Circling the Drain

On Feminism, the Patriarchy, and What Marriages Really Need

This past week, one of the most popular Catholic podcasters on the Internet, Matt Fradd, released a three hour conversation with Mike Pantile, a Red Pill Manosphere influencer turned Catholic Manosphere influencer. Fradd also released several shorter excerpts from the interview, including one titled, “Feminism Destroys Christian Marriage.” In it, Pantile expressed some problematic views about women and marriage. Fradd didn’t disagree with them. And although I rarely comment on these kinds of things, I do want to comment today, not only because this kind of mainstreaming of the Catholic Manosphere is profoundly concerning, but more fundamentally because I think, with these conversations, we are missing the proverbial forest for the trees.

Before I dive into the meat of my concerns and explain what forest we’re missing, I want to clear up a few things, just in case that clip left you confused about where the Church stands.

First, in the video Pantile rightly asserted that men and women are different. We are. Men and women are not the same. God created us male and female, and sexual difference is a great and glorious gift from Him. But the Church considers maleness and femaleness two different ways of being a human being. She does not believe, as Pantile implied, that we are two different types of creatures, whose likeness is rooted solely in the fact that “we’re God’s creation.” Rather, we are alike because we share the same human nature. There is not one human nature for men and another for women. There is just one nature, in which we equally partake. Men and women are equally made in the image of God. We both possess the ability to reason, know right from wrong, exercise our will in freedom, and give ourselves in love to one another. We are, in the most important ways, more alike than we are different. And our shared human nature is why.

Pantile also asserted that “the only innocuous piece of feminism is the voting.” And even the voting, he went on to add, was a debatable good. I’ve written before that I don’t call myself a feminist. I think it’s a word which means so many things that it has lost its meaning. But if not for women who did call themselves feminists, Saint Edith Stein might never have become a philosopher, Saint Gianna Beretta Molla might never have become a doctor, and Flannery O’Connor might never have written her stories. It was first wave feminism which secured the educational opportunities those women needed to fully develop their gifts. Likewise, without the work of feminists, women who were beaten and abused wouldn’t have had shelters to which they could flee. Nor could they have kept and raised their children if they did manage to leave. Likewise, women who were abandoned wouldn’t have had the ability to buy or sell property, sign contracts, or even open a bank account in their own name. Yes, feminism has brought many an ill to our world, but it’s also brought many real goods. Any serious conversation about feminism has to recognize both realities. If you’re looking for a good example of how the Church does this, I recommend reading Pope Saint John Paul II’s Letter to Women (and the Endow study I wrote on it).

Perhaps most concerning to me, though, was Pantile’s assertion that “the perfection of femininity” is a woman “saying yes to God through her husband, in being obedient and submissive.” This is wildly untrue. If it were true, the doors to perfection would be slammed shut on the countless women who have given their lives to Christ through consecrated life. The Church, however, has celebrated these women for millennia, recognizing that their whole life is a yes to God. And that’s what all our lives are called to be: one great yes to God—yes to His will, yes to His plan, yes to allowing Him to transform us into the unrepeatable work of wonder He made each of us to be. That “yes” is what constitutes holiness, and holiness, not submission and obedience to a fallen human being, is the perfection of femininity. It’s the perfection of masculinity, too (because, again, shared human nature).

I could go on. There is a great deal more that is concerning in the video. But I’ll stop here. And frankly, there is nothing I could say about that video that I haven’t said before. If you want to know what the Church actually teaches about women, I have a Substack newsletter about that. If you want to know what the Church teaches about Christian marriage, I have a Substack newsletter on that as well (two newsletters actually). And if it’s a step by step walk through the heresies and dangers of the Manosphere that you’re after, I have 1, 2, 3, 4 newsletters which do that. I also can direct you to shelves of books and Church documents on the questions that will give you a far fuller and truer picture of what the Church thinks about women and marriage than any podcast can.

My decision, however, to not dive deep into any one assertion made by Pantile is not about a reluctance to repeat myself. The truth is, I don’t want to do some line-by-line rebuttal of a YouTube interview because I am increasingly finding the whole conversation annoying. It’s what you’d expect from fundamentalist Protestants and 20-something-college guys with no real experience of marriage, not middle aged Catholic men who should know what a vastly complicated enterprise marriage is and who have access to the Church’s richly developed teachings on these matters, teachings which state in black and white that “whereas in the relationship between Christ and the Church the subjection is only on the part of the Church, in the relationship between husband and wife the ‘subjection’ is not one-sided but mutual,” (Mulieris Dignitatem, 24).  

My annoyance, however, goes beyond these conversations’ infantilization of women and relegation of us to a lesser category of human beings. More fundamentally, they annoy me because they do nothing to help (and much to harm) marriages that are actually struggling. They mislead young men, presenting them with a vision of marriage that is more Protestant than Catholic, and they suck up all the air in a room, so that there is none left for the real conversations about marriage that need to take place.