Valorizing Masculinity: An Internal Contradiction of Modern American Feminism

Why should women valorize
or imitate masculinity?

What led me to feminism in the first place was an intense need to have my dignity as a woman affirmed. I had an intuition that being a woman was meaningful, that it carried some kind of significance—one that had been overlooked, even distorted, in the fundamentalist evangelicalism of my childhood. I seized onto feminism as an affirmation of that intuition, and for a time, it gave me the language I needed to begin to express and understand what I felt to be true.

Quickly, though, as I foraged more deeply into the categories and concepts of contemporary feminism, I also fell prey to its internal contradictions. The central of these is that modern American feminism, at its core, valorizes the masculine, affirming the key virtues of autonomy, success, and power.

In college, when my evangelical feminism was at its height, the question I dreaded most was this: doesn’t feminism have an undue emphasis on power, and isn’t that antithetical to the gospel? I had an answer to this of course, which I kept ready in the holster, just in case—but the reason I dreaded the question was because I didn’t think my answer was a good one. Even then, I saw a tension between the Christian virtues of self-giving love, humility, obedience, and the virtues of feminism, which were preoccupied with power imbalances, with making sure everyone gets an equal slice of the pie. But instead of listening to that tension, my response was to find a way to bury it. This signals to me how, even then, my feminist commitments had subtly supplanted my Christian ones.

Favale, Abigail Rine. Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion (pp. 116-117). Cascade Books, an Imprint of Wipf and Stock Publishers. Kindle Edition.