I’ve written on this topic before, so if I am a bit tedious, I apologize.

“Everything is like sex, except sex.” That’s an expression I’ve heard more than once. Literally everything in nature, everything in the physical world (and the spiritual, as far as the human imagination can muster), whether created by God or man—is like sex. Thesis, antithesis, synthesis, is universal: The positive (active, male) and the negative (passive, female) are united and something/someone new is made. At its most elemental, pre-mythological level, earth is soil, watered by heaven, to bring forth life. From there, allegories emerge.

Only superficially are we androgynous beings. Proven by the discovery of gender-determining chromosomes at conception (not “created” later by societal or cultural “influences”), we are born either male or female; there is no neuter anywhere in nature or in science. Neuter is impotent (“dead.”)

Most of us are familiar with the “serenity prayer” made famous by Alcoholics Anonymous: “Lord, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change (the feminine principle), the courage to change the things I can (the masculine principle), and the wisdom to know the difference.” It’s a good formula for mental health. Chronic unhappiness, depression, or anxieties that lead to all kinds of addiction can often be resolved by an examination of that formula, by finding where we are trying to be serene when action is required, or trying to be active where serenity is required, and thus perhaps attain wisdom. 

But I could probably fill a page with clichés that describe the confusion of our times—“road rage” that results from unwillingness to “go with the flow [of traffic],” for example. Frustrations, anger, aggression—“control freak”—and yet we are admonished by commercials and psa’s, and all sorts of advice at every turn to “take charge” of our lives/weight/health/future/whatever. Politically, we’re always trying to “empower” people. We live in a time when the masculine principle is universally admired and the feminine principle is universally despised. In fact, that which is feminine is regarded as deprivation. The very title of “The Female Eunuch” assumes that the opposite of masculine is neuter. There is masculinity—and then there is deprivation of masculinity.

The feminine principle has nothing to do with feminism—except that you could say the latter is a consequence of the destruction of the former. Feminism is not an action, but a reaction. It’s not a cause. It didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t a result of men going off to war (they’ve always done that), or any other theoretical bit of non-explanation. Men ceased to value women, and women are dependent on men for their value as women. It’s really that simple, that devastating.

In the early seventies, Florida became a no-fault divorce state. I had just returned from Europe where I’d lived for five years. I remember walking down three blocks of a street in Orlando and encountering two parked cars with children in them, along with what appeared to be personal belongings. The vast majority of the destitute in the U.S. were abandoned wives and children, many of whom were living in parked cars. The number of hungry and homeless women and children was incalculable. To be mistreated or abused is bad, but it’s a remediable situation. To be discarded, literally thrown away, is irremediable. Feminism emerged out of necessity.

The twentieth century faced the worst wars in human history, all of which, despite incredible cost of lives, eventually ended (one can hardly claim any war “won.”) That which happened on the surface of history, horrific as it was, is no match for the catastrophe that befell humanity under the surface: As a seed planted by widespread “Enlightened” Protestantism, secularism grew quietly under the surface, and traditional lifelong (Catholic-in-origin) marriage disappeared while no one was watching. It survived longest in cultures where Catholicism dominated, but not in northern Europe, or the United States, and finally not anywhere. Contraception followed, and, as the night follows day, so did abortion.

In the sundering of the feminine and masculine unity, the feminine principle, as the passive element, was discarded, abandoned. It cannot, by its definition, save itself—it must be saved. It was not. Yet on that principle all natural life depends. Nothing is more allegorically accurate for our time than abortion. Now, hardly anyone knows what the feminine principle is. It’s best understood by these words:

   “Be it done unto me according to thy word.”