The Weaponisation of Women

Despair and daring on the battlefield of the family

Feminism, said the Frankfurt School radical Herbert Marcuse, is ‘the most important and potentially the most radical movement that we have.’ A radical — from the Latin radix, “root” — goes to the root, and feminism aims at infecting the family as the foundation of the society to bring about the most thoroughgoing, extreme transformation possible.

Its attack had two prongs. First, it aimed at encouraging young women to have sex before marriage as a honeytrap to emasculate men by enslaving them to lust, rendering them “playboys.” The clue was in the name, and contraception was integral to the childish pursuit of pleasure without responsibility.

Second, feminism aimed at encouraging women who did get married to work outside the home. This not only cultivated independence rather than submission, subverting the hierarchy between husband and wife. It also weakened the mother’s influence on the moral formation of her children. If a wife is the heart of the home, a working wife means heart disease.

Society can’t return to health until a counterattack is launched here. Since mothers shape the sexual behaviour of their daughters more than fathers do, stay-at-home wives who model traditional morality for their daughters will do more to fight promiscuity than promiscuous men whining online about women with high bodycounts ever will. We must return.

But is it possible? Many men doubt it, and they are feminism’s last laugh — so emasculated, so enmeshed in the feminist worldview that they do not believe a man can have a stay-at-home wife. The objection is usually financial, but the data doesn’t support it.

As Clive Hamilton points out in ‘The Disappointment of Liberalism’, today we have seen ‘the real incomes of most people rise to three or four times the levels enjoyed by their parents and grandparents in the 1950s.’ Real income accounts for inflation, and the comparison to the 1950s is especially illuminating because the same men who despair about the possibility of having a stay-at-home wife today tend to refer to that period as a Golden Age.

Back then, they imagine, things would have been easier. But the truth is it was harder. If you can’t do it now, you couldn’t have done it then.

Indeed, not only is the average person in the world today around 4.4-times richer than in 1950, but house prices as a multiple of average earnings have been higher at many times in the past. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, for example, houses were more expensive than they were from 1960-2000.

Yet those were the decades when many men decided that stay-at-home wives were supposedly unaffordable. Throughout the entire latter half of the 19th century, in fact, houses were more expensive than they are now. Men didn’t have working wives then. The idea would have sounded absurd and shameful to most of them.

The truth is that it’s not a question of prices but priorities:

Only when careerism dies will feminism die, but since women are more depressed than ever before in history and deeply unsatisfied by their careers, they have nothing to lose except their delusions. And men must disabuse them of these. But to do that, men first break free from the effeminate excuses that prevent them from even wanting to launch an attack on the critical, final battleground of marriage and the family.

I was recently surprised by the reaction to a post I made on social media saying that men doubting their ability to provide for their families must remember that God, ultimately, will provide for them. This was a new way of looking at things for them. Hope means that we aim at attaining something good that isn’t certain or easy, so it presupposes courage. But that’s masculine. And we can be cheerfully confident of success. There’s no reason to bitch rather than build: “Do ye manfully and let your heart be strengthened, all ye that hope in the Lord” (Psalm 30:25).