Why is toxic patriarchy making a comeback?
Ericka Andersen
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Toxic, Christian patriarchy is making a comeback with younger millennials and Gen Z. Scroll through Christian Twitter, and you’ll find men and women ideologically and radically committed to traditional gender roles, lamenting the sins of yoga pants, makeupless wives, and feminized masculinity. The men extol the virtues of virility, headship, and physical labor, admonishing women to become quiet, submissive homemakers.
Women proudly don the title “patriarchalist” in their bios and share memes obsessing over hyper-feminine images of homemaking mothers. Some even follow accounts like this one, which encourages women not to hold marital rape against their husbands.
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In a viral tweet, one rising star in the movement wrote that the only “acceptable occasion” to wear yoga pants is when a woman is “alone in the house” with her husband. Another writes regularly of Christian women who are chaste, gentle, and feminine.
A woman may feel called by God to eliminate yoga pants from her public wardrobe, but the explicit claim on their morality is concerning. Furthermore, there is nothing wrong with the virtues in the latter example, but many women simply don’t fit the stereotypical examples of femininity, and that’s OK.
This leads me to Turning Point USA’s recent Young Women’s Leadership Conference. An audience member asked TPUSA founder Charlie Kirk how she could balance her career ambitions with those of motherhood. Quick to crush her dreams, Kirk told her she’d have to choose, and if she wanted happiness, a career wasn’t the answer.
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“Go try to spend a couple days with babies, and if it doesn’t move you to want to have some of your own, then go do the surgeon thing,” he said. ”If you don’t get baby fever being around young kids as a young lady, then you kind of have your answer.”
A 22-year-old college student who doesn’t get “baby fever” isn’t destined for the single life. Most women of this demographic aren’t ready for babies, nor in college to get a Mrs. degree, as the old joke goes.
I understand what Kirk and others are doing. Things aren’t going well for Western culture. People are marrying less, having fewer children, and experiencing worsening rates of mental health. I, too, believe that marriage and family are good for society, that the data show married people are happier, are more fulfilled, and enhance the world around them.
But we’re at risk of recreating a world that’s not good for women — again — with this kind of rhetoric. It’s only been 100 years since women gained the right to vote. There are literally women still alive who were born before the 19th Amendment passed. At one point in the last century, we had “beach police” walking around measuring women’s swimsuits. Just 20 years ago (and sometimes still), Christian girls were told their bodies and clothing could “cause a man to stumble” as if just existing were a sin. One man recently suggested that we implement gender-separated gyms and beaches, so you know something is still amiss.
Men and women are biologically wired for different interests and abilities. This is a wonderful, God-designed system, but few legitimate “rules” exist to contain these things. The truth is, women are wired for motherhood, and more than 86% of women in the United States have had children by their mid-40s. For Kirk to tell this young woman she’d need to choose between motherhood and a career is actually harmful to the cause he pursues.
Do we want women to get married and have children? If yes, don’t tell them they have to sacrifice every other dream. Many women want to be homemakers, and that is a beautiful, important, admirable desire. In fact, one poll showed that 39% of women with children under 18 would “prefer to stay home.”
But that’s not everyone, and when we tell women there are no in-between options, we suffocate them. Kirk and others like him are overcorrecting here, stuffing women back into the archaic boxes that led them to embrace the sexual revolution and all that came with it in the first place.
As Yoram Hazony writes, the “nuclear family” model of the 1950s was a “tomb for women,” who became isolated with the “minimalist ingredients that the structure of the nuclear family had left them.” As Hazony notes, prior to the nuclear structure, people lived in traditional families, with generational family nearness, shared business endeavors, and strong, faith-based community, ritual, and structure.
You still hear it today. Women are often lonely and unhappy, disconnected and desperate for friendship. I see it in Facebook groups for mothers every day. We eliminated the means it takes for women to pursue this idyllic vision patriarchal ideologues advocate. For even this one reason, it’s not feasible to demand that women take on this role with such specificity. There are so many right ways to be a mother these days, even within the context of a conservative, Christian framework.
We each have different callings, and it’s quite possible to cultivate ideologically and professionally diverse, strong families that make better children, communities, and societies at large.
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Ericka Andersen is a freelance writer living in Indianapolis, Indiana. She is the author of Reason to Return: Why Women Need the Church & the Church Needs Women.