Why International Women's Day remains a sham

Today is international women’s day, a day which acts as a focal point in the women’s rights movement, celebrating the achievements of women, gender equality and reproductive rights. It is a day for all women. Short women, tall women, fat women, thin women, rich women, poor women, women with penises and 18” shirt collars. You name them and international women’s day will celebrate them – unless of course they are potential women in utero, International Women’s Day is not interested in celebrating those little nuisances getting in the way of the important things, like being a CEO.

So, who are the women that we are invited to celebrate? For an answer to this I thought I would look through the list of women given to children at a local secondary school, they include;

Janice Bryant Howroy, the first African-American woman to build her own billion dollar company.

Morag Myerscough, a London based artist who in 2014 created an installation celebrating the year in which same-sex marriage became legal.

Jill Scott, a female footballer and member of the England squad that won the women’s Euro championship 2022

And of course, no list of women in the modern age would be complete without a man - Danica Roam - the first transgender person to ever run for the Virginia General Assembly and…(checks notes)…oh, that’s it, but at least they got a bloke in there.

One can’t help noticing that the W in IWD seems a bit incidental. Too many of the well-intentioned attempts to celebrate women focus on the things that they can do as well as any man.

There is no denying that it is a great human achievement to invent a new medicine, win the world cup, run a $1 billion company and…er...run for Virginia General Assembly, but none of these things are unique to women.

It is not so much about what women can ‘do’ that should preoccupy those interested in celebrating them, but about who they are.

There has never been a more important time to recapture a sense of what a woman is, outside of what a woman does. It is this heavy emphasis on achieving that is leading young women to believe that her worth as woman lies in an ability to compete in the same arena as men. In order to do that she will be told that claiming her reproductive rights is an essential way to level the playing field. The problem is that this doesn’t level the playing field at all, it simply unbalances everything.

Whilst women will be encouraged today to view the sexual revolution as an unalloyed good that has empowered them to take a place at the table, the reality is quite different. This revolt against who we are has, despite what the feminists say, done more for men than for women and seems an odd thing to be celebrating.

Calls for unfettered access to contraception and abortion on demand only sets up the conditions for men to have easier access to sex with none of the consequences. As Dave Chapelle piercingly observed ‘Well if you should be allowed to kill them, then we should at least be allowed to abandon the little f***ers’. This attitude should not be shocking to a culture that has encouraged women to forget their vocation as physical and spiritual mothers and to treat their own bodies as objects of use, be it in the boardroom or the bedroom.

In 1968 Pope Paul VI prophesied the fallout from the sexual revolution. He foresaw a general lowering of morality, less respect for women, coercive control by governments over sexuality and bodies being treated like machines.

In 2023 it would take a woman with some big brass cajones to deny that he was right. The explosion of the porn industry has helped to solidify the image of women as sex objects. Huge numbers of young women are forced into prostitution and sexually abused – awkward pregnancies either avoided or ended, with 10 million lives lost to the genocide of abortion since 1967. That’s 1 baby every 2.5 minutes for 55 years. Millions and millions of baby girls whose mothers will be busy celebrating International Women’s Day, even if they never will.

Undisciplined in self-control men who do get women pregnant abandon them at unprecedented rates, from 1960-2000 the proportion of children raised by single mothers more than tripled in Europe and North America. As if that weren’t enough, desperate women find a market for their eggs or become ‘wombs for hire’ in order to satisfy the desires of gay men.

As with all things, the church has an explanation about why it is that we might have expected one thing but got another. She alone truly understands human nature. She understands Gods plan for our sexuality. She knows that if we mess with Gods plan (which we are free to do) it won’t go well, but she also picks up the pieces and acts as a field hospital on the spiritual battleground. Like holy mother church, woman gives life.

International Women’s Day is a bit like the hallmark valentine’s day which the culture sells to us every Feb 14th. If love was honoured every day we wouldn’t need that shtick. The shallow gender equality proposed by advocates of IWD is really just a call for uniformity between the sexes.

A true honouring of women recognises her unique vocation, upholds her dignity, gives thanks for the ways in which she receives love in order to return love.

‘In God’s eternal plan, woman is the one in whom love first takes root’, and it really is love, not money or power, that keeps the world turning. That’s something worth celebrating every single day.