By now it is safe to assume that almost everyone has heard of Matt Walsh’s famous Daily Wire documentary What is A Woman? In this documentary, Walsh challenges many of the most insane progressives out there asking these ridiculous trans activists to answer the simple question “What is a woman?” It shows quite well that any person advocating for this insane ideology falls apart under even the most basic interrogation because at the end of the day this is just nonsense. Unfortunately, because it is not the purpose of this documentary, the only real definition of a woman put forth is “an adult human female.” This definition has two flaws. The first is that it is essentially cyclical to define a woman as a female. The second, comes from his counterpart at Daily Wire, Michael Knowles. Michael Knowles routinely criticizes conservatives for answering this question a little too rigidly and academically with answers like “adult human female” or “two x chromosomes.” However, his response is that women are “sugar and spice and everything nice” because this includes certain exceptions among the fringe cases with chromosomal abnormalities while still giving a positive idea that a woman really means something. But this too leaves one wanting. While both Knowles and Walsh are appealing to audiences wider than strictly Catholics so they do not necessarily turn to Catholicism to offer this answer, in reality it is only in Catholicism that the real answer can be found. In Cardinal Ratzinger’s book (later Pope Benedict XVI), Daughter Zion: Meditations on the Church’s Marian Belief, he gives us a few points on the theology of women that more appropriately answers this question.
The first major point that ultimately answers indeed what a woman is, he describes woman as “the necessary opposite pole of man.” Referencing Eve he shows that Adam, without her, would be “not good.” As such defining woman relies on mutual reference to the sexes in such a way that the two of them together are what realizes the wholeness of humanity. Note that it is not just another person or another man or a friend. Woman is specifically opposite, a necessary opposite of man. It can be understood that the sexual difference is certainly important to what makes a woman in that it is part of being that necessary opposite pole - among other important things making woman man’s necessary opposite. Beyond this Ratzinger offers a solution to the fringe abnormalities by showing the comparisons of the comparison of Sarah to Hagar, of Rachel to Leah, of Hannah to Penina. He states that “In each case the fertile and the infertile stand opposite each other, and in the process a remarkable reversal in values is reached. In archaic modes of thought, fertility is a blessing, infertility is a curse. Yet here all is reversed: the infertile one ultimately turns out to be the truly blessed, while the fertile one recedes into the ordinary or even has to struggle against the curse of repudiation, of being unloved.” Here Ratzinger shows that fertility is not the sole defining characteristic of women. As such we can understand that older women who are no longer fertile or women suffering from something causing infertility are still women because they are still “the necessary opposite pole of man.” Ultimately he finishes with one last point regarding the theology of women harkening to the figure of “wisdom (Sophia)” who routinely takes on a feminine role. Ratzinger states that “‘Wisdom’ appears as the mediatrix of creation and salvation history, as God’s first creature in whom both the pure, primordial form of his creative will and the pure answer, which he discovers, find their expression; indeed, one can say that precisely this concept of the answer is formative for the Old Testament idea of wisdom. Creation answers, and the answer is as close to God as a playmate, as a lover.” This answer gives us an understanding of what it means to be the necessary opposite pole of man. Woman is the answer who is as close to man as a playmate, as a lover while simultaneously remaining simultaneously the necessary opposite pole of man.