What Even *Is* True Patriarchy?
my take on Mike Pantile, Matt Fradd, and their bad answer to that question
I spent last weekend in California with some dear friends and one of them off-hand mentioned a new Matt Fradd interview she was sure I’d heard about. I didn’t really think twice about it until I got home and opened my email inbox.
Hoo-boy, some of you had opinions about Mike Pantile, a Catholic-fitness-podcaster-guy. I clicked it, watched it, and knew I was going to have to whip something up about it.
I don’t usually feel weary by this work; I tend to feel energized. But I’m currently rereading Lord of the Rings, which I’ve mentioned about 89 times in the past month1, and for one of the first times being known as ~The Catholic Feminist~, I longed for Rivendell. I just felt exhausted and burdened. I wanted to throw my sack to the ground, kick back on my heels, and pout. So instead I went on a long walk around my neighborhood with Amanda Cook screaming in my ears, I treated myself to a drive-through pumpkin spice latte, and I turned on my electric fireplace full blast. I made my own little corner of earth as it is in Heaven and reminded myself that it is a gift to try and parse out truth with you all, even though it sometimes leads me to a false sense of despair.
For as Gandalf says in Fellowship of the Ring, despair is only for those who see the end beyond all doubt.
We do not.
Pull on your coziest socks, and let’s dive in.
Per usual, I know you don’t all have time for a two hour YouTube video so here’s a brief recap.
This is a *recap* of things pertinent to *feminism* as I see it. Therefore, it’s not an exhaustive list of everything discussed. Matt Fradd’s interviews are extremely long. If I missed something you thought was essential to understanding the context, mea culpa—feel free to share it in the comments.
Mike Pantile talks about his upbringing in Canada and his eventual marriage to a protestant woman. He goes into his fears of Catholicism that he had (the communion of saints, Purgatory, etc.) and his view of sola scriptura.
He goes into the Red Pill movement, which is essentially a group of online men talking about how marriage is anti-men and how men need to be woken up to the “cold, hard realities” of how bad women are. He describes his transition both into and out of this movement. He talks about how much of the Red Pill movement isn’t wrong, and how it’s true that “feminism is the manifestation of hell on earth”.
He says that the Seneca Falls convention, one of the earliest gatherings focused on women’s suffrage, was about figuring out how to destroy the family. Matt Fradd mmhmms in agreement. He talks about how women have always been focused on how to “rule their husbands”.
He reveals that he’s the product of a single mother household2 and that he also grew up really overweight and insecure about his body.
He talks about having drug and alcohol addictions and says I was deeply lonely, and in my heart I knew I didn’t want to be alone. Is there something wrong with me? and eventually became suicidal.
He goes through the many inconsistencies of the Red Pill movement (ie., it’s anti-marriage, but marriage is good for society, and it actually, in his words, “creates” the promiscuous women it’s so against.)
Matt Fradd says that it’s perfectly reasonable that people should only want to marry people who are virgins, but we’re living in this “war-torn” land after the sexual revolution so we have to find a way to find each other grace.
Mike discusses becoming Catholic and “coming alive” for Jesus, and says he cried out to Jesus to save him when he just felt completely worthless. It’s pretty powerful.
He talks about some of his “rules for masculinity” including not to just listen to your “pee-pee”, which to be clear is what my 6-year-old recently also called a penis before I corrected her because she’s not a baby and body parts have proper names. It is so bizarre that he keeps calling a penis that throughout this entire interview. Okay! Moving on!
I will give Mike this; he consistently talks about things men shouldn’t do and then quickly acknowledges that he did these things once, too in a posture of humility that reads genuine to me. He’s clearly speaking from experience about things like not being overly obsessed with your body.
He talks about helping to evangelize his wife and how he assisted her arrival into the Catholic faith.
They then move into talking about feminism directly, which he says has been slowly brainwashing society. He says that “mutual submission falls flat” because it implies that men and women are the same.
He then goes into admiring The Case for Patriarchy by Timothy Gordon, who I used to wave away as someone people don’t take seriously and now apparently have to pull into the this-is-a-person-people-listen-to category.
He says that the only good thing that’s *ever* come out of feminism (I am not exaggerating to be funny—this is truly his take) was *maybe* voting. Matt Fradd says nobody should be voting (?) but that men should probably vote on behalf of the family if anyone is voting—that’s what seems “reasonable” to him.
Matt says that first wave feminism was a lie, wicked “root and branch”.
They say we need more women to “speak in a way that women will hear” to be freed from feminism.
Mike says that perfect femininity is a woman saying “yes to god through her husband” by being obedient and submitting to him.
Matt describes an “ugly” church service he went to that looked like it was designed by “gay men” with little holy water fountains for their “little fingers” and guitars. (If you’re new to the show, Matt really hates a guitar.) Mike does swoop in and say Novus Ordo masses are licit and that we need to be careful how we talk about Pope Francis which, to be clear, at this point I’m grateful for.
Mike says that women effectively just want to be men, but don’t want any of the responsibilities that comes from being a man. Women naturally, he explains, want to be nurturing and be home. And if they don’t want to or feel like it isn’t what God’s calling them to do, Matt says, “it’s your problem and you need to figure it out.”
Mike says that everything needs to be centered on honoring God and touches on his own father wounds. When men aren’t focused enough on honoring God, that’s where they turn into tyrants. God needs to be the center of every marriage.
He says that you need to be gentle, but if your wife is overweight, that’s a “failure of leadership” on the part of the husband. “Barring metabolic issues that don’t really exist” (wait, are we barring them or do they not exist?") women would get in shape of they “buckled down”. We in society are “giving them too much rope”. Also, the “dad bod” needs to go away—men should never be out of shape.
Okay. So here’s my take.