Webinar tomorrow!
A live conversation on domestic work and the mental load, plus two new books on sex and gender
Hi friends,
It’s that time of year: Memorial Day BBQs, pools opening for the summer, and end-of-the-school-year celebrations are upon us. For most families with school-age kids—mine included—mom is the one who keeps track of the spirit week activities, random dress up or down days, teacher gifts, and general household coordination. For families in which both parents work, mom is generally the one who takes the lead on piecing together summer camps, babysitters, and various forms of childcare over the summer, too.
This is, to put it mildly, a lot of work. Since the groundbreaking book The Second Shift was published in 1989, there has been a gradual growth in awareness of the heavy burden that so many moms quietly carry, dubbed “the mental load” or “emotional labor,” and of the reality that women spend much more time on basic household tasks like cooking and cleaning. As sociologist Pamela Stone detailed in her powerful 2007 study, Opting Out?, many mothers find themselves in what she calls “the double bind,” trapped between a rock (intensive mothering ideals) and a hard place (the ideal worker model). In the cases Stone studied, the unyielding expectations at home and at work caused so much conflict that these moms ended up leaving the workplace entirely.
Workplace expectations and norms have changed a lot since 2007, especially since the onset of the COVID pandemic in 2020. It’s much easier now to find flexible, freelance, or remote work (although such options usually come with a downgrade in pay and benefits). But have things changed much on the home front? Is it worth trying to get to an equal division of household labor, or are the biological, psychological, and societal forces pushing traditional gender roles just too strong?
The impressive women over at FemCatholic have asked me to do a webinar with them on this topic tomorrow at 1:30 EST. The conversation is a lead-in to the book club they’re running this month on Fair Play, by Eve Rodsky. In that book, Rodsky offers some practical strategies for divvying up the domestic load more fairly. I hope you can join us for the conversation by registering here!
I’ll have lots more to say tomorrow, but just one quick note here: as we discuss this emotionally laden issue, I think it’s key to remember that marriage, family, and home are meant to be schools of virtue for both men and women. I’m all for pushing back against regressive stereotypes, but I also think it’s important to acknowledge both biological realities and how deeply our own ambitions and self-awareness are shaped by the hegemony of the market. It’s tempting to define ourselves in terms of our professional productivity, seeing family responsibilities as something that just get in the way of that primary life goal and source of identity and worth. But, of course, that’s not good for us as people, or for our spouses and children. Keeping in mind the big picture of the primacy of the shared vocation to marriage and parenthood can help take some of the acrimony out of tense conversations between stressed out, overworked spouses.
“Rethinking Sex”
I recently published reviews of two new books on sex and gender. The first, at National Review, is about Christine Emba’s “Rethinking Sex: A Provocation.”
I originally wanted to title my review “Overthinking Sex: Christine Emba’s Not-So-Provocative Take on Sex.” (Sadly, my editor said this was too wordy.) If you click through and read the whole thing, you’ll see my main criticisms of the book, but that working title gives you the gist. This was a really promising book that fell very flat.
Part of the problem is that Emba is trying really, really hard to appeal to a very broad, secular audience. In doing so, she waters down traditional Christian sexual ethics and refuses to take her line of thought to its logical conclusion, which would entail disapproval of premarital sex—a big no-no, if your goal is to avoid alienating the kind of reader Emba has in mind. The observations she shares about the consumeristic, market-driven emptiness of hook up apps and the troubling normalization of sexual violence, for example, are certainly good ones. But, ultimately, they feel not only incomplete but also unresponsive to the sexual politics of our particular moment.
In my review, I mentioned the Love and Fidelity Network, which was active at Princeton during the time Emba was a student there. I don’t know Emba, but my sense from reading this book is that she took up the parts of LFN’s advocacy and arguments that she liked, discarded the uncomfortable bits, and then combined them with personal narratives from interviews and from her own life. This is fine, as far as it goes, but not as original or provocative as her title made me hope for.
“The Genesis of Gender”
On the other end of the spectrum is Abigail Favale’s new book, The Genesis of Gender. The book is truly outstanding, but it is definitely written for a Catholic (or at least Christian) audience.
Favale is a powerhouse. Raised evangelical, she drifted away from faith and became a hardcore feminist in college, studying poststructuralism and gender theory in grad school and writing her dissertation on French feminist theorists. Now an English professor, mother, and Catholic convert, she—more than anyone else I know—has the deep knowledge of the various strands of feminist thought needed to engage with it in a robust and nuanced way, putting its core tenets into conversation with an authentic Christian anthropology and vision of sex. That’s exactly what she does in this book.
Favale’s work is remarkable in its ability to balance the competing demands of both truth and love. On the one hand, she doesn’t mince words, calling out evil and lies when she sees them. Consider this section, for example:
Evil, in [the Genesis] cosmology, is presented as a force that divides. What was created to be in balance is now in conflict. Soul and body, man and woman, people and the earth, the human and the divine—every layer of the cosmic totality is now riven with division. That is what el diablo does. The diabolic is ultimately a force of fragmentation, discord. It splits apart and disrupts meaning. The symbolic is a force that brings together, creating equilibrium in order to reveal meaning. Genesis and gender theory are two incommensurable frameworks, two distinct ways of understanding human personhood. One draws together; the other splits apart.
The gender paradigm is diabolic, in the literal sense. I realize this is a provocative statement, but I also believe that it is true. It is a framework that deceives people, whispers the enthralling lie that we can be our own gods, our own makers, that the body has no intrinsic meaning or dignity, that we can escape our facticity and find refuge in a tailor-made self.
Passages like this fall on the opposite side of the spectrum from Emba’s approach. I don’t recommend opening the conversation with your LGBTQ friends and family members by telling them that their worldview is diabolic. But, to be fair, neither does Favale.
Toward the end of the book, she shares the stories of both detransitioners and of trans-identifying people who are trying to square their Christian faith with their transgender identity. She engages with these people in respectful, compassionate ways, trying to understand their painful experiences and accompany them in moving toward healing and wholeness. She writes:
I’ve made it clear that I disagree with transgender anthropology, namely its denial of the sacramental principle that the body reveals the person. Nonetheless, in every desire can be found a desire for something good, even if that good desire becomes distorted or aimed at the wrong thing. Trans identities signal a longing for wholeness, for an integrated sense of self, in which the body does reveal the person. This desire is fundamentally a good one; it reflects the truth of the human being as a unity of body and soul. The error comes in thinking that this integration has to be achieved through artifice, through violence against the body, rather than recognizing that we are integrated by our very nature. The lie—I have to force my body to reveal my true self—supplants the truth: the body I am is always already revealing my personhood.
This enduring desire for integration and wholeness can be harnessed, I think, as a bridge from a dualistic anthropology to a holistic one: a bridge from self-rejection to self-acceptance.
Favale shares some beautiful, compassionate examples of Christians living out “the way of accompaniment”—a phrase of Pope Francis’s—“rather than rejection; the way of love, rather than the way of fear.” That’s precisely what we’re all called to do: to encounter trans-identifying people as people, loving them as fellow children of God and wishing wholeness and happiness for them.
Even as we speak honestly about the machinations of the gender paradigm, we have to realize that there are real people, real lives, being churned up in its gears. We have to welcome these people into our parishes, into our families, into our communities. It is possible to judge whether an ideology is true or false—but we cannot judge persons; we have not been granted access to the inner chambers of the human heart. Each person’s status before God is a mystery that cannot be known from without. We must critique the framework, in the appropriate time and place, while embracing those who are caught up in that framework, no matter how they look or sound.
Okay, I’ll stop block quoting now. Suffice it to say, I think you should buy and read this book.
I’m also going to be hosting a webinar with Dr. Favale at the end of July. I’ll share those details once a sign-up page is ready. In the meantime, I also highly recommend the really excellent long-form essay she wrote for us at PD last summer, “Feminism's Last Battle,” along with the responses written by Erika Bachiochi, Margaret Harper McCarthy, Leah Libresco Sargeant, and Angela Franks.
Okay, that’s all for now.
Hope to see many of you on the webinar tomorrow!