The Heresies of the Manosphere, Part 3

Shifting Worldviews

This is the third installment, in an ongoing series. Before diving in, you may want to read Part 1” (Print) (Audio), and Part 2 (Print) (Audio).

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Today, I want to go back to the beginning. Not to the beginning of everything, but rather to the beginning of this series.

Last month, I kicked off this whole brouhaha with a story about my identity crisis in college. I was nineteen-years-old, crazy about a boy who didn’t like me back, and convinced that the problem was me. Not just that I wasn’t the right girl for this boy, but rather that I wasn’t the right girl for any boy. I feared that my sharp mind and strong opinions would make me forever unloveable, that I would always be the wrong girl because I wasn’t girl enough—not thin enough, not pretty enough, not charming enough, not sexy enough. And so I started starving myself.

That helped somewhat. Tiny, delicate Emily attracted more male attention than mildly overweight Emily. But tiny, delicate Emily was also slowly killing herself, both physically and spiritually.

What saved me was coming back to the Catholic Church, having my heart and mind transformed by the graces of the sacraments, and reading The Theology of the Body by Pope Saint John Paul II.

The theology of the body has fallen out of fashion these days. We could do a whole Substack on why that’s happened (maybe another time), but the end result is that many Catholics, young and old, have no idea what the theology of the body is. If they’ve heard of it at all, they equate it with some kind of marital sex ed class, and many dismiss it as such. They do this either because they think they already know what the Church teaches about sex or because they think what John Paul II teaches about sex is not what the Church teaches. This latter view is promoted heavily in the Catholic Manosphere and prevalent among its adherents, many who think of the theology of the body as just another modernist innovation.

But the theology of the body is not a modernist innovation. Nor is it a sexology—a study of the Church’s teachings on sex. Rather, the theology of the body is an anthropology. It is a study—rooted in Scripture and Tradition—of what it means to be a human person, made in the image of God.

Two decades ago, when I first encountered the theology of the body, it answered the question that drove me into the dark hole of anorexia—“What does it mean to be a woman?”—and then pulled me out of that hole. Christ used the theology of the body to give me my life back. Today, it can do the same for all the young men and women asking similar questions: What does it mean to be a man? What does it mean to be a woman? And knowing that, how are we called to live?

In fact, I suspect that the neglect and abandonment of the theology of the body (and the frequent failure to teach it correctly) is a large part of why we’re in the situation we’re in today. When we’re not presenting the truth in a compelling way to people, compelling lies and half-truths will fill the vacuum.

So yes folks, today we’re going to do something that feels a bit old school and talk about the theology of the body. If you’ve read my book These Beautiful Bones, this will be familiar territory to you. If you haven’t, consider this the Cliff’s Notes version of the book’s first few chapters. Either way, I promise this isn’t a diversion from the topic of the manosphere. It’s the necessary foundation for finally answering the question I’ve been wanting to get to for over a month now: What is authentic masculinity?

But first, the theology of the body.

The Sacramental Worldview

Let’s start with the origin story.

Not quite fifty years ago, before Cardinal Karol Wojtyla became John Paul II, he was working on a book that we know today as The Theology of the Body. At the time, he was concerned about the widespread dissent which had followed the release of Humanae Vitae (Pope Paul VI’s 1968 encyclical reiterating the Church’s ancient teaching against contraception). Wojtyla believed one of the primary reasons for that dissent was that too many Catholics didn’t have an adequate understanding of human dignity and human love. Basically, he recognized that most of us have no clue who we are or what God wants from us in this life. His goal in writing this new book was to give people that understanding, using elements from the personalist philosophy he knew so well to open up the truths revealed in Scripture and Tradition for Catholics living in the modern (and post-modern) world.

Wojtyla had just finished his manuscript for the book when John Paul I died and a conclave was called. There, Wojtyla found himself elected bishop of Rome. At that point, rather than publish the manuscript, he decided to deliver it bit by bit during his weekly catechetical audiences. After he finished— five years and 133 Wednesday audiences later—the individual catecheses were collected and put into a book initially titled The Theology of the Body.

The audiences ended in 1983. Over the next fifteen years, few people—save for a handful of scholars—talked much about those audiences. But during the last year’s of the twentieth century, the pope’s teaching began entering into more mainstream conversations about the Faith.

I first encountered the book, The Theology of the Body, in 2001, shortly after I came back to the Church. In the months before and after my reversion, I was reading like a woman whose life depended on it, diving deep into the writings of the Fathers and Doctors, as well as G.K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, Frank Sheed and Christopher Dawson, Dietrich von Hildebrand and Karl Adam.

Then, after I read all that (and more), I read The Theology of the Body. There, I didn’t find a thing apart from the other reading I’d been doing. I didn’t find a break from Catholic tradition. Rather, I found a synthesis of Catholic tradition, an anthropology that wove together the divinely revealed truth of Sacred Scripture, the wisdom of the Fathers, the systematic theology of Thomas Aquinas, the penetrating insights of the Church’s mystics, the wonder of G.K. Chesterton, the precision of Frank Sheed, and the personalism of Dietrich Von Hildebrand.

In short, what I found was a rearticulation of the sacramental worldview with a special focus on the human person.

If you’re not familiar with the phrase, “sacramental worldview” it’s basically shorthand for the Catholic vision of reality. It’s how Scripture and Tradition teach us to see God, man, and the world. It’s this way of seeing reality that gave rise to Western Civilization, then gave it its shape. Dante’s Divine Comedy and Mozart’s Requiem, Aquinas’ philosophy and St. Catherine’s mysticism, the lingering quiet of dimly lit Gothic churches, and the gilded frippery of Baroque cathedrals—all reflect in some way the truth the sacramental worldview proclaims.

That truth, at its most fundamental, is that matter is never just matter. Mountains are never just mountains. Stars are never just stars. Dirt is never just dirt. All were created by God. All are loved by God. And all speak about God. Like the psalmist wrote, everything in creation proclaims the glory of God. Everything that is, everything that ever shall be, reveals some truth about its Creator, pointing beyond itself to give us a glimpse into the nature of the One who spoke creation into existence.

As such, the whole of the created world is a type of revelation. It’s also an instrument of grace, a means through which God draws near to His people and draws His people near to Him. Through grace-soaked matter, God speaks to us. Through grace-soaked matter, God teaches us. Through grace-soaked matter, God shares His life with us.

What’s true of all creation is especially true of the human person, who alone in all the universe doesn’t just image God, but is made in His image. As men and women, we resemble our Maker in soul and body. Spiritually, our ability to reason, choose right from wrong, and give ourselves in love to another all point to a God who is Truth, Goodness, and Self-Gift. Physically, our bodies’ form and function bear witness to the strength, power, beauty, and nurturing, nourishing love of the all-knowing, all powerful, all-loving God.

Even more fundamentally, our bodies bear witness to the truth that God is a communion of Persons and the law of His inner-life—that which governs the relationships between the three Persons of the Trinity— is life-giving love. They do this, though, not as one body, but as two.

The Stories We Tell

This is what sexual difference proclaims. The male and female bodies are, as the Postal Service song says, “like corresponding puzzle pieces.” They fit together because they are made to go together. Each has constitutive parts and a chemical makeup that only fully make sense in light of the other. And when those two bodies come together, in the right way and the right time—new life comes into being. The love of man and woman—and only man and woman—is physically life-giving.  

Our bodies do more than reveal truths about God, though. The Church teaches that the human person is a union of body and soul. As such, our bodies aren’t objects we possess. They’re not shells we inhabit. They’re not mere matter, that we can mold, manipulate, reshape, or discard as we see fit. Rather, our bodies are us. My body is me. Your body is you. And just as our bodies express truths about God, our bodies also express truths about us. This is what John Paul II means when he says, the body “expresses the person,” (TOB 14:4). Our bodies make visible the invisible truth of who we are. They allow us to express our innermost feelings and desires as we speak, laugh, cry, run, jump, dance, create, and hold the ones we love in our arms.

Our bodies also tell stories about us.

Our bodies tell stories about us as individuals. Laugh lines and stretch marks, the way we walk and hold our head, the look in our eyes and the callouses (or lack thereof) on our hands—all that reveals something to the world about who we are.

Our bodies tell stories about us as human persons, too, with sexual difference not just proclaiming that God is a communion of Persons, but that each of us was made for communion, with God and one another. “It is not good for man to be alone,” said the Lord. And He didn’t just speak that truth. He wrote it into the very design of our bodies.

Lastly, our bodies tell stories about us as men and woman, revealing to us and to the world something integral about what God calls us to do and how God calls us to do it. They are part and parcel of our vocation, our divine mission in this life. And that vocation is parenthood—fatherhood for men, motherhood for women.

I know a statement like that can rankle feathers. But stay with me here, because neither the Church nor I think that every person’s divine mission in life is to conceive as many biological children as possible—or even any children at all. Right now, we’re just talking bodies. And that really is what our bodies are designed for and what distinguishes the design of the male and female body: fatherhood and motherhood. A man’s body—its shape, its structure, its chemical composition—is oriented towards fatherhood. That’s the point of its sum total of parts—the telos. Likewise, a woman’s body—its shape, its structure, its chemical compositions—is oriented towards motherhood. That again is the point of its sum total of parts. Motherhood is the telos of the woman’s body.

As John Paul II wrote, the “mystery of femininity manifests and reveals itself in its full depth through motherhood…W]hat also reveals itself is the mystery of the man’s masculinity, that is the generative and paternal meaning of his body” (TOB 21:2).

Remember, though, the body is a sign. It’s a material thing that reveals spiritual realities. As such, physical motherhood and fatherhood are signs too. They’re not the end. They also point beyond themselves to a deeper truth about who man and woman are.

In other words, physical motherhood and fatherhood are a form of revelation. Motherhood reveals the truth about the feminine genius—about who woman is and what God created her to do. Fatherhood reveals the truth about the masculine genius—about who man is and what God created him to do. Each is the physical expression of a much larger spiritual reality. And that spiritual reality—not the physical sign— is the one to which the Church teaches all are called.

Again, from the theology of the body: “physical generation also fully corresponds to its meaning only if it is completed by fatherhood and motherhood in the spirit…” (78:5)

Not everyone is called to have biological children. Not everyone is able to have biological children either (infertile woman writing here, remember!). But we are all called to be spiritual fathers and spiritual mothers. That’s what God made us to do. That is our mission in this life. And that is authentic masculinity and femininity. It’s fatherhood and motherhood, always in spirit, sometimes in body, too.

But what is fatherhood and motherhood?

Digging Deeper

There’s the rub, right? In today’s world, where so many families and so many people are broken, the words “fatherhood” and “motherhood” don’t suggest one simple thing to everyone. Some hear “father” or “mother” and the first thought that pops into their head is absence. Or neglect. Or abuse. Domineering, rigid, cold; fickle, faithless, fool; unreliable, selfish, narcissistic—the list goes on. Some of the adjectives aren’t even bad; they’re just different. Not all fathers are firm. Not all mothers are soft. Some dads are funny, but lots aren’t (although most seem to think they are). Some moms are sweet, but there are plenty of salty moms too. As I mentioned in the first essay in this series, while sex is binary, men and women are individuals, and as individuals we all have different strengths, gifts, and calling. There is almost nothing—no skill, no virtue, no strength—that is exclusive to one sex or the other.

Except for motherhood and fatherhood itself.

This is a basic biological fact. No matter what body parts you mutilate or hormones you alter, only men can be fathers and only women can be mothers. This suggests that there is something about the embodied act of fatherhood and the embodied act of motherhood that points us to some deeper truth about the unique mission of men and women in the world. And by embodied act, I mean the actual act of becoming a father and becoming a mother—the origin point, where sexual difference is determinative of the roles man and woman play.

Here again, the theology of the body sheds light on this question.

When speaking about that origin point for fathers, John Paul II uses the word “generative,” to describe a man’s role in the creation of a new child. Defined as “begetting,” “originating,” or “producing,” generative highlights the fact that it is the man who starts the process of a particular child coming into being. No matter who comes on to who, no matter what egg is being released from an ovary, no actual act of conception can take place unless a man enters a woman. He initiates the actual act. He engages. He literally goes out of himself to bring new life into being.

For the woman, it’s the opposite. When describing the origin point for mothers, John Paul II uses the word “creative.” For her, the process is inward, she receives the man’s body into her own and then new life grows within her. But it doesn’t just grow. The life is nourished and nurtured and protected by the woman, whose blood feeds it and whose womb shelters it. The body’s energy, in an immediate way, is focused on the particular child within the womb.

Generative and creative. Both are active words. Neither are passive. But one implies initiative and engagement. The other implies receptivity and sustained attention to a particular work. And together, they give us a foundation for understanding true fatherhood and motherhood, which is to say, authentic masculinity and authentic femininity. They aren’t the sum total of either, but they do chart a course for men and women’s mission and vocation in the world.

And I promise, promise, promise, that is what I will wrap all this up by writing about next time.

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“The Heresies of the Manosphere, Part 1” (Print) (Audio)

“The Heresies of the Manosphere, Part 2 (Print) (Audio)

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Visitation Sessions: In Search of the Masculine Genius (Podcast)

Welcoming the Wholeness of Women: The Catholic Vision of Feminine Dignity (Substack Essay)

Tending the Garden, Part 1: Understanding God’s Vision for Marriage and Family (Substack Essay)

Tending the Garden, Part 2: Redeeming the Family (Substack Essay)

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