By Dathan Paterno
This past weekend, I was driving with my family when my adolescent daughter noticed a car with a bumper sticker that read, “Behind every great woman is … herself.”
“What does that mean, Dad?” Now, I love my kids, but they’re especially adorable when they toss me softball questions like this.
While I knew that the bumper sticker was meant to be clever, pithy and provocative, I also knew that the assertion revealed one of the essential fallacies of the modern feminist movement. Given that my and Dr. Gina Loudon’s new book addresses this very topic, the coincidence seemed uncanny. I couldn’t resist a teaching moment.
“It means that woman believes that she is utterly self-sufficient, that all of her success is due to herself – her own skills, drive, talents, character, temperament – and that no one else should share any credit or glory for what she has become.”
“You mean, not even her parents, teachers, or God?”
“Apparently so.”
“I wonder if she is married.”
“I sure hope not.” Almost immediately, I receive an elbow to the ribs from my wife (a former feminist who did her graduate studies in the California University system, before I took her away from all of that). I added, “Why would she want to be married if she wants to be behind herself for everything? And what man would want to be married to a woman who didn’t need him for anything?”
I can see my precious girl mulling it over. “Mom, you need Dad, don’t you?” Oh, from the mouths of babes. During a few moments of silence that ensue, I sense the tension in my wife’s mind, calculating whether to use this moment to zing me or to play the dutiful, genuine godly spouse.
Safe money is on the former, so I jump in: “Mommy needs me like peanut butter needs jelly to make PB&J … which also means that I need her just as much.”
“So God is the bread?”
“Yep. God loves PB&J, so he made it so that men need women and all of their beauty and wonderful strengths and skills, and women need men and all of their awesome strengths and skills. But He also knows that both of them need Him, so He holds them together in Himself. That is what marriage is.”
“So if we had a bumper sticker about that, what would it say?”
“I think it would reflect what we believe – something like, ‘Behind every great woman is the Lord, and behind many great women stand the parents, siblings, teachers, friends and husband He provided for her.'”
A woman needs a man, as Gloria Steinem once opined, like a fish needs a bicycle. Yet women need men because men have what they do not – and are not supposed to – possess. Modern, radical feminism whispers this sweet-smelling lie to women: that women can be uniquely and utterly independent and have evolved beyond the weakness of needing others, especially those irrelevant, barbaric men.
Just as Satan’s whispers in the Garden of Eden promised the seductive notion of radical independence from God and His sovereignty, radical feminism promises radical independence from God and His Natural Law. Our new book, “Ladies and Gentlemen, Why the Survival of Our Republic Depends on the Return of Honor,” describes the follies and pitfalls of radical feminism and its adoptive parents, modern liberalism and atheism.
If we are to reclaim the soul of this great republic and redeem it for God’s glory and for the good of our children and grandchildren, we must recognize the sweet-smelling, seductive lies that have wafted through our culture, while learning to challenge them in light of the truth of Scripture and God’s Natural Law.
Dathan Paterno, Psy.D., is a licensed clinical psychologist and clinical director of Park Ridge Psychological Services. He is the author of “Desperately Seeking Parents” and “Ladies and Gentlemen.”
