What Makes a Bad Woman

The question remains.  What does it mean to be a woman?

I hear the answer, mainly from a certain kind of woman, “It means whatever you want it to mean.”  Sorry, but that is equivalent to saying that it means nothing.  Women, in my experience, prefer their nihilism to be dressed up in perky relativist clothing.  Relativism is nihilism for girls.

If we are to believe the women’s magazines on sale at groceries and drug stores, a woman is obsessed with her body, eager to learn new sex tricks, always on the watch for dirty revelations about pop-culture celebrities, prone to consulting horoscopes, ready to shell out a lot of money for new fashions, all-in for “safe” gay men who destroy one another’s lives rather than women’s lives, and firmly committed to “women’s health,” which depends on contraceptives and abortions and everything else that is meant not to restore healthy function to a diseased organ but to thwart the natural action of a healthy one.

If we are to take as evidence women’s political shows, a woman is loud, vulgar, screeching, ignorant of history, morbidly touchy, vindictive, smug, voluble in slogans, impervious to the principles of any coherent political philosophy, and ready to see the world as the she-bear sees it when her cubs are restless and the food is scarce.   . . .

That is not what women are.  That is what bad women are.  It is what happens when you fail to cultivate the difficult virtue of womanliness, just as the thug and the lout are what you get when you fail to cultivate the companion virtue, manliness.  

Anthony Esolen, Out of the Ashes: Rebuilding American Culture, pg.118