Jemimah’s Reviews > The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory > Status Update

Good quotes:

"In 1930, the pursuit of womanhood involved adopting the female procreative role. By the 1950s, womanhood had become simply a matter of reshaping one’s appearance. What is behind this conceptual shift? What unfolded in those intervening decades? The widespread normalization of contraception."

"Both women implicitly sculpt their vision of freedom according to the male ideal. Women can only find true freedom by making themselves as much like men as possible."

"From the 1960s onward, feminists have followed in the footsteps of Sanger and de Beauvoir, locating women’s oppression in their biology and advocating for a vision of “health” that pathologizes female fertility."

"Sanger’s writings make explicit her view that female fecundity is not natural and good, but pathological—a dangerous disease that needs to be treated and controlled. This view has become entrenched in our culture."

"There is something sacred about that very harmony and order, about restoring the natural processes of the body. A Christian vision of women’s health is one that sees female physiology in terms of wholeness rather than pathology and works with, not against, the natural order of the female body."

"These statistics clearly indicate women’s widespread dissatisfaction with available birth control methods, belying the triumphalist line that contraception is the golden key to women’s reproductive health and freedom."

—“appear to have ignored the implications of shutting down a woman’s natural cycle. [They] figured out how to supplant periods long before they began trying to understand why they work the way they do.”

"Doctors are so quick to prescribe the drug [contraceptive pill] to teenagers reporting bad cramps without investigating to see if there is an underlying cause.”

"While she put the blame primarily on female fertility, I would shift it elsewhere: to the lack of social support for these women, the cultural expectation that women should always be sexually available to men, and limited awareness about a woman’s fertility cycle."

"We now think of sex as a recreational, rather than procreational, activity. The connection between sex and the possibility of new life has been severed."

"Planned Parenthood, currently performs around 350,000 abortions per year. Once the birth control pill was legalized in America, abortion rates skyrocketed. In 1965, the year that birth control was legalized, the abortion rate was 794. Just five years later, that number jumped to 193,491."

"In the United States, however, abortion has functioned as a back-up, a secondary form of birth control when contraception fails."

"Contraception makes a promise that it can’t always deliver. The promise: a fertile woman can have sex without getting pregnant. The reality: all birth control methods have failure rates, and when a method fails, our shared fantasy of sterilized sex skids into reality. A woman who finds herself in this position, feeling betrayed by a functioning body, will often seek an abortion."

[Talking about old man scrolling on tinder] "Just as his lust obscures the personhood of the faces on his screen, so it also diminishes his own humanity."

"It is not enough to say that the best we can expect from sex, morally speaking, is that it’s not rape."

"The era of sexual liberation is not as liberating for women as advertised."

“Take this pill,” says the serpent of the new millennium, “and ye shall be as men.” But a woman on the pill is still a woman, and when the illusion of autonomy collapses, it is she—and her offspring—who pay the blood price."

"To appear and act as a typical woman seemed sufficient to become a woman. The separation of sexual union from procreation prompted a cascade of disconnection that has brought us to the gender bedlam of the present."

"Is it any wonder that today’s parents don’t bat an eye at the idea of dosing their children with synthetic hormones? After all, we’ve been doing it to our adolescent daughters already, for decades."

Oh man. You've read further than me now. I need to pick this book back up so we can have a good chat about it 😁💯❤️