A quick heads up to all you wonderful subscribers: For the next few weeks, I’ll be doing something a bit different with the newsletter. Instead of sending out one long essay for full subscribers, I’m going to be sending out three shorter essays on the same topic: the theological errors of the Christian Manosphere. It’s an important topic, which requires more words and thoughts than I can fit into one reasonably sized essay. I want to make sure I explore it with the care and nuance it deserves, so I’ll spread out my writing on it over the next few weeks. These essays will be only for full subscribers, but I’ll include a decent-sized preview with each one, so you can decide if this series is worth a cup of coffee to you. If you do upgrade your subscription at any point, you’ll have full access to all the archives, as well as the opportunity to weigh in on the discussion. Thank you!
When I was nineteen-years-old, I didn’t know what it meant to be a woman. I knew I was one. People tended not to be as confused on that point thirty years ago as they are now. But beyond having two X chromosomes, I wasn’t sure what defined a woman or made her a good one. Was it long hair and curves? Was it an interest in small children and homemaking? Was it a quiet voice and a pleasing personality? What, besides hormones and the ability to bear a baby, made me different from a man?
This collegiate existential crisis was brought on, as most existential crises are at that age, by a boy. I liked one who didn’t like me back. And he wasn’t the first. Plenty of boys I’d liked had not liked me back. The reason for this, I decided, was that something was wrong with me. I felt like I had missed the class on how to be the sort of woman who could catch a man’s eye.
Accordingly, for weeks I stomped around campus confused. I was torn between feeling angry at all the adults who had encouraged me to focus on academics at the expense of makeup tutorials and also feeling like being a woman had to mean more than looking winsome and willowy. I wondered if I could still be feminine with a sharp mind and strong opinions. Was I less of a woman for being more smart than sexy? Did the size of my pants matter in some ontological way?
Eventually, I split the difference and developed an eating disorder. I decided that if I was tiny and delicate enough, I would appear so feminine that no one would notice my opinions. It didn’t work. People still noticed the opinions. But all these years later, I find myself strangely grateful for my confused descent into such foolishness. It has given me a kind of empathy for young men today, whose confusion over what it means to be a man is leading them deeper and deeper into the Manosphere.
What is the Manosphere?
For those of you wondering, “What the heck is Emily talking about?”, the Manosphere is a corner of the Internet where men are encouraged to be men. Or, more accurately, where men are encouraged to be a certain kind of man—the kind of man who is large and in charge, strong, virile, and the king of his castle.
In the secular Manosphere, that means being jacked, wealthy, and sexually promiscuous. In the Christian Manosphere, it seems to mean practicing jiu jitsu, smoking cigars, and being the sole breadwinner and decision maker in the home (or in pursuit of a wife who will let you do all those things without complaint). For Manosphere Christians, headship in the family is not understood so much as a dance with the heart, as it is a dance lesson given to the heart … and everyone else in the family. In the Manosphere, father always knows best. Accordingly, submission is never mutual, with husband and wife deferring to one another in love, but rather a one-way street, where submission is a duty owed exclusively by the wife to the husband.
Both in the secular Manosphere and Christian Manosphere, men frequently speak of being “red pilled”—a phrase drawn from the movie “The Matrix,” that basically means they have woken up from a culture-induced stupor. They see how the culture and feminism have conspired against them, and they’re no longer going along with it. (For a great podcast on this phenomenon, check out Two Become Family’s episode on the Manosphere and Red-Pilling)
Over the past few years, thanks to the loud voices of podcasters and YouTubers in the Manosphere, the number of Christian and non-Christian young men who claim to have swallowed a red pill has exploded. It’s no longer just gamers in their mother’s basements bitterly bashing women online. It’s now also nice Catholic boys on the campuses of good Catholic universities informing young women that it would be a mortal sin for them to work outside the home should they marry. It’s men in the offices of well-known Catholic apostolates protesting hiring women writers to do what a man could do. It’s newly married Catholic husbands telling their wives they’ll need permission to leave the home, even for simple errands like going to the grocery store. Whole swaths of Gen Z Catholics (and younger Millennials) have started subscribing, in whole or in part, to the retrograde, misogynic, and deeply unCatholic ideas about manhood found in the Christian Manosphere.
And I kind of get it.
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