It may surprise you to learn that for all my traditional values, I don’t believe women are the “weaker sex” – but let me explain.
Modern feminism is more than a little confused about what it means to be strong, or even what it means to be equal.
Because of this, they have collectively advanced the unscientific and illogical notion that both sexes are identical in bodily abilities — and failure to adopt said fallacy is just misogyny.
This is how you get lady firemen and maternity flight suits as marks of true progress which, if you’re not blinded by ideology, are clearly so degrading to women.
What they don’t seem to get is that women don’t need to match men’s physical power to be strong, and they certainly don’t need to do the same things as men to be equal.
Pretending that women should be carrying bodies out of burning buildings or soaring off into the wild blue yonder with morning sickness and swollen ankles actually denies the reality: Women are just as strong as men, just in a different way.
While we women may not be literally carrying the weight of the world on our shoulders, we carry all the worry or “mental load” of childrearing and keeping the home fires burning that last a lifetime.
We endure the gauntlet of pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and then the constant care and concern for that child’s lifetime.
We are also the ones who endure the sting of infertility or the trauma of miscarriage while our husbands are, at best, supportive spectators as our bodies betray us and bleed out the life of our young.
We are the ones who are the first to awaken to the sound of a child’s frightened call in the middle of the night or bolt out of bed from the unmistakable noises of a vomiting child, awake and ready to comfort or clean up or both no matter the hour.
We are the ones who sit up nights, chests heavy with worry while we pray and makes plans for the toddler not hitting his milestones, the middle schooler getting bullied, or the teen pulling away from the family.
That kind of sustained emotional outpouring and constant problem-solving are not for the weak.
Especially during World War II, it was the women who raised the children, stretched the rations, worked the fields or factories, made do with unexpected shortages in a pinch, and solved each new domestic catastrophe for years on end – all without the help or companionship of the men they sent off to war.
Even then, men had them beat in physical might – and war surely took its emotional and mental toll on them too – but the women at home were performing endless feats of courage, strength, and resilience as they took care of themselves, their kids, and their communities.
When both parents work in today’s world, women still shoulder most of the household chores and childcare. That’s not because of some patriarchal conspiracy, but because we’re uniquely oriented to tackle the relentless realities of life that require a woman’s touch rather than a man’s muscle.
The undeniable truth is that men and women are not the same in what we can do, but that doesn’t mean we’re not equal.
Instead, we are complementary in abilities and purpose – with some overlap to be sure – but each sex uniquely contributes to a marriage, a family, and to society with certain strengths and weaknesses.
If all the world needed was brute strength, life would be all jackhammers and no lullabies.
Women need men’s physical power to protect them, but men need the womanly strength of self-sacrificial love that gives them something to protect.
Women are only the weaker sex if you believe there’s only one kind of strength that matters — and feminists encouraging women to give up one for the other is the worst kind of misogyny.