Why Deconstruction Is Necessary

A lot of people are extremely concerned for me right now after reading my essays on why I married a Catholic, denounced my childhood faith, and critiqued the superiority of homeschooling. I’ve had accusations of needlessly airing the family’s dirty laundry and no longer loving the Bible. Some have said I lost my way in Germany or that my husband has brainwashed me. One person even went so far as to say I’m no longer entitled to an opinion because I’m “just coming to terms” with my upbringing.

Deep down I’ve always known I would inevitably deconstruct.

There were moments where I fantasized about breaking free — but the fear of breaking bad held me back.

I knew there was a lot that wasn’t right about how I was raised, but somewhere mixed in it all, I was convinced there were things worth saving — including my own soul. I turned to romanticizing my childhood, even the things that distressed me, in an attempt to discern between what was abnormal and what was actually legitimately worth salvaging.

The good and bad were all so twisted and tangled together I was afraid I might sabotage myself if I attempted to uproot myself too quickly.

I watched others — those I respected and adored — go down dark paths as they turned their backs on everything, abandoning family and religion to “discover” self. It appeared meaningless to me, though. How did they become “more themselves” by rejecting dresses and plastering their faces with make-up? It seemed to me that self-discovery had a burdensome price tag. I saw those I love turn to commercialism as they conformed to low-brow trends and fads. They raged bitterly but never said why and never really spoke out against anything other than God. Freedom meant showing cleavage and butt-crack while brain-rotting in front of a forbidden screen. Only a few addressed actual abuse, and of those few, only some of them aspired to do something beautiful with their lives.

I read books like Educated, The Glass Castle, and Unorthodox. I was obsessed because I felt seen, while simultaneously hating the books for ending as they did. I wanted it all — the good parts of my childhood along with the healing and self-discovery my relatives and the authors of the books sought after but seemed, in my estimate, unable to actually master.

If this is what deconstruction looked like, I wanted no part of it. I made jokes about being raised in a cult. But I loved cults, especially mine. My cult was the good kind. The kind that made you interesting1. Also, my family just wasn’t that bad. Sure, I’d had things rough. But who doesn’t?

One of the hardest aspects of deconstructing from one's family cult is having people tell you, "But you seemed to turn out just fine. Seems your family protected you from a lot.”

It’s gaslighting, except they’re somewhat correct. This, too, made me uncertain that there was anything wrong with how I was raised. If I had it better than many, who was I to complain? It could’ve been worse. My parents meant well. Furthermore, the fear of becoming embittered and ugly held me back.

However, the space of many years, a loving husband, and the birth of our daughter all served to embolden me. Sure, my parents may have meant well, but they have been misled by a harmful ideology and consequently pathologize their children when the fruits of their ideology didn’t show. While I have turned out fine, my other eleven siblings are still deeply entrenched in obscure family traditions, generational educational neglect, and social anxiety.

There is still much left that I will continue to romanticize because it wasn’t all bad, but some of the dirty laundry must be aired for the sake of my siblings and for the sake of my own children. What kind of sister would I be if I achieved what I wanted for myself with no thought to those who remain confused and beleaguered?

How To Properly Deconstruct Your Childhood Faith Without Losing Your Soul

I spoke with a young girl a few years ago who was undergoing gender-affirming surgery and who had just had her breasts cut off. Knowing a little of my background, she approached me one afternoon asking for advice although she knew I was a conservative Christian. I told her, “It is normal for you to feel confused — all of us do while we are young, even about our gender. This doesn’t mean your feelings need to be stifled or dismissed. But you should act cautiously and avoid making any major, permanent decisions until you feel emotionally at ease. I tell myself constantly I won’t make any life-altering decisions until I’m thirty lest I regret them. Everything feels so urgent now, but patience and deliberation may save us much future agony.”

Although I was warning this girl to move cautiously through her transgender surgery, I felt as if I were speaking to myself, too, and some of the things I was struggling through at the time. I didn’t want to be that person who threw the baby out with the bathwater because of a bad experience with water.

This deliberate, slow method of deconstruction is a process that requires a lot of patience.

You have to be willing to suffer through the bad feelings for a time without doing anything about it. Those feelings need to work themselves out and settle down before you’re able to recognize that all water isn’t actually harmful. After a time, you might even be able to enjoy a sunset on a beach without getting triggered.

Here are three things that have helped me get there:

• Step one: Pause and Reflect

Before you deconstruct, you want to prioritize maturing. Consider the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds. If you pull the weeds out of your life too soon, you will destroy yourself. Let the weeds alone while you focus on your emotional and spiritual health.

This doesn’t mean you have to stay in a bad situation. I started traveling as soon as I was old enough to leave home. But I was careful not to rebel and become a prodigal daughter2. I knew two things especially were important to my parents while I traveled: that I continue to wear dresses and that I didn’t drink. One could say they didn’t deserve my honor, but I did this for myself as well because acting out in rebellion diminishes us so we come to be defined by only that which we reject.

I’ve been slow to reject anything I was raised with and have carefully weighed the merit of the things I was taught. When I first left home, I was not ill-formed and unsure of what my beliefs or values were. I wasn’t emotionally or spiritually ready to deconstruct. However, I engaged in conversations, observed the world, and read a lot, thereby slowly testing the things I was taught as I formed my first principles.

After a few years I began to get a sense for what I wanted out of life. I discovered I actually loved wearing dresses, but I rejected teetotalism. When I at last had my first sip of wine I enjoyed it because I wasn’t drinking out of spite or bitterness. Instead I enjoyed that sip of pear wine for its own merit, and I will always remember that golden sweetness.

• Step two: Reconstruct a New Pattern

I know a guy who hates the American government. He fantasizes of a day when the American people will rise up and revolt, tearing the system down completely. I asked him once, “And then what?”

He had no answer. He said it didn’t matter. I pointed out that a worse system might rise up if he didn’t have a vision for what should be. Anarchy for anarchy’s sake will ultimately lead to replacing corruption with another corruption.

It is the same in our own lives. If we denounce and rage without purpose we will rip our hearts open only to realize we have nothing to put into it once everything has been removed. It is irresponsible to deconstruct if you don’t first know what shape you want your life to take.

In the Parable of the Wheat and the Weeds, the weeds were not burned until the wheat was first stored in the barn.

If you haven’t yet found stability in life — if you aren’t yet gathered into the Lord’s barn — deconstruction will only send you spiraling with no place to land. It is not enough to have gained spiritual and emotional maturity, you also need to cultivate positive aspirations. It is then — when you are living a fulfilling life — that you are able to finally begin deconstruction without becoming empty and void of purpose.

• Step three: Acknowledge the Bad

By the time you get through the first two steps you will no longer feel like deconstructing. It will seem redundant or pointless now. This is good. You don’t want the process to be fueled by negative energy. However, it’s still necessary to eventually recognize the harmful patterns of your past so you don’t repeat them and so you don’t invalidate the feelings of those who also need to move on.

Ideally your deconstruction phase will be impersonal. Most of what I’m sorting through right now is how wrong ideology creates family dysfunction. I don’t intend to villainize my parents, but call into question their beliefs and how those beliefs negatively impacted me and my siblings. This is necessary because those beliefs continue to be promoted and propagated and unless I speak out about it, the “fruits” will appear good even though they aren’t.

It’s not necessary for everyone to be public about their deconstruction. However, it may be helpful for others to know what you’re going through, and it may be the thing that encourages another to free themselves of a bad situation, too. There is much I will never share publicly because it wouldn’t do any good or is not my business to publicize, however I also understand that there is a lot of stigma against “airing dirty laundry” and I try to combat that, too, knowing that people who most want to silence me are leading double lives they don’t want brought to light. Even so, share carefully — ask yourself if you’re truly willing to face the consequences of going public, and consider whether or not it will do more harm than good.

Conclusion: It’s Okay To Romanticize Your Childhood

I was raised in a movement that viewed children as a blessing — the more the merrier!

I do not resent being raised in a large family. Having siblings is actually a good thing. I even like the imagery of children being like arrows, and blessed parents having their quiver full of them! There’s absolutely nothing problematic about this . . . unless you’re living in isolation broken off from any ecclesiastical authority.

What good is a quiver full of arrows if the parents never put us to the bow? So many of my siblings and cousins and friends have grown brittle and antiquated from failure to launch. And so the good that might’ve been is negated because they are left unused. If a grown child dares realize this and tries to jump the quiver to serve his intended God-directed purpose he is accused of rebelling! It is very difficult to disentangle oneself from this culture without feeling as if something is wrong with you.

Even now, I am accused of being a Jezebel by various folks from my orbit for the outrageous crime of growing up. Now I can laugh — I know these accusations come from those who are trying to subdue others with fear.

It’s naive to say I’m fine so none of this matters, and it’s unfair to say I’m fine because of the good parts of my childhood. I’m fine because I’ve chosen to be fine, because I’ve been honest about what was good and what wasn’t, and because I’m dealing with it in my own way. I’m fine because, Lord willing, I won’t be repeating the mistakes of my ancestors. It is delusional to say I’m fine because of how I was raised — the good parts were boons but the ground was shaky and could’ve easily led me down a dark path with only rage and bitterness for guardrail.

Some may see my current deconstruction and think it’s been fast, but what they haven’t seen is the process I underwent before I was willing to publicly denounce parts of my childhood. A few of them are right to worry — am I doing a complete 180?

No. I will continue to romanticize the good parts of my childhood. But I feel as if I must curb all that positivism with a few reality checks here and there. Nevertheless, I don’t want to get stuck in the deconstruction phase — ideally it’ll be brief and won’t define my personality.

I never wanted to be like Tara from Educated or like my great-uncle3 who formed an identity around their bitterness for their parents. I don’t resent my childhood at all — I’ve learned to separate the good from the bad. I am still able to recognize the beauty that exists in cults and why people are drawn to them, and I’m able to appreciate poverty and hard times. I’m thankful for the experiences I’ve had and how they’ve shaped me. My most recent essays haven’t changed my appreciation for cults at all, mostly because I’ve moved slowly and cautiously and have not been quick to reject or denounce anything.

When I share the things I choose to publicly share, I’m not doing it out of retaliation but to show that it is possible to deconstruct without malice. I understand why some are concerned for me right now — they are rightly worried for my soul. But my intentions I hope shall be proved over time when it’s clear I’ve not forsaken beauty and truth in my attempt to separate myself from the harmful beliefs my parents espoused.

I hope that over time I can encourage others raised like me, especially my siblings, that there is a way to leave the quiver without becoming a prodigal son or daughter.

In the meantime, let us pray for wisdom and charity.

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Laoise and I became mutuals on twitter a few months ago after my husband sent me her account encouraging me to befriend her because she seemed to appreciate the same things I did, and also lived in the desert, a place he wanted me to learn more about. We hit it off immediately, and I was fascinated by how she seemed to have a strong sense for her femininity in spite of her geography. And so I asked her to write something.

While we often hear stories of women who went West in an attempt to reject their femininity, Laoise does an excellent job painting a fuller picture of the silent majority who liked being women and not only managed to preserve their femininity and adapt when confronted with harsh and hostile territory, but also found ways to bring beauty and joy to the men in their lives.

If you’d like further reading on how to prioritize beauty and femininity read my practical guide for wearing dresses. There’s a section about women who dress modestly and beautifully while branding cattle or working on ranches and farms, too.

For now, I hope you enjoy what Laoise writes below.

Martha Summerhayes was thirty years old when she left the place of her birth in Nantucket, Massachusetts to live with her husband in Arizona. Both were brought there due to his position in the military, and she quickly had to abandon her life of comfort and leisure to brace the harsh terrain of Fort Yuma, the desolate forests surrounding Prescott and Camp Verde, and several other areas of the uninhabited state. During her stay, she endured the fear of attacks from the Apache, learned how to become a homemaker without pleasures of air conditioning or electricity, and raised children as she traversed across violent, and unchartered parts of Arizona with her husband and what small amount of items they could take with them.1

During her early years adjusting to the state, she shares the difficulties of maintaining femininity and motherly duties from her diaries published in 1979, titled “Vanished Arizona.” These diaries take place from 1871 to 1873, before the railroad was developed in the state. Some of the struggles she shares include learning how to cook at first given she had scarce supplies, and not knowing how to decorate their home with so few pieces of furniture and resources. The desert can be a lonely place, and with that, she grappled with the isolation. At first, she had no village to help her learn childrearing skills, but the American Indians that resided on a reservation near her taught her what they knew. Interestingly enough, when she and her husband had to move to another military base in Arizona, the American wives were appalled and laughed at how she carried her newborn son on a cradle board – they had never witnessed anything like it.2

Martha Summerhayes is just one of many women who ventured out West and attempted to make a life for themselves and family. While she gained notoriety for her stories and writing style, there is comfort in knowing she was not the only one to endure issues many women still face now when it comes to adjusting to the roles of wives and mothers. One may read these stories and relate to them to an extent.

It is possible you married and had no prior experience with cooking, or you spent most of your life isolated from children with no idea how to raise your own. It is also common in modern day to not have much of a village as one struggles with the tasks of childrearing and homemaking.

The plights of past women in the Sonora and other desert landscapes may not seem too foreign to some readers, and from their struggles, we too can learn how to adapt to an environment that appears hostile, isolating, and dull.

On the surface, the desert appears to be the antithesis to femininity.

When looking at its traits, descriptors that may come to mind include desolate, harsh, barren, and arid. Deserts appear dusty with intense heat and little rainfall, crawling with animals that are venomous and hostile. Violence makes up much of the history in this environment, with events such as the Battle of Apache Pass, or the Pleasant Valley War. While there is a variety of flora and fauna, it is not common to come across damp floors of moss and wood, or dense areas of green vegetation. From what one can witness, the desert is a brutal and unrelenting place, a place where femininity is a foreign interloper, battling with the vicious backdrop of the burning Sonora.

While femininity can be defined in several ways and with multiple adjectives, I believe there can be an objective cohesiveness readers can agree upon. In general, femininity can be described with words such as nurturing, quiet, kind, soft, mysterious, and gentle.

A feminine woman is generally depicted as one wearing their hair long, dressing modestly and girly, while using warm and soft gestures. In comparison to the desert, it seems femininity is the converse; one may struggle at first to find such traits in such an arid terrain.

If one looks closely, one can find these traits in hidden places. Consider the resiliency of the environment of the desert, how it nurtures several different varieties of life forms, or how the beauty of the ochre and dust-filled sunsets mimic mysterious qualities found in the feminine soul. When one looks past the harsh and sparse appearance the desert gives on its surface, one can see how women found their feminine side in the dull, dreary and drab territory.

If we view the desert with the words described previously, how do these two coexist in harmony? How does a feminine woman maintain her tender and gentle demeanor when dealing with struggles like isolation and resource constraints? The Cambridge Dictionary defines femininity as “the fact or quality of having characteristics that are traditionally thought to be typical of or suitable for a woman.”3

Could one argue that feminine traits shift when a woman is placed in different landscapes and locations? Do certain characteristics become more suitable if a woman is in a dangerous and vicious setting than a comfortable and cushy one?

Similarly to light and darkness, or feminine and masculine, these qualities exist to compliment one another. Women bringing their femininity to a scene such as the desert brought many positive, and uplifting traits that made living in the desert more beautiful, more comfortable, and more relaxed. The book, “Doing What the Day Brought,” shares several accounts of women’s experiences relocating to Arizona in the late nineteenth century.

For example, women often provided hospitality to their husbands, family, and guests by serving homemade and hearty meals people could indulge in after a long day baking in the Sonoran rays. Some would wear simple, yet charming and attractive dresses that could light up a room. They would play music for visitors to add a bit of color into their day layered in the mundane.

One Arizonan woman recalled how as a child, she would spend time in their parlor playing music on the family piano. As local American Indians passed through to head into town for commerce, her father would catch them stopping by the parlor windows, leaning their ears to it to enjoy the sounds. He would invite them in, and they would sit on their living room floor to lose themselves into the foreign melody. The girl recalled how excited and honored she was when one of the chiefs got up after her music session and draped his tribal beads over her neck before returning to the reservation.4

In the same book, more accounts share how women maintained femininity by performing the same rituals they did back home. One woman shared how although she lived on a farm without any major comforts she enjoyed back East, every day at four o’clock, she would call her husband in from a day’s work, and both would change into nice clothing and enjoy afternoon tea together. Locals near them overheard this ritual and would show up spontaneously to join. Though this woman was out of her element, performing strenuous work on a farm far from home, she still managed to enjoy her slow and soft feminine side by hosting individuals over for a small meal. The comradery during a difficult era such as that time helped boost morale and made women feel more like themselves.

While all of these aspects of femininity did bring benefit to the men and women around them, it also helped preserve the feminine spirit. The feminine did not arrive in the desert and die, but rather adapt and eventually thrive. Women found a way to synchronize this spirit and thread it into their daily lives to cope with the environment around them. It wasn’t as if women arrived in horse-drawn wagons or by train to this region and immediately cut their hair due to the scalding weather, or decided to live a monastic life due to being far from family they left in the east, they would pin their hair up in a fashionable style and learn how to listen to the gentle breeze of an approaching monsoon to add the thrill and excitement they so often found themselves in back home.

While women did bring traditional aspects of femininity to the desert, they also transformed it by adding a sense of ruggedness and durability.

While one may find women tending strictly to their house in children in a more urban environment, it wasn’t uncommon for one to find a woman helping with cattle on Arizona ranches, or tending to other livestock. Elsie Dunn recalls her experience working on an Arizona ranch. “I would get on my horse and bring in the cows from the pasture. I helped milk the cows and brought the cans to the house. Then I helped feed the calves and take care of them. I loved to be outside.” 5

While performing what was traditionally work done by men, Elsie shares the difference of life in the West, and how femininity convened with masculine tasks.

It was difficult for many women to leave their hometowns, where they had many connections with family and neighbors, to relocate to a region where many would go days or weeks without speaking to another soul. One of the issues women were faced with was a lack of education on homemaking from their relatives, as many lived far from them. Another account from “Doing What the Day Brought” describes what women did to help newlyweds during this difficult life transition. “If there was a newlywed in the neighborhood, very often they would go over and teach her their specialty in cooking. They would leave the recipe for her, which was very thoughtful and very nice. And if anyone was sick they took care of them at home; the neighbors took care of anyone who was ill.”

The isolation of the desert helped yearning, social souls find ways to connect each other to help one another.

One may ask themselves, is modern motherhood similar to being in a desert?

Many mothers could agree that it can be very isolating, arduous, and exhausting. In some instances, mothers may endure such a severe identity change, it may mirror similar experiences women went through when leaving their homes back East to enter into a completely new life. The struggle they endured when figuring out how to cook their husbands a well-balanced and warm meal for dinner while tending to their sobbing baby may not seem so foreign to women reading this currently.

This then lends a question to the reader; will modern mothers grow upset and resistant with the desert they have found themselves in, growing more isolated and more exhausted, or will they adapt to their environment like these women did in order to cope and thrive?

Reading and meditating on past wisdom of women who were able to maintain resiliency and stability in difficult times can be a comforting and cathartic experience for modern mothers. We must aim for the same abiding, feminine spirit they sought out to preserve as to help us become as resilient and resourceful as them to build warm, welcoming environments for us and our children to thrive in. Their wisdom and experiences shall never be forgotten as their words and emotions mirror the same challenges mothers face today.

The desert is bleak and strict, but even in such places one can find fields and mountainsides covered in colorful and vibrant patches of desert lilies and marigolds. While the feminine spirit may seem lost at first glance, one must look closely at these fields and mountainsides to understand and realize, it still endures.

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Mid-way through my twenties I began to accept that I might always be an old maid. Several people encouraged me to “be nicer to men”, otherwise I might never get a chance to have babies. However, while many girls have an unfair amount of standards, I was simply too romantic to fall for just anyone who didn’t first try to sweep me off my feet with poetry and handwritten letters. And I didn’t want to have to go looking for him!! Nevertheless I conceded, “If I’m thirty and unmarried, I’ll get on a dating app and go out with every potential match.”

I turned thirty last month, and as many of you know, I fortunately met my husband a couple years ago (our story was just as romantic as I’d always dreamed it might be) and we now have the most perfect little baby girl. So I never needed to create that dating account1 after all!

Whew. So thankful to have dodged whatever heartaches it may have come my way.

I do this little tradition I stole from the Emily of New Moon books where I write a letter to myself to read in ten years. This means on my thirtieth, I read a letter I wrote when I was twenty, and I then wrote another I’ll read when I’m forty. My letter from twenty-year-old self was pretty cringey, I’m not going to lie. It started out something like, Wow, you’ve now begun the downhill journey . But I hope you’re happier than I am now.

Then I proceeded to list the things I hoped to achieve: go to college, get my driver’s license, get married (I included a list of men that might be options although I said I didn’t really like any of them very much), have children, get a book published, find happiness.

I was pretty straightforward about feeling uncertain that I could accomplish any of this. There’s a lot I put off onto that magical age, thirty, because I didn’t feel as if I had any agency over my ambitions.

But now that I’m thirty, I can look back and see that despite how helpless and depressed I felt, I did a lot of the right things that got me to a better place. The best thing that’s happened that wasn’t even on my list though was finding solace in the Catholic Church — I would’ve scoffed at the idea then, so sure of the evils I thought uniquely belonged to Catholicism. But because of it I feel at peace about many things that I thought I had to simply wrestle with for the rest of my life. So many of my doubts are laid to rest.

Of course, it’s not just Catholicism. My husband, too, has increased my happiness — I used to have daily migraines. They’ve all miraculously gone away since I married.

I’ve achieved many of the other goals on my list, too. Some of them — such as getting a book published2 — are still in the works. But I am a published writer now. So, I’m sure a book isn’t too far off in the future. Maybe by the time I’m forty?

None of this would’ve been possible had I not accepted every opportunity that came my way.

Saying Yes to EVERYTHING (Internalizing Rejection Philosophy)

I was raised in a family that believed daughters (and sons, too) should stay home until they got married. However, no men were asking for my hand, and I wasn’t interested in living indefinitely with my mother who I clashed with daily. I prayed and journaled daily, begging God to show me a moral way out that didn’t require me to dishonor my parents.

By the time I was fourteen, I knew I had to leave home and be independent from my family. I dreamed of turning eighteen . . . only to realize I had no idea what to do with myself now that I was legally an adult, but also penniless and friendless.

However, all good things start with patience, perseverance, and a willingness to accept any opportunity no matter what shape it takes or how long it takes to roll out. I had a vision and was willing to stick to it no matter how untenable it seemed.

I said yes to everything. Even if I didn’t know how to do it, I said I could, and then I figured it out, usually with great success. I faked confidence and skill, and as a result I soon got a reputation for having many talents.

Someone wanted to pay me to work in their greenhouses? Yes — any money was more than I currently had, and I saved every penny.

Someone wanted me to mend a leather jacket? Yes, I could do it. This would eventually lead to me working professionally in formal-wear.

Would I help a woman with some of her cleaning gigs? Before I knew it I was running my own cleaning business with several employees.

I remember the first time I held a wedding dress in my hands that I agreed to alter. Had I made a mistake? I sweated over it for hours longer than necessary, but the bride was happy and I slowly built up the confidence to do more.

I got my license. I volunteered for a ministry that kinda traumatized me for years. I went to Germany. I stayed with every friend who had a baby as a postpartum baby gift.

My openness to whatever life threw at me went deeper than just trying to jump ship. I also wanted to test myself and my beliefs. I wanted to find out what it meant to be a Christian woman, and I wanted to feel what it felt like to run up against a wall and find a loose stone and make your way through anyways. I’d discovered the 100 Days of Rejection and made it my life philosophy. I refused to be deterred by a “no”.

Living in a Station Wagon

My first “no” was COVID. I had a lot of travel plans for 2020, with airline tickets already purchased but now returned as future points I never used.

Because I couldn’t go to New Zealand or Iran like I’d hoped, I instead hosted a giant picnic that made the local papers. Then I visited and wrote about EVERY church in my area. After that I bought a junk car for $500 off Facebook Marketplace then drove from Montana to Alabama, open to death on the road or meeting new friends, whichever God willed. The next year I drove to Vermont and camped for a week in the woods with my cell-phone off, then I went barefooting in NYC with friends from Upstate New York (I decided then I wanted to live in Upstate NY someday). The following year, I did a five-month stint in my station wagon, saying yes to every contra dance, skill-trade, learning experience, and Facebook message request.

At the end of that five months I said yes to a two-and-a-half-hour phone call with the man I’d marry.

Turning Thirty

I never went to college, but this last decade has been a continual learning experience. I read a lot. I audited history classes at a local university, and also attended a couple Christian apologetics seminars. I listened to every free audiobook when I cleaned or sewed. While I was in Germany I took language and martial arts classes. I was accepted into a work-trade program with the John C. Campbell Folk School when I was living out of my car. Throughout all this, I remained open in conversations with people of various persuasions.

Nothing was really off-limits for me except my faith in God. How I dressed, how I practiced religion, my political beliefs, the food I ate — it was all on the table and I was very willing to analyze it all with every stranger I met to test which values were worth putting back in my skirt pockets.

It’s only the last couple years that I’ve finally let myself settle into some black-and-white thinking, much of it influenced by my unorthodox travels and high-paying, low-status jobs I worked. Although I am still deeply curious about the world, and spontaneously focused, I feel as if I’ve earned the right to be set in my ways now that I like where I’m at. I understand that’s naive thinking, but I’m okay with that. There’s not much naivety left in the world, and I want to hold down the fort.

God has blessed me and satisfied my every desire, even the ones that seemed impossible. I am so very thankful for all He’s done and continues to do. I am thankful for all of you, too — some of you have been on this journey with me now well over a decade! I appreciate your loyalty, and all the friendly messages and conversations we’ve had over the years!

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Hi Keturah!

I grew up in a modern, secular, feminist home. After being saved in my 30s and marrying an amazing Christian traditional man, I was excited to kick my master’s degree to the curb and be a full time mother and homemaker. I had a baby, quit my career… and I’ve been feeling like I’m failing ever since.

Even with a village to help me with my baby (I have SEVERAL hours of child care every weekday), I can’t keep up with cooking and cleaning. I manage to cook one meal a day, and it’s nothing impressive… I’m talking pasta and meat sauce. I am ALWAYS cleaning but somehow the house never gets clean? I know it’s important to look feminine and put together, but that falls by the wayside more often than I’d like because I feel like there’s just not enough time for me AND the house to look presentable.

I know women have been doing this for ages, with more than one baby, and doing it way better than I am. Logistically, HOW? I really am trying but it feels like I’m lacking whole skill sets that girls with traditional upbringings spent years learning. I don’t know how I can catch up this late in the game.

Thanks and blessings, congratulations on your perfect baby, keep writing :)

Dear Reader,

If there’s one lesson I’ve learned from being raised in a large family, it’s this: motherhood is always a game of catch-up.

However, after a certain point, one learns to move leisurely. You learn to stress a little less — there’s nothing to worry about. The work is rarely all done. This is fine, just as long as you aren’t giving into the chaos. Not every meal is an impressive achievement — this is fine as long as the meals are healthy.

What matters most in all of this is entering each day with a chill attitude. And if you took fifteen seconds to slip into a comfortable, flattering dress. Are you ready to enjoy motherhood? Don’t forget to hum a little melody and wear your favorite smile. Kiss your baby. Then roll up your sleeves, apply some elbow grease, and re-prioritize. It won’t all get done, but a few minutes here and there can go a long way to preventing your family from living in squalor and filth.

The Girlboss mentality has had dreadful consequences for the stay-at-home-mother’s mental health. We’re encouraged to be ambitious and competitive even when we don’t want to. Furthermore, the outside world preys on the concupiscence of women, pulling at our heartstrings to invoke envy or self-pity.

I recommend ignoring it all.

Motherhood need not be as ambitious or competitive as a career — you chose to tend the souls of children and a husband over status and recognition. Instead of comparing yourself to the things you’ve rejected, soak in the bliss. Move slower; set fewer goals for yourself. Take your baby on a walk. Read this book:

How to Be Idle is a manifesto for intentional laziness. Some of the chapters encourage actual degeneracy, but I love the overall direction of the book, which encourages radical idleness and doing nothing. Of course it’s a book written for men, so you’ll have to find a way for it to fit your life as a mother. You won’t ever be able to do absolutely nothing. But there are ways to orient your life toward doing less.

Here is my formula for living a leisure-focused life:

I’ve slowly curated a collection of possessions I find beautiful and enjoyable. The things I own are easy to clean and use. When I get ready for the day, I endeavor to feel beautiful as quickly as possible. I brush my hair then put it up so it’s out of reach of the baby. I wash my face and brush my teeth. I slip into a dress that is comfortable and practical to move in. I keep shorts or leggings handy to wear under my dress if I decide to go for a walk. All this takes less time than changing the baby’s morning diaper.

Each day I make the exact same breakfast (eggs, bacon or sausage except on Fridays, and toast). Lunch doesn’t always happen. If it does, it’s something simple, like grilled cheese or fruit or sautéed vegetables. I put more effort into dinner, but that, too, is often simple: cabbage and beef are my go-to dish.

I wash my dishes by hand because I find it more reflective and enjoyable (and because I like the dishes I’ve thrifted and enjoy cleaning them properly). I do the dishes after every meal — it takes maybe five minutes. Then if the baby is happy, I straighten up the kitchen. I wash the stove-top and declutter surfaces. I clean the table and highchair and the floor around the highchair. I might put a load of laundry in the wash.

That’s all I require of myself each day. It’s very little. But then if the baby is happy and I don’t have any major sewing goals or a gripping book, I add a few extra chores to my morning. I might clean the bathroom, or mop the kitchen floor, or vacuum the rugs, or deep clean one of the rooms in the house, or fold all the laundry I’ve piled beside the couch.

My afternoons right now are pretty free. If the baby is napping I finish the chores I’ve assigned for myself, or I read or sew. When the baby is awake I walk (unless my husband and I decided to walk that morning).

After dinner, I clean up the dishes, bathe the baby, and we settle down for the evening with books and toys and the radio.

There are things I tolerate that would leave others appalled. I rarely sweep my floors in my shoes-on household, and the crawling baby is fine. I mop maybe once a week. I might wash a load of laundry every week, but I don’t always fold it (I leave it in a basket in the laundry room or in a corner in the living room to work at when I sit down). But there are other things I never tolerate. Dirty dishes are never left around the house or left unwashed. Dirty laundry, too, is never left around the house. Clothing is always hung up immediately or put into a hamper (this means picking up after the baby and my husband). Trash is never thrown on the floor. Dirty diapers (I use cloth) are cared for immediately. Food is never left on the stove or table, especially overnight.

These basic things keep our home comfortable even if there’s a bit of dirt or clutter I haven’t yet addressed. It requires some diligence and forethought, but very little time or effort.

Once you’re able to master the small things, and feel like you’re still lacking necessary skills, you can start to use an afternoon once a week or so to learn something new. Or maybe you’ll find time to devote to expanding your skills each day. Nevertheless, I believe you’ll be amazed at how much time you suddenly have and how much you feel you’re getting done once you lower your standards and focus on leisurely living.

With love,

Keturah

Thank you for reading Polite Company. My writing is not pay-walled, however if you’d like to support my work you can buy me a coffee or commission a handmade sewn, knitted, or tatted item.

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The first time I had white noodles I was about eight years old.

My grandmother had brought my siblings and me to a family church camp and gave each of us a bowl of chicken noodle soup. We were not picky eaters (our mother would never tolerate that!), but we gagged and refused to eat the soup.

My grandmother called my mother.

“That’s odd,” she said.“They like soup, what’s in it.”

After my grandma shared the ingredients my mother said, “Oh, it’s the white noodles. They’ve only ever had whole wheat. Don’t make them finish it.”

We never ate chocolate, only carob. Instead of sugar, my siblings and I would pour too much stevia in our tea (on purpose) then lick our fingers. We loved the after taste. We hated white rice or bleached flour. We only wore natural fibers (mostly cotton because it was cheaper). We didn’t have toys that made obnoxious sounds. Instead of candy or potato chips, Mom roasted chickpeas with salt or mix carob and honey in a bowl and let us eat it by the spoonful. We were feral and old-fashioned. We never broke a bone (we credit the gallons of raw milk we consumed each week) and we never went to the doctors. If we had a cold, Mom gave us spoonfuls of elderberry syrup or goldenseal tincture. If we had pink eye our mother washed our eyes out with colloidal silver. We took charcoal for food poisoning and made our own cough syrup from sliced onion soaked in honey.

We weren’t hippies. We were just weird Christians who happened to have a naturopathic grandfather.

Hippies let their kids run outside naked and eat grass. We were feral, too, but the boys wore suspenders or belts and we girls wore bloomers under our dresses. We didn’t make kombucha or sourdough. We didn’t eat organic — we couldn’t afford it. We didn’t shop at a co-op. We didn’t eat “healthy candy”. We were just as skeptical of that stuff as anything else.

I sewed my wild oats in my early twenties by thrifting a couple polyester dresses. But I noticed they held onto my body odor and made me smell worse. So I went back to wearing natural fibers. I didn’t like how fast food made me feel. I preferred to skip meals than eat packaged food, so that’s what I did.

Now that I’m older and can afford more, I wear linen and wool. I had polyester stuffed animals, but my child has a wool filled teddy bear. Our mother started us on food when we were six months old, but fed us apple sauce, bananas and oatmeal. I’m doing bone broth, egg yolk, avocado, and chunks of steak. I’ll let my kids have chocolate and white rice, but I plan to minimize the sugar and other processed foods. I’m using cloth diapers because it’s cheaper and easier. I don’t like shopping (my husband really hates shopping). If I go to the co-op, I prefer to check what’s in the dumpster before going inside.

People used to make fun of us for how we lived because it seemed like “too much”. It feels like whiplash to see it all trending now.

I’ve been called crunchy. I’m shy of labels1, though. I don’t know what I am — I’m just doing what feels normal to me. I don’t like the word “crunchy”. It feels too hard, too brittle, like you might break a tooth or something.

The only granola I like is the family recipe (baked with honey). I prefer foods that are chewy. I’m drawn to anything colorful and soft. I will never dread my hair. I like my clothes to flatter my feminine form. I am not a fan of recycled materials unless they are natural fibers. I’m skeptical of chiropractors, supplements, and essential oils. I like simplicity. I like things that make sense without having to read a fifty page essay about why it should make sense.

I like vintage if it’s beautiful. I am a hippie who never had a high. I like to think that I’m living the sort of lifestyle that could easily overlap with those who are holistic and those who aren’t.

It’s cool that the things I’m doing are popular2 right now, but I like to think that I’m just a woman who’s trying to honor her mother’s good decisions.

Because eating this way has been in the family, I know it isn’t magic. I have a sister with type 1 diabetes. Healthy choices do make a difference, but they aren’t the final answer in a diseased, sin filled world.

Behold the birds of the heaven, that they sow not, neither do they reap, nor gather into barns; and your heavenly Father feedeth them. 
Are not ye of much more value than they?
And which of you by being anxious can add one cubit unto the measure of his life? 
And why are ye anxious concerning raiment? 
Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin:

Matthew 6:26-28

I know many who take eating healthy too far. I have relatives that will only eat the food they’ve sourced themselves. This keeps them from accepting dinner invitations. They say that control over their diet will let them live another ten or fifteen years. I can’t imagine wanting to live a decade longer if I were lonely. I would rather swallow food I dislike when fellowshipping with friends than enjoy the tastiest, healthiest meal in isolation. I think this distinction, too, means I’m not a “purist” even though the Beatitudes never mentions eating organic last I checked.

Jesus said, “Do not worry about what you will eat or drink or wear” 3

I want to make the best choices I can make because I think it does matter in the everyday. It is a futile ambition though if ever it gets in the way of my larger goal to be a good mother, friend, or Christian. No matter what, I am not promised health in this life. My life is not my own, and neither our my children’s lives mine.

Bonus:

Usually the baby just eats what we eat! But because she is petite, I try to give her extra pureed foods and also try to avoid buying store bought foods unless we’re traveling. Also, because she is use to eating off our plates, she prefers flavor. Anyways, I recently put together this random concoction that she loves. Thought I’d share the recipe with you all!

Here’s the recipe:

A half a sweet potato boiled in homemade bone broth and cow’s milk. As I mashed it, I added half an avocado, several tablespoons of butter, a little lemon juice, and a jar of Beech Nut ground chicken in broth.

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Hi Keturah!

I am hoping you can offer me some advice. I am 22, and have been married just shy of a year. I am still getting used to my new role as a wife. I did not grow up in a house with traditional gender roles, and come from a very broken family, and I am just now, after a full year, figuring out how to make edible meals (half the time at least) and figuring out how to keep up with the chores. It has been a work in progress, and I have learnt many things. (Turns out glass jars full of bone broth break when you freeze them, and although you can air fry many things a cheese pizza is not one of them).

Despite how wonderful this first year of married life has been, I am starting to find that I feel quite lonely and overwhelmed at home. I feel very discouraged by my lack of basic home making knowledge, and depressed by how house bound I am. Part of it is that we moved back to my husband’s rural home town which is filled with retired boomers, and a much smaller church community, and the fact that I don’t drive. This means aside from Church on Sunday, I am really limited in how much I socialize and how far I can travel. I spend most my time listening to podcasts trying to figure out what to make for dinner. There aren’t many families or young women in my church, and our community is known as being the kind of place people buy houses in but don’t work or spend time in. It’s cheap to live here but there’s not much to do.

I actually tried making a Facebook post in our towns Facebook group to see if there would be any women who wanted to get together to do some sort of home makers social group, to combat isolation house wives may feel and get women connected, and it got very little traction much of which was negative. This is all to say I am feeling very put out in my efforts to find community and am feeling increasingly isolated and lonely at home. I am in a very odd spot in life, being in my early 20s and living in a town where I am much more conservative and traditional then those around me. If you could offer any advice, I would really appreciate it. Thank you!

Dear Reader,

Welcome to this new season of life! It seems you’re already starting out on the right foot by focusing on your cooking skills. This will be the thing that personally serves you most as you grow your community.

Finding community is a lifelong process. There’s no easy method for meeting and making kindred spirits overnight. I’ve told others that you can expect to put in a good three to five years before you feel your circle is flourishing. It’s a lot of time and work. But if you pull it off once, it’s much easier to do a second time if every you move.

There will be some hiccups. Many people are antagonistic to adding new friends to their life. Others are uncomfortable going to other people’s houses because it’s hard to accept hospitality in an era where all the rules of etiquette are being dismissed or rewritten. Keeping this in mind. If you haven’t already, cultivate a spontaneous attitude — be open to most1 people as they are, you may in time be able to be the one others feel most comfortable around, and in time that may lead to great friendships and community support.

I highly recommend reading my posts on spontaneous hospitality and industrial hospitality. But I’ll summarize the main points here:

• Welcome spontaneously.

• Make it clear they don’t need to text first or remove their shoes unless they want to.

• Don’t worry about presenting a perfect image or a immaculate home. People are going to care more about your smile and the food you offer to them than the state of your home.

Keeping this in mind, here are some ideas to get people to step into your home:

1. You’ve perfected one bake good. Or maybe some fudge. Fill a basket with 15-20 individually wrapped treats and hand deliver them to all the neighbors on your street or near your street. Knock at their door and say, “Hello, I’m —. My husband and I are new to town and looking to make friends. We are planning a cook-out at our house next month and would love to have you join us.” Many might not be receptive to this approach, though most everyone will appreciate the gift. Only a few may accept your invitation. However, even those who don’t show are not a loss cause, because you may later encounter them in the grocery store. By that time their opinion of you will have grown fonder and there may be a second opportunity for connecting.

2. Plan an event centered around a holiday (Thanksgiving or Independence Day) and hand write notes for everyone you know telling them to also invite a friend. Hand deliver as many of these notes as possible.

3. Visit every church that is near your home and stay for whatever social event/ Bible study they have whether it’s before/ after church or on another day of the week. Try to friend at least one person and make solid plans to have coffee or tea later that week.

4. Check flyers at grocery stores for events. Attend anything that looks remotely social and interesting. Check out library events or historical club meetings — often these are groups of old ladies, but still can be fun. And old ladies always know EVERYONE.

5. See if any of the bars or tea houses or bookstores in your area host open mics. I’ve met many friends this way.

6. Cultivate a fun skill (i.e. making scones), then put up fliers all over town offering a FREE community scone-making class.

Once you make two or three solid connections, your social circle will be like a snowball. It may seem to grow slowly at first, but once you get it rolling, it’ll be larger than you thought possible. The difficult part is being vulnerable at the start when you put yourself out there. Remember, there will be rejection. But if you treat it as a challenge, you will only encounter success and become more confident.

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Read at your own risk.

A current goal of mine is to lose my internalized prudishness without turning into a vulgar, obscene hag. One would think this would be easy enough now that I’m converting to Catholicism, but the Puritan aversion to “the natural world” is a tough weed to pull.

I got “the talk” when I was sixteen. It lasted approximately thirty seconds and I didn’t learn anything I hadn’t already observed in the barnyard. I was not at all prepared for what sex would really be like clinically and metaphysically (nobody ever told me that you unlock version 2.0 of yourself the moment you give yourself fully to a man). Even so, it seemed clear to my “experienced” husband that not only had I been a virgin, I knew nothing about my body or the art of intimacy.

Since getting married I have set out on a journey to learn “the secrets of Prostitutes”. I have read several marriage books on the topic but found most of them lacking. Either they offered zero moral guidance or presented vague innuendos couched in “do what feels good” without offering any actual practical advice for what that might look like.

At nearly thirty years old I hadn’t even heard of the word orgasm until right after I was engaged and a married friend told me, “Once you’re married I have to tell you about orgasms, because nobody ever told me and it took my husband and me seven years to accidentally figure it out.” Unfortunately we had a falling out before she could divulge her secrets to me.

So I was back to square one looking for content that was explicit but not pornographic, Christian but not Evangelical. I desired something simultaneously wholesome and graphic. I wanted something that embodied a positive message about sex that was neither consumerist nor duty-focused.

I thought I might find what I was looking for in the Sex Issue by , a “Vanity Fair” cosmopolitan magazine for alt-right women1. Even though it’s a magazine written by conservative women for conservative women, a lot of online conservative women hate it. Some say it’s cringe. Others hate it because it is funded by Peter Thiel. One of their most “controversial” things was the milkmaid dress, a dress that doesn’t really look all that different from many of the sundresses currently sold at Walmart.

Anyways, I’m not 100% on board with all of the views and aesthetics promoted by Evie Magazine, but I think most just women hate it just because it’s cool to be a hater. I on the other hand like to expand my palette. I enjoy being on friendly terms with those who aren’t perfectly aligned with me.

There’s much hype about this magazine. Although the editor is Catholic and seems to espouse Christian values, Brittany Hugoboom is reviled by Christian women across the internet for no reason I can discern. It is a magazine written by married women for married women, yet Christian women canceled the magazine before it was even released.

Some of the haters said that married women should only be getting information like this from women in their lives. Too bad for women like me I guess? Others said that there were more appropriate sources for written information. I guess books are acceptable, but magazines aren’t? I wasn’t sure what any of these people meant, except that maybe such women want sex education to be vague or stuffy.

Although not necessarily a fan of Evie magazine, aptly noted:

Evie is under intense scrutiny for publishing…and I want you to take a deep breath so the horror can fully marinate…

sex advice for married women. Oh, and worse, endorsement of pleasurable sex within marriage.

I know, I know. It’s terrifying.

It’s a fair question. Why would married women be angry about a magazine purporting to equip them to be happier in their marriages? I didn’t hear a satisfying answer, so I purchased a copy of the magazine for myself.

Additionally, I welcomed the idea that I might be able to add a little more happiness to our marriage. I wasn’t entirely disappointed.

The Sex Issue

The front cover features the model, Georgia Ball. There is also a 20-page boudoir photo shoot with her mid-magazine. I’m not entirely certain why she was chosen to represent married women since she is ostensibly unmarried, but other than that fact I saw no problem with the photography. Yes, I have mixed feelings about boudoir shoots, but this is a far cry from being pornographic and certainly better than most other magazines on shelves these days.

The magazine is designed to be accessible.

Although it is two-hundred pages, it’s an easy cover-to-cover read. And it’s not just a magazine about technique. It’s divided into six sections: Philosophy, Pleasure, Confidence, Technique, Health, and Psychology.

There are eight contributing writers — ten of the twenty-seven articles are written by Ivy Lipton, a woman’s whose private twitter is called “Art of Sensuality”.

The opening essay, “Why We Need Sex” by Elizabeth Lovelace, is my favorite. She uses sacramental language to make a case for why a magazine like this is both needed and wanted by married woman. She argues that sex is necessary — not as a duty, but as devotion.

A relationship without sex becomes little more than a domestic partnership. Beyond this, sex acts as loyalty glue. Not in the guilt-laced way where sex is a duty you pay to keep someone from wandering, but loyalty as attachment, as a shared sense of us. When two people are connected erotically, they tend to protect the bond more instinctively. Not because they’re afraid to lose it, but because they don’t want to. It’s about choosing the same person over and over again.

This introduction is followed by essays on how to protect and grow the marital bond. It includes an overview of female anatomy, tips for how wives can initiate sex, hygiene, a guide for overcoming vaginismus, various instructions for massages to promote health and pleasure, and recommended exercises that stimulate sexual health. There are two endearing essays written anonymously by men about what men really want from their wives as well as illustrated (graphic, but not explicit drawings) guides for various positions.

The final essay, titled “The Afterglow”, closes the issue by reminding women that the minutes following sex matter, too. Neglecting those sacred moments forfeits deepening your intimacy, the author argues. She says, “What happens after determines what his desire attaches to,” then she offers some tips so sex doesn’t leave you feeling objectified, instead ensuring you that you can become the focus of your husband’s devotion.

The magazine is unlike any other book I’ve seen on the topic. It felt like a mostly complete guide — more of what one might need if their homeschool curriculum omitted biology, sex ed, and PE.

I closed the magazine feeling inspired. Not because I’d learned some new things (I had), but because I felt I understood a beautiful truth a little more deeply.

Even So, I’m a Little Skeptical

I wanted to fully like the magazine, however there are a few parts I can’t endorse.

Overall, I am about 90% happy with the issue — enough that I plan to gift a copy to my sister as a wedding present. But before I do I will rip out one of the articles and take a Sharpie to a few sections.

In addition to these minor complaints, I wish there had been one extra essay in the philosophy section. I wanted a moral or ethical guide.

Instead I got a sense that the authors, although probably all Christian, were uncomfortable making their moral values known. The unspoken message seemed to say, Do whatever makes you comfortable. This struck me as too woke to befit a Conservative magazine. I get that Evie magazine wants to be accessible to the full gamut of Conservative women, but I fear there is something lost when one tries to separate religion from conservatism. It is akin to an atheist claiming they can have a moral code while rejecting God. It can leave the reader feeling as if the authors are disingenuous if they fail to lay a foundation for their values by leaving their religion unmentioned. This easily leads to perversion of the ethics preserved by tradition. Because without understanding where one comes from, it all becomes mere aesthetics which then devolves into kinks.

I admit I expected the magazine to be more Catholic, too, because of the editor’s religious affiliation2. I was surprised to realize that most of the writers are probably Protestant, and their worldviews on sex certainly colored the narrative. This might seem pedantic to some, but I do fully believe that there are core philosophical differences between evangelical sex and Catholic sex as pointed out by :

For all that the Evangelical books talk about pleasure and intimacy, they seem to indicate that sexual pleasure is good simply because God created it. While this is certainly true, Catholics go a step further. Not only is sex good, it's a sign of the ecstasy of Heaven.

Aside from the tone feeling too nonreligous or evangelical, it promoted or condoned practices that I found to be questionable.

The essay I’ll be tearing out was on BDSM. Of course, it tried to redefine BDSM, but the core principles remained intact. By including this, the beautiful reflections on devotion and submission were sullied. The sacramental analogies were undercut and made out to be glorified kinks.

This was justified by one of the authors by claiming 40-70% of women have fantasized of themselves in compromising situations. The argument then was that it must be acceptable to live out these fantasies since a large percentage of women want them, even a substantial number of women who experience no childhood abuse or trauma. Men, too, want variety, it was written. It’s ok to get a little naughty when it’s consensual, the authors claimed. Just as long as you’re comfortable with it.

I believe in an absolute morality that has less to do with consent and more to do with dignity. God created the body not for us to misuse as we like, but as a sacred temple — a temple He desires to fill with His presence. When we distort devotion and submission between spouses, we put a stain on what it means to devote and submit ourselves to God.

Furthermore, just because a large percentage of women have violent fantasies doesn’t mean it’s healthy.

I conjecture that if one were to look at the women who have these fantasies you’d find something in common. There may be no childhood traumas, but their everyday lives are probably filled with weak men. They may even say they want their men to be this docile. But I believe women actually feel safest when the men in their lives are in charge — protecting them, adoring them, guiding them toward some clear vision or purpose. If the men in their lives lack competence , the women look to remedy this in bed. Because that’s the only time the world isn’t watching, when it’s ok for her to drop the facade of wanting to be in control. That’s the only time it’s permissible to let the husband wear the pants again. When it’s a kink, it’s acceptable to be dominated.

But women who are happily married to men who are strong and confident and kind in the daytime aren’t interested in BDSM. And men who are wearing the pants in their marriage or who aren’t viewing porn have little interest in it, either. That’s my theory at least.

Aside from tearing out that essay and a small section on BDSM in another essay, I plan to Sharpie a section that illustrated a story of a wife jerking her husband off at a time he couldn’t finish inside her. Although there are very few rules in the catechism on sex, this explicitly violates Catholic doctrine. There were also some questionable references to vibrators and toys I’ll probably mark out.

And of course, there were a few times where the advice bent toward manufactured femininity. Although it’s not immoral to wax and shave, I will be marking out all sections that advocate for it because I don’t think it’s healthy to tell young wives that their bodies are created inherently gross or imperfect. That might be a little over the top, but I don’t want my sister to think it’s necessary or that she isn’t being a good wife for simply being a woman.

Further Reading

The Sex Issue of Evie magazine is tastefully presented. It never feels gross or too explicit despite the content. The criticisms I raise may be substantial, but they are such small portions of the magazine and easily removed or blotted out that they don’t detract from the overall helpfulness of the magazine. It is a wonderful guide for married women, and I do believe it will help many marriages. Nevertheless, because it lacks any moral instruction, it should not be read on its own.

If one is Catholic, they shouldn’t neglect to reference their catechism. A few stuffy books might be worthwhile reading, too. “Holy Sex!” by Gregory K. Popcak is the one I’ll probably give my sister when I give her the magazine.

However, it has dawned on me that a lot of my philosophical values concerning sex have been derived from reading literature about various romantic couples — sometime inspirational, at other times the dynamics are complicated or unhealthy.

Here is a short list of some of my favorites:

• “East of Eden” by John Steinbeck

• “The Sound of Waves” by Yukio Mishima

• “Great Expectations” and “Little Dorrit” by Charles Dickens

• “Green Dolphin Street” and “Child From the Sea” by Elizabeth Goudge

• “The Blue Castle” by L. M. Montgomery

Part of my journey toward Catholicism has led me to believe that the human experience is incomplete without sensuality. It is the means through which we digest beauty; through food, music, art, intimacy, and ultimately religion.

Too much prudishness stifles the soul. But the other extreme — porn and the kinkification of virtue — do as much damage. Through it all, may we meditate on the dignity of humanity. Only then will we comprehend devotion and submission in their proper forms, and learn to love our spouses as Christ loves us.

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When I was sixteen I tried to make a case to my mother for why I needed privacy.

My only friends were my pen-pals, but she required me to show her every letter before I mailed them to make sure I never wrote anything “bad” about the family. I begged her to stop, and she replied, “If you have nothing to hide you have no need for privacy.”

We homeschooled, but we were not registered and always refused the census. Privacy from the government was a big deal to us, and we were constantly afraid of CPS. Looking back I wish I would’ve responded with, “Then why do you want privacy from the government? Do we have anything to hide?”

Instead I felt there was something wrong with me for craving independence. Did this make me rebellious? The Bible says rebellion is as the sin of witchcraft, so maybe my desire for privacy meant I was like a witch.

I didn’t like going between my parents, but I’d had enough. I approached my father about the letters, and he told her to give me space. She was angry, but stopped reading my letters.

My father is now very involved in political activism, and likes to talk about how there is nothing more precious than freedom. I understand that better than many because I felt trapped for most of my teen years. When I turned eighteen, before my mother said “happy birthday” she said, “Now you know just because you turned eighteen doesn’t mean you can do whatever you want?”

I was angry. I had waited years to be old enough to leave home, and yet I realized I was stuck. I had nowhere to go.

When she asked me what I wanted, I said I wanted her to make me a high school diploma. I still wanted to go to college despite her wishes and knew I’d need one to enroll. She bought me some cowgirl boots instead, and said she would make a diploma, but never got around to it. Finally two years later, I got the paperwork for my Hi-SET, then took the two day test. Even though I’d had no books for high school, I excelled in every subject on the test except social studies which I just barely passed. I felt relieved. Maybe my education hadn’t been that bad after all.

It’s very hard to write honestly about my experience with homeschooling.

I instinctively want to apologize for saying anything bad about homeschooling. It seems wrong to admit that maybe public school isn’t always the worst option. I want to think my parents did the best they could. But I also have to admit that they failed me and my siblings, and that we aren’t outliers. My parents aren’t evil, but they have cherished beliefs that they’ve clung too so tightly, and they are unwilling to see the damage done by those beliefs.

I went with my father to a political rally when I was in my early twenties and we handed out copies of the Constitution of the United States of America. I overheard him tell someone how the State doesn’t want us knowing about our rights, so they don’t make kids read the Constitution in public school anymore. I cringed. I hadn’t read it, either, and I doubted any of my siblings ever had. I wondered if my father knew this. I asked him for a copy and I read the constitution for myself for the first time that night.

I wondered what would’ve happened if I’d read this as a teenager. Sure, my parents believed we all deserved freedom from the State. But there’s no freedom from mother’s apron strings until the day you die. You must honor your parents all the days of your life, and in our circles that means childlike obedience.

We were taught that a child always belongs to their parents and that the entire point of education was to be able to read the Bible1. Public school was bad because you might learn things you shouldn’t.

Taught By Women Who Didn’t Read

My great-grandfather pulled his children out of schools in the 1950s. Because it was illegal to homeschool, they chose to rent instead of own so if a truant officer were to discover the thirteen children playing during school hours the family could move house at a moment’s notice.

My great-grandparents were probably qualified to teach their children to read and do basic math. From their letters and poems, I believe they were well-read and well spoken. But there was no curriculum for homeschoolers in those days (that they knew about). Furthermore, they didn’t understand the purpose of education aside from learning to read the Bible. They failed to recognize how a complete education safeguards one’s religious and social freedoms. Furthermore they rejected the Classics, Latin, or anything else that seemed frivolous.

It is difficult to tell how well they taught their children, but I know most of my great aunts and uncles can’t spell and I highly doubt they’ve read a literary work. Nevertheless, their education was probably adequate and equaled or perhaps slightly surpassed what their peers received via public education.

The next generation was mostly homeschooled while it was still illegal. Although they never had any issues with CPS, it was during a time when many other families had their children taken away. The Amish received legal heat for taking their children out of public schools and not educating them past the 8th grade. Eventually the Amish won the right to run their own schools2 and not instruct their children past the 8th grade.

By the time my own generation was homeschooled, it was mostly legal to so do, but with some regulation which my family never complied with.

My parents could not afford to buy me material past the 8th grade, so I thrifted used college textbooks. I would often get a headache if I tried to study math in the daytime while my siblings played. Or maybe my mother would give me too many chores and I’d burn the bread while studying. Sometimes she’d ground me from my school if I studied too much because she feared it would make me a feminist. Because of all these things, I would wake up at 5am to get my school done before the others were awake.

Nevertheless, I was never tempted by public school. I believed public school made you dumb and immoral.

I liked having complete autonomy over my school. I had a love for learning and believed I would have been stunted had I attended public school where I might’ve been forced to learn stupid things that were inaccurate or boring. At a public school I would have had to sit still for eight hours and still have home work. Or maybe I would’ve been bullied for being a Christian and wearing dresses. I was grateful to be able to learn whatever I wished in the privacy of my bedroom.

I had no sympathy for other homeschoolers who claimed they needed a more structured setting to learn, or who complained about their parents holding them back. Thrift stores were available to all of us. Anyone could do as I did and secretly study in the pre-dawn hours of the morning.

I was a believer in education done right — at home, in bed, with a pile of books around you.

For one year my family hired an Amish teacher and I had a regular school routine. I went through three grades that year because I finally had access to books. Other than that one year, I had no structure or oversight, so there was no way I could know that although I was learning a lot about certain things, there were large gaps in my education that would make it difficult for me to assimilate in the real world once I turned eighteen.

Why Public Schools Failed

About 6% of school-aged children are homeschooled. What was once niche and illegal is now trending3. You no longer have to hide your children from the neighbors — you can own your home, plant your roots, and educate your children however you want.

Many States require parents to file a notice of intent to homeschool and then expect parents to meet the standards set by their local public schools. However, there are several states that require zero oversight for homeschooling.

The top reason parents choose to homeschool is concern for school environment4, followed closely by wanting to provide moral instruction, keep the family together, dissatisfaction in academia, and a fear of school shootings. All of this is exacerbated by media pushing sex ed/ gender theory onto teens then teachers reinforcing the propaganda through sermons on social equality causing young girls and boys to do irreversible damage to their bodies before they are emotionally certain of their place in the world, Popular news stories on children confiding to teachers about confusion around their sex then being removed from loving, healthy homes has led to further distrust in public education. Additionally, a child is three times more likely to be assaulted by a teacher than a religious leader.

More families than ever are choosing to homeschool to protect their children from politics, violence, and sloppy education.

The statistics are in favor of homeschooling regardless of parents’ credentials or finances5. Homeschooled children score 15-25 points higher than their public school peers, or 23-42 points higher if the student is black.

The numbers alone seem to suggest that homeschooling is the wisest choice.

However, these statistics aren’t based on the entire pool of homeschoolers and fails to account for families who aren’t testing or registering their children, which is most people I grew up with. The only students volunteering to be tested are the ones who excel or attend college. Additionally, it is easy to do well by comparison when the standard you’re competing with has fallen so low, as it lately has in the public school system.

True success is not measured by outperforming those who are failing. An education is more than just being able to read words on a page and figure basic arithmetic. It is the underpinning of understanding our humanity. An education permits those who might’ve been slaves to obtain power by breaking down natural barriers formed by disparities in inborn intellectual ability.

An education liberates us from the natural order of power constructs and enlightens the mind. It endeavors to make all men liberal. A true conservative would be content to go to synagogue, Church, or town square to hear the scripture or decrees read out for him, and finds no need to learn how to spell his own name when an X does the job sufficiently. Even the Amish who instruct their students no further than 8th grade are liberal compared to our illiterate hunter-gatherer ancestors. We all believe that men and women both deserve to know how to read. This is the essence of classical education in a nutshell.

We can confidently say that homeschooled students who volunteer their grades tend to perform better than public schooled students and sometimes do as well or better than private schooled students. But we have no idea except via anecdotal evidence of how many homeschooled children suffer neglect and educational abuse.

Parents are nervous about schools for good reason. The system has failed their children — public education is no longer a guaranteed option for securing a good education6, and neither is it safe. Nevertheless, the #1 place a child is likely to suffer is at home and the most likely person to abuse them is their parent.

The things causing school shootings, gender confusions, and moral decay starts at home, often behind a screen.

The Internet: Homeschooling Unraveled

My love of learning was mostly supplemented on 10¢ thrifted books and encyclopedias. I was drawn to calculus and thousand page books on history about wars and religion. I learned typing, sign language, German, and music theory all from books. I loved the classics and obscure old novels, although I was prohibited from reading most literary fiction if my mother sensed there might be any romance in them. Somehow Jane Austen equaled dollar-store smut in her mind. I didn’t like fluff except for the “Dear America” books.

Despite the flaws in my education, I was a sponge for information. The only resentment I felt then was not being allowed to read quality literary works and not having my hand on more books. But I had no intentions of being rebellious, so I never secretly read forbidden books even though I was sorely tempted. Looking back, I wish I had.

The best thing my parents did for me was not allow me to use the internet. In this, my homeschooled education allowed me some advantage over my public schooled peers because I had no distractions whatsoever.

I got a blog when I was sixteen, but wasn’t allowed to use the internet freely until I was nineteen, so social media never tampered with my pursuit for knowledge. However, this has not been the case for my siblings, cousins, and homeschooled friends. Most of them have had unmonitored access to video games, anime, and the internet.

This undid the pretense for homeschooling, which was supposed to protect the children from bullying or exposure to drugs and pornography. The parents in my circle maintained a high distrust for Latin and the Classics, and eliminated biology and geography as subjects altogether, teaching nothing about their bodies or the world outside the home. We were not allowed to do sleepovers or be alone with friends or have any privacy for fear we might talk about periods or how our bodies function.

And yet, the internet is available7 to most homeschoolers I know. Even in families where the children previously spent hours reading thick books or playing in the woods, they are now adapting queer aesthetics, bred in the isolation of their bedrooms.

The New Atlantis published an essay on the American Diner Gothic, a new type of person is sprouting up in rural areas at a higher rates that cities due. The author, Robert Mariani, writes:

This is the story of the collapse of the middle-class consensus.

The story goes like this. The great stagnation desacralizes local America through the homogeneous efficiency-machine of national private equity, and everything flattens. Gen Z is disinherited by Boomer policy that culminates but never crests, rationing the good life in generational warfare. Regional accents and identities and cultures are vanishing. Liquid Internet flows into this void as a mass-vision event, the mythic power of fandom and content overflowing from and washing over millions of minds in placeless America, the new soul of a soulless world. Subcultures and nerd cultures disappear into simply culture, self-oblivious and technicolor and sincere in a way that postmodernism could never permit. Instead: a riot of myth and meaning in the fandom-noosphere that bootstraps itself from and then forgets the North American provinces.

The sigh from the provinces is the Hello Kitty ketamine raver, the dispensary cashier in the Korn T-shirt, the TikTok cosplayer dancing in the parking lot, the VTuber with a day job in a suburban office park: the Deltarune hyperfixator, the Tumblr alumnus, the state college theater-enby, alt-prole girl-autism. Mallgoth aesthetics become Walmart defaults, subcultures converge into the downwardly mobile mass aesthetic. Anime becomes cool, not by assimilating into taste but by overwhelming it. Queerness leaves the sophistication-cradle of the urban bohemian elves and conquers the tacky masses of the hinterland middle and lower classes; the great severance comes in the form of hobbit parents shrugging at the total queering of their sons and daughters.

What Mariani describes here has become a default subculture in the homeschooling world. Parents maybe believed they were saving their children from locker room drama, but a greater monster has been unleashed on their children in the safety of their own homes.

Social media might be prohibited, but Discord and Pinterest are not. Together these two apps along with graphic novels and video games have created a cartoonish nightmare in the lives of cloistered children.

There’s a spectrum of results, but slowly the world of Christian homeschooling seems to be going woke through educational neglect:

Everyone has a reading disability and self diagnoses as autistic or dyslexic. They may morally reject bestiality or furries, but will say they relate to animals more than humans and refuse to or are not allowed to read literary fiction. They exclusively read or watch anime, fantasy, and adventure novels. They draw digital art and write fanfiction. If they write original works, it’s almost always fantasy.

They have social anxiety about the real world. Their anime is their virtue porn: they feel helpless to do anything noble in the real world, so it feels good to pretend that virtue doesn’t exist anywhere but in Asia. They get high thinking about nobility, but don’t have the gumption to do anything meaningful themselves. Western civilization is scary and bad. Femininity is ugly unless it’s anime. It would be better to be anything other than what one is, so they play dress up and role play, uninterested in the world outside their bedroom because it’s not Japan.

Their mothers are either too exhausted to do anything about it or are, ostensibly, paying the wifi bill as a bribe to keep their adult child from rebelling and running away. At least their child isn’t reading Steinbeck or Homer or becoming a girlboss. That would be REALLY terrible.

And so the thing that was meant to liberate the human mind has become a tool used to control and keep one’s offspring living like perpetual toddlers. The internet allows the homeschooling farce to go on.

What’s even scarier is that many from this homeschooled generation believe in the superiority of homeschooling. If they marry (many of them do) they will homeschool their children because that’s what one does. As her son games or views porn, mothers will claim, “Children aren’t meant sit down all day, but should be home with their mothers where they can play outside and build things with their hands.”

Maybe they are correct to believe it is better to remain under mother’s thumb idling the hours away than sit for eight hours a day studying history.

Because there are no books, or they aren’t spending much time in them, the education has deteriorated. Life is geared toward re-watching saved reels and scrolling memes.

The new generation of homeschoolers communicates in a language of recently invented cultural references. They’re turning primitive: it’s not really about teaching children to read the Bible as much as understanding the paintings on the cave walls their graphic novels.

I’m terrified when I imagine the current generation — who spend much of their leisure time gaming or watching reels — having families and homeschooling their own children.

The Return of the Cabbage Growers

Only one of my siblings is as unhappy with her education as I am. Another sibling was academically gifted, so my mother didn’t make him study, and now he’s the furthest behind out of all of us but doesn’t care because he’s making plenty of money. The rest of my siblings claim their 3rd-4th grade education is perfectly adequate for the life they want to live. Most of my homeschooled friends have no complaints about their education either. All of my siblings and friends plan to homeschool their own children when the time comes. Many of them prefer the “unschooling” method: learning with only books and no proper curriculum. Most of them also believe in censoring which book their kids will read, though, and will prohibit a majority of the Classics along with much of history, geography, biology, and social studies.

Who am I to argue with their lived experiences? Perhaps compulsory education has been a mistake. The people want to be illiterate.

One could argue that I, my siblings, and my friends have suffered from educational neglect8. But so did my parents and my grandparents. None of them were properly homeschooled. Is it neglect if everyone is on the same downhill trajectory and only a few of us are unhappy about it? Especially when our public schooled peers are also graduating without being able to read9 or hold down a job? At least many of my siblings are successful business owners.

Nearly all of my siblings boast in their ignorance10. When I take my siblings to task for their insufficient educations and how they probably shouldn’t homeschool their own children if ever they have any, they will argue, “An education isn’t really that important.”

Why read a book when you could just Google anything you might need to know? ChatGPT knows more anyways. They’re never going to travel or run for political offices. They take a black marker to all the encyclopedia pages containing art of “naked statues”. They dream of starting their own churches that are more “bible-based” than the churches that burned their trust. They have their own ideas of history they dreamed of while herding goats. They cling to their superstition. They sincerely believe they are superior for growing cabbages and singing off-tune melodies.

And maybe they are. They may become slaves to men more powerful than they, but the Bible says, “He who wants to be great must become a servant.”11

You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him drink. And should you even try when the “fountain” of public education" is now contaminated and diseased? Should everyone be force to get an education if they don’t want it?

In this modern era of compulsory education we often forget that literacy is not a natural right.

For much of history, most people believed that education was a frivolous pursuit compared to a day of hard labor. One couldn’t eat a books. Even many aristocrats were skeptical of literacy, and unless it pertained to warfare, they might not teach all of their children to learn to read. Furthermore, a daughter12 might receive an education before a son since she would be in charge of the finances while a son might be sent away to war.

However, there were some who believed educating the masses would put an end to class divisions, and so priests and nuns established schools for young children. Those who excelled might be hand-picked to continue learning, often leaving home to live with the priests or nuns. Literacy slowly spread. Families who could afford to do so might hire tutors and governesses. Nevertheless, education remained decentralized, private, and was not a concern of the mothers13.

This changed with the industrial revolution and a need to standardize a compulsory education system. Benevolent activists wanted the common man freed from superstition and put on a level playing field. Not only did all men deserve access to an education, America wanted employees for her factories.

And so public schools emerged, many of them still teaching the religion of that community. This system began to crack in America in the mid 1800s with the secularization of schools.

Murray Rothbard writes, “one of the major motivations of mid-nineteenth-century American ‘educational reformers’ who established the modern public school system was precisely to use it to cripple the cultural and linguistic life of the waves of immigrants into America, and to mold them into ‘one people.’

It wasn’t enough to free the people of their illiterate superstition. Religion, too, would have to go. Rothbard writes further of the demise of privatized education:

The public school reformers saw the parochial schools as a menace to the goal of imposing a uniform American-Protestant culture on all children.

The campaign reached its peak in the 1920s in Oregon, where a law was passed outlawing private and parochial schools and forcing all children to attend the public schools.

For the spearheads of the law were not, as we might expect, liberal or progressive educators or intellectuals; the spearhead was the Ku Klux Klan, then strong in the northern states, which was eager to crush the Catholic parochial school system, and to force all Catholic and immigrant children into the neo-Protestantizing and ‘Americanizing’ force of the public school.”

~ From “Education: Free & Compulsory” by Murray Rothbard

This attempt to remove Catholicism, and then all religion, from schools, would eventually lead to a homeschooling resistance in the twentieth century when evolutionary theory replaced the Creation Story. All one needed, after all, was to be able to read and write enough to sign one’s name and read the Bible.

The burden of the new workload was dumped onto mothers who had no training to be teachers. But they embraced this new role with enthusiasm, because they believed it would save their child’s soul from pollution.

It Takes A Village: Baby Fever to Story-Teller

I’ve never resented being the oldest of twelve or helping out with the little ones while my mom was sick in bed. But when I was seventeen and my mom told me she was expecting another baby, I responded with, “Why? You aren’t even able to handle the rest your children?”

I didn’t mind the workload or helping. But I had no sympathy for her baby fever when it seemed to me everything was falling apart in our home.

My words were harsh. I was not suggesting birth control, but I was upset that my mother seemed more excited to have another baby than try to get her home in order. I felt she was neglecting her duties homeschooling and disciplining the rest of the children, and I was right to feel this way, especially since I knew any increase in chores would fall on my shoulders. My siblings’ and my education would be put on the back burner once more.

My mother simply couldn’t do it all.

She was never meant to. Who decided that a busy, pregnant mother suffering morning sickness should ever have to take on the added task of educating her children? And to do it all alone without the help of aunts, grandmothers, or church community?

It was no fool who said it takes a village to raise a child. A mother was never meant to do it alone.

We need teachers so mothers can enjoy their baby fever years without feeling like failures.

Motherhood is beautiful because of the sacrifices a mother must make for her children, but the extra expectations leveled on the modern homeschooled mother profit no one. Mothers needs ample time to weave and gossip — so many homeschooled mothers I know are like zombies, unable to create anything beautiful because they’re checked and overwhelmed. And yet, they grit through their days, dead-eyed, believing that homeschooling is the only moral option.

Tribes and villages have always had storytellers so the children might grow up to know who they are and where they came from. A mother simply can’t be expected to fill this role for her children while she is bent over a toilet vomiting or snuggling her newborn infant at her breast. A village is required not only to successfully raise children, but also for the sanity and health of the mother.

Last winter when pregnant, I would nap for large portions of the day. I didn’t mind the morning sickness because I had no obligations. But I started thinking, “How am I going to manage being sick and this exhausted while pregnant once I’m homeschooling older children?”

Some time after that I went to a dinner with my mother and we met a woman who had ten or so children. She shared how she’d recently stopped homeschooling her children and enroll them at a Christian school. Her children were thriving; yes, they had less playtime, but the structure had allowed them to catch up. And the mother confessed that it was nice not having to juggle the various roles of mother and teacher anymore. She was now working a part-time job to help cover the tuition, yet felt she had more quality time with her children. Everyone was happier.

I could see my mother judging the other mother throughout this conversation. She believed this woman was a failure for having given up on her “values”. But I was impressed.

This woman had put her pride aside and had prioritized her children’s educations. The mother went onto say that she might pull one of her children out at some point because academia wasn’t as important to them. She was open to being flexible. She had lowered her standards for herself to something that was more reasonable and achievable. She wasn’t going to tie herself to an ideology.

My own patch-work education is proof that homeschooling is not inherently superior. Although I have above average reading, writing, and math skills, when I married I did not know the three branches of the American government, how many oceans there are, or what you call the process of plants converting light into oxygen.

Homeschoolers like to argue that homeschooling is superior to public school because of how bad public schools have become. But maybe this isn’t ideal. Maybe this is like saying formula is better than breastmilk because some babies are lactose intolerant. “Fed is best” — it’s better to have a poor education than be propagandized. But homeschooled education also comes with costs that can quickly outmatch the dangers of public education with unlimited screen use, social isolation, overbearing or abusive parents, and no access to quality reading materials.

If you can’t afford the books, if you’re sick in bed, if your children are struggling academically, wouldn’t it be better to send them to whatever school you can afford and then supplement their moral formation at home?

We might not be able to trust modern-day public education. But at least it offers some advantage to those who don’t want to be farmers and shepherds.

The End of Faith and Literacy

For years I’ve dreamed of writing my own homeschool curriculum that would incorporate all subjects into one single lesson per day lasting no more than two hours. But I’ve been second guessing myself after the birth of my daughter. I don’t want to be so wed to a “family tradition” that I fail her. I don’t feel equipped to homeschool anymore. However I also don’t trust public school to do a better job. The statistics might be misleading for homeschoolers, but the numbers for public education are all too real.

Like it or not, society is doom-scrolling toward a post-literate state. But we aren’t returning to growing cabbages and writing ballads. This illiteracy is more dark and sinister than mere superstition and hard work. It is fueled by propaganda and mind control that the masses readily consume via the internet, all the while believing that somehow they are more enlightened than “professional and experts who are all brainwashed” on any given subject.

Perhaps not all of my children will be gifted academically. My goal isn’t to force my children to become scholars, but I want them to have the opportunity.

I have only a few advantages over my mother and grandmothers. My self-education may be lacking, but at least I am well-read. Additionally, I have a husband who is well-educated and excited to help with the education of our children. If we homeschool, I won’t be doing it alone.

Private school is not an affordable option for everyone. However, if one is going to choose to homeschool, they must accept the financial realities of that. If one can’t afford to home-educate, they should feel no shame in sending their children to school, especially if one likes their community.

A few months ago, my husband stumbled upon an essay about an Amish girl who became a Runway model in Tokyo. She wrote how her parents joined a Mennonite church, but for some reason decided to homeschool her instead of sending her to the Mennonite school. She was the odd one among the girls at her church and was never able to make close friends. It is no wonder she eventually left her faith to look for a community she could wholly embrace.

Too many homeschooled parents make the mistake of trying so hard to keep their children separate from the world that they isolate their families from Christian communities. This does no favors to anyone. There is no perfect community, but it is important to search one out anyways and fully assimilate if you want your children to retain their faith. Fragmenting one’s family from a chosen community often fosters resentment in the children and adds unnecessary burdens to the mother’s life.

Perhaps some children will do better with fewer books, spending much of their childhood outdoors tending goats and growing cabbages. So be it. But in America, children have certain educational rights so they don’t feel thrown to the wolves when they grow up and (hopefully) leave their mother’s care.

A healthy homeschool environment with unlimited access to quality books can produce a good learning environment as long as there is structure and the parents aren’t overbearing. A healthy public or private education can do the same. Any net positive achieved by homeschooling is quickly undone by the presence of internet in the home. Instead of being so attached to a single model, we (parents and teachers) should be open to whatever is best for the individual child.

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Hi Keturah,

I have a question for manners and morals! Thank you!

I’m a mother of two and bring in an income that’s pretty good having almost twenty years experience in my field as a licensed professional. My husband does the care work of homeschooling and caring for our boys (seven and three) and the household chores during the day.

I hate this set up.

My job is bearable but I don’t love it nor care a whit about professional recognition and it’s super stressful. Financially it made no sense to keep my husband working the minimum wage job he held previously. We are very thrifty with house and car (one used car, small house, dodgy area) so with just my income we can afford extras like music lessons and sports for our kids and high-quality, whole foods, and occasional out-of-pocket naturopath doctors; the homeschool programs we attend are paid for by the school district.

I see my kids at their worst time of day (when I get home late and they’re getting ready for bed). My husband gets to spend all day with them.

Do I just suck it up and understand as an adult that I need to do what it takes (work 50-hour weeks in an office) to take care of my kids even if that means not getting to do the hands-on care work I want to do and would be really good at? Do I risk my family’s stability leaving this job and taking on freelance (which would entail complicated set-up, stressful and not-lucrative in my field) to supplement the much lower income my husband could make? Is giving up kid’s music lessons, sports and high-quality, whole, organic food so I can be the primary caregiver a selfish act and a disservice to my kids when they already have a full-time stay-at-home-parent?

Dear Reader,

I asked my husband the other day if he would consider our relationship to be “egalitarian”. We both agreed we are not. Yes, we both respect the other’s domains. He doesn’t tell me what to do in the day-to-day matters and trusts my judgement when it comes to the baby, meals, etc. I dress modestly, but he’s not the one telling me what modesty means (sometimes I ask for his thoughts on a garment I feel uncertain about). Neither of us are looking to “control” the other one. I submit to my husband, but not in the way a child does with their father. He’s not barking orders at me nor am I subservient to him.

We are both very hands off and aren’t in the the habit of making demands from each other, so by all appearances many would assume that we are egalitarian, or complementary at most.

However egalitarianism assumes that roles of mothers and fathers are somehow interchangeable. While there may be preferred ways of splitting tasks, at the end of the day it’s all personal choice and there will be no negative outcomes if you decide to change things up.

I reject the idea that parenting is a genderless construct or that mothers and fathers are basically the same. Sure, in an emergency a father can give a child their bottle and a mother can be the provider, but messing with the natural order of things often ends disastrously, and in my opinion, may result in children suffering gender dysphoria or struggle to have healthy marriages.

That being said, we in the modern era are so disconnected from the natural order of things that it can be difficult to know what an authentic traditional life ought to look like without LARPing. If you’re looking for a resource on this topic, I highly recommend Ivan Illich’s essays on “Gender”.

However, I will share a few opinions of my own. Do with them as you will.

Ideally, a child should have both mother and father at home, preferably in that order. Consumerism and capitalism do not build healthy families. If possible, avoid anything that forces either parent to pursue manna over virtue.

Many of the things you list are good things. But you seem to instinctively realize that the pursuit of these good things is destructing from the home life. Your children need you more than they need healthy food or music lessons. Furthermore, your workload isn’t increasing your personal joy.

There are several things I might do if I were in your shoes:

1. Sign up for SNAP or WIC. The government does very little good, but supporting large families by providing healthy food is a thing to be applauded. There is no shame in accepting these benefits if it allows your family to remain a whole unit.

2. Connect with your local Amish. They often have ways of accessing food and herbs for a fraction of the normal prices.

3. Transition to part-time freelance work so you have a little extra for the naturopath. My mother also used to bake pies or other baked goods for our naturopath, and she was willing to trade although the trade was not completely “fair”.

4. Encourage the children to cultivate hobbies that might earn them a little income so they can pay for their own music lessons and sports clothes. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with a child finding a way to pay for the things they value. When I was a teenager, I used to bake for a farmer’s market. I traded baked goods for sketching lessons. The money I earned was used for art supplies. I found much meaning in being able to pay for my own lessons and supplies. I have also taught piano lessons, and when I did, was always willing to accept eggs or maple syrup in trade for my services. I have also done mending in trade of things like massages, cleaning in trade of photography, tires, or bulk foods (for small businesses).

I hope this illustrates that one can be both a good mother and find ways to provide the extras one feels her children might need or want. You might have to stretch the imagination a little, but it seems you and your family are already well suited to thriftiness and pitching in together. That skill will help your family more than anything.

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Growing up, my parents agreed that the internet and TV were taboo. We listened to story-cassettes on our radio and watched VHS tapes on our box television set. Our father was a hardworking man with very little time for family activities, but when we were little he liked to buy a new movie from the discount bin at Walmart and we’d watch a movie together after dinner.

Usually this was okay.

But sometimes my mother would get into one of her religious fits. She take us older children aside and say, “I’m not saying you can’t watch movies with Dad, but I won’t be watching them with him anymore because the Bible says it’s wrong to set anything evil before your eyes. However, it’s your choice. So don’t tell Dad that I said you can’t watch the movies with him if you decide it’s not a good thing to do.”

I loved spending time with my father, but I wanted to please God more. So when Dad would put the movie on I’d say, “I’m going to read instead.” My younger siblings, too, would choose to do something else. Sometimes.

Sometimes we’d watch the movie, and our mother’s glare would let us know God was angry with us. And so the next night we would go to another room while our father watched a movie.

I remember one time sitting on the kitchen floor reading a book. But I couldn’t read the words on the page because my eyes were filled with tears I had to hide. I was the only one who’d chosen to do the “right thing”. The rest of my siblings were watching “Walker Texas Ranger” with my father, a favorite show of ours. My mother was in her room. I wanted to scurry to my bedroom so I wouldn’t hear the show or my siblings’ laughter, but I was nervous they might see me crying if I walked by. Or maybe mom would think I was trying to catch a glimpse of the television. My father called out, “Keturah, why don’t you come watch the movie with us!”

“I’m reading!” I lied.

My younger brother came into the kitchen during a break. I whispered, “Why are you watching the show? You know it’s bad.”

“It’s not bad,” he insisted, hurrying back to the living room.

What made all this more confusing, is sometimes my mom would forget her lecture to us, and she’d watch the movies with the family. When she did that, I would tentatively join the family. Surely, if she was doing it then it wasn’t so wrong after all. My guilt would wash away, and I’d enjoy the time spent with my family.

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The Crunchy Nag

I’m not qualified yet to give an abundance of marriage advice, but if there’s anything I’ve witnessed in my short life, it’s that no husband appreciates his wife beating him over the head with the Bible and her private interpretations. Most men want a partner to do life with, not someone to yuck their yum at every turn.

“You really should stop drinking soda if you don’t want to die young.”

“I don’t want our children listening to that music. Please turn the radio off.”

“The Holy Spirit has been speaking to me about your friends, and I realize I’m no longer comfortable with you having your friends over anymore.”

“Take your shoes off!”

“Put the toilet seat down!”

“Why are your dirty underwear on the floor? You’re such a child.”

Nobody wants to be handed a piece of cake that has the icing licked off. This is what it’s like to live with a contentious wife1. Such women claim to be on a crusade for holiness in the family. They are certainly on a crusade, but they aren’t helping their family get to the Promised City any faster with their private interpretations of Scripture.

I have a friend whose parents divorced when she was a teenager. She told me that all her father ever wanted was for his wife to sit down and have a cup of coffee with him in the morning. But she hated coffee and was always overwhelmed with a bunch of little things nobody asked her to worry over. “I often wonder if my parents would be together if they’d just drank coffee together each morning.”

My parents are still together, but their marriage isn’t something that I’d call inspirational. I’ve always believed there might be a little more love between them if my mother had simply chosen to let go of her holier-than-thou attitude and enjoy life with my father.

And maybe if she had, he would’ve been more interested in having conversations about what movies we watched together as a family. Instead, the issue remained tense and inconsistent throughout my childhood.

Let Your Hair Down and Have a Drink

I’d resolved to drink the coffee and watch the movies if that’s what my husband wanted. But he could do without both of those. What he loves is having a drink with the old men, and he wants his wife at his side.

I don’t believe it’s wrong to drink (the Bible only prohibits drunkeness) however, I grew up a teetotaler, so bar culture is foreign to me. When I first started going with my husband I hated it. I had nothing in common with anyone there. The atmosphere is crass and hostile toward femininity2. The chairs are high and uncomfortable. I don’t have a taste for the booze. Even the bar ladies often snub me, probably offended by my naive prudishness.

Many women in my circles advise young wives to not go to bars with their husbands. But why? That would be like refusing to go out to eat with your husband because the Bible condemns gluttony.

I could be like Vashti and refuse to show, but I’d rather be more supportive like Esther3. I’m not interested in changing my husband or making him give up anything that God doesn’t ask him to give up. It’s not my job to do the work of the Holy Spirit. And if I’m worried about my own salvation . . . well, the Bible says I’m saved through child-bearing4 not by beating my husband into submission. So if I’m feeling an urge to get my husband on the straight and narrow, I probably just need to have a few more babies.

I can have all the high and mighty ideas I want for myself, but the Holy Spirit isn’t going to convert me into a nag. Nobody wants to be controlled or changed. I don’t want my husband berating me anymore than he wants me to constantly get on his case. It’s not good for the children either. They more than anyone need to see two parents respecting and building each other up in love.

The beautiful bonus about choosing to enjoy life with your husband is he remains your best friend.

What’s the point to marriage if you’re not vibing?

We get to do through everything together. The music he likes I also like. His friends become my friends. Where he goes, I want to go, too5. What he loves, I love, too. I didn’t marry a fixer-upper, but a man I adore.

Thank you for reading Polite Company. If you’d like to support my work you can buy me a coffee or commission a hand sewn, knitted or tatted item.

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Note: This is a guest post written by Mitochondrial Eve. She and I became twitter mutuals after I discovered her thread on how cross-dressing became normalized. Her work has been both encouraging and influential for me — it’s always validating to realize your didn’t just “dream up” your beliefs, but that others have held these same convictions longer than you have.

She recently posted the following on twitter:

Longer spacing between babies is trad. Lactation amenorrhea is a legitimate form of birth control and more effective when women are low body fat percentage.

You underestimate the overwhelming aspects of modern life. Imagine not needing to worry about your kid's education.

This is going to sound weird, but I think mundane life was more sexually charged in the past. Between the highly sexed clothing, separation of male/female spaces, gender roles, etc, I think daily life was just more erotic for women.

I was particularly interested in the line “Imagine not needing to worry about your kid’s education.” There are so many things that women now have to concern them selves with that they never before had to, and they have to do it without a village! I’ve always known this, however the I never connected it with education. Maybe, I thought, homeschooling isn’t actually so trad. Maybe it’s not actually good for a woman to be concerned with being both her child’s mother and their teacher. Not only does this heavy her burden, it makes like less “erotic” for women. Where once it was okay for her to be in constant baby fever mode because the village would’ve been concerned with raising and educating the older children, she now has to hit pause on those instincts and think about all her children a little more.

For better or worse, it’s an interesting thought experiment. I asked her to write that thought out into an essay, and this is the result.

You can follow Mitochondrial Eve on Substack and X.

Mystery stands at the core of attraction between the sexes. Our highly dimorphic nature puts distance between us, drawing up a curtain of separation through which the rare stolen glimpse into the world of the opposite sex was wrapped in weighty consequences. To know one another—just as is biblically understood—is a dangerous game. Like the poles of a magnet, attraction between the sexes is an escalating force. A glimpse leads to a touch. A touch leads to joining. Joining leads to procreation.

Our ancestors saw the danger that poorly timed procreation could sow, and they rightly reinforced that dimorphic curtain, drawing it up tight with numerous social and legal guardrails that put careful separation between the sexes. This separation revolved around biological and social markers. Puberty was the entrance into adulthood and the end of free mixing between the sexes. After puberty, marriage became the central institution of civilization, through which procreation was regulated and paternity guaranteed.

The separation between the sexes had the important function of keeping procreation within the bonds of marriage, but to this end, mystery and eroticism was engendered.

Our dimorphic clothing is the most visible illustration of this. In the western world until the last century, men historically wore trousers and pants while women wore skirts and dresses. In other cultures, men might wear a kilt or a toga, but in all civilized cultures, there was clear distinction between men’s and women’s clothing. This universal constant goes back millennia, predating the Bronze Age and persisted until very recently.

Our modern gnosticism does not understand the psychological and spiritual impact of our bodies’ interaction with the physical world. We are spiritually transgender—believing our maleness or femaleness is defined by how we internally classify ourselves, instead of how our bodies appear and how we are perceived.

In our ancestors’ age, our maleness and femaleness were front and center, obvious to our eyes and tactile under our fingertips. Our clothing was highly sexed and our aesthetic separation stark. The dimorphic curtain between us was heavy and drawn up tight. Without androgyny or familiarity between the sexes, mystery was allowed to flourish.

In western tradition, a woman’s lower body was draped in fabric reflecting her innate unsuitability for rough labor that would be difficult in long skirts. The source of her fertility was veiled so that even the outline of legs leading to it was hidden. The practical male uniform communicated a telos totally polar to the female—the masculine capability for physical work and violence.

Our respective uniforms told a story. Feminine fragility and masculine virility was tactile, an ever-present, obvious signal to everyone around us and to our own nerve endings. This separation was not just present in clothing. Our roles were highly sexed with very little intermingling. Men’s and women’s spaces were strictly segregated. Interaction between men and women were subject to social regulation so intense that in Regency England, the touch of ungloved hands was highly controversial.

The polarity between the sexes was highly charged and our dimorphic life force was potent. You could call this polar energy eroticism, as it is the hetero—the force between opposites—that is the root of hetero-sexual desire and primitive form of eros. Dimorphism is the driving force behind lust and love between the sexes.

Compare the erotic energy of the English Victorian Era—one that is slandered as “prudish” when a visible female stockinged ankle was cause for controversy—to today when spandexed camel toe, sports bras and butt cracks are a common sight on our city streets.

Like the animal in captivity that self-pleasures but refuses to reproduce, our modern clothing is not a symptom of hyper-sexualization but rather a weak sexuality drained of all polarity. The female of our species is trapped in an ever-escalating war for male sexual attention, forced to display herself more and more provocatively to draw a sexual response from impotent men and a culture that has been drained of all eroticism, eros and higher purpose.

That higher purpose, the end of eros—procreation—and its destruction is behind all the social rot of the modern age. The controls over our fertility that grew more and more advanced in the 19th and 20th centuries track in conjunction with the end of sexual dimorphism and the legal and social convergence of the sexes that culminated in women entering the workforce. In curing women of the inevitability of motherhood, we did not liberate the female sex, but rather transed her, replacing her feminine telos with that of a weak and effeminate man.

Eve was tempted by Satan to become like God and received the curse of pain in childbirth as a reward. Satan tempts her still, now making her believe she can end the curse of childbirth once and for all simply by becoming a man.

We have made a deal with the Devil. In order to seize control of fertility from God’s hands, we have poisoned the roots of our sexual drive—our sexual dimorphism— killing eroticism and eros in the process.

One by one, the roots of our dimorphism have been cut off. The marriage contract was made egalitarian. Sex segregated spaces eliminated. Our clothing androgenized. Female fertility sterilized. Root by root, the foundations for human lust and love were destroyed.

In the death of dimorphism, the convergence of the sexes into a single androgynous being has eliminated all mystery between us. The pesky problem of procreation has been solved, bleeding the magnetic polarity between us, rendering the pull impotent.

But human sexuality is not programmed for uniformity. Healthy human beings—hetero-sexuals—are attracted to what is different, not what is familiar.

Androgeny is the enemy of eroticism and familiarity is the death of eros.

The convergence of the sexes has been at a slow simmer since the Enlightenment, but the effects have hit a breaking point in the past few decades. Marriage and fertility rates are at a steep decline. Sexlessness is at an all time high. It seems something has fundamentally broken between us.

Heterosexuality is irrevocably opposed to the post-Enlightenment liberal world order. Sexual dimorphism is antithetical to the liberal mandate that hierarchies be flattened and distinctions between individuals erased. The two can not coexist.

And in the past century, the modern liberal order has reigned supreme. Nowhere is this better illustrated than the English marriage contract which has been transformed through incremental changes over the past 150 years. Like Theseus’s Ship, the institution that our Anglo ancestors knew as marriage has been entirely and fundamentally replaced so much so that two men or two women can now sign the same contract and enter the same status as a man and wife.

The Gay-ing of Marriage in the English Common Law

1870: Coverture begins to be dismantled

1923: Male infidelity becomes grounds for divorce

1925: Coverture fully ends

1925: End of father default custody of children in event of divorce
1928: Full women’s suffrage

1946: Ban on married women working in civil service overturned

1961: The contraceptive pill made available to married women

1973: Partial no-fault divorce enacted

1975: Discrimination of women in hiring made illegal

1991: “Marital rape” illegalized

2013: Gay marriage legalized

2022: Full no-fault divorce enacted

Conservatives fundamentally misunderstand the gay marriage debate. The institution of marriage was not opened to homosexuals. The gay-ing of marriage took place over more than a century unilaterally for all married people in the entire western world until marriage as was historically known ceased to exist. Male roles were feminized and female roles were masculinized until all inequality and distinction faded away.

The destruction of marriage is a microcosm for the slow, insidious decline of all heterosexuality. Modern liberalism has chipped away at our maleness and femaleness so thoroughly that our inborn sexual drive, that erotic attraction to mystery—hetero—has no outlet. Like the blind man who may philosophically know a sunrise is beautiful, modern man might proclaim his heterosexuality and love for women without ever having known one.

After all, what is a woman? Her soft curves have been sharpened so she may compete in the male workplace. Her dangerous fertility has been sterilized to liberate her. Her clothing doesn’t tell a story of mysterious fragility, but rather her suitability for athleticism or hard labor.

The modern heterosexual male is chronically starved for the extinct female of the species and he doesn’t even know it. His sexuality, therefore, is so weakened and demoralized that while our “prudish” Victorian ancestors needed only the glimpse of a stockinged ankle peeking from under yards of feminine skirts, the modern man needs porn. The sex organs are the only dimorphic trait that has been spared from the convergence, so they are the only stimulus that will come close to satisfying the modern man’s heterosexual urges.

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The modern woman has a different drug to placate her frustrated heterosexuality that has no real outlet in our modern world. In killing ovulation, hormonal contraceptives destroy the female sexual drive as well. The Devil exacts his price: there is no separating the danger of fertility from a woman’s heterosexuality, they are part and parcel.

The other outlet for the repressed female drive is fiction—the female verbal foil to male visual pornography. As male virility has been neutered, his disproportionate strength reigned in and all power hierarchies flattened by the modern status quo, women have created for themselves a parallel fiction about men to maintain a glimmer of eroticism in our sexless age. In this fiction, women tell themselves lurid stories: rape is about power; men are always seeking to subjugate women; and that men lurk in every dark corner ready to pounce. In the female mind, these stories transform weak, feminized men into tantalizing sexual animals.

You’ll often hear leftists say with a clever smirk that the trad wives and their patriarchal husbands are acting out a sexual fetish rather than a genuine worldview. In a way, they are correct. The fetish is heterosexuality and the trads are attempting to reestablish the sexual dimorphism—the hetero—that is at its core.

You’ll hear others criticize the trads’ preoccupation with aesthetics, ignorant to the importance of visual and tactile reminders of our femaleness and maleness. The critics mistake the trad wife’s dress as superficial, forgetting that for men, eroticism begins in the eyes and fuels their virility and life force. The patriarch too is insulted as an incel, closeted homosexual or chauvinist, and the saying “the only way he can feel big is by making a woman small” is often repeated. Here, it is forgotten that female heterosexuality begins with power imbalance.

Where feminists invent erotic fiction as a coping mechanism, the trads seek the real thing: a real, concrete polarity and hierarchy within marriage that transforms the relationship from a gay civil union into a highly-charged spiritual and physical joining of two becoming one flesh.

If the trads deserve any criticism, it’s that they don’t go hard enough. There are far too many who have co-opted traditional aesthetics without committing to the underlying premise. Our war isn’t with fourth wave feminism or seed oils, it’s with the entire post-Enlightenment worldview that destroyed our sexual dimorphism, social class, hierarchy and nations. Everything must be questioned. But few will have the courage for the questions that must be asked. The tenets of a religion we didn’t even know we’ve been following must be reexamined, no matter how sacred they might be. Women’s suffrage is just the beginning.

What is necessary will be incredibly painful. But the pains of this rebirth are essential to the survival of our species. Plato presents eros as the fundamental motivational energy of human existence—driving artistic creation, moral virtue, philosophical wisdom and procreation. It’s the spark that counters stagnation and mortality by propelling humanity toward wholeness, beauty, and the eternal. If we can not find a way to nurture eros through a reestablishment of sexual dimorphism and eroticism, we will continue our trajectory towards a slow, pathetic extinction.

Hello Keturah,

I’d like to have a family one day, but right now I don’t have any promising romantic relationships on the horizon. I don’t want to spend my time as a single woman just waiting around or longing for something that may not align with God’s will. I’ve been considering picking up a skilled trade. There’s a solid chance for me to apprentice in the electrician’s union, and from what I can tell, the work itself would be engaging and satisfying. Still, I’m not entirely sure whether it’s the smartest way to use this season of my life. What are your thoughts? Does it make sense to go for this opportunity, or would my time be better spent in a different direction?

Any advice you have to offer would be much appreciated.

Dear Reader,

I remember all too well being where you’re at now. Even when I was young, I never could relate to all my peers who sat around prepping for a marriage they were never promised. I wanted to get married, but I didn’t want to idly dream and find myself an aged, disappointed old-maid who’d done nothing but fill my hope-chest with things I never got to use.

However, I didn’t want to do something that would leave me ill-prepared for marriage, either. I wasn’t interested in pursuing a degree that might give me nothing but debt in exchange and a career that I’d have to abandon the moment I started having babies. Yet . . . if I wasn’t to marry or have children, I wanted to be doing something with my life.

I believe this question was a little easier for Christian women a couple hundred years ago. They used to have three clear choices: marry young and raise a family, remain at home and engage herself in feminine employment, or enter the convent and serve God in prayer and poverty. Now we modern women are encouraged to do one thing: get a job and become a little man. Marriage and even ministry-work can wait — because what if your husband leaves you or dies? The modern person is quite concerned with livelihood.

It’s complicated further because we are expected to make good use of our youth and maybe even prolong our singlehood in order to secure an education that pays.

I’m not wholly against this. I’m all for education especially when it involves expanding the mind through literacy. Furthermore, I’m not opposed to women working. Women have always worked.

The real question here is what sort of job is appropriate for a Christian woman who hopes to be a mother and wife someday?

I believe you must keep two things in mind when pursuing education and employment. Will this help you if you are widowed or never married? Will the work environment nourish your femininity or ask too much of you? And will you also be able to use this skill as a mother and wife?1

I don’t believe the electrician union would be a healthy environment for a young woman. While it may be cool to fix your own household electricity if you became a mother, it’s hardly worthwhile to pursue an apprenticeship for that reason alone. You would be in a male dominated field and many of your co-workers would likely be perverse and impolite and have no regard for your femininity.

I strongly recommend choosing something that would permit you to foster all your best feminine qualities. House-cleaning, tutoring, nannying, and clothing alterations are all great lines of work that pay well and empower a woman regardless what season of life she is in. These are also easy jobs to pick up and quit as needed. If you considering obtaining a degree, choose something that you won’t regret being in debt for even if you never have the chance to use it in any way other than with your own children.

I would also encourage you to not work away all your single days. While it’s nice to have a fat dowry for marriage (I did), now is the one of the only times in life you’ll have with no obligations to little children and so you can make yourself available to other mothers or older women or do some sort of ministry work. You can also use this time to expand your skills or travel. I wrote about some things you can do while you’re single here.

Whatever you choose to do, never forget to choose things that will nourish your femininity. Trust God and He will bring you where you need to be.

Thank you for reading Polite Company. My writing is not pay-walled, however if you’d like to support my work you can buy me a coffee or commission a handmade sewn, knitted, or tatted item.

My morning routine is very simple. I put on clean clothes1. I brush my hair and put on a covering. I wash my face, brush my teeth, and sometimes apply a little face cream. I almost always spend more time on the baby than I do myself. And yet, I never feel bad about my appearance because I love the dresses I wear.

Even though I’m postpartum and have a little more weight than I’d like, my dresses help me maintain a positive mindset about my body. They’re comfortable and flattering even with the extra baby pounds.

The other day my husband and I were walking down the road when we saw a woman come out of her apartment. She had a full face of make-up, but her hair was piled high on her head and she was still in her pajamas. A common Upstate New York sight. My husband commented, “It astounds me when you can tell a woman spent an hour in front of the mirror but she still doesn’t looked ready for the day.”

I confess, putting on a dress is much easier than doing one’s make-up. However, just because it’s the lazy woman’s beauty hack doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile. Putting on a dress and keeping your hair tidy is a statement. It’s choosing to be feminine while simultaneously avoiding vanity. It’s the best of all worlds.

However, not all dresses are equal.

Another time my husband and I were out shopping, he pointed to a woman ahead of us. “She’s wearing a dress,” he said, “You should go talk to her and become her friend.”

Often I will do just that. But this time I shook my head. He seemed puzzled. I explained that there was a difference between a woman wearing a dress and a woman who wears dresses. I could easily make friends with women who wear dresses, but a woman who simply has a dress on for the day — and she often wears a specific type of dress I’d rarely if ever wear — might be weirded out if a stranger tried to make friends with her because of her fashion choice that day.

These are the things that only a woman can discern. No wonder we fascinate men.

If you want to be a woman who wears dresses, you have to fully embrace your femininity and beauty by only wearing dresses that are feminine and beautiful.

Here are four types of dresses (or skirts) I’d never wear and why.

1. Jean skirts

Jean skirts — especially the sort home-schooled girls live in — scream, “My mom won’t let me wear jeans.”

They are rarely paired with feminine blouses, but with sporty shirts or button-ups. The “look” is sealed with a pair of tennis shoes. Nothing about the outfit is “girly”.

I don’t like them for ideological reasons — they are usually cut to look as much like jeans as possible. Most girls I know who grew up in these skirts resented having to wear dresses, wore these as a “compromise”, and then exchanged them for the real deal as soon as they ran away from home.

I also don’t like them because they’re ugly. They look like a girl pulled a stiff, shapeless box down around her hips and knees.

If you want a denim skirt, I recommend something with ruffles or a-line gores. The denim skirt pictured in the upper left corner was sewn and made by Revivall, a company whose clothes and mission I adore.

2. High-Low

This dress is the barmaid meets pastor’s daughter. The uneven hem makes it seem safe for the church girls who want to flirt with their femininity without being accused of looking Amish. However, it draws all the attention to their knees, and unless your knees are extremely well-cared for, it is not a flattering spectacle.

When choosing the length of your dress, be decisive. It can’t be both short and long without looking ridiculous. For religious reasons, I don’t approve of mid-thigh but it certainly does a better job at revealing what one might want to see without focusing on the knees.

I understand wanting some texture to your skirt. There are ways to do this without it looking like the seamstress skimped on the fabric. Cascading ruffles, triangle shaped gores, etc are all great alternatives.

3. All Lace Formal Wear

The knee length lace dresses are often worn by women who never wear a dress until they’re forced to attend a wedding. Sometimes it’s an attempt to LARP as a blue-blood. The dress, though, is too tacky to be true formal attire. It is garish instead of elegant — everything about it is wrong from the often skin-toned under layer to the jarring difference of hem lines, odd sleeve lengths, and the mismatched necklines.

Lace is good, but this is too much lace. Remember, when trying to look elegant less is more.

Other formal wear to avoid unless: The mermaid dress, dropped waistlines, unusual sleeve cuts, etc. Most women I see wearing these dresses don’t have the right body type to pull them off. It’s better to stick with classic styles for formal wear. If you want unique features, choose an interesting neckline. Generally this is a safer option than messing with too much below the natural waistline.

If you want a nice dress for weddings, try silk or velvet and focus on simple aesthetics with one or two complex features. It’s good to have a hem length that looks good with heels which is usually mid-calf or past the ankle.

4. T-shirt Dress/ knit Skirt

I used to be a fan of the knit skirt before I understood that it was hardly any different than wearing a pair of leggings or sweat pants.

T-shirt and tank top dresses are included in this category — sure, they are all comfortable, but in a white-trash sort of way, and that just isn’t worth it. And they aren’t flattering on most body types (you have to be really skinny to pull it off). It’s more difficult to get away without wearing a bra with knit clothes, too.

If you want comfortable clothes that are becoming, decent, and dignified I recommend Super Cute Dresses (cotton spandex dresses, but they don’t cling to all your curves) or linen dresses (they hang loosely).

Love What You Wear

The goal should be to curate a closet you don’t want to throw away. Even if it takes years, every garment should make you feel beautiful. Most of them should be comfortable, too, as well as practical for your lifestyle.

Dress-wearing is a hack. It should bring out all your best feminine qualities. And so you should never feel frumpy or ugly or slovenly. Mostly you should never feel like it’s highlighting the wrongs parts of your body — knees and reproductive organs. The right dress will make you look and feel like a lady, and you will be able to wear it through the various stages of life from girlhood to motherhood.

If you’d like to embrace your femininity apologetically but need more ideas for flattering, visit out my guide for wearing a dresses.

Let me know what you think about the dresses and skirts I’ve shared. Is there anything you’d add (or take away) from the list?

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Thank you for reading Polite Company. My writing is not pay-walled, however if you’d like to support my work you can buy me a coffee or commission a handmade sewn, knitted, or tatted item.

Note: After I wrote The Real Woman a friend recommended Ivan Illich’s essays “Gender”. The collection is short, although dense. The author, a Catholic Priest who was eventually defrocked for supporting contraceptives, writes a compelling history on gender drawing no conclusions but leaving plenty of room for the reader to do so.

This essay is an attempt to write better what I wished to convey in the Real Woman now that I have more information and a richer vocabulary to work with, thanks to Illich. My intentions are to reach women of all backgrounds, politics, and ideologies, so I equip rhetoric and language from “both” sides. I believe it’s impossible to fully understand what a woman is without looking at everything important conservatives and liberals both have to say on the matter.

We often dismiss something if it comes from someone we consider stupid or repulsive. It can become impossible to have a sincere conversation with someone who isn’t on “our side” if we refuse to be open to arguments that don’t align with our chosen rhetoric — especially if those arguments come from people we don’t respect.

I, too, have been guilty of this. I want to think that I love Truth. But this requires constant openness. I must search out my own biases and question any sentimental attachments I foster for various beliefs. It is not easy. But it is necessary if I am to love my neighbor more than myself.

After reading Ivan Illich’s essays on Gender, I realized I had shut my ears every time a woke person talked about gender and sex. Although my core beliefs haven’t changed, I no longer believe conservatives are completely correct on the gender issue1.

Woke talking points haven’t materialized out of thin air. Culture has been in a steady decline for many decades now. We’ve long ago forgotten what it means to be human. Conservatives claim to base their beliefs in reality, but even they have forgotten what it means to be a man or a woman. Despite their rhetoric about marriage and families, divorce and broken families prevail in their communities and many men and women struggle with no-one to turn to.

If we’re to save society from collapsing, we must put biases aside and start sincerely asking, What is a woman?

In this video, a student argues the topic of gender with Charlie Kirk. They establish at the start that they both believe sex is biological. However, the student brings up gender. Kirk claims gender is made-up. The student points out that it’s not, claiming we know whether someone is male or female by how they present themselves to us through their clothes — in other words nobody has to reveal their genitals to prove their their sex.

The student says, “If I shave my mustache, I dress like a male... you would think I’m a man.”

Charlie Kirk ignores this and says, “If a man dresses like a woman, does he become a woman?”

The student says the man remains a man regardless of his clothes, but that maybe he’s presenting as a woman.

Charlie Kirk seems incapable of understanding gendered clothes, even though he uses gendered clothes to try and disprove gender. He asks, “What is a woman?”

The student quips, “You know it when you see it.” He then points around the crowd at various women. “She’s a woman, she’s a woman, she’s a woman. Because they look like women.”

The video ends as if Kirk clearly won the debate. But it’s obvious to any unbiased viewer that Kirk mostly talked over the student. It had been decided that anything liberals say on gender is incorrect and delusional long before the student opened his mouth.

Now, I am no Charlie Kirk hater, but this video is a good example of the modern day conservative2 vs leftist positions on gender.

• Conservative Christian position: Sex is biological and unchangeable. Gender is a made-up concept so there’s nothing to deconstruct. Your genitals are no different from your fingers and have no influence over your identity. You can’t escape your sex, but men and women are basically the same aside from biological functions and women can have babies.

• Leftist position: Sex is biological and changeable. Gender is a social construct that can be deconstructed and must be deconstructed in order to liberate those who are ensnared by biological sex. There are many genders and we are all unique and more than basic biology.

I will use this essay to explain why both perspectives are flawed and incorrect. In my opinion, Truth lies somewhere in the middle.

• My position: Sex is biological and unchangeable. Gender is a social construct that must not be deconstructed. Denying the existence of gender is asinine. Endeavoring to liberate gender from society or reconstruct it will lead to devastating consequences for the human race.

A Brief History of Gender

Defining the terms:

Sex: The genitals: female / xx chromosomes, male / xy chromosomes

Gender: How we relate to our reproductive function culturally through tasks, tools, fashions, and purpose. It is not synonymous with “culture” or “humanity” but can be thought of alongside those two ideas.

From afar, the native can tell whether women or men are at work, even if he cannot distinguish their figures. The time of the year and day, the crop, and the tools reveal to him who they are. Whether they carry a load on their head or shoulder will tell him their gender. If he notices geese loose in the harvested field, he knows a girl must be nearby to tend them. If he comes across sheep, he knows he will find a boy. To belong means to know what befits our kind of woman, our kind of man. If someone does what we consider the other gender’s work, that person must be a stranger. Or a slave, deprived of all dignity. Gender is in every step, in every gesture, not just between the legs.

Ivan Illich, pg 64

When Charlie Kirk asked, “What is a woman?” He wanted a purely biological answer. He didn’t believe in gender. However, whatever your politics might be, we aren’t testing chromosomes to determine who is who.

Instead we look to gendered cues such as hands, hips, the neck, and clothes.

Conservatives are too busy naval gazing to realize gender has been unraveling for decades. We have been living like 3who assume sexual identities of our own choosing long before woke ideology sprung up.

Perhaps this is why the student had the wherewithal to politely ignore the scornful-holier-than-thou-attitude of the conservatives “booing” around him and respectfully respond,“What is a woman? You know it when you see it.”

Kirk argued that gender was made up by John Money in the 1960s. While it is true John Money pioneered the theory of gender neutrality4, it is a stretch to say he invented gender.

Gender has existed since nearly the beginning of time.

When God breathed life into humanity He assigned us sex; male and female, He created them5. There was no gender in the beginning, only man and woman. However, after Adam and Eve sewed fig leaves for clothes, and then were dressed properly by God, we see the first signs of gender emerge. For better or worse, culture was instituted when man and woman covered their nakedness.

Gender dictated everything a man and woman could and should do. Although it is often associated with patriarchal societies, gender is what protected the vulnerable sex and allotted her a place of privilege and honor. Although the metrics were arbitrary from village to village or tribe to tribe, the health of a community was ensured through a consistent gendered identity. It would become the glue of societies and a safety net for fairer sexes and children.

Gender was more than just the things one did or the clothes they wore, but also included the animals they tended and the tools they used in everyday life. Because gender was immersed in all they did, there could never be a mistake about who was a woman and who was a man even when seeing them from afar.

The deconstruction of gender within communities has been a painstakingly slow process and the push to eradicate it from society is strong both from conservatives who wish to deny its existence and liberals who try to refashion the constraints created by gender. Nevertheless, we are left with traces of gender.

One of the most obvious examples we have left of gender today is found in linguistics.

If you’ve ever taken up a second or third language, you may be familiar with gendered nouns. Even though nouns can have no sex it is thought they might have acquired gender through associations with sex. Whatever tools or tasks might’ve belonged to a man or woman may have been referred to with a masculine or feminine article. Although time has stripped gender from tasks and tools, the nouns remain gendered in many languages.

The Two Biological Sexes: male, female

The Four Grammatical Genders6: masculine, feminine, neuter, and common7

The two new functions, that of the breadwinner and that of the dependent began to divide society at large: He was identified with overalls and the factory, she with an apron and the kitchen.

While during the nineteenth century, technological change revolutionized the work outside the household, at first it had little impact on housework routine, except for tightening the enclosure into which each housewife was locked. Tap water put an end to her carrying the jugs to and fro, but also to her meeting friends at the well . . . Only as recently as the second quarter of the century did technology really change the material reality of housework; simultaneously, radio and TV began to act as substitutes for community conversation.

Ivan Illich, pg 51

Ivan Illich essays on gender explore the many ways gender has existed throughout history. He draws no conclusions, painting only vivid observations of the past and present (1960s) while leaving any future speculations or moral quandering up to the reader.

Throughout the essays, Illich argues that industrial capitalism along with feminism removed gender from both sexes, but have had greater impact on the fairer sex. Essentially, modern ideologies ignore gender. This is a delicate matter because it has led to an imbalance between men and women creating a sexist environment for the woman who was never meant to behave like a man. Modernity has also been harmful for men, but it’s taken us a century longer to see the the assault against masculinity whereas women are more vulnerable and fragile therefore had more to lose at the start.

Signals, Cues, and Customs

As much as we try, we can’t deconstruct gender and rebuild it at will.

We can put on different clothes or puff up our lips or cut off our genitals, but no amount of cross-dressing or plastic surgery or make-up will fix the gender dysphoria. We can swap signs on bathroom doors or welcome everyone in the bathroom. But gender will never be completely eradicated. It was put there for a reason and without it we are unable to communicate or live harmoniously.

On close inspection, many of our grandparents’ tools still smell of gender.

Here men use the scythe and women the sickle. There, both use a sickle, but there are two sickles, each of a different design; the handle and blade betray the gender. In Syria, for example, men’s sickles are clean-edged for cutting, and women’s are indented, curved, made for gathering of stalks. In one valley in the Alps, both genders use the scythe, but she only to cut the fodder, and he the rye. Here, only she touches the knives in the kitchen; there both cut the bread, but one cuts down and away, and the other draws the blade toward the chest.

Almost everywhere, men plant grain. But in one area on the upper Danube, women harrow and sow, and that is the one place where men do not handle the seed stock. Animals are tied to gender, even more than plants. In one place, women feed cows but never draft animals. Farther east, women milk cows that belong to the homestead, while the herd on the manor grounds is milked by the men. Only a few hours’ walk away, the same job is done only by maids.

pg 91-92

When we think of gender today we often think of roles, work, or fashion. Illich argues that these things are only gendered in extension to the tools we use, which are gendered by how well they accommodate and flatter our bodies.

While our clothing is gendered, it is only so in order to assist or enhance male and female functions. And although certain tasks are gendered, this stems from how our body interacts with the world around us.

Gender paid the price when we disregarded the biological differences between man and woman and pretended everyone could equally work as soulless beings in factories. Communities disintegrated, women forgot how to sew buttons onto shirts, men lost their connection to the land. Fashion, too, turned bland when it forfeited its primary functions.

Although gender enhances biological sex, it is fluid. Just as words and sounds vary from language to language, the tasks, tools, and fashions of gender were expressed differently from community to community throughout history. However, despite the differences in customs and cues, the purpose of gender remained constant: to inform.

Just like language exists to communicate — and to do so artfully — gender’s primary role is to bring the sexes together in a way that benefits both parties.

To revisit to Charlie Kirk’s question: No, a dress does not make a man into a woman, but in a properly ordered society a dress may inform others that they are interacting with a woman. If there is a man in the dress, there may be other gendered signs to alert the viewer of the discrepancy. In other words, a man in a dress is a misgendered man, but that does not mean gender doesn’t exist.

The way the gender divide runs determines how closely the two genders mingle, and on which territories and occasions. In one valley of the Alps, they meet on the threshing floor, he with the flail and she with the sieve. Farther down the river, this place is the men’s exclusive domain. As they are divided, so genders are also interwoven differently in each culture and time. They can rule separate territories and rarely intertwine or they can be knotted like the lines in the Book of Kells. Sometimes no basket can be plaited, no fire kindled, without the collaboration of two sets of hands. Each culture brings the genders together in its unique way.

Ivan Illich, pgs 105-107

This knowledge was important in the past because it let one know how to behave. One does not interact equally with those of the opposite sex, so how are we to know when we are interacting with the opposite sex without being crude? The fact that modern people might look to hips or hands or necks is also a crude method, and besides, these methods are not always accurate indicators especially if one experiences hormonal issues.

However, the clothes one wore, the tools they used, and the tasks they performed were objective unspoken signals that instructed members of communities and even strangers on how they might relate to one another without risk of misgendering each other.

Gender is a conversational signal with layers of information. In other words, it’s a vernacular language just as rich and complex as any other language.

If humans became completely genderless, pandemonium would become the norm. We would not know how to behave with others without overly scrutinizing their bodies and making them feel objectified.

This information protected society, especially women, by giving each person privacy around their bodies and the space they needed in order to thrive where others could not or should not violate. Gender protected sex, but it was also how one might artfully express themselves without being crude.

It became more than just a way to separate the men from the women. The goal wasn’t to keep men and women apart as much as to signal when it was appropriate to mingle or enter another’s private space. In this way, the ethics of gender invited men and women to work and live together as if they were dancing.

A decade ago, I listened to a Serbian peasant telling how haying had been done a generation back. He described gathering, loading, and storing the hay as if the work had been a ballet in which men and women each danced their appropriate parts. While he spoke, we were watching how things are done now. Haymaking has turned into a unisex job under workers’ control, which any hired hand can do. With a mixture of sadness and pride, the old man looked at the young woman who was driving the tractor of the village commune. The gender that disappears on a tractor has adapted to ever new conditions over millennia. The tie between gender and ox in some well-documented cases has survived from prehistoric times. No woman ancestor of this young driver would have yoked or fed an ox. This gender trait can be traced back in her people to a time when they neither spoke a Slavonic language nor lived in the same part of Europe.

Ivan Illich, pgs 92-93

It is delightful to read her [Yvonne Verdier’s] report on the slaughtering of a pig. Only the woman can choose which animal will be slaughtered, addressing it as “Monsieur.” But the man must set the day for the slaughter. They go through dozens of appointed steps, as if dancing a minuet. Women prepare the sausage and men salt the lard. But while, in Minot, only women beyond their menopause can pick up salted pork from the larder, a few miles down the road not even they may trespass into this male space. Each village does its own dance to the tune of its own regional music.

Ivan Illich, pg 108

How Men Lost Their Spines and Women Became Little Men With Vaginas

With the arrival of genderless, and therefore scarce, machine-produced clock time, gendered rhythms tend to subside: Women are often much more pressured by the unisex rhythm than men.

Ivan Illich, Note 79

Early conservatives and liberals largely agreed when it came to the issue of gender. Neither wanted to see a woman de-feminized. They wanted her on an “equal” playing field. Together they pushed for her right to vote and work, ignoring the fragility of the female sex in favor of expanding industry.

The industrial revolution — more than feminism even — was the first major move for de-gendering women.

In order for women to work in factories or offices, she had to be willing to undergo considerable change. Her hormones were disregarded. Her hair was cut short for safety. She was encouraged to put on pants or raise her skirt hems. The feminine arts were no longer profitable, and so she was made to abandon them.

Women have always been inclined to sacrifice themselves for the greater good, and the machine took advantage of this, asking for the greatest sacrifice of all — her gender. The woman did it willingly, not for herself at first, but for her family who needed extra income, or for the war effort.

It was difficult enough for men to fit into the world made by the machine, but it was extremely costly for women — it only only took her femininity, but often her life, too. Once the damage was done there was no way the woman could return to her natural proclivities.

For the historian who looks at the past in a rear-view mirror, sickle and scythe are but local farm tools once used in the harvest, replaced by techniques when modernization occurs. If such history pays any attention to mentalities and sentiments it tends to focus on the characteristic alienation, loneliness, and exploitation that grow apace with the new techniques. It examines the pain inflicted on people by the new market economy, mechanization, or hunger. The other injury resulting from the loss of traditional gender, now washed away through the new plumbing, remains the hidden side of the sorry story. What did she lose with the sickle? What else went with the scythe he had to give up?

Ivan Illich, pg 173

Although gender was a highly tuned art that was beautifully ingrained into culture and preserved traditions and customs for centuries, it did not suit the “machine”. There’s no money to be made off of those who live autonomously.

Feminists like to paint a picture of a Big Bad Patriarchy that kept women oppressed, powerless, and silent. They omit the parts of the story where women basically ran the show in the background.

These women weren’t doormats to be liberated from their femininity. They sometimes ruled as queens or became advisors8 to kings. There were many famous female poets, historians, and novelists9. Women owned property10 , oversaw the husband’s finances, and ran the household. While many women married or remained in their father’s home, Catholic society introduced a third option: she could choose a religious vocation. And before she married, it was common for young girls to work out of the home long before factories were erected.

The patriarchy had no chance of survival without its matriarchs.

However, the machine needed communities to separate in order to equip the individual. Now a few generations later, we pay the price for the loss of gender because of the greed of a few.

There had been a rhythm, but now for the sake of “freedom” one was ruled by clocks and calendars and employers. Instead of being the master of their homes and their villages, women became little men, as Leah Libresco Sargeant calls it in her book, The Dignity of Dependence.

Once there had been a harmonious dance between the sexes. Now women are the lesser sex, or “Shadow worker” as Ivan Illich calls it. Once it had taken a village to raise children. Now you needed only a mother and a father, both of whom were encouraged to get “real” jobs that paid no attention to either of the genders and even less attention to the children who were left to find out what it means to be a man or a woman on their own.

By the 1960s women had already been stripped of most of their power. John Money’s theory of gender neutrality was really an observation of something that had been going on for a long time. By the 80s and 90s women would have mostly given up their skills and femininity entirely. Is it any wonder that their children and grandchildren now experience gender dysphoria at such high rates?

Gender may have been mostly discarded, but it could not be forgotten. It had been the threads that wove women and men together for so long that its absence now left a void in the human story.

It’s hard to find the true culprit. Feminists aren’t totally responsible for the eradication of their gender, and neither was industrial capitalism. The Reformation could be blamed, for it weakened Christian men and turned them into gluttons and drunkards11 . However, villages had long been broken up into smaller, privatized units that could be more easily taxed based on married couples instead of households or tribes.

Outside industrial societies, unisex work is the rare exception, if it exists at all. Few things can be done by women and also by men. The latter, as a rule, just cannot do women’s work. In early eighteenth-century Paris, you could recognize the bachelor from afar by his stench and gloomy looks. From notaries’ records, we know that solitary men left no sheets or shirt when they died. In the time of Louis XIV, a man without a woman to keep house could barely survive. Without a wife, sister, mother, or daughter he had no way to make, wash, and mend his clothes; it was impossible for him to keep chickens or to milk a goat; if he was poor he could not eat butter, milk, or eggs. He could not cook certain foods even if he had the ingredients. And today, in the rural Mexico I know so well, a woman would rather die of embarrassment than let a man cook the beans.

Ivan Illich, pg 67

Reconstructing Gender

Tools are intrinsic to social relationship . . . In all pre-industrial societies, a set of gender-specific tasks is reflected in a set of gender-specific-tools. Even tools that are there for common use can be touched by only half the people. By grasping and using a tool, one relates primarily to the appropriate gender. As a result intercourse between genders is primarily social. Separate tool kits determine the material complementarity of life.

Women’s domain is here organized around the basket, each one has woven for herself at the time of her first menses, and the men’s world turns around the bow. No personal authority stands above the two domains. The division, which is constantly experienced, engenders the tension that holds this society together. If ever a woman touches the bow of a hunter, he loses his manhood and becomes “pane”. His arrows become useless, his sexual powers are lost, he is excluded from the hunt, and, if he does not just shrivel and die, he lives out his life behind women’s huts, gathering food in a discarded basket.

Ivan Illich, pg 90

The conservative’s primary goal is to keep things from changing too fast, however he rarely opens a history book to reorient himself. He’s content with whatever changes a liberal of a few decades ago might’ve brought about. However, a liberal is a true radical. Often they may not care for truth, but they have an intuitive hunger for it all the same. Many, especially those who are “woke” lack the moral compass for knowing how to reset things in an orderly fashion.

Who are we to resent men for putting on princess dresses? At least the liberals are trying to preserve gender by popularizing beautiful clothes.

John Money didn’t come out of left field when he wrote about gender neutrality. He believed he was finishing something that had long been underway. After a set of male twins were born and one of them had a botched circumcision, he convinced the parents to raise that son up believing himself to be a girl. For a time it worked, and he used this as proof that biological sex is irrelevant — we are only what we perceive ourselves to be, or what others perceive us to be.

However, the test failed. The child with the botched circumcision grew up feeling confused about himself, and when he found out he was not actually a girl he eventually committed suicide.

Many Conservatives believe this proves that gender doesn’t exist. This is a logical fallacy. Just because we can’t reconstruct gender doesn’t mean it’s fake. Gender is fluid, but so is water. The fluidity of it does not give us more power or choice over it, but less. Meddling with gender will always end poorly, even if the results aren’t immediately evident.

Furthermore, although it is arbitrary and varies from place to place, it can’t be rewritten and rewired because it stems from the human psyche.

Think of fire hydrants or streetlights. Although the colors and shapes of these both are different from place to place, as a society we have generally agreed upon what a hydrant should look like and that green signals go and red means stop. The rule may be arbitrary, but there’s no undoing it now. Imagine if half of a countries’ citizens decided that yellow should now mean stop and that stopping for green is regressive.

Saying “thank you” and “please” are also arbitrary rules of society. Not all societies have the same rules for manners as others, too, which can make moving to another country difficult. But to refuse to learn their customs would be foolish unless one would always want to remain an outsider. Furthermore, completely disregarding the etiquette of one’s own culture makes one socially awkward.

You might think it stupid, but in order to get along with others we have to abide by the arbitrary rules in order to enjoy each other’s company and feel safe with strangers. This is true of manners, streetlights, and gender.

Gender Dysphoria

The modern woman experiences gender dysphoria. She is confused about her femininity and feels uncomfortable in her female body. She is convinced it is best to look like either a prepubescent girl or a young man.

First world women lost their gender before men did when unisex work was forced on them.

Have you ever noticed the abundance of material on women’s issues? We rarely see anything on “men’s issues”. This is because masculinity, although now growing unpopular, remains prevalent and more accepted than femininity.

We don’t yet have to ask what a man is because we haven’t forgotten. But when we ask “what is a woman?” nobody can give a straight answer. And so we grasp at any book, podcast or film that might remind us of what it is to be a woman. Not just another man with a womb.

However, even if a woman intuits what it means to be a woman, society will try to suppress her. And liberals aren’t the ones at fault for de-gendering these women. Although liberals hate the empowered housewife, they are attracted to her beauty. It’s conservatives who are pushing for the extermination of the fairer sex.

Even so, women didn’t merely lose their gender because they stopped wearing dresses. They lost their gender when they gave up their power in the home and in the villages, and when they spurned the spindle, needle, and cradle for a taxable paycheck.

Certainly we modern women didn’t ask for this. Neither did most of our ancestors. However, the few suffragettes and factory foremen thought they knew best for all women, and now we pay the price.

Women are made to feel it is more cool to be a tomboy than a princess. Butch feminists are in and stay-at-home-mothers are out. It is shameful to be a damsel in distress — we are liberated women who can save ourselves! Women are embarrassed to have men open doors for them and get angry if a man offers his assistance. Many women are uncomfortable wearing a dress or fixing up their hair or looking pretty at all. Girls will starve themselves so they won’t have hips. A woman can’t expect to get respect in the real world without plastic surgery, girl-bossing, and birth control pills. Even when women do the “women” things such as tend to children, they are discouraged from using their body naturally to birth and feed their infants. And then they are called a “parent” and told to make sure the husband does his full share of “parenting”. Nothing belongs to the woman anymore.

Christian women used to have three choices: marriage, spinsterhood, or the religious life. Now even the conservatives want their stay-at-home-wives to become little men who they share a bed with. Whether it’s on the ranch or in the office, men want their women to work. There’s no time for the vulnerable, pretty things of life, shindigs, or anything superficial.

Capitalism’s clock is ticking — there is no time for femininity in the machine world designed for men.

Reclaiming Your Gender Identity Without Becoming Woke

The culture may be matriarchal or patriarchal, the greater share of power in the hands of women or men, but only for women does to live and to dwell mean to engender bodies, to leave behind a trail of new life. In one culture men may build shelters, make fences, or terrace a hill; in another, these tasks are assigned to women. But only from women does bodily life come into the world. No matter how the local mythology depicts the creator of the world — as mother, father, or androgyne; no matter whose name the children carry — mother’s, father’s, or uncle’s; the special space (and the time that corresponds to it) that sets the home apart from nest and garage is engendered only by women, because it is they who bear living bodies.

. . . women are doubly out of place in the space of the modern apartment, and that they clearly say so. The encroachment and usurpation of normative space frustrates the flesh of women as it does not and could not affect men’s. Unisex architecture is necessarily male-sexist, as is the unisex ticking of watches. Such designs place women, in their flesh and rhythms, in double jeopardy: Their potential contribution to homemaking is frustrated, and they are yanked out of their proper gender context; in both respects, they suffer more than men.

Ivan Illich, pg 122

My experiences in the “woke” community are somewhat niche12. However, what I saw remains memorable. I saw hurt people who were denied beauty and gender by their parents and grandparents. I believe they are trying to regain what was stolen from them. They think they want the freedom to choose their sexual identity. I believe they yearn for the return of gender identity. You can see this by their fascination with tools, fashion, and folksy skills, and how they are building communities that look like they jumped out of a storybook.

Their idea of gender is best expressed at contra dances, of which I have attended many. Here everything is colorful: men and women are unemployed. They dress in vibrancy, they knit cowls and socks out of variegated wools, they sneak home-made food into the dance halls. They leave their things laying around — even their smartphones — because they are a high-trust community, and maybe they want to lose their smartphone anyways because they prefer community to social media.

It is hard to tell who is actually a biological man or woman here. This is done on purpose. Although everyone is wearing their gender on their sleeve, it’s also been liberated from biological sex. Gender is no longer a cue, it’s an expression, and so biological sex is of second or no importance. Anything that might remind one of the sex-gender contract is obliterated from the vocabulary.

When we dance, we used to have the men’s and women’s parts. But now there are no men and women. So we then had the “lead” and “follow”. That language had too much of a male/ female complex, and so was deleted. Now the dance parts are called lark and raven. Except I can never remember which is which, and neither can half of the other attendees. Those who have fully embraced the new gender roles make up their own dance line — they are the best dancers. You don’t dance in their line unless you’re completely used to the new code.

The rest of us — ten plus lines — dance in our own chaotic way. We’re able to enjoy ourselves even though we don’t know who’s a lark or who’s a raven. But we’re also confused. The streetlights and bathroom signs and clothes have been mixed up. Do men or women wear dresses or pants? Does green or yellow mean go? Or is it purple now? And so we trip over ourselves and avoid contact when not dancing.

Nevertheless, I blame conservatism, not leftism, for all gender confusion. The conservatives, after all, are some of the first to fully embraced the idea that one can choose their sexual identity by what one wears or how they alter their body.

It is they — not ‘woke’ types — who convinced young girls to keep their hair short or tucked under a baseball cap. It is conservative Evangelicals who mock women in head-coverings or call her “Amish” if she wears a long dress. They encourage their daughters to prefer Tonka trucks to dolls, fishing to baking, and baseball to sewing13. And now many of those girls — the ones who identify as tomboys — are nervous to put on a wedding dress or stay at home with their children. They are unable to sew and cook and clean.

These girls have been groomed — by their conservative parents — to speak derisively of “girly” things. If they meet a prissy girl they are sure to let her know how silly she looks in her long braids and ruffled skirt.

Is it any wonder so many young Christian people are so gender confused and coming out of the “closet” to put on different clothes?

Many of these Christian girls claim to be “free spirits”, but they’re ruled by a hatred for their own sex. While they may oppose the LGBTQ+ movement, they wish they were boys and are getting as close to being one as they can without cutting off their breasts. These “tomboys” have bought into the idea that in order to be a “free spirit” they must spurn anything pretty and instead wear baggy men’s clothes14.

One might want to think they are exempt from this criticism.

None of us are spared.

Just as we are each influence by the porn industry and living under its consequences whether through direct contact or from exposure to those who are addicted to porn therefore suffering from eating disorders and body image insecurities, all of us women are have had our gender stolen from us.

We need more than a dress and a sewing machine to restore our femininity.

Even so we can’t ignore bathroom signs, gendered clothing on the wrong sexes, the lost of art and skill, etc if we’re to save women from losing themselves entirely. Like it or not, we are all caught up in this gender dysphoria.

We need solid community to validate femininity — men who support us, friends who do as we do, and older women to guide us. Meanwhile, we have to start being honest with ourselves: we are confused. We have had our femininity stolen by a world made for men. But we don’t have to continue permitting society to gaslight us into looking like and becoming little men. It is good to be a woman.

Acknowledging this is how we rediscover and reclaim our femininity. The first step to ending the dysphoria is embracing the things that belong to women and encouraging other women to do the same.

This isn’t merely a “cultural shift”15. The demands of the machine have unraveled culture and drastically changed the psyche of conservative thought toward femininity. Once men would write ballads on women’s beauty, now they belittle women for being feminine. We have to recognize that this is an injustice committed against women if we’re to do anything about it at all.

Only then can women truly be empowered again in their femininity to function and thrive as wives, mothers, and members of our communities.

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Thank you for reading Polite Company. My writing is not pay-walled, however if you’d like to support my work you can buy me a coffee or commission a handmade sewn/ knitted/ tatted project be messaging me. I also would love to hear your thoughts!

Hi Keturah,

I would love your thoughts on a dinner party.

The wife of my husband’s first cousin (we can call her Maria) had suggested we all get together to celebrate Chinese New Year (they have never done so and she was enthusiastic about seeing what that entails). My parents agreed to host it (since my father is Chinese it would make sense for us to do the hosting). Several weeks ago my dad sent out a text invitation to my husband’s parents as well as Maria and her husband. He specified the time and date in the invitation.

This weekend I messaged Maria to confirm whether or not her and her husband would still be able to join us. The two of us were supposed to meet yesterday for tea but she had to cancel to help a friend in crisis, so I wanted to make sure next weekend would still work for them.

She asked me for the time of the dinner and texted me that they “won’t be able to stay that late” due to a ticketed event that night. I told her to let me know if I should try to move the event a bit earlier (I was under the impression it was an evening event probably around 8 or 9pm). However she responded that their event is at 6:30!

At this point I realized we couldn’t move the dinner to 4pm (which would barely give them one and a half hours to join us since their event is thirty minutes away from my parents’ house). I also sell my art Saturday morning until 1, meaning I’d hardly have time to help make the dinner with my parents as the event calls for a pretty elaborate menu. I did end up talking to my parents today about whether or not we should be responsible for moving the dinner, but we decided it’s not really feasible, and also could be rude to my mother and father-in-law to last minute change the time of the dinner.

Dear Reader,

I appreciate your heart for spontaneous hospitality. It is good to be willing to adjust our plans and accommodate others — this is one of the most practical ways we have of living out the gospel in our everyday lives. However, this desire to please others can sometimes turn us into a “Martha Stewart”.

You did your part when you were willing to facilitate your husband’s cousin but making time for her. You are not obliged to bend over backwards for your guests, though. Authentic spontaneous hospitality isn’t ruled by the clock, which means it can’t be forced to fit into our busy lives. It is something that is performed freely and either one shows up or they don’t.

The introduction of industrial hospitality has increased the demands and expectations of Christian hospitality and changed it into something it was never meant to be. However, the roles of host and guest remain as constant as they were in the New Testament: Your part is to prepare the meal, “Maria’s” role was to sit at the feet of Jesus. You feed those who show up and leave the rest up to God.

You did right to not reschedule the meal. If your husband’s cousin can’t make it, so be it. My only advice to you at this point is to remind you of the Parable of the Banquet in the gospel of Luke. Remember the poor, the crippled, the blind and the lame!

Sincerely,

Keturah

Then Jesus said unto him, “A certain man made a great supper and bade many.

And he sent his servant at suppertime to say to them that were bidden, ‘Come, for all things are now ready.’

And they all with one accord began to make excuses. The first said unto him, ‘I have bought a piece of ground, and I need to go and see it. I pray thee have me excused.’

And another said, ‘I have bought five yoke of oxen, and I go to test them. I pray thee have me excused.’

And another said, ‘I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come.’

So that servant came and showed his lord these things. Then the master of the house, being angry, said to his servant, ‘Go out quickly into the streets and lanes of the city, and bring in hither the poor and the maimed and the halt and the blind.’

And the servant said, ‘Lord, it is done as thou hast commanded, and yet there is room.’

And the lord said unto the servant, ‘Go out into the highways and hedges and compel them to come in, that my house may be filled.

For I say unto you that none of those men who were bidden shall taste of my supper.’”

Luke 14:16-24

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Before I married I led the ideal single life.

It had not come to me easily, but was the result of much prayer and perseverance. I worked at jobs I loved for about six months then traveled the rest of the year, usually living out of my station wagon. When I was home I facilitated “knitting and literary socials” in my house on the family compound. Every sort attended — Christians of various denominations, liberals, anarchists, all misfits who I’d met during COVID. When I traveled I went wherever I liked and I stayed as long as I wanted. My social circles expanded and my skills grew as I endeavored to learn from each person I met.

I was well-loved and satisfied with my community.

However, my biological clock was ticking. I was too much for most of the Christian men in my circles, and although I had many great non-Christian male friends, I wasn’t interested in any of them because I wanted to give my children a father who was not only intellectual but also moral.

I met a woman on twitter who took it upon herself to find me a match. Within a couple weeks she’d found my soulmate, another twitter user who was my aesthetically matched male-doppelganger. We talked on the phone for a couple hours, then he asked for my address and sent me a seven page hand-typed letter with scenic photographs taped to the backside of the paper.

I shared that letter with my friends while sewing in my living-room a few days later.

They squealed and screamed and shed real giant tears and said, “He’s so perfect for you, Keturah, you’re gonna marry him!”

I knew they were right. I sat there at the height of my girlhood freedom with my dearest friends around me and I slowly realized something. I said, “I’ll be trading all of you guys for him. I’m giving up everything I know. I feel almost stupid. Should I respond?”

They assured me I should.

We grew serious. The feminine urge to lay aside our girlish pursuits to become wife and mother was strong in each of us. My Prince Charming had come to carry me away, for better or for worse. And I would willingly go with him across the country far from family and friends because this is the price for love.

The Social Butterfly Gets Twitter

I naively thought it wasn’t such a big deal.

I could rebuild everything I had, I thought. I would make my new home just as beautiful as this one. I would make new friends and host new sewing circles. My new life would be better because it would include a husband and children. It would be easy because I’d already done it once, and I easily won friends. Next time would be only easier.

This has been somewhat true.

Although I have not been accepted by most of my in-laws, I have fallen in love with the place my husband brought me to and made my new home beautiful and have made many new friends. But due to the nature of our travels, I have been unable yet to recreate the community I had. I’ve also lost most of my family and some of my friends because I married a Catholic.

I have absolutely zero regrets, however, in an attempt to have community while on the road I turned to heavy posting on twitter. I’d already been active for years. In the past I’d share my random opinions with my friends and they’d laugh or feel inspired or beg me to write a book of proverbs. They lovingly called the bizarre things I said “Keturahisms”.

However, while my friends heard my tone and understood my eclectic background therefore appreciated my strange and strong opinions, the internet did not accept me so easily.

I remember when I first logged onto twitter and came across the “trad meme”. I was floored. “They’re talking about me as if I’m cool,” I thought. I made a few online friends, all who seemed rather tolerant of me and my thoughts at first. I quickly gained a reputation for being too sweet and naive to hate.

I was viewed (rightly) as a sheltered parochial girl who had some judgmental views and values, but who also tolerated others those who didn’t align with her views. It was uncouth to pick on me because I was too innocent.

I’d posted things like “wearing leggings in public is like wearing your underwear” and “There are a lot of scammers on here who think wearing a frilly apron will make them a “tradwife” even though they cuss like a sailor”.

My personal views were harsh but quaint, so I was “in”.

Some of my online friends would post things like the meme below as playful mockery, but it all felt good spirited to me. I would say, “I don’t think you’re going to hell for not doing what I do” and they’d say, “We know, it’s just a joke”.

I was too gullible to realize that when you’re the butt of a repeated joke it’s often because those people have no respect for you. Their deprecating humor inevitably becomes outright cruelty and disrespect.

Lipstick on Pigs

I overlooked the early signs and put up with being treated like a the court jester because I have a hard time believing some people don’t have good intentions. Such people believe they “own” others. Once they realize they can’t control you they go berserk. This is how it works online, at least. You’re either in or your not, and the rules are all dictated by vibes.

Things began to turn after I married my husband — we both had been twitter’s sweethearts. We were too authentic to be hated. For a brief moment, they liked us together, too. But the internet wasn’t ready for the way we validated each other. And we sided with people who weren’t “cool”.

I began to sense something was going downhill when I received private messages from mutuals telling me I shouldn’t be following certain accounts like Megha or Aly because they were mean girls and I would become a mean girl, too, if I were too friendly with them. I didn’t think much of it. I had never gone to public school, so I was unfamiliar with the attitude of “If you want to be cool you can only be friends with who we say you can be friends with.”

I didn’t think my worth should be contingent upon who I was friends with, especially since those people weren’t saying anything bad or that different from what I was saying. I also had made it clear that I wanted to be friends with everyone.

Then all the people who said they could never be mean to me started to make unsolicited snide remarks. A mutual privately said, “Women who wear dresses are immodest because they’re making everyone look at them instead of just being normal.”1

One woman began to talk a lot about her leggings and how she liked wearing them to Wal-Mart so men would stare at her [redacted]. She is a wife and mother to several children. Her interactions with me soured. I tried to become less judgmental and share fewer opinions and only say kind things to her. But she’d jump on me and twist my words every chance she got (privately in a group chat).

Nobody defended me. I tried calling out what was happening and asked for an explanation but everyone pretended like nothing was happening. I felt gaslit and whiplashed. After awhile, I left the chat but the timeline, too, was turning strange. Shortly after, one of the women freaked out and privately DMd me, demanding I apologize for something — but she wouldn’t tell me what. She then told my husband to rein me in or things would get bad for us both.

Slowly things got weirder. I had a contract with a paper for an article, and after a few months of edits they pulled it with no explanation. Maybe it was nothing, but the timing felt as if I was being shadow banned or canceled. I had similar experiences with other publications I’d worked with. Many of my mutuals became hate follows. Nobody explained themselves, but it was clear: I had chosen the “wrong” friends. I was now low-status.

Although it had once been uncouth to be mean to me, everyone was suddenly attacking me in chats and on the timeline, always for vague reasons even when pressed directly to share why they were so offended. It was arbitrary because they were still buddies with others who espouses some of the same views I had, so it was all about “tone” and “vibes”.

Don’t get me wrong. I still had plenty of sincere friends. My posts continued to be well-loved and went viral. But the haters weren’t trolls or new followers as much as old mutuals who’d turned on me.

I began to feel panicky in public and have emotional breakdowns. I would try to not post any opinions, only pictures of things I’d made2, things I was doing, etc. But something “controversial” would slip out, and it would always be about the most inane things such as cars3 or pregnancy tests.

These last tweets sealed the deal. I was no long the sweet, innocent girl from a holler in Missouri. I was a Mean Girl.

I’d committed an unspoken taboo. I had gone too far, whatever that meant.

Nevertheless, I persisted posting and trying to explain myself. I figured I was I was interacting with people who just needed me to explain things to them in a simpler, kinder way. I didn’t want to admit that they might be purposely reading me in bad faith, but over time it soon became clear that I’d been chosen as a person to hate as a way to virtue signal what kind of person you were. I was no longer cool, and if you wanted to be cool you better make it clear you didn’t like me.

I was canceled, dog-piled, and bullied. There was no option for recovery. No matter what I said, it was never enough. I pointed out that other people said the same things I said but weren’t getting this level of push back. I was told they were “humble in their criticisms while I exhibited pride”. I needed to stop writing because nobody liked what I said, that God would “teach” me by giving me a terrible childbirth/ difficult baby. I would be put in my place for the things I dared post. After I had the baby, someone cropped a photo of me three days postpartum with the caption “your tradwife”.

The threats and curses continued, but I tried to grow a thicker skin — twitter was all I had now for friends, and there was still much good to be found through the torrent of verbal attacks.

After all, I could just log off, if it got too much, right?

“Cyberbullying is fake, just turn ur phone off, bro”

I used to believe online bullying4 is fake.

I’ve written long essays in the past on how taking social media breaks is silly. If you have something worth saying, keep saying it, I claimed. However, I had never been exposed to such large numbers of people before, and I’d always been previously untouchable and well-loved. I had never experienced how vicious and nasty other Christian women could get. It didn’t matter if there were no faces. That only made it worse.

When I turned the computer off, the words remained in my head and became the voices of demons:

Maybe my writing was worthless. Maybe I was being too provocative. Maybe I am too scrupulous and self-righteous. I’d meant to spread truth and beauty, and to have fun, but all I did was make people feel bad. I was too dumb to word things in a way that people could understand. I deserved all the hate I received.

This seemed to be a prevalent message I received both privately and publicly. Hoards of Christian women taunted me and blocked me and told me how worthless and evil I was and warned other women to block me or put me in my place. And even though I logged off, I began to believe them.

But logging off didn’t fix it immediately.

Once I had been socially adept. Now I was socially anxious.

I used to love attending parties and visiting new churches, but now I was afraid people would recognize me and not give me a chance to be loved. Maybe they were the face behind the things said. Yes, I could tell they hated me by how they looked at me, and they were unhappy to see me. I knew this was neurotic, but I couldn’t help it. I begin to understand why some kids commit suicide after getting harassed online — I’d never understood it before.

You can’t just turn away from the screens because everything that was said is now seared in your soul. When you have hundreds of people lying to you, even if you don’t know their real names, you start to wonder if maybe what they say is true. Even if hundreds of others claim to love you and what you do, you can’t believe them. You doubt the support of anyone when so many attack you.

It becomes less about who said what and where they said it and more about the fact that you can’t get the words out of your head. You might not even remember having that particular late night thought that everyone now hates you for. It does not matter if you’ve been flippant, you’ve now proved that your soul is inherently evil and you do not deserve a second chance at making friends in real life because you shared a careless 140 character tweet.

These are lies from the devil spoken through the mouths of strangers. I know this. Yet, this is the reality that one must pray their way through.

Now that I’ve gone through it a little, I can see it in other people’s eyes. The more followers one has the stronger the anxiety. It makes me have empathy for people I might’ve previously disliked — politicians, celebrities, Onlyfans women, redpill bros, artists, etc. I can only imagine the level of societal discomfort they experience.

It makes me want to take a hammer to all of our phones and all of our computers and then start one giant knitting and literature social club where all are welcome. But first the demons must be exorcised. Then we must pray and promise to abandon all status driven games and the temptation to form cliques.

But I know this is naive. Despite it all, I have still not learned anything of value from all my time on twitter. I still want to believe people aren’t actually that means spirited or stupid. Somehow I remain the woman who was easy to mock then dog-pile because I innocently believe all people want to be as good as I want to be. Instead people pretend to think that I believe I’m already good or better than them.

They just want to be left alone. They want to keep LARPing as “tradwives” without having to interact with a born, bred, and cookie fed traditional woman. They want me squashed because I remind them that there’s more to being trad than wearing lipstick and acting coy around redpill bros. I probably make them feel ashamed. I am sorry I made them feel that way.

I never logged on to make people angry, but to remedy a social gap. For a while that need was being met, but now there’s no positive returns. It’s time to stop playing a rigged game.

I might log off forever5, but I won’t shut up.

Even so, I don’t need to speak into a pit of vipers. I don’t need to hang out with a bunch of women who wish they were still in high-school. I need to work on regaining my real life social vibrancy so I can look strangers in the eye again without being afraid that they hate me. It’s time to spend a little time in prayer so I can be rid of the demons.

Back to Square One

I’m left with the same issue that led me to heavy posting: I have no solid in-person community, no nearby family, and few nearby steady friends. Although there’s good reason to log off twitter, I mustn’t forget that I turned to it with a legitimate need. Social media has turned out (for me) to not be a sustainable answer especially since it’s now created another issue: social angst.

I am forced to rip the band-aid. To continue on at this rate in the hope it might deliver anything worthwhile is foolish. I’ve already got a lot from it — a husband, a few good friends, some decent writing connections. But it’s time to move on from Twitter. My skin isn’t going to get thicker, and my heart can’t be reshaped or rewired to suit the algorithm.

I thought I could use Twitter to help us meet people as we travel — and this worked for a time. But now I’m also afraid to interact with new people lest they recognize me. It’s all backfired, and the good that was done is being undone.

I want to regain my love for the stranger. And so I have to be open to meeting people organically and getting creative in a way that doesn’t involve twitter.

Furthermore, it’s not like I don’t have anyone. I still need friends who I can call and write to. I have my husband who I adore and my gorgeous baby girl who fills my days with indescribable joy. Since getting off twitter the last couple months, I’ve managed to edit a book of short stories6 and knit and sew a lot more. My focus for reading is returned.

I know a lot of people feel as I do. Twitter has become a fill-in for the community many of us feel unable to find. But it’s simply not working. We have to close the screens and try a little harder.

Much of this substack is dedicated to making and meeting community in real life. In our travels I think I’ve lost touch with some of that and gotten lazy. It’s much easier to log in and interact with faceless strangers than to stumble across like-minded people. But the trade-offs aren’t worth it, especially since I’m not even monetized.

There’s no easy way to make friends. Looking for shortcuts will only lead to anguish. Trust me — I’ve learned this all too well this last year.

I will probably return to this topic again in the future to talk more about how to make friends (and get over social anxiety) without social media. Feel free to email me in the meantime. I’d like to collaborate with my readers on this one.

Thank you for reading Polite Company. If you enjoyed this essay please share it with a friend. Everything I publish is free to the public, however If you’d like to support my work you can buy me a coffee or commission a handmade sewn/ knitted/ tatted project.

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Of course then people might be like “the things you make aren’t really that cool” or “why do you think sewing makes you a better person than me?” even though I never said such things.

I’ve come to realize that there is no certain method for avoiding hate on twitter. Even the women who post nothing but beautiful pictures of the things they make get accused of acting better-than-thou. Twitter doesn’t deserve your beautiful pictures. It wants to chew you up then spit you out and stomp on you.

The Hospitality Business

After Christmas, my husband and I went to Delaware because even though it’s the first American state — it’s the one you never hear about. We wanted to show our daughter the ocean.

We had no destination in mind and had made no reservations. We stopped once we reached a hotel on the beach, then we walked across the sand to dip our daughter’s tiny toes into the frigid waves. She was nonplussed, so we went to the front desk.

The woman at the front desk scrutinized us. I wore a head-covering, a long dress, and the baby in a woven purple and green wrap. Andy was dressed like a respectable hobo from the depression era. We both were at least thirty years younger than anyone else currently vacationing here, and the only ones not wearing black, grey, and beige.

“Do you have a reservation,” the woman asked.

We didn’t. She went to see if there were any rooms available, a little bit flustered that we hadn’t made any reservations. Perhaps we’d have to settle for a stable, but this hotel was large and there were few guests meandering about.

“Can we get a room with a view of the sea?” my husband asked. We hardly splurged for “normie” things. But when we did, we liked to do it right.

She eyed us once more, as if doubtful we could afford it. She said as much, and my husband said, “It’s worth it.”

We were paying guests, so we got are key card despite her glances. However, I had the feeling that we were “bad for business”. The woman was short with us. I overheard her help the guests after us — a normal middle-classed elderly couple who looked like they wanted a divorce. She offered them more information about the layout of the hotel, breakfast, and the lobby.

My husband noticed none of this. He was in a hurry to see the view we’d paid for. We deposited our things on the bed, then took the baby out on our private balcony and watched the waves roll in.

“Why wouldn’t you pay for this?” my husband said.

That evening we ate at the hotel restaurant, sitting at a window facing the sea. Once more we felt out of place, surrounded by retired couples who were here because they had no time to vacation elsewhere. A few eyed our baby anxiously, then ignored us with relief once they realized we had one of the few quiet babies who wouldn’t disrupt the peace.

Breakfast, too, was much the same. My husband noted how odd it was that nobody else seemed to care for the best seats next to the window. Everyone ate sitting far apart. Although we were all staying at the same place, nobody seemed to care to get to know one another even as we were standing in the buffet line.

We stayed a couple days, enjoying the scenery but hardly interacting with others except on a surface level. When we checked out, we were bid farewell with a plastered smile.

“We hope you enjoyed your stay! Visit us again.”

Knowing we probably wouldn’t return, we said, “Thank you. It was lovely.”

This experience of industrial hospitality wasn’t foreign to us, but something about this particular stay made us realize that we were truly not living in the same world as those around us.

What we’d experienced was designed for a specific demographic, and you aren’t meant to feel welcomed if you don’t fit the criteria for a certain type of client the industry markets to. If you return, you might hurt business.

Marketing Virtue

Growing up my family regularly invited strangers to live with us (families, immigrants, the homeless, hitchhikers) with no strings attached. As a child I didn’t mind giving up my room or being a little extra crowded if it meant new faces in the home. My siblings and I all had a sincere love for the stranger.

Even so, I didn’t begin to understand hospitality as a Christian practice until my mid-twenties. I threw myself fully into looking for opportunities to share my home with others and began writing on spontaneous hospitality.

At the start, I loved talking about the joys of practicing hospitality and I would tell anyone I met. A few got it. Some would glitch out, or think I was talking about tea-parties. Many would respond, “Me too! I have my bachelors in hospitality management and worked in the industry for several years.”

There’s nothing wrong with industrial hospitality if you’re in need of a hotel. The problem that’s arisen is most people no longer understand organic, spontaneous hospitality. Even many Christians believe they must model hospitality after industrial hospitality, or worse yet, they’ll shirk their responsibility by directing guests to stay at a hotel instead of their home. I believe this has caused much spiritual damage to the Church. Certainly, allowing industrial hospitality to influence and reshape hospitality has not been good for our souls.

This has led to two types of hospitality:

The market has done such a great job monopolizing virtue that it’s easy to conflate Christian and industrial hospitality. However, hospitality was not always a mere commodity to be purchased and up-charged, but basic Christian charity. The moment we started selling hospitality is the moment we stopped believing in it.

Industrial hospitality has made us believe that what we have to offer is inadequate because our homes may not be clean enough or are too crowded or we don’t have luxurious experience to offer. Or maybe we believe we aren’t called to be hospitable anymore because it’s too dangerous or we might be take advantage.

Unlike a hotel or resort experience, authentic Christian hospitality is open and friendly to the stranger despite their appearances. Industrial hospitality profits from the respectable looking stranger. But Christian hospitality welcomes everyone as they are.

This difference between industrial and Christian hospitality is extremely important because it is one of the main ways we get to live the gospel out in our everyday lives:

Hebrews 13:2: “Be not forgetful to entertain strangers: for thereby some have entertained angels unawares.”

1 Peter 4:9: “Use hospitality one to another without grudging.”

Leviticus 19:34: “But the stranger that dwelleth with you shall be unto you as one born among you, and thou shalt love him as thyself; for ye were strangers in the land of Egypt: I am the Lord your God.”

1 Timothy 5:10: “Well reported of for good works; if she have brought up children, if she have lodged strangers, if she have washed the saints’ feet, if she have relieved the afflicted, if she have diligently followed every good work.”

Matthew 25:35: “For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in.”

In my early twenties, I’d stayed at my first resort for a conference with a gala at the end. We dressed in formal attire and were served by waiters in bow-ties who brought us gourmet food on silver trays. It reminded me a little of aristocratic nobility, and although it made me feel fancy, I was a little uncomfortable being apart of this system that relied upon the labor of “slaves”, even if they were paid.

Who was I to be waited on hand and foot?

And yet, I liked it. I couldn’t help it. I had a nice bed to sleep in that I didn’t have to make. I had a room to stay in that I didn’t have to clean. I could walk on nice floors and carpets without worry of ruining them because they weren’t mine to worry about. I could sit at table that I didn’t prepare and eat food I hadn’t cooked.

It made me feel like a queen with make-believe servants. It didn’t make me feel very Christian.

If Jesus were here, I thought, He’d tell everyone to sit down and eat together, staff or slave or guest. We’d do away with all this frivolous, industrial hospitality and get down to authentic, spontaneous hospitality. Now I can imagine someone like St. Francis getting up from the table, stripping himself of his fine clothes, and leaving the room quietly to help serve the food and wash the dishes, refusing to eat anything except the scraps.

Five Ways The Hotel Business Influenced Christian Hospitality

1. Options

Industrial hospitality is designed to profit from the stranger’s need or misfortune. Christian hospitality is centered around unconditional love and generosity. This difference creates a marketing opportunity to up-charge customers for additional comforts, some of which we now take for granted as necessary features of hospitality.

In the past, Christian hospitality was sufficient because everything was enough. Once even commercial hospitality was fashioned after Christian hospitality. Inns were known to sleep six to a bed, or as many as would fit, and would make only one pot of soup — everyone brought their own dish and ate to their fill. You got what you got, nothing more, nothing less. The host, too, would eat with you and tell stories of others who had traveled through.

However, the industry of hospitality with the advent of modern conveniences, commercialism, and excess has created extras. These are not necessary features of hospitality, but tools for raising the bill. Nevertheless, ordinary people are nervous to open their homes because they have been led to believe that they should offer more than what they have.

Whatever bed (or couch or floor space) you have is adequate. Whatever you are making for dinner is enough. Christian hospitality doesn’t require you to bend over backwards and do party tricks, but keep your door cracked and your hands open.

2. Reservations

Reservations are necessary to industrial hospitality, and without them, a business might lose profits. Even if they have vacancies, many hotels prefer for guests to book their stay days ahead. They are annoyed by same day reservations.

Christian hospitality is spontaneous. The Good Samaritan didn’t check his calendar before helping the wounded man. Hospitable Christians don’t ask to be called or texted first because true hospitality understands that when someone has needs — be they physical, emotional, or spiritual — those needs must be met immediately with no regard to social norms, clocks, or schedules.

3. Sterility

Industrial hospitality is concerned with reviews because this determines future profits. Hospitable Christians are concerned only with being available. Industrial hospitality puts up a facade of perfection, and expects you to do the same. However, a hospitable Christian invites the guest to come as they are, because the host is not putting on a performance.

Yes, cleanliness is next to godliness, so hopefully a one’s home isn’t caked in grime. However, things don’t need to be perfectly cleaned before one welcomes guests inside. If there is crayon on the wall and a few bread crumbs scattered here and there, so be it. Even if the home is in complete disarray, hospitable Christians should rarely spurn the stranger. There may be moments where one is tempted to be a Martha Stewart when Jesus arrives at the door. Resist the urge!

Guests don’t need a perfect presentation as much as an attentive, present host.

Note: Proper etiquette for receiving guests applies to both industrial and Christian hospitality, but especially to Christian hospitality, including when it comes to the controversial topic of shoe removal. The general guideline1 is when it’s for your own family you can have whatever rule you like concerning shoes in the house. However, if you have more than ten-fifteen guests, especially for a dinner party, it is inconsiderate to ask guests to remove shoes. This creates unnecessary discomfort and hassle for guests and clogs up the entrance. It is especially rude to ask guests to remove shoes if they arrive in clean, dinner shoes. If they are wearing snow or rain gear, it is expected that they will remove their boots without being asked. Generally it is inappropriate to demand what others wear/ don’t wear in your home especially if they are elderly as they may have knee or back issues that require them to wear their shoes indoors. A lot of people are also emotionally discomforted at having their feet seen in public, especially men. Some may have foot issues, prosthetic feet they keep a secret, athlete’s foot, warts, etc, that make it impossible for them to remove their shoes and could cause embarrassment to them if requested to do so. The hospitable Christian should try to be as considerate as is humanely possible when welcoming others into the home.

4. Architecture

Many houses no longer look like homes, but are modeled after businesses such as hotels, theaters, or casinos. When a home is modeled after such business, it suffers because it conforms to the philosophy of industrial hospitality.

Industrial hospitality maximizes entertainment, even at the cost of community. Christian hospitality centers around nourishment and fellowship.

A home that is influenced by industrial hospitality will have a projector instead of a fireplace. The kitchen will be unused in favor of take-out. The couches are designed for maximizing luxurious comfort of the hosts while offering little extra space for guests. There will be no table, or if there is one, it is hardly used. The rooms will be sparse of anything that provokes spiritual or intellectual stimuli, because everything present is designed to assist the hosts in escaping reality rather than welcoming strangers. The doors are locked. The cell-phones are muted. When they do invite guests, it will be a big to-do. There is no thought of being hospitable when they do have “parties”, but of shaking things up.

The hospitable Christian designs their home to be a place where the gospel can thrive. It is not another theater or game arcade. It will be a place for prayer, fellowship, and feasting. The host facilitates regular gatherings that are both planned and spontaneous. The table is used often. There will not be enough seats because of how many arrive, but there will always be plenty of food.

The home that is inspired by industrial hospitality encourages vanity and licentiousness. However, those who enter the hospitable Christian home will know at once that they have entered the house of the Lord.

5. Purpose

Industrial hospitality vs Christian hospitality are inherently at odds with one another.

Industrial hospitality is most concerned with rewarding the host. Christian hospitality is eager to serve the guest even at cost to the host.

This leads to the various aesthetic and practical differences.

Establishments that practice industrial hospitality will be trying to sell you something the entire time. They want to up-charge you, offer additional options for your comfort or your entertainment. At the moment, these things might feel good, because you are paying to feel like royalty. But it is not a sustainable for true satisfaction. At some point one wants more. And even then, one may find themselves displeased and leaving bad reviews because some luxury was not to their liking.

Homes that model their hospitality after this type are not memorable. Even if comfort and entertainment are maximized, one isn’t left feeling welcomed, wanted, and accepted. Therefore there is no real desire to return.

Christian hospitality, though, is concerned with the soul. It sells nothing. It is the gospel made flesh through the practice of philoxenia (love for strangers). Through hospitality we become companions by breaking bead together.

We welcome Christ into our homes when we are spontaneously hospitable to the stranger.

And because of this our homes are built ready to accept Jesus without reservation. We do not ask for anything in return. We give all we have — nothing more, nothing less. We offer ourselves to our guests as we offer ourselves to Christ.

Final Remarks

From the Bible, we know that the Christian way is to walk the second mile and give away our last coat and offer drink and food to those who knock on our doors. It is foolish to think that modernity has somehow changed or minimized this calling. We are to give freely of what we have. This is Christian hospitality.

At what point should we want to give more than that?

Should we accept a higher paying job so we can build a guest house? Should we optimize the guest room so it is updated with all the finest luxuries modernity has to offer? When our guests make unreasonable demands, do we comply?

Early Christians had these same thoughts, and so when the apostles wrote the Didache2, they included a section for the Traveling Christians.

Let everyone who “comes in the Name of the Lord” be received; but when you have tested him you shall know him, for you shall have understanding of true and false .

If he who comes is a traveler, help him as much as you can, but he shall not remain with you more than two days, or, if need be, three.

And if he wishes to settle among you and has a craft, let him work for his bread.

But if he has no craft proved for him according to your understanding, so that no man shall live among you in idleness because he is a Christian.

But if he will not do so, he is making traffic of Christ; beware of such.

This passage doesn’t contradict the command to care for the windows or aged family members, but explicitly speaks to our duties toward the stranger.

There are limits to how much charity you owe the stranger. Give him a good bed, a good meal, a couple days of conversation, and then bid him farewell. If he must remain, find him work. If he is unable to work, do what you know to be best. But do not let him take advantage of your hospitality. Doing so mocks the gospel.

Although I preach what I call a spontaneous hospitality (the practice of always be welcoming anyone at any time) I have been accused of not performing true hospitality by my own standards because I have limits.

I do not allow animals in my home3, especially the kitchen or living-room. With the exceptions of dinner parties, I will ask my guests to wash the dishes. If I have someone staying for a few days, I expect them to help out with meal preparations and chores. I will respect their dietary needs and make sure they have access to the same comforts I do, but I will not adjust our everyday living circumstances to suit their preferences.

Last summer when I was waiting for our daughter to be born, we had about ten or so house guests. Some of them were there to help with the birth of the baby, some of them simply needed a place to be. I welcomed them joyfully despite my condition because I felt it to be the right thing. However, I did except them to help out with chores and meals especially since I was pregnant. When someone requested the heat turned on (it was mid-summer and my husband and I were not in the least bit cold) I said, no. Instead I showed them the closet filled with extra wool blankets.

There was some outrage over this, because they thought that my beliefs about hospitality meant I had to say yes to anything they asked. This is not Christian hospitality, but a result of industrial hospitality influencing us to believe that one is entitled to options, maximized entertainment, or to demand extra comforts than what was provided.

Christian hospitality is satisfied with offering a stable when there is no other rooms left. This doesn’t mean you have to turn the heat on in the summer time if that’s what your guest wants, or that you must allow people to live with you if they aren’t pitching in. Even the early Christians believed it was good to set reasonable4 limits and not invite back those who disrespect your hospitality.

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Other essays in the hospitality series:

Dear Keturah,

Whenever you get back to writing once your baby is here, I have a question for your Manners and Morals series, that I would love to hear your thoughts on:

Is it improper for undergarments like panties and bras to be hung on a clothesline? What about higher-coverage underthings like bloomers, slips, petticoats, or chemises?

For a bit of context, I was raised in a survival prepper/ doomsday borderline cult that cultivated, among other things, a lot of fear and paranoia. I was taught that women’s underthings should never be hung outside on a clothesline because inevitably some dangerous pervert will walk by (even if you live in the country surrounded by woods) and the sight of your underwear hanging on the line will make them want to break in and rape you.

Now, I no longer ascribe to the belief system of that group (primarily because of the way they elevate survival-at-all-costs above their Christian morality) but I would be interested to hear another perspective on the specific matter of underwear on a clothesline as a matter of propriety rather than simple paranoia. I do hang my underthings on the line (while in my hedge-enclosed back yard out of sight) but usually do try to place them behind larger, more impersonal items like towels or skirts or shirts. And of course, I would never hang outside anything intimate or “sexy” like lingerie — that certainly feels improper — but I am less certain about the everyday sorts of items.

I would love to hear your thoughts.

Dear Reader,

It seems to me that you’ve basically answered your own question, and I have no disagreement with the conclusions you’ve drawn.

What I find most interesting about this particular issue is the reasoning behind it all. It is a perfect example, in my opinion, of how human nature when left unchecked will find bad reasons to do good things. This, in my opinion, is an especial dangerous deception used by the devil to persuade us — once we are burnt by the folly of our own reasoning — to abandon good pursuits altogether.

For example, one could home-school because they want to offer their child a better education, or one could home-school because they want to hide their child from the world. The child might get a perfectly good education in both instances, however because the parents have a positive outlook their child will probably grow up and not resent his parents. On the other hand, a child raised by the second type often ends up speaking out on how home-schooling is abusive and isolating. The first child might describe his home-schooling experience as enrichening. The second child might claim he was raised in a cult.

I’ve seen this done with so many things. Women who are raised in dresses to hide their bodies might leave the family and try to liberate themselves of the shame they were conditioned to live in. However, women who were raised to respect their bodies and appreciate the beauty they are endowed with tend to feel satisfied to keep wearing dresses and don’t have as much negatively associated with the word “modesty”.

Those who read the Bible because they feel like they have to will find the Bible boring. Those who haven’t been forced to read the Bible as some sort of dogmatic ritual tend to want to binge read it more. Those who become Christians because they want to love God and love their neighbors tend to be peaceable and fun to be around, even when they have radical beliefs. Those who become Christians because they are afraid of going to hell tend to be bitter, not very hospitable, and extremely judgmental.

It’s important to do things for the right reason especially if we call ourselves Christians, otherwise we will have no true light within us. It is our job to be vessels that point to Christ. But if there is no love within us we become obnoxious and the works we do, although good, become distorted distractions.

The light on a hill mutates into vicious, blinding floodlights.

And so it is, even with small things such as hanging undergarments on the clothesline. No, we shouldn’t be afraid of bad men seeing our slips and wanting to rape us. Ideally, one should be joyful while hanging laundry on the lines. It is not an occasion to tremble with trepidation!

Nevertheless, there are appropriate ways to do things for the sake of propriety and beauty. Instead of looking to the fear-led wisdom of cults, however, we can look to our ancestors. What did they think about such matters, even such trivial matters such as where to hang the underwear?

For the most part, they did as you are doing, hanging the intimidates between towels and sheets, not out of fear, but out of self-respect. It was considered to be low-class to do otherwise. Women who had any sense of dignity about themselves didn’t want the neighbors talking about what color her panties were. Or maybe she just didn’t want them to see how many times she’d mended her petticoats. Either way, those garments were meant to remain hidden.

It was all a type of show. For these undergarments were hardly indecent looking. Most of them did not look like the things we wear today, but perhaps like a less full skirt or a pair of baggy pants (bloomers/ petticoats). These things weren’t necessarily improper, but they were the covering of things you didn’t want to reveal to the public — the veil between what is seen and what is not seen.

Modern equivalents would be tank tops, leggings, shorts, or any such garments you wear under your skirts, blouses, and dresses. If you have lingerie, you could hang that on the line between the towels and sheets, if you are comfortable doing so and if it’s not a bright color that might stick out even if hidden.

You might not want to air out your dirty laundry, but a fresh breeze is good for any garment that is properly situated!

Thank you for reading Polite Company. These essays are published free of charge to encourage young girls and mothers, and to offer entertainment for those who are curious about another way of life. If you’d like to support my work you can buy me a coffee or commission a handmade sewn/ knitted/ tatted project.

Disclaimer: I don’t like being forced to walk on thin ice, and this is how it feels to have to add a disclaimer. I want to think best of my readers. I don’t want to coddle your feelings, I want you to read me in good faith. I want you to do whatever you want with your pets in your own home. I don’t want you to think I’m basically Hitler for not wanting a cow in my kitchen.

I have had my fair share of pets: dogs, cats, and goats. But I’ve never wanted to share my living space with them unless they were newborn or sickly and in need of extra care. For some reason, refusing to welcome animals into my home has caused a measure of aggravation among acquaintances.

This amplified once I was pregnant and my sense of smell was heightened. I absolutely could not stomach the odor of pet urine while pregnant, and now that I have a crawling baby, I don’t want someone’s pet walking on my clean floors.

Nevertheless, over the years I’ve been met with much resistance. Various people have tried to trick me into admitting that one day I’ll want have an indoor pet. Or I’d marry a man who would. And if he didn’t, our children would, and it would be akin to child abuse to forbid our children to have an indoor pet. Because children deserve the right to be smothered in the saliva of animals.

If you say anything about how you think it’s gross to have an animal in your living space, these sorts will counter, “puppy poop is good for kid’s immune system1” and “people used to keep cows inside their houses”.

But I don’t want a cow in my kitchen anymore than I want a cat on my table or a dog on my couches. I’m ok if this makes me not trad. If my children’s immune system is a little weaker because I keep the barn out of my home, so be it. I draw my lines at the thresh-hold: no animals indoors.

Furthermore, my child is incomparable to animals. Here are five reasons she has nothing in common with your pets:

1. My Child is Not My Emotional Support Companion

Ideally, parents aren’t having children for the same reason one would get a pet. We don’t have children to “heal” our inner child. Choosing to have children is choosing to sacrifice one’s needs for the need of their children. In fact, expecting your child to be your emotional support companion would qualify as “parentification”, where children are forced to do for their parents what parents should be doing for their children.

It’s not a child’s duty to fulfill their parents emotional needs, rather our children are learning to how to regulate their emotions from us. I am my child’s emotional support companion. She is not my pet, but my child.

2. My Child Isn’t Teaching Me To Be A Responsible Adult

Many pet owners will talk about how their animals force them to have routine and have a sense of responsibility. However, there is no true comparison to how a parent instills virtue into children and how a dog or cat demands care. Parents should hopefully be responsible before they have children, otherwise they would be irresponsible parents.

Good parents establish routine for their children and teach the children how to become responsible adults because the parent is already responsible and organized2. The parent sacrifices and instructs so that the child might grow up in a secure and stable environment. The child isn’t doing these things for the parent, but receiving these from their parents.

3. I Am Not Offended if Strangers Don’t Want to Touch My Child

I’m not one of those neurotic mothers who says nobody can kiss my babies, but I actually do prefer if strangers don’t immediately grab and touch my child as if she’s an animal to be passed around. Furthermore, if I am comfortable with you holding the baby, I don’t get upset if you don’t want to hold my baby.

One could argue that there’s something wrong with people who don’t want to hold babies. However, more often than not it’s argued that there’s something wrong with people who don’t want to pet someone else’s animal. However, if a good mother realizes that someone else might be uncomfortable holding her baby, she’s not going to care. It’s usually best to not force your child (or pet) onto others.

4. I Do Not Let My Child Roam Free in Other People’s Spaces

When my mother-in-law was on hospice, a friend of hers came to visit with her tiny dog, took it off its leash, then let it run around the house unchecked. It came straight for my toes. I remember thinking that even my child wouldn’t be permitted to act this unruly in someone else’s home. Not t I’d use a leash, but she will be taught to respect other people’s homes. It’s not hers to wander around in as she likes. And she certainly won’t be allowed to lick anyone’s toes.

For some reason many pet owners believe they are entitled to other people’s spaces. They are offended if their animal is not allowed in someone else’s home (even if that home has small children who crawl on the floor or immune compromised patients). Without asking permission, they will bring their pet into pet-free environments apologetically and then proceed to let the animal roam unsupervised. This would be inappropriate behavior for children, too, and yet pets tend to get away with it more often because it’s somehow worse to be accused of not liking animals than of hating children.

5. I Don’t Expect Anyone to Accommodate My Child’s Poor Behavior

A friend was once watching her own small child and her sister-in-law’s child at her sister-in-law’s home. They had a small dog. The two infants were playing when the dog snapped at them and bit my friend’s child, so my friend smacked the dog on the snout then later informed her sister-in-law of what she’d done so should would know to watch out for it in the future with children. Instead, the sister-in-law freaked out, saying it was inappropriate to punish the dog, and told my friend she was never to come back.

I’ve shared this story countless times, and without fail, even those who are anti corporal punishment, have said that the young baby probably asked to be bit by being rough with the dog! Such people who believe that animals are somehow superior to children can’t be helped. Yet I remain horrified. A baby does not deserve to be bit by a dog. Even if the baby is still learning how to have gentle hands, it is not a proper punishment.

I would never excuse such behavior from a child. If my daughter were to bite some other child because that child annoyed her, I would not tolerate it. Biting is rarely permissible. And yet many seem to have this double standard concerning their pets.

I experienced similar disrespect when I was pregnant. Countless guests brought their dogs into our home without permission. Their dogs urinated on my floors, chewed up cushions, and jumped on guests (small children). I was the one who cleaned up after the dogs and intervened when they attacked my guests even though I was heavy with child. And when I got annoyed for having to clean up after someone else’s pet I was told, “I don’t appreciate you’re always complaining about dogs.”

Final Remarks

I had only one nightmare while I was pregnant: my baby was peacefully born at home and then a relative’s dog came rushing in and gobbled up my newborn. I think it’s fair to say, I was a little more paranoid about animals after that around the time of her birth. Even now, I’m extra cautious when we go places that have indoor pets, especially large dogs.

I’ve loved many animals over the years, and have cried when they died or were sold. But their deaths were the deaths of animals and nothing to compare to the thought of losing my child (who I’d never sell).

A lot of my friends have told me that their feelings about animals changed a lot after they had children. One of my friends re-homed her two big dogs who she loved so very much after she had a baby. She couldn’t bear the risk of the dog accidentally smothering or chomping at her baby. Another friend shooed all the cats out to the barn. Others, after an infusion of new hormones, banished the house-pets in an attempt to de-hair and deodorize the home so everything would be clean for the new baby who would soon be crawling on and licking off the floors.

If you’ve been pregnant, you more than likely have had the similar experiences. It might be hard to imagine this if you’re single and have a lot of love and devotion for your pet. To that I say, just wait. Someday, God willing, you too will experience heightened awareness as your motherly instincts kick in. And then you will find that having a child is indeed nothing at all like having a pet. The love that you feel will be greater and more noble, and you will find yourself willing to lay down your life and all your passions and interests for this precious little human being. There’s truly nothing like having a child.

If you enjoyed this essay, check out my article on Blaze on how modern pet-ownership is related to mental illness.

Thank you for reading Polite Company. These essays are available free of charge to encourage young girls and mothers, and to offer entertainment for anyone curious about another way of life. If you’d like to support my work you can buy me a coffee or commission a handmade sewn/ knitted/ tatted project.

It is important to not be vague when discoursing controversial subjects1.

What is a tradwife? Some say it’s a lifestyle, others claim it’s merely LARPing. Some dip in and out of the “fad”, claiming to be traditional when tradition trends, then reject it when that, too, becomes the cool thing to do. Whether they claim to hate it or love it, few people seem to really get it traditionalism. Probably because few people are organically trad. It’s easy to fall in love with aesthetics only to completely miss the value system that created those aesthetics.

And when the aesthetics fail, they blame it on "tradition”. But which tradition?

Without role models who are cemented in generational traditions, it’s impossible for modern tradwives to understand how far they’re falling short of becoming traditional. Cultural dissonance and an inability to think outside of their current modern worldview keeps their tradlife surface level.

When they fail at the “trad” lifestyle they conflate all traditional values as backwards, harmful, and oppressive.

I touched on this when I wrote my Polite Rebuttal of Helen Roy's FERTILITY IDOLATRY. I pointed out that although she is “TradCath”2, she approached and argued against Catholic traditions using quotes and proofs from Protestant sources to disprove certain Catholic theologies she disliked.

J. Oliver Conroy also did this when writing about traditional families. He mostly interviewed Catholic families who embraced a simple life. But then to “show the other side” he contrasted these seemingly “harmless families with quaint values” with examples of former tradwives who were predominantly Mormon. The counter-examples were women who had once espoused supposedly traditional principles but now rejected them due to oppression or abuse. But the women he highlighted never had the same values as the families he interviewed although both sets of women identified as “traditional”.

Both Helen Roy and J. Oliver Conroy, although sincere in their attempts, seem to gloss over the fact that tradition isn’t a Mr. Potato head. Not all religions or expressions of faith have the same traditions.

In other words, not all tradwives are equal: some wear hijabs while others wear Carhartts according to their religious (or lack of religious) affiliation. If you’re going to write about the tradwife — especially if you wish to criticize her — you have to understand this simple fact.

While there may be some overlap in verbiage and aesthetics, not all traditions share the same ethos, failures, or successes.

In order to condemn a certain tradition from a certain faith you must stick to examples within that faith. One can’t argue against Orthodox Jewish practices because of oppression among Islamic women. Both types of women are traditional — but they don’t share the same traditional values.

Here are some of the most popular types of tradwives3.

Not all self-identified tradwives will fit neatly into one category, especially if they’ve recently converted from one expression of faith to another and have holdover values from their childhood faith.

The Mormon

Hannah Neeleman and Nara Smith are two of the more popular Mormon tradwives. They use their social media to inspire people of all walks of life to have babies, homestead, and look sexy doing it. They may talk about “traditional values”, but mostly they are sharing cooking tutorials or updates on the homestead. In many ways they are not traditional (they do not exclusively abide by the traditions of their own faith). For instance, they are both known to not wear the traditional Mormon undergarments, often preferring to wear garments that would be considered immodest by LDS church standards.

There’s a lot of importance put on sex appeal and “perfect image” which leads to many negative reactions. Some love these types of traditional women for not caving into the “messy hair, don’t care” culture. Others hate them, often out of a place of envy — how can a woman have so many children and still look that hot?

Values: Manufactured beauty standards, prosperity gospel, your homestead-can-be-your-earthly-Kingdom, extravagance of spirit, simplicity when it’s sexy, wholesome food, cooking.

Alternative: The fundamental Mormon tradwife looks nothing like Ballerina Farms. She might be mistaken for Amish because she wears long dresses. Like the modern Mormon tradwife, there is emphasis on a type of prosperity gospel, although perhaps a Mormon family might not attain such wealth until the next life when God will reward a man with his own kingdom. Such families often practice polygamy and obscurity.

The TradCath

The TradCath has many flavors from cradle Catholic to convert. The converts seem to struggle with ridding themselves of their Protestant inclinations4, often trading their Sola Scriptura beliefs for an obsession with the Latin Mass. Cradle Catholics are often a little more chill and tend to talk about the Rosary more than how to receive the Eucharist.

Unlike Mormon tradwives, the men tend to be more popular (on twitter) than the women. The men talk a lot about the doctrines and dogmas. The women argue about what to wear on Sunday, but dress normally for the rest of the week.

Everything centers around the mass — where they live, go to school, work, etc. They love tradition, too. Sometimes they fall into the trap of idolizing the 1950s even though their tradition predates that era by several centuries.

Values: Somber and reserved; Poverty is a virtue; birth control and IVF are prohibited; children submit to parents, women submit to husbands, husbands submit to Priests, Priests to Bishops, and so forth all the way up to the Pope who submits to Jesus; humility is key; life is about becoming a Saint; The sacraments are central to life, especially the Eucharist.

Alternatives: There are two main divides in Tradcaths: the homesteader and the aristocrat. Mike Thomas and Bug Hall are two examples of Tradcath men who are homesteaders. They reject modernity and wealth, have many children, and live alongside the Amish. Mike Thomas is the man behind the Catholic Land Movement, a movement to resettle rural America. Such families reject the dichotomy of the SAHM/ working father. Both parents, if possible, are home with the family or have a purpose of severing ties with career culture.

The second archetype — the aristocrat — struggles with the Church’s doctrines on simple living, and might argue that poverty is for Monks and Priests, but not for the family man. Their wives tend to like fine things, and these sorts are drawn to the cities. If they are rural, they aren’t intentionally living on the cheap. They have, with the “homesteader” value a robust education for their children.

The Eastern Orthodox

The Orthodox woman is bubbly and welcoming. She is the most hospitable of the Tradwives. She will greet you at the door, and offer you a piece of bread during communion. After Divine Liturgy she will make sure you stay for lunch, and that you have someone to sit and eat with. Stepping into an Orthodox Church feels like entering another place or time — this is because, to us Westerners, the East seems like a distant land.

Some say that Catholics are all head and Orthodox are all heart. This isn’t really true — what is true is that Orthodox are heavily influenced by the East, and Catholics by the West. One might say that Catholics are more like Jews — they care a lot about Leviticus, ancient ritual, and respectability. The Orthodox are bit more Muslim in spirit — chill, a little on the barbaric side, and beautiful.

Values: Hospitality, ancient Liturgy, art, piety, vibrant colors and food, ethnicity, layered clothing. The women have a sort of Serbian-Greek-Russian style paired with American thrift-store fashion.

Alternatives: Almost all of the Orthodox I’ve interacted with tend to be converts. They are often the ones who are the most hospitable and engaging. Many of the ethnic churches can be harder to enter as a stranger.

The Homesteader

This type doesn’t have to be religious. She might be a Wendell Berry fan or a non-denominational Christian. She wants to be a little like all the women she’s seen on social media. She wants to work hard and have a nice farm. Often, she doesn’t put much stock in beauty. That’s for Instagram influencers. She’s most often seen in leggings, jeans, or Carhartts. Although she’s been influenced, she’s most likely gotten rid of her smart phone.

She reads a lot of gardening books and dreams of milking her goats and gathering eggs from her chickens. She doesn’t sew, but would like to learn how to mend. She’s a spendthrift when it comes to buying things for her livestock, but she won’t spend much money on herself. Occasionally she’ll put on some makeup to go to town.

She may or may not believe in Christian traditional values. She picks them as they please her.

Values: growing your own food, canning, baking, cooking, having chickens, butchering, limited social media exposure, fencing. Gender-roles don’t really matter though sex sometimes does. If she has children they live in mud boots alongside her.

The Evangelical

Evangelical tradwives are a bit like the Mormons: they put a lot of emphasis on sex-appeal, although they usually reject “picture perfect” images. They are the “normies” of the trads. They like dresses if they are sexy. Women submit to their husbands because it’s a kink. Procreation is a choice. Poverty is stupid.

Values: Normalcy; probably doesn’t identify as trad because it’s too old-fashioned, instead would claim to be “in the world, but not of it”; sex is encouraged (within the bounds of marriage, but anything goes as long as both parties are happy); abortion is evil but birth control is a choice; homosexuality is evil but femininity is a choice as long as your husband is happy with you in the bed.

Alternatives: There are many evangelical tradwives who exclusively wear dresses or skirts, but if they do so, try to look as “normal” as possible. They don’t wear anything that looks too “Amish”. Denim skirts with a cut similar to pants are often preferred because they make these types of women feel more like “modern” women who wear jeans.

The Fundamental Christian

This is how I was raised, so it’s the most familiar to me. There is some overlap with the Fundamental Christian and the Evangelical, except Fundamentals try hard not to be normal. They also completely reject the term “tradition” because it is too Catholic. They will claim to be bible-based. There is a fine line between fundamental Christians and cults — fundamental Christians can rarely organize themselves well enough to become a cult, and often have “home churches” but it’s just their family and a few elderly neighbors.

Values: Strict gender roles for both men and women, all books outside of the Bible could be evil, Bible-based but a lot of arbitrary rules created by parents, teetotalism, Father is the head of the household, truth matters more than unity so families are often isolated, Children must always obey parents even as adults, women tend to claim to be demure doormats but are often manipulative, men claim to be patriarchal but are often spineless and naive, private interpretation of scripture is good, homeschooling but education isn’t super important as long as you can read the Bible, off grid if possible. A lot of perverts are attracted to these sort of families because parents are often too excited to see new blood in their “church” to question whether or not their guest has ulterior motives. Every family has a unique culture and accent.

Fundamentals: Some baptists or non-denominational Christians claim to be fundamental because they believe in a specific interpretation of end-time prophecy and wives submitting to husbands. However these sorts usually still reject “tradition” as a label.

Amish

Amish5 love tradition. They are more Catholic than Fundamental Christian: unity matters more than truth. They do not embrace poverty as a virtue, but they believe in simplicity and living within their means. Fathers are the head of the home, but they do not create rules that are not approved of by the bishop. They are neither in nor of the world, neither do they create their own little kingdoms. They are plain folks trying to be as invisible as possible.

The Amish do not easily trust “English” — outsiders. Most of them will do business with anyone. They will smile widely and warmly, and they will be polite and non-judging. But they do not trust easily. They fear those who file law-suits easily. The women will hide if they see a man in shorts approaching. They are hesitant to invite women wearing pants into their homes. They love desert at every meal along with a good helping of gossip.

Values: simplicity, 1800’s reiteration of tradition, hard work, discipline, unity, modesty for both genders, spurns vanity, rejects common etiquette because of how superfluous it can be, straightforward, working together, cheapness, good deals. This is the only group that completely rejects manufactured beauty standards such as shaving and makeup.

Alternatives: There are many types of Amish (and Mennonites). Some Amish are known to be merely traditional (think Lancaster Amish). These sort might charge you more or be less honest in their dealings. Amish are humans, too, prone to many failings because of their harsh lifestyle. But they value their heritage — this keeps their communities together in spite of legitimate or misrepresented scandals.

Ethnic Tradwives

It is almost unfair of me to group all these women into one category because they each are from distinct cultures and religions with their own values and aesthetics. However, I do so anyways for the sake of brevity. This traditional woman, alongside ethnic traditional Orthodox and Catholic women, is perhaps one of the truest tradwives — she is the farthest from the memed tradwife, and is the oldest by centuries.

The Hasidic, the Muslim, the Indian, the Nigerian, the Native American6, the Romanian, etc.

She is traditional because it is how she was raised, not because of books or some Instagram post.

These are women who often descend from families with both matriarchal and patriarchal figures that work side-by-side in gender-segregated work. These are people that may know true generational suffering and poverty, and as a result value the pursuit of generational wealth almost above anything else. Family comes first, of course. They applaud the virtues of hard work, loyalty, and being content with the simple things in life. But, with rare exceptions, they would scoff at the idea of poverty being a virtue.

They are intuitively trad — they do what they do because that’s what their mothers and grandmothers did. But they are not motivated by arguments for why tradition might be better. They don’t think in terms of tradition vs modernity. Their mindset is antiquated — they don’t need to know why. Instead they roll up their sleeves and do what must be done.

The Meme/ 50s Tradwife

The meme tradwife doesn’t exist. Anyone who claims to be like her is cosplaying television actresses. Any journalist who believes that this is the inspiration for any true traditionalist is stupid.

Values: Many true traditionalists reject most of the values purported by the 50s tradwife. For instance, her dress is polyester and looks like it was bought from Shein. She probably has skills, but mostly she’s a SAHM with vintage cookware. The husband works a 9-5 job. She is demure and has no opinions of her own. She is a fictionalized woman, and her husband is just as fake. They are both bland and boring — the stuff of memes.

Alternatives: The Twitter Trad is a reiteration of this meme. These are women who have a fetish for submission. This type of woman boasts about being stupid and deranged. She is an irreligious kinky degenerate who role-plays “femininity”. She is the tradwhore7. She is profane and uncouth and everything she does has perverted undertones.

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It’s easy to speak of tradwives as if they are all of one mind. That is simply not the case — even this guide is too brief to capture the complexities of the women of various traditions. Some of them have much in common —others have absolutely no shared values despite aesthetic similarities.

The real ones are often born into it. It isn’t a trend or a kink, but a way of life based on wisdom and customs passed down from woman to woman. Those who wish to sincerely study tradwives in order to join them or condemn them must first understand the type of woman they are looking at.

Not all tradwives are the same — and to write or speak as if they are is a gross injustice to all traditional women.

Some trad families wish to have a lot of children because they want a large family — they might do anything to have many children, including IVF. Other trad families have large families only because they believe in being open to God’s ultimate plan. Some pursue earthly wealth; others preach the virtue of poverty. Some families put a lot of emphasis on manufactured beauty standards and might justify watching porn together as a couple — others want to get back to what is natural and ordered and may reject anything that alters the body.

Although the various tradwives might initially appear the same, different baseline-values will produce different outcomes.

Traditional groups who value manufactured beauty standards may have a higher rate of porn consumption and divorces. Those who promote having lots of children rather than remaining open to God’s plan may result in overprotective parents who won’t let their children go once they become adults. Those who value simple living may have both parents at home; those who pursue generational wealth may have more debt and an overworked patriarch.

Some groups will lead to women being more oppressed — other groups produce empowered matriarchs, who although submissive to their husbands, aren’t asking his permission to function. Some groups raise intelligent, capable children. Others keep the children home until they’re fifty.

These are not arbitrary differences — they are the things that make up the different types of traditionalists and what ensures their successes or failures as a family. They are mostly defined by the expression of faith they’ve chosen to embrace.

We can look at the patterns within various traditions, see their fruits, and discern which sort of tradwife we want to be.

Thank you for reading Polite Company. Feel free to tip me if you enjoyed this essay!

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P. S. I recently wrote a note on Substack venting about the “religious illiteracy” among secular people and their tendency to use “Amish” as a slur whenever they meet a woman wearing a head-covering and dress. This led me to a fellow Substacker’s blog and her essay on The Fashions of Religious Sub Cultures. Worth a read!!

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