Too Emotional to Lead

In divorce court you’re not allowed to show any hint of emotion. Emotion translates as “unstable,” and instability isn’t good for kids.

This means when your ex shows up with his stripper “fiance” and starts telling tall tales about your terrible parenting, you have to sit there and take it. When he perjures himself in front of a room full of strangers, convincing the judge that your baby is better of with the drug addicted stripper than she is with her mother, you can’t bat an eye. When he uses the death threats you’ve fielded from deranged activists as “evidence” to convince the leftist judge that you’re a rightwing bigot who’s endangering your daughter, you just have to sit there calmly smiling and pretending there’s nothing wrong. You can’t let anyone see you break.

You can’t let them see how broken you are after years of abuse and infidelity. You can’t let them see your grief over the prospect of missing half your child’s Christmases and birthdays because the man who promised to be faithful to you decided he didn’t mean it. You can’t let them see how terrified you are that a complete stranger holds the power to decide how often you get to see your own child.

You have to set your face like flint. You cannot flinch. And if you truly love your kid, you’ll find a way to do it. It will kill you a little inside; full force fury is the only honest or truly appropriate response to the hell you’ve endured, but you’ll lock it away if that’s what you have to do to survive.

So you swallow your feelings and shove them deep down into some inaccessible box, and you throw away the key and learn to move on with your life. It’s a lesson from the school of hard knocks, and you’ve gotten a bit tougher with every betrayal, every 911 call, every protection order, every time he’s called you a “worthless cunt” or headbutted you or trapped you in the house or broken your possessions. You’ve become precisely as fierce and as strong as life has required you to be.

And now your senses are heightened and finely tuned. You can sniff out the cheaters and the wife beaters and the woman haters as readily as a shark can detect that first drop of blood. You can predict, with startling accuracy, the precise point in a conversation when an abuser is going to drop the “c” word to humiliate his wife. You can discern within 30 minutes which men are likeliest to commit adultery. It’s muscle memory to you by this point, a survival instinct or life skill you had zero intention of ever cultivating. But it’s there, and you trust it. You’ve had to.

The broken women are drawn to you like a moth to a flame. It’s like they speak Greek, and you’re one of the few fluent Greek speakers within a 500 mile radius. Their stories flood your inbox—stories of their husbands’ decades long fetish porn addictions, stories of the awful names their men call them when they step out of line, stories of the churches who refuse to bless their decision to pull the plug on the unions that are killing them. You want desperately to help them, but you feel pretty powerless. At least you can tell them that they’re not alone. At least you can tell them that it’s okay to leave.

Your marriage was hardly your first time at the chauvinism rodeo. You’ve known exactly how little some men value women for a very, very long time. You saw it in church when battered woman after battered woman was coerced to remain married to her scoundrel husband. Hell, even today, you logged on to a horror story of a deacon from your childhood church and the more than 100 women he bedded as a married husband and father while claiming to represent God. “No wonder his daughter wanted to escape womanhood and chop her breasts off,” you think. Who the hell would want to be a woman based on the way they saw womanhood modeled in that home?

You saw it at the Sunday dinners where the womenfolk scurried frantically around the kitchen to prepare all the food while the men rested on their laurels talking about all the philosophical things you actually cared about. You saw it in the good old boys’ clubs and elder meetings where women’s voices were perpetually absent. You mostly shut up and refused to complain. “Rebellion is a witchcraft.” You read it in the Bible, and witchcraft will destroy your life. So you played along and stifled your inner Protestant Yentl. Your gifts and passions don’t reveal as much about your earthly purpose as your sex does. That’s what the men in power have convinced you to believe anyway.

And you’ve seen the chauvinism in the workplace and on the campaign trail: Men who refuse to care enough about the fate of womankind to lift a finger to help when our sex-based protections are being erased. Men who rebuke you for taking the lead when they won’t. Men who punished assertive women by categorizing them as “bitches” while applauding the “leadership skills” of the men with the same qualities. You went along to get along for the most part. No one likes a person with a victim mentality, so as long as you were still able to climb the ladder, you figured at least it was better than it was for women in the 50s.

You’ve seen the contempt for women in your advocacy for abuse victims: the dismissals, the coverups, the obstruction of both truth and justice. You’ve observed the relative silence of your party about the epidemic of sexual crimes against women, and you wonder, as you watch your ingroup lament the alleged “war on men” where the hell they’ve been when women are being raped and harassed and discarded like objects. You want to know why it’s always the Democrats who seem to care about testing backlogged rape kits or holding rapist men accountable. Why couldn’t conservatives start #MeToo? Why couldn’t conservatives be the first to hold Ravi Zacharias accountable?

By the grace of God, you’ve seen the good guys, too. They showed up at your rallies. They shared their pulpits and platforms with you. They’ve gone to bat for you and prayed over you and supported you when you needed it most. You’ve since remarried, and this man is a good one who champions your voice and celebrates your strengths and never tries to shrink you to fit into the confines of his own ego. You know the good guys exist. You’re busy raising two good men of your own. You’re fiercely defensive of them. You know good, loving men are a balm that could heal the world. You know any progress humanity is going to make will require good men and good women working together in tandem.

You love and deeply value the good men, but you’re still so weary of the bad ones. And you want to warn the good ones that enabling or ignoring the bad ones will end in catastrophe on a societal level. The severity of this cancer cannot be overstated. But you know that you have to be VERY careful about the way you communicate this warning if you want to be taken seriously at all. Emotion translates as instability and no one trusts a crazy person.

So you collect and gather data. Receipts. Illustrations of the misogyny you name. Proof of your teammates behaving badly. There’s a lot of it. Too much, to be honest. And you start to share it. You hyperlink the proof of rape coverups, of victim shaming, of cold, cruel, abject hatred of women. And you share it over and over and over again over a period of years wondering if anyone of influence is going to give a damn or step up to help. You want the same things they want: You want abortion to end. You want the sexes to live peaceably together. You want strong men to be supported and encouraged. You want strong women to be elevated and honored. And you realize none of this is possible when you’ve got the malignant tumor of misogyny, fueled by epidemic degrees of pornsickness metastacizing in your collective body. As your best friend put it, “Patriarchy is feminism’s unholy father,” and blaming feminism for all the world’s ills is like plucking the head off a dandelion and expecting your weed problem to go away. You know the issue must be tackled at the root level and that this is going to require some deep cleaning of your own house. But you never seem to get very far in your awareness campaign.

So you start to speak loudly, a little more emphatically. And a lot of the people you thought were your teammates aren’t okay with it. Now you’re rocking the boat. Now you’re challenging their idols. Your advocacy is valuable as long as its aimed at the right targets—leftists. But turn your focus to your own camp, and you’ll learn very quickly just where you stand. They’ll remove you from their friends lists. They’ll stop inviting you to speak at their events. They’ll write letters warning you that they’re concerned about the status of your eternal soul because you’ve obviously been consumed by feminism, and that’s a mortal sin. You’re a liability now, and you should be held at arms’ length. You’re obviously too damaged to be objective or trusted. You have daddy issues. You need therapy. You hate men.

This all hurts your feelings and leaves you questioning your own sanity, but you simply can’t unknow what you know. Your radar is up. Your red flags are all completely triggered. There is danger ahead, and you have a duty to warn.

Still, you remain as calm as possible. Emotion is instability. You want people to trust you.

And then you make the unfortunate decision to confront one of their leaders about his own misogyny problem, and the wheels come off the cart. He invites his 2 billion followers to mock and scorn you, and you wonder to yourself how in the hell the people preaching “wifely submission” can think their demands are reasonable when the men you’re supposed to submit to are actively referring to dissenting women as" “fat, ugly bitches,” “harpies,” “crones,” and “too ugly to fu*k.”

You realize that one of the most prominent leaders of “conservative values” is leading an army of men who behave like entitled incels, barking orders at women to literally get back in the kitchen and make their men sandwiches. They want to repeal the 19th amendment. They accuse women of destroying western civilization. They declare that all western women are trash and that men are better off ordering brides like cattle from a catalog.

And something in you snaps. You’re no longer calm. You’re furious. Because this is very, very wrong, and there’s seemingly no accountability or end in sight. And rage is the appropriate response. And it all comes flooding to the surface—the years of swallowing your emotions and putting on your brave face and bending over and taking it and ignoring cancer and begging the people with the power to let you keep your kid because the asshole abusing you doesn’t deserve her and you are, in fact, what’s best for her. And you are not wrong. And you are not abusive. And you are not hysterical. You are just bone tired of working this hard to be seen and heard and valued and respected, and you’re really not asking for anything too hard to give. You just want a little basic human decency.

You feel the angry tears welling up in your eyes and immediately punish yourself for them. “Reel it in, sister. No one wants a hysterical woman.”

And so you pray, “Lord, take my anger. Point it in the right direction. Keep bitterness far from me. And you remember that enmity between the sexes is Satan’s idea, not God’s. You remember that there was no subjugation of women in Eden, and there will be no subjugation of women in heaven. You remember that equality is God’s created order. And you trust that His justice is not delayed.