I had a great conversation today with filmmaker Les Lanphere, who is working on a provocative new documentary called Deceived: The Ruin of the Modern Woman.

Les is an experienced documentary filmmaker whose previous work includes Calvinist, Spirit & Truth, and Cessationist. In addition to his independent documentaries, he has worked on major, large-budget film productions, bringing valuable experience from the broader film industry to his own projects. His newest documentary takes on a very different subject: feminism and its impact on women, men, families, and society.

What particularly interests me about this project is its willingness to challenge one of our culture’s most deeply entrenched assumptions: that feminism has been a force for good in women’s lives. Les takes a much more provocative position. His film sets out to expose the consequences of a movement that claims to liberate women but has often left them worse off.

The film approaches these questions from a Christian perspective, examining how feminism has reshaped our understanding of women, men, marriage, and family life. Les is asking important questions that deserve far more attention than they typically receive, and I’m delighted to see a filmmaker willing to tackle them so directly.

Here’s the trailer for the upcoming film:

Helping bring the film to life

The project’s crowdfunding campaign has already reached its original fundraising goal, which is wonderful news. But producing a documentary is an expensive undertaking, and additional contributions are still welcome and appreciated.

If you believe that feminism deserves serious scrutiny and that alternative perspectives should have an opportunity to be heard, consider supporting the project.

Support Deceived: The Ruin of the Modern Woman on Kickstarter

I’ll be interviewing Les soon for Men Are Good, and I’m looking forward to exploring his plans for the film, what motivated him to make it, and what he hopes audiences will take away.

Stay tuned. I think this will be a fascinating conversation.

Men Are Good.

A note from Tom - Moore’s work is especially important today because so much contemporary discussion of masculinity begins—and often ends—with its shadow side. Feminist theories have given us an increasingly thin picture of men, rich in criticism but poor in any understanding of mature masculine strength. Moore never denied masculinity’s capacity for violence, domination, and destructiveness; he simply understood that these distortions cannot be comprehended without also recognizing the healthy power from which they have fallen.

Of Robert Moore’s four masculine archetypes, the Warrior may be the easiest to not understand.

We hear the word and think of violence. We picture a soldier, a prizefighter, an action hero, or perhaps a swaggering man eager to prove that he is tougher than everyone around him. In our current culture, the Warrior is often treated as the embarrassing remnant of an earlier masculinity—something primitive that civilized men should learn to suppress.

Moore believed that this was a serious mistake.

The Warrior is not simply the part of a man that can fight. It is the capacity to act, to endure, to remain loyal, to protect a boundary, to organize resources, to distinguish what matters from what does not, and to place one’s strength in service to something larger than oneself.

Violence is one possible expression of Warrior energy, but it is not its essence. In fact, the man most eager to use force may be possessed by the Warrior rather than mature in it. And the man who insists that he has no aggression may be no safer. His sword has not disappeared. It has simply gone underground.

Moore’s central insight could be put this way:

The mature Warrior is not the violent man. He is the man who has acknowledged his capacity for force, brought it under conscious discipline, and placed it in service to something beyond himself.

The dangerous man is often the one who either worships the sword or insists he has no sword at all.

There Are No Freelance Warriors

 

In a previous post, I explored Moore’s understanding of the King. The King creates order, accepts responsibility, blesses life, and establishes the values of the realm.

The Warrior serves that order.

That relationship is crucial. Warrior energy by itself does not know whether a cause is just. It knows how to identify an enemy, formulate a strategy, accept hardship, mobilize resources, and attack an objective. Those capacities can protect a child or terrorize one. They can defend a community or destroy it. The Warrior supplies power, but it cannot by itself decide what that power should serve.

That is the King’s task.

Moore said that there can be mercenaries without a King, but there can be no true Warriors. The mercenary may be highly skilled. He may be brave, disciplined, and effective. But he fights for money, status, excitement, or whoever happens to be paying. The mature Warrior serves a moral order: a community, a sacred obligation, the vulnerable, the future, or a vision of justice larger than his own appetite.

This is one reason Warrior energy cannot be understood simply as aggression. The mature Warrior does not ask only, “Can I win?” He asks, “Whom do I serve? What am I protecting? Under what authority do I act? What will I refuse to do, even to an enemy?”

Power becomes mature when it kneels.

The Sword Is a Responsibility

 

Moore spent considerable time discussing the symbolism of the sword.

The sword represents potency, discrimination, and the ability to cut through confusion. It separates one thing from another. It says yes to this and no to that. It establishes a boundary and makes action possible.

But in the traditional ceremony of knighthood, the candidate does not merely seize the sword and begin swinging it. He kneels beneath it. The sword touches him before he carries it.

This means that the Warrior comes under the authority of the sword. His power is governed by a code. He accepts responsibility for how it will be used and what must never be done with it.

The mature Warrior knows that he can cause harm. He does not pretend to be harmless, nor does he advertise his dangerousness in order to frighten others. His power is acknowledged, visible, disciplined, and accountable.

Moore contrasted the sword with the dagger. The sword is openly carried. The dagger is concealed.

The dagger belongs to the person who says, “I am not angry. I would never hurt anyone. I have no interest in power.” Yet the blade appears through sarcasm, procrastination, chronic criticism, manipulation, helplessness, gossip, obstruction, or the perfectly timed wound delivered from behind.

Just because a person does not show a sword does not mean there is no blade.

Denied aggression does not become love. It becomes unconscious aggression.

Permission to Be Powerful

 

For a boy to develop a healthy relationship with his strength, he needs more than warnings about what not to do. He needs permission to be powerful.

That permission does not mean, “Do whatever you want.” It means, “Your strength is real. It is welcome. It has a place. Let us help you learn what it is for.”

Moore saw the father’s response to the son’s growing power as enormously important. The mature father does not shame the boy for his energy or become threatened when the boy begins to surpass him. He is pleased by the son’s increasing strength. He draws him close, lets him admire, and eventually helps him place that power under discipline and moral purpose.

The shadow father does something very different. He mocks the boy’s awkwardness, treats his energy as dangerous, competes with him, or crushes him before his adult capacities have had time to form. Moore told of a shy, thin adolescent whose father ridiculed his emerging masculinity. The boy later grew into an impressive man, but the wound remained. The father had attacked the unfinished form of something that needed encouragement and time.

Moore pointed to Bull Meechum, the domineering Marine father in Pat Conroy’s The Great Santini, as a vivid portrait of this shadow father. Meechum is a formidable military man—competent and commanding—but emotionally he remains a boy. He can drill, compete, and dominate, but he cannot welcome his son’s emerging strength or bless him as he comes into manhood. What appears to be mature masculinity is largely an impressive uniform wrapped around an uninitiated personality.

A boy who never receives permission to be powerful may grow into a man who fears his own strength. He may become excessively compliant, wait for others to decide, or apologize whenever he takes up space. He may also be vulnerable to sudden eruptions of rage because the Warrior, excluded from ordinary consciousness, returns in a primitive form.

Or he may find someone else to carry his Warrior for him.

The Warrior We Give Away

Moore was particularly good at showing how disowned power becomes projection.

A person who cannot say no may attach himself to someone who says no cruelly. A man who cannot act may idolize a strongman who promises to act for him. A dependent person may wait for a rescuer. A rescuer may go looking for a helpless person and an abusive villain so he can play Sir Galahad. A grandiose leader may surround himself with loyal knights willing to sacrifice themselves for his cause.

In each case, Warrior energy is present. It simply has not been claimed consciously.

This is why Moore refused to define Warrior pathology only as “too much aggression.” Too little conscious Warrior can be equally destructive.

The person who continually says “I can’t” may be projecting agency onto everyone around him. The compulsively nice person may secretly admire people who intimidate and dominate. The chronic complainer has enough Warrior energy to carve at the world but not enough to do anything constructive about it.

Moore’s observation was delightfully blunt: people who complain a great deal often do very little.

Passive aggression is Warrior energy trying to enter through the basement. Procrastination, deliberate incompetence, obstruction, and overcompliance allow a person to attack while preserving the belief that he is innocent.

Imagine a therapist asking a compulsive client to bring in some dreams. The following week the client arrives with forty-two of them. He has obeyed perfectly—and buried the therapist beneath the obedience. The dagger has struck, but no one can accuse him of failing to cooperate.

The healing task is not to make such a man more aggressive. It is to help him become direct.

The Capacity to Act

At its most ordinary and necessary, the Warrior is the part of us that gets things done.

It makes a plan. It identifies the next step. It organizes time and resources. It accepts discomfort. It gets out of bed, makes the telephone call, confronts the problem, keeps the appointment, protects the child, finishes the work, and stays faithful when novelty has disappeared.

The Lover may bring two people together, but the Warrior helps them keep their vows. Attraction is not fidelity. Feeling deeply is not the same as remaining present when a relationship becomes difficult.

The same is true of vocation. Many people can imagine, study, discuss, analyze, worry, and wait. The Warrior acts.

Moore described clients who could spend months exploring their dreams without ever asking what they should do. He began deliberately making room for that question. And he discovered something remarkably practical: people usually already knew.

They knew the conversation they needed to have, the habit they needed to stop, the application they needed to submit, the boundary they needed to set, or the task they had been avoiding. What they lacked was not information. They lacked access to the energy required to act upon it.

Therapy, at that point, could create a space in which the person named the action and received support for the Warrior as he began to do it.

That fits closely with what I have seen in working with men. Insight matters, but insight often needs somewhere to go. Many men begin to move when suffering can be translated into a task—not because action replaces feeling, but because meaningful action gives feeling a form.

The Warrior’s Anesthesia

Warrior energy carries its own anesthesia.

In battle, crisis, emergency, or sustained effort, that can be lifesaving. The Warrior allows a person to continue despite fear, pain, fatigue, and injury. A firefighter cannot stop in the burning building to process every emotion. A father protecting his family may need to act before he has time to feel. A surgeon, police officer, soldier, or trauma worker may temporarily set aside his own reactions in order to do what the situation requires.

But the Warrior does not know when enough is enough.

Moore joked about tanks advancing across the plain until they ran out of gasoline. It is a wonderful image of the workaholic life. The campaign is impressive, the objective is clear, and the forces keep moving—but no one has checked the fuel gauge.

When Warrior energy dominates a personality, a man may not feel tired when he is tired. He may not know he is wounded. He may continue working, fighting, producing, and enduring long after his body or relationships have begun to break down.

The Warrior is not designed to tend the wound. The Magician can recognize it. The Lover can feel it. The King can decide that the welfare of the realm requires rest, repair, or retreat. But the Warrior alone knows only the mission.

This is why Moore never intended any archetype to stand by itself. The pure Warrior is not a complete man. He is a magnificent and terrifying machine.

In Part Two, we will follow Moore’s Warrior through the white, red, and black knights—then examine the Warrior’s relationship to enemies, shadow, admiration, and the difficult passage from raw power to mature service.

Men Are Good.

The question is not whether girls should lead. It is whether parents are being told what kind of political formation is taking place in their children’s schools.

When we were children, many of us heard the same warning: do not go anywhere with a stranger who offers you candy.

It was never a very complete picture of danger. Most children are not abducted by strangers. Yet the story carried a truth that parents understood: children are impressionable. They can be attracted by something pleasant, familiar, or seemingly harmless without seeing where it may lead.

And yes, they can be drawn to a message that relieves them of responsibility and explains their difficulties as the fault of the opposite sex. In that sense, the feminist message can be its own kind of candy.

I have been looking at feminist organizations that establish clubs and leadership programs for girls and young people. At first I wondered whether there was evidence of an effort to introduce girls to feminism early and bring them into activism. The answer to that questions is yes—but the organizations’ own public materials tell a more specific story than the caricature: they introduce young people to feminist ideas and train them to advocate for particular political causes.

What I found was an organized pathway. It begins in middle and high school. It teaches students a particular way of understanding social problems. Then it gives them training and tools to advocate politically for the causes selected by the organization. A small portion of those tools, often called Guidebooks, is available to the public. The largest portion of their material is withheld. Do you think they might be hiding something?

So it can be framed as public youth activism. But it is not politically neutral. The publicly available material makes it clear that their objectives are to train activists to fight for the feminist cause.

Middle-school girls are at an age when belonging, identity, and moral purpose matter deeply. They are not empty vessels, but they are still forming ideas about who they are, whom they should trust, and how to interpret unfairness. That is why parents should take seriously any program that combines friendship and leadership with a particular political worldview.

Let’s have a look at some of these programs.

Girls Learn International: a pathway, not merely a club

Girls Learn International (GLI), a program of the Feminist Majority Foundation, reports more than 160 clubs in 26 states and 18 countries. Its clubs are for middle- and high-school students, and GLI says they operate in public and private schools as well as community settings. Its own description says that it is building “a movement of informed advocates and a new generation of leaders and activists for social change.”

The organization provides an online Guidebook with more than fifty meeting guides. The public catalog includes titles such as “Allyship in Action,” “In Her Shoes,” “Representing Girlhood,” and “Rethinking the Language We Use.” The detailed lessons require a club login, so ​we really don’t know what is behind that door.

But GLI is very clear about the larger program. Students meet regularly to learn about human rights and gender equity, then are expected to undertake advocacy or fundraising projects. The stated issues include reproductive rights, comprehensive sex education, the Equal Rights Amendment, LGBTQIA+ rights, racial justice, environmental justice, civic engagement, and menstrual equity. There are trainings, a summer activist program, conferences, internships, United Nations opportunities, and a bridge into the organization’s college-level feminist network.

Again, none of this is hidden. The point is not that the group is concealing its goals. The point is that parents may see the word club or leadership and not recognize that the program is also a pipeline into a defined political movement.

NOW is even more explicit

The National Organization for Women’s Campus Action Network offers materials for middle- and high-school students as well as college students. One public activity list gives us a much clearer view of what “young feminist” organizing looks like.

Students are invited to do an “Education Privilege Walk.” They line up, step forward or backward in response to statements about family education, race, language, disability, income, religion, gender, sexual orientation, and safety. When the walk ends, the students who have moved furthest forward—those treated by the exercise as having the greatest privilege—compete for two candy bars. The discussion then asks whether the competition was fair and what “gaps in privilege” need to be bridged.

There is nothing illegitimate about discussing unequal circumstances. Young people should understand that some classmates face burdens others do not.

But the exercise does more than encourage empathy. It gives students a framework: social outcomes are understood through privilege, group identity, and unequal power. That is a political lens. It is not the only lens through which children can be taught to understand the world.

The next activity makes the framework explicit. Each student receives a card naming an “intersectional feminist issue” and is asked to discuss how they would solve it. The approved issue list includes ending the wage gap, abortion access, keeping Planned Parenthood open, ratifying the ERA, comprehensive sex education, transgender military service, immigration policy, and other causes. The same document recommends documentaries such as She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry, Seeing Allred, The Hunting Ground, and Birthright: A War Story.

Those films and causes do not represent every reasonable view of sex, family, women, men, violence, education, or public policy. They represent a particular worldview. The clubs then give students practice in fundraising, campus organizing, publicity, and political action.

It is hard to honestly describe this as merely encouraging girls to “find their voice.” It is training young people to use a feminist voice in public life.

Other organizations say the same thing in different language

GLI and NOW are not unusual.

Girl Up, a program launched by the United Nations Foundation, calls advocacy its tool for “social, political, and economic change.” It supplies clubs with advocacy resources around gender-based violence, sexual and reproductive health and rights, menstrual equity, education, and other issues. It reports thousands of clubs worldwide.

Advocates for Youth publishes a 64-page Youth Activist Toolkit. It teaches young people how to define a problem, identify “constituents” and allies, analyze decision-makers, build collective power, shape a public narrative, and run campaigns. Its examples include reproductive justice and ending stigma around abortion.

Girls for Gender Equity is more candid still. In a public program model, it says its work is grounded in Black feminist pedagogy, intersectionality, social justice, and an anti-oppression analysis. It recruited young women and gender-nonconforming youth to develop policy recommendations for New York City around education, health, anti-violence work, criminal justice, and other systems. One may agree with its aims. But no parent should mistake the program for neutral civic education.

​I suppose these organizations might provide some value to girls. They ​might encourage confidence, public speaking, friendship, service, ​and attention to real hardships​.

But those benefits do not erase the political purpose. Leadership is not neutral when the organization chooses the causes, the interpretive lens, the reading and viewing lists, the vocabulary, and the campaigns.

What about boys?

There are programs for boys. I found groups such as A Call to Men, Coaching Boys Into Men, Equimundo, and MenEngage. They often teach boys about consent, relationship behavior, violence prevention, “healthy masculinity,” and being allies in gender equality.

Some of that work may be useful.

Yet there is a striking difference in emphasis. Girls’ programs are often organized around girls’ leadership, girls’ rights, girls’ voices, and girls’ advocacy. Boys’ programs more often begin with what boys must not become: violent, sexist, dominating, unsafe, or emotionally closed. They are frequently asked to become allies to a movement built around others’ needs.

I have not found a comparably large and well-developed network of school clubs that begins with this message: boys and men have inherent dignity; their struggles matter; their gifts matter; their health, education, fatherhood, and safety deserve attention; and they can organize to address the places where boys and men are doing badly.

That absence is worth noticing.

The question parents should ask

The point is not to pull girls out of every club, or to frighten parents with exaggerated claims. It is to ask the same questions we should ask of any organization seeking access to children.

What is this group teaching? What assumptions does it make about men and women? Which social problems does it emphasize, and which ones does it ignore?​ What films, readings, slogans, and activities shape the ​young girl’s understanding of men, women, and social problems? Is the purpose service, discussion, leadership, political advocacy—or all of the above?

And perhaps most importantly: are parents told the answer plainly?

Both boys and girls should be encouraged to think, lead, speak, and act. But neither should be quietly handed a ready-made ideological map and told that it is simply compassion, empowerment, or equality.

Children deserve to learn how to think before they are trained to become advocates for someone else’s conclusions.

A word about the money

The funding picture is large, even though the precise youth-program share is difficult to isolate. Public Form 990 filings show that the Feminist Majority Foundation reported roughly $8 million in revenue in its most recent filing, while Girls for Gender Equity reported roughly $3 million. The United Nations Foundation—the parent organization of Girl Up—reported about $77 million in revenue. Those three organizations alone represent nearly $90 million in annual organizational revenue.

That is not a claim that $90 million is spent on girls’ clubs. It is not. The United Nations Foundation supports many projects besides Girl Up, and the Feminist Majority Foundation does much more than Girls Learn International. The other organizations discussed here have separate budgets as well. No honest person can turn their parent organizations’ full revenue into a dollar figure for youth feminist advocacy. But the responsible conclusion is still clear: this is not a shoestring effort. It is a well-funded ecosystem with national and international reach, professional staff, curricula, conferences, networks, and access to schools and public institutions.

Imagine if even a small portion of that kind of sustained support were devoted to boys. Not to telling them they are dangerous or defective, and not to making them auxiliary members of someone else’s movement. Imagine school clubs, mentors, and materials that told boys that masculinity is honorable; that courage, responsibility, protection, competence, and leadership are gifts to be developed; that boys’ pain and losses matter; and that they have inherent value simply as human beings. Imagine a generation of boys being invited to lead from strength and purpose rather than being taught, first of all, to apologize for who they are.