Today's gospel, our Lord talks about those who are beautiful on the outside, but who are very dirty on the inside.
It's a schizophrenic split, which is present in many of us, actually, because of disorder and sin, right?
But which is very much present in our culture today.
So in that vein, we are going to continue our catechesis on sexuality today.
We'll look at some of the philosophical underpinnings of what's called gender theory, which is really rooted in feminist thought.
Abigail Favale, in her book, The Genesis of Gender, she points out three threads of feminism in particular, which got us to where we are today.
She talks about existential feminism, postmodern feminism, and what's called intersectional feminism.
So we'll say something about each of those in the next couple of reflections.
We've already spoken about Margaret Sanger's contribution to our present reality of sexual license and sexual anarchy, basically.
I guess you could call her a transitional figure, sort of a bridge between what are called the first generation of feminists and the second wave, or second generation of feminists.
First wave of feminists included women like Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Sojourner Truth.
For the most part, they weren't radicals or revolutionaries.
They weren't pro-abortion or anti-family or anything like that, actually, quite the opposite in many respects.
The second wave of feminists included people like Betty Friedan and Simone de Beauvoir.
We'll focus today on de Beauvoir because she's kind of the ideological godmother of the gender theorists.
Though in reality, she's totally dependent on Jean-Paul Sartre for her philosophy, so she's not an original or independent thinker by any means.
Simone de Beauvoir was a 20th-century French philosopher, existentialist, also Marxist, and a cultural activist.
Existentialism, as a philosophical school of thought, says that existence precedes essence.
So the fact that you exist comes before who or what you are, which is not what we believe as Catholics.
Just first be aware of that.
And essence is, what is it?
It's that which makes a thing to be what it is.
Each thing has a specific manner of being.
For example, an eagle has certain qualities regarding size, the fact that it can fly, its feathers, its beak.
Because it's an eagle, it has the qualities of being an eagle.
It's the case with all created realities, plants, human beings, angels, etc.
So what something is, its essence, informs what it does and how it lives.
So, in reality, essence precedes, it actually comes before existence.
Existentialism, again, says the opposite, says existence precedes essence.
In referring to people, existentialism says, I exist first, and then I have to discover or even better, I have to create my own essence, I have to create my own identity.
Following Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir would say, I'm not created, I create who I am through my activity.
And she'd add to that, there's no such thing as human nature.
Only the human condition, they would say.
There's no intrinsic meaning to the world and to our lives.
You have to make meaning in order to justify your existence, was her philosophical point of view.
So for the atheist existentialist, which is what de Beauvoir was or is, human nature itself doesn't exist.
Life itself has no real meaning.
You have to give meaning to your meaningless existence.
Sounds very happy and positive, doesn't it?
This is a big theme in existentialism and in postmodern thought, too.
Theirs is a world totally devoid of the virtues of faith, hope, and charity.
Why?
Because those are theological virtues.
You can't have them when you disavow God.
This might sound a bit off to some people, but as a feminist, do you know what Simone de Beauvoir's ideal was?
Might sound a bit off, it might not.
Her ideal was to be as much like a man as possible, because that's where she saw true freedom to be.
One commentator notes her famous book, which Wikipedia calls her, quote, trailblazing work in feminist philosophy, unquote.
Her work entitled The Second Sex.
One commentator notes that the second sex is really just a protest against being feminine, the whole thing.
Simone de Beauvoir essentially hated being a woman.
She believed that women are oppressed not only by social forces, but also by their very biology, too.
Freedom for her is freedom from being female.
And this lines up perfectly, actually, with Jean-Paul Sartre's view.
He himself was a misogynist.
He hated women, treated them as mere sex objects.
He said they were what he called being in itself.
They were soft, corpulent, embedded with matter.
He said all those things are bad.
You need to suppress being in itself.
He said it embraced being for itself, which included qualities of freedom, abstraction, creativity.
And for him and for de Beauvoir, those were male qualities, not female qualities.
So two of the bedrock founders of modern-day feminism essentially hated the qualities that make women women.
Just be aware of that.
Among other things, in a published interview with feminist Betty Friedan, de Beauvoir said no woman should be authorized to stay at home to raise her children.
Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is such a choice, too many women will make that one," unquote.
Fast forward for a moment to today, the plan of gender ideologists isn't really just to ensure the individual freedom of someone who's to decide what their gender is or what it should be.
Their plan is to destroy the natural family and totally impose their interpretations of what gender and sex and what's normal and what's abnormal is upon everyone else.
That's their Marxist totalitarian side, and in large part they get it from Sartre and de Beauvoir.
Sartre, who said that his subjective truth, he said, my subjective truth is true for everyone.
In street language, that means you're going to believe what I tell you to believe, not because it's true, but because I said so.
De Beauvoir said, as long as the family and the myth of the family and the myth of maternity and maternal instinct are not destroyed, women will still be oppressed, she said.
So how do you stop women from being oppressed?
Destroy the family.
Let's harken back to Margaret Sanger's creed when Margaret Sanger championed, quote, the right to destroy, which is what we mentioned when we talked about her last week.
De Beauvoir also wrote, work alone, work alone can guarantee woman's concrete freedom.
Work alone, presumably work like a man works.
Abigail Favale points out that when you think about that, that sounds a lot similar, very similar to what was written above the entrance to Auschwitz and other Nazi concentration camps, right?
Work will set you free, not too far from Simone de Beauvoir's philosophy.
Maybe if she had reflected a little bit more on Sartre's works and on his own life, maybe if she would have thought about that, she would have noticed that, well, Sartre was a man, and he had a pretty miserable view of humanity himself, too, of life himself as well.
He hated his life, actually.
De Beauvoir saw maleness and masculinity as an ideal, which is again why secular feminism is often a misnomer, right?
It's more masculinism.
It's not really feminism, it's masculinism.
So Simone saw maleness as an ideal, Sartre defined man as a useless passion.
That was his definition for man, useless passion.
So what's her ideal?
According to her partner, a useless passion was her ideal.
Pretty dark stuff, actually, when you begin to think about some of these things.
Both Sartre and de Beauvoir maintain that human beings are at their core nothing, nothing.
This is very much in line with the philosophy underpinning the transgender movement and gender ideology, too.
When you read Sartre and de Beauvoir, you do get the impression that they're kind of like two black holes staring into each other.
And de Beauvoir, again, admitted that she was totally reliant upon Sartre's philosophy in her own work.
So she chose to subjugate herself and her understanding to the thoughts of a miserable, misogynistic, male existentialist.
Self-loathing is a term that would perfectly fit Sartre and de Beauvoir's philosophy.
Again, Simone de Beauvoir wanted to be male, she wanted to be masculine, she wanted to be that which in her own eyes has always oppressed women.
That's what she wanted to be.
Not surprisingly, she herself was very unhappy.
A biographer of hers tells us that when she was a heavy drinker, she smoked excessively, experimented with drugs, of course, threatened suicide, suffered bouts of depression, was obsessed with death.
Even when she was writing her so-called masterpiece, The Second Sex, her biographer said that she was swallowing pills, booze, and whatever else she could get her hands on to give her the energy for another bout of writing.
Many of the saints pray before they write.
The existentialists seem to have different rituals before they do their writings.
Very sad, actually.
And apparently, before he died, of all things, in 1980, Jean-Paul Sartre renounced his atheism.
He said, I do not feel that I am a product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who is expected, prepared, prefigured, in short, a being whom only a creator could put here.
And this idea of a creating hand refers to God, he said.
All his years of atheistic philosophy, at the end, he dumps that, becomes a theist.
De Beauvoir responded to that, you know what she called it?
She called it the senile act of a turncoat.
Seems like it didn't make her change her own trajectory too much at the end.
And as a side note, we spoke of Margaret Sanger in our last two reflections.
Her father was a socialist and a free thinker, anti-Catholic, never let his wife go to Mass.
Simone de Beauvoir's father was an atheist until he died, refused to see a priest on his deathbed.
Both of their mothers were pious, devout Catholics.
The girls both took after their fathers, so just be careful who you marry.
It does matter what your spouse, or potential spouse, actually believes.
And what's that famous line in the Supreme Court's Planned Parenthood versus Casey decision in 1996 that we've quoted before, it's, at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life, unquote.
In a nutshell, that's existentialism, rooted in feminist practice.
In this case, abortion, which is plan B, when contraception doesn't do the job.
So we hope these sketches of those who've influenced gender ideology are helpful to some.
If the trees are rotten, the fruit's going to be pretty rotten too.
Unfortunately, the human forces behind gender theory have often not only embraced very bad philosophies, but they've also very often lived bad and very sad lives as well, too.
Let's ask our Lady to pray for all those who've embraced these lies, that would be given the grace to see life and humanity more from God's point of view, which is actually much more hopeful, much more beautiful.
And, we'll continue in our next reflection talking about the roots of gender theory in postmodern and, also, intersectional thought.
May His grace be Jesus and Mary, now and forever.