While the Italian side was open to Catholic education and white-collar work as the proper life path of an immigrant in America, this paradigm did not exist among Japanese farmers. For the Japanese, one was meant to fulfill the role they were given by their family and by birth, and this constituted a complete, proper, and honorable life. I am sure that my grandfather would have agreed that he did not see this as “evil” as much as incomplete. His family viewed higher education as a kind of specialization that was ultimately debilitating. What use was there in learning mathematics, American history, or another people’s literature? How does any of that help grow better tomatoes or make one’s own tools? When my grandfather announced his intent to pursue a PhD, his father responded, “I see you have made yourself more of a cripple.”

In the end, my grandfather did go on to get his PhD, and he worked for the same federal government that had forcibly relocated his family as a child. His job was to help displaced African American families from the South – sharecroppers – as they moved north and tried to build a new life for themselves.

He also ended up raising a boy who – among other things – served in the military, went to college at 16, and climbed up the side of an apartment complex to sneak into the room of a Hawaiian girl he was “friends” with on December 7th, 198[x]. My Dad – like a certain child of his – likes doing many things and had no idea what he wanted to be when he was younger. However, he eventually realized that his combination of intelligence, quick thinking, people skills, and desire to help others made him uniquely suited to being a doctor. He would go on to meet his future wife at their residency program – in a large city with a high crime rate – where all who went through it described it as “a good place to be from”.

While my parents were in their residency together, they took care of a patient with Stevens-Johnson syndrome, a disease that leads to the rapid and irreversible loss of all the body’s skin. They monitored the patient, drugged out of his mind on painkillers, for many weeks. I believe the antecedent cause was AIDS.

The week before my mom started, another resident was raped in their hospital’s parking lot.

Finding a place to effectively insert an IV into a long-term heroin addict can be difficult. One frequently admitted patient, after he had recovered from an attempted overdose, left the hospital with the needle still in. Why waste the clean injection site.

My parents are still doctors. And their mutual love and faith in God have lasted decades and far more of life’s vicissitudes than that. The human condition is flawed, and we are subject to both the evil we intentionally inflict and the cruelties of nature entirely out of our control. Today, we live in a world that seems uniquely designed to turn every reverence for what we value into mere representation, then parody, and ultimately mockery. And for many – for diverse reasons – this day in human history seems uniquely designed to highlight that fact. What so proudly we’ve hailed has survived enemies from without, a near-death experience in infancy, and skies like iron and ground like bronze, only for us to greet what our grandparents had hoped would be a day of joy and gratitude with cynicism and the accusation of hollow celebration.

We have lost faith in ourselves – and one could argue that this is because in the chase to have freedom “from” we have lost sight of the deeper freedom “for”, or that this “freedom” was fictive and hypocritical from the start – but on a deeper level, it seems that we have collectively reached our “fundamental limit”. We joke; all empires have a life cycle of 250 years. But such a joke would have been unintelligible even a generation ago. And while it might be easy to say that this is because previous generations lacked the long view to self-conceptualize as an “empire” or that the stubborn narcissism of exceptionalism had not yet learned its place, I think the deeper reason was that the afterglow of victory and the steady head needed for braving a novel type of existential annihilation instilled a certain responsibility, one that readily translated to humility in regards to trials overcome and grit in the face of whatever might happen next. One of my favorite movies, Interstellar, has a famous quote along the lines of “It’s not possible, it’s necessary.” The optimism of America’s past seems to have been inherently tied to this ethos; It’s almost like we don’t know what to do with ourselves once we actually succeed.

The essay, In Hoc Anno Domini, written by WWII veteran Vermont Royster and published annually in the Wall Street Journal, stresses the unique importance of (yes) freedom and (yes) equality in Christ’s message. It is almost as if in being “slaves to God”, all other values become relativized due to that relation’s infinite importance. Patriotism is good insofar as it is reverence and respect for a nation God blesses, analogous (but not identical) to how we revere and respect our Creator. Charity is good insofar as all human beings are created in the divine image and are thus entitled to an infinite obligation of love by virtue of their very existence. No lesser ideal can claim us because we have been fully claimed by God, but it is precisely because of this claim that we are morally obligated to serve neighbor and nation. The article ends with a scriptural injunction: “Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ has made us free and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage.” This is both a call to battle and an admonition of responsibility – totalitarian societies work; that is why they have been the law of history, and that is why so many people happily choose to live under them. The price of freedom is not a mystery; it is the human nature we already know and the dark passions we both revel in and are victims of when wielded by others.

We find ourselves in a world where it is not unusual to see people who are overcome by addiction and mental illness commit acts of violence in public, where overworked and underappreciated police officers lethally react to those they were meant to protect, and where the worst crimes that are regularly used as self-evident justifications for capital punishment are regularly and unapologetically committed by captains of industry, moral authorities, and elected “servants of the people”. As much as “humans have always been like this,” it is not hard to see why patriotism today is either treated like a punchline or a pagan idol. What else is one human to do in the face of so much depravity and despair but reject it as an empty promise or turn it into their personal god?

There will always be more suffering, mental illness, and poverty than any society can solve for. But to say that freedom and pluralism are uniquely responsible for this, to say that America is somehow uniquely worse at dealing with these perennial tragedies, is to ignore not only the very conditions that birthed the miracle of modern medicine, technology, and personal liberty in the first place, but the cultural ethos that led to people believing that those problems - and individual lives - could not only be worth remedying, but that it might actually be possible to do so.

We have decided as a society that it is more humane to have homeless shelters than involuntary commitment. That it is better to brave the risks of assimilation than to turn any child born on our soil away. That states can be allowed to decide on the nature of a right that many believe to be one of the most foundational to personal liberty and human life. Those are all decisions that can be argued in good faith within the systems of classical liberalism and deliberative democracy. But to blame pluralism, a specific political party, or even America is to ultimately find an easy scapegoat for something that is fundamentally a problem of human nature.

There are many reasons people offer for why America is or isn’t exceptional. I believe that we are. And I believe so for the very boring reason we all learn in our baseline inculcation of civic virtue – not because of blood and soil (if it were, I would not exist), not because of an unconquerable foundational sin, not because we are uniquely capable of enacting a set of ideals, and definitely not because we are politically mandated to maintain divine fidelity (in fact, it is almost precisely the opposite). The reason I believe America is special is that no other civilization has ever been founded on maintaining the unique gift – freedom – that God gave us precisely because we are all made in the divine image. We have the ability to say no, we have the ability to tear ourselves apart, we have the ability to fall to our knees for something less than the creator of the universe and hold our own hands up for the promise of gilded chains, but this is why our yes is so powerful and true when it does happen - and as it has happened for the past two hundred and fifty years.

On this Fourth of July, two and a half centuries since the founding of our nation, it would do well to stand fast, therefore, in this freedom. Not because it is possible, but because it is necessary.

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The place was almost entirely empty, and I had taken a single table along one of the walls. Despite this, as I was most innocently scrolling through my Atlantic article feed – oscillating between moral guilt at my lack of serious attention and incredulity at the type of pseudoscientific alt-medicine crap they’ll publish – another college guy decides to sit at the single right next to mine on the chair directly diagonal from me. There is a profoundly awkward moment where he tries to make eye contact for a good five seconds. I furrow my brow in his general direction and rapidly become fascinated by how tantric salvia will cure the male loneliness epidemic and make a point of looking at the opposite side of the restaurant for at least another minute.

The guy is skinny with no pigment to speak of and has the poofy hair of your standard-issue Gen Z male. But he’s also wearing a washed denim jacket and a metal shirt and clearly has other alt affectations, despite (as I would later learn) overall attempting to communicate “zoomer bro energy”. I felt confident that I could both take him in a fight and a duel on Slayer lore.

About five minutes later, a girl pulls up and sits in the seat across from him. There’s a very mechanically challenged moment where it seems like he’s either trying to take her jacket or give her a hug, but it never seems to work out in his favor, and in defeat, he takes his seat again. The girl is the spitting image of a put-together, Pilates-attending, out-of-state sorority type. Her balayage hair is in a high, tight bun; her dontlookdontlookdontlook yoga pants are the correct pastel earth tone; and her gold jewelry is tastefully draped across ear, wrist, and neck.

At this point, my bowl has arrived, and I am more than happy to ignore whatever is going on over there. But about five minutes later, I realize neither one of them has said a word to the other. He keeps – I shit you not for it is permanently scarred in my memory – reaching for her hair and trying to brush it behind her ear/stroke said ear with his thumb, but she seems entirely indifferent to this overture and one or two times even actively bats his hand away. More silence. After a few minutes (this restaurant does not have particularly fast meal prep). She takes out her phone and goes on Instagram. I’m trying to figure out whether this is a breakup, a really dry long-term, or some horrible and Godforsaken family member visit, but then it dawns on me that this is, in fact, their first date. This is their first date, and he keeps trying to touch her face while she actively avoids him and scrolls through Instagram reels. And from the attempts at a conversation, it seems like they probably met on Hinge, and this is the only time they’ve even seen each other in person.

Everything that could go flat or awkward on a first date somehow did. And I and my poor duck meat shoyu ramen got a front row seat for the carnage. He could’ve chosen to sit anywhere in the entire blessed restaurant, but no. This sensitive young man chooses to sit right next to me and make me watch his mating dance (with frankly, way too many thirty-second-long silent smirks at her) while I am haplessly held hostage to second-hand social death. The contempt – or at least indifference – that she feels for him is as evident as her faux Van Cleef, but he seems unable to veer off the “playfully teasing” script and that one hair move that maybe an older friend or a YouTube video told him would be the correct way to break the intimacy barrier.

Finally, blessedly, their ramen bowls are set before them. They dig in with a ferocity that only social shame could provoke. He asks, “Is it too spicy for you?” She responds no, she’s fine with spice. He makes a comment about the general food quality. She does the sorority girl, half physically, half socially tired point-five-decibel “yeah”, Eventually, after about five or so minutes of this, they call over the waiter. Sensitive young man pays for the whole thing, and they both leave in opposite directions with 75% of the ramen uneaten.

Now, I bring up this story not to disparage the social skills of my most illustrious university, but rather because I think it illustrates a microcosm of why zillenial dating and gender relations are uniquely hard and difficult to navigate. We all know that gender, sexuality, and dispositional sympathies could cause a variety of observational reactions to this interaction, ranging from “he is a creep violating way too many boundaries for a first date who probably lied on his hinge profile to bag a sorority girl. And now she’s doing the best she can to minimize the situation and get out with the least amount of damage to both of them,” to “Her indifference seems clearly correlated with the price differential between the materials on their bodies. And not only that, at least he was trying to make a connection. They matched on Hinge. They both went into this viewing it as a date. She didn’t exactly give him a lot to work with, and now he’s going to have to suffer both the financial and social consequences of her rejection.”

There is probably truth to both, and plenty of other interpretations of this encounter. And too much discourse on gender has been wasted trying to argue that only one of these is overridingly true.

Assigning blame to the guy or the girl is far less important than noting that both went into that interaction with the deck incredibly stacked against either of them having any chance at connection or intimacy. Since they met over Hinge, the threat of heartless sex is always in the background, which makes it very hard to become friends with the person afterwards. The pretense through which they met already artificially constrains the bounds of permissible interactions, and it irrevocably colors all implications that are consequently tied to them. In fact, I imagine if they ever have the vicissitude of taking a class together, they will probably sit as far away from each other as humanly possible.

But on a deeper level, beyond the fact that they met on a technology uniquely suited to clinicalizing what should be the most spontaneous, they both brought to that date a very natural and understandable (if tragically overexaggerated) way of acting that will likely further alienate each of them from the opposite gender. Within a particularly modern context, the language of flirtation and other sorts of prolegomena to intimacy have been subject to stress tests without precedent. I know the following is already obvious to every other sane guy out there, but it still bears repeating. The type of shit that clavicular pulls on stream, and that pua’s used to do back in the day only works if the woman is already attracted to you. Projections of dominance are a force multiplier, not a torque vector. Similarly, there is a difference between the unfortunate coldness required to shut down an obsessive admirer and the prima facie decision to presume predatory intent. Your disgust (however warranted) at him repeatedly touching your ear does not register as disgust at inappropriate romantic behavior; it registers as disgust at him. Feminism speaks in the abstractions of patriarchy and systemic oppression, but here is a man in front of you trying his best, who you may never know is trying his best, because culture has given us the carte blanche pass of saying all awkward male dating behavior is malicious and indicative of a profound character flaw.

And this double encounter of misinterpretation only leads to deeper apathy. When someone of the opposite gender acts virtuously, unless it is within a particularly “cross-gendered” context, we are often inclined to view it as a good human action. But when heterosexual people have a difficult interaction with someone of the opposite gender, it is very hard to overcome both our standard negative cognitive bias and the biological hardwiring designed as handmaiden for finding the love of one’s life and not view it as yet another “woman moment” or “just another man”. We are inclined to view good actions as good human actions and bad actions as the intrinsic fault of the Other.

And when it comes to fraught and highly charged subjects – such as porn addiction, rape culture, and our teleological ends as men and women – we are ironically then at our highest likelihood of meeting people of the opposite gender who are the most combative and likely to be acting in bad faith. When a man encounters a feminist, when a man encounters a woman who will bluntly speak to him in her terms about patriarchy, lived experiences, and taking up space, he is almost certainly not meeting the college girl suffering the immediate fallout of being violated by her boyfriend, or the woman who grew up in a religious environment that taught her with complete sincerity that her gender is the root of all that is shameful and evil. Similarly, women, almost by definition, rarely encounter the men who deserve sympathy for deep, constitutively male loneliness the most, and they thus become that much more hardened to legitimate calls for understanding the way modern life uniquely harms young men. They have to be. There is no other appropriate response to someone who consistently violates social codes and the baseline of moral decency than to be absolutely clear that they are not welcome and will be dealt with accordingly. The sociopaths have no problem manipulating others with their claims of suicidal ideation and lack of love, while the men who actually deserve it, the men who are actually facing that cross in all its naked desolation and loneliness, can barely even step out of their apartment, much less trouble another person for a pittance of empathy. It takes a rare soul who has both the honesty and the bravery to advocate for either of those deeper truths of male and female suffering in a public space. It is the difference between Socrates and Gorgias. When we have discussions on gender relations, we are most often talking with people who know how to argue, not people who know how it feels.

Besides the structural ways that cross-gender dialogue (whether romantic or practical) especially falls prey to negative feedback loops, the internet has made it uniquely difficult to arrive at emotional honesty. This is not just an argument about the general way online arguments anonymize and desanctify, the internet intersects in a very particular way with some of the pre-existing “bugs” in how we experience sexuality. When we have strong erotic feelings towards someone – whether because of that person specifically or a class of people they belong to – we often view them along the lines of the sexual projection of our desires without realizing it. We see the sexual persona, not the volitional person. To cite a really dumb but illustrative example, breasts are lumps of fat tissue and mammary glands. They can not be “perky, but insistent”, and they certainly can’t boob boobily down the stairs of their own free will. You are entirely experiencing the workings of your own, twisted, breast-obsessed mind, not objective reality.

This crosses the line from being stupid to dangerous when we assign moral responsibility to the person beneath. For another blunt but unfortunate example, consider the self-rationalization of a rapist who says his actions are excused because “she tempted me,” If feminism made no other contribution to the fabric of our collective moral framework then establishing as bedrock the distinction between the two very different ways in which the word “tempted” can normatively operate, then that alone would be justification enough for its goodness in human history.

The problem with the internet is that since it completely divorces symbolic communication from embodied communication, it has never been easier to conflate projections with subjecthood while being completely unaware that this is what we’re doing. There is no better example of this than the people who use AI thumbnails of their articles to make them appear at least an integer and a half more attractive than they are in real life. We cannot help but psychologically associate moral characteristics from the visual signals of a profile with the person behind the screen. I have thought about this in the context of my own presentation here. It seems my profile naturally blunts a lot of the bitterness and cynicism that its author feels in real life. This was a wholly unintentional consequence of its design, but I think it is, for the most part, a blessing.

The state of mind of someone who types hateful, indifferent words about the other gender has never been more radically divorced from the effect of that communicated message on the reader. Plato would have a field day.

It is a very understandable need to paint the one who harms us as a hateful, all-powerful belligerent because, on the surface, this provides legitimacy to our grievances. The worry is that if we felt pain from a coward, then clearly that pain must be “all in our heads”. But it is often the cowards who cause the most pain to others.

The misunderstanding of fear and the improper application of vengeance can tear apart communities and civilizations, but we play out this drama every day when we refuse to give the benefit of the doubt to those with whom we have a high phenomenological alterity, and in particular, if we are heterosexual, heterosexuals of the other gender. It is always humiliating to be the first to admit vulnerability, and there will always be people (both on the home and the away team) who will misunderstand such gestures and intentionally and maliciously use you as their scapegoat as a result. There is a reason “performative male” and “pick me” are effective shaming mechanisms, no matter which gender deploys them. But the only way we will be able to get anywhere is for someone to take the risk of showing compassion to the “other side” before their own. You might be surprised at the number of people who are grateful that you did.

2. Because, as countless cultures, philosophers, and religions have affirmed, man is transcendent, and woman is immanent. Man is form and woman is matter. Woman may be Goddess, but she has a lesser light, and her ultimate telos is to bring more men into being. Christ was Man because men were created to represent the transcendental, volitional nature of the divine, and women were meant to passively receive salvation.

3. Pagan anthropology is a heresy that should be rejected in all Christian thought. As Genesis affirms, both men and women were created in the divine image. However, men are favored in some way in salvation history that women are not (“From the woman came the beginning of sin, and by her we all die”), and so salvation requires a male body, just as with preaching and transubstantiation.

4. The maleness of Christ has no bearing on gender relations; it is merely a formal requirement of fulfilling the Old Covenant as the King promised to the line of David.

5. Men and women are equally in the image of God and equally favored in salvation. Both can reach the highest degrees of holiness. However, they have distinct, complementary roles within the drama of our relationship with God. Christ is male because Christ is the bridegroom of the female Church, whom He rescues from the bondage of sin and adorns with His love and beauty. This is also why there can never be female priests.

6. Because just as humanity in general needed to be reconciled to God on the cross, so too did the male body in general need to be reconciled to the female body in general in the Passion. Human history and personal psychological interrogation are conclusive about this. From Soraya to Magdalene, and from Sylvia Likens to Elisabeth Fritzl, the direction of human sadism, violence, humiliation, and degradation has always been clear. And the public worship of women’s purity as a social defense against this type of predation often far outstrips individual men’s willingness to be horrified at its necessity. We try to hide from this guilt with soft complementarianism, jokes about age-gap relationships, and never really saying what we mean in polite conversations about gender and sexuality. It’s hard when both genders know how to read. It forces us to answer questions we don’t want to and have conversations that most societies in human history were never able to bring into their Overton windows. Some, whether to hide from themselves or to force the unwilling to comply, brashly assert that what we see is how human relations were always meant to be. And as a result, a fallen order becomes reified by public morality, and we are left with Aristotelian anthropology, the Victorian “rule of thumb”, and the victim impact statements of GirlsDoPorn as our legacy to future generations for how civilized we supposedly are. Is becomes ought, and all the logical consequences of this sexual fantasy spill irrevocably into every culture’s conception of morality, anthropology, mythology, and spiritual horizons.

The Passion required an adult male body because, just as Christ needed to take on the weight of all of humanity’s sins to reconcile us to God, so too did a man, a King, need to be stripped naked, publicly whipped, mocked, sadistically tortured, and exiled from the recognition of shared humanity by the same people who worshiped him and fell at His feet less than a week before. One of the hardest things for abuse survivors of either gender to believe is that it is possible for men to understand - that defections from the brotherhood are not only possible but zealously embraced when the crime is of sufficient magnitude. Human history does little to prove them wrong. There will always be Buchas, Nanjings, and Jerusalems, and it will always be the gentle who suffer the worst, whose violations are the least correlated with any sense of wartime utility. The God of the universe chose to identify Himself with their agony. He weeps over the unmarked tomb of every daughter and son, and even, in some mystical way, at Gethsemane and Golgotha, experiences the full weight of their suffering with them. There is at least one man who has fully assumed the responsibility of every rape, every child’s life cut short, and every woman stoned to death with her own co-adulterer in the crowd. And yet He is also the man who recognizes the full depth of the violation, and who weeps with, and walks with, every survivor until they are able to find peace.

However, it is just as hateful and ridiculous to accuse each man individually of such a crime and disposition1. God would have saved Sodom for the sake of just ten righteous souls, but the countless examples of good and loving men are ignored in favor of radical condemnation, shameless declarations that men are undeserving of love, and accusations that male heterosexuality is intrinsically disgusting and evil. The whole reason Christ died is that He loves each one of us so deeply that He would undergo one of the most brutal forms of execution ever conceived in human history for the mere chance that we could come home to Heaven. Christ is male because the male body is beautiful. God so loves Man, and so loves men, and so loves the male sexuality He designed that He found no form more fitting for His pilgrim time on Earth. He came to love, both in the sense of seeing beyond sins and in making brothers out of bondsmen. One of the central problems with modern feminist discourse - and one of the reasons it is met with widespread apathy and few converts - is it refuses to perform the separation of sin and sinner that Christ does on the Cross. It, in many ways, is like the caricature of the wrathful, vindictive God of the Old Testament often found in popular culture; more concerned with meting out collective punishment than seeking out the origin or redress of purported wrongs. People often talk about how the overly religious have no insight into how judgemental they sound. As an overly religious person myself, I agree. When you believe something very strongly (and especially when it is of the order of magnitude of faith or justice) it can be very hard to understand how you sound to others who are not of the same mind. I imagine many more men would be happy to say they are feminist, and many nonbelievers happy to have a more welcoming opinion of the Church, if both groups stopped saying things like “you men” and “you sinners”.

The masculinity of Christ is both gentle and defiant. Throughout the Gospels, He performs actions and takes up positions that are considered unconscionably embarrassing and disgusting for a man meant to be a teacher and moral leader, and yet He is adamant that it is society which is wrong in how it understands strength and shame. The maleness of the victim of the Passion undoes the curse of the garden. No longer does man rule over woman, or woman bear the suffering of childbirth and sexual violence alone. Christ became passive, meek, and obedient to the point of death. And in doing so, He dethrones the prince of this earth, rises triumphant as King of Heaven and Son of Man, and shows what true masculinity looks like in the face of pagan posturing and human cowardice.

7. Because when God in the Trinity disclosed themselves, they indexed their persons – and their gender – with respect to the most perfect and beautiful of all angelic and earthly creations: Mary, Queen of Heaven. Mary exists in all possible relations with God: as Mother of God the Son, Daughter of God the Father, and even, in a miracle of divine unification, as Immaculata herself. It would be far worse for feminism if the only person of the Trinity that wasn’t male was the one Mary had sovereign maternal jurisdiction over.

8. Whatever the reason may be, it might be the explanation for why 80-90% of all stigmatists are women and why the Church only recognizes the highest level of union with God – a mystical marriage – to a soul that is of necessity a female bride.

9. The last eight words of John 21:22, kjv

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There are certainly reasons on this list that come closer to the truth than others, and I definitely have my favorites. At some point, all of them have been seriously advocated for by the holiest and most devout Christian thinkers and saints. But at the end of the day, it is probably the last that is the closest to the truth. It is far more important that we are saved than that we have precise knowledge of how we are saved. It matters much more that we have been given the grace of receiving Christ in Communion than the politics of the body behind the altar. This Easter, we could do worse than reflecting on that fact.

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