Humanity is at a critical juncture in its history. Forces that are shaping society have waged war upon its very foundations. The current post-Modern era hails these ideas as the final liberation of thought and mind for every human being on the face of this planet. The fight has been brought to your doorstep, your dinner table, and in the intimacy of your bedroom. The fight is for the way your children think and for the way they shape the world to come. It is the way they perceive themselves, their fellow human beings and the future that they create. This is your legacy and the lives of your children.
The “empowerment”
of women and the decline of traditional manhood are two sides of the same
coin. Aggressive advances made by
radical feminist movements had been attempting to turn women into men for
decades. As late as the previous decade,
their attempts were largely unsuccessful.
Since the dawn of the new millennium, the precipitous decline of manhood
has left a large void in society that women have been desperately trying to fill. There is a crisis of true masculinity while
authentic femininity has been overstretched and eroded to compensate for the
vacuum. Both sexes have become
fundamentally weaker and taken on the traits of the other. In either case, men and women have been
struggling and ultimately failing to execute their authentic gender roles. The failure is striking and disturbing
compared to only a half a century ago.
THE BETTER HALF
The strength of a woman as a partner, equal in dignity but different in role, is losing its palatability in society. The exemplary feminine qualities of patience, generosity, magnanimity, resilience, persuasion, and understanding have been usurped or distorted. A woman’s ability to ease the heart and the mind of a man by her mere presence is sheer power. Her core strengths are her abilities to listen, counsel, influence, encourage, comfort, and sympathize. As wives, young women today lack the fierce fidelity and unbreakable loyalty to their husbands that their counterparts possessed merely 50 years ago. Women have an immeasurable gift for nurturing, sensitivity and tenderness that cannot be quantified or explained by any human language. A woman’s identity is deeply intertwined with her actions. She lives, does and gives of her very self; body, mind and spirit. Her powerful passions allow her to perform brilliant acts of kindness, sacrifice and selflessness without hesitation or inner doubts. This is real womanhood. It has been subverted in favor of a false & meager caricature of masculinity. The darker aspects of the feminine nature have been misused by humanity to the moral degradation of Western society and the entire globe.
The
role of woman as wife and partner to man has evolved according to the ebb and
flow of society but largely towards a detrimental shift in recent years. There is a large divide between being a wife
and being a mother when compared to women in the past. This stark dichotomy stems from the vast
epidemic of children born out of wedlock, especially to teen and/or
psychologically immature young women.
Compounded with the sharp rise of negligent and absentee fatherhood, the
effects of this plague run deep into the core of families today.
The
traditional understanding of a wife has been warped by the evolution of
economics and transformed by new social trends.
In recent years, women have excelled in academics and the job market at
a sharply higher rate compared to previous generations. Women’s rights groups over the past century
have opened many new doors and avenues for younger women today. Even though the elite upper echelon jobs
still remain an ‘all-boys club,’ the ascent of women to high-ranking positions
is noteworthy. The economic success of
women has empowered them financially and psychologically but eroded their
femininity instead of supplementing it.
Stress in the workplace combined with the pressure and maintenance of
home life takes a heavy toll on the hearts and minds of women. It makes women more manly and masks their
authentic, powerful feminine nature. Their
capability of managing both tasks is not the primary question here. It is an analysis of the effects that strenuous
and consuming employment can have on women and their families. While manhood has declined almost to the
brink of failure in the Western world, true femininity has become a disfigured
and fragmented shell of its former grace.
A
lasting legacy of the ‘sexual revolution’ of the 1960’s has been the myopic
emphasis on physical, mental & sexual pleasure. It has become acceptable for women to be used
as sexual objects for the gratification of others. Many women take pride in their sexual prowess
and welcome many admirers. The feminist
backlash encourages women to mimic the foolish behavior of men by engaging in
promiscuity, repressing shame, followed by a misguided pride. As women encounter greater difficulty in
finding suitable life-long male partners, they assert a measurable yet weary
and cynical sexual dominance over the men who court them. The void of manhood in the society is
creating an abyss that is severely corrupting and slowly erasing authentic
womanhood.
MOTHERHOOD
Motherhood
is power. It is the quintessential and
encompassing definition of femininity.
The towering glory of what it means to be a woman. Even as children, little girls emulate their
own mothers by playing with and adopting baby toy dolls to act as their
children. Most young girls seek to foster
and understand maternal action and instinct from a very early age. Such behavior is often welcomed and
encouraged by the parents and siblings of girls. Authentic motherhood is a woman’s magnificent
power to shape her child’s worldview even before the wiring of the child’s
brain is complete. She can mold the
personality and harness her child’s innate strengths. Being a mother requires immeasurable
self-sacrifice and self-donation. She
gives generously of her time, talents, love, dedication, body, soul, and
character to her children. If paired with the consistent and constant presence
of a strong father, the child is bound to exceed both parents in achievement
and acumen. Every parent’s dream is for
their child to do better and to live better than they did. Motherhood is not only the epitome of true
womanhood but it is a pinnacle of excellence for all of humanity.
Authentic
motherhood truly covers a wide scope but it remains deficient without proper fatherhood
to complement it. The reverse is equally
true but less prevalent in society. The
legal system largely protects a mother’s rights commensurate to children she
has given birth to. In the situation of
a pregnancy out of wedlock, the child grows up seeing a false and distorted
image of male-female interaction and relations.
The father is already at a disadvantage.
He is a mentally weak man who has engaged in reckless behavior and
failed to formalize a marriage with the woman before impregnating her. He is morally weak by default and deemed inept
by the woman, by their child[ren], as well as by families on both sides. The unwed mother is usually charged as the
primary caretaker and then glorified to improper heights as the father becomes
vilified. Neither parent is truly a
successful parent without the full support & presence of the other.
The
reverence for mothers and grandmothers has increased exponentially wherever the
curse of absentee fatherhood has flourished.
The sons of these single mothers become overly emotional, effeminate,
moody, and patterned strongly after their family circle comprised mainly of
women and no authentically masculine men.
While the daughters who are raised in such environments exhibit an
inflated, substantively weak and false imitation of male bravado, similar to
their mothers.
The
single mother herself is forced to adopt pseudo-masculine traits in order to
ensure survival of her household. This
survival requires her to maintain a firm disciplinary authority with her
children, a traditionally paternal trait.
If strong paternal discipline is non-existent or lacking, then it
becomes much desired by the children in later years. Maternal discipline is always less feared by children
if a strong father is present in the family home. A mother’s heart is malleable, more
understanding, more visceral, more accepting and sympathetic. A single mother’s discipline may be respected
but not feared as her children grow older.
The warped masculine traits she exhibits are eventually recognized as
weak imitations of real masculinity and the image of her motherhood becomes distorted. Her image as a woman is also distorted in the
eyes of her children. In the absence of
one parent, the basic family unit falls into shambles. Without balance & cooperation of both sexes,
the demise of the society is not far.
LOOKING FORWARD
As time
passes & attacks on the family further escalate, it is imperative to never
lose a fixed frame of reference or ideal.
The days of men as the heads of the house and women as the heart of the
home seem long gone. It has become the
stuff of myth and folklore of our grandparents and great-grandparents. We forget that they were flawed men and women
of flesh and bone just like us. We are
their children and should exceed all previous generations in every conceivable
way as our children should surpass us.
This means financially, socially, politically, academically, and yes,
morally. They made it work but we should
make it work better.
Today’s
world is polluted with momentary sensationalism, instant gratification,
exorbitant materialism and consumerism.
This is the self-serving Tower of Babel we have built in the 21st
century. There has been a harsh metamorphosis
in the moral culture of the West. Men
and women are the building blocks of family.
Family is the cohesive unit that builds communities into cities, cities
into nations, and nations into empires.
A woman
is figuratively and literally the life-blood of the family. She is innately gifted at completely
integrating and investing herself into the demanding needs of her family. As a mate and wife to man, she is the rock of
their mutual love. She gives birth and
she is a fountain of life. Through her
as mother, the family multiplies and grows strong under her shelter and influence. A woman can radiate her entire heart, soul, and
life-experience through her caring, nurturing, and noble service. This is a definition of womanhood that needs
to be embraced again if we desire a better world for our children.
