A Brief History of the Battle of the Sexes

As the battle of the sexes wages on both inside and outside the church, I thought it might be time to pause for a hot minute to reflect on some of the history that led us here in the first place. Perhaps analysis of these dynamics can help us improve them? I’m a firm believer in addressing problems at the root level. Blaming all the world’s ills on feminism is like plucking the head off a dandelion and wondering why it continues to grow. Similarly, laying all the blame at patriarchy’s feet is a surefire way to continue to funnel a fresh supply of oxygen to a fire you’re trying to douse.

So here, without further adieu, is a brief and non-exhaustive refresher on the path that led Americans to this uniquely fragile moment in time:

1. Patriarchy is given free rein to subjugate and silence women. Men hold all the power and call all the shots. Women and girls are sexually assaulted, and it’s swept under the carpet while they’re told to forgive and forget. Boys will be boys. Men have needs. No one is perfect. She was asking for it. 

   
   In the 1940s and 50s, the percentage of unwed mothers delivering babies triples. But rather than finding themselves surrounded with compassion, grace, and support, too many of these women are sent across the country and hidden in maternity homes to deliver and ultimately relinquish their children to strangers, lest anyone find out they had sinned. The babies' fathers often go on to college with little more than a slap on the hand or a backwards glance at the girls whose lives they’ve decimated.

   
   Women are largely discouraged from pursuing careers or playing sports or generating income of their own. They can be secretaries but not lawyers, nurses but not doctors, house cleaners but not architects. They can’t wear pants in Congress, can’t have a credit card without male consent, can’t divorce a wife beater without losing their kids. (He has the money and the lawyer and the power.)

   
   Women are dependent on their husbands and fathers and forced to overlook rampant infidelity and mistreatment. It’s now the era of “stand by your man,” and everyone knows the female’s primary purpose is to pop out babies and look pretty and support men in the important stuff. 

   
   This is God’s will, they’re told. God is a man. God will bless them for surrendering to abuse. God commands women to submit. They’ll earn jewels on their heavenly crowns this way. 
   

2. Women are pissed. They’ve had enough of this nonsense. Feminism steps up to the plate where the church has largely neglected its daughters. Women fight to be treated as equals, as humans. They make amazing strides in employment and academic and athletic access. They build shelters and support networks. They pursue higher education and careers and use their God-given skills for the greater good. They’re accused of all manner of Jezebellian evil in the process. They’re told they’re destroying the family unit, that their children will suffer, that they’re disobeying God by competing with men for men’s work. But onward they march because there’s work to be done.

   
   But they overshoot and keep on going. If men can be free to be promiscuous, so can they. Now, instead of transcending the role of sex object, they’re embracing it as a form of empowerment. They believe the misogynistic lie that, in order to succeed in a man’s world, they have to wage war against the one superpower women possess that men do not: the ability to give birth. More than 63 million abortions later, and they’re still not free. In the absence of a faith, they embrace a cause that validates their life choices and makes them feel like good people. Suddenly they’re in this weird tailspin, subscribing to mantras where “Love is my religion” leads to “God is queer,” and “Men can give birth.” And basically every other loony tunes philosophy under the sun is given harbor as long as it conflicts with the dogma of their male oppressors. 

3. And men are pissed. They’ve had enough of this nonsense. They’re tired of watching toxic empathy show up at the polls and run roughshod over sanity in public policy. They’re tired of being told they don’t get to have an opinion when their offspring are flippantly destroyed by the millions. They’re calling BS on polyamory and sex clowns for kids, and when they look behind the curtain to see who’s driving the crazy train, they see a bunch of liberal white women. So they try to take back the reins, and they justify misogynistic garbage initiatives like the move to #repealthe19th, fully convinced that the world went mad the day they started treating women like humans instead of sex slaves and breeders. They launch crusades to eliminate no-fault divorce. They preach sermons reminding the world that God says men get to be the bosses, ignoring His actual created order of mutuality and respect. 
   
   They demonize the “girl boss,” shame childless women as some sort of perversion of God’s created order, insist that western women are “trash,” and encourage their brothers to look for wives in southeast Asia, where they perceive the women are more compliant, when, in reality, many of them are just desperate for the financial freedom promised by these rich white guys from America.
   
   Porn consumption skyrockets, so now these guys are literally rewiring their brains to view women as objects to be used and discarded. They have no clue how to build or foster intimacy, and, of course, it’s women’s fault for both tempting them sexually and then rejecting their maladjusted attempts at relationship.

The complementarians are no help because they’ll consistently side with the patriarchs at the expense of women. Don’t tell me I’m wrong. We’ve seen it time and time and time again. Half the egalitarians are no use because they’ve gone full blown rainbow brigade, while the other faithful (sexually orthodox) half sits fecklessly on the sidelines while kids are being chemically castrated in the name of progress and in the name of God. 

And here we find ourselves in the heart of the battle between the sexes with not so much as a hint of respite from the Genesis curse Jesus came to lift. 

There was no enmity between the sexes in Eden, and there will be no enmity between the sexes in heaven. That’s created order. That’s God’s design. How we continue to muck it up so severely is a marvel of the devil himself. We’re so busy trying to smash the patriarchy and crying “Feminism is cancer!” that we aren’t really slowing down to address our respective problems at the root level. Bad men and bad women make the world ugly. Good men and good women must work in tandem to repair it. 

All I can say is Lord Jesus, come—preferably in the form of a revival instead of the asteroid we deserve.

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