male and female he created them
some friends of mine have been keeping a group blog as a forum for discussing leon kass' book "the genesis of wisdom" (www.genesiswisdom.blogspot.com). a recent post there on the nature of resurrected bodies has got me thinking about gender, and about the meaning of 'maleness' and 'femaleness.'
here is a thought i have had (and expressed) more than once before: many of us want gender to be meaningful, and we want it to matter not merely at a biological level, but at a human level. that is, we want 'maleness' or 'femaleness' to carry some significance not just as a fact of anatomy, but as something important to the things we care about and the way we live. at the same time, however, in trying to characterize the meaning of gender, it is hard to know how to proceed without just relying on stereotypes -e.g. lists of 'male' or 'female' traits or qualities. its seems that such stereotypes are likely to be not only inaccurate, but also biased and even destructive. how then, can we think about gender as something more than anatomy without falling back on vague generalities about 'what men are like' or 'what women are like'?
before tackling that question directly, its worth saying a bit more about what i mean by saying that we want gender to be meaningful at the human level. part of what i have in mind is that we want being male or female to play some role in what it means to live well. one way to think about this role is the idea that there are 'masculine virtues' which capture what it is for a man to live well, and there are separate 'feminine virtues' that capture what it is for a woman to live well. this is a very old idea. but its rejection is also very old, and can be found in more than one philosopher from ancient greece. this is also an idea with persistent appeal, and it it my sense that many people still hold something like this to be the case, though perhaps not with much consistency.
the idea that there are separate virtues for men and women is tightly connected to the idea that there are distinctive roles for men and women. the virtues corresponding to each gender are what they are in virtue of the gender's respective roles or functions. courage, then, is a masculine virtue, because it is the man's role to protect the family and city from harm. gentleness is a feminine virtue, because it is the woman's role to nurture the children. to many of us, the idea of such fixed roles seems outrageously misguided, because: 1) it frequently, if not always, is grounded in (or at least implies) the notion that women are somehow inferior to men in terms of important human functions, such as rational decision-making, 2) it overlooks the variety of capabilities that both men and women have with respective to the whole range of human activities, 3) it leaves too little room for individual choice and creativity in structuring human lives -e.g. that some men could flourish as 'stay-home dads', while some women may flourish in non-domestic roles.
i have no sympathy for the idea that the genders have separate virtues. however, a related view that is more appealing is this: there are not separate lists of virtues for men and women, but the virtues will be inflected differently for men and for women. thus, courage is not a 'masculine virtue' -it is a virtue for all humans, but in men courage will be displaying or realized in a distinctly masculine way, and likewise women will display a distinctly feminine form of courage. there is, i think, something intuitive about this view. we are used to thinking of a distinctive ways in which a man or a woman will 'get the job done' or successfully navigate a situation. this is a frequent theme in movies and tv. on reflection, though, i'm unsure if it actually makes sense to say that virtue can actually be 'gendered' in this way, or what this really amounts to.
perhaps our wanting gender to be meaningful can also be expressed this way: from a first-person perspective -in looking at our own lives- we feel that our gender is important, and we when we think about living well we want to live well as men, or as women. we want to be good human beings, be we also want to be good men, or good women. that is, we do not imagine ourselves as gender-less, and in the way we carry ourselves and the way we plan our lives, we are (somehow) aware that our 'maleness' or 'femaleness' is important. thus, to say that gender is 'merely anatomy' is to miss something about our own (perhaps inchoate) sense of the importance of our own gender.
the enduring desire that gender be meaningful is testified to everywhere in our culture. not to long ago, some friends were telling me about the popularity of a series of books written by an evangelical christian about the meaning of 'manliness' and being a 'real man.' these books, it seems, probably fall into the very trap i am wary of -turning shallow (and possibly prejudiced) generalities into the basis for a theory of gender and its importance. at the same time, the popularity of these books (and others like them) suggests to me that people are unwilling to think about gender as mere biology, and they are hungry for a way to make their own maleness or femaleness a considered part of their self-understanding.
i would like to add two of my own reasons for wanting gender to be meaningful. first, the vast, vast majority of human cultures throughout history have understood maleness and femaleness to be significant in our understanding of what it means to be a human and what it means to live well. i am wary of dismissing such a widespread human practice and outlook, even if it we think it was infected with bias and ignorance and must be examined critically.
second, the church has historically understood gender to be meaningful. even if we think this understanding has been misguided in certain ways, and even if we do not agree with how this has always played out (e.g. not allowing women to be ordained ministers), it still seems that there are deep theological reasons for wanting to take gender seriously. if nothing else, we have the basic formulation from genesis that god created humans male and female. it rings false to me to suggest that this creation was merely a matter of biology, just as god could have created us with three legs instead of two.
here is a thought i have had (and expressed) more than once before: many of us want gender to be meaningful, and we want it to matter not merely at a biological level, but at a human level. that is, we want 'maleness' or 'femaleness' to carry some significance not just as a fact of anatomy, but as something important to the things we care about and the way we live. at the same time, however, in trying to characterize the meaning of gender, it is hard to know how to proceed without just relying on stereotypes -e.g. lists of 'male' or 'female' traits or qualities. its seems that such stereotypes are likely to be not only inaccurate, but also biased and even destructive. how then, can we think about gender as something more than anatomy without falling back on vague generalities about 'what men are like' or 'what women are like'?
before tackling that question directly, its worth saying a bit more about what i mean by saying that we want gender to be meaningful at the human level. part of what i have in mind is that we want being male or female to play some role in what it means to live well. one way to think about this role is the idea that there are 'masculine virtues' which capture what it is for a man to live well, and there are separate 'feminine virtues' that capture what it is for a woman to live well. this is a very old idea. but its rejection is also very old, and can be found in more than one philosopher from ancient greece. this is also an idea with persistent appeal, and it it my sense that many people still hold something like this to be the case, though perhaps not with much consistency.
the idea that there are separate virtues for men and women is tightly connected to the idea that there are distinctive roles for men and women. the virtues corresponding to each gender are what they are in virtue of the gender's respective roles or functions. courage, then, is a masculine virtue, because it is the man's role to protect the family and city from harm. gentleness is a feminine virtue, because it is the woman's role to nurture the children. to many of us, the idea of such fixed roles seems outrageously misguided, because: 1) it frequently, if not always, is grounded in (or at least implies) the notion that women are somehow inferior to men in terms of important human functions, such as rational decision-making, 2) it overlooks the variety of capabilities that both men and women have with respective to the whole range of human activities, 3) it leaves too little room for individual choice and creativity in structuring human lives -e.g. that some men could flourish as 'stay-home dads', while some women may flourish in non-domestic roles.
i have no sympathy for the idea that the genders have separate virtues. however, a related view that is more appealing is this: there are not separate lists of virtues for men and women, but the virtues will be inflected differently for men and for women. thus, courage is not a 'masculine virtue' -it is a virtue for all humans, but in men courage will be displaying or realized in a distinctly masculine way, and likewise women will display a distinctly feminine form of courage. there is, i think, something intuitive about this view. we are used to thinking of a distinctive ways in which a man or a woman will 'get the job done' or successfully navigate a situation. this is a frequent theme in movies and tv. on reflection, though, i'm unsure if it actually makes sense to say that virtue can actually be 'gendered' in this way, or what this really amounts to.
perhaps our wanting gender to be meaningful can also be expressed this way: from a first-person perspective -in looking at our own lives- we feel that our gender is important, and we when we think about living well we want to live well as men, or as women. we want to be good human beings, be we also want to be good men, or good women. that is, we do not imagine ourselves as gender-less, and in the way we carry ourselves and the way we plan our lives, we are (somehow) aware that our 'maleness' or 'femaleness' is important. thus, to say that gender is 'merely anatomy' is to miss something about our own (perhaps inchoate) sense of the importance of our own gender.
the enduring desire that gender be meaningful is testified to everywhere in our culture. not to long ago, some friends were telling me about the popularity of a series of books written by an evangelical christian about the meaning of 'manliness' and being a 'real man.' these books, it seems, probably fall into the very trap i am wary of -turning shallow (and possibly prejudiced) generalities into the basis for a theory of gender and its importance. at the same time, the popularity of these books (and others like them) suggests to me that people are unwilling to think about gender as mere biology, and they are hungry for a way to make their own maleness or femaleness a considered part of their self-understanding.
i would like to add two of my own reasons for wanting gender to be meaningful. first, the vast, vast majority of human cultures throughout history have understood maleness and femaleness to be significant in our understanding of what it means to be a human and what it means to live well. i am wary of dismissing such a widespread human practice and outlook, even if it we think it was infected with bias and ignorance and must be examined critically.
second, the church has historically understood gender to be meaningful. even if we think this understanding has been misguided in certain ways, and even if we do not agree with how this has always played out (e.g. not allowing women to be ordained ministers), it still seems that there are deep theological reasons for wanting to take gender seriously. if nothing else, we have the basic formulation from genesis that god created humans male and female. it rings false to me to suggest that this creation was merely a matter of biology, just as god could have created us with three legs instead of two.
posted by micah at 10:37 AM
3 Comments:
I had brunch with a friend several weeks ago during which we ended up discussing this very topic. And the thought I came upon as I was saying it (always risky, I know) was that perhaps gender is, at it's most fundamental level, a gift.
The first several verses of Genesis reveal God to be wildly creative, to have a penchant for variety. And when he created a companion for Adam, he didn't create a twin, which might have made more sense. Instead he created a new being. Distinctly other from him in physiology and in some other, less-easily-defined sense.
The conversation with my friend was more specifically about homosexuality and my attempt to grapple with what appear to be biblical injunctions against it. And I wondered if we could clear away the phobic attitudes and language that obfuscates the true nature of what's involved in this "issue" we would find that the fundamental offense of homosexuality is in rejecting the gift of gender. That perhaps in giving female to male, and vice versa, God was providing us with a means to be fully engaged in/with the world (to be fully human?). He was providing us with a physical way to give and receive ourselves and in that less-easily-defined sense, he was giving us this gendered interaction as a way to refine our own abilities to be virtuous.
Like Micah, I find little merit in arguments that would maintain there are separate virtues for men and women. See Dorothy Sayers' Are Women Human? (recently put back into print by Eerdmans). But the idea that men and women add different textures to what it means to have courage or to be patient, etc. is appealing.
I guess what I'm saying here is more about the value of gender than about the nature of it. Even more, my comments are thus far limited to the genders as they are juxtaposed one to the other. So another question: What does it mean to be female in the absence of a man? And vice versa? Does my gender-as-gift paradigm mean that homosexuals and single heterosexual people are somehow limited in their ability to be human since they haven't accepted (whether by circumstance or by choice) the gift? (I shudder in protest to the thought.) Is this perhaps a result of living in a "fallen" world? Or do interactions between men an women in non-sexual (a misnomer, but you know what I mean) friendships serve the same broadening function of the long-term, give-and-take, for better or for worse male/female relationships (or enough of the same function to suffice)?
Okay... I'll stop rambling for now. : )
i think the idea that people will embody virtues differently is right.
it makes sense that the virtues will be embodied according to people’s different experiences of being in the world, and it seems fair to say that women and men experience the world differently. at the social level, females have a different experience in the world because they are perceived as women and males as men. but i think we can find a way of thinking about gender that avoids the pitfalls of both essentialism _and_ pure constructionism. so at the biological level, our bodies mediate our experience of the world, and there are important differences in the male and female bodies. one is that women’s bodies have a rhythm different than that of men, and the bodily cycles of women are more obvious than those of men. it seems that different experience could have ramifications for one’s relationship to bodies, nature, medicine, maybe technology.
for example. one of my friends studied midwifery and the professionalization of medicine/birth and noted how gendered the divide between doctors and midwifes was. she traced how doctors were eager to put birth on a quicker timetable (induce births) and move birth away from the home. it seems like a gender analysis that takes into account both the social experience of women and men – of men doctors operating in a capitalistic system and women denied entrance into medical schools and associations – and the biological experience – of women being forced to wait on their bodies in ways more obvious than men – could be helpful for explaining what’s going on in midwifery and the medicalization of birth.
i don’t want to say that there is a necessary relationship between sex and a particular attitude toward nature or medicine or technology or something – just that it would make sense that you could pick out general features of women’s and men’s attitudes toward those things, and that that those general features need not always be arbitrary or constructed.
all that said, something about this project still sits funny with me - it's one thing to say that people will embody virtues differently or even say that women might generally embody virtues differently than men, but i'm skeptical about finding a "female way to embody courage." where would such a description come from? and how would you protect against these lists being used normatively (as, historically, they always have)?
however, the only thing that struck me as outright problematic about your post, micah, was the title…
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