What Feminism Gets Wrong about Love, Sex, and the Meaning of Life

And why treating marriage and family as the enemy leads only to pain and heartache.

Whatever happened to love?

Near the end of the new blockbuster Barbie movie, one of the characters suggests that Barbie’s story should end with her falling in love with Ken and living happily ever after. I presume it won’t come as too much of a spoiler to tell you that not only does this not happen, but the entire idea that Barbie would want to fall in love with a man and build a family is mercilessly scoffed at and discarded.

In a similar vein, Disney will be releasing a new live action remake of Snow White in 2024, and according to star Rachel Zegler, it’s going to be much different than the original. “She’s not going to be saved by the prince. She’s not going to be dreaming about true love. She’s dreaming about being the leader she knows she can be.”

These are the stories our culture tells now, and I find them incredibly sad. "Not going to be dreaming about true love? That is one of the most tragic statements I have ever heard. One wonders if the new film will also include a flash forward 30 years into Snow White’s future, where we see a rich, lonely, and depressed feminist hero sitting alone vacantly scrolling TikTok while downing a bottle of wine and refusing to allow herself to think about whether it was all worth it. After all, that is where this line of thinking has led hundreds of thousands of women today.

Why? Because contemporary feminism is a fight against reality at its most fundamental level. The message that the sexual revolution has been preaching to girls since the 60s, that women should avoid family entanglements such as husbands and children, as they are oppressive, and instead chase after promiscuous sex, money, and power, leads only to destruction.  As we will discuss in this post, to not want to find true love is to rebel against the very meaning of life.

The Nature of Love

Let’s start with a definition. What is love? According to the traditional Christian understanding, love is first and foremost a response to value. It is a recognition and affirmation that someone is objectively of great worth. To love is to proclaim to the beloved that he or she is precious and deserving of esteem, simply for being who they are. It is to say to someone, “It is good that you are alive!” Importantly, this attitude is the exact opposite of saying to someone, “I think you are special because of what you can do for me.” That is treat a person as a tool, an object that you are going to use for your pleasure, and is the opposite of love.

Second, love is the giving of oneself sacrificially for the good of another. To love someone is not just to say that he or she is valuable, but it is to act sacrificially for that person’s good. It’s not enough to think that a person is great, or even to tell them that several times a day; we must act in a way that benefits that person. We don’t just love in word and thought, but in our actions (1 John 3:18). The fact that love is an act of will gives lie to the notion that we can “fall in and out of love” as the fluttery feelings in our chest come and go. Although love certainly has emotional elements, it is not so much a state of mind as a command to follow. You are always able to love - even your enemies, according to Jesus (Matt. 5:44) - the only question is whether or not you are willing to follow through and actually do it.

Third, love is the desire for unity with another person. You want to be together, but even more than that you want to be one with that person, at least to some degree. (Romantic love has a higher degree of union than friendship, for example, but each involves a degree of union.) To love someone is to hurt when they hurt and rejoice when they rejoice. It is to know them as they know themselves. This union is only possible as people share time and experiences together. As such, this longing for union includes a longing to simply be with the beloved. Parents who says they love their kids but never want to spend time with them do not actually love those children according to this definition.

Love as the Ultimate Reality

Much more could be said about the nature of love, but let’s leave it at that for now and talk about where I got this traditional Christian three-part definition. Is it arbitrary? Did God (or some medieval theologian) just make it up out of thin air? No. It is based on the nature of God, who is love.

By that I mean that God has eternally existed in a mutually self-giving relationship within the Trinity. The Trinity involves the three persons of the Godhead 1) recognizing the infinite value of each other and 2) giving sacrificially of themselves to each other, 3) resulting in perfect union. Love, as I described it, is the essence of God’s existence.

This means that love is the most basic “thing” in all of reality. As Jean Danielou writes, “Without a doubt the master-key to Christian theology... is contained in the statement that the Trinity of Persons constitutes the structure of being, and that love is therefore as primary as existence.”¹ In other words, love is foundational to everything; love is what reality is all about.

Love Results in Family

As such, love is the reason God created the universe and everything in it. Creation is the natural consequence of love. New life and a larger family, which is what God created when he made Adam and Eve, is what love produces. It is love’s nature. There is a sense in which God’s Trinitarian family could not be contained; it had to expand and grow. Love had to continue to encompass more and more people. Creation is simply the expansion of God’s family of love. This means that the “purpose” of creation is loving family. Mankind is meant to be part of God’s Trinitarian life; we are intended to be children of God, and that means we were meant to live in family.

The Meaning of Sex

So far I have argued that the meaning of life is love and that humans were created to live in familial union and give of themselves to others for their good. Have you ever wondered how Adam and Eve knew this? After all, they didn’t have any books to read or internet sites to surf. I suppose they could have just asked God directly, but somehow I don’t think that was necessary. Adam and Eve knew that life was all about love because they could see each other naked (Gen. 2:25). They knew from the very form and nature of their bodies that they were made to give of themselves to each other. One doesn’t have to be a great detective to see how male and female bodies were designed to go together and that this involves an act of mutual self-giving.

Pope St. John Paul II calls this the “nuptial meaning of the body.” He explains “The body includes right from beginning…the capacity of expressing love, that love in which the person becomes a gift – and by means of this gift – fulfills the meaning of his being and existence.”² Adam and Eve could see that they were meant to have sex, and that this truth was inseparable from the fact that they were meant to love. As Matthew Lee Anderson writes:

In the act of sex itself, the man gives himself to the woman and the woman (by way of freely opening herself) gives herself to the man. In that sense, Christian sexuality is not simply an expression of an abstract or vague inner desire—it is a dynamic encounter between a man and a woman in the fullness of their humanity before God, which is constituted by their mutual self-giving to the other for the other’s good.³

As Dietrich Von Hildebrand notes, “The sexual gift of one person to another signifies an incomparably close union with that other and a self-surrender to him or her. The sexual union is thus the organic expression of wedded love, which intends precisely this mutual gift of self.”⁴ In nuptial sex man and woman give themselves to each other completely and totally; nothing is withheld. Their body and spirit are given to each other in full self-surrender. This is true love. Anderson continues,

Authentic human sexuality is something more than a physical act done for the purpose of bodily stimulation or pleasure. It is the mutual self-giving of two persons in their external dimensions, inaugurating a union that encompasses the totality of their lives. It is an overflow of love that starts in the heart and shows itself in the very members of our flesh.⁵

Sex Reveals the Nature of Life in the Trinity

As mentioned above, the meaning of life is not arbitrary. It’s not as if God had several different options to choose from and finally decided on “love” as the purpose he would impose on humans. Love is the meaning of life because God is love. We are called to interpersonal communion because God himself is a communion of persons in the Trinity.⁶

Indeed, to be in communion with another person is one part of what it means to be created in the image of God.⁷ Genesis 1:27 states: “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” That is why Adam was incomplete without Eve. He could not reflect the image of God without Eve to love. As such, the image of God is not found in Adam alone or in Eve alone, but in the union of Adam and Eve.

The sexual union of Adam and Eve, then, is the clearest image we have of the life of the Trinity. Nuptial sex is about as close as we are going to get on earth to the experiencing the complete mutual self-giving that takes place within the persons of the godhead. But someday we will experience that Trinitarian life fully. As such, sex is a foretaste of Heaven. As I have discussed more fully in a previous article, the culmination of God’s redemptive purposes is to draw us into the life of the Trinity. God intends for us to partake of his very essence for eternity. The clearest physical picture we get of that blissful state is sex. Of course physical sex on earth will pale in comparison to the spiritual intimacy we will share with God in Heaven. The great mystics who have tasted of both testify to this. However, physical intimacy does offer as a small clue.

Peter Kreeft writes:

This spiritual intercourse with God is the ecstasy hinted at in all earthly intercourse, physical or spiritual. It is the ultimate reason why sexual passion is so strong, so different from other passions, so heavy with suggestions of profound meanings that just elude our grasp. No mere practical needs account for it. No mere animal drive explains it. No animal falls in love, writes profound romantic poetry, or sees sex as a symbol of the ultimate meaning of life because no animal is made in the image of God. Human sexuality is that image, and human sexuality is a foretaste of that self-giving, that losing and finding the self, that oneness-in-manyness that is the heart of the life and joy of the Trinity. That is what we long for; that is why we tremble to stand outside ourselves in the other, to give our whole selves, body and soul: because we are images of God the sexual being. We love the other sex because God loves God.⁸

Sex Enables Us to Participate in God’s Creative Activity

Love is inherently creative; it cannot be contained. The joining of two persons in love results in more people to love. This admittedly mysterious principle of reality was at work in the creation of the world and continues to be at work in the creative process that sustains the world. God did not start everything and then leave it to operate by its own power. He continually upholds it be his power. If God stopped his creative work, all life would cease. Amazingly, humans get to play a part in this process. Being made in the image of God includes the ability to participate with him in creating new life. It makes sense, of course, that this life would come as a result of sex. Just as Adam and Eve were created out of God’s love, their children are created out of their love.

Why Sexual Immorality is So Bad

If the meaning of sex is to practice love and share in the life of God, then the reason for the biblical injunction that sex should only be practiced between a married man and a woman becomes far more clear: that is the only place the fulfillment of sex’s purpose could take place.

For example, sex is about love. But sexual affairs are not about love. They are about each person using the other as a means of physical pleasure. This is not love. Love, buy its nature is the giving of self for the other’s good. Sex outside of marriage is about making another person a tool for self-gratification.⁹ Even if the sex partners genuinely care about each other (and frankly, usually illicit sex is very explicitly about selfish desires: “I have a right to be happy;” “He just makes me feel so good about myself;” “We just hooked up for the night because it was fun,” etc.) sex without marriage is not a complete self-gift. Something of each person is always withheld, not the least of which is lifelong commitment.

Also, sex outside of marriage removes the image of God from the equation and keeps us from participating in the Trinity. The fullness of God’s nature and creative plan is experienced in the sacrament of marriage only. It is impossible in homosexual or other adulterous relationships. These practices, as well as the other sexual sins, disavow God by their very nature. They are a blatant and aggressive slap in his face, so to speak.

As such, they have a great effect on other areas of life. After all, if a person is willing to deny the obvious meaning of sex, to what part of the natural order will they conform? In other words, if they won’t affirm and submit to the natural order in this area, they have essentially rejected the natural order in all areas, thereby making any and every action morally acceptable. Edward Feser notes that abortion and homosexuality have been traditionally been regarded with such horror not because they are worse than other sins on some scale of judgment but because they are positively unnatural (in the Platonic, Aristotelian, Scholastic sense we have been using here) and “they constitute an affront to the very foundations of morality. If there is no such thing as a natural order (again, in the classical realist sense) then there can be no basis for morality at all. But those who commit an act of sodomy or abortion seem to thumb their nose at the very idea of natural order, to put themselves above and beyond it.”¹⁰

I believe this is one reason why Paul lists “sexual immorality” as the first consequence of foolishness and idolatry. (Rom. 1:18-25) He follows that with a longer list of vices, but gives preeminence to homosexuality before moving on to iniquities such as envy and even murder.

Because of this, God gave them over to shameful lusts. Even their women exchanged natural sexual relations for unnatural ones. In the same way the men also abandoned natural relations with women and were inflamed with lust for one another. Men committed shameful acts with other men, and received in themselves the due penalty for their error.

Furthermore, just as they did not think it worthwhile to retain the knowledge of God, so God gave them over to a depraved mind, so that they do what ought not to be done. They have become filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, greed and depravity. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit and malice. They are gossips, slanderers, God-haters, insolent, arrogant and boastful; they invent ways of doing evil; they disobey their parents; the have no understanding, no fidelity, no love, no mercy. Although they know God’s righteous decree that those who do such things deserve death, they not only continue to do these very things but also approve of those who practice them. (Rom. 1:26-31)

Sex is intended to be the source of great light in our world. Sexual immorality, however, leads down an increasingly dark path. And this path is full of pain and suffering. Sin may feel fun for a moment, but it ends in misery and death.

Conclusion

This principle applies not just to eternity, but to the here and now. A life of sin does not bring happiness, no matter what the propagandists say. Living contrary to how you were designed to live hurts. The reason feminism doesn’t produce happiness is because it promotes living contrary to reality.

Classic Hollywood love stories were good because their major themes lined up with reality. True love is something to be desired, and it is wonderful for a young woman to want to live happily ever after building a family with her Prince Charming. The sexual revolution is a Satanic attack on God, the family, and the human person that only results in pain and suffering. By changing the age-old message to fit with the spirit of the age, the feminist message in films like the new versions of Barbie and Snow White are leading the next generation to destruction.

1. Jean Danielou, God and Ways of Knowing (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 2003), 122

2. John Paul II Original Unity of Man and Woman: Catechesis on the Book of Genesis (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1981), 114 (From the January 16, 1980 lecture)

3. Matthew Lee Anderson, (2011-06-01). Earthen Vessels: Why Our Bodies Matter to Our Faith (p. 125). Baker Book Group. Kindle Edition.

4. Dietrich Von Hildebrand, Purity: The Mystery of Christian Sexuality (Steubenville, OH: Franciscan University Press, 1989), 7

5. Anderson,  127

6. The thoughts in this section are taken primarily from a series of weekly lectures Pope John Paul II gave in 1979 and 1980. These lectures are known as his “Theology of the Body” and are available in several forms. The communions of persons reference here is from the November 14, 1979 address. John Paul II Original Unity of Man and Woman: Catechesis on the Book of Genesis (Boston: Daughters of St. Paul, 1981), 70

7. Although this term encompasses attributes like rationality and sacredness and such, in the text it is primarily familial. For example, in Genesis 5:3 Adam fathered Seth “in his own likeness, in his own image.” God gave us a different nature than the rest of creation in that we are his children, his offspring. God’s goal in creating man was the creation of family.

8. Peter Kreeft, Everything You Ever Wanted to Know about Heaven But Never Dreamed of Asking (San Francisco: Ignatius: 1990) excerpted at http://www.peterkreeft.com/topics/sex-in-heaven.htm

9. This is how shame came into the world and clothes became a requirement. Shame results from being used as an object. Clothes are an attempt to protect people from being used in this way. In a fallen world, nakedness is now supposed to be reserved for that safe environment where you are safe to let yourself know and be known completely, that is, in marriage.

10. Edward Feser, The Last Superstition (South Bend, IN: St. Augustine’s Press, 2008), 224