Gender Differences Made America Great

By: Chris Johnson

Every week or so on X (formerly Twitter), a new post or picture or video clip goes viral among Christian and conservative accounts, driving a constant rotation of conversations, if not conflicts, among those who would be allies on most positions.

While these are most often a vapid and useless waste of time and energy for all involved, every once in a while, they can bring about a conversation that needs to be had, or a truth long forgotten. This is the case in the last few days’ edition.

Social media commentator and former Miss New Jersey pageant winner Samirah Khan posted this inflammatory statement with a video: “This accent needs to be illegal and women should be banned from doing manual labour like this. There is NOTHING feminine about American women. American women are literally men.”

The video featured a pretty, young southern woman with a thick drawl discussing her home construction project which she’s helping her father and husband with. This woman’s name is Hannah Barron and she apparently gained notoriety for her “noodling” videos on TikTok. Noodling is where you stick your arm into a hole in a river bank in hopes that a catfish will bite on so you can pull it up, which is perhaps in no ones’ definition of traditional femininity.

What ensued was a debate which was inescapable in certain X circles about what it means to be feminine, which actually is a debate worth having- much more so than whether Southern accents should be illegal or whether there is anything feminine about American women.

When American culture is in a period where femininity is seen as being acquirable by anyone willing to wear enough makeup and go through enough surgeries, we clearly need to settle on what exactly it means to be feminine.

Decades after the American founding, the French aristocrat and later Foreign Affairs Minister Alexis De Tocqueville traveled our young nation, observing the burgeoning society.

The defining characteristic, he noted, was the distinction of duties between the genders: “There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make man and woman into beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things–their occupations, their pleasures, their business…

“It is not thus that the Americans understand that species of democratic equality which may be established between the sexes. They admit that as nature has appointed such wide differences between the physical and moral constitution of man and woman, her (nature’s) manifest design was to give a distinct employment to their various faculties; and they hold that improvement does not consist in making beings so dissimilar do pretty nearly the same things, but in causing each of them to fulfill their respective tasks in the best possible manner.”

As men and women are so obviously, naturally, physically different, de Tocqueville says, Americans in the founding generation expect the sexes to do that which they are best suited to. They are equal, but they are not the same.

Khan thus seems vindicated by de Tocqueville. Perhaps Hannah Barron ought not to be doing construction and noodling for catfish.

But, funnily enough, Barron replied to the controversy, clarifying that when she helps her dad she’s not doing anything like what he does. She’s not doing what she would consider “manual labor,” just helping out however she can. She’s not echoing the feminist mantra that she can do anything a man can do just as well if not better. She’s closer to de Tocqueville’s position – and the Biblical one – that men and women are not interchangeable, not in either direction.

‘Hence it is,” de Tocqueville notes, “that the women of America, who often exhibit a masculine strength of understanding and a manly energy, generally preserve great delicacy of personal appearance and always retain the manners of women although they sometimes show that they have the hearts and minds of men.”

This seems to describe Hannah Barron and certainly describes many great American women, which someone like Khan might despise, to a T – although they may not like being described as having the “hearts and minds of men!”

But why does this silly little controversy really matter? Who cares what Samirah Khan thinks of Hannah Barron’s accent and hobbies?

Chloe Cole, who began hormone therapy at 13 and underwent a double mastectomy at 15 before detransitioning at 16, explains one reason why it’s a discussion worth having: “It’s this exact idea that tomboys are too ‘masculine’ to be good women that makes beautiful, tough young girls want to run away from their femininity and transition. Save the tomboys, and leave us be!!”

De Tocqueville himself gives us an even better reason. One hundred and ninety years ago, this was his prediction as to the result of treating the sexes as, “not only equal, but alike” or the same: “…both are degraded, and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women.”

Alexis de Tocqueville was so impressed by the American philosophy of distinctive gender roles, and particularly how this was observed in American women, that he came to this conclusion, which affirms how relevant this discussion is as patriotic Americans wondering how we can restore our nation and culture to its former greatness: “…If I were asked… to what the singular prosperity and growing strength of that people ought mainly to be attributed, I should reply: To the superiority of their women.”

When femininity is reduced to an aesthetic, achievable by either sex, or to a list of acceptable hobbies or interests – or accents, as in this ridiculous example – the inherent, natural differences which separate the sexes are ignored.

Thus Hannah, recognizing that, while she enjoys helping the men in her life with their projects, recognizes that they’re uniquely equipped to accomplish them in ways she is not – just as they are not equipped in the same ways she is. This is the understanding of the sexes that has made America great, according to de Tocqueville.

Khan’s idea of femininity, however, as a list of activities and interests leaves the door to femininity open to men like Dylan Mulvaney.

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