Not a men problem. Not a women problem. A virtue problem. And the way back.
“When the soul loses its sense of shame, it loses its strength.” — St. John Climacus
Modern discourse about sexuality has become a tug-of-war of accusation. Mention pornography, chastity, modesty, or moral responsibility, and instantly the two sexes retreat into battle formation.
Women insist pornography is a male failure, and men respond with grievances of female hypocrisy, nagging or both. But beneath all the fighting, something ancient, important, and fragile is breaking.
This is not a debate about porn. Not really. This is a revelation of the interior collapse of the feminine soul in this modern age; and the masculine soul as well (but I speak to women, not men).
To mend what is unraveling, we must speak plainly, gently, and without fear.
❧ The Blind Spot Women Do Not Want to See
Women often wave away the entire conversation by saying, “Men consume more porn than women, therefore this is a man’s issue.”
And yes, men do consume more. But this does not absolve women.
Today:
- 4 to 6 out of 10 women consume porn in some form.
- Many women also produce it, willingly or under cultural pressure, ignorance or because they have grown up in a moral void and don’t know they have other options.
- Among self-proclaimed Christians, a striking number of women admit regular or occasional consumption.
- The porn economy profits overwhelmingly from the sexual exhibition of women themselves.
The feminist illusion—that women are passive victims in the porn crisis, or that women are empowered and not seriously damaged by this—cannot bear scrutiny.
Women are not only affected by pornography; they are participants in it, perpetrators of it, and they are damaged and wounded by it.
If pornography is degrading — and it is — then women are degrading themselves twice: as consumers and as the consumed.
But the greater problem is this: Most modern women have not been formed in virtue at all. Many are academically trained, socially adept, and vocationally ambitious, and yet interiorly under-developed. And it shows, although most were surrounded by other women of the same under-development— so they lack critical self-awareness.
Most modern women were not raised with:
- moral formation,
- careful conscience-building,
- a sense of feminine dignity,
- or a spiritual understanding of desire, ethical sexuality, reproduction and marriage.
Their families, schools, and culture starved them of moral truth, and now they unwittingly starve themselves — and everyone around them — of the fruits of maturity.
❧ Porn Is Not the Real Issue; It Is the Symptom
Porn is the wound, not the infection.The deeper disease is the collapse of chastity.
Everywhere we see: normalized casual sex, the mockery of modesty, the glorification of exhibition and promiscuity, the severing of intimacy from commitment and marriage, divorce accepted as an inevitability, contraception that reduces sex to recreation, dating apps turning lust into a vending machine, and the reduction of the body to performance and product; to numerical ratings and body counts.
It is a world so base, so stripped of reverence, that our grandmothers, great-grandmothers, and all the women who carried us through history would scarcely recognize us. These were women who endured hardship with dignity, who honored their bodies as sacred gifts from God, who understood marriage as covenant, who preserved modesty as a form of strength, not shame. They would look upon our generation—flaunting what they concealed, trivializing what they honored, discarding what they safeguarded — and wonder how we could squander, in one lifetime, the moral inheritance they spent generations protecting.
As Chesterton wrote:
“Every high thing becomes perverted when its truth is forgotten.”
Pornography is the inevitable rot that appears when desire loses virtue, the body loses dignity, and sex is torn away from self-giving love and reduced to the service of the lower nature.
In this light, women condemning men who use porn while living unchaste lives is incoherent.
Fornication and porn are not two different issues. They are two expressions of the same interior disorder.
Fornication and porn are siblings; one enacted with the body, the other enacted with the imagination.
❧ The Double Standard No One Wants to Name
When women demand that men restrain their sexual appetites while most women refuse restraint in their own lives, men do not hear a call to virtue. They hear hypocrisy. They hear posturing. They hear insufferable, holier-than-thou nagging from women who — for the most part—do not practice what they preach.
And here is where the dynamic becomes even more warped: The most adamant female voices condemning porn are often married, modest, seemingly virtuous influencers — but they are not speaking to other women who most desperately need correction, but rather speaking over the women, directing all their outrage at men.
As if porn is a man’s failure.
For the most part, they are not calling women to chastity or modesty. They are not addressing women’s complicity in porn culture. They are not admonishing women to stop living like concubines and start living like future wives and mothers. They are not challenging women to repent of fornication, immodesty, promiscuity, exhibitionism, and emotional manipulation. And even when they are, they chastise men “in general,” as though the entire male sex were a misbehaving child needing public discipline.
This is why their message rings hollow; this is why men feel irritated, dismissed, and unfairly targeted; and this is why it feels like nagging instead of exhortation.
The critique is aimed at the wrong audience.
A woman preaching chastity to men while ignoring the huge promiscuity problem of modern women is like a doctor lecturing strangers about diet while feeding her own children poison.
But this does not mean men are innocent. Nor does it mean wives are wrong to feel deeply wounded by their husband’s porn use.
Because porn does dishonor marriage; it dishonors both husband and wife; it ruins intimacy; it ruins trust; and it fractures the marriage bed.
❧ Husbands and Wives Must Repent
Husbands and wives must repent. Both.
They must face their vices and addictions, confront the habits that have hollowed out their intimacy, practice genuine self-mastery, and work diligently to rebuild the trust they broke.
And let us not pretend that only men fall here.
Many wives also indulge in pornography, or they tolerate it, excuse it, or quietly justify it — and they must repent and change as well. A woman dishonors her husband just as surely when she turns her eyes, her heart, or her desires toward fantasies instead of her spouse.
And this includes the vice no one wants to name: the smut-soaked “romance novels” and explicit fiction marketed to women as harmless escapism.
They are not harmless. They are pornography, but wrapped in plot and sentiment so that women can consume lust while preserving the illusion of virtue. These books create emotional infidelity, unrealistic expectations, and a kind of soft adultery of the imagination. They teach a woman to crave the man who does not exist, instead of loving the one she married. They train her heart to hunger for drama rather than holiness, for erotic self-indulgence rather than fidelity.
A fantasy in text is no less corrupting than a fantasy in pixels. It simply flatters the ego more.
When a woman feeds her imagination, and her bodily urges, on erotic novels, she is turning her desires away from her husband just as surely as he does when he turns his eyes toward a screen. Both violate the exclusivity of the marital bond. Both cheapen the sacredness of intimacy. Both wound the trust that marriage requires to flourish.
So no — the crisis is not “men and their porn.” It is men and women and all the ways each sex seeks escape from the duties of love.
❧ The Right Ordering of Moral Responsibility
But when it comes to public discourse, I believe the feminine duty remains clear: Women must address the sins of women, men must address the sins of men, and each must hold themselves to the standard they demand of the other. Only then can our moral exhortations ring with integrity instead of hypocrisy.
Women; we must call each other back to chastity, modesty, boundaries, dignity, and self-respect, and stop pretending that unvirtuous women do not exist or are irrelevant to the crisis.
And men must challenge other men toward self-mastery, fidelity, inner discipline, and sacrificial leadership.
When women ignore women’s sins and focus solely on men, they betray their own sex. They fail to guard their daughters. They fail to protect the feminine ethos. They fail to uphold the very virtues they claim to prize.
The feminine critique has authority only when it flows from the feminine example.
And right now, tragically, in many cases it does not.
“Why do you see the speck in your brother’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?Or how can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when there is the log in your own? You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s.” —Matthew 7:3–5
Without chastity, the whole moral ecosystem collapses.
❧ How Women Became Masculinized in Their Vice, and Why It Wounds Her More Than Men
Modern women increasingly imitate masculine patterns of vice: consuming porn visually, adopting a male-style detachment in sex, talking about sex in crude terms (bragging about body count etc), pursuing pleasure without commitment, and treating their bodies as consumable content.
But the feminine heart was not built for masculine-style detachment.
A man who indulges in sexual vice becomes dulled, detached, and weakened.
A woman who indulges becomes fragmented, anxious, and emotionally disoriented.
This is because female sexuality is inherently relational and commitment focused; it is yielding and highly emotionally connected. When she violates her feminine design, her whole interior life pays the price.
As St. Edith Stein wrote:
“The soul of woman must be expansive and quiet, warm and bright, unfolding itself in love.”
Sexual vice suffocates that unfolding.
Women do not become powerful by copying the vices of men; they become diminished.
Thus we see a generation of women struggling with: chronic anxiety and depression, relational and gender confusion, self-loathing, instability in intimacy, an inability to bond deeply, etc.
Vice unfeminizes a woman. Chastity heals and restores her.
Women do not become free by copying male vice. They become less of who they were created to be.
❧ Chastity: The Lost Crown of Womanhood
Chastity is not a relic of puritanism. It is the architecture of feminine strength. It does not repress desire. It orders it; toward love, faithfulness, marriage, and dignity.
Chastity says:
- My heart is not public property.
- My body belongs to love, not consumption.
- My desires serve truth, not appetite.
A chaste woman is powerful because she is self-possessed. She knows her worth. She honors her future or current marriage. She carries a quiet, radiant authority.
Modesty is simply chastity made visible. It is not the hiding of beauty as the modern anti-feminine culture has convince us it is. It is the protecting of the sacred. It is the public expression of inward dignity.
Modesty is not about disappearing. It is about protecting what is sacred; your dignity.
If Women Want Men to Rise, They Must Rise First
A fundamental pattern runs through human nature: women set the tone of sexual culture, and men respond to that tone with their own form of virtue or vice. The dance between the sexes assigns different responsibilities to each. This is a good thing.
Women have the feminine ability to civilize men; not by shaming them, but by embodying the virtues that make men want to rise up and become worthy.
Historically, men rose to the standard women set.
And here lies a deep biological and historical truth:
Across every culture, the percentage of women who become mothers has always exceeded the percentage of men who become fathers. Women will carry the next generation, and men always had to work at being chosen to participate in that future.
Thus:
- Men competed for the opportunity to father children.
- Women selected who was worthy of that honor.
- And what made a woman “wife material” was not just her outer beauty — but her inner beauty as well, which is another way of saying, her virtue.
A virtuous woman; modest, faithful, and discerning — was seen as a safe and desirable mother for a man’s children. This instinct has not changed, although most are unconscious.
Even men who are not the most virtuous still long to marry a virtuous woman; for the sake of the children she will raise for him.
When women abandon: chastity, modesty, self-restraint, moral clarity and wisdom,
men sink more easily; not because they lack strength…well maybe, a little…but because sexual temptation strikes them differently and more forcefully than it does for women.
When the boundaries once held by virtuous women disappear, even good men stumble.
Yet this does not imply men are incapable of self-civilization. Far from it.
Men carry their own form of virtue; strong, disciplined, forged through hardship.
A virtuous man: governs his impulses, orders his strength toward the good, protects the vulnerable, honors his commitments, embraces sacrifice, and upholds the moral architecture of the home.
If the woman’s virtue is the hearth that warms civilization, the man’s virtue is the foundation that stabilizes it.
Women civilize by calling forth greatness. Men civilize by becoming strong enough to uphold what is good. Both are indispensable. In a family, neither stands without the other.
“Husbands, love your wives, as Christ loved the Church and gave Himself up for her.”
— Ephesians 5:25
Christ does not lead by domination, but by self-giving love, by sacrifice. And women, likewise, influence not through pressure, but through the strength of feminine virtue.
In sex, romance, and marriage, it is the woman who signals the moral boundaries. She decides whether intimacy is sacred or casual, whether attention must be earned or freely given, whether a man must rise or may simply take, and then take some more.
When women rise in virtue, men rise as well. When women fall, men fall harder. When both rise together, they build a civilization and high-trust societies.
A woman’s virtue is her greatest beauty and strength, and also her greatest influence. And a man’s virtue is also his truest power; his ability to build, lead, protect and defend.
Together, they shape the moral order in which future generations will live.
❧ What We Must Teach Our Daughters
Our daughters are not thriving. You can feel it everywhere: in the restlessness behind their eyes, in the brittleness of their self-worth, in their fear of marriage, in their suspicion of motherhood, and in their exhaustion with a life lived according to the demands of a world that does not love them.
No generation of young women has ever been more sexually exposed yet emotionally starved, more “empowered” yet more fragile, more “liberated” yet more disconnected from the feminine soul.
And despite all the propaganda insisting they are happier, stronger, and freer than the women who came before them, the truth is the opposite: today’s young women are more depressed, more anxious, more medicated, more promiscuous, and more spiritually lost than at any point in our cultural memory. They are becoming more like men sexually—detached, indulgent, competitive, transactional—yet this imitation does not elevate them. It hollows them out. It deadens their soul and hardens their heart.
It is no wonder they want marriage less than any generation before. They do not trust permanence. They do not trust men. They do not believe in sacrificial love. They do not believe in lasting love. They have never been taught how to cultivate intimate bonds or how to discern a virtuous man from a charming predator who only wants to use them for sex. Their ideas about sex come not from their mothers or the Church or wise elders, but from pornified media and Hollywood, degrading music, wounded peers, and platforms designed to addict and distort everything that is true, good and beautiful.
They are receiving little moral formation, if any. And instead of virtue, they are fed a steady diet of sexual chaos packaged as confidence, independence, and self-realization. The culture tells them they are “goddesses,” “divine feminine portals,” “sexual priestesses,” and other New Age delusions meant to spiritualize vice and baptize self-indulgence. What used to be called immodesty and promiscuity is now rebranded as “awakening,” —as though moral disorder becomes holy simply by giving it mystical vocabulary.
But this is not empowerment. It is a clever form of captivity; a vanity masquerading as enlightenment, teaching young women to worship their impulses instead of governing them, to treat desire as destiny instead of disciplining it toward love. It does not liberate the feminine soul; it deforms it.
Every day, the culture catechizes them: Your value is measured by visibility,; your power is measured by desirability; your liberation is measured by sexual availability; your body is your currency; your rebellion is your virtue; and your emotions are your compass.
And so on.
But these messages do not make young women free. They make them controllable; by appetite, by advertising, by predatory men who will never love them, and by the emptiness that follows every misuse and degradation of their body.
This is why mothers must once again become teachers of the interior life.
Not simply teachers of the clinical, biological facts of sexuality— like many unfortuantely receive from their middle school sex ed teacher— but of the moral meaning of sexuality. Daughters need their mothers to explain not just “the birds and the bees,” but the purpose and beauty of ordered desire, the dignity of their fertility, the sacredness of their bodies, and the spiritual consequences of misusing their gift of intimacy.
They need their mothers to speak frankly about the dangers they will encounter: the men who will seek pleasure without love or responsibility, the peers and the entertainment industry who will pressure them toward promiscuity, the online world that wants to shape their identity around their sexuality rather than their soul.
And they need their mothers to teach them how to evaluate male character; not with suspicion or distrust or fear, but with wisdom. A girl must learn how to recognize courage, humility, discipline, faith, stability, and genuine masculine virtue. She must also learn how to run from the opposite. This discernment is not intuitive and does not come naturally; it must be taught. And it must be taught by those who love her; her parents, but especially her mother —who has the responsibility to teach her daughter how to be a virtuous woman.
Mothers must also recover their authority in boundary-setting.
Girls are not protected by permissiveness; they are protected by structure. Girls who are coming of age do not flourish when left entirely to their own devices; they flourish when guided towards setting proper boundaries, corrected again and again, sheltered from dangerous situations, and slowly prepared to inherit the responsibilities of womanhood.
This is not oppression, and it is not old-fashioned; it is protection — because real love manifests itself in limits, in boundaries, and in the kind of self-care that guards the soul rather than indulges the flesh
“Train up a child in the way he should go; even when he is old he will not depart from it.” (Proverbs 22:6)
This is not a suggestion. It is a spiritual law.
If mothers do not train their daughters, then algorithms, strangers, the “cool kids” and, eventually, the most persuasive voices of decadence will do it in their place. And the results are written plainly across the faces of this generation of young women: a sadness they cannot name and a longing they do not know how to fulfill.
We must teach our daughters that their dignity is inherent; not dependent on visibility or sexual performance. That modesty is not repression but protection. That chastity is not weakness but the crown of a woman who knows her worth. That their bodies are sacred vessels of future life, not entertainment for male consumption. That marriage is a gift worth preparing for, not an obstacle to self-expression. That motherhood is not a burden, but one of the highest callings inscribed into their being.
And above all, we must teach them that the soul’s movements toward goodness and love matter so much more than the world’s opinions.
A girl who learns chastity learns how to love. A girl who loses chastity loses the map back to herself.
This generation of daughters stands at a crossroads: one path leads toward vice, confusion, and the loneliness we see everywhere; the other leads toward virtue, clarity, and the joy of becoming the women God designed them to be.
It is our moral and sacred duty to show them the way.
Saint John Paul II wrote:
“The future of humanity passes by way of the family.”
The future of the family passes through the formation of daughters who are capable of becoming women of virtue, wives of strength, and mothers of moral clarity.
If we want a better world, mothers must raise virtuous daughters. If we want better men, we must become better women.
This is why chastity, modesty, virtue, and ordered sexuality are not optional. They are the safeguards of the feminine soul.
❧ The Path Forward
The cure for our sexual crisis is not anger, not finger-pointing, not internet wars, not statistics, and not outrage.
The cure is virtue. Chastity, modesty, accountability, repentance, interior growth, the rebuilding of conscience, and the restoration of the feminine soul.
Porn is not a men issue. Porn is not a women issue. Porn is the mirror revealing what happens when a society loses virtue.
The way home is the way women have always had great influence: through moral clarity rather than moral decay, through the desire for holiness rather than self gratification, and through strength wrapped in gentleness, in femininity and grace.
This is the Feminine Standard. This is dignity, restoration, and the way back to love.
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