How to Treat Women Like a Chronically Online Sophomore

Much of the online masculine rhetoric of our age lacks fatherliness. It attacks women, sometimes even godly women, like a high school frat party.

I see quite a bit of bravado among the X-patriarchy. This shows up most often when discussing the role of women in church and culture. While this attracts your share of aficionados at 3 am, it’s unlikely these domestic influencers are persuading the female species to their cause. In other words, it is virtually a lost endeavor to convey the glory of women by belittling them online.

Nor are we going to persuade women that the professionalization of their futures is harmful to society by turning social media into a theater of contempt. Men who spend their days mocking women, ridiculing femininity, and cultivating a constant spirit of irritation are not building a Christian culture. They are revealing a failure of mission, or better yet, a failure to define mission.

The biblical pattern is not male bellicosity...the biblical pattern is male headship rooted in sacrifice, clarity, and purpose. That’s why St. Paul says, “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ also loved the church and gave Himself for her” (Ephesians 5:25, NKJV). The burden placed on men is not first domination, but a cruciform leadership (side note: I refuse to use the language of “servant leadership” because it fails to connote the good death the Bible speaks of. Good Friday was not Christ’s service to the world, but his victory as a gift to the world through sacrifice. Thus, “cruciform leadership addresses this more biblically, in my estimation).

A husband is called to create a world of order, fruitfulness, protection, and worship into which a wife gladly enters. Men are to be cultivators before they are critics. I still find Luther’s exhortation one of the most memorable and meaningful for households:

“Let the wife make the husband glad to come home, and let him make her sorry to see him leave.”

For all of Luther’s righteous anger toward the papacy, he did more than perhaps any figure of his era to restore the dignity of marriage and household life. Luther understood that masculinity is not proven in loudness or perpetual criticism, but in building a home marked by affection, stability, joy, and duty. He offers a healthy masculine vision rooted in responsibility rather than resentment.

This is one reason Genesis presents Adam as the one charged with guarding and tending the garden before Eve is brought to him (Genesis 2:15). The mission precedes the helper. The calling precedes the companionship. Eve is brought into Adam’s task, not as a servant to his laziness or an audience to his online frustrations, but as a co-laborer in the cultivation of glory. Read that last line again.

A woman is far more likely to follow a man whose life possesses direction, wisdom, stability, and conviction than a man who merely complains about feminism on the internet.

Additionally, the Scriptures repeatedly insist that women are to be treated with honor, not as objects of perpetual suspicion or targets of generalized scorn. Peter writes, “Husbands, likewise, dwell with them with understanding, giving honor to the wife, as to the weaker vessel” (I Peter 3:7, NKJV). Of course, honor does not mean flattery or the refusal to speak truth. Scripture itself mocks folly, rebellion, and covenantal unfaithfulness. We should note various forms of feminine rebellion that deserve direct confrontation and even ridicule in the prophetic sense. But biblical correction always addresses particular sins and actual disorders. It is not a perpetual disposition of sneering at women as women.

Much of the online masculine rhetoric of our age lacks fatherliness. It attacks women, sometimes even godly women, like a high school frat party. It lacks gravitas. It lacks the kind of mature strength that builds households and civilizations. The Church does not need more men who know how to provoke reactions online…needlessly. The Church needs men who can lead prayer at the dinner table, disciple children, love their wives with tenderness and firmness, establish economies of hospitality, and labor faithfully in their vocation. In other words, men whose masculinity is persuasive because it bears fruit.

The Christian answer to confusion between the sexes is not mockery as a lifestyle. It is the recovery of mission. Men must build something beautiful enough that women desire to join themselves to it. That’s the best way for headship to become attractive— when it resembles Christ: sacrificial, ordered, courageous, fruitful, and full of joy. The goal is not the humiliation of women, but the restoration of men and women together under the lordship of Jesus Christ.