CULTURE | Rethinking Feminism

In this episode, Abigail Favale meets with legal scholar Erika Bachiochi to discuss feminism and the many hot topics associated with it. What does "sexual asymmetry" mean? Has contraception helped or harmed women's position in society? What does virtue have to do with our sexuality?

A fellow of the Ethics & Public Policy Center, Erika Bachiochi is a legal scholar specializing in Equal Protection jurisprudence, feminist legal theory, Catholic social teaching, and sexual ethics. She is also a Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge, MA, where she founded and directs the Wollstonecraft Project. Her newest book, The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision, was published by Notre Dame University Press in 2021.

Table of Contents
00:00 - Intro
0:52 - Women's Rights and The History of Feminism
2:00 - Erika Bachiochi's relation to Feminism
6:25 - Sexual Asymmetry
10:15 - The Contrast of Woman Suffrage in 1913 vs. 2017
12:17 - Abortion & Women's Equality
14:27 - Voluntary Motherhood
17:02 - Sexual Revolution
20:30 - Argument of Contraception
25:45 - Contraception allows Men to think Sex is Trivial
26:50 - Contraception decreases One’s Awareness of Fertility
29:50 - Cognitive dissonance for women
32:07 - Second Wave Feminism: Hypersexualization
33:20 - Mary Wollstonecraft: Virtue
39:00 - Virtue, Imitation of God
40:25 - Erika’s relationship with Temperance
42:00 - Passions are Ruled by Reason
44:50 - Family Claim over Social Claim
52:13 - What kind of Specific Policies would be Helpful?
53:30 - Flexibility is key to the return to “Agrarianism” model
58:40 - Wollstonecraft Project
59:55 - Building a Christian Worldview
1:02:12 - Abby recommends book

Professor Abigail Favale completed her doctorate at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, where she was a recipient of the competitive Overseas Research Award. In 2011, her dissertation was granted the Samuel Rutherford Prize for the most distinguished thesis in English literature.

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[mary_puffin]

Love the voluntary motherhood point around abstinence during fertile periods. This is truly the only way men can understand the burden women bear when it comes to sex and its consequences.

[LaurieLyon-uw]

I understand the skepticism of modern-day technological control of women's reproduction. I am a mother of 3 daughters. 3 pregnancies, 3 births, 3 daughters that I raised as a single teen mother. I was groomed starting as a young teen by older boys and men in this patriarchal dystopian hell hole of a world. You cannot tell me had I been raised 100 or more years earlier that this would not have happened to me because women were respected by men and courtships were a mechanism for women to refuse sex and women could refuse sex with their husband if they didn't want to have children or for any reason.

The only way for women to achieve a world where abortion and contraceptives are no longer a part of life for heterosexual women; where women can have enjoyable sex with men is a matriarchal world. A world where the world is run by, for and about women. A world where women are Not viewed by men as commodities body parts for sale or to be used. The economies, governance, society have to be centered around women's reproductive capacity. Not men's. Men's entitlement and dominant capacity for violence stalking, raping, beating and murdering women has to be completely eradicated from all regions of the world.

There is a reason why feminism came to be in the first-place. Life was and still is hell for women in a patriarchal dystopian system. There is a reason why Radical and socialist Feminist's analysis came to the conclusions it did. It sounds like the past that you are referring to was a utopian heaven for women and it was and still is anything but that. The reality for women throughout history is male dominance and power over all women, any women and girls men wanted to have they took and raped them. Rape was considered a past time for men. In the past rape was used by a male, if he was not the chosen man for a girl to marry, because once he raped her it was quite common for the family to hand her over to him to become his wife. The spoiled girl being of no value to the prospective husband. She becomes a throw away to her rapists. Even if the few girls/women who were allowed to marry someone they preferred it was commonplace that men ruled over their wives abuse and rape within marriage was rampant and it was never considered abuse nor rape within the confines of marriage. You cannot tell me that this was not the case for women throughout human history.

When unmarried young women were groomed or raped the children they birthed would have most likely been given up for adoption and the girls/women would be most likely be ostracized by family and her community, pushed into postitution for her livelihood survival for the crime of being raped and groomed and becoming pregnant out of wedlock.

Unless you, religious anti feminists deal with the issues of how to develop a matriarchal system globally and eradicate male entitlement, dominance, violent controlling behavior over women BEFORE you reject men's modern day technological fixes for women's reproduction there is no solution to what has come to pass.

[freudianslip]

Fathers are less likely to take leave because less leave is offered. My workplace offers women up to 13 months of leave. However, for men it’s three days.

Another never discussed topic is the idea that most women want to “marry up” socio-economically. It is literally impossible for most women to “marry up” while having equality in wages between the sexes in the workplace.

[brendabanning]

I am so grateful to hear from much younger women (I am 67 years old) something that I have believed for years and years. Why is it that so often a discussion around sexuality and moral issues concerning abortion has nothing to say about men?
This makes no sense. Men are called to be virtuous as are women, together loving eachother with responsibility (John Paul 11). Thank you for your voices of reason!

[ItsTheNada]

This lady can’t help but qualify her statements by saying things like callous men and good men and their preferences. Her toxicity has not left her. I would have agreed with Erica if she’d have said society has gotten away from itself but she still blames men for everything.

Using her logic, if it is a bad man who walks away from a woman once he’s casually made her pregnant than it is also a bad woman that let’s a man casually get her pregnant without the commitment of marriage. If it is a bad man who is tempted by a woman, it is a bad woman who tempts a man. If you’re going to judge, you will also be judged.

Women fought for sexual “symmetry”, got it, then blame men for what they fought for. No accountability here in this interview. There was a day when men had to court women and marry them. It’s women who wanted to get away from this paradigm.

[jonahtwhale]

But femunism is only part way through. Femunist have campaigned for equality in the prestigious bits - political leadership, CEOs, film director etc. When will they campaign for equality in the bad side of life? - homelessness (75% male), prison (95% male), workplace deaths (95% male), murder victims (70% male), battlefields of Ukraine (over 95% male), reproductive rights, societal empathy (overwhelmingly assigned to women). Why don't women want equality when it doesn't benefit women?