The comments here that say “I personally haven’t encountered this so I have doubts about it being real” are so confusing to me. It’s happening—I know people in real life who are embracing these very ideologies & lifestyle practices. Not having experienced something firsthand doesn’t mean it’s being overstated by those who have knowledge or experience with it. This article is prophetic in the sense that it describes a truth about something that is already happening and may become even more widespread. It is not making a mountain of a molehill. This ideology is dangerous and it’s real.
Amen. I wonder how much of this is the fact that women often talk to one another about these things, and men often don't. So perhaps it sounds as if women are encountering fringe groups online and taking it too seriously, but the reality is that we are paying attention to the quiet sharing that happens over meals and breastfeeding and brief encounters at the church pews, and we're rightly concerned.
I think that for the men who have managed to miss the great demand-fueled perversion of porn-shaped marital expectations, it's not even on their radar when they view these discussions, and it needs to be!
I was once privy to an IRL discussion among friends: under debate was the idea that it could be a good gift to a spouse to engage in intimacy even if not directly feeling "in the mood." A gentleman was insistent that this was a good gift when offered, and that to turn away, as if only overflowing instinctive passion was acceptable, was the unkind response. A lady was arguing with equal passion that it was seriously detrimental to a relationship to engage in intimacy when there was no sense of inclination towards it. This discussion has stayed with me because, thanks to feminine conversations, I happened to know that the gentleman had willing gone through years-long periods of chastity in his marriage in order to allow for full healing of his wife's body after a traumatic birth. But I also knew that the lady was married to someone who had repeatedly faulted her for self-absorbtion because she had "forced him to deal with incredible temptation" by not "tending to his needs" in the weeks immediately following a similarly traumatic birth. For the gentleman in the conversation, it was an appalling idea that a man might pressure his wife into physical intimacy at a time when it would physically damage her. For the lady, it was her lived reality for several years.
I was thinking about similar conversations I have been part of, and the advice I have given to the ladies over the years who have asked me. I used to lean on the "just say yes even if you're not already in the mood" because women work differently than men and a lot of newlyweds just haven't figured that out yet, even absent outside pressures (I did make sure to mention that "I just wasn't thinking about it right then" is very different from "it causes pain or would be dangerous").
But there have been a couple times, especially in recent years, where a woman has asked me, very quietly, if she is frigid or a prude because her husband asks/expects/tells her to do things that are truly repulsive, and suggests that his ability to remain faithful depends on her compliance. It's....incredibly sad. And not feeling safe is a huge desire killer for women. Not to mention the idea that sex is viewed as an exchange of goods and services rather than a gift of self by both husband and wife. What a way to destroy a marriage.
Thank you for this Helen. I listened to your podcast and I must confess that I was initially confused by your new approach with this series. I am technically gen z, but my bubble, at least from college and grad school, is hyperwoke Ivy League types. I still feel like I would need to fight for the right to be seen as valuable as a homemaker instead of a McKinsey consultant or woke academic within this group. The idea that people actually think like the weird online trads irl is so crazy to me (I’m guessing that’s why you’ve gotten pushback, people can’t imagine it) but it makes logical sense that it would happen. As you say, 15 years ago many thought transgender tumblr was an online fringe. I really appreciate you explaining where you’re coming from here. Even if these “trad” people don’t come to dominate the culture, the truth does matter, so pushing back against the ideology is not a bad thing.
One more thought — I usually think of mainstream trends as coming down from elite institutions. I that sort of happened with woke stuff: it started on tumblr, was embraced by academia, and then made its way into the regular culture. I have a very hard time imagining the same thing happening with the trad stuff, but that’s not to say it couldn’t. More so, I wonder if could take an entirely different path to become dominate, superseding the traditional academic world. Perhaps elite academia is actually becoming irrelevant for portending future cultural trends. I don’t know, just thoughts.
I just pulled our family—and all my daughters—out of the church for this reason. Thank you for writing this. It is a huge issue. I call the older women who bully the other young women into vile animal servitude “the madames of the brothel.” Our church even let one of these addict husbands, a convicted s*x predator, back into the fold and positions of trust.
Yikes! I’m glad you got out of there. Men have made themselves gods at a lot of these “churches” and this moron women worship them without a question, basking in the glow of being picked.
I agree wholeheartedly and it’s such a joy to read your work. I know people on the Christian side who are depriving their girls of an education because “they don’t need it to be homemakers” and it absolutely tears me apart.
Helen is correct when she says a lot of so-called trad Christians don’t think of women as fully human. Sending girls to school would be like sending your cow to school — a pointless waste of time for all concerned. It’s bleak.
It’s not common…but it is actually real, not some made up fantasy by angry left-leaning people. And I personally think it’s starting to appear more frequently.
Honestly, in a way it makes sense (logically). If you want to enslave women, you *withhold education*. How else could you keep them happily/ignorantly in their subservient state??
I've seen this as well, but I'm not convinced it's now more frequent. Perhaps I'm missing those circles? But the ATI/Bill Gothard crowds of the first homeschooling generation had a tendency to lean this direction. There was also Vision Forum, and the way that they extolled the stay at home daughter lifestyle. I remember my mother pushing back against a lot of this messaging; it has been around a while, for sure.
But maybe it was less in the guise of No Education and more along the lines of just not allowing daughters to start part time jobs early in the way that sons were encouraged to, or in not explaining finances to them, or having them develop a marketable skill or really learning to wrestle with upper education? Hmmm.
In my experience, the ATI/Bill Gothard crowds that kept their daughters from pursuing higher education also kept their sons from it too, and also discouraged them both from getting part time work unless it was with a family. That aside, I used to LOVE the Vision Forum catalogues and would spend hours perusing them with my siblings!!
That seems so wild to me, but also I have seen it online a lot, and I think once in person. I am frequently mildly frustrated by my wife’s lack of knowledge about thermodynamics or materials science or biology or various other technical subjects. I don’t know why you wouldnt want a wife who understands a fair amount about all these things and more—theyre so useful in daily life. To say nothing of the need to educate children, etc if you were going to be a homeschool stay at home mom. You can get your kids so far ahead of traditional schools it is wild. My dad was teaching me how to solve equations and derive my own for model rocketry when I was in like 3rd grade. It was awesome. After elementary school, I wasnt challenged in physics classes until college.
One uniting theme of the far left and far right vis-a-vis women is that we can have unique insight into our feelings and experiences. Left-leaning people do this by rhetorically flattening the inherent differences between men and women and by bullying women who disagree with the current reproductive rights narrative. Meanwhile, right-wingers (both online and in real life, for me) insist that women who have experienced sexism, harassment, and similar challenges are just confused, or else evil harpies. Both tend to belittle women with snide, condescending comments, despite claiming to be the ones who truly care about women.
Thank you for this. I had my reactionary phase after I accepted Christ and was leaving queer lefty circles. Went to a Baptist adjacent church for 2 years. Was important to my formation, but I’m glad I’ve found a more moderate and intellectually open church. I don’t want politics in church or incel rhetoric in Bible study. I found a good man who is barely online, was raised right and has character
As someone who doesn't fit comfortably in any political box or faction, I find your writing very comforting. To my mind, forging your opinions and nourishing your faith with knowledge, critical thinking and curiosity for the world around you is building your house on a bedrock of stone.
My convictions are what they are today specifically because I was encouraged to read, debate and discuss, to confront in an intelligent and nuanced way opinions that are opposite to my own, to discover cultures far from mine. My position in favor of traditional family values, for example, would be an empty shell if I was just repeating blindly what I was told, and what good would that be for my child? What could possibly grow from a barren belief? These men you speak of who want to keep women in ignorance because "they don't need to be educated to stay at home" are actually making it impossible for them to live a truly virtuous life, and doing the Devil's work by destroying their own families.
Hi Helen, I think you’re onto something, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. What you’re writing about has been a difficult part of my faith for some time. It might be helpful to name names, as I haven’t personally read anything by the "porn-to-Andrew-Tate-to-rad-trad" converts you're referring to. From what I've seen, trads generally believe that a woman can't “have it all” and must choose between a career and a family. However, they still support single women pursuing careers and education and believe that married women should have volunteer roles or activities beyond just raising children.
I think the primary goal for many traditional Catholic couples is to live a shared life that doesn’t rely on effective contraception. Married women’s entry into the workforce was largely enabled by technological changes that traditional Catholics can’t use. Also, I don’t think we can assume what’s happening in anyone’s bedroom. When women end up with less than ideally spaced pregnancies it’s less about a belief that women don’t have the right to refuse sex and more about trying to use NFP, which can be notoriously unreliable and especially unreliable post-partum.
My best friend from high school has fallen into the trad ideology, and it’s ruining our friendship. Her entire personality has changed. She thinks single women (including me) are ultimately unfulfilled. She doesn’t think women should go to college. She doesn’t think a woman should have any job or even HOBBY outside of the home; she thinks every woman should not just learn to cook but learn to LOVE to cook, because the kitchen is a woman’s most fulfilling and natural station. She thinks having as many children as possible is every Christian woman’s mission on Earth. She has no opinion her husband hasn’t signed off on. To those who say this movement isn’t taking shape in the real world — it is. And it’s hurting real people. Not to mention it’s an entirely unbiblical ideology and completely ignorant of history. Thanks for the post!
This piece hits home to me. I see an evolving world where unthinking women scream "patriarchy" and unthinking men scream "feminism" as if these two things can explain everything about the world around them. I put the blame for the screams largely on technology that funnels people and their actions into boxes. It is a technology largely designed by men and so to me seems a bit harsher for the female half. We need to remember our collective humanity. Indeed the internet does seem to be paving the way for reality. As men are being driven to consume porn and learn that feminism is the source of all the world's ills, many young women are denouncing womanhood altogether. And yes, for all the men that do not think this is happening, it goes the other way too. It just looks different.
I love nothing more than anti ideology essays. They are the incarnational answers to the problems of today, no matter our politics or preferences. This one was especially fantastic. Well said! :)
Thisss. I think much of the right is unaware of the legalist ideological overcorrection which has infected the interweb male right and it is scary. One male influencer I keep tabs on teaches his male followers that all women are whores and jezebels. They claim to be Christ followers but all love and humanization of women is absent. Most of church history’s theology of women has been abysmal and being traditional should not include regressing to these modes of thinking. I highly recommend Christian’s read ‘How God Sees Women’ by Teran Williams. The self shrinking and Aunt Lydia-ing has to stop.
"Pornography addiction and masculinist heresy go hand in glove, pardon the pun, even while the figureheads encourage men to stop masturbating, for this reason: it does not fundamentally change or challenge their formation with regards to women."
The more prevalent pornography becomes, the more data we have on its effect. The results are disastrous, and solutions are badly needed. A ground-up restructuring of culture is in order.
Many people misuse faith to hide themselves because of various issues, for example, sexual orientation, or to vent their anger and frustrations. True faith is conjoined with love, but love as a verb, not a fleeting emotion.
Good essay. I’ve noticed these issues too, but from a different vector as a gay guy. I’m sympathetic to these guys’ grievances but not the bullshit attitudes and behaviors that often come with it. There’s a lot of brokenness just beneath the surface that gets projected onto others. To some extent, these dynamics are a mirror image of the toxic femininity issues I wrote about yesterday. https://jeffgiesea.substack.com/p/how-toxic-femininity-fueled-trumps-election
Totally. The throughput as I see it is this blinding victimology — a desire, through a monocausal ideological explanation of the world to outsource agency, prudence, and the responsibility for squandering one’s own potential for greatness. We need a new politics of excellence, and neither of these factions belong…
Yes. Squint, and one can see that blinding victimology is behind a lot of Trumpism, even as people complain about victim ideology from the left. So much projection. I agree that a politics of excellence, of being the elite we wish to see, is definitely needed!
The comments here that say “I personally haven’t encountered this so I have doubts about it being real” are so confusing to me. It’s happening—I know people in real life who are embracing these very ideologies & lifestyle practices. Not having experienced something firsthand doesn’t mean it’s being overstated by those who have knowledge or experience with it. This article is prophetic in the sense that it describes a truth about something that is already happening and may become even more widespread. It is not making a mountain of a molehill. This ideology is dangerous and it’s real.
Amen. I wonder how much of this is the fact that women often talk to one another about these things, and men often don't. So perhaps it sounds as if women are encountering fringe groups online and taking it too seriously, but the reality is that we are paying attention to the quiet sharing that happens over meals and breastfeeding and brief encounters at the church pews, and we're rightly concerned.
I think that for the men who have managed to miss the great demand-fueled perversion of porn-shaped marital expectations, it's not even on their radar when they view these discussions, and it needs to be!
I was once privy to an IRL discussion among friends: under debate was the idea that it could be a good gift to a spouse to engage in intimacy even if not directly feeling "in the mood." A gentleman was insistent that this was a good gift when offered, and that to turn away, as if only overflowing instinctive passion was acceptable, was the unkind response. A lady was arguing with equal passion that it was seriously detrimental to a relationship to engage in intimacy when there was no sense of inclination towards it. This discussion has stayed with me because, thanks to feminine conversations, I happened to know that the gentleman had willing gone through years-long periods of chastity in his marriage in order to allow for full healing of his wife's body after a traumatic birth. But I also knew that the lady was married to someone who had repeatedly faulted her for self-absorbtion because she had "forced him to deal with incredible temptation" by not "tending to his needs" in the weeks immediately following a similarly traumatic birth. For the gentleman in the conversation, it was an appalling idea that a man might pressure his wife into physical intimacy at a time when it would physically damage her. For the lady, it was her lived reality for several years.
I was thinking about similar conversations I have been part of, and the advice I have given to the ladies over the years who have asked me. I used to lean on the "just say yes even if you're not already in the mood" because women work differently than men and a lot of newlyweds just haven't figured that out yet, even absent outside pressures (I did make sure to mention that "I just wasn't thinking about it right then" is very different from "it causes pain or would be dangerous").
But there have been a couple times, especially in recent years, where a woman has asked me, very quietly, if she is frigid or a prude because her husband asks/expects/tells her to do things that are truly repulsive, and suggests that his ability to remain faithful depends on her compliance. It's....incredibly sad. And not feeling safe is a huge desire killer for women. Not to mention the idea that sex is viewed as an exchange of goods and services rather than a gift of self by both husband and wife. What a way to destroy a marriage.
I'm confused about why that's confusing to you.
Thank you for this Helen. I listened to your podcast and I must confess that I was initially confused by your new approach with this series. I am technically gen z, but my bubble, at least from college and grad school, is hyperwoke Ivy League types. I still feel like I would need to fight for the right to be seen as valuable as a homemaker instead of a McKinsey consultant or woke academic within this group. The idea that people actually think like the weird online trads irl is so crazy to me (I’m guessing that’s why you’ve gotten pushback, people can’t imagine it) but it makes logical sense that it would happen. As you say, 15 years ago many thought transgender tumblr was an online fringe. I really appreciate you explaining where you’re coming from here. Even if these “trad” people don’t come to dominate the culture, the truth does matter, so pushing back against the ideology is not a bad thing.
One more thought — I usually think of mainstream trends as coming down from elite institutions. I that sort of happened with woke stuff: it started on tumblr, was embraced by academia, and then made its way into the regular culture. I have a very hard time imagining the same thing happening with the trad stuff, but that’s not to say it couldn’t. More so, I wonder if could take an entirely different path to become dominate, superseding the traditional academic world. Perhaps elite academia is actually becoming irrelevant for portending future cultural trends. I don’t know, just thoughts.
I just pulled our family—and all my daughters—out of the church for this reason. Thank you for writing this. It is a huge issue. I call the older women who bully the other young women into vile animal servitude “the madames of the brothel.” Our church even let one of these addict husbands, a convicted s*x predator, back into the fold and positions of trust.
Keep speaking about it!
I hope you can discover a spiritual home that honors human dignity very soon. Thank you!
Yikes! I’m glad you got out of there. Men have made themselves gods at a lot of these “churches” and this moron women worship them without a question, basking in the glow of being picked.
I agree wholeheartedly and it’s such a joy to read your work. I know people on the Christian side who are depriving their girls of an education because “they don’t need it to be homemakers” and it absolutely tears me apart.
Thanks, Emily. I truly value your support and input. I have seen the same.
Helen is correct when she says a lot of so-called trad Christians don’t think of women as fully human. Sending girls to school would be like sending your cow to school — a pointless waste of time for all concerned. It’s bleak.
How common is this in real life?!
It’s not common…but it is actually real, not some made up fantasy by angry left-leaning people. And I personally think it’s starting to appear more frequently.
Honestly, in a way it makes sense (logically). If you want to enslave women, you *withhold education*. How else could you keep them happily/ignorantly in their subservient state??
I've seen this as well, but I'm not convinced it's now more frequent. Perhaps I'm missing those circles? But the ATI/Bill Gothard crowds of the first homeschooling generation had a tendency to lean this direction. There was also Vision Forum, and the way that they extolled the stay at home daughter lifestyle. I remember my mother pushing back against a lot of this messaging; it has been around a while, for sure.
But maybe it was less in the guise of No Education and more along the lines of just not allowing daughters to start part time jobs early in the way that sons were encouraged to, or in not explaining finances to them, or having them develop a marketable skill or really learning to wrestle with upper education? Hmmm.
In my experience, the ATI/Bill Gothard crowds that kept their daughters from pursuing higher education also kept their sons from it too, and also discouraged them both from getting part time work unless it was with a family. That aside, I used to LOVE the Vision Forum catalogues and would spend hours perusing them with my siblings!!
That seems so wild to me, but also I have seen it online a lot, and I think once in person. I am frequently mildly frustrated by my wife’s lack of knowledge about thermodynamics or materials science or biology or various other technical subjects. I don’t know why you wouldnt want a wife who understands a fair amount about all these things and more—theyre so useful in daily life. To say nothing of the need to educate children, etc if you were going to be a homeschool stay at home mom. You can get your kids so far ahead of traditional schools it is wild. My dad was teaching me how to solve equations and derive my own for model rocketry when I was in like 3rd grade. It was awesome. After elementary school, I wasnt challenged in physics classes until college.
One uniting theme of the far left and far right vis-a-vis women is that we can have unique insight into our feelings and experiences. Left-leaning people do this by rhetorically flattening the inherent differences between men and women and by bullying women who disagree with the current reproductive rights narrative. Meanwhile, right-wingers (both online and in real life, for me) insist that women who have experienced sexism, harassment, and similar challenges are just confused, or else evil harpies. Both tend to belittle women with snide, condescending comments, despite claiming to be the ones who truly care about women.
*is denying that we can have unique insight! Just another sleep-deprived Mom here ☺️
Thank you for this. I had my reactionary phase after I accepted Christ and was leaving queer lefty circles. Went to a Baptist adjacent church for 2 years. Was important to my formation, but I’m glad I’ve found a more moderate and intellectually open church. I don’t want politics in church or incel rhetoric in Bible study. I found a good man who is barely online, was raised right and has character
As someone who doesn't fit comfortably in any political box or faction, I find your writing very comforting. To my mind, forging your opinions and nourishing your faith with knowledge, critical thinking and curiosity for the world around you is building your house on a bedrock of stone.
My convictions are what they are today specifically because I was encouraged to read, debate and discuss, to confront in an intelligent and nuanced way opinions that are opposite to my own, to discover cultures far from mine. My position in favor of traditional family values, for example, would be an empty shell if I was just repeating blindly what I was told, and what good would that be for my child? What could possibly grow from a barren belief? These men you speak of who want to keep women in ignorance because "they don't need to be educated to stay at home" are actually making it impossible for them to live a truly virtuous life, and doing the Devil's work by destroying their own families.
Hi Helen, I think you’re onto something, and I’m looking forward to the rest of the series. What you’re writing about has been a difficult part of my faith for some time. It might be helpful to name names, as I haven’t personally read anything by the "porn-to-Andrew-Tate-to-rad-trad" converts you're referring to. From what I've seen, trads generally believe that a woman can't “have it all” and must choose between a career and a family. However, they still support single women pursuing careers and education and believe that married women should have volunteer roles or activities beyond just raising children.
I think the primary goal for many traditional Catholic couples is to live a shared life that doesn’t rely on effective contraception. Married women’s entry into the workforce was largely enabled by technological changes that traditional Catholics can’t use. Also, I don’t think we can assume what’s happening in anyone’s bedroom. When women end up with less than ideally spaced pregnancies it’s less about a belief that women don’t have the right to refuse sex and more about trying to use NFP, which can be notoriously unreliable and especially unreliable post-partum.
My best friend from high school has fallen into the trad ideology, and it’s ruining our friendship. Her entire personality has changed. She thinks single women (including me) are ultimately unfulfilled. She doesn’t think women should go to college. She doesn’t think a woman should have any job or even HOBBY outside of the home; she thinks every woman should not just learn to cook but learn to LOVE to cook, because the kitchen is a woman’s most fulfilling and natural station. She thinks having as many children as possible is every Christian woman’s mission on Earth. She has no opinion her husband hasn’t signed off on. To those who say this movement isn’t taking shape in the real world — it is. And it’s hurting real people. Not to mention it’s an entirely unbiblical ideology and completely ignorant of history. Thanks for the post!
I also know real people who are living this reality. Anyone who denies it as fringe is either ignorant, delusional, or truly not paying attention.
This piece hits home to me. I see an evolving world where unthinking women scream "patriarchy" and unthinking men scream "feminism" as if these two things can explain everything about the world around them. I put the blame for the screams largely on technology that funnels people and their actions into boxes. It is a technology largely designed by men and so to me seems a bit harsher for the female half. We need to remember our collective humanity. Indeed the internet does seem to be paving the way for reality. As men are being driven to consume porn and learn that feminism is the source of all the world's ills, many young women are denouncing womanhood altogether. And yes, for all the men that do not think this is happening, it goes the other way too. It just looks different.
I love nothing more than anti ideology essays. They are the incarnational answers to the problems of today, no matter our politics or preferences. This one was especially fantastic. Well said! :)
Thisss. I think much of the right is unaware of the legalist ideological overcorrection which has infected the interweb male right and it is scary. One male influencer I keep tabs on teaches his male followers that all women are whores and jezebels. They claim to be Christ followers but all love and humanization of women is absent. Most of church history’s theology of women has been abysmal and being traditional should not include regressing to these modes of thinking. I highly recommend Christian’s read ‘How God Sees Women’ by Teran Williams. The self shrinking and Aunt Lydia-ing has to stop.
Excellent essay. This part especially
"Pornography addiction and masculinist heresy go hand in glove, pardon the pun, even while the figureheads encourage men to stop masturbating, for this reason: it does not fundamentally change or challenge their formation with regards to women."
The more prevalent pornography becomes, the more data we have on its effect. The results are disastrous, and solutions are badly needed. A ground-up restructuring of culture is in order.
Helen, thank you for your wisdom and willingness to confront the satanic lies coming out of this deranged movement.
Many people misuse faith to hide themselves because of various issues, for example, sexual orientation, or to vent their anger and frustrations. True faith is conjoined with love, but love as a verb, not a fleeting emotion.
Good essay. I’ve noticed these issues too, but from a different vector as a gay guy. I’m sympathetic to these guys’ grievances but not the bullshit attitudes and behaviors that often come with it. There’s a lot of brokenness just beneath the surface that gets projected onto others. To some extent, these dynamics are a mirror image of the toxic femininity issues I wrote about yesterday. https://jeffgiesea.substack.com/p/how-toxic-femininity-fueled-trumps-election
Totally. The throughput as I see it is this blinding victimology — a desire, through a monocausal ideological explanation of the world to outsource agency, prudence, and the responsibility for squandering one’s own potential for greatness. We need a new politics of excellence, and neither of these factions belong…
Yes. Squint, and one can see that blinding victimology is behind a lot of Trumpism, even as people complain about victim ideology from the left. So much projection. I agree that a politics of excellence, of being the elite we wish to see, is definitely needed!