How Feminumbulum Got Into Everything

Introduction

This famous summary of what frequently happens to people who start telling lies is most usually applied at the level of little boys who got into the pantry to get into the potato chips. It is certainly true there, of course, but we make a grave mistake when we limit it to that level.

One of the more important things we need to realize about deception is that it is something that scales. If little lies can create the kind of web that can catch flies, it is important to note that the biggest lies can create a kind of web that can ensnare empires and civilizations.

“Deceiveth the whole world.” Of course it is possible for a lie to scale.

And speaking of which . . . if you would, I would like to write for a little bit about feminism. And by feminism, of course, I mean the ideology that is advocated by the ardent and self-described feminists, but I am also seeking to include almost everyone else. The toxic mix made up of the assumptions of all such—both the true believers and the go-alongers—is something which we may, for the sake of convenience, call feminumbulum. This is a noun that refers to the accumulated consequences of all the nonsense that has piled up in our culture since the first feminist conference in Seneca Falls, NY in the year of our Lord 1848. These consequences, like so many bricks in the hold, have got the whole Western world pretty much gunwales under.

First the Tangle

The sexual act is a metaphor, and abuses of the sexual act are also metaphors. In the first chapter of Romans, the apostle Paul refers to the “natural use of the woman” (v. 27) as well as the women abandoning their “natural use” (v. 26). Men and women together in this rebellion were engaged in a fight “against nature” (v. 26). But this natural use extends far beyond the mere fact that heterosexual sex is normal and natural, although it is. The parts do fit together neatly, but like I said, it is also a metaphor.

The parts continue to fit together neatly when the man assumes the responsibility of providing for his wife and children, as well as the responsibility of protecting them all. As the head of his wife (Eph. 5:25), he is to rule his household (1 Tim. 3:4). In addition, when she assumes the role of bearing the children (1 Tim. 5:14), nursing them, caring for them all, managing the home (1 Tim. 5:14), and feeding everybody (Prov. 31:15), she is doing that which is consonant with nature—her nature, and all the remainder of nature outside her. This means, among other outrages, that she makes the sandwiches. If she is really on the ball, she oversees the servants making the sandwiches.

Now imagine you are assembling a complicated bit of mail-order furniture, and you take it into your head to attach the parts wherever you feel like putting the parts. You throw away the assembly instructions, and start screwing things together as the inspiration strikes you. Instead of dancing like nobody is watching, you are assembling like nobody is watching. The picture on the box indicated that it was supposed to be a rocking chair, but by the time you were done, it looked more like a tall but misshapen end table with a couple of bendy legs, and it kept falling over. It falls over again and again, but we have a strategy to deal with that. We now call the falling over “empowerment.”

When you violate the design features of anything, one of the results you invariably get is that nothing works anymore. When you redesign things that were already designed, what you get is a misshapen mess. And if you have, for ideological reasons, determined to weave yourself into the tangled web that Scott described, your self-deception increases with every week that goes by, and the prospect of admitting that your great grandmother knew more about sex and sex roles than you do becomes ever more humiliating. And so because the delusion must be maintained, you don your red corporate-babe power suit—heels, glasses, the works—and walk purposely through the offices of your skyscraper prison, muttering to yourself how fulfilled and happy you are. And that would be true, except for that it isn’t.

And the longer you lie to yourself about all this, the more miserable everything gets, and the more insane the justifications, evasions, and excuses have to get. The inmates of the asylum have now convinced themselves that they are actually the Viennese boys choir, and so they occupy themselves by yelling off-key from their beds, keeping time by tapping on their tray tables with a spoon. Somebody would say something, but it is now illegal to bring any sort of negativity into anybody’s life. Staff can go into a broom closet to roll their eyes, but to object in public would cost them their job.

Bedlam. Pandemonium. Madhouse. Chaos. Ruination. Shambles. And all of it is caused by lies, and maintained by refusing to let go of lies. And even when clinging to such lies results in a shambolic, senile, and shuffling disaster in threadbare house slippers and bathrobe, the facade is maintained. But in his own mind, he is a man about town.

The truth that these lies are trying desperately to hold off is the fact that women are the domestic sex, and men are not. There, I said it. The fact that female robins build the nest and male robins don’t really help out with the task is not the result of “the patriarchy.” We have similar impulses and instincts, but with one signal difference. We, unlike the robins, are fallen and sinful. We don’t like where God puts us. If robins were like we are, she would be complaining to him about how she thinks they ought to be more like the finches. “In the finch community, the male helps. Would it hurt to be more like a finch?” He replies in a way that seems compelling to him, but she is still peeved. “But I am not a finch,” he tried to argue.

So the way we are is a design feature, and we are supposed to like it. No, stronger than that. We are required to like it. When we are humble and obedient, at peace with our Creator, we do like it. When we rebel against Him, we point to such Rube Goldberg achievements as we might accomplish, sneering at those traditionalists who had ordered a rocking chair, taking great pride in our perverse ingenuity.

It is like trying to impress your high school shop teacher by pounding the nails in with a crescent wrench. The fact that you managed to finish your project that way makes it worse, not better.

Evangelical Feminumbulum

So feminumbulum is the state of affairs that exists in the world outside the realm of card-carrying feminists. This is the world of normal people, especially evangelicals, who all believe (amazingly) that they have stayed put and not budged at all. They believe this because they are normies by disposition, and they don’t know anybody who ever actually burned their bra.

What they don’t realize—feminumbulists as they are—is that because of feminism they have been acclimatized to the fact that the whole world has been rejiggered. Girls in Christian schools talk about going into the military without even blinking. Christian fathers let their daughters go out and about in hookerwear—and they pimp their daughters like this because their daughters have assumed all the privileges of guys, who don’t have to worry about things like that, and none of the responsibilities of a lady. But ladies do worry about things like that, and can’t you see how unfair this all is? Tell a bunch of Christians that all you want for women in the workplace is “equal pay for equal work,” and everyone nods sagely, as though this were an obvious matter of social justice. But as I heard someone say recently, social justice is to justice what social security is to security.

How were Christian women suckered into this? The devil is a sly one, and he pitched his new order with more subtlety than any of the other beasts of the field would have. Under the older order, men had certain responsibilities and they also had corresponding privileges. Women also had certain responsibilities and they too had corresponding privileges. That was all good, and according to nature.

The sales pitch for this new approach to sex roles offered to grant women all the privileges that the men had, but without burdening them with any of the responsibilities. Being part of a two-person marital team, where everyone is an equal partner with equal say, seemed to them to be a great advance, but when there is a noise in the basement at 2 am, the one with the XY chromosomes is still the one who has to go check. That one is also the one who needs to shovel the driveway when it snows. It may be retorted that the XX person is still the one who cleans the bathrooms, but this is only because she is the one who cares about it. He goes down to the basement because she is the one who cares about it.

So Christian women had no desire to take the lifestyle approach of the buzz-cut dyke, but the idea of privileges without responsibility is the kind of thing that has that universal appeal. Not everyone wants a buzz cut, but everyone wants to skate a little. And so here we are.

What Nobody Seems to Grasp

When women are admitted to realms that were previously male-only, and the people doing it are not the feminist crazies, nobody seems to realize how they are being played. The “common sense” assumption is that we can still have the same club that we did before, with the only difference being that now women can come in also. There is no realization of the fact that the entrance of the women destroys the thing that was there before, and replaces it with another thing entirely, albeit with the same name.

This is true of West Point and the Naval Academy. It is true of deacon boards in soft egalitarian churches. It is true of MDiv programs. It is true of the Garrick Club in London. It is true of the Citadel and VMI. It is true of the school board at your local Christian school.

Daughters go out for the football team, and blithely assume that this will in no way change the nature of the game. This is only possible because her ignorance is rivaled only by her mother’s, who was the one who suggested it. Dad knows better, but he also knows better than to open his mouth.

Now the feminists want women inserted into all those places because they wanted to see them destroyed. They hate football. That has been the plan all along. Kate Millet stated the goal a long time ago—”the destruction of the American family.” The feminumbulist women who go along with this charade are foolish enough to think that the place where they forced entry is still the same kind of place. But it is nothing like that same kind of place. The only way she could have enjoyed what the males were previously enjoying there would be if she had been born male. And therein lies the central grievance—because envy always insists that justice requires God to have done things differently. But that is not the way the world actually is. That is not the way that God governs the world—and He is altogether wise, while we are the stupid ones.

Which is why our ongoing abuse of nature is going to provoke a reaction, a reaction that I think is probably already under way.

The Reality Recoil

I have frequently thought, looking at some cityscape or other, about what would happen if the city were simply abandoned, and no one set foot in that place for hundreds of years. We actually have a pretty good idea of what would happen—it would become an overgrown forest, a wilderness. We can see this in the Amazon, where amazing ruined cities were swallowed up entirely by the inexorable forces of nature, and these cities were only discovered because of amazing imaging technology platformed in outer space.

In other words, nature is a beast. Horace knew all about this—naturam expelles furca, tamen usque recurret. You can drive out Nature with a pitchfork, but she keeps on coming back. And if you wind a spring too tight, you will get a good illustration of this reality. The danger is that the sproing might put your eye out.

Thoughtful Christians will always be the ones who act instead of reacting. “What does the Bible say? Let’s do that.” But those who went along with the feminumbulist nonsense, simply because it was widespread and lots of people were doing it now, are the same kind of people who will jump on the Bronze Age bandwagon, just as soon as that becomes popular enough. We have endured a generation of sheeple feminumbulists, and now it looks as though we are going to need to deal with a generation of sheeple misogynists and incels. Overreaction begets overreaction, but sensible people will always lean against the careen.

But sheep without a shepherd know how to fall into any kind of crevice that presents itself.

Our Book Giveaways

The Canon title being given away (Nov. 11-15) is my commentary on the book of Romans, helpfully entitled To the Church at Rome.

And in my Mablog shoppe, I am now giving away:
21 Prayers for Pastors on the Lord’s Day.
Letters of Marital Counsel, found here.
Proof as Moral Obligation
And new today . . .
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