Human nature is a stubborn thing. Despite the desires of centuries of thinkers and politicians trying to change it, it remains a mystery of predictability.  The 20^th Century brought one of the most determined efforts to turn reality upside down; that would be the cause of radical feminism. I say “radical” because up to the mid 20^th Century, women were treated as second class citizens in the Western world, so feminism’s roots were lived in the real world experience of women being treated as less than God’s created equals.

But equality is a fruitless obsession that doesn’t really exist in the real world. We are all theoretically equal, but none of us actually are. We are all in America supposedly equal before the law, but that doesn’t always exist in the courts of law. According to the Declaration that gave this nation its freedom, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Indeed it was mainly “men” that this document referred to, since women didn’t even have a say in how this country was governed until the 19^th amendment to the Constitution gave women the right to vote in 1920.

The problem with radical feminism and its modern liberal cheerleaders is that their underlying assumptions deny that there is a human nature, and that human personality is a social construct. So gender is only a physical attribute of a person and has nothing to do with what we call man or woman; what a person becomes on a scale of femininity to masculinity is determined not by something that inheres in their natures as male or female, but is determined by their environment, upbringing, social interactions, etc.

Early feminists of the late 19^th and early 20^th Century didn’t want women to become men; they had no desire to obliterate the difference between the sexes, because they knew that differences didn’t imply superiority or inferiority. Still imbued with a Christian worldview, they knew differences implied function, not better or worse.

That all changed in the 1960s with the sexual revolution and The Pill. Since women could now have consequence free sex they could act like men! Differences in the sexes were defined on a superiority/inferiority scale, and feminists demanded women be treated more like men. This so called equality didn’t work out so well, and we’re still dealing with the confusion it wrought.

This is all prologue to a phenomenon cultural commentators have noticed of late in some of our popular entertainment. It seems in these books, TV shows and films women want to be sexually dominated, or as Newsweek calls it, “The modern woman’s retro bedroom fantasy.”  This is very disturbing to the modern liberal mind; they can’t fathom why any woman, especially modern educated and supposedly enlightened females would fantasize about sexual submission, or enjoy stories about it.

There have been a variety of works in this mold in the last decade or so, but the two that seemed to have brought this to mass cultural consciousness are a book called Fifty Shades of Grey, and a new HBO series called Girls. There are all kinds of interesting commentary on these two works you can find, but the Newsweek piece pulls these and other works together and sees a disturbing trend.

But why, for women especially, would free will be a burden? Why is it appealing to think of what happens in the passive tense? Why is it so interesting to surrender, or to play at surrendering? It may be that power is not always that comfortable, even for those of us who grew up in it; it may be that equality is something we want only sometimes and in some places and in some arenas; it may be that power and all of its imperatives can be boring.

In Girls, Lena Dunham’s character finds herself for a moment lying on a gynecologist’s table perversely fantasizing about having AIDS because it would free her from ambition, from responsibility, from the daunting need to make something of her life. It’s a great scene, a vivid piece of real-seeming weirdness, which raises the question: is there something exhausting about the relentless responsibility of a contemporary woman’s life, about the pressure of economic participation, about all that strength and independence and desire and going out into the world? It may be that, for some, the more theatrical fantasies of sexual surrender offer a release, a vacation, an escape from the dreariness and hard work of equality.

The author gives away the modern feminist credo with the use of the word “power.” In a Godless universe with no transcendent moral norms, all we are really left with is the “will to power.” I know agnostics and atheists will argue the point, that values and morality and truth do exist without any reference to a God, but it’s kind of difficult to get there when the only reference is blind matter that has no inherent purpose in its existence.

But before I get all philosophical, the point of this post is that these modern sexual submission fantasies by secular, supposedly urbane and educated women make total sense to the believing Jew or Christian. The reason is simple. A look through the first three chapters of Genesis tells us where human beings got their natures. In other words, human beings are not purely social constructs; there is something as man, qua man, and woman, qua woman.

God created both man and woman in his image; everything human beings are and can do is a reflection of that image. Adam was alone in the garden, and God thought this not good, so he created a “helper” for man. Man and woman as created by God were indeed equal; both bore the divine image, but they were different and had different functions. But something went terribly wrong when Adam and Eve decided to disobey God. One of the consequences we see in Genesis 3:16: to the woman he said, “Your desire will be for your husband and he will rule over you.”

The Fall, as this disobedience is called, distorted the relationship of man to God, man to his fellow man/woman, and man to himself; what should have been a perfectly complimentary partnership with a leader and helper, turned into a power struggle. Yet because the image of God remains, the possibility of the right ordering of this relationship still exists. Deep down most women don’t want to be like men; most women feel the need to be “taken care of” by a man; they are attracted to the masculine strength and real manhood; smart women know how to stroke a man’s ego. We can go along with these differences between men and women, male and female all day long; we all know “Venus and Mars.”

Radical feminism lost. As with The Atlantic Dan Quayle article I referenced in a previous piece, the cultural watershed moment came in the early 90s with another magazine cover, this time from Time. Today nobody questions the differences; the debate is where they come from. The urbane New Yorkers in “Girls” have no idea, but one of them can’t keep from sexually submitting herself to some creep. Modern women just shouldn’t do that! The writer of the Newsweek piece admits in conclusion:

It is perhaps inconvenient for feminism that the erotic imagination does not submit to politics, or even changing demographic realities; it doesn’t care about The End of Men or peruse feminist blogs in its spare time; it doesn’t remember the hard work and dedication of the suffragettes and assorted other picket-sign wavers. The incandescent fantasy of being dominated or overcome by a man shows no sign of vanishing with equal pay for equal work, and may in fact gain in intensity and take new, inventive—or in the case of Fifty Shades of Grey, not so inventive—forms.

As I said, stubborn.