The #MeToo campaign has far-reaching implications for both feminism and the so-called sexual revolution to which feminism gave rise.
First, today’s feminist affirms a model of womanhood that is, or is supposed to be, radically at odds with what she takes to be the traditional, patriarchal stereotype from which feminists have (allegedly) liberated women. Feminist Woman is strong and self-sufficient; she is large and in charge, no one’s victim. Non-feminist Woman, in stark contrast, is said to be weak, needy, and forever at the mercy of her male oppressors.
Yet as the #MeToo campaign has made abundantly clear, Feminist Woman is a mirage, an illusion.
She is a Big Lie.
The vast majority of women on board the #MeToo train travel in left-leaning circles. They are Feminist Woman. Yet here they are revealing to the world that they are every bit as much in need of protection as Non-feminist Woman, though they certainly are much louder about it. As to strength, the evidence does not suggest that Feminist Woman has the advantage, either.
There is nothing strong or self-sufficient about a woman who, upon being sexually harassed or assaulted, remains silent in exchange either for accepting hush money or otherwise advancing her career, thereby making it easier for other women to fall prey to the same predations to which she claims she was subjected.
There is nothing strong or self-sufficient about a woman who, after having remained silent for decades, in many instances, decides to level allegations of sexual abuse only after many others came forward beginning the trend that makes it attractive and, in some cases, even profitable to do so.
Such a woman is nothing if not at the mercy of men.
Feminist Woman is strong, self-sufficient, and no man’s victim—except for when she is weak, needy, and the victim of predatory men.
Repudiating the West’s Dominant Ethic
Second, Feminist Woman’s position on sexual morality is as self-contradictory as her position on women.
Classical Marxists once equated traditional Christian sexual morality with a form of “bourgeois” repression. Feminist Woman, exposing unmistakably her Leftist pedigree, regards the Christian sexual ethic as an instrument of misogynistic, “heteronormative” oppression. Thus, the sexual revolution that broke loose some 50 years ago was self-consciously meant as an unequivocal repudiation of the West’s dominant, traditional ethic.
This ethic affirms the virtues of modesty, self-discipline, self-love, and mutual respect between men and women. It prescribes chastity until marriage, which is considered a sacrament, the lifetime covenant that a man and a woman enter into with one another and with the God who instituted marriage for the essential purpose of begetting and raising children. Feminist Woman and her fellow “revolutionaries” have spent over a half-a-century doing whatever they could to hack this ethic to pieces. Its virtues Feminist Woman has transformed into vices. Along with her fellow sexual revolutionaries, Feminist Woman has derided and mocked the Christian sexual ethic.
For humility and self-restraint, she has substituted ostentatiousness and self-indulgence. Feminist Woman has jettisoned commitment in favor of convenience. Marriage she wrote off as nothing more or less than a “social construct” that was devised by heterosexual males for the sake of bolstering their “hegemony” over women and sexual minorities (homosexuals, the “transgendered,” etc.), and sex, far from serving a larger common good like the production and nurturing of a family, exists first and foremost for the sake of bringing pleasure to those who indulge in it.
As long as the sex is consensual (however individual feminists define this), it matters not with whom, where, when, or how it occurs.
This is the anti-Christian ethos within which the #MeToo campaign has taken flight.
The Revolution Eats Its Own
In short, the sexual revolution has proven to be not very liberating after all. It has turned on itself, cannibalizing its own.
Unfortunately, it isn’t just the “revolutionaries” who have been harmed. Most tragically, untold numbers of children, both born and unborn, are casualties of this systematic assault against traditional sexual morality. The rate of children born out of wedlock has risen astronomically, as has the rate of divorce, and the phenomenon of the “broken home” is now commonplace.
And since the early days of the revolution to the present, tens and tens of millions of children have been denied the opportunity to leave their mothers’ wombs, killed by their mothers in the name of a “woman’s right to choose.”
To be clear, once convenience trumped commitment and the pleasure of the individual assumed categorical importance, the child in the womb became a “fetus” and the killing of that child an “abortion.”
Given its dependence upon a deceptive vocabulary, the sexual revolution, like feminism itself, reveals itself as a Big Lie.
Yet it is a most dangerous lie. It has resulted—and continues to result—in the mass destruction of lives, including and especially the lives of the most innocent and defenseless among us, those who have never and could never “consent” to the sexual revolution, and who are unceremoniously ignored by the #MeToo campaigners.