How Pope Paul VI Predicted the #MeToo Movement
The #MeToo movement showed us that now more than ever, it's a man's world, and women are objects in it. And why is that? Way back in 1968, Pope Paul VI provided a clue.
Do not forsake wisdom, and she will keep you; love her, and she will guard you.
~ Proverbs 4:6
My grandma met my grandpa in her hometown of Panama City, Florida. He was a Kentucky boy who’d been stationed there with the Air Force, and she'd recently returned from earning a secretary degree at a college in southern Alabama, where she'd learned to type 90 wpm and had been voted the prettiest in her class. After a brief courtship they tied the knot and she found herself heading to his new appointment in Southwest Florida. She recounted an incident that occurred on the way down.
One evening, after driving past alligator-infested swamp lands near Lake Okeechobee, they checked into a hotel and within an hour or so the manager knocked on the door, concerned. They’d checked in under her husband’s name; but what was her last name? That was unclear.
It was the same as his, she assured him; probably smiling, probably blushing; and he let them be.
That was about eighty years ago.
At the beginning of another evening, in another time and place, I sat with a friend in an otherwise empty bar in Hong Kong. We'd both arrived a week earlier, and found ourselves living next to each other in tiny, closet-sized rooms in the congested neighborhood of Sham Shui Po. As newcomers to the city, we became BFFs for the span of about three weeks, navigating crowds at the food court in the Dragon Shopping Center, learning how to travel across the city in the mass transit railway with our Octopus cards, eating mango mochi from street vendors, sampling mooncakes during the Autumn festival, and taking each other out for dinner on our September birthdays.
She was buxom, with long black hair, dark skin, clear complexion, and carried herself like no one you'd mess around with.
“I don't think so,” she told the server, pushing the check back at her, as it included a charge for a tray of nuts she'd brought to our table when we first arrived. “We're only paying for what we ordered.”
She was telling me that night about a basketball player she’d just connected with on Instagram; they were exchanging texts and photos in direct message. He was some sort of second-tier player, she explained; she'd dated them before; who’d been passed over by the NBA, and was in Hong Kong for a series of games.
As we left the bar and wandered to a street vendor for a can of beer, she showed me a photo he'd just sent of him lying down, bare-chested. Beyond any shadow doubt, she knew he had a steady girlfriend in the US.
“But if he isn’t cheating with me, he’ll be cheating with someone else.” She'd been on the receiving end of this behavior from her most recent ex, who'd lure her back with roses, chocolates and empty promises, until she finally cut it off.
So she had no qualms when, a few hours later, she went to see this B-list athlete at his hotel room. But not much happened, she told me later at our place. “He was kind of a snob.”
Even so, she returned a week later and they hooked up.
That was three years ago.
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In 1968 Pope Paul VI issued Humanae Vitae (of human life), the encyclical where he emphatically renounced all forms of artificial contraception, advocating instead natural methods of birth regulation, and encouraging doctors and state leaders and married couples to come on board. Before writing it, the pope met with a panel of experts and couples who provided disparate recommendations on the issue. This was the height of the sexual revolution; contraception was a pressing issue; and Catholics the world over eagerly anticipated the Church's magisterial position.
Therefore We base Our words on the first principles of a human and Christian doctrine of marriage when We are obliged once more to declare that the direct interruption of the generative process already begun and, above all, all direct abortion, even for therapeutic reasons, are to be absolutely excluded as lawful means of regulating the number of children. Equally to be condemned, as the magisterium of the Church has affirmed on many occasions, is direct sterilization, whether of the man or of the woman, whether permanent or temporary. Similarly excluded is any action which either before, at the moment of, or after sexual intercourse, is specifically intended to prevent procreation—whether as an end or as a means. ~Humanae Vitae
Church leaders immediately spoke out, saying the teaching wasn't binding and contraception was a matter of personal choice between couples, encapsulating their sentiment with quips such as “The Church needs to stay out of the bedroom.” Nevertheless, in the ensuing decades the Church only doubled down on its position. Throughout the 80s, Pope John Paul II expanded on Paul VI's teachings on contraception and the nature of marriage in a series of 129 lectures given at his Wednesday audience at St. Peter's Square, which have come to be known as The Theology of the Body. This catechesis, although enthusiastically embraced by some, has been roundly ignored by Catholics worldwide; it's estimated that as many as 98% of Catholics have used artificial contraception.
The issue of artificial contraception has created a chasm in the Church, where one position has been emphatically professed, and its opposite widely practiced, while the culture at large, on balance, has denounced the Church's position as “mechanistic” and “profoundly lacking in humanity” and, most especially, hopelessly backward with respect to women's rights.
Contraceptives are the greatest live-saving, poverty-ending, women-empowering innovation ever created. ~Melinda Gates
That a group of celibate men can continue to leverage the faith to enforce this ban, and continue to cause needless anguish among decent people throughout the world who want to do right by their religious belief, is no accomplishment. ~Terrence R. Connelly in a NYT opinion letter.
It's a sad state of affairs, so many conclude; the teaching reveals Church leaders to be isolated in an ivory tower, totally separated from the daily lives of ordinary Christians, entirely divorced from reality.
What's not entirely congruent with this conclusion, however, is that in the decades since Humanae Vitae, during which contraception has become the status quo, the culture has started to splinter, crack, entirely fall apart, in precisely the manner Pope Paul VI predicted it would.
Prognosticating in the Papacy
To support his condemnation of contraception in Humanae Vitae, Pope Paul VI included three undesirable scenarios he believed would come to pass as a consequence of permitting artificial contraception within a marriage.
First, he foresaw that countries and government leaders would mandate couples to use contraception as a means of population control.
Finally, careful consideration should be given to the danger of this power passing into the hands of those public authorities who care little for the precepts of the moral law. Who will blame a government which in its attempt to resolve the problems affecting an entire country resorts to the same measures as are regarded as lawful by married people in the solution of a particular family difficulty? Who will prevent public authorities from favoring those contraceptive methods which they consider more effective? Should they regard this as necessary, they may even impose their use on everyone. It could well happen, therefore, that when people, either individually or in family or social life, experience the inherent difficulties of the divine law and are determined to avoid them, they may give into the hands of public authorities the power to intervene in the most personal and intimate responsibility of husband and wife. ~Humanae Vitae
Governments have indeed intervened in this most personal responsibility of husband and wife. For four decades, the Chinese Communist Party mandated contraception and abortion to enforce its one (and then, briefly, two) child policy. In the 1950s, India's government launched an aggressive “we two, ours one” campaign, encouraging couples to have only one child. According to a friend who grew up in India in the 70s, contraception was so implicit that it was considered uneducated for a family to have more than two children. Shortly, India plans to implement a program making contraception free and available to all. And in the 1980s, the South Koran government, too, pushed for couples to use contraception so as to limit families to two children.
Secondly, Paul VI anticipated that the widespread use of contraception would lead to a debasement of society.
Let them first consider how easily this course of action could open wide the way for marital infidelity and a general lowering of moral standards. ~Humanae Vitae
Identifying lower moral standards in today's culture is like reaching for low hanging fruit. For starters: armed men regularly enter public areas and kill innocent people, oftentimes without any apparent motive. This certainly wasn't commonplace five decades ago.
But focusing primarily in the arena of sex and relationship: divorce is so common it's almost become rote; as part and parcel to adulthood as purchasing a home or buying a car. The best of us cannot seem to escape the emotional and financial blow of the disintegration of a marriage; stories of someone pouring all of his income into alimony payments, of another losing her home and having to live in an RV for an extended spell, or putting all her children's college savings into gaining full custody of her children, are a dime a dozen.
And vaginas have become a routine topic of public discussion, bandied about between men in mainstream pop culture these days. Consider this 2018 interview on The Joe Rogan Experience(1:40), where Rogan has a lengthy, “intelligent” discussion with comedian Kyle Dunnigan on the topic of women's pubic hair; a topic he's determined suitable to produce and distribute to his 12+ million subscribers; a topic that would be unimaginable in a public forum a hundred years ago.
And this exchange between comedian Marc Maron and Onion writer Todd Hanson from 2012, on Maron's WTF Podcast (minute 46):
Hanson: The best Onion headline I ever wrote....it sounded like it was really intelligent political commentary...the headline was: “Jenna Bush's Federally Protected Wetlands Now Open for Public Drillings”
Maron: (cackling) Ah yeah!
Hanson: People bring that up to me to this day.
Let’s NOT do this, Marc. I mean seriously; a cultural decline is demonstrated not only in the headline, which, as well, would have been unimaginable in the recent past, but in that it's the work Hanson is the most proud of in a prolific career, and (purportedly, anyway) it's work he's received much praise for.
“Lowering of moral standards” is probably the most exaggerated understatement Pope Paul VI made in Humanae Vitae. While writing it in the late 1960s, he lived in a society. We now live in a pig-pen, a culture in free-fall, a culture that's collectively playing a game of “how low can we go” and is proving to be far more agile than it would seem possible.
And finally, Pope Paul VI predicted that the widespread use of contraception would lead to the objectification of women.
Another effect that gives cause for alarm is that a man who grows accustomed to the use of contraceptive methods may forget the reverence due to a woman, and, disregarding her physical and emotional equilibrium, reduce her to being a mere instrument for the satisfaction of his own desires, no longer considering her as his partner whom he should surround with care and affection. ~Humanae Vitae
Women being reduced to mere instruments for the satisfaction of men's desires has in fact become a topic of much discussion in the current culture. Consider Millennial writer Lena Dunham's revelations in an interview with Terri Gross in 2012:
Gross: So do you get a sense that a lot of guys your age have learned about sex through porn sites and have these unrealistic and sometimes ludicrous ideas of what sex is like or what a girl would like?
Dunham: I do get that sense.... I've found that there are guys doing things where you go there's no way that that is your own personal instinct. You learned that from somewhere and it wasn't, you know, a birds and bees conversation with your mom and it also wasn't taught to you by a high school girl you met in Michigan.
Gross: Do you think it's different - difficult for young, single women to say no to a guy who wants to try some things he's probably learned from a porn site and say, you know, I'm not going to enjoy that. That's not going to be pleasurable. It's not even going to be comfortable?
Dunham: I do.
And Ada Calhoun's discoveries, after interviewing dozens of Gen X women, recounted in her 2020 book, Why Can't We Sleep:
One married woman told me that her husband had come to her after their second child was born and said, “I'm unsatisfied. I want more sex I'm not going to masturbate anymore. I'm not going to watch porn anymore. I don't want to fantasize about or be aroused by anything other than you. And you need to help me with this”….
…As Nikita was out running errands one day, her phone pinged. It was Amazon saying: “Thank you for shopping with us. You ordered More Than Two: A Practical Guide to Ethical Polyamory. We'll send a confirmation when your item ships.”
Nikita looked at her phone. The family Amazon account was connected to her email address, but she had not ordered the book. That meant her husband had. “He'd told me before that he was interested in the idea,” she said. “But seeing the book order gave me an out-of-body experience.”
There's something so Gen X about that moment. Not only does the woman of the house have to decide what's for dinner and which sink to buy for the rental property—now she must also make the call on whether or not her husband is allowed to sleep around.
To a man who doesn't want to be a cheater, it can make a kind of sense. He loves his wife and decides he would act on his lust for other women only with her explicit approval.1
And the filth we all sadly learned about during the #MeToo avalanche of 2017 and 18: Harvey Weinstein raping and harassing dozens of women, Louis C.K. masturbating in front of women, Aziz Ansari coercing a women into oral sex, etcetera....over those nine months or so, women exposing abusive men, and men's careers crashing down because of it, became so commonplace that #MeToo became a verb.
These examples could go on and on. But I hardly need a litany in order to demonstrate that the prevailing environment is one where men believe it's their perfect right to act on all of their sexual desires, women and their preferences be damned. Any woman who's stepped outside her front door has intimate, first-hand knowledge of this reality. As Scott Adams observed in his podcast in February of 2020 (min 39):
What percentage of adult women have not been sexually molested or raped? What would you guess? ....By the time they're in their early 40s, what percentage have been sexually molested and/or raped? ....I don't know the answer, but my estimate is 100%. I think I could defend that...ask any woman you know, by the age of 45 if they've been sexually molested and/or raped. It's gonna be 100%.
Now more than ever, it's a man's world, and women are objects in it. As Calhoun points out, this is a hallmark of post-Baby Boomer generations.
So Paul VI is 3 for 3. Every scenario that he predicted would transpire as a consequence of contraception permeating a society has come to pass, writ large. No one is denying this. The evidence is in our face, we live with it every day. Many in fact are stark raving mad about the current state of affairs.
That's not the kind of accuracy you'd see coming from an out-of-touch, sorry little man. It's an accuracy, rather, that would come from an uncannily prescient individual. And for this astuteness, the substance of his encyclical merits closer attention.
Defying Gravity
Humanae Vitae isn't a totalitarian edict issued from on high.
The encyclical, rather, interprets the natural course of things as reflecting the will of God, the Creator. This “natural law” is something we're all subject to: clergy, laity, women, men, all of us. It admonishes us to live according to these natural laws or suffer the consequences, and observes that a conjugal act is by its nature both unitive and procreative.
The Church, nevertheless, in urging men to the observance of the precepts of the natural law, which it interprets by its constant doctrine, teaches that each and every marital act must of necessity retain its intrinsic relationship to the procreation of human life.
...But to experience the gift of married love while respecting the laws of conception is to acknowledge that one is not the master of the sources of life but rather the minister of the design established by the Creator. Just as man does not have unlimited dominion over his body in general, so also, and with more particular reason, he has no such dominion over his specifically sexual faculties, for these are concerned by their very nature with the generation of life, of which God is the source. ~Humanae Vitae
We cannot fight or change this natural order; interrupting the dual nature of sex with contraception is akin to denying that gravity exists, and then living accordingly. It will inevitably lead to a disastrous end--an end we're experiencing in the here and now.
He concedes that in the cultural climate in which the encyclical was issued, abstaining from contraception at times required a heroic effort, and so encouraged the laity to avail themselves often to the Sacraments of Communion and Confession.
Finding Our North Star
At the 2018 Golden Globes, on the same stage that James Franco accepted the award for Best Actor while rumors swirled that he’d gaslit a woman into giving him a blow job, Laura Dern, her blonde hair flowing over a black gown, informed us that time was up.
"I urge all of us to not only support survivors and bystanders who are brave enough to tell their truth, but to promote restorative justice," she said as she received her reward for her performance in Big Little Lies.
This ceremony marked the first public appearance for Time's Up; eight women's activists accompanied A-list movie stars to promote and propagate the organization's message of anti-harassment and equality in the workplace.
No doubt this sort of exposure serves to rein things in. But can a dais of lovely women really reverse the dehumanizing shift we've seen over the past fifty years?
A fundamental weakness in the #MeToo movement is that it fails to explore what created this phenomenon in the first place. It assumes that men have always behaved like boys and that it's only now they're finally being called out for it.
And, true, a tendency to lust after women is part and parcel to men's fallen natures and one they've always railed against; in the Biblical story of Tobit, for example, on his wedding night he prays at his bedside that he might “take this wife of mine not because of lust, but for a noble purpose.” (Tobit, 8:7)
But the situation has worsened exponentially since the sexual revolution. Modern society is much more debased than societies of fifty, sixty, seventy, eighty years ago—as Pope Paul VI forewarned us it would be.
And so it's unlikely we'll dig ourselves out of this filth without first acknowledging that a celibate man might have imparted some sage advice some fifty some odd years ago, and then answering some really tough questions: What will it take to bring society back into alignment with natural law? And what are the consequences we face, collectively, if we fail to?
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Ada Calhoun, Why Can’t We Sleep. First Grove Atlantic. 2020. Pages 165 & 130.