Men are attracted to weakness: A theology of small women

Probably 15 years after high school, I had the unfortunate experience of encountering a former schoolmate on the worldwide web. He was a couple years older than I was, but relevant to this context is the reality that the entire student body population at our small Reformed Presbyterian high school was roughly 105 people. Everyone knew everyone. No one was a total stranger.

Our only official sport was fencing, and I was a member of the madrigal choir, which meant that, at Christmas time every year, I was required to wear a big poofy Renaissance dress as part of the choir concert. There was a certain obsession with all things medieval times, specifically as they related to John Calvin and Reformed theology. The average person might struggle to conceptualize this high school experience, but in retrospect, I’m largely grateful for it, though there are absolutely things I would dramatically change without second thought.

In any case, on this particular encounter, this former schoolmate was spewing some sort of incel-light rhetoric about “western women,” who, for some inexplicable reason, had all seemed to reject his romantic advances, the obvious conclusion being that they were trash; they simply couldn’t appreciate the caliber of masculine virtue he brought to the table. I tried to remain civil for approximately the first four or five comments, and then I just flat ran out of patience.

“Men are attracted to weakness,” he insisted. “Men want small women who need guidance.”

I resisted the petty urge to guide him out of his spelling errors and just sat there irritated, because even then, before I had the language for it, I knew that statement was doing more than just being wrong. It was exposing something. It was a window into a co-dependent definition of masculinity that only functions if women are deliberately kept underdeveloped.

That’s the piece that has been needling at me all week.

We tend to talk about these environments as though they are primarily about restraining women, when in reality they are doing something just as formative to men. When you consistently hold up a model of womanhood that is soft to the point of passivity, deferential to the point of silence, and “childlike” in both tone and presentation, you are not just shaping women. You are training men. You are calibrating what they find comfortable, what they find admirable, what they are capable of engaging with.

The timing isn’t incidental. News broke this week that another Duggar son has been arrested on charges involving sexual crimes against children. At some point, we have to stop treating these as isolated moral failures and start asking what kind of environment keeps producing them.

Michelle Duggar didn’t just model submission. She modeled a kind of cultivated smallness that bordered on the pre-adult. The baby voice. The careful softening of every edge. The constant signaling of gentleness and non-threat. Even the aesthetic choices that leaned into exaggerated girlishness. I remember watching her dot her i’s on one episode of the show. Instead of a standard dot, she drew bubbly hearts like a 12-year-old collecting Lisa Frank stickers. And according to her own niece, Amy King, none of it was incidental. In the 2023 documentary Shiny Happy People, Amy described the baby voice as a deliberate performance, a way of projecting meekness and avoiding any appearance of authority or assertiveness. A “quiet spirit,” performed on command.

I’m not arguing that a baby voice causes abuse. I’m arguing that both things, the cultivated smallness and the predatory behavior, emerge from the same soil. When a culture systematically trains women to present as pre-adult and trains men to find that presentation appealing, it would be strange if that conditioning had a hard stop at legal adulthood. Environments don’t work that way.

It all worked together to present a version of femininity that was not just submissive, but disarmingly juvenile. And then that presentation gets reinforced from the pulpit.

Sit through enough Evangelical sermons on “biblical womanhood” and you start to notice how narrow the lane is. The same verses, the same tone, the same emphasis. Be gentle. Be quiet. Work quietly at home. Don’t be contentious. While these are biblically rooted instructions from the Apostle Paul, to be sure, with the culturally narrow manner in which they are often conveyed to women, there is an almost liturgical predictability to them. Meanwhile, entire categories of female strength in Scripture are functionally sidelined. Abigail’s intelligence and strategic courage rarely make the cut. Jael’s ferocity is too uncomfortable to linger for very long. If Deborah is mentioned at all, it’s usually in conjunction with a warning about the failure of male leadership. Shiphrah and Puah’s defiant civil disobedience doesn’t fit neatly into a framework that prioritizes compliance and quietness, so it gets minimized or skipped altogether. “Gentle quiet spirit” is the mantra du jour.

What you end up with is not a full biblical picture of womanhood, but a curated one, a softened one, one that consistently highlights traits associated with youth, pliability, and non-confrontation, and quietly filters out the women in Scripture who act with sharpness, initiative, and unapologetic strength, like Deborah or Abigail.

And that has a downstream effect that we don’t talk about nearly enough.

Because if the ideal woman is consistently presented as small, soft, and non-threatening, then the men being formed in that environment are not just being told what to look for. They are being trained in what they are capable of loving and, conversely, what types of women they should view as threats instead of assets. They are being conditioned to feel most at ease with women who are less developed, less assertive, less fully realized. Women who won’t challenge them, won’t outpace them, won’t require them to rise to the occasion.

Over time, that doesn’t produce the kind of strong, world-shaping Christian marriages people love to talk about. It produces a profoundly uneven yoking, where one half of the relationship is positioned as the authority, the stabilizer, the one who knows, and the other is quietly formed to be led, corrected, and kept. At some point, that stops looking like a marriage and starts looking uncomfortably like a dynamic where one person functions more like a parent than a lover.

Men begin to associate femininity with a kind of emotional and intellectual smallness, and anything outside of that starts to feel abrasive or unfeminine. A woman who is direct feels “harsh.” A woman who is competent feels “intimidating.” A woman who is fully adult, in the sense that she is thoughtful, articulate, and capable of standing her ground, starts to feel like a category error. Rebellion. Witchcraft. Jezebel.

They don’t just prefer smaller women. They need them to be smaller in order for their own sense of masculinity to remain intact. Ironically, this is utterly fragile masculinity, and from it all kinds of egomaniacal terrors are birthed.

When you normalize the infantilization of women, you are, whether intentionally or not, grooming men to crave it, to feel drawn toward women who are easier to guide, easier to correct, easier to manage. Women who mirror back a sense of competence without ever requiring it to be real. It creates a dynamic where maturity in a woman becomes a liability, because it disrupts the equilibrium.

This means the system has to keep reinforcing the same message: Stay small. Stay soft. Stay sweet. Stay obedient. Refer to your husband as “lord.” Because the moment women step outside of that, the illusion starts to crack.

And this is why that offhand comment from a former classmate stuck with me. “Men are attracted to weakness.” That wasn’t just a personal preference. It was the distilled logic of an entire ecosystem.

But weakness is not actually attractive to a healthy man. It’s just easier.

It requires less of him. Less discipline. Less growth. Less humility. It allows him to occupy the role of leader without ever having to do the humbling grunt work of becoming one.

A man who is secure in his strength does not need a diminished counterpart to validate it. He does not need a woman who feels like a dependent in order to feel like a man. He can stand next to someone who is fully formed, fully adult, and not experience that as a threat.

So, when a culture consistently produces men who are most comfortable with women who feel small, soft, and slightly childlike, it is not unreasonable to ask what kind of desire is being formed in them. If you train men to equate femininity with immaturity, you should not be shocked when maturity no longer attracts them.

At some point, we have to be honest about what we are cultivating. Because a system that conditions men to prefer women who feel less like equals and more like dependents is not just stunting women. It is warping male desire itself.

And warped desire does not stay theoretical for long.

Originally published at Honest to Goodness.