Misomasculinity, Virophobia, and the Reign of the Smothering Mother

Disclosure: Notwithstanding the apparently misogynist theme, this writer is a passionate, extravagant, devoted philogynist. He was only slightly smothered by his own mother whose fierce maternity was, happily, purified and corrected by the conjugal love she shared with her husband who told her: "Do not put your son on a pedestal!"

In the real order, every person, relationship, family and community draws its integrity, vitality, harmony, creativity, and joy from the interaction of the feminine and masculine as spousal, tender, reverent. If one pole or the other is denied, dominant, feared or despised, life becomes toxic. The denial of gender bipolarity is the collapse into chaos; andryogyny is sterility. Our society and Church, in its flight from toxic masculinity and patriarchy as tyranny, in its fear and hatred of virility, is not being liberated, but falling under the despostism of the the controlling, devouring feminine.

The Smothering Mother is:

- Motherly love as excessive in compassion, inclusion, acceptance because it is unbalanced by and hostile to fatherly love as demand, obligation, authority, boundary, tradition, truth, honor.

- A moral sense that is emotivist and anti-intellectual.

- Quintessentially: the Evil Mother swallowing her unborn, innocent and helpless.

A militant femininism hostile to femininity as form, as purpose, as beauty-truth-goodness, in a degenerate mimesis of toxic masculinity as careerism, loneliness, individualism, sexual license, and fear of the father.

- Safetyism as global, pervasive anxiety; flight from death, risk, adventure, challenge, combat, engagement; compulsive construction of a protected, maternal bubble; covidophobia, over-masking, extreme social distancing, hypermandating; conspiracy theories and dread of vaccines; helicopter parenting.

- A presidency and political party that is rabidly anti-paternal and anti-maternal in its genocide of the unborn, innocent and powerless; that desecrates the human body in its denial of the sacrality of sexuality as conjugal, fruitful, iconic; that abandons its allies in Afghanastan in a debacle of shameful disloyalty and startling incompetence; that is unwilling to protect its borders and so lures countless poor southern neighbors into a dangerous pilgrimage of hope; that spends the money of our children/grandchildren in its "boomerish" insistence on consumpiton NOW; that propagates a narrative of powerful/powerless, rich/poor, black/white, male/female, hetero/homo, and cis/trans that dehumanizes an alleged "oppressor class" as it infantilizes a "victim class" (e.g. black men are emasculated by the allegation that they are victims of "the man" and unable to protect their women and children); and so provokes, from the underclass, an anxious, raging populism-nationalism that tends to crude toxic masculinity.

- The expansion of the "mommy state"; tolerance of, indeed indulgence of moral decadence and sexual depravity; systemic deconstruction of traditional itineraries into noble masculinity; immersion in a tyranny of technology and bureaucracy; the predominance of unbalanaced femininity in crucial arenas of education, entertainment health care, media and law.

- A pontificate that is emasculated in an excess of compassion-acceptance-nurture bereft of fatherly demand, accountability, responsibility, chastity, authority, holiness, justice and truth; that is allergic to manly sturctures of dogma, law, tradition, authority, hierarchy; that embraces immigrants but is indifferent to the need for boundaries, rule of law, and national identity; that abandons the martyred Church in China in cowardly submission to vicious communists; that urges inclusion and dialogue but then resents criticism and lapses into catty resentment of traditionals (suppression of Latin mass) and conservatives (destruction of the John Paul II Institute in Rome"); that unleashes a confused, disorienting "synodality" in a vague resentment of tradition bereft of clarity, direction and purpose.

- A gay movement that, in a classic oedipal drama, camouflages its wounded masculinty, by recoiling from the paternal viewed as hostile-judgmental-shaming-rigorous and embraces the maternal as accepting-approving, and rages (in an elaborate liturgy of pride, parades, rainbows, coming out, etc.) like a petulant child for unconditional moral approval.

With this we understand the nature of our civilizational and ecclesial crises: a classic oedipal drama. In suspicion and resentment, son and mother collude together against the paternal experienced as tyranical and evil. The key protagonists are the gay and the femininist; the antagonist is masculinity as paternal. The structures of modernity...contraception, sexual liberation, deconstruction of gender, bureaucracy, technology and scientism, expansive state, demise of the family and intermediate institutions...all collude in the disparagement of paternity and the empowerment of a Smothering Motherhood.

The good news is that the Real, the True, the Good, the Beautiful are all irrepressible: masculinity/femininity, paternity/maternity, filiality, spousality, fraternity...these are superabundant, generous, resilient, captivating, charming and engaging. They share a certain invulnerability to The System. They will triumph! Thanks be to God!