Western Feminism is a stumbling block for women’s exercise of moral agency.

Targeted Readership: Men
Theme: Female Agency and Accountability
Author’s Note:  Some comments from readers have been integrated into this essay. Links to original comments are embedded in the initial word.
Length: 700 words
Reading Time: 4 minutes

In the past, life conditions imposed responsibilities on women, but modernity and liberal polity have strategically removed these incentives.  The feminist movements have advocated for changes in law and social standing that give greater economic and political liberties to women, but which also deny, limit, or even prohibit the exercise of true moral agency of females.  Now, women have few incentives and little to no motivation to exercise agency, and there is next to nothing remaining to keep themselves in check.

As the Progressive / Feminist / W0ke juggernaut progressed in scope and reach, it became more and more evident that women will destroy themselves, their marriages, homes, children, and all of society, when left to their own devices.

Meanwhile, whenever women are put on the spot for their failures, whether by chance or by scrutiny, they will routinely, even predictably, deny personal agency. In turn, others deny their own personal agency by accepting this excuse and running cover or interference, subtly assuming that women are particularly subject to suggestion and social pressures, and that their decision making can be impaired easier than that of an equally affected male. While it is basically true, this narrative has been taken to the extreme to form the crucible of female hypoagency which envelops the larger culture.

Yes, although it is true that there is something inherently different about men and women in the way God made us that makes women more prone to the deception that her actions are free of moral consequences, however, the ways in which society has insulated women from the consequences of their actions actually makes this condition even worse.  The steady rise in feminine “unhappiness” stands as a stark testament of this malady, and if things are allowed to progress, this condition will only grow more noxious.

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One of the most acerbic and shameful results of this is that what a female says cannot be trusted, but even so, their “consent” about everything is necessary and they should be believed and taken seriously anyway. Thus, women are able to consent to something at the moment and then a day or decades later withdraw that consent.

All of this is to say that modern women have been granted unprecedented liberties and powers, but are never held responsible for what they might do.

The matter is further obscured when these women’s liberties and powers are often misnomered as agentic by secular culture (e.g. “empowered”, “independent”, the motivations behind YOLO, etc.), when in fact, it has nothing to do with authentic moral agency.  It is a cheap substitute that employs an inversion of values and coerces the ignorant to abandon faith.

Bruce Charlton described this condition in a recent essay.

“Modern agency has, however, become very individualistic; and insofar as free agency genuinely exists and is deployed (which is apparently not much, very seldom), it operates at the personal level rather than in groups. 

What appears superficially to be group agency, is actually a product of causal and determinative thinking; manipulating individuals (e.g. via laws, rules, and propaganda) to conform behaviour to external will. 

Part of this manipulation is to encourage individuals to believe they are already living by free agency; when in fact they have ‘switched-off’ their own agency; and are thinking almost-entirely in terms of automatic, mundane, externally-inculcated and -imposed concepts and information.“

Bruce Charlton’s Notions: Causation versus Free Agency (2022/11/24)

And given that the forces that govern society are wholly contemptuous of God and His ways, the destructive customs and practices that allow and enable women to get away with avoiding their own agency are systemic (“baked into the cake,” so to speak).

Women are the first to fall for this ruse, primarily because they don’t actually think things through.  They just tag along with the crowd, and duck out for a while whenever they want to privately entertain themselves with a little sidepiece of sin.  All the while they emote and feel and vomit their feelings all over the place, meandering from one emotion to another emotion, and expecting it all to make some kind of sense.

It doesn’t, of course.  It’s all anesthetization and avoidance.

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