very clear and compelling essay. especially liked this part:

‘The internet discourses that bubble up around the signifier “patriarchy” encourage the adoption of flat, prescriptive roles that not only are silly and un-Christian but may be personally devastating, especially because of the real physical and dispositional differences between men and women.

Gress devotes a section to the manosphere, casting its ascendant, violent misogyny as an “unfortunate development” that is “simply a self-defensive cover in the battle of the sexes.” This equivocation is incongruous with the lines that follow, in which Gress favorably quotes Edith Stein: “The relationship of the sexes since the Fall has become a brutal relationship of master and slave.” Earlier in the book, Gress castigates early feminists for seeking common cause between abolitionism and the women’s rights movement, diminishing this relationship to the “piggy­backing” of an illegitimate cause on a legitimate one. She unfavorably cites Mary Wollstonecraft, who “added her own comparison of women’s lot to slavery. ‘Was not the world a vast prison, and women born slaves?’ ­Wollstonecraft asked.” Gress and I agree that the authentic, mutual affection of the sexes provides a clear path to freedom from mutually debasing animosity. But sentiment is not enough; formal justice and equality, what Gress writes off as “feminism,” is still necessary to protect the particular frailty of women from the particular frailty of men.’