Paul Washer once said “No one hates women more than feminists.” At first glance, this sounds ludicrous; feminism is all about empowering women, liberating them from anything that might restrain them, and expanding the privileges they enjoy at home, at work, in politics, and everywhere else. That sure doesn’t sound like they hate women. At least, until you understand what hate actually is.
In the Bible, hate is presented as the opposite of love; for example in Ephesians 5:28-30:
So husbands also ought to love their own wives as their own bodies. He who loves his own wife loves himself; for no one ever hated his own flesh, but nourishes and cherishes it, just as Christ also does the church, because we are parts of His body.
Love is the opposite of hate. Really helpful; it’s not like we have problems defining love biblically, much less concisely. Thankfully, there is a concise definition of biblical love, courtesy of Voddie Baucham: “Love is an act of the will, accompanied by emotion, that leads to action on behalf of its object.” Love is a choice, first and foremost. Jesus commands us to love our enemies, whether we like them or not. He’s not telling us to force ourselves to feel some sort of way, He’s commanding us to act for their benefit, even though we don’t like them. Whenever Jesus talks about loving your enemies, He does so with a list of actions to take, not feelings to feel (Luke 6:27-28). If you love someone, you will act in such a way as to benefit that person, and the feelings we associate with love will (usually) follow.
If hate is the opposite of love, then we can define hate as ‘an act of the will, accompanied by emotion, that leads to action to the detriment of its object’. Hatred, like love, is a choice, not an emotion. Just like how you can love someone for whom you feel a deep antipathy, you can hate someone for whom you feel great fondness. Consider Proverbs 13:24:
He who withholds his rod hates his son,
But he who loves him disciplines him diligently.
Parents who do not discipline their children hate those children, even if they don’t discipline because they feel all kinds of positive emotions towards that child. Such a ‘love’ is really only a veneer over a hatred of that child.
Hatred, like love, is accompanied by emotion. Hate is often erroneously defined as simply an intense aversion, antipathy, or dislike of something. These feelings often accompany hatred, but they are only the symptoms, not the hatred itself. If someone makes the choice not to hate another person, those feelings will fade eventually.
Does hatred lead to action? Absolutely. Love and hatred both are inextricably linked to the actions one takes. Someone who hates spiders will squash them at every opportunity. The 20th century was full of hatred being acted upon: the Holocaust, Dekulakization, Jim Crow, the L.A. Riots, and constant Palestinian acts of terrorism against Israel are only a handful of examples from just one century. Hatred leads to action, even if that action is cloaked in claims of virtue.
So how do feminists hate women? Quite simply, they are stridently opposed to everything God created women to be, and seek to spread that opposition throughout society. Since God is the Creator of the universe, He gets to define what makes men and women what they are and how they should behave, and His definitions are non-negotiable. A woman who acts like a man and takes on masculine social roles is not redefining gender roles, blazing a trail for women, or being successful. She’s actually failing at being a woman. Much like parents who don’t discipline their children, feminists encourage women down a path of defiance to God’s will, and thus show that, deep down, they are the real misogynists.
This can be easily seen with a few examples of what feminists teach women:
Let’s start with abortion. Abortion is sold by feminists as an empowering way for a woman to take control of her life and reproductive choices. Leaving aside the incredibly misogynistic assumption that women have zero self-control and will sleep with anything in possession of a Y chromosome, the reality is that they are encouraging women to murder their own children. Further, they are devaluing God’s special gift to women, the ability to have children, and treating it as if it were a bad thing. Since God says children are a blessing, feminists are lying to women, which is not a loving thing to do. They completely gloss over the trauma experienced by all but the most deranged women who get abortions. As you might expect, murdering one’s own child leaves some mental and psychological scars. This is on top of the fact that God hates murder. Is it loving to encourage someone to sin against God, thus incurring divine condemnation, while incurring psychological trauma and risking death or sterility in the process? No. Abortion is clearly detrimental to women (to say nothing of the children, but it’s obvious that feminists hate children); encouraging someone to get an abortion is only something you do if you hate them.
Let’s take a controversial one next: equality. Feminists are always pushing for gender equality, something the world has conditioned us to assume is a good thing. What they won’t do is distinguish between equality of value and equality of ability. The Bible is clear that men and women have equal value as image bearers of God. What the Bible nowhere affirms, frequently denies, is that men and women have equal abilities, proclivities, or roles in society. This is not to say that one or the other is better, simply that men and women are different. Feminists deny this obvious fact. They claim that a woman can do anything a man can do as well as or better than a man. We can see that this is blatantly untrue if we apply a little common sense. Let’s start with the most obvious: women can’t father children. Because biology is a thing. Likewise, men are, as a rule, naturally bigger and stronger than women. This makes men objectively better than women at physically demanding tasks. Examples would include manual labor and, contrary to everything you’ve seen from Hollywood, fighting. These biological differences can’t be hand-waved away by any amount of girl-power nostrums and believing in oneself.
Nevertheless, feminists deny any fundamental differences between men and women, and attribute any disparities to oppression of women by men. Thus, they continue to push the discredited myth of the ‘gender pay gap’, on the assumption that women don’t make different choices from men, or have different competencies, and thus should get the same results as men.
This flawed assumption, that men and women are even comparable, which is necessary in determining if things are equal, results in feminists judging women by male standards, when the standards for men and women are different. The things that make a good man, biblically speaking, and the things that make a good woman, are not all the same. For example, wives are to submit to their husbands, and not vice versa. A husband who submits to his wife is doing manhood wrong. A woman who claims to be a preacher is doing womanhood wrong. In judging women by the standards for men, feminists are saying that men are better, and women should become men. It’s very similar to the ‘social transitioning’ pushed by transgender activists, and misogynistic to boot.
A prime example of this would be the glorification of the ‘girlboss’ archetype. You’ve probably already got a picture of this type of woman in your head. This is the empowered career woman who works 80+ hours a week at a corporate job, makes lots of money, drives expensive cars, and generally dominates everyone around her; all traditionally masculine behaviors. Feminists present this as the ideal woman; one who behaves like a man.
This presupposition that men and women are equal is how we got transgenderism, which functionally (and sometimes explicitly) denies that women exist. If men and women are truly equal in the sense that feminists mean, then there is no difference between men and women.The reason they end up here is because they hate what God created women to be, and thus hate women.
Another way feminists encourage women to (supposedly) act like men is by encouraging them to have casual sex with lots of people. (Although, as a man, I’ve never really seen the appeal of that. Ick.) The first and, hopefully, most obvious problem here is that promiscuity is sinful. If you love someone, you’ll encourage them to not sin, and that should be enough. But, since sin always has consequences, it gets worse. One recurring theme you’ll hear among ‘empowered’ women is their fear of ‘catching feelings’ for men they sleep with. The last thing they want is to actually care about the person they’re being intimate with, even though God designed sex for that exact purpose. The end result? These women kill their ability to love by repeatedly forming and breaking the most intimate of bonds, until that bond simply won’t form anymore. Feminism teaches that this is a good thing, and in doing so cuts these women off from one of God’s greatest gifts and turns them into the bitter, angry people that characterize the movement.
I find it hard to believe that the women who push this idea do so in ignorance. They know the end result of this lifestyle, in many cases because they lived it, and they continue to perpetuate it because to do otherwise would be to admit they were wrong. Thus they throw the next generation into the emotional meat grinder of casual sex, in order to soothe their own cognitive dissonance. That’s hatred right there.
Where feminists reach peak misogyny, however, is with their denigration of godly womanhood. While much could be said on godly womanhood (Voddie Baucham has some excellent sermons on the subject) a good thumbnail sketch can be found in Titus 2:3-5:
Older women likewise are to be reverent in their behavior, not malicious gossips nor enslaved to much wine, teaching what is good, so that they may encourage the young women to love their husbands, to love their children, to be sensible, pure, workers at home, kind, being subject to their own husbands, so that the word of God will not be dishonored.
Does any of that fit with what feminists teach? No, in fact they teach just the opposite. Feminists teach women to view their husbands (and men in general) as an enemy who will oppress them at every opportunity. This is antithetical to loving your husband. We already covered what feminists teach about children; needless to say that’s not loving either. Do feminists encourage women to be pure? Heck, no. Feminists lionize pornography as ‘empowering’, encourage promiscuity, and are generally lewd. A pure feminist can be found in the same place as jumbo shrimp, efficient bureaucracy, and honest politicians.
I think we all know how feminists feel about women working at home instead of being out in the workforce. The very thought of a woman working at home, caring for a husband and children who love her, instead of toiling away in a soul-crushing corporate job for a boss who views her as a replaceable ‘human resource’ whose value can be measured in dollars, is enough to send them into girlboss conniptions. Being subject to her own husband? Make those conniptions extra spicy with a side of generalized man hating.
It would be funny if it weren’t so sad. God knows what is best for women, better than women themselves do (there’s those conniptions again), and His commands direct women to do what is best for them. Feminists fight against this, despite the consequences, and are happy to feed generations of women into the meat grinder of ‘empowerment’ just to avoid repenting of their arrogance. To feminists, other women are just cannon fodder to protect their own egos from even the possibility of being wrong. Again, these are the actions of someone who hates women.
Now for the big question: what do we do with this information? The biggest takeaway is quite simply don’t trust feminists. Even when they’re saying something true, such as that ‘transwomen’ aren’t women, remember it’s a Trojan horse. They may deny that men can turn into women physically, but they still want to turn women into men socially. They may oppose gender ‘transition’ for children, but they ardently support murdering those same children in the womb. Their inveterate hatred of women remains intact, and thus they are not to be trusted or compromised with. Their poisonous presuppositions infiltrate every position they take and the only antidote is to assume they’re trying to put one over on you and rigorously examine even their most innocuous and non-controversial statements in the light of Scripture. Remember, whether you’re a man or a woman, feminists hate you. God does not.
Since feminists have had outsized influence in the culture for a long time (longer than most of us have been alive) we need to scrutinize our own views on gender roles, relations between the sexes, and even the nature of men and women, in the light of Scripture alone. Any belief we have about women’s rights, women’s roles in society, or anything else touched by feminism is open to question and correction by Scripture. It’s not always comfortable rooting out feminist presuppositions that are entrenched in our thinking, but it’s something that must be done if we want to treat women with the dignity and respect that God requires.
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