What Does 'Complementary' Mean?

And go see The Christophers in theaters!

First, I was delighted to write a reflection on The Christophers for Word On Fire, and I hope a lot of you will see it in theaters. It’s the best movie you’re not aware is playing. It stars Ian McKellan and Michaela Coel, and, as I say in the piece: it’s “a reverse heist. Here, once again, talented professionals pull off an impossible job, but this time, something is improbably restored, rather than stolen.”

Check your local listings! It’s excellent. And you want to go with a friend to kibitz after.

Some time ago, I had a post here titled “Against Fractional Complementarity,” which sparked a lively conversation. I drew on several women writers I admire, particularly Abigail Favale, as below:

Fractional complementarity, then, sees the sexes as complementing one another because they each reflect partial or fractional aspects of a whole human being. Fractional complementarity tends to divvy up various human traits and virtues into pink and blue lists: men are more rational, let’s say, and women are more emotional, so together they make up for one another’s deficiencies—together, we account for a well-rounded human being.

Integral complementarity, in contrast, views men and women as whole human persons in their own right. The full range of human traits and virtues is open to cultivation by both sexes. Our complementarity, then, is synergistic—it does not complete a lack but enhances a whole, resulting in a fruitful collaboration that is more than the sum of its parts.

Men and women overlap significantly, and there are some strong statistical differences between men and women when our traits as a group (height, appetite for risk, etc) look like two overlapping, slightly offset bell curves. These are what Favale calls “second order” sex differences.

The “first order” ones are not like overlapping bell curves at all, but a fairly sharp binary: women are ordered toward the production of large gametes, men toward small gametes. (“Ordered toward” takes not that you do not cease to be a woman when your reproductive system functions poorly. I did not cease to be a woman when miscarrying—I experienced a distinctively and exclusively female form of loss).

I asked you readers a couple of questions, among them:

Do you agree with Favale’s distinction between “first order” and “second order” sex differences?

Where have the overlapping bell curves of personality-traits-by-gender felt most germane to you?

Tessa wrote:

This is a great question. When we feel uprooted and adrift, it’s easy to fall into a regimented, lifeless, or fractional system, because we’re looking for something solid to hold on to.

My thought on why it is that we struggle with being non-reductionistic in our conception of what it means to be masculine and feminine is that it seems rooted in at least two things: (1) our increasing distance from ordinary community and from the ordinary cycles of life and death, around which a community would have specific rituals and traditions (one example is cooking: cooking within a particular food tradition rather than according to whatever a placeless expert says is both more grounding and freeing, and most likely healthier too), and (2) our lack of a symbolic/poetic imagination. We have a really hard time with metaphor and symbol nowadays, such that when we see something amiss—such as the erasure of traditions and differences of any kind—when we try to rectify it, it’s easy to replace the lost thing with a kind of hardened and actually imprecise understanding, which can lead to absurd notions, such as fortitude only being a masculine virtue.

There was a little discussion of the Greek tradition, which is pretty well glossed by this number from Hedwig and the Angry Inch.

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Dissent made a pitch for stronger gender norms and divisions, saying they can be arbitrary and important at the same time:

In society at large, we need more same-sex spaces, not fewer. It may be arbitrary who does the plowing of the field or the threshing of the grain, but in a particular community it is not arbitrary. The more comprehensive the divisions between the sexes the more flexible the whole thing becomes in times of necessity. (Women always take over male responsibilities in times of war, when men are off at war.) When men in a marriage know what their normal duties are they can work to get it done---and in times of necessity pick up the slack without worries. It might be your wife’s work to change diapers when you aren’t around, and you aren’t around often, but if you have that sense then, in your wife’s absence, you can do the Daddy diaper change without having that murky sense you are a traitor to your sex. That duty *is* arbitrarily female, but *because* it is firmly normative it *can* be assigned to the male in times of necessity, like when the wife is sleeping, working, showering, cooking, milling grain, or all the rest.

Unity (and equality) is only borne out when there is radical habitual division between men and women. Recognizing the call of necessity and the ability of the sexes to be interchangeable in any isolated task is only possible when it is an exception. When it is a norm, the identities of both men and women are lost.

I read this as partially saying it’s easier on everyone if you feel like your (and everyone else’s) understanding of you as a man/woman is strongly established. You’re not proving it day by day or frequently on the margin of “obviously” male or female.

To that last point, I also asked you to reflect on some of Sr. Prudence Allen and Sr. Carino Hodder’s ideas that our embodied nature makes the same act “feminine” or “masculine” because of who’s doing it. The paradigmatic example is that a mother or father comforting a sleepy baby may both be shushing and rocking, but it’s true to say it’s maternal in one and paternal in the other.

Michael weighed in:

The idea that an act becomes masculine or feminine based on who's carrying out the act rings true to me as a stay at home dad. As my wife notes, there is something masculine about how I care for our kids and take care of our house, just like there's something feminine in how she does her work. It's hard to tease out all the differences, and how the work I do looks different by virtue of me being a father and a husband, but there is a difference there, certainly.

But Gemma didn’t find that Hodder/Allen’s framework resonated for her:

I don’t think that all of my acts are feminine acts by virtue of being done by a woman. There is no necessity that virtues have to play out “in a different key” in response to the body of the person doing it. We should be wary of going from a descriptive “men and women sometimes tend to enact virtues in observably different ways” to a totalising “virtues always become different when enacted by a man or a woman.” Sometimes what we are embodying is not “man” or “woman” but simply “neighbour” or “friend” or indeed “parent.” I’m all for recognising the importance of the specific relationship between a woman and the child she has birthed, but even then there are parental acts that need not take on a sexed character.

I think Sr Hodder has inadvertently implied that something has gone wrong if a woman is, at any given moment, not enacting the feminine in some sense. No doubt it is comforting, given that assumption, to hold that this has always already been achieved, but it actually needn’t always be necessary in the first place.

A user going by Beloved framed the question through Jesus and Mary:

“The act becomes fem/masc by nature of the actor” sounds appealing but not quite rich enough to me. The place I have pondered about masc/fem recently relates to our invitation to participate in giving of ourselves. Jesus sacrificed his body through death (and resurrection and ascension); Mary, through pregnancy, childbirth, nursing. But they both lived and died. The red martyrdom vs the white martyrdom - dying for Christ vs living for Christ - the difference to me today is which moment is more /obviously/ heroic. Continual renewal of purity of heart is painful, but usually invisible. Your literal heart ceasing to beat cannot be hidden. But rarely does one dare to die for Christ if one has not already lived for Christ; or, rather, to die in the body if not already in the will. Jesus lived, doing the Father’s will and not his own, his whole life, not just during his passion and death. If he hadn’t had that last bit, he would have died a white martyr; and plenty of women saints have died a red martyrdom (or died in childbirth). No definitive conclusions, more musings.

I enjoyed the discussion and there’s more in the original comments!