Inside the Enemy's Plan for Femininity

Corrupt the language and the culture will follow

“Readers are advised to remember that the devil is a liar. Not everything that Screwtape says should be assumed to be true even from his own angle…

There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.”

– C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, Introduction

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Now that the physical copies are fianlly in my hands, I am bursting with excitement to share this book with readers!

While C.S. Lewis said he felt deeply troubled when taking on the demonic persona to compose The Screwtape Letters, I felt the opposite. As I wrote, it felt more like receiving than composing. The process served as a true examination of conscience. The Holy Spirit showed me my weaknesses, and the grace I could receive to overcome them—if only I would ask.

Ultimately, it brought such peace to pull back the curtain on the Enemy’s lies, and fortified my convictions to live otherwise—as the Lord uniquely calls us as women. It is that gift that I am so excited to get into the hands of mothers everywhere this Lent.

If you order today, you will receive your copy next week—just in time to be your Lenten reading (plus a bonus letter available immediately).

And be sure to join us at CatholicMom.com for our Lenten book club, beginning February 25—check out the page for a limited time discount of 30% off!

For now, please enjoy the excerpt below. I can’t wait for you to read the whole thing!

AMDG,

Samantha

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My Dear Bellbind,

In our last communication, we spoke of ways to create friction between the spouses so as to prevent the mutual exchange of self. I may have been premature in my advice to you. Mind you, I am not suggesting that we abandon the tack of fomenting division and loneliness altogether. The anguish and despair that method yields alone make it worth pursuing.

However, I would be remiss if I failed to call on the great ally we have in contemporary culture: the movement of so-called feminism. Naturally, you and I jitter at the great jest we have made in convincing them to give it such a name. What a lark, to coerce them into bestowing such an utterly contrary name upon a movement that seeks to undermine all that is feminine, to demean their unique qualities and to steal away their most momentous of capacities: that of becoming a mother. Our Father is, of course, a veritable genius in the art of propaganda, and this may be the height of his achievements in the arena yet. Though that last point is debatable as we have achieved so many victories in this present age.

How I shiver with delight when I think of the ways we have managed to invert some of the Enemy’s most basic truths! Take Our Father’s prized base camp, “Planned” Parenthood: in point of fact, the organization relies on what is unplanned, its goal (and ours) being to eliminate parenthood altogether. In these chapels of death, devotees of our abortion cult chant that blessed hymn to bodily autonomy: “My body, my choice,” blissfully blind to the way we’ve engineered this propaganda to destroy bodies and erase choices by the millions.

Yes, I titter with mirth as they echo our slogan “my body, my choice,” while championing the denial of bodily sovereignty for those most despicable little seeds of flesh, whose choices are blessedly stamped out.

I relish the destruction of the flesh in gender “affirmation” and death with “dignity,” alike, through which we in fact deny the goodness of the body and violate the sanctity of life.

To accomplish any of these ends would laudable it itself, but I veritably giggle with glee at the inversions Our Father has constructed to befuddle the issues!

“Compassionate” care—ha! This movement is nothing more than a refusal to suffer with the dying; “aid” in dying has become the slogan for those who are all too happy to kill.

These fleshlings are such simpletons, really. All you have to do is invoke a term that elicits the proper emotion, and they are eating out of our hands. Just think of the many numbers we have seduced into destroying their babies, their marriage, their bodies and even ending their own earthly existences— all by spoon feeding them the message that their happiness somehow depends on their ability to become agents of their own annihilation. It is a delicious cycle; we feed them the lies, and in turn, we have a plentiful bounty of souls to consume through all eternity.

It is among the easiest of our tactics to employ in this current culture, so ripe for harvesting are so many dull and deadened souls. I suggest you mobilize the weapons we have developed in the culture to entice your patient to view her femininity with disdain and abandon those traits in which she has been uniquely gifted. You need merely to teach your patient to despise her femininity and imitate the poorest of the masculine traits. No longer need we whisper that they will become like gods; they are content with the promise that they might become like men. Our delicious propaganda has elicited such rightful distaste for all that women are. We have finally convinced them of the truth: that power is greater than love.

Lure her away from fruitfulness, dangling the carrot of control. Begin with a program of systematic disrespect towards the husband, which, if carefully managed, may undermine the marriage altogether. This tactic works best in tangent with a spouse who is already predisposed to anxiety over the finances, who looks to his spouse not as a helpmate but as a substitute self who can lift his burdens by carrying them herself. He can be made to view this woman he has vowed to protect and provide for as lazy rather than, as the Enemy dictates, the proper recipient of his gifts, the one for whom he is to lay down his life. Coordinate this attack with Inimicus so that the husband seeks to instrumentalize and extract from your patient, with razor focus on her utility to him, and to resent her if she does not pull her own weight.

If she cannot be swayed into idealization of the masculine traits, into a total rebranding of her heart’s desires, then you must push her to the opposite extreme. Teach her to live as a caricature of the feminine, one defined primarily by lipstick and lace. Once she begins to view her femininity as a performative act rather than a constitutive aspect of her person, she will act against her own flourishing in the very effort to attain it.

She can be made to cage herself in the trivial trappings of “feminine” and as she occupies herself with fulfilling this standard, she will retain none of the docility and flexibility to answer the Enemy’s call in the moment—so focused should she be on fabricating her feminine facade. As she further weaves herself into this design, lead her to harbor disdain for those who fail to live up to her imagined ideals of womanhood. With each day that passes within these trappings, she will be less likely to recognize herself without them. And that is right where we want her—a reduction of herself shackled to illusions, unable to answer the Enemy as He uniquely calls her to do so.

This line of temptation is most effective if her spouse is inclined to domination. In time, Inimicus will work on him to demean womanhood, to belittle his wife by the very lifting of her up on a pedestal as a porcelain caricature. Men of this sort can easily be taught to deny all that is uniquely strong about their counterparts and, if you happen upon a generous stroke of luck, he may even turn out to be of the sort who tell themselves they prize their women, even as they pummel them to the floor.

If the one tendency makes her think her husband a fool and regard him with disdain, the other makes her idolize him and think him her king. Whether she regards him with zero reverence or total sovereignty is immaterial; in neither case can one share in communion with the other, and so our Enemy’s aims are entirely thwarted, be the husband a buffoon or tyrant.

Even if her husband cannot be made to entertain such extremes, so long as you cripple her vitality by crafting an ever-smaller circle of acceptability, she will remain docile—to its limits. Do try to usher her into our program of sexual liberty and control, as it is most suitable to our aims; we generally prefer to discourage the habit of docility on the grounds that any practice of a virtue puts our patient solidly in the Enemy’s camp, and there is no telling what He might make of even the smallest of their efforts.

With love and venom,

Boomslang

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PS If you know someone who would love this book—or have a friend you’d like to do a Lenten study with—would you share this email and help get the book into the hands of the readers who’d delight in it?