I suppose it makes me deeply (maybe unfortunately) Protestant that I don't really have a strictly-bordered notion of masculinity. Like, I can point to Victor Glover or Mr. Rogers or Barak Obama or Dietrich Bonhoeffer as models of people who seem to be living well into their masculine vocations. But I can't point to one thing that every good healthy man has, that sets them apart from good healthy women.
I can point to elements of masculinity that I certainly have and embrace and model in healthy ways--and I think it's *especially* important to be open about the way we model healthy and God-honoring uses of "dangerous" masculine traits.
I think of aggression as one of those--I remember clearly when two women down the street came asking if we had any video footage of the people who had slashed their tires and poisoned their gas tank. I remember being in a quiet rage for the rest of the day--how dare someone do such unasked for evil even to my very neighbors! I don't think this is an exclusively male trait (at all!), but I do think it is a statistically male trait, and I think an important part of teaching boys to be men is teaching many of them to say, "yeah, I have a tendency to get very angry and feel protective when I see people near me being harmed, and while anger has its dangers, it also has its potential to be used for justice and kindness." But that doesn't mean that I see women asking that the folks behind "Rape Academy" be tortured to death and think they are less feminine for it! That's just, you know, being human (even if maybe not perfectly Christian). I'm also not going to say that Mr. Rogers was less masculine just because he was naturally calm! So, like, it's healthy to defend "virtues whose expression occur more commonly in men," but not as exclusively "masculine virtues." I'm very much against Chesterton here, sadly. Although not too sadly--I've always thought him the type who would rather you fight with him from time to time than servilely accept everything he said.)
Thank you. I find any discussion of gendered virtues to be at least implicitly misogynistic, because such discussions always assign women the passive dimwit ‘virtues’ and give all the goodies, like courage and intelligence, to men. I think your approach is much healthier, and leads to much less woman-hating conclusions.
It seems a lot of people have ideas about compartmentalization that don't strike me as relatable even. I don't think of man and woman as fractured parts of each other, but as whole persons with different biological roles that interplay differently according to the demands put forward by their sexes. These demands are masked in "gendered" terms, but are ultimately rooted in biology, reproduction needs, and community health. The main reason I don't believe in egalitarianism is it seems to me to put forward the idea that women and men are interchangeable -- they observably aren't. Mothers don't make good fathers and fathers don't make good mothers. We need both, and we need them in different ways.
There was a reply on twitter about roles vs modes of motherhood and fatherhood that I was thinking about, and I thought I'd throw my thoughts in here.
Mothers and fathers having different roles is most obviously true at the very basic level. My wife carries our children in pregnancy, I cannot. She can feed our children from her body. I cannot.
Beyond this, things get murkier. I have a one armed hold that can cure gassy babies, which my wife has trouble doing, for instance.
That being said, I do think there is a difference between fathers and mothers, and not just a difference in modes of doing. I see this reflected in how our kids interact with us.
It's mom who everyone wants to cuddle with at the end of the night. It's my bark that gets everyone moving when they're goofing off, (this came to a surprise for both of us, I'm not exactly the most imposing person in the world, and my wife is very much used to being listened to!)
It's interesting how our children respond to us in this way that reinforces and draws out our natural roles as father and mother, even though our arrangement might not seem traditional at a glance.
See, it's examples like these that make me think the notion of motherhood and fatherhood of so little use. Like, I am the one who cuddles our youngest at the end of the night, and I've known many mothers who are more strict than fathers.
And this is coming from a family that has relatively traditional divisions of labor--the wife working part-time from home, while I work outside the home during the day.
Honestly, the times I felt most like a "father" rather than a "parent" relate to the specificity of my kids' gender. That is, I feel very much that, no matter how much my eldest is a mix between me and my wife, there is a particular way that my existence is establishing his default idea of what it means to be a man (as he is growing up to be), and my wife who establishes his default idea of what it means to be a woman.
Why do you find the notions of little use? Do you find them overly broad, or because there's such mixing of tasks in the day to day? For me, it's parenthood that I find overly broad, or at least the only way I can experience it is through fatherhood.
I do agree that there is a relationship between fatherhood, motherhood and our children's gender. My boys especially want to help me, they want to cook like I cook, or work on the lawn mower like I do. My daughter always wants to do special things with my wife, not me. It's certainly remarkable to see my daughter go off with mom to learn from her, or my boys crowd around me. It's humbling to know that I'll be the model that they'll hew to or push against when they grow into adulthood.
Another way to put the question is, if we're made body and spirit, in what sense are our spirits made male or female? We have biology to point to for bodily male and femaleness. The different versions of complementarity, unity, polarity posit different ways of our spirits being male or female.
Some camps think body and spirit can diverge (the transgender movement doesn't use the language of spirit, but it holds that something inside of you is your real gender, which supersedes biology). Some might say our spirits aren't sexed at all, but are ungendered beings attached to male or female bodies. Some versions of polarity and even complementarity definitely see the spirit as sexed, and then attempt to list the sex-specific traits (empathy, courage, risk-taking, etc.) that are presented as more than just the results of biology.
I think our spirits are in fact male or female, because humans are created by God as unified wholes. But I can't think of any special revelation that speaks to precisely in what sense our spirits might be male or female, hence we're mostly left to these philosophical discussions.
Does anyone who makes sharp distinctions between men and women EVER rank the women’s side higher than the men’s side? That is, has anyone who has ever said that male and female roles must have a hard division between them ever given women the prestigious, powerful, and remunerative duties?
No. NEVER. Not once in all of human history have women EVER gotten the sugar end of the sugar/ shit split. ANY distinction between the roles of men and women will always put women in a lower, poorer, powerless, filthy position. ALWAYS.
An extraordinarily dubious proposition, madam. And if we were to do that, we would also have to add all of those women's husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons who were murdered as well.
Indulging in bitterness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Consider quitting your quaffing.
You hooked me with Micaela Coel and have me churning in my mind about the gender binary. On the one hand it seems obvious but when one tries to parse it all it’s far less so.
I suppose it makes me deeply (maybe unfortunately) Protestant that I don't really have a strictly-bordered notion of masculinity. Like, I can point to Victor Glover or Mr. Rogers or Barak Obama or Dietrich Bonhoeffer as models of people who seem to be living well into their masculine vocations. But I can't point to one thing that every good healthy man has, that sets them apart from good healthy women.
I can point to elements of masculinity that I certainly have and embrace and model in healthy ways--and I think it's *especially* important to be open about the way we model healthy and God-honoring uses of "dangerous" masculine traits.
I think of aggression as one of those--I remember clearly when two women down the street came asking if we had any video footage of the people who had slashed their tires and poisoned their gas tank. I remember being in a quiet rage for the rest of the day--how dare someone do such unasked for evil even to my very neighbors! I don't think this is an exclusively male trait (at all!), but I do think it is a statistically male trait, and I think an important part of teaching boys to be men is teaching many of them to say, "yeah, I have a tendency to get very angry and feel protective when I see people near me being harmed, and while anger has its dangers, it also has its potential to be used for justice and kindness." But that doesn't mean that I see women asking that the folks behind "Rape Academy" be tortured to death and think they are less feminine for it! That's just, you know, being human (even if maybe not perfectly Christian). I'm also not going to say that Mr. Rogers was less masculine just because he was naturally calm! So, like, it's healthy to defend "virtues whose expression occur more commonly in men," but not as exclusively "masculine virtues." I'm very much against Chesterton here, sadly. Although not too sadly--I've always thought him the type who would rather you fight with him from time to time than servilely accept everything he said.)
Thank you. I find any discussion of gendered virtues to be at least implicitly misogynistic, because such discussions always assign women the passive dimwit ‘virtues’ and give all the goodies, like courage and intelligence, to men. I think your approach is much healthier, and leads to much less woman-hating conclusions.
"passive dimwit ‘virtues’"
I think the actual misogynist here is you.
Great to see Tessa's comment included!
It seems a lot of people have ideas about compartmentalization that don't strike me as relatable even. I don't think of man and woman as fractured parts of each other, but as whole persons with different biological roles that interplay differently according to the demands put forward by their sexes. These demands are masked in "gendered" terms, but are ultimately rooted in biology, reproduction needs, and community health. The main reason I don't believe in egalitarianism is it seems to me to put forward the idea that women and men are interchangeable -- they observably aren't. Mothers don't make good fathers and fathers don't make good mothers. We need both, and we need them in different ways.
There was a reply on twitter about roles vs modes of motherhood and fatherhood that I was thinking about, and I thought I'd throw my thoughts in here.
Mothers and fathers having different roles is most obviously true at the very basic level. My wife carries our children in pregnancy, I cannot. She can feed our children from her body. I cannot.
Beyond this, things get murkier. I have a one armed hold that can cure gassy babies, which my wife has trouble doing, for instance.
That being said, I do think there is a difference between fathers and mothers, and not just a difference in modes of doing. I see this reflected in how our kids interact with us.
It's mom who everyone wants to cuddle with at the end of the night. It's my bark that gets everyone moving when they're goofing off, (this came to a surprise for both of us, I'm not exactly the most imposing person in the world, and my wife is very much used to being listened to!)
It's interesting how our children respond to us in this way that reinforces and draws out our natural roles as father and mother, even though our arrangement might not seem traditional at a glance.
See, it's examples like these that make me think the notion of motherhood and fatherhood of so little use. Like, I am the one who cuddles our youngest at the end of the night, and I've known many mothers who are more strict than fathers.
And this is coming from a family that has relatively traditional divisions of labor--the wife working part-time from home, while I work outside the home during the day.
Honestly, the times I felt most like a "father" rather than a "parent" relate to the specificity of my kids' gender. That is, I feel very much that, no matter how much my eldest is a mix between me and my wife, there is a particular way that my existence is establishing his default idea of what it means to be a man (as he is growing up to be), and my wife who establishes his default idea of what it means to be a woman.
Why do you find the notions of little use? Do you find them overly broad, or because there's such mixing of tasks in the day to day? For me, it's parenthood that I find overly broad, or at least the only way I can experience it is through fatherhood.
I do agree that there is a relationship between fatherhood, motherhood and our children's gender. My boys especially want to help me, they want to cook like I cook, or work on the lawn mower like I do. My daughter always wants to do special things with my wife, not me. It's certainly remarkable to see my daughter go off with mom to learn from her, or my boys crowd around me. It's humbling to know that I'll be the model that they'll hew to or push against when they grow into adulthood.
Another way to put the question is, if we're made body and spirit, in what sense are our spirits made male or female? We have biology to point to for bodily male and femaleness. The different versions of complementarity, unity, polarity posit different ways of our spirits being male or female.
Some camps think body and spirit can diverge (the transgender movement doesn't use the language of spirit, but it holds that something inside of you is your real gender, which supersedes biology). Some might say our spirits aren't sexed at all, but are ungendered beings attached to male or female bodies. Some versions of polarity and even complementarity definitely see the spirit as sexed, and then attempt to list the sex-specific traits (empathy, courage, risk-taking, etc.) that are presented as more than just the results of biology.
I think our spirits are in fact male or female, because humans are created by God as unified wholes. But I can't think of any special revelation that speaks to precisely in what sense our spirits might be male or female, hence we're mostly left to these philosophical discussions.
Does anyone who makes sharp distinctions between men and women EVER rank the women’s side higher than the men’s side? That is, has anyone who has ever said that male and female roles must have a hard division between them ever given women the prestigious, powerful, and remunerative duties?
No. NEVER. Not once in all of human history have women EVER gotten the sugar end of the sugar/ shit split. ANY distinction between the roles of men and women will always put women in a lower, poorer, powerless, filthy position. ALWAYS.
Every soldier who's died begging for his mother in a ditch while trying and failing to hold his intestines in his body has entered the chat.
As has every woman murdered by men, and there are a whole lot more of those women than those soldiers.
An extraordinarily dubious proposition, madam. And if we were to do that, we would also have to add all of those women's husbands, fathers, brothers, and sons who were murdered as well.
Indulging in bitterness is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die. Consider quitting your quaffing.
You hooked me with Micaela Coel and have me churning in my mind about the gender binary. On the one hand it seems obvious but when one tries to parse it all it’s far less so.