Monstrous, Fatal Feminism: A Review of The Gunn Brothers’ Film, The Monstrous Regiment of Women

Written by Colin and Emily Gunn. Studio: Gunn Productions. Running time: 54 minutes.

I loathe feminism as much as I love Colin Gunn’s documentaries. So when I learned that he and his wife, Emily, had co-written a movie exposing feminism in all its satanic gore, I joyously tore into it.

Nor was I disappointed. 

You know from the title that this will be a provocative and unusual film. The Gunns took “The Monstrous Regiment of Women” from a pamphlet that the reformer, John Knox, wrote against England’s Queen Mary I. Her persecution of dissidents and her penchant for roasting Knox’s friends at the stake understandably aroused his ire. Furthermore, he worried that her mother and regent, the Dowager Queen of Scotland, would import those atrocities to his beloved home. 

And so he excoriated Mary’s bloody reign with his tract – a work whose “very name is enough to enrage feminists everywhere, and most women as well,” according to Rosalind Marshall, a “world-renowed Knox biographer” at St. Giles’ Cathedral in Edinburgh, Scotland, whom the Gunns interview. 

We can attribute some of that rage to ignorance of sixteenth-century terms. As the Gunns and their guests explain, “monstrous” then meant “unnatural” and “regiment” referred in this context to “rule.” 

Yet even in translation, Knox’s premise insults modern sensibilities. Which the Gunns peaceably and charmingly acknowledge before reminding the Christians to whom they’ve dedicated the film that like Knox, we take our beliefs from the Bible, not the world. And Knox merely echoed Scripture when he denounced women’s rule (not that men’s rule is so hot, either: remember the Lord’s exhortation to anarchy in I Samuel 8). Indeed, the Almighty inflicts female governors on a nation as a special curse: Isaiah’s third chapter lists the punishments He will visit on Judah in particular and sinful countries in general; Verse 12 mentions that “women rule over them.” Or, as another of the Gunns’ interviewees, Jennie Chancey of Ladies Against Feminism, paraphrases it (and I’m paraphrasing her), “You have messed up so badly I’m allowing women to rule you.” Deliciously, the Gunns flash pictures of America’s female politicians across the screen as Mrs. Chancey talks. 

From this the documentary segues into a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s likelihood of attaining the presidency, God help us. And that is my only quibble with the film. I found this section a bit distracting, not because their repulsive target doesn’t deserve all the opprobrium anyone can heap on her, but merely because there are so many equally damnable women in office. Why pillory Hillary alone? 

Meanwhile, the Gunns chat with an avowed feminist who defines the philosophy as “egalitarianism.” Emily Gunn reminds us that our Father is most firmly opposed to such and that He has blessed us with a hierarchy in which “the head of every man is Christ, the head of woman is man, and the head of Christ is God” (what luscious freedom! Notice the complete absence of the State from this order). Furthermore, feminist “egalitarianism” isn’t egalitarian at all: it merely replaces a woman’s husband with the State while bringing men under its suzerainty as well. And it forces “equality” on two obviously dissimilar sexes however “unnatural, unrealistic or harmful the consequences may be, ” as Emily Gunn puts it.

I especially appreciated the film’s linking of feminism with communism. Phyllis Schlafly, feminism’s lifelong and fearsome opponent, notes that “the feminists’ goal was to make the role of the full-time homemaker economically impossible and socially disdained.” Jennie Chancey adds that Betty Friedan, the author of the Feminine Mystique who joined the Communist Party, enthusiastically endorsed Marx and Engel’s ambition to extirpate the family, turning children into wards of Leviathan. Feminism thus saw to it that “security, protection and provision, once the priorities of the father, soon passed to the paternalistic State.” 

Some of what the Gunns explore is familiar ground, such as feminists’ love of universal daycare as a tool for shoving kids into Leviathan’s maw. Feminism also strips women of choice while forcing them to conform to socialists’ preferences. “Equal pay” laws and exorbitant taxation have destroyed the “family wage” breadwinners used to earn so that it’s extremely difficult for wives and mothers to remain home even when they want to. Worse is the change in women’s thinking, so that even those who don’t identify as feminists adopt their attitudes: most girls grow up expecting to serve a boss instead of a husband. They either despise marriage and the home or relegate them to a distant second-place after career. 

Like all statist philosophies, feminism’s “death toll” is horrifyingly high. Not only has it pushed women into the military to kill and be killed, but it also urges abortion on them. 

The Gunns open their segment on abortion with a woman who justifies murdering the unborn because she passed two obviously homeless men on the street and assumes their mothers didn’t want them. Yes. But successive shocks come even faster and more furiously. 

Soon after this chilling speculation, we watch video of an actual abortion. We see a perfectly formed though miniature baby rather than a “cluster of cells” as feminists claim; an abortionist delivers this “fetus” after killing it. Blood drips and spatters. He wraps the tiny, lifeless body in a white sheet like a cut of meat from the butcher’s; no burial, only disposal. The Gunns brilliantly juxtapose this footage with that of a feminist and physician who “very, very, very” strongly believes in a woman’s “right to choose.” She praises abortion as “a humane, normal, medical procedure.” That “procedure” exterminates as many victims each day as 9/11 did, according to the Gunns; they call it “an unprecedented holocaust.” Yet it’s not Al Qaeda attacking: it’s “the monstrous regiment of women.”

Even more compelling is the movie’s interview with the heroic Carol Everett of The Heidi Group. Ms. Everett sold abortions through her clinic for six years in her quest to become a millionaire – until she met Jesus Christ. Don’t miss her nauseating, powerful expose of an utterly evil industry devoted to murder, money, and manipulation.

The Gunns address their short masterpiece primarily to female Christendom, but I strongly recommend it to everyone. Women weary of feminism’s tyranny or those whose lives it has ruined will obviously relish the film. My husband watched it with me; while I was riveted from the opening credits to the end, he grew itchy. But I suspect that’s only because feminism has never threatened our marriage. Men whose homes and families it has shattered will embrace this vindication of Biblical femininity as eagerly as I.