (cf Romans 9:20) never works and only leads to our misery. As a wise man once said, “You may not like it… but accept it.”
But everything about our society is geared toward plugging our ears and yelling so loudly that we don’t hear it, much less accept it.
As President Biden said, “There’s not a single thing a man can do that a woman can’t do as well or better. Not a single thing.”
There’s not a single person on earth who functionally believes that. Not one. But we’re still expected to pay homage to the idea and pretend we do believe it. Feminism has so taken over our society that we have to go along with blatant lies lest we upset the woman-exalting orthodoxy.
Here’s the twist, though: elevating women in this way doesn’t help them. It simply saddles them with an impossible burden.
The funny thing is, the Barbie movie almost accidentally stumbled into this truth. In the movie’s central monologue, one character decried all that is placed on women today. Thankfully, People.com jotted it down for us and saved us the two hours, $20, and my male dignity so I didn’t have to see the movie to share it.
"It is literally impossible to be a woman. You are so beautiful, and so smart, and it kills me that you don't think you're good enough. Like, we have to always be extraordinary, but somehow we're always doing it wrong.
"You have to be thin, but not too thin. And you can never say you want to be thin. You have to say you want to be healthy, but also you have to be thin. You have to have money, but you can't ask for money because that's crass. You have to be a boss, but you can't be mean. You have to lead, but you can't squash other people's ideas. You're supposed to love being a mother, but don't talk about your kids all the [expletive] time. You have to be a career woman but also always be looking out for other people. You have to answer for men's bad behavior, which is insane, but if you point that out, you're accused of complaining. You're supposed to stay pretty for men, but not so pretty that you tempt them too much or that you threaten other women because you're supposed to be a part of the sisterhood.
The thing is, she’s mostly right! The standards are insane! Nobody can be everything all at once. Being a woman with all the standards and expectations imposed in today’s world actually is impossible.
But that’s not because of the patriarchy. It’s because of feminism.
You push the idea that men are essentially excess to requirements since women are as good or better at everything they bring to the table, and that means women have to do it all. In this system women aren’t the helpmeet; they’re the one pillar holding it all up. Trying to functionally be a man and a woman at the same time would burn out and depress anybody.
But it doesn’t just burn out the women. It gums up the functioning of the entire society. Women can’t be men, and stubbornly insisting they can be means we have to artificially eliminate the things men are better at so women can take on those burdens, too.
The perfect example is found in the way the military has lowered its fitness requirements to accommodate women who are incapable of meeting the demands of the male-centered standards. Rather than realizing that maybe they weren’t created for these functions, we lower the standard of male roles to make them accessible to females.
The result is that we have unqualified people of both sexes being given jobs they are not able to do. No wonder a depressing sense of being in over one’s head sets in.
The answer is not to push men out of the way and lower the standard of the God-given male role so women can achieve it. The answer is to accept reality and return to roles that support each other. I do what you can’t, you do what I can’t. I do the dirty, unpleasant chores around the house. You nurse the kids. I protect the house. You keep the home. I bring home the bacon. You fry it up.
“But that’s so sexist! It shouldn’t be that way!”
First of all, where on earth do we get this idea of “should?” We just made it up. As I often say, a relativistic, “Speak My Truth” society does not get to impose “shoulds” on anyone.
Second, we can insist things “should” be a certain way, or we can accept them the way they are. All these decades of fashioning the world in the way we think it should be hasn’t exactly led to male or female thriving. Continuing down the road that has created this much misery in the insistence that it’ll get better when men are completely out of the way is insanity.
Lay down the impossible burden of having it all, doing it all, being it all. Don’t believe the lie.
Once again, time and space have run out. This is going to have to be a 3 part series. As always, make sure you’ve subscribed to receive (what should be) the finale next week as we look at the man’s role in all this.
CONTENT RUNDOWN
This week’s Think Deeper Podcast was a fun one, as we debated each other’s Top 5 Bible books and submitted what we consider to be the Top 5 Most Important
On Who Let the Dogma Out? we did an overview of the Proverbs and all the ways our under-emphasis on them has hurt the church today
And, over on the Focus+ subscription site we rolled out my new teaching series with my brother, Joe, as we go through Revelation from the partial preterist, 70 AD view. We’ve had a blast putting it together. Check it out if you’ve got a few extra bucks to throw Focus’ way.