Welcome back to the Federalist Radio Hour. I'm Joy Pullman, the executive editor
here at The Federalist. I'm joining the show today to speak with a special
guest, Carrie Gress. She is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy
Center in Washington, DC and the author of the brand new book The End
of Woman, How Smashing the Patriarchy has Destroyed Us. She's also the editor
of the Fabulous Theology of Home website and the mother of five children. Carrie,
Welcome, Thanks so much for having me. Carrie, Why don't you
start by summarizing the argument of the End of Woman and then telling us what
drove you to write it. So the new book really starts with the beginning
of feminism and starts pulling out some very distinct patterns that we see start there
and finish to where we're at today, which is, you know, we're
at the point where we're actually trying to change women into men biologically, and
so, you know, I just really it started with a question how why
can't we define a woman? And why are we trying to make women into
men? And that's sort of you know, I went back to the first
wave of feminism. I had written about the second wave, but I went
back to the first wave really not not sure what I was going to find,
and ended up finding just a whole trove of pieces that really put together
this whole movement so that we can see it. It really is in an
ideology of a piece. You know. I think a lot of people have
talked about feminism being hijacked at some point or taking a very left turn in
the sixties. That what I discovered was that that's really not the case.
That all of those elements were there. So it looks at how feminism from
the very beginning has been asking the question, you know, how do we
help women, but not as women, it's asking the question, how do
we help women become like men? And so I think that that, you
know, the whole book sort of steps through that and helps us figure out,
like, this is why we were having these struggles because we haven't really
been encouraging womanhood. We've been encouraging women to become like men. And I
that actually when you pin oh, the second part was what drove you to
write the book? Oh? Okay? So I ended up writing it partially
because I have had written a book before called the Anti Mary Exposed which was
a Catholic book and really talked about this issue. And I went back to
just the beginning of second wave feminism, and I had a lot of people
asking me, you know what about first wave and you know, can you
write something that is on this topic. But that's also for people that are
Protestant or secular, you know, can be given to anyone. So it's
kind of those pieces together. But it really didn't come together until I started
digging into the research, because I was expecting to find some very like lovely
work on women. But you know, what I found was not at all
what I expected to find, and found just you know, remarkable connections to
the occult and a lot of really dark content that you know, I thought
had only sprung up in the sixties, and it goes way goes back much
further than that. So you actually yourself didn't expect So, if I'm hearing
you correctly, you did not expect to kind of find that the trail of
feminism going back to its inception, kind of had the seeds of what we're
seeing today in the division and the kind of attack on the biological womanhood of
woman. Would that be an accurate characterization, Yeah, no, I think
that's absolutely right. I had no idea that these elements certainly free love,
this idea of smashing the patriarchy, and the occult that that any of these
things happened back then. I think we have very polished versions of the early
suffragettes, someone like Elizabeth Katie Santon and certainly Susan B. Anthony, and
think of them in kind of Victorian terms. And you know, even Mary
wellstone Craft, to you was writing back in the seventeen eighty seventeen nineties,
around the time of the French Revolution, She's can be very sterilized sometimes,
and so yeah, I think it's just was amazing. I was shocked,
you know, Halftime, just sort of picking my job from the ground as
I'm reading this content, having no idea. I felt the same my reading.
Yeah, yeah, it has that sense to it. And of course
the moving on later to Betty for Dan and the whole communist all the communist
connections, that was really eye opening and surprising and not at all expected.
So yeah, it was a pretty remarkable book to research, especially because I
didn't use people that were critics of feminism. I used people that either primary
sources or people that were really proponents proponents of what was happening. I think
you're absolutely right that a lot of women today see the transgender issue correctly as
an attack on female biology and existence. Really, but I do think that
a large number of people also think that the original feminism really meant something like
basic rights, treating women like humans, just really baseline stuff. So I
mean, obviously, for example, nobody has ever supported rape or beating women,
you know, systematically, But the argument is that women have historically been
systematically oppressed in these brutal kinds of ways, and they really needed feminism to
pull them out of that. So, based on your historical research, what
did you find that speaks to that common belief? Yeah, well, I
mean there's so much. I mean, the whole book really goes into that.
But I think that, you know, the one thing we have to
keep in mind is just how effective communism has been in this and how much
we have been taught to think like Marxists. And you know, even up
to two weeks ago, I had someone suggests that I should feel guilty about
doing this research because you know, I have an advanced degree and I work
and you know all of this that and I think that's the argument, is
that we can't have these things unless we had feminism. And yet a lot
of these things are just very common sensical of them were coming about in different
degrees over over time anyway, So it wasn't really feminism that brought them to
us. Furthermore, we didn't have to destroy the whole culture to get at
this point, because of course, a lot of what's happened with feminism really
underscores the woke movement and whatnot. But you know, the first thing to
know is just even the word patriarchy comes from angles. You know, he
was writing with Marx, and Marx died, and so he after Marx's death,
was trying to clean up things, especially on the women's issue, and
that was what one of the words that he came up with. He was
referring to it more in terms of, you know, the landed farmer or
landowner oppressing poor workers. But that got translated very easily. And this is
what feminism has done, is it's translated Marxism from the class warfare into the
warfare between the sexes. And so men are through this prism are automatically the
oppressors, and women are automatically the oppressed, we become the victims, and
it's just all of this continues to play itself out, and so yeah,
it's just really been remarkable to see how much this has been perpetrated in the
culture and how much we really believe this idea that you know, feminism is
ultimately trying to protect us, when in fact it's you know what it's done,
it's not. It hasn't made us happier. It's actually, you know,
if you look at the metrics of things like depression and suicide numbers,
even things like divorce and STDs, you can really see that women are not
getting happier from it, that it's actually creating a lot of misery and heartache
because we've made things that come natural to the come naturally to the woman's soul,
things like raising children and loving their husbands, we've made those things into
the what women are told are obstacles to their happiness. So yeah, it's
it's it's remarkable to me how effective the marketing has been and how little pushback
the Fountast movement has has received the years, And you know, some of
that is because they've been able to silence it, but they've also done an
amazing job of sort of telling people that are that don't explaining people that don't
agree with feminism, making them look like either you know, Handmaid's Tale women,
or you know, that they're idiots, or that you know they're they're
you know, too submissive to a man and can't think for themselves. I
mean, they have both painted themselves as the right women, and then the
women that would disagree with them, they've done an amazing job of painting them
and their own strokes. So yeah, it's it's been very very effective.
You're making me think about I just recently, you know, wrote about kind
of some of the recent attacks on Jenny Thomas, the wife of Supreme Court
Justice Clarence Thomas. You know, so there have been a number of profiles
of her, and it was and it was interesting to me to read it
and as a conservative woman who is you know, yeah, who believes that
God made women, he loves them, that the way they are right,
and that there's something absolutely beautiful about that, and and and to read that,
you could you could understand see that these feminist leftist writers couldn't figure out
how to square the fact that Jenny is also you know, conservative group in
a super conservative home where her mother was a conservative political activists and her mother
actually ran i believe, for states, you know, state leadership, state
representative position, and you know, it was, it was they were so
confused about how people describing themselves, women describing themselves as super conservative and making
sure to write misses on you know, their things, to identify themselves as
married women and respectful of their husband. And you know what, also,
they couldn't figure out the juxtaposition of that conservative female orientation with also running for
Congress being a really you know, kick ass wife of a Supreme Court justice
who was very effective politically. I've seen the same thing, for example,
even years back about Phillis Schlafley. You know, you know, she was
treated the same way, right, you know, she's this mother many children,
she's running and effectively out of her home office in national political organizing,
grassroots campaign for years and years. Then people just couldn't figure out, you
know, how a woman, you know, who believed in being a woman
and that the men and women are different, and that men are good,
you know, and that they have strengths that we you know, that women
should respect and vice versa. You know, a woman who believes all of
that. You know, how she you know, but shouldn't she be under
her husband's thumb and like his doormat and whatever? How do those two fit
together? Right? No, they're wordable. When they actually do pay attention
to women like that, they can't figure it out because it doesn't fit anywhere
within the framework that they've established for you know, fifty years now. Yeah,
I mean, I've just been I mean, it's been something to me.
It just it's been a slow dawning, you know, to think,
Oh, I'm a conservative woman who've been about around conservative men all my life,
and all the most like patriarchal leadership kinds of men that I've ever known
have been the most respectful of women and wanting to promote me and you know
and treat me like an equal as compared to you know, other interactions that
I've had. So that's been kind of a shocking personal experience juxtaposed against the
narrative. I think there's a huge psychological component, a lot of it probably
unconscious, to the way that women think through feminism and apply it to their
life. So even if you don't support far left feminism such as abortion until
birth, you know, the feminism still is a factor in the way women
think and live their everyday lives. So can you help provide clarity by defining
what you mean by feminism and in fact what historically you know and has it
meant, because some people just define it as not abusing women or basic human
respect, you know, which I think accounts for a lot of its support.
Is that how the women who created it and defined it themselves and propelled
it into public life. Is that how they defined it or what did your
research find? Yeah? No, I think that's a great question. And
one of the things that has been so challenging is is the fact that it
isn't often defined. I think we, just, like you said, think
of it as human respect or even just being pro woman. That that's the
only way in which you can sort of use It's the only language that you
can actually use to really declare yourself to be pro woman. But from what
I found, the three markers of it I think that go back to almost
the very beginning are like I mentioned before, there's free love and that means
non marital sex, no commitment sex, right, yeah, exactly, And
the end of the nuclear family, seeing marriage as an kind of enslavement.
So that was a very popular piece from the very beginning and was popularized actually
even by Mary Wallstonecraft's husband. He was one of the best known free love
advocates. He was an anarchist. He you know, was known very well
at that period for that being his position. So it was sort of a
scandal when he and Mary Wellstonecraft actually got married because she was pregnant and a
lot of that happened because she had already had a child out of pregnancy or
out of wedlock rather, and she saw what happened to her first child because
she wasn't married, and so she wanted the second child to have the advantage
of coming from a married family. And you can see this also. You
know Percy Shelley, who was Mary Wallstone's craft Walstonecraft's son in law. He's
a piece of work, that guy. Oh man, he's my marathony.
So he's also highly instrumental in this because he's trying to carry on the work
of both Mary Wallstonecraft and her husband William Godwin and create this you know,
women's revolution. So we see he's actually really I think, you know,
if you're gonna talk about where feminism as a unique unit comes from. I
think he's a much better starting place than than Wallstonecraft is because he includes the
free love piece. He also includes the occult element. He's highly into the
occult, highly into rewriting the Bible and making Eve a hero instead of a
temptress or you know, being her fault that that man fell. You know,
he's just such All of his work was really saturated with this element.
And then the third part is really just this restructuring of society, which ultimately
did become this idea of smashing the patriarchy that started with the Marxist and the
Communists later on, but that piece was around the very beginning. Wallstonecraft was
very much an advocate for getting rid of the church and getting rid of the
hierarchy in the military and in the church. Those are the two things that
she was very much a proponent of. So we can see that those things
sort of in different waves cycling through the movement, you know, really even
up to our own day. And so I think that that those three pieces
are kind of the essential core of feminism. Now there's going to be all
kinds of people that have different definitions of that, and I think that's really
where it's incumbent upon other people that they define. You know, Okay,
we accept this part, but not this part because those things are largely unsavory,
especially to conservative women. So we need to be really explicit about Okay,
this is the part that I'm maintaining, or this is what I mean
by feminism, because that's really where why it's been so effective is because it's
so slippery. People just sort of apply to it whatever they think it means
instead of what it actually means. So those are the three three elements,
and then of course just that overarching piece of really having idealized the masculine.
And this is what that weird schizophrenic you know dynamic happens between men and women
because you know that we know that this the idea of getting rid of gender
altogether was there from actually from Percy Shellet. He actually predicted that we would
try and get rid of it. He thought it was a construct and awful,
but that really came alive in the sixties and seventies of course, So
that dynamic where you know, women want to be like men and they want
men to be more like women, but at the same time they hate men.
So it's just this weird, you know, schizophrenic relationship that isn't he
You know, it just keeps me aggravated over and over again by by feminism
just because of these underpinning ideas. So yeah, I think that all of
that can really help us sort of unpack. Okay, well, what do
I if I'm going to use call myself a feminist? What do I really
mean by it? And this is what I mean by that may be either
similar or differentiated, but at least we have a base mark to start with
instead of just using it in sort of this maternal grandmotherly you know, concept
that somehow has been looking out for women for two hundred years. The watched
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Apple, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcast. I also don't think
it's like really fair to say, oh, I think feminism means just like
treating women like humans, because that's basically say, okay, I mean nobody
disagrees with that, So then you're kind of, you know, it's like
saying I don't know I believe that. You know, it's just like saying,
oh, my political platform is like peace, love and apple pie.
Okay, yeah, you know, that's it's just kind of you're not even
talking about the issues that people are talking about at that point. You know,
there's yeah, there's basically nobody except you know, fewer than one percent
of you know, actual scum kind of people who would disagree with that kind
of statement, you know, so it's not really it's not really germane to
the actual topic. I think it's just a cope. Yeah. No,
I think I think that's right, and I think that it's you know,
if you look at the movement itself, it's it's really interesting to just see
how effective they have been with these sound bites. I mean not just kind
of another one that has pulled out and glibly thrown out that sort of sounds
like that like a trump card of sorts. You know, the uh,
you know, treating women these humans, and you know there's all kinds of
from Madeline Albrights. You know, there's a place in hell for women that
don't vote for other women, and you know, on and on they just
they seem to be everywhere. There's you know, just it's like a movement
that was made for slogans. I mean they're all over the Women's March and
things like that. So I think that's another red flag that women really need
to pay attention to, is if you hear a slogan like that, maybe
you should, you know, get behind it a little bit more instead of
just absorbing it and smashing. The patriarchy is absolutely one of those that you
know, it's been spouted out in so many different ways, and of course
Barbie the Barbie Movie just highlighted that all the more. And yet there's so
much baggage and real content behind what they mean by that that is actually really
unsavory and incredibly unhealthy. It was very interesting to me to read in detail
what you put in your book, just the personal lives of all those key
early feminists, and there seems to be a real overlap between women who have
been treated very badly and feminist support. It's it's funny how, you know,
in their deep woundedness they cling to something that victimizes them even further.
I'm thinking about Wollstonecraft, for example, he treated Mary Shelley like garbage.
Women get stuck with all the baggage that comes from the intimate accounters of free
love, the emotional as well as a physical like babies. You know,
that's that's something you might have to commit yourself to for life. Motherhood.
It's it's an as essential choice. Giving birth to a baby can kill you,
you know. And you point out in the book that there is not
just a huge overlap between women alienated from motherhood and men and leading feminists.
You essentially cannot find a key feminist who has not been alienated from men and
motherhood and often very horrifying abuse and waves. And it seems almost like psychologically,
some of these women are doubling down on the very things that have hurt
them, because if they repudiate their ideology based on its obviously terrible consequences.
Then they have to explore their own responsibility for that. Yeah, And I
think Wollstonecraft is interesting because she was obviously so wrapped up in what was happening
politically. She was very engaged in the work of Thomas Payne. You know.
Godwin of course, was sort of this celebrity. She spent time in
Paris during the French Revolution, and you know, would have died if she
had not had this relationship with this American that she got pregnant with with her
first child. He told the American embassy that they were married. They never
married, but at least she had the protection as an American from the guillotine.
So I think that there's all of these political ideas that are swirling about
her, and this this idea of getting rid of taboos. I mean,
the Marquis dessaud Is writing at that time, all of that was really in
the air, and you know, getting rid of the church and all of
that. So it's interesting to see how much her early childhood and this,
you know, this horrible relationship that her parents had where her father was highly
abusive and her mother was super submissive. In this bizarre how that lent itself
to where you know, her sort of seeing that this whole we need to
redo the whole thing kind of thing. But that was really that the attitude
of the whole French Revolution was we need to just make it all new again
and redo the whole thing. So she's interesting in that perspective. But yeah,
as you go along, I mean this the whole beginning chapter, that
part chapters, that part of the book is called the Lost Girls because it's
really all these apomen women and that's it's their anger and their rage and their
frustrations that that drove a movement in so many ways that we're really disordered.
And just as you said, you know, they thought that they were doing
things that would actually help them and in fact that made things much much worse.
And you know, this is just again the cycle that that repeats itself
and you know, really comes to a head I think in the sixties and
seventies. And yet that's what we're not really supposed to pay attention to because
again, we're supposed to be so grateful that we have feminism, you know,
that we're not supposed to look and see that, okay, these things
are actually not doing what we're being told that they're doing over and over again.
So yeah, it's this incredible cycle to see, you know, these
broken women that have really created public policy and public perception of what womanhood is.
You know, shouldn't have any place in forming the minds of you know,
anyone, much less young women who are are trying to figure out who
they are and what they should be doing there with their lives and moving forward,
you know, as women. Right, So, if you just think
you're talking to a young woman who doesn't come from a horribly abusive home like
the majority you know of leading feminists have, you know, just to describe
her likely life, you know, as pattern onto theirs, is just completely
out of touch, right. You know, the average woman, thankfully is
not you know, growing up in a home where the father is an alcoholic
and beating the mother you know, who just puts up with it, and
so on and so forth, or whatever other kind of abusive situation you can
describe, you know. So when we are you know, yeah, it's
kind of you know, it's kind of well, I'm going to talk about
those psychological issues. I'm still saving that for later. But before we wanted
to we get there, I wanted to talk about could you if you don't
have your book in front of you. I do. But on page seventy
seven, Kate Millet or is it Malay the French pronunciation, but she Millet?
Okay, so her catechism basically at her of her group of feminists.
I found that just wow, it's right there. It shows it all together.
It's very direct. They're not hiding any of this, and you know,
and then it was if I under I forget what the decade was for
that. It was around ninety two. Oh no, this is okay.
So this is becoming very conscious and obvious in that nineteen sixties era or what
had been planted before. Then do you hear? Why don't I just unless
you want to, I'll just read that. Yeah, why don't you read
I don't have my book in front of me, so yeah, I wrote
down I haven't memorized by now, but I don't. Yeah. I almost
could do it, but I'll just read it to make sure I'm accurate.
Okay. So here I'll show the cover to our video viewers. But that's
okay. In late nineteen sixty somewhere in the West Greenwich Village, Greenwich section
of New York City, at Lila Carpe's apartment, Twelve women, led by
Kate Millett, sat around a large table and repeated this chant. Why are
we here today? The chairwoman asked, to make revolution? What kind of
revolution? The cultural revolution? And how do we make cultural revolution? By
destroying the American family? How do we destroy the American family by destroying the
American patriarch? How do we destroy the American patriarch by taking away his power?
How do we do that by destroying monogamy? How can we destroy monogamy
by promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion, and homosexuality. I just
found that extremely striking, the explicitness of it. You know, in late
nineteen sixties, you know we're talking. I can do math fifty plus years
ago, right, you know, so this is you know, before I
was born. This is I believe if i've second wave feminism right, so
again to which a lot of women you know, still still support and right
there, you know, they basically say their goal and taking down the patriarchy.
You know, they use sexual promiscuity and all kinds of forms of destroying
family and marriage by basically having you know, sexual forms of sex outside of
marriage to destroy it in order to basically destroy the American family. And they
saw taking down the patriarch or the father of the home or of the of
the kind of family line or extended family as a key person to take down
for that, you know, because once you knock him down, you can
have all of his goods of aka you know, his family, everyone he's
standing in the way of and protecting. Ideally, So can you what can
you tell me more about the interesting I mean, I just find that so
strike and the other thing that I'll say to you, and both of us
are Christian women. To me, when I read that, I thought,
oh my word, that sounds like a catechism. This is a pagan catechism.
You know, the question and answer format very clear. Even a twelve
year old could understand that. Yeah, yeah, No, I mean the
fascinating thing about this And I'll have to actually go back and check the date
because i know you just read it in late sixties, but it's thereabouts.
But is that Millett was a student of Wilhelm Reich and he was a member
of the Frankfort School, one of the New Left and you know, communist,
communist, yeah, intellectual exactly, yeah, And he wrote the book
Sexual Revolution that became the blueprint for what became the sexual revolution in the United
States. But they understood the Frankfort School began to understand through him and Marcusa
that they needed to hit the culture. They couldn't just hit economics or you
know, all of these government agencies that they were infiltrating. They needed to
go deeper. And so that's where they really started to push. Angela.
Davis is another one where they started infiltrating universities in academia in particular. So
this is what you know, Cape millett is is spouting. I mean,
she's studying under him. She knows that that the effort was to destroy the
American family the way that it had been done so effectively in the Soviet Union,
you know, back at the early part of the nineteen hundreds, that
when you destroy the family unit, then everybody's sort of your waging us lost.
Yeah, and that's really what they wanted to do. And of course,
you know, it's all couched within this language of you know, feminist
freedom and whatnot. So yeah, it's it's incredibly ugly, and but it's
also been incredibly effective. And that's why, you know, if you'd read
that list, you know it's late nineteen sixties. I mean, none of
those things are popular in the culture at that point. And now if you
look at the culture now, you know we've absorbed everywhere and a lot more
than than what started. So you can see how once you start tearing away
at the family that happens. And you know, the other thing I just
marvel at, and this was not in the book, but certainly not at
any kind of length, it's just how effective feminism has been at silencing men,
not just through the string of things and destroying the family, but you
know, it's almost like kryptonite, Like you mentioned the word feminism, and
men just know they're not going to win that conversation in any way, shape
or form, and that they don't want to comment on it. Yeah,
and it's super understandable because they've learned behavior that this is say never win.
Yeah, but you also see that this is how why the movement has been
so effective, because it's really about power. It's not about love, it's
not really about helping women as women. It's about power, and that I
think is the biggest piece that we have to struggle with is letting men know
that even if it's in ways that they're not being confrontational about it. We've
got to start moving beyond this divide. I mean, certainly women has to
start with women, but it's got it. We've got to start healing this
relationship and start seeing that these problems need to be solved together instead of men
just sort of feeling like they're you know, painted into a corner. And
that's you know, a really hard and delicate thing to do, because if
first they have this learned pattern of you know, anything a woman says she's
right and they're wrong, and you know, you know, the whole routine.
Well, I also think there's kind of there's been, of course,
more recently, kind of a backlash against that dynamic, but the most I
don't know if it's most prominent, but very often the kind of young men
who see that dynapkin, they say, oh, this is lose lose for
me, and it's fair, you know, just because I'm a man,
I don't get to have input on lots of important issues that concern men.
You know, they get angry about that, and sometimes they also lash out
out about it, and they don't sound too good doing that, right,
They might say, you know, really just you know, extreme things that
won't have anyone's support sometimes, and you think, well, you know,
you know you're extreme and you're not right, but also you're you know,
responding to someone else who is extreme, but their extremism is completely accepted in
our culture. Yeah. No, I think that's exactly right. Yeah.
And you know what I actually I wanted to ask you about this. I
think it's in your introduction you recount an anecdote. I think it's Jordan Peterson
and Camille Pollia talking about this this say, this problem of this war between
the sexes that we have just amped up to such a great degree in our
culture. And Camille says, you know, I think, you know,
the men need to start standing up for themselves, if I remember correctly,
and Jordan Peterson says, look, you know, men can't have fights with
women. It's it's really like one of the problem, like one of just
the basic difficulties or divisions between the sexes is men cannot engage women on the
same terms that they engage men on because men know that, you know,
after very tough words come punches, and men, you know, any decent
man is not going to start punching a woman no matter you know, no
matter what. So you know, but when but they're egged on and they're
egged on, and when women kind of trends, you know, men know
because a punch maybe awaiting that they don't get to the level of aggression where
the punch is the next thing, right, So that's kind of like an
internal self restraint among men that women don't have, you know, so women
have. You know, men and women sometimes will push to the level and
beyond of the punch stage. You know, if she was a man,
she get decked. But you know, but the man just has to shut
up because obviously he's not going to punch a woman. So that kind of
creates this situation you just mentioned where men feel like they have no legitimate arsenal
with which to say, look, you know, we feel like are we're
not being hurt either, you know, so it's it just creates almost this
Gordian knot what's you know, almost unsolvable of you know, both men and
women are angry at each other and they can't you know, kind of come
come eye to eye to each other, and you know, the you know,
so kind of what do you think is the way out of that.
I think you have an indication. I don't know that anyone. I don't
know that there's really a good way out, you know. But do you
think Camille Paglia is right? You know? Should the men be the ones
to stand up elves and say, look, I'm not taking this or I'm
not engaging with this because this is you know, unprofessional treatment or whatever.
Or should the women, you know, be the ones to I mean,
what can be done about that situation by people of good will? Yeah?
I really have come to think that it has to be the women because you
know, men, although I will say, you know, Matt Wallace has
done more for women with that question what is a woman than probably anyone who's
done in a long time, that very socratic question, you know, basic
question. I think has really woken a lot of people up and started them
thinking like why why is this so hard to define? So I think that
there can be effective ways, but they just can't be that typical dynamic that
you just describe that Jordan Peterson was explaining that that that kind of dealing with
the problem. But you know, it's interesting because we talk about this every
election cycle, you know, the women's vote is it's something that it seems
sort of this immovable thing. I mean, these these we can talk about
this on the micro level of the late ships, but we also see on
the macro level with the way in which women vote. But I think that
there has to be something coming from other women where we start showing everyone that
there's a different way to be a woman than a narcissist, than self absorbed
and focused on our careers. I mean, this is what the culture has
been telling us, and you know, over and over and over again for
fifty years. So most of us are really recovering from feminism and one degree
or another because it's just been so ingrained in us. But yeah, I
think it's you know, if you look around and start seeing anybody and try
to answer the question, you know, what do we do about the women's
vote, there's crickets. There's really very very little that's that's done about it.
And you know, I noticed this and the research that I did from
my book The Anti Mary Exposed, where suddenly became very clear that the reason
why we have this struggle is because women are getting a constant, you know,
fire hose of information from elite women who all have the same narrative,
and as conservatives, we have not in any way pushed back against that.
We haven't filled up the gaps. We're not. We just see it as
fluff or something unimportant, and in fact that there's a kind of content that
women love, that women absorb. And you know, this is why my
colleague Noel Marrying and I have done created that theology of homebooks is to try
and help recreate some kind of grammar for womanhood, but do it in a
way that women liked to absorb. Content with beautiful images, like a magazine
is more of a coffee table book. But we have to use these kinds
of tools to help women instead of expecting that we're just going to be able
to reason them out of it, because logic and reason are no longer really
available to us and the way that they would have been, you know one
hundred years ago even or fifty years ago. You know, but we've been
so formed by emotion and visuals and you know the appearance of sexiness or being
cool or whatever that we don't those things are very hard to penetrate and sort
of crack open, like what's really going on there. So rather than trying
to debunk all that, I think that there has to be a really concerted
effort to start presenting women in a different way and that you know, that
breaks through this leftist hold on the way women are presented. And you know,
I know we have the money, but do we have the resources of
will to start trying to help women who you know, may not read regularly,
or may not you know, may not even have family members that they
have seen that live a different life. How do we help women break out
of this to see there's a different way of life? And I think that's
really where we're going to find a lot of fruit and people's lives change.
And I know, just even from our books, you know, we hear
stories, you know, every few days about women who's who's think you know,
it's saved their marriage, or they've thought think differently about themselves being at
home, or you know, we just heard this one beautiful story about a
woman who lost her son and she was a interior designer and it just really
helped her heel through that. So I think there's all of these things that
we have at our disposal that we're just not you know, tapping into yet
that could be really effective, much more so than you know, the constant
battle between the sexes. Yeah, I think that's getting right into that section
and question that I've been signed posting this whole time about how this a lot
of this is very much latent inside all of our heads as unconscious imagery of
what the good life looks like as a woman. You know, the vast
majority of the images available are of women who sacrifice relationships for money. Now,
you know, we're we and I are both professional educated women. We
enjoy exercising those parts of us. So we're not talking about you know,
getting rid of that or you know, or that it can't be part of
a well rounded life. We're talking about completely sacrificing and eliminating the nurturing and
mothering aspect of oneself to live in a holy masculine way, you know.
So I also think I think many women have been traumatized by those incessant images
and ideas that tell us being a woman isn't there's it's really bad you know
if you if you don't do it in a certain way and basically act like
a man, you're evil. I mean, I think that does contribute to
girls who hit puberty and say I don't want to be a girl. You
know, I hate periods. This sucks. I'm scared of having a baby.
Nobody tells me that's a good thing, and what's beautiful about? And
how our society can't run without people doing that? Why don't I just be
a boy instead? And I also, you know, many women also have
an instinctive feeling or worry that men are latent or even active oppressors as an
entire group, not just specific actual abusers individuals, and many women, you
know, which includes me for most of my life, you know, have
a fear that if we let men lead our families and lead you know,
engines of society, it will mean oppression for women that we can't contribute and
be you know, equal partners whose voices are heard. So how can we
reconcile that deep emotional animosity and fear that many women have, which is legitimate
and real, you know, sometimes it comes from actual experiences of true abuse.
How can we reconcile that deep fear with how we're talking about these things
and presenting to women an alternative and saying, you know, maybe feminism isn't
all it's cracked up to be, and there's another way to live that will
make you joyful. Yeah, no, I think that's a great question.
And you know, I think it's always important to remember that this didn't come
out of a vacuum. You know, really there is there are obviously very
bad men who have done very bad things. And you know, that was
one of the other patterns that I saw in the eighteen hundreds was just the
amazing amount of just abuse that a lot of women went through. And this
is what was motivating that they're early feminists, and you know, it's certainly
understandable. But I think that that's you know, goes back to that question
of what's how do you break out of that? How do you and what
the culture is teaching us is not in any way breaking out of it.
I mean, if you look at what the hookup culture has done, just
re traumatizing people, re traumatizing people over and over and over and over again,
rather than you know, if you think about the good Father, I
mean, the good Father stands in the way and protects a young girl.
Because girls don't know what they're getting into, they don't realize, you know,
the importance of that day. They don't realize to it. And this
was something that I started thinking about a lot when I was writing the book.
You know, just that that power of vulnerability. This is what happens
when you have a child with somebody use you. No matter how healthy you
are, you are going to become vulnerable, and your child is vulnerable as
well. And this is why we live in community with each other, so
that there is somebody someone to help and protect and provide in that that instance,
so that both of you can carry on the future in that child.
And when that image gets disrupted and it ends up being all about acquisition,
you know, that's when you're going to have real problems. And you know,
I think that there's I mean, thank goodness, there are opportunities for
people to heal from this kind of thing. But it's not going to happen
through following again and again and again what the culture is telling us to do.
I mean, that's that. I think that's the saddest part is that,
you know, you can really see this with people just continually, you
know, reopening the same wound or getting new wounds or going deeper, you
know, adding new problems to their lives because they don't know how to sort
of get out of that cycle. But yeah, I think it's it's one
of those things where we also have to be those of us who don't have
these wounds or who have healed from these wounds need to, you know,
have really deep compassion and of our assistance too. I know that, you
know, one of the things that I wish we had more of in this
culture is a sense of mentoring. And this again when the family, you
know, the extended family, like ah, there's sometimes I just wish I
could talk to my grandmother, you know, and get her wisdom and insights
and you know, know that she went through a lot in her life,
the Second World War and whatnot. But you know, it's that kind of
thing that I think a lot of women who are older feel like, well,
what would I even say or how can I help someone? And it
can happen in very tangible ways. I mean, similar to magazines like teach
someone how to can Like I would love to spend some time with a woman
that could teach me how to you know, I taught myself. I think
I just YouTube videos. I mean, how much do we do with YouTube
videos? Whereas if I had a neighbor that said, you know, I'm
going to be doing some canning, would you like to come learn how to
do it, like that would be a much more pleasant way to learn.
And I think that there's all those kinds of opportunities that you know, are
missed because we feel like, well we don't want to impose or whatnot,
but that that we need to start thinking more purposefully about that, or even
sharing stories older women sharing stories of their lives and their own kind of wisdom,
you know. I think those are the kinds of things that may not
be you know, show results immediately, but are going to plant seeds for
younger women to think, yeah, this is all my grandmother or my aunt
or whomever you know did that. I think those are really beautiful ways that
we can start reforming our kind of moral imagination about what it means to be
women instead of kind of just being stuck in these silos of you know,
sex in the city or you know or whatever. We've got to kind of
break out of these very cookie cutter and disordered kinds of understandings of womanhood.
Yeah, and I think, actually, yeah, like you say, relationships
maybe the most healing thing, you know, because I'm just thinking about you
know, so I have had to do a number of like major mind shifts
on not you know, on many things, but including you know, this
issue in that sort of internal sense. And I I think, you know,
possibly the most important figure and that has been my husband, you know,
who has been able to be I mean. And so you know,
if there's some men listening who wonder about this, like you know, all
the women in your life are feeling not maybe not all know, most of
the women in your life are battered by this. You know, these image
has been presented to them that are totally out of step with their their given
natures as women. And you know, I think there's absolutely a role there
for men to be just patient and kind and loving leaders of women, you
know, always showing them. Look, you know, you know I do
care about you, and I will show that in these clear ways. I'm
there for you, you know, when you are hurt, I listened to
you, you know, and just all those supportive ways as well as you
know, saying you know, look, I mean my husband has said this
to me, you know, right, like you don't need to treat me
like I'm just some generic jerk, right, you know you married me,
you know, like, how about you assume that I love you? Right?
Start with that, right, And then you hear that, you think,
well, that is a good point. I have men, I cannot
argue with that, right. We have a long and deep history of him
showing up from me in moments of need. Right. So I mean,
yeah, so I do think, you know that both women and men can
be a part of that healing process. But I think actually that that is
something that's pretty much entirely out of like the social media or the like conservative
chat sphere sort of thing, because that is just a really harsh it's a
come out of environment. And what we're talking about is one on one relationship,
showing people love for years at a time, you know, having those
conversations with them. And you know, I would add one of the things
that I've seen with my work. A number of years ago, I was
I spoke at Georgetown University and there were some young men that asked I don't
remember what the question was, but I remember just explaining, you know,
women, we have been so brainwashed for fifty years. We have been told
so many lies about who we are, about who men are, about what
our relationships should look like and what our futures should look like, that you
know, we need to have a huge amount of compassion on women. It
was really interesting because I watched these young men and their body language is changed
dramatically. You know, they were feeling I think there was a sense of
resentment and sort of feistiness initially with the question, and then the more I
spoke, you can just see them like letting it go and just thinking,
like thinking about women in a completely different way and realizing like, yeah,
these you know, this is almost I need to feel compassionate towards women and
help be patient with them because they have been lied to and they don't even
we don't even know how deeply we have been lied to and misinformed about all
of it. So yeah, I think it can go a very long way
if a man can sort of shift his own attitude and from thinking I hate
women, they're awful to Okay, women just need a lot more than they've
been given, and how do we be patient work with that moving forward?
Everything? It can go a long way. And I do wonder if there's
kind of this sense like as women, we know that we are vulnerable,
and so that just makes us I mean I shouldn't speak for all women,
you know, but for myself, it makes me more afraid, right,
So you might expect to be victimized because you're like, I'm victimizable. If
somebody, you know, wanted to grab me in a parking lot, it'd
be rough, right. And men don't have that orientation towards the world,
and so, you know, so it's hard for them to get inside our
heads unless they might hear us say something like that and say, oh wow,
that's what it's like for you. Yeah, and you see that.
I mean, there's a great book that I reference in in this book,
the Warriors Versus Warriors by Joyce. I think it's Benson Benon Bears for Ben
Inson, I can't remember, but that's the title of a book, Warriors
Versus Warriors. And it's really interesting because she she makes that very point that
a lot of things that motivate women are because of our vulnerability, especially positioning
ourselves or our children in such a way where we're kind of in this underground,
quiet competition, you know, fighting everybody else to sort of get the
rewards, you know. So it's it's or to get a better light for
ourselves because we don't have the capacity to do that through our own strength,
and because oftentimes we are so vulnerable because we are pregnant or having children or
bearing children or you know, children to raise, or just physically smaller you
know, Yeah, and exactly that too. So those are the kinds of
motivations that I think when we're aware of them, as women and men are
aware of them, then it makes a lot easier, like makes a lot
more sense to see what's what's motivating us. So I'm going to switch to
prop I mean, just a completely different topic. But so usually when I
read, you know, so you know books, I get lots of books
for my job, and you know, when they come with you know,
like a promotional package, press release and so forth, you know, they'll
typically include questions. And I think I'm a real journalist. I read the
actual documents and I come up with my own questions. But there was one
on your list that I loved and can't resist asking, and it is is
feminism compatible with Christianity? M Yeah, I think that's a great question.
I did not come up with that question. I think, you know,
based on what I was saying before. If you look at Christianity and you
look at what feminism is at the core, you know, it's free love,
which of course is not edible Christianity. It's the occult also not credible
understanding, and it's you know, smashing the patriarchy. So you know,
our whole faith is built on patriarchal order, you know, going back to
the beginning, you know, to old testaments. So innated as a man,
that's right, I think the answer is no. And again, you
know, I'm I think that there is room for for you know, narrowly
defining exactly what you mean by feminism if you insist on using the term.
But I think in general it's just creates so much confusion because then Christians that
they're they're using it in ways that they don't even really know what they mean.
So yeah, I think it's and actually I think it's I think it's
a lot worse than all that, because if you look at just what it's
done to sever that relationship between mother and child and the whole abortion movement.
You know, we actually as a planet, we abort more children than people
die of any other disease or any other heart disease, cancer, And it's
a huge number. It's like ten million more people are aborted then die from
COVID or whatever. Then you know, the numbers are really ghastly. And
these are not civil wars, these are not hot wars. These are you
know, mothers. And I think that that alone should scare all of us
into really realizing, like, this is deadly. You know, this is
a huge it's just like gutmaker. I think it's this year is projecting something
like seventy three million abortions. That's more than the whole population of the UK.
So if you think when you start seeing it on that scale, you
don't mean just this year alone, you mean total in the US since Row
versus Wade. No, no, I mean in the world and the world
okay, we'll want to share. Seventy three million abortions will be performed sixty
nine million people that live in the UK. So imagine just the UK wiped
out, that's the equivalent. So I think that that alone just needs to
give us pause and say, what do we Why would we want in any
way? You know, we see that these are the elements of it.
Why would we want in any way to perpetuate this when it has been such
a force of destruction of our families, our homes, our lives, and
now our our bodies and our children. So yeah, I think pretty definitively.
It's, you know, unless you're super careful about what you mean,
you mean something else, it's it's just not compatible. And I just wonder,
why would you not take the you know, key the leading lights of
feminism at their word that you know, they support the occult, they support
the abortion, the mass murder of children inside their mother's rooms, they support
I mean, you know, not all of them, but you know,
there is definitely I think you can take a definite line from the division of
the sexes and the sublimation of femininity to masculinity that you know, career as
feminism does. I think you can draw straight line from that to transgenderism,
right because it's just bodily reflecting what is already spiritually being imposed on people,
you know. And so if you look at all those sort of things that
are just like straight up abominations, and the people who are pushing them,
the majority of them, the leaders of them, say we're doing this in
the name of feminism. I think that's something you have to grapple with.
You can't just wave it away and say, oh, they're just they've all
been lying this whole time. They didn't believe they were lying yeah, no,
I mean one of the most striking things that Kate Millett said was that
she was very motivated by the capacity of soldiers to kill innocent people in Vietnam,
and she said, you know, women have to be just as strong
or if not stronger, and kill their own children. And that was her
reasoning for abortion, was that she thought that was just important that women had
that kind of strength. She called it strength to kill their own children.
So there, you know, if you when you and I think that's the
other amazing thing is just to look back and see what these people actually have
said and do say. And it's amazing too how one of one thread of
feminism, the academic thread, is super convoluted. It's always very hard to
read. And I think that's how they hide a lot of things, like
if I just say this with a tough academic jargon, people won't really know
what I mean. But then you have someone like Gloria Steinem and certainly Kate
Millett and others who have said the most outrageous things, and just people again,
like you said, they sort of dismissed them, like, oh,
she's kind of the the outlier or whatnot. But these are really the women
that were the engine behind it and motivated so much of the public policy that
we see in the culture today. For me, this whole, this whole
the dealing with like the feminism issue is like, yeah, I've, I've,
I've signaled throughout this podcast. It's some. It's also been kind of
a psychological journey towards wholeness, right. It kind of disentangled that those habits
of thinking from my own and to just feel so much more happiness and freedom
and being a woman. So there's a lot that this book has to offer
here, and thank you Carrie for joining the show today to tell people about
it. Thank you so much for having me on. It's great to get
an endorsement like that, So thanks Joy. Carrie Gress is a fellow at
the Ethics and Public Policy Center in Washington, DC and the author of the
brand new book The End of Woman, How Smashing the Patriarchy has destroyed Us.
I really enjoyed that and our conversation together. And thank you all for
listening to the Federalist Radio Hour. Don't forget to be lovers of freedom and
anxious for the fray