We all know the stereotypes about men and women. Women cook, take care of children, are emotional and faithful and put flowers on things; men make money, seek power, build things, never cry and are emotionless beasts when it comes to sex and food. To some extent we all have these stereotypes in our head and they provide a kind of standard against which to compare the actual data of our lives. Frequently today these comparisons come merely in the form of jokes, because the stereotypes diverge so far from our experiences. We think of men as “breadwinners,” but in forty percent – and quickly rising – of American households women are the primary breadwinners; in the younger age brackets women earn more than men. We think of women in the kitchen, but in the majority of American households men do the majority of the cooking. Hannah Rosin writes about how young women enjoy sex but avoid relationships and commitment, a phenomenon which most American males can confirm with some kind of anecdotal evidence or other. A male friend was telling me about a woman he tried to date, impressed as he was with her beauty, intelligence, personality, competence, love of nature, and the like. Her response? “I’ll sleep with you, but I won’t date you.” Similarly in my anecdotal world I know many more marriages marred by female infidelity than male infidelity, and the data certainly indicate that women initiate divorces – two thirds of all divorces, in fact. This flies in the face of all the things we are told about the genders.
This creates a fair amount of confusion and astonishment, which I’m sure is one of the reasons why periodicals will periodically run pieces about the genders. If the things we have been told about the genders are false – and I believe they are – then what is true? More and more we look to science to give us answers on this, but it is always difficult to draw conclusions from scientific studies. One famous example tried to study casual sex by having people proposition random passers-by; many more men were willing to have sex in this casual way than women. But studies like this have been proven to be too simplistic: women can be proven to respond to a propositioner who is a celebrity, for instance, or to someone who is known as a good lover.
All of this is of particular interest to all those who find themselves frustrated by dating, marriage, or parenting – which is, I suppose, just about everybody. And I will say for myself and for a number of the people around me, that we find many men whom we feel to be deficient as men, and women who appear to be deficient as women, though it is not clear that we know exactly what we mean by this and whether we have any right to make such judgements; and further so many men who appear to unhappy as men and (especially) women who seem to be unhappy as women. It all seems very confusing – and interesting.
Into this modern miasma is thrown a little book by Alice von Hildebrand, The Privilege of Being a Woman. It is meant to restore women’s satisfaction in being women, while defending Christianity against the charge of being “sexist.” And precisely as you would (unfortunately) expect from a conservative Catholic, it addresses none of the relevant data. The experience of the past two generations is ignored; science is ignored; the possible presence of human instincts shaped by evolutionary experience is ignored; Von Hildebrand’s personal experiences are never mentioned; and the conclusions hence are risible.
Let’s offer a little catalogue of risibility, to get this out of the way. Women can’t wear shorts – “shorts, although acceptable for the male sex, are likely to undermine the female respect for the mystery of her body.” Women should not “cross their legs in a manner which can be offensive” (to whom? God?). Men never proposition “modest” women (“men are talented at reading women’s body language, and they are not likely to risk being humiliated when a refusal is certain… if little girls were made aware of the great mystery confided to them, their purity would be guaranteed”). Sex is always “deep and serious” (has she never seen a naked person? Has she never had beans before sex and unleashed a massive fart in the moment of passion? Sex is so often funny. Imagine G.K. Chesterton having sex. C.S. Lewis writes about this, and of course we have Rabelais, Balzac, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, etc. – Catholics all – to remind us). She adds elsewhere, “to view the sexual sphere as ‘fun’ is a desecration.” Good Lord. Can’t we say the opposite? If you don’t have fun while having sex – or while living, in general – isn’t it possible you’re doing something wrong? Does God want us to be happy or doesn’t He?
Some of Von Hildebrand’s claims are risible but also awful. Women should be punished for adultery more than men: “When a particular mission is confided to some persons, and these persons fail to respond to its demands, it creates greater metaphysical disharmony [whatever that is] than when the same failure is found in someone who has not received this special calling.” Some claims are partial and hence bigoted: “The make-up of women indicates that their reproductive organs are stamped by sacredness and belong to God in a special sense.” (How about men’s reproductive organs? Who do they belong to? How about the entire human body? How about the entire creation? “The earth is the LORD’s, and all the things therein.” God is not just for pussies.) Some is just flat assertion of ecclesiastical power to run as a for-profit licensing operation for sex: “This self-revelation [of sex] can only take place with God’s express permission, for we belong to Him…. one cannot ‘reveal’ oneself to more than one person.” (What does “can” mean here? How is it affected by the death of a spouse? How does one get “God’s express permission,” since the Church obviously is no effective indicator of God’s will?)
The worst howler of all – which is excommunicable – is this tripe:
Throughout her autobiography, Saint Theresa of Avila repeatedly refers to the dangers menacing the spiritual life of “the weak sex”: emotionalism, dreaming, illusions, self-centeredness. She repeatedly stresses how much they are in need of guidance. Two great spiritual directors, Saint Francis de Sales and Dom Columba Marmion, emphasize the fact that “however intellectual or enlightened a woman may be, God, according to the ordinary rulings of His providence, wills her to be directed by a man who is His minister.” This is a theme which keeps recurring in his spiritual letters. Women need men whose mission is to help them to channel their emotions, to distinguish between those that are valid and those that are tainted by irrationality, those which are legitimate and those which are illegitimate. (38)
She elaborates on women’s need for guidance and their inability to steer themselves through the emotional mess known as themselves. In other words, this book is precisely what one might fear it would be: a call for women to shut up and be happy letting men run their lives, while they should go home and cry about the thorns in the Sacred Heart of Jesus who is weeping about women leading men astray. Reactionary claptrap.
This makes me so sad. I don’t deny the importance of guidance, of taking advice, of listening to other people. But I know from experience – as do all the people whose minds are not closed – that this advice becomes good and healthy when it comes from a place of wisdom (or inspired folly), not from a source who happens to have a Roman collar on. And gender has absolutely nothing to do with it. I – along with many modern men – hope for some kind equality to be realized, because we know that we do not know everything: we are aware of the partiality of our viewpoints, and we hope for spouses who are counsellors and sources of wisdom, and we hope also to benefit from the wisdom of elders, both male and female. We know from actual experience that wisdom is not lodged entirely in men, and what is sad is seeing someone like Von Hildebrand actively teaching women to take no role as leaders and counsellors. Her advice is precisely the advice that will drown the ship in the modern sea: listen to the men with the collars on, let them do the thinking for you, let them tell you which feelings you have are “legitimate” and “illegitimate.” I can speak for American Catholics who know better: the corporation of these men, known as “the Church,” is literally not to be trusted with a little-league baseball team, much less the governance of an important worldly mission or the spiritual direction of an honest person striving to live as a full human being. Even the few good priests – the ones who are worth listening to – know that this is true.
Von Hildebrand is a sad indication – as they all are, it seems – of the state of Catholic higher learning. She has a Ph.D. She is the author of at least half a dozen books. She has taught at “Hunter College of the City University of New York, the Catechitical Institude in Dunwoodie, New York, the Catechetical Institute in Arlington, Virginia, the Thomas More College in Rome, Italy, Franciscan University in Steubenville, Ohio, and Ave Maria College in Ypsilanti, Michigan.” That she found employment with them does not reflect well on any of these institutions. And her lightweight piffle of misogynistic retread – I mean this book of hers – went through five editions between 2002 and 2005 (probably more since then – it has dozens of 5-star reviews on Amazon), showing that there is a market for this kind of barbarism. That is the sad part always, is it not? Religion is profitable always insofar as it is bad. There is more money in heroin than in potatoes. Out of all the apostles, Judas cleared the best margins.
And besides being bad religion, Von Hildebrand sells bad thinking. She decries people who have pursued sexual pleasure: “They have tasted the poisonous violence of passion and an intensity of pleasure which, as Plato wrote centuries ago, nails the soul to the body” (95). Plato might have written this, but Plato was not a Christian – in many ways, Plato was precisely what Christ came to deliver us from. Incarnational theology is incompatible with a body/soul divide. And sure enough, the Gospels have no word for soul as opposed to biological life. The word used – psyche – means “life,” which by Biblical thinking has the idea of “soul” in it. But it is not an individual existence – it is something we all participate in. Just as there is one Spirit – God’s – which we all have. “And God breathed his Spirit into the dust, and it became a living soul.” That’s what we are – dust + spirit = living soul. You cannot “nail the soul to the body.” God did that ages ago. Von Hildebrand is just another fearful prissy little Catholic girl, legs tightly closed, sitting at the edge of the pew so no one will sit next to her, and terrified that her whole Platonic mental apparatus will crumble at the approach of a single real feeling, much less a full-blown orgasm. I don’t know what they are teaching at the Catechetical schools, but it’s not Christianity. This is the kind of fear which gives religion a bad name.
She talks about the vagina as the hortus conclusus. I like metaphors, so let’s let her have at it:
The very structure of her body symbolizes a garden that should be carefully guarded, for the keys of this garden belong to God. It is His property in a special sense and is to be kept untouched until He allows the bride-to-be to give the keys to her husband-to-be of what is called, in the Canticle of Canticles, a hortus conclusus (“a closed garden”). How beautiful when, on the night of her wedding, the young bride can say to the bridegroom: “I have kept this garden unsullied for you; now that God has received our pledge to live our married life in His sight (in conspectu Dei), I am granted the permission to give you the keys to this garden, and I trust that you will approach it with fear and trembling.” How very sad when this garden has already been trampled upon by impure feet and ravaged by lust. (82)
But how sad when the garden has been neglected and absolutely nothing done in it for years and years on end. What kind of garden thrives with neglect? I spoke not long ago with an American Catholic woman who had been married and divorced without ever knowing of the existence of the clitoris. I am not making this up. And it makes sense given the conservative Catholic picture: after all, how would Von Hildebrand explain this organ (if she knows of its existence)? It’s not necessary for baby-making, or for male pleasure. It is there merely to make sex “fun” (what a desecration!). Perhaps this organ was not created by God but put there by the Devil to tempt women to bad behavior.
In short, I accept her metaphor, but I am a gardener and I know what gardening is like. A garden is something that requires maintenance, affection, love, and effort. It is something that needs to be thoroughly known, and every inch of which cared for. It requires experience, trial and error, and wisdom gained from others. And even when known, it remains unknown. It is a rich metaphor for the sexual experience. But it is not “sullied” by the presence of people. Promiscuity is no virtue, and some degree of exclusion is necessary for an intense relationship, but in actual fact virginity is rarely a good starting-point for a relationship. And the fact that an enclosed garden is private is only the beginning of the metaphor’s applicability. Sexuality is not just privacy, as it is not just fertility – just as gardens cannot be measured by the effectiveness of their fences or their production in pounds. The pleasure, the intoxication, the addiction, the attachment, the comfort, and the new life sexuality creates – and I mean this not just in a biological sense – are as important and as transcendent as anything else about it, and are a strange indication of the mind of God. Sexuality is also probably the only area of life in which I have truly envied women the privilege of being women – I will never ever forget the first time I experienced a woman having an orgasm under me, and I will say that nothing in male sexual experience seems even remotely comparable. But Von Hildebrand – and conservative Catholic culture generally – offers no guidance in such matters, which they think should be passed over in absolute silence. They are afraid that to love the blossoms of the garden too much might “nail the soul to the body.” Von Hildebrand is not teaching anything true – true Catholicism preaches the love of the body, since it teaches its resurrection. The hope of the religion is to be able to stay in the body forever, not a fear of being attached to it.
Similarly she speaks often about “specialness,” which is one of the key Catholic words indicating “b.s.” When women’s sexual organs, for instance, bear God’s impress “in a special way” than you know that she is saying that the argument is false but useful to her. I was keyed in to this Catholic approach in a sermon where the priest said that God was present on the altar – he then corrected himself to note that God was actually present everywhere, but was present in the eucharist “in a special way.” Every thing Von Hildebrand says about female virtues – humility, receptivity, fidelity – she admits are male virtues also, but female virtues “in a special way.” This kind of argument never stands up to scrutiny. I admit that the body is holy, and sexuality is holy, and receptivity is holy, but that is just as true for me as it is for any woman. She says nothing that is convincingly gender-specific.
Most of Von Hildebrand’s book is complaint, but she does cast one approving glance at the status of women elsewhere, which is revealing: “Deep sadness is called for when one watches Western girls running around practically naked and then compare them with how the Hindu or Moslem women are clothed with modesty, grace, and dignity.” I have heard her say that she considers Hindu and Moslem women to be more or less the only “real” women left. I must say this makes my blood boil a little bit. I remember being in Turkey, on hundred-degree days when I would soak my white shirts in water every hour to keep myself cool, watching the farm laborers – all women, attired head to toe in black – stooped over in the fields with looks of the greatest suffering on their faces, watching rich Westerners like myself zip on past to sites like Troy or Ephesus. It was not modesty, grace, or dignity. It is not what I would want for my daughter or my wife or my mother, nor for myself if I were a woman. Her admiration of it strikes me as comfortable self-indulgence of the typical revolting type (I will note that she is wealthy, and has spoken in the past against the Gospel having anything to say against riches).
As for traditional gender roles, the evidence seems to suggest that women remain in them more or less according to their personalities, and almost always step out of them a little if they have any options. I understand that there are pressures on all of us from the consumerist state which contort our natures, but still it is striking to me that traditionalist roles for women seem to be maintained by force and shaming, not pleasure and freedom. What this means about the true nature of women I do not know – I don’t think anyone knows. But I know many women whom Von Hildebrand would probably despise: women who wear glamorous clothes which are sometimes tight, sometimes brief, sometimes form-revealing; women who hold powerful jobs; women who never listen to men; women who cohabit with men without marrying them; women who put their children in daycare as soon as they can; women who want to limit the number of children they have – and yet I do not despise them the way Von Hildebrand does. I find they remain unmistakably women. I find myself still mesmerized by them, still amazed and charmed by the difference and the beauty. I find them still utterly lovable, and often excellent companions – “help meets” – for men. The essential is still there, though so many of the “accidents” have changed.
I remember going back to Rome not long ago, and thinking how horrible the city was now – it was so much more expensive now that the euro was there, and none of the students could afford three-hour dinners in the restaurants every night the way we used to; and there were supermarkets which were forcing all the little tiny specialty shops to close; and there were bars in the city now, catering to tourists (Italians don’t do bars); and in general there were many more tourists and far fewer Romans, and the whole place was not the way it was when I first came to Rome. But then I heard some young people talking about the city – which they were experiencing for the first time – and it seemed like I was hearing myself talk about the place twenty years ago.
True wisdom is the gradual process of finally paying attention to the essence, and learning to let go of the superficies. This is the way I feel about men and women. I wish there were good guidance out there to help men and women find happiness in ourselves and with each other – and I acknowledge this may require some changes, just as I think perhaps Italy may find its culture of craftsmanship and hospitality would be better served by a currency policy encouraging exports. One way or another, retreads and reactionaries like Von Hildebrand offer no help whatsoever. Separate the grain from the husk, Thoreau says, and people will run after the husk and pay their respects to that. This is what Von Hildebrand does with womanhood: it is all about crossing your legs and never wearing shorts. It is a shame that American Catholic culture cannot do better than this.
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