The Abolition of Women
How C.S. Lewis Predicted Today's Feminist Crises
(I originally guest-wrote this article for Shelf of Crocodiles in two parts (part one and part two). I recently assembled both parts into one document to share with someone and added it here for your convenience!)
When Taylor Swift turned thirty, an interviewer asked if she planned to have children. Offended, Swift quipped, “I really don’t think men are asked that question. So I'm not going to answer that.”
While Swift didn’t necessarily condemn childbearing, her response was an automatic one for most women today. Today’s third-wave feminists are not against having kids the same way first and second-wave feminists were (Margaret Sanger, the founder of Planned Parenthood, famously said that the ‘feeble-minded’ should be sterilized. )
It may not get you points in certain climate-quibbling circles, but it’s okay to have kids now.
What strikes me about Swift’s reaction is her offense at the thought of childbearing. If the interviewer asked if she planned to visit the dentist any time soon because, after all, she has teeth or get screened for breast cancer because, well… those questions wouldn’t offend anyone.
Some might say the problem is not that women can have children; it’s that childbearing is all society expects of them. But is that really what everyone expects? How many women do you know are unable to function or get a job because everyone is constantly pressuring them to have children?
Well, they would reply, there’s still a stigma—and that is what I want to pinpoint now. Most cultures throughout history regarded motherhood as an incredible, almost sacred thing. Women make people! Clearly, childbearing is not all women can do. But if suggesting that “women having kids is a good thing” is automatically a bad thing, we must ask why.
If the very thought of associating women with motherhood is offensive, we are betraying a set of rigged assumptions internalized by the narratives we’ve been swallowing. Now, and more than ever, it’s critical that we train ourselves to think instead of merely reacting.
As far as reactions go, we are hard on all stigmas but our own.
Speaking of Reactions
Taylor Swift’s interview reaction reflects a common tendency: being quick to question a traditional norm but never thinking about why one questions it. G.K. Chesterton pointed out the danger of this mental habit a century ago with his fence analogy. A fence in the English countryside may appear random, ugly, or unnecessary, but until you know why someone put it there, you’re in no position to knock it down.
As you well know, we live in a time when smashing down fences is morally unassailable—and learning ‘why’ comes after the fact, if at all. Take, for example, the obvious hijacking of women’s sports, and you’ll see what I mean.
In 2022, 29-year-old Ricci Tres, a trans woman, competed against thirteen-year-old girls in a skateboarding competition… and won. He insisted that he had no physical advantage just because he was a biological male and almost twenty years older than the competition. But don’t be too hard on the guy; in his defense, he said, “I'm not going to go easy on them just because they're kids.”
Despite the growing, overdue pushback, those willing to point out that a fully grown male competing against thirteen-year-old girls is well, unfair, risk being slapped with ‘isms.’ Ageism, sexism, and transphobia, just for starters.
Again, stigmas.
Thinking that grown men who can’t compete against young girls face serious, unfair prejudice may be the extreme end of the spectrum—but it was once unthinkable. What was extreme ten years ago is now mainstream, and nothing is stopping this runaway train.
This puts third-wave feminists in a real conundrum.
What is it they want? Women (as women) used to roar. Now they find womanhood, as a category, offensive. Third-wave feminists are all angry about… what exactly? Why be angry and march at rallies if you’re not even a thing anymore?
Two or three generations ago, evolutionary biologists would have categorically affirmed the biological difference between men and women. They, unlike our newest Supreme Court Justice, would have considered it a neutral, proven, indisputable fact. Those assumptions remain, and yet—if you believe those who insist that biological men can get pregnant—they are meaningless.
Why?
How did we transition toward a world in which facts are BOTH the final word, while simultaneously counting for nothing?
How Did We Get Here?
While the contributing factors are countless, our current pandemonium is actually predictable. Scholar and beloved children’s author C.S. Lewis more or less predicted it decades ago.
In his 1943 book “The Abolition of Man,” Lewis critiqued certain modern educational practices that were rapidly rising in his day. While none of those practices involved, say, letting biological males compete with women, the train of logic is clear enough.
Modern education, as we know it today, particularly in America, was just heating up in Lewis’ day. But what was then gaining traction is now assumed.
You might summarize these ingrained, long-normalized theories in this way: children should never be taught that any subject has any significance, meaning, or definition beyond itself.
Let me explain.
Imagine two men standing near a waterfall. One describes it as “pretty,” the other as “sublime.” Which one is correct? According to modern education, neither. The men are only describing how they feel about the waterfall. The man “appeared to making a remark about the waterfall… actually…he was not making a remark about the waterfall, but a remark about his own feelings.”[1]
Those educational theorists advanced the idea that knowledge itself can be neutral. So, the only true things a person can say about a waterfall are material observations (e.g., the water is wet) or completely subjective observations. Once we decide whether it’s an animal, vegetable, or mineral, we’re over it.
Lewis cites this as one of two fundamental changes:
“All sentences containing predictions of value are merely statements about the emotional state of the speaker."1
In other words, there is nothing objectively true about waterfalls outside of what we can observe with our senses. We can all detach our own emotions, thoughts, and opinions from the real act of learning.
This assumption gave rise to education as we know it today.
The Myth of Neutrality
This shift may seem subtle, but it has drastically shaped the landscape of education. Today’s classroom assumes a naturalistic, meaning-neutral universe of stripped-down facts. These facts can be learned apart from any worldview. A Muslim child, Christian child, Buddhist child, and atheist child can all enter the same classroom, check their values and beliefs at the door, and learn something together.
If you’ve spent any time in public education, this may not shock you. Nonetheless, the theory that you can learn a subject that is devoid of any values, religion, or deeper worldview thinking is a drastic departure from previous generations.
Later in the book, Lewis builds on that:
“Until modern times, all teachers, and even all men, believed the universe to be such that certain emotional reactions on our part could be either congruous or incongruous to it—believed, in fact, that objects did not merely receive but could merit our approval or disapproval, our reverence of contempt.”2
People used to believe that everything is connected and interpreted by everything else, that every stripped-down fact has a deeper significance than what first appears. In other words, we could look at a toad and definitively describe it as ugly; a flower as beautiful. Moreover, rape and murder were always, and intrinsically wrong. Kindness was good. Math, science, literature, and grammar were all connected, all part of the same system of values and truth. Without those linking connections, we come to a second fundamental change:
“All such value statements are unimportant.”3
Think about it.
If you can’t say anything of ultimate significance about a waterfall, then what you feel about waterfalls is also irrelevant. In truth, it has to be. All value judgments are private, random, subjective, and therefore meaningless. They don’t count in the real world of stripped-down facts. While there’s some good in realizing that we all make our observations with some personal bias, total postmodern subjectivity puts our very ability to say anything in a bind.
“We appear,” Lewis writes, “to be saying something very important about something: and actually, we are only saying something about our own feelings.’’4
Without predicting that answers to math problems would one day hinge on a 2nd grader’s feelings (at least in New York City), Lewis clearly saw such absurdities coming.
How did we go from neutral “classroom facts” to this brave new world in which facts now count for nothing?
What happened along the way?
The problem is that those biological facts were never ‘neutral’ in the first place. We drifted, and then went over the falls, by going along with it. Taylor Swift, Lia Thomas, and Ketanji Jackson Brown may not know it, but they are way downstream…
In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis wrote that human nature is oriented by three categories:
The Head: our logical, rational mind.
The Gut: What we would call the “heart” today. This represents not only our emotions but our appetites.
The Chest: What we are loyal to and motivated by.
The head and gut alone are not enough. They both need to be disciplined and directed by the chest. For Lewis, the “chest” represents a sense of honor, higher principle, loyalty to something bigger than cold reasoning, or mere appetites and emotions. Don’t confuse the chest with mere morality, although it includes that.[1]
Lewis predicted that when you dismiss the chest (honor, loyalty, morality), education and culture will merely showcase an ongoing pendulum swing between the gut and the head. Swinging between mind and emotions, between reason and appetite, means missing the greater picture of what it means to be truly human.
We see this clearly in recent history. The World War Two generation was all “head.” They were of the cold, stiff upper lip; your feelings don’t matter, tribe. Then, with the Boomers, the pendulum swung from head to gut, which gave rise to the age of therapy in which emotions took the throne.
Lewis considered a culture of people who are only motivated by head OR gut to be petty, tribal, and animalistic. He predicted that if this is how education unfolds, then what you will wind up with is the competing propaganda narratives of people who are in power and want to stay in power—and an entire civilization of people who are vulnerable to those competing narratives.
Where Does this Leave Us?
Because we live in a time when the “heart/gut” is over-elevated above the head and chest, third-wave feminists like Taylor Swift equate freedom with lack of restraint. Because the heart/gut includes both emotions and appetites, freedom for moderns is a simple exchange—break the bars, destroy the cages, and drop all binaries, boundaries, and barriers to our appetite.
Strangely, many moderns assume this is a new thing. As if we alone have cast off religion, morality, rules, and tradition. We alone embrace a daring new world in which women must never be associated with childbearing.
But history has been there many times over, albeit with different manifestations. Past cultures would have taken our measure and instantly spotted the problem: we have fallen into the simplistic but fatal error of the average three-year-old.
For some reason, we have wholesale adopted the assumption that merely to gratify appetite, passions, and inward feelings is freedom and happiness. What Lewis understood is that far from freedom, letting “gut” take the throne is, instead, enslavement. It is an enslavement to self; to whims, irritations, moods, and animalistic cravings.
Again, in Lewis’ day, it was cool logic on the throne. Lewis literally captures this in his novel That Hideous Strength. This was his attempt to write The Abolition of Man as fiction. Near the end of the novel, the characters encounter the horrific rule of a disembodied human head, kept alive with machines and placed on a throne. This head quite literally represented the absolute truth claims of science and reason apart from the heart and chest.
Today, instead, there is a heart on the throne (although the head still gets dragged out when needed, during fake epidemics, for example). The “heart” may seem sweet on the surface, but this stripped-down version of humanity also creates monsters.
As Lewis put it:
“In a sort of ghastly simplicity, we remove the organ and demand the function. We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise. We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst. We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.”
Whether “heart” or “head” is uppermost, in either case, you find humanity at its worst. A “ghastly simplicity” in which humans are reduced to mere animals. The final stage of degeneration.
Instead, children should be trained at an early age to love and hate the right things, “To make the pupil like and dislike what he ought” as Aristotle put it. Lewis similarly argued for an education in which students acquire knowledge while being trained in their loyalties.
“The head rules the belly through the chest. The seat of magnanimity, of emotions organized by trained habits into stable sentiments… It may even said that by this middle element that man is man. By his intellect, he is mere spirit, and by his appetite, mere animal.”
Though we are discussing women, these truths affect every aspect of our modern life. But since woman, as a concept, is on the chopping block…
What is a Woman?
No one knows… except for trans women. Men pretending to be women are the only ones who apparently know exactly what a woman is. A woman talks with a silly lisp, dresses like Barbie, and poses in corsets. Having won “Woman of the Year” in just one year, a middle-aged white male, Bruce Jenner, did a better job at being a woman than women can.
Don’t worry, ladies; I got this.
Because women have been abolished.
1 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, (Collier Books/ Macmillan Publishing, 1943).
2 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, (Collier Books/ Macmillan Publishing, 1943).
3 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, (Collier Books/ Macmillan Publishing, 1943).
4 C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, (Collier Books/ Macmillan Publishing, 1943).
Brilliant! I can think of about 10,000 people in positions of authority who I would like to force into reading this piece.
Way too controversial for me!