That Matt Fradd Carrie Gress Interview

Fighting culture wars and faithfulness are not the same thing

To begin a post bluntly, I’ll say I generally despise the current outrage economy that runs wild throughout our media. I find harboring anger to be unproductive, and I see getting worked up about this horrific thing this talking head said and that abhorrent thing that politician did to be a real waste of mental and emotional energy, so as a general rule, when I see a headline or a title I think will make me angry, I choose to avoid said piece of media. Naturally, when I saw Matt Fradd, a Catholic YouTuber/podcaster, and therefore a talking head (this also means I’m a talking head), had interviewed Dr. Carrie Gress, who has been on a different podcast in 2019 and made me very angry before, on his show Pints with Aquinas, and given the episode on Spotify the not at all controversial title of “Women Need the Patriarchy”, my gut reaction was that this would be great episode for me to never listen to.

When I saw Claire Swinarski, author of Letters from a Catholic Feminist (who I’m a subscriber to with a different email address) had written a nuanced critique of this episode, which I would recommend reading, I decided it might actually be a productive and good idea for me to give the episode a listen and write a response to it as well.

Like Mrs. Swinarski, I cannot say Dr. Gress and Mr. Fradd are without their merits. When I listened to that aforementioned podcast episode with Dr. Gress that made me angry, I did actually find there was a lot of merit to her view that just as there have been, are, and will be Antichrists, there is an Anti-Marian spirit at work in the world. Traditionally, the Cosmo girl could not be a virgin or a mother. Though Dr. Gress has many views I do not agree with, I share in her critique of most forms of most secular feminisms in that they elevate the masculine and devalue the uniquely feminine. Our medical system often treats female fertility like it is a disease to be medicated as opposed to the sign of a healthily functioning female body and an ability to be managed. Few women receive any instruction on how to tell when they are fertile and ovulating and when they are going to menstruate, something all women and teenage girls should know, but are instead just put on artificial hormones. Many forms of many secular feminisms see the ability to become pregnant and motherhood, something men cannot do, as obstacles to self-fulfillment. This is not to say pregnancy and motherhood do not create unique challenges, particularly when unexpected, but that a woman in a difficult situation should have them eliminated instead of having her situation become more accommodating to them is what is problematic. And if viewing the uniquely feminine as an obstacle to be eliminated and despised is not misogynistic, then I do not know what is.

Moreover, Dr. Gress also pointed out in the 2019 interview the masculine ideal many forms of many secular feminisms seek to emulate is not even that of a good man. Many secular feminisms call for total sexual liberation for women, that we tolerate the same amount of sexual license for women that we are willing to tolerate for men. It is true there has been and is a double standard regarding acceptable sexual practices for men and women, and this is wrong, but I don’t think anyone would call promiscuity in a man to necessarily be an admirable quality. We don’t like womanizers.

This now brings us to Mr. Fradd, and the main impetus for why I felt the need to write this. Mr. Fradd excels at long form interviews and promoting thoughtful intellectual discussions. Mrs. Swinarski affirmed, and I will do the same, that he has done a lot of good work in the anti-pornography movement. A certain escapade on the internet led me to have an hour long off-the-record phone conversation in 2021 with a New York Times journalist about abortion. Looking back on said conversation now, there were definitely things I could have said differently, but the best resource I found to prepare for said conversation so that the journalist and I were able to have an intellectual, completely secular, mature, thoughtful, and respectful dialogue that did not devolve into bizarre hypotheticals and ad-hominem attacks, etc, as such conversations often do, was Mr. Fradd’s interview with Stephanie Gray. Like Mrs. Swinarski, I have also met Mr. Fradd in person, though only on one occasion. I genuinely found him to be kind and a real lot of fun to be around. He clearly deeply loves, respects, and reveres his wife, Cameron. Like me, Mr. Fradd is also Byzantine Catholic. Since the Eastern Catholic Churches are small, once one gets far enough into American Byzantine Catholicism, one more or less gets to a point where everyone knows everybody. Mr. Fradd is part of my extended community. Some of his very dear friends are some of my very dear friends, yet, unfortunately, I really do not like Pints with Aquinas. I have often found Mr. Fradd’s style to be acerbic, insensitive, and too heavy handed. Additionally, Pints with Aquinas, is mainstream. I feel little need to engage with the Taylor Marshalls or James Martins of the world, the most prominent of extreme Catholics, because they are both, as I said, extreme, and engaging them would only be giving them more air time; however, when a mainstream Catholic YouTuber/Podcaster who is part of my extended community publishes an interview I find to be problematic, I am going to write a response.

The purpose of this interview was to bash feminism. Anyone who has read to this point of my post will have noticed I do have critiques of secular feminism. I am not here to challenge Dr. Gress’s findings, which she rattled off quite smugly, that Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton were into the occult, nor am I here to contradict her statement that Bettie Friedan and many others in Second Wave Feminism were involved with communism, and that many feminisms have been heavily influenced by Marxism. Carrie Gress has a doctorate; I do not, and this is her area of expertise, but what made me so angry in her 2019 interview, and what I am also responding to now, is that before we bash all forms of all feminisms in one fell swoop, we must recognize feminists of all eras of all stripes are not creating chaos purely for the sake of chaos, but are responding to legitimate issues. There were real problems that led women to be, as Dr. Gress frequently said through what seemed to me to be a smirk, to be “envious”of men. Although I do not have a degree in philosophy or history, I do have a degree in English, and it is impossible to study literature without studying history, so I am going to go back through certain examples of literature to look at the status of women throughout modern history.

Anne Brontë’s 1848 novel The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, has often been described as a proto-feminist novel. Unlike characters Dr. Gress mentioned, such as Mary Wollstonecraft and her daughter and son-in-law Mary and Percy Shelley as well as the American early feminists of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Anne Brontë was Christian. She perhaps may have had some interesting beliefs, as I alluded to in my piece on her sister’s novel Jane Eyre, in how she has her heroine, Helen Huntingdon, in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall express belief in apocatastasis and has a bad Tractarian preacher in her other novel Agnes Grey; nevertheless, Anne Brontë’s Anglican Christian faith is indubitable. Helen Huntingdon is trapped in an abusive marriage. Her husband is also unfaithful. Although Lord Lowborough, another character with an unfaithful spouse, can seek a divorce, Helen cannot because unlike Lord Lowborough, she is a woman. During this time period in England, married women had no independence apart from their husbands. When Helen realizes remaining with her husband is not only dangerous for her, but also dangerous for her young son, she chooses to flee from her husband. This could potentially lead to her being charged with kidnapping. Yes, she could be charged with kidnapping for absconding to safety with her own child, and when her plight is recognized among people in the town to which she flees, she is not given the most sympathetic response. The local vicar tells her she never should have left her husband. To reflect other attitudes of the time regarding marriage, one mother in the novel tells her daughter that when she weds, she will please her husband, “and he will please himself.” Where is there any martial advice akin to what St. Paul says in exhorting husbands to love their wives as Christ loved the Church? Similarly, with double standards, in Jane Austen’s famous 1813 novel Pride and Prejudice, George Wickham is able to go cavorting about with few consequences. When Lydia Bennet runs away with him, it not only nearly completely ruins her, but her innocent sisters as well.

In George Eliot’s (Mary Ann Evans) 1871 novel Middlemarch, Dorothea Brooke desires intellectual fulfillment, but because she is a woman and, therefore, cannot attend the universities, she enters into a disastrous marriage with the decades older pedantic scholar Mr. Casaubon, who treats her like a secretary. Shortly before his death, he abuses his male headship to nearly compel Dorothea to spend the rest of her life in her widowhood working on his project The Key to All Mythologies, despite his research being out of date. He dies before he can compel her to do so. Additionally, Rosamond Vincy, the town beauty, has received the model education for women at Miss Lemon’s school. She has excellent manners and can sing and play the piano, but she has never been taught to be mature and take personal responsibility, nor has she had much to stimulate the intellect. She has been educated to be a beautiful ornament, not to be a thinking reasoning person, which causes problems in her marriage to Dr. Lydgate. Her humanity and adulthood are compromised due to society’s expectations for upper-class womanhood.

Lastly, in Kate Chopin’s 1899 novel The Awakening, Edna Pontellier is in a rather stifling marriage. Her husband, Léonce, views her not as a person with a mind and agency, but as one of his many possessions. He does not reciprocate her passionate nature and speaks to her primarily in the form of a remonstrance. His behavior often leaves her with crying fits of whose cause she cannot fully explain. With a home life devoid of any real intellectual or artistic outlet, for Edna’s vocation is to be a painter as well as to selflessly love and be loved as a person with equal dignity, Edna, more or less, does experience what Bettie Friedan called and what Dr. Gress was quick to criticize “the comfortable concentration camp.” She is stifled and “listless” prior to her erotic awakening. Despite being labeled as one of the first feminist novels, The Awakening ultimately illustrates how the the generally secular feminist solution to the problem of women being denied agency does not work. When Léonce goes to New York City on business and Edna’s children go to spend time with their paternal grandmother, Edna moves out of her husband’s house into a bungalow with money she earned from selling her own paintings, which she also worked on in her husband’s absence, and embarks on an extramarital affair. Then she drowns herself at the end of the novel remembering her friend, Madame Ratignolle’s, words to remember her children, her children who demand she give of herself. Because of Edna’s unavoidable motherhood, for motherhood is a reality for women no amount of science or medicine can ever eliminate, she is unable to pursue the individualist dream she desired, so she commits suicide rather than have to continue giving of herself. A better, more Christian, solution, would have been for Mr. Pontellier to treat his wife as a person equal in dignity and truly engage her, as opposed to treating her like one of his many possessions he liked to walk around the house admiring. Likewise, a Christian solution for the double standard regarding male and female sexual ethics seen in The Tenant of Wildfell Hall and Pride and Prejudice is not free love, but actually enforcing St. Paul’s revolutionary exhortation for male chastity.

These are all examples of women not being treated has human persons with equal dignity to men. Yes, all these examples are fictional, but they represent real conditions women faced during their respective time periods. The fact Church holds man and woman to both be made in the image of God and be equal in dignity was never once affirmed in Mr. Fradd’s interview with Dr. Gress. Although Dr. Gress mentioned how many of the early feminists did not come from good family situations with husbands and wives both living in selfless harmony, she provided very little nuance to her critique of feminism, and why would she when the point was to bash feminism? Despite my frustration with her 2019 interview, I did seriously consider buying and reading Dr. Gress’s book The Anti-Mary Exposed, but I stopped because the first review on the cover I remember seeing was from Ann Coulter. Now I know one person’s repugnant ideas on one issue do not negate his or her good ideas on another issue, and since I believe it is important to read and consider the views of those with whom we disagree, I could potentially be charged with hypocrisy by refusing to read a book Ann Coulter positively reviewed, but I had been looking to read a nuanced Catholic book. When I saw Ann Coulter had reviewed the book, my first though was not, “Catholic,” but “Right-Wing.” Although Catholic and Left-Wing are not the same thing, neither are Catholic and Right-Wing. Despite being Presbyterian, Ann Coulter is a big name in the Secular Right. Dr. Gress boasted about her book being canceled on Meta, as if that was her main accomplishment, and this leads us to my other main criticism of this interview and the other big reason why I do not like Pints with Aquinas, being Right-Wing.

There are many on the Left who have adopted postures outright hostile to Catholicism, but that does not give us license to go align ourselves with the Right. For my twenty-second birthday, my friends got me The Big Book of Women Saints by Sarah Gallick, and I could not count the amount of Spanish nuns and religious sisters featured in the book who had been martyred by the communists around the time of the Spanish Civil War. Clearly, the Left was violently persecuting the Church leading up to and during the Spanish Civil War, so the Spanish Church went and aligned herself with Franco and the fascists; therefore, when Franco won the war, the Church was unalterably associated with the violence and oppression of Franco and the fascists. Consequently, post-Franco Spanish society has now collapsed into secularism.

Despite being a mainstream Catholic YouTuber/Podcaster, Mr. Fradd chose in 2020 to have a speaker from The Daily Wire, a secular right-wing news website, on his Catholic show to urge Catholics to vote for an adulterer who had been impeached by the House, was already on Twitter alluding to refuse to concede the election, reinstituted federal death penalty (so much for being consistently pro-life. Situations in the American context where the death penalty could be used to protect society or bring about repentance are practically unimaginable), and is now facing multiple lawsuits. Absolutely nowhere in this did I say Mr. Fradd should have endorsed President Biden. Neither political party fits with Catholic Social Teaching, so Catholics will vote for who they vote for (if they vote at all). Fine, as long as they keep the principles of Catholic Social Teaching in mind when they vote¹, but for Mr. Fradd, a main-stream Catholic speaker, to endorse secular Right-Wing morally decrepit politician because of the excesses of the Left, as opposed to not endorsing anyone and transcending the binary, is a symptom of a larger problem I am seeing within orthodox Catholic circles of which this interview with Dr. Gress is also a symptom: mistaking doing the opposite of the Left for faithfulness.

Now, I know I cannot claim to be wholly objective and without biases here. I was vegetarian for four years to reduce my carbon emissions by not consuming meat from factory farms until I learned eating locally raised grass-fed meat is healthier and more sustainable than eating tofu from, say, a mono-crop soy culture in Iowa. I use a bamboo toothbrush and buy post-consumer recycled paper products. When I go clothes shopping for myself, I usually go to thrift stores in order to reduce waste. I think it is important to have conversations on touchy subjects such as race. I strongly dislike gun culture, and as a former teacher, I’m revolted by the idea of potentially arming teachers to make schools safer. My retired army colonel father’s deep disdain for violence led me to adopt pacifism. I like the idea of social safety nets. Although I have not done the research to know what would actually work, I’m desirous of more humane immigration reform and well as healthcare reform in whatever respect is practical. Some devout Catholics on an intuitive level are “conservative”, and others on an intuitive level are “liberal”. Fine. Clearly, on an intuitive level, I’m “liberal”; therefore, I will be more apt to dislike more “conservative” ideas, but here is the thing: notice what ideas I did not say I agree with that are very prominent in Left-Wing circles. I doubt I need to name them. My “liberalism” is subjected to my Catholicism, not the other way around.

For both intuitively “liberal” and “conservative” Catholics, there is always a temptation (of which I know I’m not immune) to put one’s liberalism or conservatism first and Catholicism second. Liberal Catholics generally know when they do this and openly admit to doing so. Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi are most likely fully aware they are out of step with Catholic teaching. Perhaps because people who have made being liberal part of their identity, both inside and outside of the Church, make it very clear they are taking stances contra Catholic teaching, “conservative” Catholics, in an effort to oppose the liberal ideas that are wildly against Catholic teaching, have a greater tendency to be blind to when their conservatism has taken precedence over their Catholicism. Moreover, this conservatism, particularly in our post-Trump America, is less defined as a thing into itself, but more defined as contra being liberal. When liberals do one thing, “conservative” Catholics will do the opposite. Mr. Fradd has a tendency to do this.

Feminism is part of being liberal or Leftist; therefore, some “conservative” Catholics will automatically oppose all forms of it, and in doing so to contradict feminism, some have adopted stances that are blatantly misogynistic. In some, I’m assuming minuscule, circles of Catholicism there is a trend of young men on first dates telling young women it’s a sin for married women to work outside the home or out of the blue discussing female submission with them without recognizing that cannot happen without being willing to die for their wives. I’ve somehow managed to go on two of these dates. There are even YouTubers who reject the idea a wife can refuse her husband intercourse, otherwise known as encouraging marital rape, which Dr. Gress seemed to nearly verge on doing in mentioning “marital debt” without distinguishing it as a mutual relationship from how that term has been abused in certain Evangelical Protestant circles. These talking heads also often insist wives should stay with abusive and dangerous husbands, husbands who have clearly forfeited their marriage vows, because of the indissolubility of marriage. Now this is much, much more common in extreme instead of mainstream thought-spaces, and I won’t bother mentioning which YouTubers do this, what Pillar editor Ed Condon described as “Catholic-themed performative misogyny”, for that would be to give them more air-time, but because feminists, for however bad their ideas may be, have always been reacting to real problems, for some, opposing feminism means encouraging these bad situations. As Mrs. Swinarksi pointed out, although Mr. Fradd has most certainly not done this type of Catholic-performative misogyny, he has said things in the past about women that are “distasteful” and has made a number of insensitive comments throughout his tenure as a YouTuber. When we do not transcend the Left-Right binary and instead pick a side, we end up harming others and not being faithful.

Furthermore, although I will reiterate I do not have a doctorate and have done absolutely nowhere near the amount of research regarding feminism that Dr. Gress has done, some of the facts she pulled seemed selective. Before I deleted Instagram in 2021, I remember seeing on Leah Darrow’s Instagram that Dr. Gress was teaching a class for Ms. Darrow’s program, Lux University, on Edith Stein, aka, St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. I have read Edith Stein’s Essays on Woman, and Edith Stein has a dramatically different perspective on feminism than Dr. Gress. Edith Stein’s response to feminism is not to bash it, but to view it as something that happened. It was movement that simply occurred, and although it was not bereft of problems, for Edith Stein does acknowledge that the goal of the feminist movement at the turn of the twentieth century “was one of individualism” (254), and that the Suffragettes “went so far as to deny completely the feminine singularity” (254), it was still a movement Edith Stein sees as having provided some benefits to women. Because of it, women, such as Edith Stein and Dr. Carrie Gress, were able to pursue the same educational opportunities as men by attending the universities and getting Ph.D’s, enter previously male career fields, such as academia, and then feminize them through bringing them to wholeness. Edith Stein even sees government as a proper career field for women, for she sees women, as better able than men to be able “to act in accordance with the concrete human circumstance” (264), and get things done, as opposed to getting caught up with a political party’s abstract ideals. What Edith Stein remembers, likely because she was among the first generation of women to enter the universities in Germany and was originally barred from a faculty position because of her gender, and what Dr. Gress seems to forget, is that if it were not for feminism, neither Edith Stein nor Dr. Gress would have been able to earn their doctorates. The universities were originally closed to women. Edith Stein has been canonized as a saint. Dr. Gress has not. In order to teach a class on Edith Stein, Dr. Gress must be aware of St. Teresa Benedicta of the Cross’s thoughts on feminism. To what extent, then, is bashing it as a whole simply part of being Right-Wing?

One could always state the case that the feminism of Edith Stein’s time, the early half of the twentieth century was very different from the feminism of the latter half and today’s, so Edith Stein’s feminism was, therefore, appropriate, whereas the later feminism is not, but Dr. Gress goes after feminism from its very inception and says nothing about Edith Stein’s perspective. Similarly, she does nothing to address other feminisms than the one mainly represented in Left-Wing media today. We could potentially be in the beginning of a fourth wave that seeks neither to operate from a hermeneutic of power nor continue upholding the masculine. Only time will tell. Faithful Catholic convert and intellectual Leah Libresco Sargeant runs the Substack Other Feminisms, where she looks into this. How can we elevate the authentically feminine as opposed to imitating men? Similarly, pro-life feminist organizations are real and exist. Feminists for Life of America has been around for a while, and Orthodox convert, speaker, writer, and presbytera Frederica Matthewes-Green, who I like and would recommend reading, once served as the vice-president. Abigail Favale, another Catholic convert and intellectual, has begun to reclaim the term feminism; however, it serves both Left and Right to ignore the existence of other feminisms, for other feminisms do not fit in with Left-Wing goals or the Right-Wing’s rejection of feminism because it is part of the Left.

Still, when it comes to solutions to the place of woman in the world and Church, there are two on which Dr. Gress and I emphatically agree. In that 2019 interview, Dr. Gress concluded by saying we need more women authentically living out their womanhood in religious vocations. We need more nuns, religious sisters, and consecrated virgins. What kind of Catholic would disagree with that? The other solution would be a devotion to and imitation of Our Lady, Mary, the Most Holy Theotokos. Men should imitate her too, her total willing surrender and assent to God. Here is woman redeemed, the second Eve. Her “Yes” undid the “No” of Eve, and as St. Kassiani said, “But from a woman came better things,” as a rejoinder to the Emperor Theophilus’s comment, “From a woman came baser things,” the Most Holy Theotokos brings us the best thing ever, her Son, as she intercedes for the faithful, praying for our salvation. By standing at the foot of the cross she displayed more strength and fortitude than her Son’s male disciples. She is more honorable than the Cherubim, and beyond compare more glorious than the Seraphim. When she, as a virgin, gave birth to God the Word without a man, she astonished the angels. She is truly the Theotokos who we do magnify.

Most Holy Theotokos save us!

1. As a side note, the American Solidarity Party more or less exists to allow people who are tired of violating their consciences every time they head to the ballot box an opportunity to protest against our morally bankrupt two-party system.