September 22, 2018

MY CORNER by Boyd Cathey

What has Happened to Masculinity and the Sexes in 21^st Century?

Friends,

This morning watching a gaggle of garrulous women, all talking at the same time, all  vacuous and empty headed, and all saying basically nothing—a so-called “panel” on Fox News discussing the nomination of Judge Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court and the last-minute and largely-unfounded accusations hurled against him by radical feminists—I finally had had enough.

There for anyone to see…and mostly excruciatingly, to hear…were five salient humanoid illustrations why the 19^th Amendment, the women’s suffrage amendment, has not only been a disaster of historic proportions for our culture, but needs to be repealed, and the sooner, the better.

I quickly switched my television dial to the Sirius Symphony Hall channel (#76), there at least to find some solace! Anyone for Telemann or Vivaldi or Schubert? Ah, but I forget: they were white European Christian males (even if they and many others like them helped create and added to the richness of our Western culture).

As I attempted to chronicle in MY CORNER on September 19 (“Brett Kavanaugh, Feminism, and Modern Witchcraft,” at: http://boydcatheyreviewofbooks.blogspot.com/2018/09/september-19-2018-my-corner-by.html ), the feminist movement has been and is, in effect, a rebellion against the laws of Nature and also against the very teachings and beliefs of historic Christianity. Whether it be the so-called “modest” reforms advocated in the 19^th century—voting rights and property entailment and inheritance reform, or the more progressivist demands of the late twentieth century—military service, professional and job parity, unisex bathrooms, or the most recent insistence on same sex marriage, transgenderism, and gender fluidity, the movement is rubricked under the principle of “equality,” that is, its proclaimed objective is the complete equality of the sexes.

Yet, in fact, equality as envisaged by the feminists does not exist and has never existed in nature.

For feminism “equality” is a slogan, in reality an exercise in guile and subterfuge employed to shame weak-willed (and weak-brained) men and to eventually dissolve the traditional social bonds and inherited natural (and moral) laws that have governed our culture for two millennia.

Whether from the Prophets of the Old Testament, or from the incredibly rich inheritance of ancient philosophy, or from St. Paul and the consistent teachings of the Church, there has been an understanding that there are discernible “laws” in nature, the orderly functioning of which made society and social arrangements possible, even harmonious.  What the Christian church did, following on the acute observations of the Ancients, was to confirm both spiritually and doctrinally the existence and appositeness of those laws, for they were integral to creation, itself.

Thus, it is no exaggeration to state that feminism is both a rebellion against not just the Divine Positive Law—the laws and teachings of God and His Church—but against Nature, that is, against the way things are and function naturally in our world, those workings and that usual consistency observed as laws for thousands of years.

The genie of feminism, of rampant egalitarianism, however, is out of the magic lamp. And it is an egalitarianism and demand for “equality” that will continue until it has completely subjected men to its will and expelled anything redolent of masculinity from our midst. For its actual objective is domination, and for the logical feminists, that men must not only become unmanly and weaklings acceding to every recent feminist demand, but in so many words, disappear, except as the selective objects for breeding purposes, or for the occasional fling, always understanding that it is the non-male who chooses the time, place, manner, initiation, and who sets all the “rules of amour and engagement” (and to ignore or violate them will bring down the wrath of feminist society and eventually the legal opprobrium of our newly feminized legal framework).

The destruction of masculinity and emasculation of men has been perhaps the most grievous and disastrous consequence of the “women’s movement.” For centuries—indeed, not that long ago—an inherited code of honor, deference and respect, how to treat women, prevailed in Western society. While, it is true, certain functions and roles were generally not open to women historically, that in no way dimmed or lessened their critical importance and paramount position in society. Indeed, as child bearers and mothers it was they most uniquely who governed the essential running of the family and palpably were the primary and substantial foundation of society.

The Church understood that women were not the same as men, that women were different and that they had unique God-given roles. Like the Blessed Virgin in Bethlehem who cared for the Cradle in the Stable and nourished the Son of God who would bring grace and salvation to the world, the primary special role of women was the nourishing of familial offspring and the continuation of the human race. There could be no more important role than this, and in that sense, women occupy in Christian teaching an exalted and unequalled position.

What folly then, to even discuss “equality” in a merely secular sense.

The potentially fatal error, the monstrous and infectious evil in our culture, is the Hydra-headed movement to extirpate “racism” and end “sexism.” As increasingly independent outgrowths of an historic cultural Marxism formulated decades ago and insinuated into our educational systems and entertainment industry, these demonic demiurges make the standards and praxis of the old Soviet Communists appear conservative. Josef Stalin would never have, and never did, put up with same sex marriage, transgenderism, or the kind of feminist domination we see around us today. True, the Soviets talked of equality and women occupied some professional positions, but for the Reds a strong family and observance of supposedly “outdated” traditional morality were still paramount. The Gulags contained dissenters.

Our present culture is filled with malignant Harpies—many political, many academic, many in entertainment, many in media. They feast on the entrails of our once noble culture and scream bloodcurdling screams against anyone who would dare oppose them.

As I have written before, in their unbridled frenzy loosed from any natural bounds and standards of behavior, they qualify as what the great English writer G. K. Chesterton called “lunatics.”

Here is what I wrote back on June 10, 2017:

“The Revolutionaries tell us that they strive for “equality,” “liberation from restraints.” But their program—their revolution—turns liberty on its head, inverts rationality, and enslaves millions in unrequited passions and desire, unbound and unreasoned, cocooned in a pseudo-reality. It is, to paraphrase the great English essayist and poet G. K. Chesterton, the definition of real lunacy. 

In his fine volume, The Poet and the Lunatics (1929), Chesterton’s character Gale asks the question: “What exactly is liberty?” He responds, in part:

“First and foremost, surely, it is the power of a thing to be itself. In some ways the yellow bird was free in the cage…We are limited by our brains and bodies; and if we break out, we cease to be ourselves, and, perhaps, to be anything.

“The lunatic is he who loses his way and cannot return. Now, almost before my eyes, this man had made a great stride from liberty to lunacy. The man who opened the bird-cage loved freedom; possibly too much... But the man who broke the bowl merely because he thought it a prison for the fish, when it was their only possible house of life—that man was already outside the world of reason, raging with a desire to be outside of everything.” [Italics added]

Our modern revolutionaries, whether out in the streets demonstrating like wailing banshees, or broadcasting nightly ideological pablum they call news, or parading before a Senate committee (or on that committee!), or indoctrinating gullible, nearly soul-less students in supposed “centers of higher education,” are, to use Chesterton’s parable, certifiably insane: men [and women] “already outside the world of reason,” whose unrestrained rage to destroy is only matched by their profound inability to create anything of real and lasting value.”

The nightmare scenario painted by Chesterton in society ninety years ago is with us today with a vengeance, it surrounds us, it cajoles us, it demands total subservience…especially if you are a man with the slightest inclination to think for yourself, to doubt the new dogmatic and constantly advancing template of feminism. What was perhaps tolerable five years ago is now met with demands for the application of a “social and political death sentence,” and what may be tolerable today will soon be seen as a sin against the triumphant and ever-evolving feminist mantra of truth.

That is, until men…and women, too…stand and forcefully oppose this lunacy, completely, honestly, rationally, and without hesitation.