Over the past few weeks, I’ve been teaching my Sunday school class (the young adult class) on the topic of biblical masculinity. Needless to say, I am approaching this from a thoroughly patriarchist angle, rather than the typical proto-feminist “complementarian” viewpoint that is found in so much of modern evangelicalism, and even in fundamentalism. I enjoy the opportunity to address “current event” issues that are involved with masculinity vis-a-vis feminism as we discuss God’s ordained gender roles in the home, in the church, and in society. I chose to teach on this because I’ve become increasingly burdened about the effeminising direction which Western society has been taking. Too many “men” in Western society have absconded their leadership roles and have become like little children who need their mommies to tell them what to do. It’s why we’ve allowed the divorce courts and the family courts to become the terror of the home; it’s why churches all across the land are ordaining female “clergy” in direct violation of the Word of God; it’s why so many so-called “conservatives” fall all over themselves to support “strong women” politicians like Joni Ernst (R-IA) because they brag about castrating pigs.

Anywise, we had an interesting discussion a couple of Sunday’s ago about the reasoning behind feminism. Why is it that feminists are the way they are, and do the things they do? Why is it that even supposedly “godly, Christian” women get swept up into unbiblical and unnatural notion about gender roles that seek to undermine the principles of male leadership and headship that God instituted?

Ultimately, what it boils down to is that feminists suffer from an extreme inferiority complex, and manifest a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction with themselves. They are, simply put, women who don’t want to be women. Feminists constantly demonise women who follow traditional gender roles as “not real women,” yet they themselves do everything they can to escape the fact that they are women. The term “feminist” is actually something of a misnomer because feminists are not really interested in advancing their own gender, but in replacing it with the masculine.

Think about it. What is the metric by which feminists always judge themselves and by which they measure “progress”? Isn’t it by how closely they approximate men? Do they get paid as much as a man? Have they broken into some field of employment traditionally held by men? Can they get drafted just like men can? Without the yardstick of masculinity, these women have no idea what they are or what they want to be.

This is not the behaviour of people who are really “strong and independent.” These are the actions of those who measuring themselves against others, see themselves as being inferior. Feminism plays from a weak hand. And the only way they can “beat” men is to get the men to emasculate themselves to the point where they’re no longer really men.

This, in a nutshell, is the whole point to the overturning of traditional gender roles in Western society – women stop being the women that they secretly hate themselves for being, while conniving many of the men to stop being the men that the feminist women really want to be. It’s confusion – and God is most definitely not the author of it.

In short, feminists envy masculinity. It’s something they want to possess, but never can. All they can do is to fashion themselves into a cheap substitute, while removing it from those who ought to possess it by right and by nature.

This fundamental disconnect stems from the failure of feminists to understand the difference between roles and intrinsic worth. Roles are the functions which we perform, and which ideally are supposed to lead to a successfully functioning society when they are performed by those to whom they have been given. God has ordained certain roles for men and certain roles for women. Even if one does not wish to accept this, mere biology ought to provide a clue as to these roles as well. Men are stronger, faster, more aggressive and risk-taking; women are more nurturing, more intuitive, more emotionally intelligent. Men are suited to labouring outside the home to be the breadwinner in a family. Women are more suited to raising the children and guiding the day-to-day administration of the home. Men are suited to wielding authority, women are more suited to following leadership. There is nothing wrong with any of this. It is all natural, it is as it should be. There are roles that each gender play which provide for the benefit of the family unit and society as a whole. It is when the genders refuse to carry out their own roles and instead try to take on that of the other – as masculinising feminists and effeminate men do – that we see the destruction of both institutions, which we clearly observe happening today.

What the feminists do not savvy is that the mere functions of these roles, in and of themselves, do not create intrinsic worth. In other words, intrinsic worth is not had merely because somebody, anybody, goes out and gets a job as a high-powered lawyer or whatever. Rather, intrinsic worth exists when those who fulfill their proper roles – those to which they are suited by God and nature – do so. One would not value it very highly if a fireman started trying to do peoples’ taxes instead of putting out fires, or if a chemist started bumbling around trying to make stock trades instead of performing experiments in a laboratory. These would each be performing low-value work because it is not what their training has prepared them to do. Likewise, when women seek to perform the roles that men ought to be doing, and vice versa, it is low value because while they may be able to demonstrate varied levels of technical proficiency, they are nevertheless harming our culture and civilisation as a whole.

Regardless of what feminists think, the highest intrinsic value work that women can truly perform is to bear and raise children and to guide the household on a day by day basis. It is THIS which lends to the passing on of our faith to the next generation, provides stability to society, creates the environment in which children are properly raised to be good citizens, and which imparts our traditions and culture to those coming after us. This nurturing role is the perfect counterpoise to the authority and risk-taking of the husband and father who goes outside the home to wrestle a living from the world around him. If a woman won’t fulfill these roles even though she would otherwise be able to do so, then she is eliminating her own worth, just as is a “man” who refuses to protect, defend, and lead his family, and who refuses to play the man for his culture and society as a whole.