The Feminine Mystake

LES SILLARS, HOST: Welcome to Season 3 of Doubletake from WORLD Radio. I’m Les Sillars.

If you’re new to the program, on Doubletake we tell stories creatively about interesting people encountering big ideas. It’s journalism plus storytelling, informed by a Biblical worldview.

We think you’re really going to enjoy our upcoming episodes. We have a two-part story about a woman who faced a really hard question: how far should she go to get pregnant?

HERTER: Didn't matter if I was driving on the freeway, if it's six o'clock, I need to pull over on the side of the freeway and I need to take this injection.

Another is about grief, Alzheimers, and the ability to navigate.

ROUGH: And there was something else bothering me. Out of all the ways to die, a slow decline from dementia scared me the most …

There’s a piece about the rise and fall of purity culture.

SHIPE: You know, you just feel stuck. I felt stuck. And I probably would have married him if my parents hadn’t intervened.

An Idaho Christian school that declared war on an entire culture.

MOORE: I held out until I felt like it was the very last minute that I could hold out in giving a phone to my daughter. And I regret now doing it then.

And more, including a three-part series based on my book Intended for Evil. It’s about a Christian who survived the most totalitarian regime the world has ever seen: Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge.

SILLARS: The soldiers and cadres were often merciless, and brutal.

MANICKAM: They had to show them that this is the power of the Revolution.

So we’re pretty excited about this season. Let’s get right into it.

FEMALE PROTESTER: I’m just really concerned with how conservative the court has gotten … 

PROTESTERS: Hey-hey, ho-ho, patriarchy has got to go …

MALLORY MILLETT: Do you remember when the Kavanaugh hearings were happening? Remember the Kavanaugh hearings? Remember those women pounding on the doors …

Mallory Millett recalls watching the protests against Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court in 2018. Protestors stormed the doors of the Supreme Court. Audio from CNN.

PROTESTERS: Hey-hey, ho-ho, Kavanaugh has got to go … 

ANNOUNCER: These are live images, folks, at the doors of the Supreme Court …

MILLETT: … those wild women like like wild banshees, pounding and screaming.

ANNOUNCER: … those are the very doors of the Supreme Court, there are now hundreds of protestors who have come up onto the stairs …

Kavanaugh had been accused, not very credibly, of sexually assaulting a girl in 1982. Protests erupted all over the country. Mallory stared in horror at the screen in her Manhattan apartment.

PROTESTERS: What do we want? Equality! When do we want it? Now!

MILLETT: That's Kate. I saw my sister, metastasized.

Kate Millett had died in 2017, the year before the Kavanaugh nomination. But to Mallory, Kate’s presence suddenly seemed very real.

MILLETT: I kept saying, it’s metastasization. It's like cancer. I had this one Kate, now there are millions of Kates.

Few people today know of Kate Millett. In the late 1960s she was an obscure English instructor at Barnard College in New York City. But her 1970 book Sexual Politics made her an instant icon in the “Second Wave” feminist movement. In 2013 she was inducted into the National Women’s Hall of Fame, along with Betty Ford and Nancy Pelosi.

As Kate’s sister, Mallory had a front-row seat as all this unfolded. At first Mallory thought of herself as a feminist. But gradually she realized feminism wasn’t quite what she thought.

SILLARS: But you think there was something distinctive that she brought to it, though, only Kate Millett brought to the whole feminist...

MILLETT: … the hatred, the hatred, that was never in the women's movement before like this.

Watching the Kavanaugh protests, it struck Mallory that Kate wasn’t just back. She’d never really left.

MILLETT: I'm sitting in this apartment in complete shock because she has taken over the world.  Kate has taken over the world.

When she said that, I had my doubts. How can you say that one woman’s ideas have taken over the world?

But Mallory says that Kate was a key figure–uh, no, that’s not right. She blames Kate for spreading incredibly destructive ideas. For shaping a new narrative about what a woman is. One designed to burn down Western civilization.

So today, a story about a woman who took a journey with her sister, only to realize that she’d been led into some very dark places. And, just a note here: this episode is really not for kids. But we think it’s important.

I’m Les Sillars. This is Doubletake.

Mallory and Kate Millett grew up in St. Paul, Minnesota, in an Irish-Catholic family. Kate was born in 1934 and Mallory five years later.

Their grandfather was one of the founders of Farmington, Minnesota. But their father abandoned the family when Kate was 14 and Mallory nine. Her mother scraped together a living as an insurance agent.

Mallory shared a bedroom with Kate for her first nine years. She says Kate often beat her up. In a memoir Kate herself described punching three-year-old Mallory in the stomach, hard, for knocking over her sand castle.

MILLETT: She once put my face through a window.

Even as a child, Kate showed signs of serious mental illness.

MILLETT: So, growing up with her was living, like living in the same room with ISIS.

Kate could be funny and charming one minute. And then dark and manipulative the next. Mallory says she was “boy-crazy.” But the boys weren’t interested. At night …

MILLETT: And she would be lying in her top bunk, just raging about what some boys at school had done. And she would just be in a rage all the time, about being a girl, and how terrible it was.

She was often in trouble in her Catholic schools. But she made it to the University of Minnesota and graduated magna cum laude in 1956. Earned a masters at Oxford in 1958 and then returned to the U.S. to teach at various schools. Kate also studied sculpture in Japan, where she met and married another artist. A man. Fumio Yoshimura. Despite this, she continued a string of lesbian relationships throughout her adult life.

In 1964 they moved to New York, where she got a job teaching at Barnard College and continued her art. Later Kate started a doctoral program at Columbia University.

Meanwhile, Mallory graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1961. In 1963 she headed to Asia with her new husband. He was a rising executive with the 3M Corporation.

MILLETT: I had a gorgeous apartment in Hong Kong, and a beautiful house in Manila. Beautiful. I had five servants who lived in.

A limousine and driver. The works. But after about five years there her marriage fell apart. We’ll just say it was messy and leave it at that.

So in 1967 she moved to L.A. to try to make it as an actress. She’d abandoned Catholicism by this point. Took up Buddhism.

And then, in 1968, Kate called.

MILLETT: … saying come to New York, we're starting a new thing, the National Organization of Women and you can be in on the ground floor.

They’d had no contact for years. But Mallory was just drifting.

MILLETT: She wanted to bring me in as an acolyte of hers, which I immediately became.

So Mallory came to New York and moved in with Kate. She and Fumio had a loft in a dilapidated former factory in the Bowery. Lots of painters and sculptors lived there.

Mallory settled in. Joined a theater troupe of 20 homosexual men and a couple of women. Some of its members had written films for Andy Warhol.

MILLETT: I'm waitressing. I'm ushering in theaters. I'm doing all sorts of menial jobs. My life has gone from the grand living, like, like, Melania. …

Melania Trump.

MILLETT: … To scraping, really scraping. Terrifying, just terrifying.

Then one day in 1969 Kate invited Mallory to a meeting at a friend’s home. They were organizing the National Organization for Women. NOW. Everyone was sitting around a long oval table.

MILLETT: So they would start the meeting with this chant...

Kind of a call and response. This is Mallory reading from an article she wrote about the meeting.

MILLETT: The chairwoman would say, “Why are we here today?”
“To make revolution,” they would answer.
“What kind of revolution?” she replied.
“The Cultural Revolution,” they would chant.
“And how do we make the cultural, cultural revolution?” she demanded.
“By destroying the American family,” they answered.
“How do we destroy the family?” she came back.
“By destroying the American patriarch,” they cried exuberantly.
“And how do we destroy the American patriarch?” she replied.
“By taking away his power.”
“How do we do that?”
“By destroying monogamy!” they shouted.
“And how can we destroy monogamy?”
And this answer left me dumbstruck, breathless. … “By promoting promiscuity, eroticism, prostitution, abortion, and homosexuality,” they rejoined.

MILLETT: I really began to realize that I had been brought into something very, very weird.

To most Americans that scene and that chant would have been bizarre. If you were a feminist in 1969 it made perfect sense. Mallory had just attended a Marxist “consciousness raising” meeting.

The public face of feminism at the time was Betty Friedan, author of the 1963 book The Feminine Mystique. Audio from a documentary called, “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.”

FRIEDAN: The Feminine Mystique, it defines women solely in terms of her sexual relation to man. As a man’s sex object, wife, mother, homemaker, and never in human terms, as an individual person, as a human being herself.

As co-founder of the National Organization for Women, Friedan helped launch “Second Wave feminism.” We’ll get into “First Wave feminism” a little later. NOW was the most prominent of dozens of women’s liberation groups, and probably the least radical.

Friedan grew up in a wealthy family and attended Smith College, an elite all-women school. After Friedan graduated she surveyed a bunch of former classmates for a reunion, asking how they were doing.

At least, that was Friedan’s story in the book. Later researchers would discover that she had a long history of leftist activism. Anyway.

Dozens of classmates wrote back. Patrick Henry College history professor Rob Spinney says most were well-off but ordinary women living traditional, domestic lives.

SPINNEY: They spent their college years reading Kant and, and Rousseau. And now all they're doing is changing diapers and, and you know, cooking hot dogs. And they said, “We're trapped. We're trapped.”

Who did seem fulfilled? Their husbands.

SPINNEY: He's got a career. That's the solution. And I'm not oversimplifying this. The Feminine Mystique really presents a gospel of careerism. And Betty Friedan goes so far as to say, a housewife who is kind of trapped inside her home, as a wife and a mom, is really a prisoner in, this is her phrase, a “comfortable concentration camp.”

The book sold three million copies in its first three years. Women across the country formed “Women’s Lib” groups to share problems and stories.

On the surface, Second Wave feminism was about equality. But “equality” in that context was a loaded word. Second Wave feminists were “egalitarian.”

SPINNEY: Egalitarianism says men and women are so comprehensively equal, that there really is no difference between them at all.

Sure, there are some minor biological differences.

SPINNEY: But once you get past that, men and women are interchangeable.

Here’s Kate Millett guest lecturing at Smith College in 1970. She’s asserting that all children are socialized into accepting one of two patterns.

KATE MILLETT: We all know as masculine and feminine. Now these patterns have no basis in biology and it is impossible to rationalize these temperamental differences on biological or innate psychological grounds.

At the same time, the Sexual Revolution was building. Driven in large part by oral contraceptives. The Pill.

Egalitarianism and the Sexual Revolution came together in Second Wave feminism. For women, having a child impedes your career. That’s the “baby penalty.” So women, like men, should be sexually liberated without fear of getting pregnant.

SPINNEY: They said, as long as men do not have a baby penalty, and women do, we're not equal. We need abortion to make us equal.

Likewise for gay rights. People are people, so you should be able to find sexual fulfillment with whomever you like. Otherwise you’re not equal.

SPINNEY: And so the logical implication of egalitarianism was homosexuality.

Spinney says that the core of Second Wave feminism is this denial that male and female are distinct identities.

SPINNEY: I think more than anything else, egalitarianism is kind of the bedrock philosophy.

Dressed up for the public as “equality.” And applied through Marxism. That’s the final layer of Second Wave feminism.

Marxism teaches–uh, I’ll make this quick. Marxism reduces all human experience to war between groups of people for economic and political power. In a patriarchal world, marriage is slavery. Its purpose is to amass private property and perpetuate inequality.

In this way of thinking, women are victims and men oppressors. Always. Second Wave feminists also said that the patriarchy corrupts every individual relationship between men and women. Left women vulnerable. That’s in part why people like Kate Millett were so angry. She believed “the patriarchy” was a deliberate and organized effort to oppress each individual woman. As one slogan put it: “The personal is political.”

So when Second Wave feminists said they were starting a revolution, they weren’t kidding. They really did want to burn down Western society.

Mallory was taken aback at the NOW meeting. But even though her relationship with Kate was deteriorating she wasn’t quite ready to abandon her sister. Or feminism. She liked a lot of things about it. She wanted a career.

MILLETT: I was going to be totally on my own and I didn't need any man. I don't need a man. We don't need a man.

Mallory and Kate were living together when Kate went to defend her thesis for her doctorate in comparative literature from Columbia University. It was 1969. Kate was a nervous wreck, thinking her male committee was going to flunk her. They didn’t.

MILLETT: She came back that evening. Triumphant. They gave her first honors. This stupid group of men.

Her thesis came out in the spring of 1970 as a book: Sexual Politics. Basically, she analyzed some pornographic passages by well-known novelists. And from those she constructed a Marxist theory of male-female relationships.

Parts of the book wallow in perversion. I don’t recommend it. But the feminist movement more than embraced it. According to a TIME cover story on Kate that August: "The movement had no coherent theory to buttress its intuitive passions, no ideologue to provide chapter and verse for its assault on patriarchy. Kate Millett, 35, a sometime sculptor and longtime brilliant misfit in a man's world, has filled the role through Sexual Politics."

The article appeared the same week as the Women’s Strike for Equality. August 1970 was the fiftieth anniversary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment, which gave women the right to vote. In cities across the country women marched instead of showing up for work that day.

MARCHERS: Sisterhood is powerful, join us now! Sisterhood is powerful, join us now!

ANNOUNCER: Join us now, sisterhood is powerful. The battle cry of the women’s liberation movement rings out down New York’s Fifth Avenue, as more than ten thousand militant feminists stage a one-day strike for equal rights.

In New York, Kate was thrilled. People were hanging out of windows, cheering and waving flags. Here’s Kate in “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry.”

KATE MILLETT: It felt like we had triumphed. It felt like we were changing the world. Now we are a movement.

MUSIC: I Am Woman by Helen Reddy

Between the TIME cover story and the movement’s newfound prominence, Kate was suddenly famous.

After the Women’s Strike, radical feminism gained a lot of steam. Much like this 1972 hit from Helen Reddy. That year Congress passed both Title IX and the Equal Rights Amendment, although the ERA has never been ratified. A year later Roe v. Wade constitutionalized a right to abortion. It was overturned in 2022.

Kate joined Friedan, journalist Gloria Steinem, and a few others as feminist stars.

MILLETT: I mean, I always tell people, if you stopped a person in Rwanda in 1973, and mentioned the name Kate Millett, they knew who she was.

In the 70s Kate continued teaching and working for abortion and other causes. She started a women’s art colony and Christmas tree farm in LaGrange, New York.

Philosopher Carrie Gress is a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. She’s a cultural commentator and the author of The End of Woman, which traces key ideas in the history of feminism.

GRESS: There was just some kind of magnetism about her that people were just drawn to her, they were drawn to her ideas.

Kate’s major impact came through Sexual Politics. The book provided a model for how to apply feminist ideas in an academic context. San Diego State University started the first women’s studies program in 1970. By 1977 there were over 250 such programs in the country. In many, Kate’s book was required reading. Today there are thousands and thousands of such programs around the world.

GRESS: She's like, the dynamite that sort of blew up in the, in the culture.

American culture had been primed for egalitarianism and the ideas that went with it. The Sexual Revolution and feminists like Betty Friedan gave the ideas a foothold. Kate ushered them into the universities, and from there they romped into the culture.

GRESS: And it was this idea of, if you can convince people that they have to express themselves sexually, and if they don't, then they are oppressed. And you can blow up the whole culture very, very easily, very quickly.

Gress adds that to reshape a culture, you need to write new narratives. She traces in her book how feminists have for 200 years offered alternative origin stories for what it means to be a woman.

In the early 1800s the infamously decadent poet Percy Shelley was a prominent feminist voice. In one poem he reinterpreted Milton’s Paradise Lost to make Satan the hero.

GRESS: And so instead of Eve being the temptress and falling with Adam, she becomes a heroine. She's the one that gets all this special knowledge from the serpent.

Feminist writers are still doing this. One of Amazon Prime’s animated hits in 2024 is a depraved musical, uh, comedy set in Hell.

HAZBIN HOTEL TRAILER: Welcome to the Hazbin Hotel! Your last desperate attempt at salvation starts here!

Its protagonist is the lesbian Princess of Hell. Its opening tells how Adam’s first wife Lilith refused to submit to him. The story of Lilith goes back to ancient Mesopotamian and Jewish lore. Lilith fled Eden. Then Lucifer found and fell in love with her.

HAZBIN HOTEL: Together, they wished to share the magic of free will with humanity, offering the fruit of knowledge to Adam's new bride Eve, who gladly accepted. But this gift came with a curse.

In this story, women weren’t deceived at the Fall of humanity. Rather, women bring knowledge and freedom. But those are a threat to powerful male forces, and that’s why men oppress women. Also, that’s why Christians hate everything creative and non-binary and want to exterminate everybody who disagrees with them. At least, that’s the subtext of this show

GRESS: Once you can disconnect the Christian roots of something and give it a new origin story, then it's a lot easier to get people to buy into it.

By the mid-1970s Mallory’s doubts were growing. Even Fumio had had enough of Kate’s relentless lesbianism, and left. Kate later wrote that Fumio had been unable to “transcend monogamy.” Worse, Kate began talking incessantly about sexual liberation. For children.

MILLETT: “Next is kid lib,” she would proclaim. “Kid lib, kid lib,” she'd chant. I didn't quite know at the time what she meant.

Others in the radical Left had been saying the same for a few decades.

MILLETT: And she strongly believed that for the human race to be truly liberated, everyone must be eroticized.

And not just sexual relations between children. She spoke approvingly of pedophilia. She called the taboo against incest, a “cornerstone of patriarchal thought.”

MILLETT: Kate was devoted to the erasure of every taboo of every kind.

This was almost the last straw for Mallory.

MILLETT: You know, when you don't want reality to come in, you can keep it back for quite a while.

But as Kate’s depravity became clearer, Mallory was edging back toward Catholicism. Occasionally she’d creep into Mass, but she wouldn’t take communion. Then she started coming more and more often.

MILLTEE: And as I was going back to the Church, my mind was resettling back into understanding reality, in the beautiful way that the Church understands reality.

By 1979 she had returned to the Catholic Church. About then she met Thomas Danaher. He’s a New York businessman who also had been raised Catholic but wandered away. Soon they were married.

For the next decade after that Mallory and Kate had only occasional contact. The family tried in 1983 to have Kate committed to an institution as her mental illnesses worsened.

MILLETT: She had gotten so insane, just temper tantrums, wild screaming fits lying on the ground, screaming and yelling.

So Mallory and a few friends gathered at Kate’s apartment with a doctor. They arranged for an ambulance to take her away. In restraints if necessary. Kate was not having it.

MILLETT: And it was a whole scene that went on for hours. And so we ended up having a real showdown right on the doorstep of the entrance of her building. And there was a policeman there, who had to decide once and for all if they could take her away against her will.

But then...

MILLETT: She snapped into sanity like that. Suddenly, she was addressing the policeman with great courtesy and sanity.

Kate’s account of this event in her book The Loony Bin Trip is very similar. She describes being terrified and frantically trying to get away. On the street shouting desperately for a cab. Then while Mallory and friends are talking to the ambulance drivers, she encounters a cop. His name is Kelly. They light up a couple of cigarettes.

And then, "While we smoke apart from the others, I explained the situation in terms of a family misunderstanding into which a psychiatrist has blundered. That one there is my younger sister. I'm a writer and someday she'll be a wonderful writer, but at the moment she is trying to have me carted off. The law, you know, forbids forced hospitalization. He nods.

MUSIC: Ticket to Ride by The Beattles

Kate shows him her airline ticket. It’s proof of her story. That she was just heading to the airport. Kelly tells her, “‘You got a ticket to ride.’ Even a smile. The Beatles song floods over me like heaven. …

I transformed his smile into a wink. A code.”

MILLETT: And he finally just looked at all of us and said, this woman seems perfectly sane to me. There was this whole group of us who just, we just wilted.

After this, Mallory’s relationship with Kate soured even more. When you’re gone, Mallory told her mom, I’ll never speak to Kate again.

MILLETT: And that's what I did. And when my mother died in September of 1993, I cut off all connection with Kate at that point.

Mallory’s relationship with Kate was a lot like the culture’s relationship with Second Wave feminism. As Mallory was distancing herself from Kate, Kate herself was fading out of the spotlight. Second Wave feminism itself was crumbling.

Perhaps because by the mid-1980s things seemed a little less urgent. More women were winning public office and job promotions. Workplace harassment wasn’t quite so acceptable anymore.

MUSIC: 9-to-5 by Dolly Parton

As illustrated by the 1980 hit movie 9-to-5 starring Dolly Parton and Jane Fonda. It’s a satire about three women who take down their tyrannical, sexist boss.

According to Rob Spinney, radical feminism had just gone too far. Maybe a third of Americans bought into the radical feminist agenda.

SPINNEY: But the other two thirds said, this is anti-family. This is anti-man. Man-hating. This is anti-child. And this is what led to the collapse of Second Wave feminism.

The attractive faces of feminism stayed front and center. Betty Friedan and Gloria Steinem. Angry figures like Kate Millett were dumped. Forgotten. Like the crazy old aunt in the attic.

In 1999 Kate wrote an article for an obscure journal headlined: “Out of the Loop, and Out of Print.” It bemoaned her inability to land either a teaching job or book contract. She wrote that she could probably survive on savings plus social security. She was 65.

But through her influence, egalitarian ideas were already entrenched in the culture. Then came “Third Wave feminism” in the 1990s.

SPINNEY: It rejects the whole idea of an authoritative life plan. As a one size fits all ideology or philosophy. Everybody gets to create his or her own feminism. Who are we to tell you that you can't be a housewife? Far from us.

Third Wave feminism isn’t a coherent movement. Everybody gets to write her own story. In theory.

SPINNEY: In practice, that story, though, is always more egalitarianism.

That’s the core: men and women are essentially the same. It’s to the point that men declare they’re women and women insist they’re men. And it can be legally dangerous to say otherwise. Further, any differences in outcome between men and women in business, politics, education, athletics–anything–are by definition the result of male oppression.

It’s not that sexism doesn’t exist; it’s that egalitarianism is the air we breathe. It’s almost like somebody planned all this.

After their mother died in 1993, Mallory continued her life with Thomas in New York. Kate lived mostly on her farm and artist’s colony in LaGrange with her partner. Occasionally she resurfaced for various awards. Such as her 2013 induction into the National Women’s Hall of Fame.

KATE MILLETT: I have fought the patriarchy all my life as a scholar, as a teacher, as a token woman, and as an artist. 

On September 6th, 2017,

ANNOUNCER: Kate Millett died of a heart attack on one of her regular visits to Paris. Millett’s 1970s book Sexual Politics …

She was 82.

When Mallory heard the news.

MILLETT: I said, Thank God, I was so relieved. It was such a relief to know she wasn't on the planet anymore. 

But Kate’s ideas were still out there.

MILLETT: It was going to poison them forever. But at least the source was cut off now.

SILLARS: It’s, it’s a hard thing to say about your own sister, you know, …
Mallory: 

MILLETT: Not when it’s Kate Millett. Not when it's Kate Millett.

Conventional wisdom about the history of feminism goes something like this: In the mid-1800s a handful of brave women started advocating for women’s rights. At the time women couldn’t vote. They were excluded from higher education, business, and politics. Their husbands dominated them at home and the courts treated them as less than equal to men.

These “First Wave” feminists didn’t really want to overturn society. Many were Christians. They just wanted equitable treatment. Starting with suffrage. And because of their efforts women got the vote in 1920.

In the 1960s, many conservatives would say, Second Wave radicals hi-jacked feminism. Brought in these wild ideas about sexual liberation and smashing the patriarchy. Reduced the sacrament of marriage to a contract. Provoked an epidemic of divorce.

But First Wave feminism is noble. Without feminism, women would still be suffering the same oppression they’d always endured.

When Carrie Gress started working on her book,

GRESS: I was expecting First Wave feminism to be really lovely and nice and something that I could, you know, I could really hold up as a model.

But …

GRESS: … when you start looking into the closet, there's some very dark skeletons there.

Her book outlines how egalitarianism’s worst features were already there among leading First Wave feminists. Figures like Mary Wollstonecraft and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were hostile to the Bible and Christianity. Some abandoned sexual restraints and took up occultic ideas and practices.

GRESS: I think that we've been sort of guilted into believing that we need to be grateful for feminism instead of recognizing that it's actually done a lot more damage than any of us has any idea of.

There have been major improvements for women in recent decades. Opportunities in business, education, and politics that previous generations were denied. But Gress argues that the effort to defend feminism, especially in Christian circles, is misguided.

GRESS: So you have to skirt a whole lot of the history of feminism and what you mean by feminism, if you're gonna call yourself a Christian feminist.

Even secular researchers have noticed the damage feminism has done. Louise Perry published The Case Against the Sexual Revolution in 2022. In a debate hosted by The Free Press recently she pointed out that if you erase sexual norms you don’t get a matriarchy or some sort of feminist utopia. You get polygamy. A few men with lots of women and a bunch of men with none. Hookup culture.

PERRY: And the thing is about polygamous cultures, that they're really bad news for women and children.

They have higher rates of domestic abuse, child abuse, and crime.

PERRY: And I've heard from so many women, because they email me all the time, who say that they bent into this, they tried so hard to prioritize sexual freedom. And it made them miserable. Because actually, there are profound differences between men and women …

Former theology professor Katie McCoy is the author of To Be A Woman. She says that after a generation of hookup culture …

MCCOY: Women are not only less happy, less satisfied, they're looking at 30s and 40s, there are fewer marriageable men …

They’re considering IVF and single parenthood adoption

MCCOY: ...because they still have that impulse for motherhood, despite all of the advances in their career, they still want a partnered family life.

She agrees that many early feminists had noble aims. But they misunderstood the problem and as a result their solutions were wrong. Yet some evangelicals are still trying to merge …

MCCOY: And I would even say syncretized …

… biblical teaching and feminist approaches.

For example, they focus on the historic imbalance of power between men and women. And on women’s ordination. They presume that fewer women than men in church leadership is evidence of unbiblical discrimination.

MCCOY: That because women are half the kingdom, half the church, that therefore we should have them be half the, fill in the blank, whatever role and ministry that is.

But McCoy says that to treat women equally...

MCCOY: You need Genesis one and two. That is what you need. After that everything becomes broken. To go back to the beginning and back to the original design, you need to be a biblicist to believe that women are equal. Not a feminist.

Even some secular researchers have …

MCCOY: … looked at the legal and social context, pre-second wave feminism, and said, we were already on the right track. We could have gotten to those legal measures without feminism. We did not need the “ism” of feminism to achieve that.

Both McCoy and Gress pointed out a tragic irony in all this. Feeling vulnerable, often for very good reasons, feminists sought to gain power in their relationships with men. But they did so by trying to become just like men. Because men wanted sex and careers, they also sought sex and careers. But what most women really wanted was marriage. And so they gave up a true understanding of their own identity. As a result, many women have ended up even more vulnerable and unhappy than they were before. Men, meanwhile, are left with a distorted view of sexuality. And the notion that the ideal woman is just like they are.

Mallory likes to quote Mae West. The breezy mid-1900s sex symbol joked that:

MILLETT: … when women go wrong, men go right after them.

That is, women have the power to divert men from God. But Gress says that a wise, spiritually mature woman living an ordered life has another kind of power. One that’s just as strong: they can point men toward God.

GRESS: I think that's just one of the key pieces and we've abandoned that because we don't realize that we have the capacity to make men better.

There are no guarantees. But if women had retained a biblical identity, they would have been much more likely to find what they wanted: a supportive and loving relationship. Emotional, physical, and financial security. Things that typically come with a healthy and intact marriage and family.

But they were deceived.

GRESS: What we have done is we've traded what our real power is for a fake male power. And we have neglected the things that we have.

You might call it the “feminine mystake.”

The result of all this is that Western culture is losing the idea that women have an identity as women. Human and distinctively female. The absurdity of denying this reality is becoming ever more clear with the rise of transgenderism. But that’s a story for a different episode.

It’s not that every feminist completely rejects the idea that men and women are different. But for over 200 years the goal of the egalitarian ideal is to erase this idea of woman. By promoting sexual license disguised as equality.

GRESS: And the diabolical piece comes in, like, it's sort of genius way, like, if you want to destroy somebody, destroy their sexual integrity.

Instead, she says, Christians should look to restore a clear and biblical view of women and men. That they have identities and roles that are distinct yet complementary. In the family, in the Church, and in the culture. One that recognizes that women can be mothers.

GRESS: I think on a core level women bear life and then are gifted and tasked with raising that life to the point where it can become the person that God wants it to be.

Not all women will have children, she notes. But we need to submit to the created order. That we are all male or female.

GRESS: I think women are meant to be bearers of life. And this is reflected both on a soul level but also very richly in a biological format, our body is going to inform us about the soul and vice versa.

For her part, Mallory still can’t quite believe that society has forgotten about Kate Millett. Someone whose ideas have taken over the world.

MILLETT: But now she's forgotten. It's all just Gloria Steinem and Betty Friedan. Gloria and Betty and Gloria and Betty. And it's all that's the most insidious part.

I’m Les Sillars, and I wrote and produced this episode of Doubletake. Thanks for listening, and we’ll see you next time.

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