SheraSeven and Slumflower lack vision

SheraSeven during a three-hour YouTube session where she says she will never get a divorce.

It's not a pretty sight, the place where many young women are coming from. Love, for instance, is barely a secondary matter, with money certainly to the fore. On that account, Kimberley McIntosh, writing in The Guardian, retorts that young women struggling with debt and burnout need a better vision than getting a rich man to pay the bills. 

McIntosh reports:

Over the past few months, a number of straight-talking, self-help gurus for women (often described half-jokingly in the comment section as “the female Andrew Tate”) have been blowing up on TikTok. SheraSeven (real name Leticia Padua) has been attracting a large audience of young women. Despite not even having a TikTok account herself, clips that have cross-pollinated from her YouTube have racked up almost 20 billion views and counting. 

The comment sections under these TikTok videos are full of women who are fed up with modern heterosexual dating to the point that they don’t believe men have anything to offer them emotionally. SheraSeven’s advice teaches women to game patriarchy and turn their pain into power.

Shera advises women over the age of 25 to seek out and date older, affluent men and to actively play games to get them. This includes hiding your insecurities from potential partners and using reverse psychology to manipulate men, so you can imitate intimacy without the risk that comes with true vulnerability. 

SheraSeven, who is an American self-styled “financial adviser” rather than a relationship guide, and who has been making videos for about nine years, declares, according to McIntosh: 

Once they’ve locked a man down, women should push for them to pay for all of their household bills and expenses. Men without money are “dusties” and not to be entertained.

[V]eering away from the stereotype of the 1950s housewife, and its modern iteration, the tradwife, SheraSeven doesn’t suggest women must take on domestic responsibilities such as cooking, cleaning and child-rearing in exchange for financial support. A man of means can hire people to help with that. You are there to look beautiful and be worshipped. This is presumably what makes her gospel so attractive.  

Slumflower (sic)

A kindred spirit is... "Slumflower (real name Chidera Eggerue), who initially implored millennial women to fight patriarchy by indulging in 'dump him feminism' via viral tweets and cute Instagram graphics that escalated into telling women to only date affluent men – and to take everything from them that they can."

Eggerue, who is British, has written several successful books on topics such as What A Time To Be Alone and How to Get Over a Boy, which the publisher proclaims as a "sensational manifesto and guide to dating men".

On dating, McIntosh states that SheraSeven "tells the audience she will never start a YouTube channel to give people advice on “real relationships” that aren’t based on money, because all relationships are ultimately based on power". McIntosh concludes:

It’s a bleak picture. So many of the ways women are being encouraged to live [... involve] a re-evaluation of our relationship to work, rest and leisure. We need a collective vision for improving our lives. Without it, women will continue looking for answers elsewhere. 

Given the bleakness in dating or married life conjured up by McIntosh's reporting, what follows is a vision that women can live by that is of a higher order than any that Leticia Padua or Chidera Eggerue seem to offer. The vision arises from the nature of marriage, and on this I quote from the source I cite at the end of this post: 

So, what is marriage? The Catechism of the Catholic Church says: The marriage covenant, by which a man and a woman form with each other an intimate communion of life and love, has been founded and endowed with its own special laws by the Creator. By its very nature it is ordered to the good of the couple, as well as to the generation and education of children (#1660). [Also], Jesus spoke about marriage as a one-flesh union that only husbands and wives can form. 

Marriage is a special kind of communion between one man and one woman that is ordered toward their mutual love and toward the procreation of children—bonding and babies.

In 1930, Pope Pius XI wrote an encyclical on Christian marriage, Casti Connubii, which says that “the child holds the first place” as a blessing in marriage. Second is “the blessing of conjugal honor which consists in the mutual fidelity of the spouses in fulfilling the marriage contract” (#19). This understanding of marriage is not merely a “Catholic thing.” It is universal, a part of our human nature. All cultures in human history recognized, until about two seconds ago, historically speaking, that marriage is a union of man and woman ordered to children and families.

As the Catechism says: The vocation to marriage is written in the very nature of man and woman as they came from the hand of the Creator. Marriage is not a purely human institution despite the many variations it may have undergone through the centuries in different cultures, social structures, and spiritual attitudes (#1603).

 Everybody’s “Imposing”

People who claim that the Church is “imposing” its view of marriage on others don’t realize that anyone who claims to define marriage for himself also “imposes” a view of marriage. For example, laws that define marriage as “the union of two adults” impose that view on polygamists and those who believe in child brides (both of which are practices that, unlike same-sex marriage, actually have historical precedent). [...] In fact, the only way not to impose a definition of marriage is to say that marriage is “what anyone wants it to be”—in which case it ceases to be anything at all.

[T]he natural-law understanding of marriage (conjugal union of bride and bridegroom, woman and man) has always been a universal human understanding. The conjugal view of marriage is the only view that explains why government has an interest in regulating marriage in the first place: because it’s the only type of union that produces a child. 

This type of relationship is unique among all others, and society rightly sees the need to bind fathers to mothers formally, in order to secure and promote a stable environment in which to rear and educate children born from their union. 

When people think that marriage is simply 'relational" (for companionship)  or romantic love, they have a hard time understanding why companionship and romance between same-sex couples should not be recognized as a marriage. They also don’t understand why sex should be saved for marriage when marriage is just about a fuzzy concept of “love” rather than a one-flesh union that is ordered to result in a child.

However, when we recognize that only a man and woman can form the “one-flesh” bodily union of marriage, any relationship that lacks this element, no matter how dedicated or caring it may be, is not a marriage.

The Catechism soars in its description of the vocation of men and women in marriage:

Conjugal love involves a totality, in which all the elements of the person enter—appeal of the body and instinct, power of feeling and affectivity, aspiration of the spirit and of will. It aims at a deeply personal unity, a unity that, beyond union in one flesh, leads to forming one heart and soul; it demands indissolubility and faithfulness in definitive mutual giving; and it is open to fertility.

In brief, marriage is a state of life of high significance not only for the man and woman involved, but for the whole of society. It requires the giving of oneself totally to the other, and that is a challenge throughout life which purifies and strengthens the two who commit to becoming one. The gift of oneself raises each to to a true community of love and fidelity.

Such a vision of marriage is what the influencers should be promoting for the happiness of their followers and the benefit of society.

💖 Made This Way, Leila Miller and Trent Horn, Catholic Answers Press, California, 2018.

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