Chapter 17: Masculine and Feminine
MASCULINE AND FEMININE
DO the women’s liberationists want to be liberated from being women? No, they would say, they want to be liberated from society’s stereotypes of what women are supposed to be. There are, according to their theorists, no fundamental differences between men and women. It is all a matter of conditioning. Some very interesting facts have been uncovered by scientists which feminists will have to treat very gingerly, for they show that it is not merely society which determines how the sexes will behave. There are strong biological reasons (a matter of hormones) why the male has always dominated and will continue to dominate in every society. The idea of matriarchy is mythical, I’ve learned, for not one that can be documented has ever existed. Doesn’t it seem strange that male dominance has been universal if it’s purely social conditioning? One would expect to see at least a few examples of societies where women, rather than men, held the positions of highest status. (The existence of reigning queens proves nothing, since they have their position by heritage, not by achievement, choice, or election.) Isn’t it really much easier to believe that the feelings of men and women throughout history bear a direct relationship to some innate prerequisite? For a scientist, that prerequisite may be biological and/or emotional (the least suggestion that there might be an emotional as well as a physical difference between males and females is for some women horrifying), but for you and me the prerequisite lies further back.
It was God who made us different, and He did it on purpose. Recent scientific research is illuminating, and as has happened before, corroborates ancient truth which mankind has always recognized. God created male and female, the male to call forth, to lead, initiate, and rule, and the female to respond, follow, adapt, submit. Even if we held to a different theory of origin, the physical structure of the female would tell us that woman was made to receive, to bear, to be acted upon, to complement, to nourish.
Last year you audited a course in seminary which required you to write a paper defining masculinity and femininity. The class agreed that this was the most difficult assignment of the semester, but the one who came closest to a definition was Kathy Kristy, who wrote:
Creation has as one of its fundamental themes the pattern of rule and submission. Power and passivity, ebb and flow, generativity and receptivity are but a few of the ways that these paired polarities have been described. The Chinese called them yin and yang and made the symbol of their religion a graphic representation of their interaction. Even the physical realm is founded on and held together by the positive and negative attraction of atomic particles. Everywhere the universe displays its division into pairs of interlocking opposites. . . .
We know that this order of rule and submission is descended from the nature of God Himself. Within the Godhead there is both the just and legitimate authority of the Father and the willing and joyful submission of the Son. From the union of the Father and the Son proceeds a third personality, the Holy Spirit. He proceeds from them not as a child proceeds from the union of a man and a woman, but rather as the personality of a marriage proceeds from the one flesh which is established from the union of two separate personalities.
Here, in the reflection of the nature of the Trinity in the institution of marriage is the key to the definition of masculinity and femininity. The image of God could not be fully reflected without the elements of rule, submission, and union.[7]
There is a fundamental and to me quite puzzling omission in most “feminist” discussion —the failure to talk at all about femininity. Perhaps it is because the elements of rule, submission, and union are part and parcel of femininity itself and of far more lasting and universal importance than any culturally defined notion. To get at this the place to start, obviously, is the body itself.
A human being comprises body, mind, and spirit. Any doctor will attest to the effect the mind may have on the body. Any psychiatrist knows that his patient’s psychological problems may have physical effects. Any minister admits that what appears to be a spiritual issue may turn out to have physical and mental dimensions as well. No one can define the boundaries of mind, body, and spirit. Yet we are asked to assume nowadays that sexuality, most potent and undeniable of all human characteristics, is a purely physical matter with no metaphysical significance whatever.
Some early heresies which plagued the Church urged Christians to bypass matter. Some said it was in and of itself only evil. Some denied even its reality. Some appealed to the spiritual nature of man as alone worthy of attention —the body was to be ignored altogether. But this is a dangerous business, this departmentalizing. The Bible tells us to bring all —body, mind, spirit —under obedience.
Yours is the body of a woman. What does it signify? Is there invisible meaning in its visible signs —the softness, the smoothness, the lighter bone and muscle structure, the breasts, the womb? Are they utterly unrelated to what you yourself are? Isn’t your identity intimately bound up with these material forms? Does the idea of you —Valerie —contain the idea of, let’s say, “strapping” or “husky”? How can we bypass matter in our search for understanding the personality? There is a strange unreality in those who would do so, an unwillingness to deal with the most obvious facts of all.
Every normal woman is equipped to be a mother. Certainly not every woman in the world is destined to make use of the physical equipment but surely motherhood, in a deeper sense, is the essence of womanhood. The body of every normal woman prepares itself repeatedly to receive and to bear. Motherhood requires self-giving, sacrifice, suffering. It is a going down into death in order to give life, a great human analogy of a great spiritual principle (Paul wrote, “Death worketh in us but life in you”). Womanhood is a call. It is a vocation to which we respond under God, glad if it means the literal bearing of children, thankful as well for all that it means in a much wider sense, that in which every woman, married or single, fruitful or barren, may participate —the unconditional response exemplified for all time in Mary the virgin, and the willingness to enter into suffering, to receive, to carry, to give life, to nurture and to care for others. The strength to answer this call is given us as we look up toward the Love that created us, remembering that it was that Love that first, most literally, imagined sexuality, that made us at the very beginning real men and real women. As we conform to that Love’s demands we shall become more humble, more dependent —on Him and on one another —and even (dare I say it?) more splendid.