“'All I want is to marry someone I can share my Catholic faith with and who will respect me. But I feel like I have to settle for dating a non-Catholic, because all the Catholic men in our area are red pill-ers who eye me at young adult group like I’m a future baby-making factory.'
-something a friend of mine said that broke my heart" - A note from Eliza Monts on Substack, August 31, 2026
My response:
"My guess is 'baby making factory' is her term for being a full-time rather than part-time wife and mom, not theirs.
As an alternative anecdote, I asked out an evangelical girl last night in a cold approach. She said it was super important to her that she marry a Christian.
This happens fairly frequently, and it’s pretty much always the evangelical girls that care enough about Jesus and say they love him such that they want an explicit declaration of faith before a date. By contrast, I’ve really never heard that from a Catholic girl, at least that I can recall.
Sure, some men are gross and give off bad vibes - but are we really expected to believe that Catholic men are grosser than non-Catholic men on average? Give me a break.
Catholic men shouldn’t be gross, but they also shouldn’t have to convince Catholic women of basic Christian or Church teaching.
I’ve found that Evangelical girls largely know what the Bible says and submit to it.
Catholic women… are more likely to give their feminism a quasi religious authority, then smear you as wanting them to be a baby making factory, and then gossip about you where you can’t defend yourself
As we see in this case online.
Just for the record."
A response to me by Rachel Lu:
"The general concern that 'traditionalist men have reductive views of women' goes beyond concerns about working (although, yes, I would indeed see the assumption that married women should definitely be out of the workforce as a red flag). This is not to say that women’s fears are always reasonable. However, it is entirely natural and appropriate for women to worry about being valued primarily for their bodies and their domestic labor, not as full-fledged persons. That has always been a real risk for women, given their particular vulnerabilities, and the gender wars of our own era seem to have persuaded many right-leaning men that they are justified in treating women as candidates for a role and not persons worthy of love."
My response:
"Everyone is a person worthy of love. If you want to get married though, you are a candidate applying for a role - that of husband or that of wife.
If you don’t believe marriage has roles, or you resent being evaluated for that role, then you are rebelling against that role and the fact that marriage has roles.
I don’t want men to have a reductive view of women either. But I would say there is a serious problem, particularly in Feminist Catholic circles, of a reductive view of wifehood and motherhood, such that these roles are inherently seen as undignifying.
That’s why there’s a defensive reaction that 'well you just hate women/have a reductive view of us!' - It’s because Catholic women have imbibed the culture’s contempt for and reductive view of the roles of wife and mother, and so they see it as a personal insult for a man to want them to be one."
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