It happened over a month ago, but I can’t stop brooding about a sad story I read early in December. A 24-year-old woman was last seen on security cameras so drunk that she could barely walk down the street. She died when she fell into a garbage chute. It’s a horrible story, but it’s also a reminder that feminism damages women by pretending they’re just like men, even as it abandons the real power women can wield in society.

The young woman who died was Jaclyn Elmquist, who was working as a legal recruiter and had attended a party at her office. She left the office completely drunk and, while her friends got her into a cab, she never made it home. Instead, she staggered down the street before stumbling into the chute where she died. What a sad, lonely way to die.

Elmquist’s death is also a morality tale, for she bought into the belief that women can party just as men can. They can’t. For starters, they metabolize alcohol differently and are more vulnerable to its effects.

Once drunk, women are more vulnerable than men. Men can get robbed and even raped, but it’s mostly women who get raped and, often, murdered when they violate the old shibboleths about going off with strange men

Lastly, women get pregnant. If they keep the baby, that’s a whole other level of vulnerability, both during pregnancy and after they’ve had the child.

Just as men cannot be women, women cannot be men—and I don’t mean that only in terms of the fact that they do not become men if they swagger around, cut off their breasts, and speak in that weirdly epicene voice that is neither male nor female after a few rounds of testosterone. Even if they still believe they are women, emulating men’s behaviors doesn’t work for them, whether physically or mentally.

Image by AI.

Modern feminism, though, means women deeply resent the societal norms that the West built around women to protect them. Moreover, they hate the greatest power the West granted them, which was to constrain men. Once, women saw it as their calling to impose civilization on men. They understood that, where men are civilized, women are safe.

Now, though, we get books like Elise Loehnen’s On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good. I have not read the book, but the blurb on this 2023 bestseller tells you a lot about how leftist women resent being called upon to behave so that men, who will always have the physical upper hand, will behave themselves:

A groundbreaking exploration of the ancient rules women unwittingly follow in order to be considered “good,” revealing how the Seven Deadly Sins still control and distort our lives and illuminating a path toward a more balanced, spiritually complete way to live

Why do women equate self-denial with being good?

We congratulate ourselves when we resist the donut in the office breakroom. We celebrate our restraint when we hold back from sending an email in anger. We feel virtuous when we wake up at dawn to get a jump on the day. We put others’ needs ahead of our own and believe this makes us exemplary. In On Our Best Behavior, journalist Elise Loehnen explains that these impulses—often lauded as unselfish, distinctly feminine instincts—are actually ingrained in us by a culture that reaps the benefits, via an extraordinarily effective collection of mores known as the Seven Deadly Sins.

Since being codified by the Christian church in the fourth century, the Seven Deadly Sins—pride, greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath, and sloth—have exerted insidious power. Even today, in our largely secular, patriarchal society, they continue to circumscribe women’s behavior. For example, seeing sloth as sinful leads women to deny themselves rest; a fear of gluttony drives them to ignore their appetites; and an aversion to greed prevents them from negotiating for themselves and contributes to the 55 percent gender wealth gap.

In On Our Best Behavior, Loehnen reveals how we’ve been programmed to obey the rules represented by these sins and how doing so qualifies us as “good.” This probing analysis of contemporary culture and thoroughly researched history explains how women have internalized the patriarchy, and how they unwittingly reinforce it. By sharing her own story and the spiritual wisdom of other traditions, Loehnen shows how we can break free and discover the integrity and wholeness we seek.

Yes, that is narcissistic psychobabble gobbledy-gook, but the core point is clear: Women shouldn’t have to be models of good behavior because it makes them feel bad.

However, there’s something infinitely worse than women acting as civilizers, whether by enforcing a moral code or avoiding self-destructive and societally destructive behaviors such as the Seven Deadly Sins. What’s worse is a society in which the powers that be have determined that there is no virtue in women’s civilizing influence. We know what this looks like because that society exists in the Muslim world. There, women don’t civilize men. Instead, men lock up women so that the men can be free from civilization.

A society that devalues its own women will do evil acts beyond imagining to those women it deems the “enemy.” If you don’t believe me, and you have a strong stomach, you can read here about the rape and torture Hamas inflicted on Israeli women.

Western women should be reveling in their power to civilize, especially because it ultimately benefits them. Instead, guided by toxic feminism, they’re racing down the path to Hamas-world, and some of them, like poor Jaclyn Elmquist, are dying painful, pointless deaths along the way