In case you haven’t noticed, the battle of the sexes has entered new and dangerous territory.
It’s not just that there’s heightened conflict within male-female relationships and interactions. Instead, gender relations in the U.S. are increasingly marked by something else: downright detachment from, and disregard for, the opposite sex.
After decades of feminist insistence that women are not only equal to men but also don’t require them, it is now men who are living out a version of that old Gloria Steinem slogan, increasingly behaving as if they need a woman like a fish needs a bicycle.
This is exemplified in the growing prominence of figures like Andrew Tate — a former kickboxer-turned-misogynistic influencer who once said he would never get married because it doesn’t have any “tactical advantage”; or the rise of the Men Going Their Own Way movement, which encourages men to separate themselves from women and a society that has been corrupted by feminism.
So, if men are from Mars, and women are from Venus, increasingly both are just staying put, not even bothering to deal with each other on planet Earth.
This sexual isolationism has been aided and abetted by technology that reduces sex and reproduction to mere mechanical functions, rather than interpersonal realities. With in vitro fertilization, women don’t need men to have babies. With pornography — and the development of disturbingly lifelike virtual reality simulations — men don’t need women for sexual pleasure.
The problem hasn’t escaped mainstream attention. For instance, the new Barbie movie (which I haven’t seen, but have read copious reviews of) tries to resolve this dynamic by essentially offering a model of “coexistence.” The tensions that emerge in the film between the Barbies and the Kens reach an agreeable conclusion by, in the words of one reviewer, opting for “Swiss neutrality in the battle of the sexes.” Men are awesome, women are awesome, and they can live together peacefully without having to define themselves in relation to the other.
But this kind of coexistence is not true harmony. Instead, it is the “harmony” of the savanna watering hole, as if men were crocodiles and women were hippos, and the best they can hope to achieve is a kind of “go along to get along” non-aggression.
This is certainly not the kind of harmony one might hope to achieve between men and women, whose very bodies seem to indicate that they are, in a sense, made for each other. Barbie just offers this kind of cease-fire, but no real and lasting peace, because peace requires justice, and justice requires things to be in right relationship with each other.
If Barbie isn’t the answer, what is?
The work of Catholic scholar Erika Bachiochi suggests that part of a solution can be found in the origins of feminism, particularly in the thought of Mary Wollstonecraft. Unlike second wave feminists, who sought to erase legal and social distinctions between men and women, and certainly unlike the third wave feminists who began to undermine sexual distinction in toto, this 18th century English woman’s solution to the tensions that emerge between men and women was something else entirely: virtue.
Wollstonecraft didn’t ignore or deny that there could be injustices in male-female relationships. Her solution wasn’t to create barriers between the two or deny distinctions, but to emphasize how men and women, equal and complementary human beings, must find ways to live together in harmonious interdependence. For instance, differences in the frequency of sexual desire common between married men and women — and the conflicts that can result — was neither a problem to be ignored nor a glitch in need of a technological fix. Instead, Wollstonecraft argued, it was an opportunity for spouses to grow in virtue — and in particular for men to grow in chastity and continence.
“The two sexes mutually corrupt and improve each other,” she once wrote. “This I believe to be an indisputable truth, extending it to every virtue.”
Wollstonecraft’s vision of men and women virtuously finding harmony in and through — not in spite of— their unique and complementary differences should sound familiar — because in many respects, it is the Church’s vision, too.
As the Catechism teaches, “God created man and woman together and willed each for the other.” Men and women “were made ‘for each other’ — not that God left them half-made and incomplete: he created them to be a communion of persons, in which each be ‘helpmate’ to the other, for they are equal as persons (‘bone of my bones…’) and complementary as masculine and feminine.”
This is the only way to resolve the battle of the sexes — not by achieving an empty “coexistence” nor by separating from the enemy — but by men and women recognizing and embracing the fact that the only way to win is to do so together, in mutual interdependence, starting with our own marriages, interactions and relationships.
Liedl, a Twin Cities resident, is a senior editor of the National Catholic Register and a graduate student in theology at The St. Paul Seminary School of Divinity in St. Paul.
