catholicworldreport.com
2026-06-19
Beatrice Scudeler's recent essay on the Public Discourse about Gen Z women and the internet fascination with "men who yearn" exposes a rather inconvenient truth for a culture that has spent sixty years telling women that marriage is servitude, motherhood is social death, homemaking is wasted talent, sexual restraint is repression, and masculine devotion is probably one microaggression away from a campus tribunal.
However, she points out that the strange popularity of fictional men who serve, protect, sacrifice, and desire one woman with disciplined constancy reveals that many young women still long for covenantal love even after being trained by the culture to sneer at the very conditions that make such love possible.
Modern feminism began by rightly insisting upon the equal dignity of women, because no sane Christian can deny that woman is created in the image of God with the same immortal destiny as man. Yet much of the movement gradually exchanged equality for sameness, and that exchange has become disastrous because a woman does not gain dignity by being measured according to male industrial categories or male sexual habits (cf. Gen 1:27; CCC, 2334; Mulieris Dignitatem, 6).
Sanity versus ideology