A reply to John Howting’s “Exodus 90: The Other Side of Feminism”

“Men are getting the short end of the stick,” John Howting concludes in his March editorial, “Exodus 90: The Other Side of Feminism.” Mr. Howting goes on to state that those “who at least have enough common sense and courage to tell [men] the truth”—men like Andrew Tate, for example, and other so-called red-pill influencers—will soon draw men away from the Church. He says church groups that promote masculine discipline, such as Exodus 90, cannot avert this.

Indeed, when Exodus 90 tells men that “in the end, our gift to women are sons, brothers, husbands, and priests who become who they are supposed to be for them” (which is the group’s mission statement, with Mr. Howting’s emphasis), Exodus 90 is actually feminist. After all, Scripture teaches that the woman was made for the man, not the man for the woman.

Although Mr. Howting is right to recognize the crisis of masculinity in the Church, he fails to see its true crux. The problem isn’t that the red-pill influencers are speaking the truth. It’s that Christians are pussyfooting around Church teaching. Like most other commentators on this topic, Mr. Howting has yet to catch up with Timothy Gordon’s 2021 book, The Case for Patriarchy. As Gordon explained, “Judging by the words and deeds of the leaders of Christianity, our faith is ashamed of its perennial teachings in favor of the patriarchy and against feminism.”

It’s a basic fact of anthropology that all societies have been patriarchies. As Aristotle said, men rule. And since grace builds on nature, Gordon writes that “Christ established not only a clerical patriarchy … but also a lay patriarchy.” Each husband is priest, prophet, and king of the mini-Church of his own household. Yet the teaching of Scripture that “as the church is subject to Christ, so let wives also be subject in everything to their husbands” is amended with many caveats in Catholic missals. 

Why? As Gordon stresses, it’s because the Church leaders have become ashamed of patriarchy. 

Enter the Muslim convert influencer Andrew Tate. Martin Luther called Islam “the scourge of God.” Throughout history, when Christianity becomes weak, it invites advances from Islam. One may wonder, how can Christianity be true when the West is so effeminate? Why has a culture that was rooted in Christianity glamorized and institutionalized single motherhood? It must be time for the real men—Muslims—to take over.

Christian men complain they have been told to take responsibility but not told to exercise authority. Although the Bible says that a sinful woman will desire to rule over her husband, the Church doesn’t teach men how to handle this. Instead, men are taught the secular motto, “happy wife, happy life,” and other feminist lies.

So, men leave not just the Church but marriage altogether. Some, like Tate, go to Islam because it at least seems more anti-feminist. Others kill themselves: suicide is the biggest killer of men under age 45. But most reject religion altogether and drift along in despair.

That’s where the red pill comes in. “Red pill” is a term derived from a scene in the 1999 sci-fi movie The Matrix in which Neo is given the choice to either swallow a red pill and learn the hard, unsettling truths of his life or take a blue pill and remain ignorant.

Put simply, the red-pill movement is an embrace of materialistic evolutionary psychology—to acknowledge and give in to our animal desires and behaviors. In Christian terms, it’s the concupiscence of “the flesh,” or the inclination of our fallen bodies towards sin. Because red-pill writers are willing to touch on the darker realities of human sexuality—especially female sexuality—men feel they are hearing things the Church failed to mention. The red-pilled tell men, rightly, that life is hard (especially for men) and they must work hard to man up. They also tell men, rightly, that women will test them, that women lust and can’t be sexually satisfied by a Ned Flanders personality. 

The crisis of masculinity in society and the appeal of the red pill is thus a reflection of the crisis of masculinity in Christianity. But the red-pill view of human nature is wrong. Christianity recognizes we are fallen and inclined to disorder: virtue is hard, but vice is easy. St. Augustine called this “the languor of nature,” describing sin as being almost a second nature—but only almost. Unlike the deterministic, materialistic red-pill worldview, Christianity says we aren’t compelled to sin. The devil can only tempt us to it by working on our imagination and appetites.

The red-pilled, by contrast, mistakenly say that what’s “natural” is merely whatever happens: sin is natural because humans sin. That’s because of a basic misconception about natural law. While it’s natural for a praying mantis to eat the head of her mate after sex, saying that this is also “natural” for human beings would be absurd. The same goes for promiscuity: it’s natural for a bull but not for a man. Natural law isn’t about whatever happens “naturally” but what’s conducive to our nature as rational animals.

Trained in the philosophy of Aristotle and Aquinas, Gordon explains feminism as an attack on not only natural law but also divine positive law. It promoted promiscuity to undermine patriarchy and restructure society, and the red pill cannot regard promiscuity as natural without furthering feminism instead of fighting it. “Human beings,” Gordon writes, “ensure their own misery by violating their rational-moral goal and function.” Since the family, as the Catholic Catechism teaches, is the foundation of society, its dysfunction is the root of the crisis of the West. Indeed, the method of the radicals who have aimed at overthrowing Western patriarchy is shown in the Latin origins of the word “radical”—someone who attacks the root. 

One such radical, Wilhelm Reich, wrote in his book The Sexual Revolution (1936) that “the sexual process has always been the core of the cultural process.” That is because nothing affects the family more than sex does, and nothing affects culture more than the family does. As Gordon writes, “Everything boils down to the family.” Feminist radicals, therefore, aimed at overthrowing patriarchy by promoting promiscuity to undermine the family.

“Feminism is, in the main, an attack on chastity,” Gordon writes. So-called “free love” was actually “weaponized sexuality,” and it has now cost the West nearly everything. In Sex and Culture (1934), anthropologist J. D. Unwin surveyed 80 societies and found that those that became totally sexually liberated experienced a cultural collapse within 100 years after their so-called liberations. That time frame gives the West until 2060. As the Columbian philosopher Don Colacho observed, “sexual promiscuity is the tip society pays in order to appease its slaves.”

Using lust against men is an old tactic. In Scripture, Numbers 25: 1-3 describes how Balaak, the king of the Moabites, hired Balaam, a prophet-for-hire, to curse Israel. Unable to curse Israel because God would not allow it, Balaam instead sent thousands of women into the Israeli encampment to have sex with the soldiers and lure them into idol worship. Balaam knew that God Himself would then curse them. The plan worked.

Similarly, feminism set a honey trap to emasculate men by making culture downstream of what impure women want. As E. Michael Jones has outlined in his book Libido Dominandi (2000), “sexual liberation is political control.” All the radicals had to do was harness the inclination in fallen human nature towards what Gordon calls “the subversion of righteous authority.” Women needed only a little propaganda to persuade them because feminists targeted “the weak spot in family unity: obedience.” And “Western society’s men,” says Gordon, “have been astoundingly swift in their shameless forfeiture of their vocational birthright to familial headship.” They preferred being playboys and pursuing pleasure without responsibility.

As a result of the feminist assault on the family, fertility in most of the Western world is now below the replacement rate. Here, Gordon makes the critical point that “contraception’s impetus was the selfsame sexual revolution that toppled the patriarchy.” In its embrace of sex before marriage and contraception, the red pill thus embraces the sexual revolution. Even within marriage, including among many Christians, contraception continues its destructive work by frustrating the primary purpose of marriage: procreation.

“Female fecun`dity,” Gordon writes, “presents the paradigm instance of what ought to be popularly conceived as ‘girl power,’” and in this sense, feminism is misogyny. It hates the essence of womanhood: the potential for motherhood. In all the 842 pages of Alfred Kinsey’s 1953 work, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, there isn’t a single reference to motherhood.

Gordon’s trenchant insight here is that homosexuality and transgenderism are “metastasized forms of super-feminism.” That is because feminism is the original gender dysphoria that leads to them. If a woman is defined by her career, as feminism says, then a man can be a woman. And if sex is severed from procreation and the family, no argument remains against homosexuality. There is no good feminism: “First-wave feminism germinated all the deadly properties seen in the second and third waves,” he writes.

Indeed, getting wives out of the home and into the workplace was “feminism’s most potent single attack against the patriarchy,” Gordon argues, “since wifely homeplace absence destroys every other aspect of the fabric of the family.” If the wife is the heart of the home, a working wife means heart disease. Hence, “the veritable Christian teaching on family … categorically forbids all married women (not only mothers) in ordinary situations to enter the workforce.” Children have a natural-law right to be raised and morally formed by their mothers.

Note that working wives are forbidden, not just working mothers. Wifely work outside the home cultivates a masculine mindset that prevents femininity from flourishing. “Men are attracted not to headstrong, officious women but rather to the supportive, submissive ones,” Gordon writes. Body positivity, which Gordon aptly terms “a form of relativism,” also damages femininity, and husbands are derided for wanting wives who put effort into being physically fit and attractive and for valuing a wife “as cook, cleaner, and caretaker.”

The feminist model of marriage is so unattractive that the media shuts out positive presentations of patriarchy—otherwise, people would long for it. Because “wives have been radicalized, and husbands have been all but deactivated,” Gordon writes, people are more depressed than ever. Depression is the leading cause of disability worldwide, and women are even more depressed than men. Real incomes are about four times higher than in the 1950s, but careerism has failed to bring women happiness.

Accordingly, Gordon notes that “the society cured of its feminism will first—or perhaps, simultaneously—be cured of its careerism.” This will involve a return, not only to fecundity, but to frugality, as husbands and wives prioritize their families over dual incomes. Whereas a red-pill “high-value man” sees his salary as the measure of his masculinity, Gordon stresses that “tireless striving for his family’s salvation can be the only adequate description of the layman’s vocation.” The West must relinquish the Protestant practice of attempting to “funnel grace not from the sacraments … but, rather, from labor.”

Only men can lead the way out of feminism because “it is up to the men of society to reclaim patriarchy,” Gordon writes. Expecting women to lead the way out is feminism. Men must face the fact that feminism involves not only female but also male failure. Any other view is an emasculating victim narrative. Just as promiscuity was the primary attack, chastity must be the primary counterattack because it “frees up a single young man’s will and intellect for self-possession and the eventual possession (or repossession) of his own family.”

Men must fight back by taking hold of society “one family—one married couple—at a time,” Gordon writes. This worked when Christianity rose from the ashes of fallen Rome. And it will work again. Only in this way will Christendom be reclaimed, and with it “will come an appreciation for the kingship of the social reign of Christ, King of the Patriarchy.” It is a society that entails the integralism I outlined in my December 2022 Chronicles essay, “Christian Nationalism—A Catholic Integralist View.” If the red pill despairs that this is possible, it reveals itself to be the black pill after all, and ‘when hope is given up, men rush headlong into sin,’ as Aquinas warned. Hence the red pill slogan “enjoy the decline,” but you can’t enjoy the decline without also being it, so the choice is ultimately patriarchy or degeneracy.