Friendly neighborhood feminist.

One summer in junior high, my best friend and her family took me on a family retreat. We all pitched tents in the back yard of one families cabin by a little river. I, being almost remarkably uninterested in boys at the age of 13, listened in discomfort as some of the other girls my age (and younger) discussed the relative merits of the young men present at the retreat. Not their characters, mind you, but their bodies. They waited anxiously for one particular young man to go swimming, almost giddy at the prospect of seeing him without a shirt. I wanted no part in this voyeurism. I felt bad for the poor guy. It seemed so degrading for him to be the object of their obsession. When the great event finally occurred, I refused to give the girls my camera, so they took someone else’s and spent the afternoon trying to snap pictures of the fellow’s glorious chest. Call me a prude; I stayed in our tent and played cards.

My friend at Bad Catholic has recently posted This about the ongoing stupidity of some feminists. Specifically, he was pocking fun at a group of them for walking topless through the streets of a city and being surprised and horrified when men took pictures. I laughed along through most of the post, but one paragraph ruffled my feminist feathers a little. “Woman has been historically more moral than man” he writes. This always bothers me. Women have, historically, been idealized as much as they have been oppressed. Victorian prudery (which was the last straw that tipped the feminist movement into action) promoted the idea that women are inherently more virtuous then men. They don’t have sexual desires, therefore, no sexual temptations. They are naturally submissive, refined, gentle, able to subdue, civilize, and please their husbands.

The feminist saw this over-awed worship of women that some men offered as another form of oppression. This idea of natural goodness was one more way that men could say “we are Human, women are Other.” They realized that as soon as a women proves herself to be less than the angle of the house, the disillusioned man feels like he’s been cheated. He didn’t get a proper woman after all. The expectations are unfair. To liberate women from these unrealistic expectations, and to free men from this illusion, feminists started portraying the virtuous girl as unattractive.  The “good girl” is perceived as stuck up, unsympathetic to human weakness, and ultimately a hypocrite. The good girl is a fake. The problem is that the feminists, as they often do, threw out the baby with the bath water. Instead of asserting their moral equality with men, they asserted their immoral equality, which is what Marcs post was about.

The girls who sat around waiting for somebody’s oldest son to take off his shirt are not unlike those men photographing a parade of topless women. You can claim that men can go topless because they have less to cover (duh).  But I can actually see where the feminists are coming from. Men need to practice modesty too, in consideration for women who (despite popular, or unpopular belief) are actually prone to temptation in the presence of a half dressed man. But this is a side issue.

I know many women who work very hard to keep themselves pure, mind, body and soul. If you promote the lie of the naturally virtuous women of the Victorian era, you are disregarding the heroism of these women who truly live the virtues of modesty and chastity. That “good girl” in pop culture is mocked because people believe that either she is lying (say the feminists) or she is somehow naturally good (say the Victorians). If you are lucky enough to find one, it’s not nature. It’s hard work and the grace of God. So my friend at Bad Catholic, if you have the good fortune, one day, to marry a woman who is more moral than you, transcends you “primitive nature” with her “primitive grace,” lifts you up and challenges you to be a more virtuous man, do her the honor of acknowledging that she can do that because she has been working with God to lift herself out of her sinful nature, just like you have.