Feminism: It's the New Chauvinism - Intercollegiate Studies Institute

Feminism: It’s the New Chauvinism

The cruel chauvinism of “men before feminism” was reprehensible. It was reprehensible because it saw men and women as two competitors for power. In fact, men and women are two components of one race. Man is created male and female within a natural order. The latter account of men and women is the Christian and traditional one, and to whatever extent chauvinism crept into the Christian world it did so as a snake into the garden.

Feminism, or female chauvinism, has mostly been an effort for women to win power over men. Female chauvinism grants to men the core assumption on which male chauvinism operates: that men and women are in competition, and where one prevails the other must always be oppressed. This assumption is essentially opposed to Nature and its God. Forgetting nature, feminism-chauvinism seeks to make a new order which favors a part of mankind and does violence to another. If man is one and created male and female, this power-struggle is like a junk-food junkie who satisfies his or her belly at the expense of his or her heart or a misguided intellectual who becomes sicklied over with the pale cast of thought and dies prematurely. But with no Creator, the feminist or chauvinist fails to see purpose and universality in the way man is made, and therefore takes it upon his/herself to arbitrarily make man again in a way agreeable to one group.

What we ought to fear and despise above anything else is atheism and a resulting nihilism. God created this world on purpose and with our good in mind. Atheism rejects God’s role and therefore creation loses its purpose and intelligibility. Nihilism results from the rejection of a natural order, and makes man into a god who can “start from scratch.” Atheism and nihilism are most damaging when they underlie a mode of operation. They’re not so threatening when they are manifested in a creed: The statement “We do not believe in God” is argumentative and often comes from a spirit of rebellion against Nature and its God; it at least acknowledges that older order as a real thing with which to contend. The actions of chauvinists and feminists (many of whom are representatives of Christianity), on the other hand, whether they fight on behalf of one sex (class, race etc) or try to get the job of umpire between two such groups, nevertheless operate on the assumption that human groups are gods in competition for the kingdom, the power and the glory–which are up for grabs in a world that doesn’t take God seriously.

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