The fallout from feminism has not just affected women, but it seems to have poisoned the ability of men and women to date, marry and form families. Writer Suzanne Venker noted in “4 Feminist Lies That Are Making Women Miserable” that, “Dating in America is all but dead, and marriage is at an all-time low.”
One major roadblock to marriage these days is the lack of “economically attractive” men. Women are hypergamous, that is, they want to marry up and look for someone economically better off than they are. But with women earning more than in the past, and with a corresponding drop off in male educational attainment and the simultaneous elimination of well-paying factory jobs, it is getting harder and harder for women to find men whom they find economically attractive. Daniel T. Lichter of Cornell University, lead author of the study “Mismatches in the Marriage Market,” has remarked, “Most American women hope to marry but current shortages of marriageable men – with a stable job and good income – make this increasingly difficult, especially in the current gig economy of unstable low-paying service jobs…Many young men today have little to bring to the marriage bargain, especially as young women’s education levels on average now exceed their male suitors.” According to the abstract of the study headed by Lichter, “This study reveals large deficits in the supply of potential male spouses. One implication is that the unmarried may remain unmarried or marry less well-suited partners.”
Increasingly, it is common for the wife to out earn her husband. This article from MarketWatch claims that 38% of American women make more than their husbands. While acknowledging that a wife out earning her husband makes some couples uncomfortable, the piece dismisses this as evidence for the need to put love over money and to “[break] away from old-fashioned tropes about who should be the breadwinner.” This same piece also notes that, “the risk of divorce is nearly 33% higher when a husband isn’t working full-time.” The article chalks this up to peer pressure, attitudes passed down from parents and a glass ceiling for women leading men to falsely assume that they should be the highest earners in the home.
This piece from the BBC admits that, “Getting a top job dramatically increases women’s chances of divorce, even in egalitarian countries. Why isn’t it the same for men?” Citing the work of Swedish researcher Johanna Rickne, the article notes that when the woman is promoted “it creates a mismatch of expectations.” Says Rickne, “[it is] still seen as quite unusual for men to be the main supportive spouse in someone else’s career,” and that, “I think this norm changing is pretty far off.”
When reading about the issues that arise when the woman earns more, there is a tendency to put the blame on men. But from the articles and studies cited in this post that women are themselves not comfortable with the arrangement either as this piece from the New York Post makes clear. The obvious answer, as will be discussed below, is that the Lord God himself has hard wired mankind for patriarchy. Placing a woman in the role of breadwinner in a relationship – which is to say, to have her usurp the role of the man – is unnatural, awkward and unsatisfying for both men and women, even for those who are not Christians.
The patriarchy, it would seem, already has been smashed. This is true not only in the home, the world of business and the military, but also in politics – it’s a real possibility that both major American political parties will run female presidential candidates in 2024 – and even in many Evangelical churches, which generally are viewed as patriarchal and opposed to feminism. The Washington Post ran a story on May 11, 2021 with the headline “Saddleback Church just ordained three women as pastors. The Southern Baptist Convention says only men should be.”
In his book Scripture Twisting in the Seminaries, Part 1: Feminism, John Robbins noted, “The rise of the women’s movement, with all its attendant evils – child abuse, promiscuity, adultery, homosexuality, abortion, and divorce – has not met the sort of strong Christian opposition that it would have in earlier centuries.” While the Southern Baptist Convention has done better at opposing feminism than the liberal mainline denominations, it remains to be seen how well it handles this most recent attempt to smash the patriarchy in the SBC’s pulpits.
Historically, Christians have recognized three types of government all ordained by God: family, church, and state. And the consistent testimony of the churches, until very recently, has always been that leadership in all three is reserved for men.
Unlike what the smashers of the patriarchy would like to tell you, man’s mind is not a blank slate, a sort of wax nose that you can bend and shape any way you want. Mankind, male and female, while both created in God’s image and having equal dignity before God, are not in all respects equal in the feminist sense. The feminists hold to a view of the equality of men and women as if they were interchangeable parts of a machine. Take one out, plug the other one in, and there is no difference.
But this is an enormous lie.
Patriarchy is not some social construct that just as easily could be otherwise as the feminists want us to believe. Rather, is the God’s will for the human race and has been so from the time of our first parents onward. It is hard coded into our very being and no amount of talk about a woman needing a man like a fish needs a bicycle is going to change this. Even presumably secular researchers such as Johanna Rickne have acknowledged the difficulty – I would say impossibility – of changing the expectations men and women have for each other. Our plummeting birth rates are but one testimony to this.
Patriarchy in Genesis
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul” (Genesis 2:7). This is the Scripture’s account of God’s creation of Adam.
Then we read, “And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him…but for Adam there was not found an help meet for him. And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs and closed up the flesh instead thereof, And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man. And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis 2:18, 20-23).
While one can deduce patriarchy both from Adam’s priority in creation, from the fact that it was the woman who was designated the “help meet” for man, not man designated as the “help meet” to the woman, and from Adam’s naming woman and even later in Genesis 3:20 designating a proper name for her, Christians do not have to rely on implication only. For in prohibiting a woman to teach or to have authority over a man the Apostle Paul cites two reasons for his stance, the first of which is “For Adam was first formed, then Eve” (1 Timothy 2:13). Paul appends a second reason to his prohibition by adding, “Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression.” This second reason is clearly a reference to the fall of man recorded for us in Genesis 3.
There is some disagreement among the commentators concerning what Paul meant by Adam not being deceived. Calvin takes it in a comparative sense, by which he seems to mean that Adam was not as deceived as much as Eve but nevertheless was deceived by foolishly coveting more than was lawful. John Gill, on the other hand writes that, “Adam was never deceived at all,” and that he ate “out of love to his wife, from a fond affection to her, to bear her company, and that she might not die alone: he knew what he did, and he knew what would be the consequences of it, the death of them both.” In either case, Adam demonstrated greater understanding of Satan’s wiles.
Conclusion
Society, our entire civilization really, is falling apart daily before our eyes. The collapse is, or at least should be, obvious to all, but world has no answers how to stop it. All secular researchers can do is look at the wasteland feminism is creating and urge people to become more egalitarian in their views of men and women, put love over money and reject old fashioned attitudes handed down from the parents. But this they cannot do, because the expectations men and women have for one another as husbands and wives is not some social construct but is hard wired into mankind by God himself.
Until the West repents of its false idol of feminism and returns to a Biblical model of patriarchy in the home, the church, and the state, there is zero chance for us to restore our once Christian civilization.
Lux Lucet 
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