The Christian Vanguard

Adam Omelianchuck has a paper in Vol. 13, No. 1 of Philosophia Christi that discusses the ontological subordination of men and women. He argues that men and women are not ontologically equal. The basis for this, he argues, is on the function of men and women. Being familiar with natural law, this is comfortable ground for me. The function of women is to be a helper, and the function for man is to be a leader. There is a difference in role, and there is a hierarchy of subordination, but what he seems to draw out is that this entails there is an ontological inequality between men and women.  He presents a Hierarchy's Less Valuable Function Principle, which states,  Necessarily, given the two functions, F1 serving as a means to and end and F2 having authority to direct the end, if any person having F1 is, in virtue of having F1, essentially subordinate to a person having F2, then F1 is a less valuable function than F2.   Now, men and women have these functions...

A few months ago, I went on a date with a woman. We met on Facebook, through common Catholic circles, and she was incredibly smart and pretty, so, we met up. Nothing really happened, but I learned from her that she was about 12 years older than I was. That surprised me, because she didn't look it. I thought she was my age, probably older, but not by much, a year or two maybe. So, I'm a bit disappointed that it didn't work out, and sometimes I wonder what would have happened if it did (it was mutually understood that it wasn't going to happen, so I wasn't like rejected or anything). Particularly, I wondered if age would be a factor.