Last month, the British Museum briefly found itself in hot water on Twitter/X. Some feminists took exception to a jokey post they’d made suggesting that their new exhibition about the Roman army, which Ben Stephens reviewed for the Herald in the March edition, was a good place to come for single girls looking to meet eligible bachelors.
The criticism was not especially coherent, but the essential problem was that the BM had implicitly acknowledged two truths that we are not meant to mention nowadays. First, that men and women have, on average, different interests, and that an exhibition devoted to how the soldiers of Rome campaigned and fought was likely to attract more men than women. Secondly, that women might want to proactively take steps to meet a man with a view to forming a long-term relationship.
It is understandable that many people in our contemporary elites should try to enforce a taboo against stating these obviously correct observations about the world. After all, if you admit to yourself that men and women are different and not interchangeable, and that most young people’s vision of the good life still involves settling down and raising a family with a member of the opposite sex, you are well on the way to asking some pretty searching questions about secular modernity.
Some thought it a bit cringeworthy for an august institution like the British Museum to be suggesting that it might play the role of online matchmaker. While I understand this, personally I welcome any assistance in the great cause of getting young men and young women to meet each other in the real world and fall in love. Our society, our civilisation and our Faith depend on that happening, but a vast unholy alliance of economic, technological and cultural foes is ranged against today’s young lovers.
Housing costs, economic stagnation, the virtualisation of society enabled by social media, and the disruption and poisoning of male-female relations by the ongoing sexual revolution: all pose barriers to the ability of people to meet, to understand one another and to create a happy marriage in a family home. Just look at the declining birth rates across the Western world. That is why it is more important than ever to celebrate when a potentially influential institution or a film or TV show promotes some simple “boy meets girl” romance.
A few months back I finished watching the American version of The Office, which remains enormously popular despite finishing its original run in 2013. The beating heart of the show is a love story between the initially timid, artistic receptionist Pam Beesly and the charming salesman Jim Halpert. By modern standards, their relationship is pleasingly old-fashioned. It starts slowly in half-acknowledged mutual attraction and tentative flirtation, before developing into a genuine friendship.
Later it becomes a romantic attachment, and notably both characters clearly regard marriage and children as the logical and desirable culmination of their love for one another. Jim buys an engagement ring when the couple have been going out for just one week, and later they are delighted when Pam becomes pregnant unexpectedly. Neither of them wants to be “childfree” or polyamorous or genderfluid, and when some very realistic marital troubles arise in the final series, they are resolved through better communication and mutual sacrifice. In one great scene their reconciliation is explicitly framed as a response to them recalling St Paul’s famous “Love never fails” passage in 1 Corinthians, which was read at their wedding.
There was another minor victory in the battle for normal interaction between men and women quite recently. Readers may be aware of a very famous photo taken in Times Square, New York on VJ Day in 1945, in which a sailor and a nurse kiss in a moment of excitement. The US Department for Veterans’ Affairs (VA) attempted to have this picture removed from thousands of their social centres, before being forced to climb down.
Their reasoning for this attempted removal was that the photo portrays what the VA viewed as a “sexual assault”, because the kiss was a spur-of-the-moment occurrence and the people involved did not previously know each other. This interpretation has become popular in academic circles; the only slight problem is that woman being kissed specifically rejected this idea before she died.
The view that an unplanned kiss under those circumstances necessarily equates to sexual assault can only have come from a profound discomfort with spontaneity and playfulness between the sexes, rooted in a feminist assumption of male aggression and malevolence. It is hugely important to push back against this kind of thinking, to restore healthy attitudes to the tale as old as time.
We in the Church should think about how we might do this, and how we might act as a beacon for those dissatisfied with the parlous state of relationships in the modern world. A more proactive public presentation of the reasons why the Church says what she does about marriage would be a very good place to start.
This article originally appeared in the April 2024 issue of the Catholic Herald. To subscribe to our award-winning, thought-provoking magazine and have independent and high-calibre counter-cultural Catholic journalism delivered to your door anywhere in the world clickhere.
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