Christian Nationalism and Semen Supremacy

The Case for Christian Nationalism is the #1 Bestseller on three Amazon book lists, including the History of Religion and Politics. It was written by Stephen Wolfe, a 2021 Fellow in Princeton’s James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions. As part of his Christian nation-building, Wolfe wants to strip women of the right to vote. I guess he’s being consistent. Disenfranchisement was an early American ideal. 

Wolfe believes the household is the basic unit of society and that “the head of the household is the sole public person.” The head of Wolfe’s household is, of course, a man. In Wolfe’s Christian nation, the man “alone would vote, and he would vote on behalf of the household.” Wolfe does not “affirm franchise” for all adult men and women. Instead, the head of the household acts as a representative of the home in public, and a representative of the state at home. 

We don’t mind if women suffer, as long as it makes things easier for men. - Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair 

When I asked Wolfe if his tweets about women voting accurately represented his views, he replied, “Why don’t you restate my view and I’ll tell you if you understand it.” 

I’d be happy to, Wolfie Boy! 

Stephen Wolfe thinks I am a woman idiot who cannot comprehend tweets because his Christian Nationalism is a stain left by Aristotle’s premature philosophy.

Aristotle thought that men’s hearts beat with vital heat. Vital heat was the energy of life and the movement of the soul. In every person, food turned into blood and blood turned into muscle, bone and flesh. But in men, vital heat transformed blood into semen. Semen was imbued with vital heat and so could form life itself. 

Much of a man’s semen remained inside of him, working to form his superior body. Men were bigger than women because of their soulful spermatoza. Women did not produce semen because they did not have vital heat. That was why they were smaller. It also explained their menstruation. While men’s semen worked, women’s blood waited. 1

When a man ejaculated into a woman’s vagina, his vitally hot semen moved to form a child from her passive menstrual blood. Not all semen was created vitally equal. More vital heat formed sons, who looked like their fathers. Less vital heat produced daughters. The historical record doesn’t say that Aristotle walked around calling men with daughters “betas”…but it doesn’t say he didn’t either. 

Modern misogynists don’t talk about vital heat, they talk about becoming feminized through female adjacency. More feminization means less vitality. Stephen Wolfe is very afraid that women’s irrationality is catching. 

Nancy Tuana, a feminist philosopher, wrote that without the ability to produce form-capable semen, Aristotle’s woman was left, “with her brain being much smaller and less developed, and her inferior brain size in turn accounts for much of her defective nature. Women’s less concocted brain renders her deliberative faculty too ineffective to rule over her emotions.” 2 It’d be easier to laugh at Aristotle’s blood to semen miracle, if the implications weren’t so far reaching. 

Society teaches that the man’s pleasure is the purpose and priority of sex. - Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair

Aristotle said reason made people human. Since he believed men had a greater natural capacity for reason, he believed they were more fully human than women. Ever a taxonomist, Aristotle sorted humans and sub-humans into separate spheres. Instead of splitting the light from the darkness, Aristotle rhetorically split the city from the home. The city, the public sphere, held religion, politics and philosophy. Men, who were citizens, pursued a good life cultivated by reason in the public sphere. Their rational actions and arguments helped them reach a state beyond happiness called eudaimonia. 

The domestic sphere held the family, the family estate and household production. Underdeveloped women could not think, but they could manage. They oversaw the domestic sphere and the people in it. There was a hierarchy in the home. Children were less rational than women and enslaved people were less rational than children. Together, their household labor supported the philosophy of men. 

The people in the domestic sphere could not pursue the good life because logic could not be home made. Women were not formed for happiness, or any state beyond it. The only arguments women were fit to engage in were the ones that could be heard through the thin walls of their bedrooms.

Sperm are dangerous. - Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair

We still live in the power structure Aristotle’s wet dream built.  The cracks in the separate spheres are caulked together with magic semen. (Mind the drips.) Their slippery shape is used to outline the economic disenfranchisement of the American home. Americans do not have paid leave, maternity leave, universal healthcare, child stipends, affordable daycare or wages for house work because Aristotle thought blood turned into semen. 

Anti-abortion legislation focuses on women because they are seen as passive blood bags waiting to be worked upon by courageous cum. And Stephen Wolfe is invoking the authority of his ejaculate when he argues for women’s disenfranchisement. It is, I am sorry to say, sperm all the way down. 

It’s tempting to call for a total and complete sperm shutdown until we can figure out what’s going on. But a new book argues we don’t need to ban semen, men just need to learn how to contain it.

Gabrielle Blair is a friend. She is a Mormon mom, like me. And she is the author of Ejaculate Responsibly: A Whole New Way to Think About Abortion. She puts semen it in its natural place, outside of a woman’s body.

In the book, Blair makes a rational, public argument for shifting the abortion debate from the bodies of women to the actions of men. Blair writes that “abortions due to unwanted pregnancies…make up approximately 99 percent of all abortions.” She argues that those unwanted pregnancies occur because of irresponsible ejaculation. No longer the stuff of ensoulment, she instead treats semen like any other bodily fluid. 

When a woman does not want to get pregnant, semen is potentially “a dangerous substance.” I suppose that makes the condom a hazmat suit. People who want fewer abortions shouldn’t seek to control women’s bodies, they should teach men to ejaculate responsibly - using condoms, vasectomies and other semen-containment methods. 

Birth control for men is easy to access and easy to use. - Gabrielle Blair, Ejaculate Responsibly

People who are resistant to semen-containment are not really interested in ending abortion, they are interested in controlling women. They’re sticky from spackling the separate spheres. Her argument has implications outside of the immediate abortion debate. If semen supremacy split the world, can semen-containment bring it back together?

In The Washington Post review of Ejaculate Responsibly, Kimberly Harrington wrote, “This slender book has what it takes to be the foundation for a movement.” She’s right about the book’s heft and potential. The slim paperback is nearly as light as a ballot information booklet. Blair’s polemic is arranged like a staggered column formation in twenty-eight arguments.

Her points repeat while her reasoning strides rapidly across open terrain. The linear logic of a polemic can never measure the many dimensions of the single issue it concerns. But it isn’t made to measure; it’s made to move. That movement can sometimes create the kind of friction that burns. (Sorry guys.)

In his book Resistant Structures, Dr. Richard Strier wrote, “Polemics are certainly necessary at times, but they are only justified by being necessary; otherwise they produce more heat than light.” But who decides when a polemic is necessary? Light and heat are both forms of energy. One does not need the other. But we need both to survive. When an object absorbs enough light, it begins to heat up. Blair’s book conducts a vital heat in the pamphlet war tradition.

Before newspapers and magazines, pamphlets were the most effective print medium for public debate. Generally eight to ninety-six pages long, pamphlets were cheap to print and easy to circulate. Women who had access to literacy and time, began to write down arguments at home so they could be set in moveable type for public consumption. The arguments were concise and easy to repeat in conversation.

Religious and political debates flourished as ideas became accessible to people who could afford to purchase a handsewn pamphlet.3 Prolonged public debates happened in flurries of folded print called pamphlet wars. Jonathan Swift’s A Modest Proposal was an entrant in a pamphlet war. So was Mary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Women.

Birth control for women is hard to access and hard to use. - Gabrielle Blair, Ejaculate Responsibly

Women pamphleteers were reviled by traditionalists. Women were meant to be controlled in private, they were not supposed to use print to make the private public. In her paper The Monstrosity of Text, Krista Bailey wrote that women were charged with “organizing to legislate their own sexual privileges.”4

That sounds like praise but it was really condemnation. It illustrated “royalists fears about sharing political power, corroding stable social political and economic relations" by “inverting the sexual hierarchy between men and women.” They were especially mad because they knew the pamphlet was invented to reinforce that sexual hierarchy, not disrupt it.

The word “pamphlet” comes from a 12th century “love” poem, Pamphilus, seu de Amore. Pamphilus, or Concerning Love. It isn’t a love poem. It’s a poem about the supremacy of sperm. In the story, Pamphilus desires the virgin Galatea. But she is too noble and wealthy to consider him. He cannot command or control her. So he asks Venus for help. The Roman goddess gives him a pep talk pick up artists like Andrew Tate are still plagiarizing,

She, whom you entreat imploringly, may first most harshly refuse you.

But this tartness is of little importance.

For truly, that which the seller may first deny,

These salable goods will always be gained by an obstinate buyer. 5

The uneven power dynamic between men and women is real and can turn violent quickly. - Gabrielle Blair, Ejaculate Responsibly

Encouraged, Pamphilus pays an old woman to lure Galatea to a place where he can be alone with her. When she denies his advances, he rapes her. No longer able to claim virginity in a culture that requires it (because of, you guessed, sperm supremacy) Galatea rages,

What do I do now? Shall I, a captive, flee through the world?

Here and there, everywhere, I must search with anxious eyes,

But no hope of joy will I find, wretch that I am!

The poem ends with the old woman’s reply. She tells Galatea to “bear calmly what effort cannot undo” and marry Pamphilus. She is forced into his domestic dominion.

There are zero consequences for men who ejaculate irresponsibly. - Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair

Pamphilus means “Beloved by All.” 6 And he was beloved. The poem spread across Europe in little booklets that were named after the poem’s hero7, pamphilet and then pamphlets. It got all over everything. Even Geoffrey Chaucer, the Father of English Literature, was influenced by the Pamphilus, seu de Amore. The poem is quoted in one of his works and heavily referenced in several others. It is delightful to me that Blair’s book fires backwards across the centuries at Pamphilus. Contain yourself, Rapacious Pamphilus.

Newspapers and magazines may have cooled the pamphlet wars but they didn’t kill them. Disenfranchised women continued to turn to the medium to make a case for their survival. In the 20th century, white, middle-class women in the Women’s Liberation Movement refused to interrogate racism and classism. Black women circulated their arguments in pamphlets like Black Women’s Liberation by Maxine Williams and Pamela Newman.

Aristotle’s separate spheres are a formal fallacy. Philosophy can be served at the kitchen table. Care work has innate value. Children are full humans. Women can think. Men can nurture. Slavery is not rational, it is evil. But he was right about the importance of action and argument. A woman’s ability to have a good life is directly tied to her right to participate in public discussion.

Men have more control of their bodies and sexual urges than we like to admit. - Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair

Engaging in public debate is becoming more difficult as the state joins Christian Nationalists in reinforcing the construction of the separate spheres. The vote is a kind of public discussion. Wolfe would take it from my daughters in the future. But it’s being taken from other people right now. Increasingly draconian voter suppression legislation is stripping the vote from low-income people, often in majority Black communities. White supremacy relies on a heavily restricted public sphere.

Wolfe’s book doesn’t come out until November, but it’s getting advance praise from white supremacists. Andrew Torba, CEO of Gab and all-around antisemite accelerationist, called the book “a masterpiece.” Torba probably also loved Wolfe’s tweets arguing that “interethnic marriage can be sinful relatively.”

Ovulation is involuntary; ejaculation is not. - Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair

The Case for Christian Nationalism is published by Canon Press, a Christian publishing house founded by Douglas Wilson. He writes essays like, The Case of Sexism. (Spoiler: Men are strong and women make sandwiches.) According to Wilson’s blog, he is a partial stakeholder in the press now. I guess he’s been busy with other things. Wilson has been in the news lately because he wants to make Moscow, Idaho a “Christian town” where gay marriage is illegal. He’s been in the news before. Like in 1996, when Canon Press published his slavery apologetic, Southern Slavery, As It Was.

The enslavement of people wasn’t a moral problem for Wilson, but he did have some operations critiques. Wilson and his co-author wrote that, “Southern slavery is open to criticism because it did not follow the biblical pattern at every point.” They write that enslaved people should have been allowed to read and write, for example. Later, they insist Christian men supported slavery because it “produced in the South a genuine affection between the races that we believe we can say has never existed in any nation before the War or since.”

Men who believe the home is a separate sphere under their dominion are never very far from from making an argument for the general benefits of violent oppression. Those of us who can, must act and argue now.

As for Wolfe and all the others like him? It’s time to wrap it up, boys. You’re making a mess of things.

Men can easily prevent abortions but choose not to. - Ejaculate Responsibly, Gabrielle Blair

Object Lessons, A Few Hidden Objects Related to This Newsletter.

I just want to make you weird little images full of hidden objects attended by weird little facts for the rest of my life, okay? Okay! And yes, I need you to guess which fact made me cry three times. (I’ll give you a hint. It includes “altar.”)

1 Eichman, Peter. “Sex, Blood, and Soul: The Transmission of Form in Aristotle’s Biology.” May 2007, pp. 1–16., echodin.net/papers/phil515/aristotle.pdf.)

2 Witt, Charlotte and Lisa Shapiro, "Feminist History of Philosophy", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2021/entries/feminism-femhist/>.

3 https://www.bloomsburycollections.com/book/the-elizabethan-pamphleteers-popular-moralistic-pamphlets-1580-1640/introduction-the-pamphleteers-in-their-context -

4 Bailie, Krista, The Monstrosity of Text: Gender Tensions in Early Modern English Pamphlets, 1550 - 1650 THE MONSTROSITY OF TEXT:GENDER TENSIONS IN EARLY MODERN ENGLISH PAMPHLETS, 1550 - 1650, The University of British Columbia, 2004

5 Garbaty, Thomas Jay. “‘Pamphilus, de Amore’: An Introduction and Translation.” The Chaucer Review, vol. 2, no. 2, 1967, pp. 108–34. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/25093043.

6 Raymond, Joad. Pamphlets and Pamphleteering in Early Modern Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2003.

7 If this doesn’t make you skeptical about the hero label, what will?