This essay is the first in a four-part exchange between Catholic theologian Rachel Coleman and radical feminist philosopher Kate Phelan. Click here to see all four installments.
I have been reading radical feminist authors with interest for around a decade. Radical feminists understood the growing threat of trans ideology far sooner than almost anyone else. Ten to fifteen years ago, even Catholics and political conservatives seemed to think “the trans thing” was niche and going to stay that way. Reading Janice Raymond and Germaine Greer convinced me otherwise, and it turns out they were right.
What keeps me coming back to radical feminist authors is precisely their radicalism. By this, I mean that radical feminists are not afraid to criticize our culture and society to its very roots. They offer perspectives and judgments that one doesn’t often hear in so-called polite society. They don’t seem in the least hesitant about shattering the Overton window. As a Catholic thinker who has often been told (both implicitly and explicitly) that I need to hide or soften my Catholicism in order to be heard in the (not-at-all) neutral public square, reading radical feminists has been both heartening and instructive. I reject your Overton window, they seem to say. I reject your whole framework and all its implicit claims on me altogether. We must always start our conversations further down or further back than polite (liberal) society allows.
The more I read radical feminists, the more overlap I see between their concerns and those of Catholics when it comes to the treatment of women. The overlap goes far beyond the issue of trans ideology into our common critique of liberal feminism and its commodifying effects. Consider the following quotations from radical feminist authors.
“Liberal feminism works best to defend women’s rights to be like men, to enter into men’s worlds, to work at men’s jobs for men’s pay, to have rights and privileges of men,” Barbara Katz Rothman tells Jennifer Block in Everything Below the Waist. “But what of our rights as women?” In her 1993 book Women as Wombs, Janice Raymond puts it even more starkly: “Gender-neutral equality equals inequality for women.” Elsewhere in the same book, Raymond reflects that “Pro-choice has become a rallying cry of women’s and reproductive rights groups in the United States today. Not pro-woman, but pro-choice . . . Women must take a hard look at what is offered to us as choice.” Similarly, in Of Woman Born (1976), Adrienne Rich writes: “Abortion is a violence: a deep, desperate violence inflicted by a woman upon first of all, herself.”
Andrea Dworkin famously opposed pornography. In a 1988 essay titled “Pornography is a Civil Rights Issue for Women,” Dworkin says: “Pornography does not, as some claim, refute the idea that female sexuality is dirty: instead pornography embodies and exploits this idea, pornography sells it and promotes it.” She also opposed IVF and surrogacy. In her 1991 book Pornography: Men Possessing Women, Dworkin writes that such practices “enable women to sell their wombs within the terms of the brothel model. Motherhood is becoming a new branch of female prostitution with the help of scientists who want access to the womb for experiment and power.”
These are just a few examples of repeating themes throughout much of the radical feminist literature I’ve encountered. Criticism of the birth control pill, artificial reproductive technologies and surrogacy, pornography, and trans ideology are all places of overlap between radical feminists and Catholics. This should pique our interest.
If Adrienne Rich and Germaine Greer outline the same concerns about the birth control pill as Pope Paul VI did in Humanae vitae, if Pope John Paul II levels the same critiques against pornography as Andrea Dworkin, and if Pope Francis has the same concerns and warnings against both trans ideology and surrogacy as Janice Raymond, this seems worthy of attention.
What could radical feminists possible have in common with Catholicism? The first principles of radical feminism do not seem to align with those of the Catholic vision of the human person. And yet a certain friendship has arisen between the two as a result of our shared criticisms and rejections. I don’t think a friendship based on rejection or negation can be lasting, or even real. Thankfully, I think that we have at least one shared positive principle: that the body matters.
A Shared Foundation
Philosophically speaking, our vision and understanding of the human person is called our anthropology. What exactly is the human being? What is the human being’s destiny? What makes human beings happy and what is their purpose (do they have one)? Answers to these questions—and more—are included in our anthropology, whether it is implicitly or explicitly held. Although the animating principles of a radical feminist anthropology are very different than those of a Catholic one, they both agree that the body (and therefore, as I explain below, reality) matters.
There is, of course, the question of what the body mattering actually means. This question could fill books (and, indeed, it has). For our purposes, let us say that to assert that the body matters is to assert (1) that human beings are sexually dimorphic (that is, we are each either male and female), (2) that being male or female is a given and unchangeable reality, and (3) that one’s being male or female directly affects one’s experience of the world.
As I understand it, a radical feminist anthropology takes the body seriously because of the impact our bodily expression has on our experience of the world. Women are, generally speaking, physically weaker than men. This can lead to our being dominated and taken advantage of more easily. That is to say, our physicality literally leads to a power imbalance vis-à-vis men. Additionally, women’s bodies are such that we (literally) carry the species. There is both great power and vulnerability in that. Thanks to the complex and wide-ranging impact of hormonal changes in our bodies, we are also cyclical beings in a way men are not. Here, too, sexual differences affect our daily experience of the world.
These are not realities women can simply opt out of. Indeed, to assert as much is offensive: it is to assert that women opt-in to the male gaze, rape culture, medical mistreatment, and sexual discrimination of all kinds. Yet this is what trans ideology and the culture of hormonal birth control implicitly assert, because they implicitly assert that the body can be changed at will. And if the body can be changed at will, then women must on some level want to be subjected to the male gaze, rape culture, medical mistreatment, and sexual discrimination. Otherwise, why wouldn’t they change their bodies? A radical feminist anthropology rejects this implication.
A Catholic anthropology also avers that the body matters, though its starting point is different than that of radical feminism. Here, the body matters ultimately because it—and everything else in the world—is created by God, and thus reveals something both about what it means to be a creature and about God himself. Put shortly: the structure of reality reveals the ultimate meaning of being. Thus, we should not only pay attention to it but care for and protect it. This is especially true for the human being, who is created in the image and likeness of God. Thus, the human body, in its dual incarnation as male and female, is a privileged revelation of the nature of all of reality.
Rejecting the Primacy of the Individual Will
Whatever the first principle leading one to it, the assertion that the body matters is a radical act in a world that has decided one’s will—or, to use the language of the trans ideologues, one’s “inner feeling”—is the ultimate reality.
Want to have sex without the bothersome biological consequence of a child? Take contraception. Want to feel good sexually without the trouble of a relationship? Watch pornography. Want to have a child even if your biology prevents it? Find a surrogate. Want to change your sex? Wrong-sex hormones and surgery it is. One never need to change one’s own actions, thoughts, or attitudes—that is, one never need change oneself. Just use technology to change the world.
Notice the implicit assumption in this position: there is nothing above or outside of me that cannot be bent to my will. I am the arbiter of what is real. I am the ultimate reality.
Both the radical feminist and the Catholic anthropologies reject this position outright. In doing so, both hold fast to a truth that was not so radical until recently: reality is bigger than each one of us, and certainly bigger than our will to determine it. Another way of putting this: by acknowledging that the body matters, both radical feminism and Catholicism acknowledge that reality matters, and must be paid attention—perhaps, we could even say, be obeyed. There is no escaping or determining it ourselves.
The desire to control and define everything—even one’s own body—is at the root of all that both radical feminism and Catholicism reject. This suggests on the part of both radical feminism and Catholicism a willingness to be open to the transcendent. By this, I do not necessarily mean other-worldly or supernatural realities. Rather, I am simply referring to realities that transcend one individual person’s mind or will. To recognize that there are objective truths (such as sexual dimorphism) is to recognize a truth that literally transcends all individuals.
I would like to thank Emily Fasteson for her help researching for this article.
