Mary, Mary, Quite Contrary

Mary Harrington's Fake Conservatism

Mary Harrington

has written an article trying to ‘dunk’ on me because apparently I belong in ‘the same gutter as pimps and pornographers’ for helping men improve their marriages. According to her, I will ‘save nothing’ and am ‘part of the problem.’

The reason is simple: I pointed out that wives should submit to their husbands and that, as Aristotle said and the Virgin Mary showed, ‘silence is the glory of woman.’

Mary’s submission and silence: the perfect model of womanhood.

I have no interest in dunking on Harrington. There’s no honour in arguing with women. Instead, the purpose of this article is to pinpoint what feminism truly is by showing how Harrington’s so-called ‘feminism against progress’ is unavoidably progressive because all feminism is.

Harrington claims to be ‘generally very pro masculinity.’ She’ll happily complain, for example, that ‘the cluster of traits generally associated with manliness is routinely deprecated, marginalised, and scorned in contemporary culture.’ But if you dare to talk about how wives should submit to their husbands? Then you ‘should not be accorded a seat at any kind of conservative table.’

As Paul Gottfried and I discussed, fake conservatives punch right far harder than they punch left. Harrington’s ‘feminism against progress’ implies there’s a genuinely conservative feminism — one that reasonable people can get behind. But feminism, as Timothy Gordon puts it in The Case for Patriarchy, is ‘the original gender dysphoria.’ There is no good form of feminism. Transgenderism began with women in trousers. If your career, clothes and cosmetics are what make you a woman, any man can play dress-up too and compete with you.

Harrington’s feminism is merely a gatekeeping operation — a rearguard for the regime of liberalism. Like all fake conservatives, Harrington will happily admit that ‘there may be, in many heterosexual relationships, a dynamic of male initiative and female deferral that at least for some is preferable to punctilious egalitarianism.’ Tradition has some perks.

But even when she’s acknowledging the reality of natural law, note how she frames it as ‘male initiative and female deferral’ rather than obedience. If a man takes the initiative, then, a woman might defer to him — or she might not. For example, perhaps he tells her not to wear an extremely low-cut dress in public. Well, she’ll see how she feels about that. Maybe. Maybe not. The same goes for working outside the home or having another child. Ultimately, it’s up to her, not him.

Nobody should be surprised at this. At Seneca Falls in 1848, the first feminist convention said their main aim was to ‘overthrow wifely obedience.’ Nothing enrages feminists more than submission does. If she submits to a man, it’s only because she feels like it. ‘Lots of women,' Harrington says, ‘value a partner who is willing to take the initiative, and are happy to defer to such a man, if he’s admirable and competent enough to make that seem appealing.’ [My italics.]

By contrast, the traditional Christian teaching on patriarchy is that the wife owes the husband obedience in all but sin regardless of whether it seems appealing or not. It’s simply her duty, and doing our duties is spiritually beneficial to us and everyone around us. For example, the husband has a duty to provide for and protect his wife even if it doesn’t seem appealing. And both parents have duties to their children that must be fulfilled even when doing so doesn’t seem appealing.

For Harrington, however, ‘a complementary marriage is less a strict hierarchy than a mutually respectful and affectionate division of labour, between distinct domains.’ In other words, wifely obedience is abolished — exactly as the first feminists at Seneca Falls hoped. Instead, there is mutual submission, which of course means there’s really no submission, hierarchy or authority at all.

Mutual submission, she believes, is a ‘grounded, sane, and obviously family-oriented’ view, but in reality no society can function without authority, and that includes the natural society of the family. Mutual submission is a mere fiction because someone must lead, and if the man doesn’t then the woman will. And that’s what feminism aims at: as Scripture says, Eve will desire to rule over Adam.

Although Harrington says she’s ‘all for polarity in relationships,’ she regards patriarchy as an attempt to ‘unperson half the human species.’ A woman is only truly a person, you see, when she doesn’t submit to a man — in other words, when she lives like she’s a man. By contrast, fulfilling her femininity is regarded as degrading. Scripture says man is the glory of God, but woman is the glory of man. And this is why feminism is really a form of misogyny and dishonours womanhood.

The glory of man? No, says feminism. It’d be glorious to be a man.

Patriarchy, Harrington says, is only ‘for men whose only hope of feeling like the Big I Am is to lord it over someone physically weaker and temperamentally more agreeable than themselves.’ For the feminist, nothing is more loathsome than having a lord. Yet that’s what women are built for and want. It’s why women are weaker and more agreeable. It’s why patriarchy is universal. It explains the most popular women’s romance novels and films.

It’s also why, unlike feminist counselling and therapy, my marriage coaching works:

As Aristotle knew, the relation of men to women is of ruler to ruled. To the liberal mind, all talk of ruling must be immediately rejected. But the etymology of the word is illuminating: from the Latin regula, meaning ‘straight stick, bar, ruler,’ it was used figuratively to mean leading according to a guiding pattern or model. Thus a king rules his kingdom for the benefit of his subjects, or a parent might ‘straighten out’ a disobedient child for his own benefit.

Patriarchy is a guiding pattern based on the principles of natural law, and natural law is like God’s signature in the created order, as Aquinas put it. Because feminism goes against this, women have become unhappier than ever since the Sexual Revolution and the feminist weaponisation of what Harrington calls ‘relationships’. What are those? Instruments of social chaos, ultimately, that have damaged men and women but, above all, children.

Only patriarchy honours women, and it’s the purpose of marriage, so if you’re a married Christian man who wants to learn more about how to apply it in your life, you can join my free community here.

Harrington claims Christianity has nothing to do with patriarchy. But Christianity simply is patriarchy, literally ‘rule by fathers’. As the Catechism of the Council of Trent states, wives must ‘be subject to their husbands.’ And because patriarchy ultimately depends on deference to the transcendent, this is all grounded in the fact that every man is also subject to the real Big I Am: God, Who said to Moses, I AM THAT I AM.

Without this, women who were sold the lie of “free love” are subject — in a Satanic inversion — to the tyranny of the perpetually adolescent playboy, the pimp, the pornographer.