Realizing That Gender Equivalence Is Clearly Insane

... leads to very bad results for women.

This essay about re-tribalizing America is easily the best one on any subject that I've read all year. It assembles facts into a coherent picture of what is happening right now in American culture in a way that clarifies so much of what had been a jumble in my head. I'm still processing it, but here's a single paragraph excerpt and a bit of commentary.

As Dreher adequately documents, the hegemonic narrative regarding gender is clearly insane. And while the level of insanity has climbed exponentially in the past decade, virtually everyone under-30 (my generation) has been marinated in relentless gender-equivalence propaganda since kindergarden. But, as the male cohort grows older, the distance between the experienced reality of of the dating market and the official dogma becomes unsustainable. The cognitive dissonance is simply too great, and boys are driven to seek answers elsewhere. And those answers come, with varying degrees of accuracy and crudity, from the PUA/Game/MRA/RedPill blogs. Whatever their faults, they all have one redeeming quality – they are manifestly not insane. This comes as a great shock and relief to boys. A shock because they realize the magnitude of the deception they have experienced, and a relief because they realize they are not the crazy ones.

Our sons have all gone through exactly this. As they were raised in a devoutly Catholic home and sent to Catholic schools*, they have not latched on to the Pick Up Artist (PUA) or Men's Rights Activist (MRA) movements, but they know for a fact that all of the gender equivalence they were taught in school is utter nonsense. Dittos for the racial grievances.

Our boys are not tribalizing in the way the essay suggests because they have a centering, Catholic foundation, but what of the boys raised in secular homes where there is no indisputable basis for objective morality?

In the long run, the fundamental problem the secular world faces is that it can't articulate an answer to the question, "Why not?"

Here's what our boys feel: I've been lied to and put down all my life for behaving as a man. No matter what I do, I'm held responsible for things that happened in the past and behaviors that are instinctive, like appreciating a beautiful woman. Their secular peers are taking this to the next level and deciding that if it was all a crock, why shouldn't they do what their bodies demand?

Without an objective basis for behavior, the secular world can't answer that "Why not?"

It goes further than that. Just as the Catholic abuse scandal rocked the church by attacking its moral foundations, the insanity of the gender equivalence movement is undermining the moral foundations of the secular world. Those foundations were always thin and weak as they're based on personal, subjective ethics so it doesn't take much to totally wash them away. "Sin is being out of alignment with my values" as Barack Obama said, emphasis mine. The end result is exactly what we're seeing in the culture. Lots of preening about gender equivalence by the elites in universities, the arts and government, but in practice, the use and abuse of women by men who have learned it was all a lie.

Gender equivalence was always a crock. Women and men are complimentary as St. John Paul II cogently argued in his Theology of the Body.

* - While public schools are an order of magnitude worse, if you think Catholic schools aren't at least partially infested with this nonsense, you are sadly mistaken.