Gilder, George. Men and Marriage. Moscow, ID: Canon Press, 2023.*
By 1973, the hightide of second-wave feminism had flooded the beaches of American culture. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique eroded the shores of traditional female roles by naming and stirring up further domestic discontentment. Kate Millet wrote her dissertation-turned-book, Sexual Politics, which sought to overthrow the patriarchy with her Marxist revolutionaries through the National Organization of Women (313). Against the flood,, conservative George Gilder manned the dikes with Sexual Suicide in 1973. With the rise of intersectionality in third wave feminism, Gilder revised and re-titled the book Men and Marriage in 1986. Besides the 2023 Preface, Canon’s republication is the 1986 edition. While the stats are antiquated, his underlying principles and overall message are clear, and his prescience of future events based on trajectories have far exceeded what he probably imagined.
When Gilder first published Sexual Suicide and then doubled down in Men and Marriage, he infuriated all the right people, drawing the ire of the main players in the feminist movement and exposing the places in our culture where the latest iterations of feminism had taken root. Second-wave feminism fought for equality with men in the workplace and the sexual marketplace. Women wanted to be like men. While the elimination of the differences did not rise to the level that we see today, in which many are claiming that there is no such thing as a man or woman, the equality called for in second-wave feminism helped lay the foundations for what we are experiencing today. Women didn’t want the consequences of sexual promiscuity, and the creation of the birth control pill and swelling tsunami for the legalization of abortion gave their wombs the liberation to live sexually promiscuous lives.
Gilder’s book rightly aims at the foundations of the false worldviews of feminism by focusing on the differences between the sexes. In the Preface to the 1986 edition (included at the end of this republication), Gilder states that the purpose of his book is to deal with the drive to deny or repress the differences between the sexes (311). He says, “I asserted that ‘the drive to deny them–in the name of women’s liberation, marital openness, sexual equality, erotic consumption, or homosexual romanticism–must be one of the most quixotic crusades in the history of the species” (311-12). His purpose is clear and on point. Once the differences between the sexes are eliminated, civilized society crumbles.
Gilder explains some of the perils of androgyny as promoted by feminism in chapter 11. His conclusions concerning coeducation and its deleterious effects on boys (181, 187), as well as the distortion of femininity through its suppression by participation in sports designed to perfect the male body, were self-evident in the 1980s and have only been made more apparent in 2023. God’s created design of the male and female bodies embodies their purpose in his world. Men’s bodies, for example, have thicker skin and greater physical strength necessary to subdue the creation. Women’s bodies are softer and have wombs and breasts to nurture children. God equips us to fulfill our dominion mandate physiologically. We mature into our full potential only as we submit to the grain of creation, cultivating our masculine and feminine designs. To rebel is suicide, individual and societal.
Sadly, Western Culture birthed in Christendom must be reminded of basic biological differences and their implications. In Chapter 2, Gilder guides us through those differences and states many truths that would have been glaringly obvious one hundred years ago. Sadly, many in the church have countenanced the belief that the way we are created biologically doesn’t speak to our nature or the nature of our mission as different sexes. Many egalitarians and “thin” complementarians in the church are functional androgynists, claiming that differences are only in roles determined by bald fiat. Even though Gilder’s analysis suffers from being ill-founded (more below), his emphasis on fundamental biological differences is a good reminder for the church as much as for the broader culture.
For Gilder, the elimination of sexual differences inevitably leads to the breakdown of monogamous marriage. Sexual “freedom” has ill effects within the sexual marketplace, creating large gaps between the haves and have-nots. Women want to marry high-value men who are powerful and with whom they can find security. Men want to find fertile women, and what attracts them are the signs of fertility in physical features and age. (84-85) When women are liberated from the consequences of sexual intercourse, knowing that they will not carry in their bodies the results of their activity, they tend to give up their marriageable years, thinking that all the men with whom they sleep they can marry. What she is doing is giving her marriageable years–her fertility years–to promiscuous men. As her sexual value declines because of her lost fertility and its cues (physical features and age), a man’s sexual value tends to increase as he becomes more successful. Men become more powerful. Women give up their power. The most powerful men then have the largest percentage of women, whether through official or functional polygyny. Less powerful men are left alone (Chapter 6) or resort to homosexuality (Chapter 7). In contrast, enforced strictures of monogamy and societal mores create a more equal sexual marketplace.
As Gilder points out, the factors breaking down monogamy cannot be attributed to a single purpose. A woman’s hypergamous desire to “marry up” becomes more difficult as she earns a large paycheck. Making more than many men, she tends to see a man earning equal or less as beneath her and not being able to be an adequate provider and protector, increasing her likelihood of divorce if she settles for a lower-earning spouse (62-3, 68, 71). This is one stat that remains consistent from the mid-eighties until the present.
Other disastrous factor is when the government becomes the man-who-will-support-the-woman through the welfare system. When women can make money and be freed from their ghetto conditions by having babies without marriage, sexual promiscuity is incentivized, and monogamous marriage is discouraged. Men are not encouraged to take responsibility. Instead, lacking something and someone to work for that are his own, the man’s energies are turned to that which is unproductive and often destructive. Women are not encouraged to trust a man who may not be as reliable as the government. Consequently, they will continue to have babies and raise them in fatherless homes, repeating the cycle exponentially (Chapters 8 & 9).
History has borne out Gilder’s conclusions. Where sexual irresponsibility is incentivized, men and women tend to take the path of least resistance. We are fallen creatures whose sinful tendencies must be discouraged and curbed through godly structures and strictures. If society is to survive, we need mothers and fathers in the home, each assuming their responsibilities within a monogamous marriage (270).
Gilder also reminds us of a principle we know intuitively but have denied in promoting false equality between the sexes: Women are. Men become. There are some weaknesses in how he understands this, but the foundational principle, especially when applied to initial attraction, is solid. Manhood is not given. It is earned. “In all its specific expressions, manhood is made, not born” (11). Manhood is earned through competition and learning one’s place in the hierarchy: only as a man achieves manhood does he qualify for a quality woman’s affection (7). But women don’t understand this masculine anxiety to perform, because womanhood is given to them, not by a performance ritual but by virtue of their bodies developing and receiving their period (10). As pointed out above, Gilder rightly notes that men are attracted to fertility cues, so a woman doesn’t have to do anything initially to attract a man. She is.
Gilder’s conclusions on many matters concerning the differences between the sexes and the consequences of denying those differences are accurate. However, I don’t see how Gilder reaches some of his conclusions with his premises. His original approach to these subjects through anthropology, social sciences, and evolutionary biology instead of Scripture handicaps his book (xxix, 82, 87). The premise reduces men and women’s drives to a functional, biological determinism. Indeed, while we can learn much from these sciences even as fallen men, the only way to have proper knowledge is through the lenses of Scripture. Somewhere in the process of revising his work, Gilder, I believe, either came to or back to the faith. Some of the revisions in his 1986 edition reflect this, and the 2023 Preface makes his present perspective clear (xxix). Nevertheless, many of the observations don’t reflect a strong grasp of Scripture.
The glaring weakness of the book is its fundamental premise concerning the sexual and moral superiority of women over men by nature.
Imagine with me for a moment, if you will, if I said, “Jesus Christ is a barbarian who must be tamed by submitting himself to the sexual and moral superiority of his bride. The nature of the man is inferior in every way to the superior nature of the female inscribed in her body.” That would be scandalous and heretical. Scripture reveals that the male-female marriage paradigm is the marriage of Christ and his church (Eph 5:22-33). Consequently, our hermeneutic of intersexual dynamics must begin, continue, and end with this relationship. What Gilder is seeing, in many respects, is true. Men are untamed. Women are the gatekeepers of sex, and when they renege on their duties to guard their bodies, the results for themselves, men, and society are destructive. Women have a greater stake in the sexual game, being the ones fully committed in a sexual act that could result in pregnancy, carrying a child for nine months, undeniable maternity, and the responsibility to care for the child. However, these observable patterns aren’t the entire story. And Gilder says that these observable patterns of “nature” and “the facts of life” (which I understand to mean “design”) prove that women are not only superior in men to having babies, but they are also morally superior because they are females (chapter 1, 264, 266, 277). The way Gilder presents it, feminine sexual superiority is a feature, not a bug resulting from the fall.
Gilder’s view of women as presented in Men and Marriage borders on gynocolatry. In the opening, we might expect to hear, “In the beginning, God created the woman, and everything flowed from her superior position in the universe.” Women are the creators of civilization (4, 16). Civilization is based on female sexuality and biology (17). Men are not even a part of civilization unless forced to be so by women (73).
Men are barbarians (passim). Men aren’t human (11). Women are the measure of what “human” means, and men are only tamed and made human by marriage (18, 60). The woman in her body is original righteousness while the man is original sin. In historical theological terms, Gilder is Augustinian when dealing with men and Pelagian when dealing with women. Men are depraved by design. Women must fall from a state of grace (see, for example, the Prologue, “The Princess and the Barbarian”). The man’s sex drive is understood as de facto problematic and maybe even sinful per se. “He [the man] becomes law-abiding and productive, in essence, because he discovers it is the only way he can get sex from the woman he wants, or marriage from the one he loves” (60). While it is true that a man must initially prove himself to be married and thus have access to sex, the issue is framed in such a way to portray the man’s sex drive as something only tamed by a woman and not by himself. Before he meets a woman, the man is only a hormone-driven, lustful barbarian. He doesn’t have a mission beyond getting sexual release. His mission is subordinated to his sexual lust and, thus, subordinated to the woman and her mission.
This is problematic on a few levels. First, when we read the paradigmatic story of marriage, we discover that the man was created first, had a mission, and the woman was created to help him with his mission. She was to be in submission—under his mission. He was not created after her to submit to her and her mission. The woman was made for the man, not the man for the woman (1 Cor 11:9). Because she was created as an extension of the garden (Song 4:12, 15, 16; 5:1), the woman becomes a part of his mission to guard and tend (Gen 2:15). He is to cultivate the woman. She is not the total focus of his mission (though she embodies it in many respects) because they share a common mission bigger than either of them as individuals. Far from submitting to the woman’s long-term sexual horizons, the woman is called to submit to the man in marriage to work toward a common mission of which her sexual purpose is vital. While Gilder emphasizes the necessity of men and women in marriage to build society (“the dominion mandate”), his fundamental premise undercuts it.
A second problem arises, putting an undue burden of responsibility on women. Women have moral responsibility, to be sure. But the way Gilder frames their responsibility, they become solely responsible for civilization because men are by nature barbarians and may claim no moral responsibility unless the woman fulfills her headship role. This is precisely the opposite of God’s design. The woman falls when she is unprotected by the man. He is to be the leader. This is the basis of the patriarchy that Gilder says is inevitable. (254) What follows from Gilder’s fundamental principles is a matriarchy and not a patriarchy. Men must follow what some have called “the feminine imperative” because it determines everything in the world.
A third weakness concerns the “Women are. Men become.” principle. As mentioned above, this is a solid principle, but it is a solid principle that mainly concerns the laws of attraction in intersexual dynamics. The way Gilder presents this principle (even though he doesn’t use the phrase that I do) is that this is a truism in every aspect of the relationship of men and women throughout the lifespan of their relationship. This suggests that women don’t need to develop character or do anything to make them worthy of praise. There is no burden of performance on them. However, Lady Wisdom in Proverbs 31 is praised for her character and the works that spring from that character (Prov. 31:10-31). Womanhood is granted by creational design, but the woman must take that gift and develop it into a fruitful character. Her youthful beauty will fade as vapor (Prov. 31:30). Her ever-maturing character will be an inward beauty that shines through everything about her (1 Pet. 3:4). Like the man, the woman must be sanctified just as Christ is doing with his church (Eph. 5:26). Men and women don’t have the same burden of performance, but each has a burden of performance.
Gilder’s conclusions don’t align with his premises, in my opinion. If women are the source and formers of civilization, it would stand to reason that men would be at best, expendable, and single-mother homes would be ideal. Gilder recognizes that fatherless homes are detrimental. (Chapter 8). But why? Is it only because the woman has tamed the man? If that is the case, why can’t she tame sons without the presence of a father?
Also, if men need to be tamed by women to submit to feminine long-term objectives, why is it not good for boys to be coeducated with girls and taught by women instead of men, as he advocates in chapter 11? Cut out the middleman. Literally. Girls are distracting in education, but they are the civilized ones, the real humans. Men must learn to conform to their civilized way of acting. Gilder’s conclusion is a non sequitur from his premise. He is right about everything he says concerning the perils of androgyny and fatherless homes. His premises undercut his conclusions.
The book is focused on men and marriage in such a way that one could infer that women don’t need anything from marriage. Men are the needy ones. Men’s sex drive must be tamed along with their barbaric, unproductive lifestyles. Though women can be led astray, females only need to realize their original righteousness and be ready to sanctify the man to make him a productive member of society. However, the Scriptures present the woman as much in need of marriage as men. In some respects, women need marriage more than men because they are relatively weaker and need the protection and security from a faithful man. Throughout Scripture, God commands that women such as widows need special attention because of their vulnerability. Even more fundamental than this, a woman also needs the sanctification that comes through submitting herself to her husband as her head, as the church does with Christ.
Men and women need one another in a complementary fashion, both of us having strengths and weaknesses that fill the gaps in the other. The superiority that Gilder attributes to women should be attributed to God’s design for marriage itself. It is in men and women submitting to God’s institution of marriage, not in men submitting to the long-term horizons of female sexuality, that we will build and sustain godly societies and avoid sexual suicide.
*This review was originally posted at Theopolis, October 17, 2023. https://theopolisinstitute.com/men-marriage-and-the-feminine-imperative-a-review-of-men-and-marriage/
