As is becoming traditional, this year’s International Women’s Day was marked by a jibe at men. A global study of 23,000 people was released on the same day, attracting headlines that would have you believe young men expect women to be servile and subordinate.
Headlines read that this new ‘shock poll’ makes for ‘depressing reading’, proving that Gen Z men (those born between 1997 and 2012) must be misogynists. The surprising revelations in question concerned traditional gender roles: 31 per cent of those Gen Z men surveyed agreed a woman should always obey her husband, and 33 per cent believed a husband should have the final say on important decisions. This stood in contrast with male respondents in the Baby Boomer generation (those born between 1946 and 1964), of whom only 13 and 17 per cent agreed with those statements respectively.
Some traditional-minded Catholics might like to champion these findings as a sign of the pendulum swinging away from liberal feminism and towards a more traditional understanding of the sexes. We should, however, not be so hasty to welcome such an interpretation.
For a start, looking beyond the sensationalist headlines, the survey results pull responses from 29 countries, including Muslim-majority countries such as Indonesia and Malaysia. It is these countries, not Western ones, that poll most in favour of wives obeying their husbands. When it came to Brits, only 13 per cent of the sample agreed with the sentiment that wives should obey husbands – far short of Indonesia’s 66 per cent. Even in the United States, typically considered more conservative and religious than the United Kingdom, less than a quarter of respondents agreed with the statement.
The fact that Muslim countries, not Western ones, are most likely to believe a woman should obey her husband means the results of the survey do not reflect a heeding of St Paul’s counsel in his Letter to the Ephesians. The apostle instructed:
‘Wives, be subject to your husbands as to the Lord, for the husband is the head of the wife just as Christ is the head of the Church, his body, and is himself its Saviour. Just as the Church is subject to Christ, so also wives ought to be, in everything, to their husbands.’
St Paul’s words reflect the mystery between Christ and his Church, with his letter later telling husbands to ‘love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church’. This invocation to sacrificial love stands unmatched by any Islamic belief – and we would be foolish to pretend otherwise.
This is not to deny the trend of younger people in the West holding firm to understandings of gender roles that sit uneasy with much of modernity. Perhaps, having diagnosed the rot in society at large, young people hope a return to something more traditional will help set the course right again. And, after being used as a scapegoat for many of the ills of the world, we cannot act surprised when men retaliate and seek to reassert themselves as leaders.
Unmoored from Christianity, however, the belief that women ought to obey husbands will not help heal our broken culture. Advocating strict gender roles in reaction to wider culture runs the risk of fetishising the recovery of traditional roles. When we prize submission rather than common-sense dynamics, gender roles become exaggerated and unbalanced.
Indeed, bereft for at least a generation, if not more, of couples embracing traditional gender roles, some young people turn to online influencers as their guide. While we might occasionally find a drop of wisdom in the sea of online content, it requires a discerning scroller to separate the wheat from the chaff.
An affinity for Andrew Tate-inspired chauvinism must not be mistaken for authentic chivalry. Tate reduces women to biological function, stripped of dignity and respect. His vision of gender roles fuels a war of the sexes and does away with proper tradition: he supports women’s subservience, yet warns men against marriage. Tate’s pernicious but popular views epitomise the harm that comes with believing in women’s obedience when detached from a Christian theology underpinning the dynamics between the sexes.
The belief that men should be obeyed simply because of their maleness does not translate into a sacrificial love, nor does it necessarily lead to basic respect for the opposite sex. Without Christ’s love as our guide, any idolisation of willing obedience in marriage is hollow.
As young men hope to revive a masculine genius, the Church has an opportunity to promote virtuous masculinity and deepen young people’s understanding of the complementarity of the sexes. Amid the quiet revival of Christianity in the West, particularly among Gen Z, we can hope young people discover the Church’s wisdom as it concerns men, women and the relationship between the two. Then both men and women will have something to celebrate.
