What Is a Woman?

Among the better New York Times columnists is one Pamela Paul. Admittedly, she does not have very much competition, but she certainly does a good job.

Yesterday, she wrote a column asking how it happens that girls have learned that becoming a woman is something to dread.

As she puts it:

Girlhood and female adolescence are treated like hurdles to overcome en route to a lifetime of persisting. Looming womanhood is something to stress over — a matrix of dire statistics about sexual violence and unwanted pregnancy often exacerbated by scare stories on social media. Girls are repeatedly told how women are discriminated against and abused, the victims of “toxic masculinity.” They hear about the pay gap and the lack of affordable child care.

Young women are apparently miserable:

According to a 2023 survey of more than 17,500 girls, girls’ self-confidence has plunged since 2017. Their levels of anxiety are way up. In a recent report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 53 percent of girls reported extreme depressive symptoms.

And also,

But it’s worth asking if part of the problem is that girls see womanhood less as something to look forward to than as something to dread. The constant emphasis on female vulnerabilities and worst-case scenarios not only overplays the extent of the challenges, it also fails to offer a full or accurate picture of what it means to be a woman in America today.

To her credit, Paul does mention that the women’s movement has something to do with this. Yet, she fails to notice that the problems she denounces come to us straight from the fevered brains of feminists. 

In order to enlist women in the vanguard of the revolution it was necessary to persuade them that living under capitalism and patriarchy oppressed them. Being a woman either made you a revolutionary or a member of an oppressed class.

Among the problems, foisted on us by feminism, most women today believe that the word “wife” is the ultimate four letter word, a curse worse than the other curse.

So, young women are not taught that they are going to grow up to become wives and mothers. Perhaps mothers, as Paul points out, but certainly not wives.

Girls learn that they must have careers, that they must be able to care for themselves. By implication, they are being told that no one will ever want to care for them, provide for them or make a home with them.

The message is clear and it is certainly depressing.

And then there is sex, about which Paul has very little to say. Today’s young women are presumably having more sex than their foremothers. They are beginning to have sex when they are younger and would never imagine waiting for marriage. 

Does this make young women feel that they are being used for sex? Do hookups make them feel less worthy? 

Today's politicians seem to want to define femininity in terms of abortion rights. Whether you are for or against it, the assumption underlying the issue tells us that pregnancy is something to be avoided, because it might interfere with career advancement.

Of course, no one mentions the problems with conception. Feminism has been a boon for reproductive endocrinologists, but not for very many others.

When Paul writes about her own pregnancy and her own experience bearing children, she is affirming the value of this aspect of womanly experience.

She makes clear that the feminist attack on biological difference has underwritten this deviance. 

As for pregnancy, I never got over the marvel of growing another life inside my own body. Those first flutters, the startling hiccups and kicks, the knowledge you are carrying within an entire being: All of it is miraculous, the most manifest way to experience our species’ resilience. To many women I know, these positive elements of womanhood came as a complete surprise.

Of course, pregnancy is a biological process. It befalls females, exclusively. Strangely, Paul does not mention that it might be part of a marriage.

Consider the logic of the old fashioned marriage. In principle,  a woman would only engage in coitus with a man if she received a firm public commitment from him, not just for this week or this month, but forever. Precisely why anyone considers such a structure to be oppressive escapes me.

True enough, it does not always work out well. But, the alternative, which we are struggling to invent, does not seem to be serving young women well.

In many ways it’s about defined roles. A woman who marries becomes a wife. The man becomes a husband. Each role has defined responsibilities. If you undermine the familiar structure and the defining structure you leave people unmoored. And that makes them miserable.

You cannot compensate for this by declaring womanhood, as Paul does, to be “intrinsically powerful.” The notion of the empowered woman is one of the cultural errors that people continue to traffic. Since Paul remarks the moment when she recognized, as a girl that her brothers were always going to be stronger than she was, the obsession with overcoming the problems feminists visited on women by continuing to call these women empowered rings hollow.

Exercising power seems to mean forcing men to play along with the feminist life plan. In most cases, this does not work, to the detriment of men, women and children.

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