Did you see the video of Matt Fradd interviewing Dr. Carrie Gress?
Sure did. Here are my thoughts.
Quick note: when I first sent this, I embarrassingly had Matt’s name as “Matt Fraud” in the headline. This was truly a typo and not some catty snark-remark. I am legit so embarrassed—mea culpa.
Many people have sent me the recent interview Matt Fradd did with anti-feminism author Carrie Gress. I don’t usually watch a ton of Catholic YouTube (sourdough YouTube, on the other hand…) but I did find the prospect of the conversation intriguing enough to watch it and see if I had thoughts.
And oh, the thoughts. The thoughts, my friends.
I can’t overstate how important I think it is for people of goodwill to have conversations about the place of women in the church, and I feel like this interview highlights why Catholic feminism is important more than anything I’ve seen lately.
Before I proceed, I want to be clear about a few things up front.
I truly believe both Carrie Gress and Matt Fradd are operating in good faith. I can’t know this, of course; I’m just going off gut feeling and the totality of their work. That’s why I’m even taking the time to watch this and respond to it (that and because I’m a nosey Nellie). I think they’re both coming from a place of genuinely trying to live out a Christian life and help others do the same; you will never, ever find me responding to a Matt Walsh video. It’s my belief that both Carrie and Matt want women to be safe and cared for.
I have briefly met Matt at two conferences. He is a much bigger deal than me and surely doesn’t remember this, ha. He was friendly and polite. His wife Cameron came on the Catholic Feminist pilgrimage to France and was absolutely lovely. I still use a parenting tip she gave me about teaching your kids to forgive one another, and I had a ton of fun with her.
I’ve never read Carrie’s books. If they’re on audio I might try to tackle that this year; I have many long commutes ahead of me in the coming days. I honestly have no desire to after listening to this interview, but I’d take one for the team if Letters subscribers were interested in my thoughts.
Matt has said some things in the past about women before that I find really distasteful, and I don’t find the way he talks about the LGBTQ community charitable or inviting.
Matt’s anti-porn work, which I think is his best stuff, has deeply helped multiple men I personally know and I think he’s a revolutionary in that field. I don’t know of a single person with the breadth and depth of knowledge he has on that topic, who also emphasize compassion and care for the men affected, and I’m really grateful his voice on it exists in the Catholic world.
OK? Sound good?
But before my take, here’s a not-at-all-short detour in the form of a TLDR summary of Carrie and Matt’s main points. This is not an extensive, total covering of everything they discussed and I apologize if I missed something vital.
Carrie describes how she went into researching first-wave feminism believing she’d find a form of “good feminism” that went off the rails, but actually found that feminism has been rotten from the beginning.
Matt says anyone who calls themselves a “Catholic feminist” is like saying they’re a “Catholic Marxist”, and that you actually can’t be a Catholic feminist. He directly says both of these things: “people can use terms however they wish to use them” and “Catholic feminism is an oxymoron”.
Carrie says that first-wave feminism wasn’t about helping women as women, it was about how to make women more like men. She says we’ve made masculinity an idol.
Carrie names Mary Wollstonecraft as the “first feminist” even though the word didn’t exist in her time. She then dives into another early feminist, Mary Shelley, who was interested in the occult. Carrie claims that Mary Shelley and and Mary Wollstonecraft are sort of the founding fathers of feminism. She claims that their love of the occult became the “model” for future waves of feminism (again, noting that feminism as a word did not exist at this time). Matt says that modern feminists won’t be turned off by this at all, we all would think it was good as we like Satan.
Carrie says that patriarchy is how we bring “salvation out of fallenness”, and that it shouldn’t be considered a bad thing. It’s just that “men bring order to society and the family.”
Matt asks if women truly need to be liberated from oppression and Carrie Gress laughs and says that men have actually suffered terribly from women. She says that people have simply “wandered from the Ten Commandments” and that what we need to do is invite men to be men and women to be women.
They dive back into history, critiquing Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony quite extensively. She talks about how Stanton also played around with the occult, utilizing “spirit tables” to communicate with supernatural beings.
Carrie draws lines between the blending of communism and feminism in the second wave of feminism, and Matt points out that in America today, since there are abortions on demand and “women go to work and someone else looks after their kids”, we’re living out a form of Marxism. Matt also points out that women frequently ask men to “bend over apologizing profusely to no prevail”. Carrie goes through most of the second-wave feminists whose names you know (Betty Friedan, Simone de Beauvoir, Kate Millett). They emphasize second-wave feminism’s desire to make women more masculine. Matt points out that Simone de Beauvoir thought women shouldn’t have a choice to stay home with their kids and basically believed that the state should raise children.
Carrie insinuates that women were probably unhappy in their marriages because they chose to go to college instead of learning how to raise children. (They talk about the second-wave feminists for quite a while, almost a third of the video. Definitely go watch the interview if you want more depth on de Beauvoir and Millett. Dr. Gress clearly did a ton of research and knows her history).
Matt claims that feminism is its own religion and Carrie counters, calling it a “cult” and claiming that nobody is allowed to “question” feminism, while on a very popular YouTube show questioning feminism.
Matt says that what porn has done for men is what feminism has done for women. He says that Carrie’s book is an act of compassion, the same way we need to have compassion for men who view porn. Carrie says women aren’t making active choices to embrace feminism, it was just “shoved down our throats”. Carrie says that she really cares for women living the hook-up culture who are miserable and depressed, and that she believes we need to offer a better way out of that for women.
Carrie says feminism has tried to erase motherhood, and that we need to reclaim it—even women who aren’t mothers are called to spiritual motherhood, mentoring, etc. She says it’s un-objectively better for women to be home with their kids yet also says that God is asking her to be realistic and live in the world she’s living in, and that she’d prefer to be a stay-at-home mom but is here talking to Matt. She says it doesn’t have to be “stay-at-home” vs. “work” as a binary choice.
They talk about the idea of wives submitting to their husbands and what that should mean vs. what Paul was saying vs. what we hear about at conferences.
Carrie makes the argument that feminism is what gave birth to gender ideology: since women are trying to become like men, they’re detaching themselves from their feminine attributes and once that’s all torn out, what’s left? “This is why we don’t know what a woman is.”
Carrie says that feminism has “strict confines”. She says that we shouldn’t say we’re feminists, we should just say we’re Catholic. She says that “feminine genius” is overused. Matt says when women say they “want to be understood” they need to “stop whining”.
Carrie says that Mary is the antidote to feminism. She says that we often think of her as unrelatable or removed, but that she was a real women who is very connected to our lives.
Matt brings it back to why we need to work towards women not working outside the home, and says that the only reason women “need” to work outside the home now is because of the consequences of sin.
Carrie says that families should vote as families and that women voting “promotes individualism”. Matt says the head of the household should vote on behalf of the family. Carrie says that she doesn’t have a firm answer on this and hasn’t done a lot of research on it.
In sum, she describes the history of feminism as one of scrappy groups of sinning women fighting against oppressors in ways that at times went way, way off the rails. She believes that the world is deeply hurting and that feminism has played a role in that hurt.
Yes, and.