Four Questions to Understand Sex
Sr. Prudence Allen on the Concept of Woman
I’ve written one more Dobbs-sparked piece for Deseret, “Life costs more than death. It’s worth it.” As I write there, “We don’t have to agree about the moral weight of abortion to acknowledge that America has neither a culture of life nor a culture of choice. We live in, as Pope Francis has termed it, a throwaway culture.” I hope it gives a few avenues to work together, even if we disagree about the ethics of abortion or the practicality of bans.
But this week, I’m going to focus on other topics at Other Feminisms, starting with some of the lines philosophers draw between women and men.
I’ve always heard wonderful things about Sr. Prudence Allen’s massive trilogy on The Concept of Woman, but I needed the excuse of a book club to pick it up. We’re reading volume three, The Search for Communion of Persons, 1500-2015, and I’m due to read about Descartes by Wednesday.
I love the clarity of her work. In the introduction to the book, she lays out the questions she’s interested in exploring, and offers four key questions introduced by the ancient Greeks:
Metaphysics
Are male and female the opposite, contrary, or the same?
Philosophy of Nature
Does a woman’s or man’s contribution to generation have consequences for her or his respective identity?
Wisdom
Do women and men have the same or different capacities for thinking, and are they wise by knowing the same or different things?
Virtue
Are women and men good by doing the same things or different things?
These are the questions posed by the Greeks, not necessarily the ones that Sr. Prudence thinks carve reality at the joints. But they still are a massive improvement over “Are men and women the same?”
These four questions make it clear how many questions are potentially bound up in that simple question. One of the key premises of my Other Feminisms writing is that men and women are not interchangeable. And when we design our tools, our expectations, and our economy in a supposedly gender-neutral way, we often end up designing for men and shortchanging women.
But if men and women aren’t interchangeable, in which ways do we differ from each other? Which of those differences are circumstantial (and could be changed or erased with no injury to men or women) and which are crucial (and transcending them would mean making us less ourselves).
I’ll take a short pass at these four questions, and I’d like to read some of your responses, too. Short answers to big questions are necessarily not fully satisfactory, but I think they help focus conversation.
Are male and female the opposite, contrary, or the same?
(edited to add: Tom has a helpful note on the technical meaning of contrary in this tradition)
This question feels too badly formed for me to answer. I prefer the language of “complementary.”
Terming the relationship one of “opposites” erases what we share, “contrary” sets the relationship up as conflicting, and “the same” falls into the error of interchangeability. We are equal in dignity, but our differences are not a threat to that equality.
Does a woman’s or man’s contribution to generation have consequences for her or his respective identity?
Yes. I appreciate Erika Bachiochi’s discussion of “reproductive asymmetry” in her The Rights of Women: Reclaiming a Lost Vision. Women are more directly vulnerable to the needs of a child, men must find the right way to respond to that need.
In pregnancy, particularly, the child’s demands on the mother are answered at the level of blood and bone. The father faces more attenuated claims, and must figure out which sacrifices he is being called to make.
Do women and men have the same or different capacities for thinking, and are they wise by knowing the same or different things?
I think these are two very different questions! Capacity for thinking and wisdom feel like two different axes of intelligence. (As Dungeons and Dragons character stats acknowledge). I think it’s probable that there are overlapping bell curves for men and women for different orientations to thinking, but it’s very hard to untangle what the “true” proportion of men:women in STEM or in carework would be absent sexism. I think it may not be 1:1, but that doesn’t mean I’m ready to write disparities off as natural.
Are women and men good by doing the same things or different things?
Men and women are both good by becoming saints. And when we look at the saints, we see a tremendous diversity in what a life of heroic virtue can look like. Very few women are called to be Joan of Arc, but we’re all called to her bravery and steadfastness. A great deal of being good is practicing love of God and love of neighbor and being curious and open to what those loves will look like in your specific life.
I think I agree with all of your answers, especially the fourth one. I don't think there are distinct "masculine" and "feminine" virtues - men and women are likely to express "courage" or "compassion" in different ways, but it's not like there's only one way for a man or for a woman to be virtuous, so we'd expect variation. I'd even say that the virtues that don't come naturally to us could actually be the most important to cultivate - I think there are plenty of men who could benefit themselves and others by being more nurturing, kinder and more humble!
I guess my answer to the third question is similar - there are many things to be knowledgeable about, and I'd even say there are many ways to become wise - practical experience vs. deep contemplation, for example. While the first part of that question could be answered through observation, I honestly feel like the only answer to "are they wise by knowing the same or different things?" that makes any sense is "Yes, they are".
Just a note about "contrary" - that's a philosophical technical term by the time of Aristotle, and does not imply conflict as such, just difference. Any two colors, for example, that are not the same one color univocally are "contrary." One cannot be both actually orange and actually blue at the same time and in the same manner - but at the same time, these colors famously compliment one another. So asking if something is "the same with, contrary to, or opposite" something else is, understood rightly, exhaustive in a technical sense.
If there is a difference between these two things signified, a male person as male and a female person as female, but not something that makes them not just contrary but "contradictory", not at all the same and in fact opposed in some absolute or qualified sense, then male and female are contrary terms relative to that difference, not contradictory.
If, on the other hand, what it means essentially to be a male person as male is contradictory of what it means to be a female person as female, then to say someone is a male person, as such, absolutely excludes that way in which someone could be described as a female person, as such.
This is just a clarification for the technical logical use there. Obviously, we often use contrary to mean "different in some opposed way" or even "contradictory" in speech loosely.