This content argues that modern feminism, termed "womanism," has inadvertently devalued femininity by encouraging women to adopt masculine traits to succeed in a male-dominated, hyper-masculinized society, leading to societal imbalance and a decline in well-being. It proposes a return to valuing both distinct masculine and feminine principles for holistic human flourishing.
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>> So, I am friends with a lot of wonderful
Latter-day Saint women who defend the
restored gospel online. One of them, our
dear friend Sarah Allen, passed away in
recent weeks, and I have posted a link
below to her GoFundMe for her family.
With that in mind, I normally ignore the
continuous flow of often silly Instagram
posts by Dr. Julie Hanks, a popular ex-
Mormon therapist. But this one going
after my Latter-day Saint sisters felt
worth responding to.
>> Hot take. LDS female apologists only
have a social media platform because of
feminism. And yet they dismiss and
discount the contributions of feminism
to their lives and to everyone's lives.
Not long ago, women and particularly
religious women were told to be quiet
and submissive and not speak in the
public sphere because that was reserved
for men.
>> Hearken unto the voice of the Lord your
God, while I speak unto you, Emma Smith,
my daughter. Thou shalt be ordained to
expound scriptures and to exhort the
church, and thy time shall be given to
writing and to learning much.
>> I have desired to organize the sisters
in the order of the priesthood. Joseph
told the women that he would make of
this society a kingdom of priests as in
the days of Enoch. The society's members
unanimously agreed to call their
organization the female relief society
of Nauvoo. Scores of women joined. The
pattern of the priesthood, Joseph
explained, meant that the women should
establish a presidency. The women
unanimously selected Emma Smith.
Feminism normalized women speaking
publicly and having their voice be heard
and valued.
>> We believe that women are useful not
only to sweep houses, wash dishes, make
beds, and raise babies, but that they
should stand behind the counter, study
law or physics, medicine, or become good
bookkeepers and be able to do the
business in any counting house. And all
this to enlarge their sphere of
usefulness for the benefit of society at
large. In these things they but answered
the design of their creation.
>> Without the work of brave feminists,
women would still be confined to home
and family only and not have options of
speaking publicly, having jobs, getting
education, or voting for that matter.
>> Ellis Reynolds was the oldest of four
children born in a farming family in
Pleasant Grove, Utah. She was 14 when
her mother died, and she had to become
the homemaker. Within a year, however,
her father remarried. She was
discontented there and made occasional
visits to Salt Lake City to attend
musical and dramatic performances,
general conference, and to visit family,
friends, and relatives. Ellis was warmly
received by the young family. Bighgam
was impressed with her vivacity and
intelligence. The next day, he sent her
an invitation to come live in the
Beehive House and attend school with his
own children. She knelt with the young
family in prayers, sat in one of their
boxes at the theater, and was privately
tutored in the Beehive House. After 2
years, she married Milford Ship and
moved into her own home. Determined to
keep up her learning, however, she arose
at 4 each morning and studied for 3
hours before her household began to
stir. When she was 28 with three
children, she obtained the support of
Bighgam, her husband, and others and
went to Philadelphia to earn a degree at
the Women's Medical College. Upon her
return to Utah, she specialized in
obstetrics, diseases of women and minor
surgery. She was active in women's
organizations of the church, a delegate
to the National Council of Women, had
additional children, and lived to be 92.
So, let's all thank feminism for the
chance to have this opportunity to speak
on social media. You may not like it,
but it's true.
>> This is why you don't go to Instagram
life coaches for history or philosophy.
But to be fair, first wave feminism was
great. It was a movement about women's
liberty and equality under the law. But
I don't think Julie even understands
that feminism has had multiple waves
since the 1890s and has evolved over
time into a movement that is actually
against valuing women and femininity.
It's a subject that I covered in one of
my earliest videos. There is no doubt
that one of the most powerful social
forces and ideologies in the past 40
years has been feminism. The broadly
construed notion that men and women
should have equality in terms of the law
and opportunity is certainly something
essentially everyone is on board with.
But what is the relationship between
modern feminism and femininity itself?
This is a question James Cussen of the
Living Philosophy podcast on YouTube
recently explored and his insights and
analysis were really interesting. The
term feminism, as we use it today, first
appeared in the 1837 work of the utopian
socialist Charles Furier. The Oxford
dictionary defines it as advocacy of the
rights of women based on the theory of
equality of the sexes. In this episode,
we're exploring the idea that this
feminism has been misnamed. We're going
to be distinguishing between true
feminism and historical women's
movement, which we'll be calling
womanism. This new feminism would be a
movement centered not on the female sex,
but on the feminine itself and on the
currently disregarded values of
femininity. The idea that femininity and
masculinity can be separated from their
associated sexes is an idea that has a
long history in Chinese philosophy with
the dynamic forces of yin and yang
representing these abstracted masculine
and feminine principles at least as far
back as the school of naturalists in the
3rd century BC. It's also something that
is intuitively grasped in language. In
the English language, we have words like
effeminate and mananish that have long
been applied to people who do not fit
the gender role stereotypes of their
culture. There are some men who are more
feminine than many women and some women
that are more masculine than many men.
And while masculinity and femininity are
obviously more correlated with their
connected sexes, every person has some
ad mixture of both in their psyche. So
here we see as he has said that everyone
actually has a mixture of both masculine
and feminine characteristics within them
whether they are biologically male or
female. And this is pretty much
something we all intuitively know. And
we also know that men tend to be more
masculine in their orientation and women
tend to be more feminine in their
orientation. And this is no surprise to
anyone who is familiar with biology and
how males and females of all different
species manifest different natural
characteristics as a general rule. So
what are the masculine characteristics
and the feminine characteristics?
This is actually a question of some
debate. But as a general rule,
masculinity tends to be connected more
to materiality, to stoicism, to being
pragmatic, to justice, competitiveness.
It's numbersoriented. It's
thingsoriented. It's objective,
independent, assertive, driven. It's
focused on grit, practicality. It's more
of speaking. It's knowing. It's deconstructive.
deconstructive.
And then the feminine on the other hand
is holistic, spiritual, cooperative,
artistic, nurturing, languageoriented,
emotionally connected, kind,
peacemaking, people and relationship
focused, graceful, elegant, expressive,
full of mercy, listening, and meaning.
Now, it should be noted that everyone
has some mixture of these
characteristics in themselves. And it
also should be noticed that there's a
lot of overlap. A significant number of
women are more masculine than a
significant number of men. But it should
be noted that the majority of women are
more feminine on average than men. So as
we look at these two lists, maybe we
should ask ourselves if femininity
amongst women is really valued in our
society. In essence, I'm suggesting 20th
century women have been living for
centuries in a male oriented culture
which has kept them unconscious of their
own feminine principle. Now, in their
attempt to find their own place in a
masculine world, they have unknowingly
accepted male values, goal oriented
lives, compulsive drivenness, and
concrete bread which fails to nourish
their feminine mystery. Marian Woodman,
the owl, was a baker's daughter. Having
established what masculinity and
femininity look like at the individual
level, it's time to look at the same
distinction from the perspective of the
collective. And when you look at the
collective side of our industrialized
culture through the lens of the
masculine and the feminine, it becomes
patently obvious that we live in a hyper
masculineized society. The cluster of
traits that industrialized society
selects for whether that's the
capitalist society of the west or
socialist societies like China and the
USSR are the traits associated with masculinity.
masculinity.
In the values landscape of industrial
society, it is masculine values that
dominate. This is the general direction
that the term patriarchy is pointed in.
The trouble with the term patriarchy is
that it runs into the same problem of
conflating men and masculinity and
females and femininity. This is actually
a fascinating take. He's saying that our
society actually has an extreme value
placed on masculine characteristics
which men by their nature are more
naturally inclined towards. However,
when men excel in greater numbers than
women in a world that places a premium
on masculine character traits, the
society is declared oppressive and
patriarchal towards women. But is this
because women are oppressed or because
we as a society do not value femininity?
The Oxford dictionary defines patriarchy
as a society, system, or country that is
ruled or controlled by men. In a
masculine values landscape, it is
inevitable that on average men will come
out on top. While both men and women
partake of masculinity and femininity,
at scale, masculine traits are more
correlated with males and feminine
traits are more correlated with females.
As such, in a landscape that is
organized according to masculine values,
men have a statistical advantage and are
more likely by the setup of the
landscape to come out on top.
Historically, the women's movement has
sought to overcome this. The basis for
this movement has been the idea of the
equality of the sexist. The womanist
movement felt that women were being kept
out of the workplace and places of power
because of historical oppression. The
direction of this oppression was seen to
be men over women. But this, as we are
arguing here, merely obscures the real
depth and nature of the problem. All of
this brings us to the real crux of the
argument. The historical movement that
we call feminism has not actually been
feminism at all. This historical
movement that in this episode we're
calling womanism achieved a big shift in
the organization of society but not in
the collective value system. Do you see
what he's saying here? Feminism is not
about finding value in the feminine. It
is about encouraging women, that's why
he calls it womanism, to be more
competitive in a landscape that values
masculine characteristics. It's about
making females, women, more masculine.
And this is really a brilliant insight.
Womanism brought women more and more
into the masculine value system. The
integration of women into the masculine
value sphere was the ultimate victory
for what we might call masculinism.
Looking back at the traits associated
with femininity in the BSRI, we find the
following terms. Yielding,
compassionate, tender, softspoken, and
children loving. These traits don't
bring to mind coders in Google, Fortune
500 CEOs, or Wall Street bankers. Now, I
can hear men watching this video saying
to themselves that the world certainly
does not seem to value masculinity. And
that is true if you are a man. What
feminism does is it tells women to be
more masculine and then chastises men as
oppressive if they express their own
masculinity because male expressions of
masculinity are a force that they are
competing with in the masculine values
landscape. The result is to push to make
women more masculine and men more
feminine instead of seeing both
masculinity and femininity as two parts
of a comprehensive whole for human
flourishing. Those top paid job
descriptions are more intuitively
connected with masculine traits like
assertive, analytical, willing to take
risks, dominant, aggressive,
competitive, and ambitious. By framing
it as a problem of women versus men,
womenism unwittingly validated the
cultures value distribution. It affirmed
the value of competitiveness, of
ambition, and of dominance. And it
argued that women are just as competent
in these traits as men. And so what
womenism ended up doing was initiating
women into a masculinist value
structure, a landscape where their
gender correlated traits are punished
rather than rewarded. The post-womanist
world has never been so masculineist.
Sure, a few more of those with power and
influence are women, but the value
structure is exactly the same. Womanism
consummated industrial society's
apotheiois of masculine values while
putting the final nail in the coffin of
feminine values. The entire thrust of
womanism ended up being not a
revaluation of the feminine, but an
initiation of women into a masculine
paradigm. What has historically been
called feminism is thus ironically a
masculinist movement. Rather than
weakening the competitive dominance
paradigm of masculinism, it concretized
it. Nothing has done more to devalue the
feminine than so-called feminism. Ooh,
he's exactly right. We must be careful
not to throw the baby out with the
bathwater. The impulse to create
equality of legal status and equality of
opportunity for men and women is
absolutely the right impulse. And the
first wave of the feminist movements
which had that as a goal was completely
justified. But as those ends were
largely achieved, the movement went off
the rails. Perhaps then the revaluation
of the feminine could be more accurately
portrayed as the consummation of
womanism as a new wave in the movement
where as women got more power they could
work towards a revaluation of the value
system itself. This is in fact exactly
what happened in the 1980s and '90s. The
equality versus difference debate was a
major battleground in the women's
movement. Ultimately, however, the
equality camp who argued for the
similarities between men and women won
out and so-called difference feminism
fell out of all favor. And so, rather
than affirming the value of feminine
traits, rather than valorizing care,
community, cooperation, and connection,
womanism abandoned feminine values. And
so, we live in a society that has become
completely imbalanced towards one way of
viewing the world, the masculinist value
structure. Unsurprisingly, the total
dominance of the masculine value
structure has quickly led to cracks
appearing in the foundations of society.
In his 2002 work, Authentic Happiness,
the father of positive psychology,
Martin Seligman, noted that mounting
over the last 40 years in every wealthy
country on the globe, there's been a
startling increase in depression.
Depression is now 10 times as prevalent
as it was in 1960 and it strikes at a
much younger age. The mean age of a
person's first episode of depression 40
years ago was 29 12 while today it is 14
1/2 years. This is a paradox since every
objective indicator of well-being,
purchasing power, amount of education,
availability of music and nutrition has
been going north while every indicator
of subjective well-being has been going
south. How is this epidemic to be
explained? Now obviously I don't think
he is saying that this fully explains
the rise in depression but it is
extremely compelling to say that our
culture has minimize the feminine
virtues and that we've become unbalanced
in our society. The masculine
characteristics that lead to material
prosperity if not balanced against the
forces of femininity create a cold world
of numbers and data rather than a world
of relationships, love, mystery, and
meaning. The mental health crisis isn't
the only major symptom of this nadar of
the feminine. The links to the
ecological crisis are obvious. And one
could also argue that the meaning crisis
could be seen as the consummation of
centuries of deemphasis on the feminine.
Masculine values have taken such
precedence in their striving upward that
the earth and this life have lost all
their meaning. The sense of embodied
meaning and connection to the world
around us has been lost in the
desensitized realm of the masculine
until we have been left treading water
in the nihilistic void. What's really
remarkable is how the data supports
this. There was a study done by the
University of Pennsylvania that tracked
the happiness of women since the 1960s.
And while both men and women have become
less happy over that time, the decline
for women has been much sharper.
In the 1960s, women were actually
happier than men on average. And now
that is flipped and women are the less
happy of the two sexes despite the
increase in female involvement in the
workplace and increases in female
representation in nearly all aspects of
society. His observation that
masculinity and femininity need to
balance each other for optimum social
outcomes is a central theme of LDS
theology. But it is in the matrimonial
union of male and female as one that we
attain perhaps the most complete meaning
of our having been made in the image of
God. Male and female.
Gender is an essential characteristic of
individual premortal mortal and eternal
identity and purpose.
But from the beginning of creation, God
made them male and female. For this
reason, a man will leave his father and
mother and be united to his wife, and
the two will become one flesh.
Therefore, what God has joined together,
let no one separate.
Nevertheless, neither is the man without
the woman, neither the woman without the
man in the Lord. In the celestial glory,
there are three heavens or degrees. And
in order to obtain the highest, a man
must enter into this order of the
priesthood, meaning the new and
everlasting covenant of marriage. And if
he does not, he cannot obtain it.
Fundamental to us is God's revelation
that exaltation can only be attained
through faithfulness to the covenants of
an eternal marriage between a man and a woman.
woman.
That divine doctrine is why we teach
that gender is an essential
characteristic of individual premortal,
mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.
purpose.
>> Interestingly enough, it was actually
this quote from an author and podcaster
named Brett Mccay that I believe most
beautifully summed up the proper
paradigm for viewing the necessity of
the differences in our natures as men
and women. There are two ways to define
manhood. One way is to say that manhood
is the opposite of womanhood. The other
is to say that manhood is the opposite
of childhood. Manhood is the opposite of
childhood and concerns one's inner
values. A child is self-centered,
fearful, and dependent. A man is bold,
courageous, respectful, independent, and
of service to others. Thus, a boy
becomes a man when he matures and leaves
behind childish things. Likewise, a girl
becomes a woman when she matures into
real adulthood. Both genders are capable
of and should strive for virtuous human excellence.
excellence.
When a woman lives the virtues, that is
womanliness. When a man lives the
virtues, that is manliness. Women and
men strive for the same virtues, but
often attain and express them in
different ways. The virtues will be
lived and manifested differently in the
lives of sisters, mothers, and wives
than in brothers, husbands, and fathers.
Two different musical instruments
playing the exact same notes will
produce two different sounds. The
difference in the sounds is one of those
ineffable things that is hard to
describe with words, but easy to
discern. Neither instrument is better
than the other in the hands of the
diligent and dedicated. Each instrument
plays music that fills the spirit and
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