With the Fall, we have left the realm of the safely abstract, and have now to consider the things of Earth. This is the sphere of confusion of mind and heart and life-and-death contention between brothers, of un-blissful ignorance and fog of the intellect, of woe and pain, strife and division.
_______________________________________________
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Obviously, we are not talking of two different species here, the division of the sexes comes after the ordinal creation of Man. God did not create Eve also independently out of dust, but rather, as it were, divided Adam's own being. So we have two entities springing from a single source, each with a different spin, positively and negatively charged particles, the yin and yang, difference in union exerting influence upon one another, repulsive forces held in proximity by overwhelmingly powerful attraction, in order that they might act as a single entity.
Nevertheless, Men and Women often seem like alien creatures to one another. Feminists (male and female) even speak as if men and women are different species, with differing interests and not a whole lot of reasons to interact, besides sexual attraction and procreation, but these little difficulties are being addressed through homosex and artificial insemination. Men, it seems, are being "phased out" just as the Bull has already been phased out of the farm; as any farmer knows, geldings and mares is what one wants to work with, not these nasty, snorting bulls.
But properly speaking, men and women are more to one another than just fleeting sexual encounters and childbearing. Now, when it comes to considering what men and women are to each other, I can, of course, speak only as a man. I realize there are those who will unreflectively discount anything I say about women on that account, but I do not consider my perspective to be thereby invalidated; we are all like people who have lived in a house their entire lives, and have never once been outside it. No matter how intimately we know the interior aspect of the house, we can have no idea what the appearance of the outside of the house is like; that we may learn only by consulting our neighbors.
Much is made of the overwhelming power of the masculine sex drive, and no woman knows what it is to have to struggle with that intense pressure, but I consider woman's sexuality to have an equally powerful effect on her person. I do in fact believe that, in comparison, a man's sexuality is more or less superficial; female sexuality is inextricably wound through all the fibers of her being, whereas a man can, at times, be somewhat detached from his sexuality.
Despite the power of male sexual responses, I do not believe that, at root, it is an entirely carnal response, unless it has been made so by the singleminded pursuit of sexual stimulation. At least I know that for me, the attraction I feel for a woman does not initially have anything to do with her sexual characteristics, but is more something that reaches out from the essential femininity of her person, touching me emotionally, though the other reactions are not slow to subsequently assert themselves. Also, women often seem to feel that a man's interest in a sexual encounter is solely physical, whereas she is most interested in the emotional aspect of the relationship. I think we have here a confusion based on the differing nature of the experience; I believe women divide the physical from the emotional in a way that men don't. Women experience both physical and emotional aspects of the event, both of which needs need to be met, whereas men experience a single physical/emotional event; it is here that a man most clearly experiences the love of his wife, and feels that he most intimately communicates love to her. It confuses him somewhat to discover that she regards it almost as incidental. Even to have a feminine presence in his environment can be emotionally sustaining to a man; perhaps the clearest articulation of this would be just to say that in many respects, a woman is to a man like water. To one without female companionship, even a smile from a girl is like a drop of water on the tongue of one perishing from thirst in the desert; conversely, the experience of a man in a marriage relationship can sometimes be compared to that of someone being waterboarded in a cell in Guantanamo.
Masculinity and Femininity model different things; this is seen clearly in most mythologies. Masculinity is of the sky, femininity is of the earth; the earth is watered and brought to fecundity by that which falls from the heavens. The masculine is the initiatory, the feminine the receptive principle, the masculine the disciplining, the feminine the nurturing, the masculine the outward moving, the feminine the inward turning; all of life unfolds in the interaction between the two influences of masculine rigor and feminine softness, is a dance of the complementary natures of masculine virility and feminine grace. Modernity rails against these things, and denies them where it can, but traditional human society has always said "vive le difference".
These things are generalities; it is especially difficult to speak of gender in a way that does not seem to falsify to some extent, because we are all really the same kind of creature, all have the same capacities, but use them differently. Also, any single statement that can be made of men and women generally will find many that fall on the wrong side of the definition; we are circles which largely overlap. Even so, when we attempt to say that a man and a woman share a particular characteristic, there will usually be found a subtle difference in the mode of approach. These things are understood best by the imagination rather than the intellect, I think; masculine and feminine characteristics have such an entirely different flavor, even when they seem to be the same type of thing.
Chesterton, writing toward the beginning of the political upheavals of his day concerning the relations of the sexes, said that no issue had any importance at all compared to the supreme importance of men continuing to be men, and women continuing to be women; in our day, we have difficulty understanding this. After all, how could men and women cease to be Men and Women? Sex is, after all, only a matter of biology, isn't it? The problem is that we have largely lost the knowledge of what Gender is in its essence; it is possible for a woman to become unfeminine, and thereby loose one of the most valuable characteristics of her soul as it was created to be. A man may become unmasculine, thereby becoming a psychological gelding, fit only to be a slave of the modern industrial complex.
"So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them." Obviously, we are not talking of two different species here, the division of the sexes comes after the ordinal creation of Man. God did not create Eve also independently out of dust, but rather, as it were, divided Adam's own being. So we have two entities springing from a single source, each with a different spin, positively and negatively charged particles, the yin and yang, difference in union exerting influence upon one another, repulsive forces held in proximity by overwhelmingly powerful attraction, in order that they might act as a single entity.
Nevertheless, Men and Women often seem like alien creatures to one another. Feminists (male and female) even speak as if men and women are different species, with differing interests and not a whole lot of reasons to interact, besides sexual attraction and procreation, but these little difficulties are being addressed through homosex and artificial insemination. Men, it seems, are being "phased out" just as the Bull has already been phased out of the farm; as any farmer knows, geldings and mares is what one wants to work with, not these nasty, snorting bulls.
But properly speaking, men and women are more to one another than just fleeting sexual encounters and childbearing. Now, when it comes to considering what men and women are to each other, I can, of course, speak only as a man. I realize there are those who will unreflectively discount anything I say about women on that account, but I do not consider my perspective to be thereby invalidated; we are all like people who have lived in a house their entire lives, and have never once been outside it. No matter how intimately we know the interior aspect of the house, we can have no idea what the appearance of the outside of the house is like; that we may learn only by consulting our neighbors.
Much is made of the overwhelming power of the masculine sex drive, and no woman knows what it is to have to struggle with that intense pressure, but I consider woman's sexuality to have an equally powerful effect on her person. I do in fact believe that, in comparison, a man's sexuality is more or less superficial; female sexuality is inextricably wound through all the fibers of her being, whereas a man can, at times, be somewhat detached from his sexuality.
Despite the power of male sexual responses, I do not believe that, at root, it is an entirely carnal response, unless it has been made so by the singleminded pursuit of sexual stimulation. At least I know that for me, the attraction I feel for a woman does not initially have anything to do with her sexual characteristics, but is more something that reaches out from the essential femininity of her person, touching me emotionally, though the other reactions are not slow to subsequently assert themselves. Also, women often seem to feel that a man's interest in a sexual encounter is solely physical, whereas she is most interested in the emotional aspect of the relationship. I think we have here a confusion based on the differing nature of the experience; I believe women divide the physical from the emotional in a way that men don't. Women experience both physical and emotional aspects of the event, both of which needs need to be met, whereas men experience a single physical/emotional event; it is here that a man most clearly experiences the love of his wife, and feels that he most intimately communicates love to her. It confuses him somewhat to discover that she regards it almost as incidental. Even to have a feminine presence in his environment can be emotionally sustaining to a man; perhaps the clearest articulation of this would be just to say that in many respects, a woman is to a man like water. To one without female companionship, even a smile from a girl is like a drop of water on the tongue of one perishing from thirst in the desert; conversely, the experience of a man in a marriage relationship can sometimes be compared to that of someone being waterboarded in a cell in Guantanamo.
Masculinity and Femininity model different things; this is seen clearly in most mythologies. Masculinity is of the sky, femininity is of the earth; the earth is watered and brought to fecundity by that which falls from the heavens. The masculine is the initiatory, the feminine the receptive principle, the masculine the disciplining, the feminine the nurturing, the masculine the outward moving, the feminine the inward turning; all of life unfolds in the interaction between the two influences of masculine rigor and feminine softness, is a dance of the complementary natures of masculine virility and feminine grace. Modernity rails against these things, and denies them where it can, but traditional human society has always said "vive le difference".
These things are generalities; it is especially difficult to speak of gender in a way that does not seem to falsify to some extent, because we are all really the same kind of creature, all have the same capacities, but use them differently. Also, any single statement that can be made of men and women generally will find many that fall on the wrong side of the definition; we are circles which largely overlap. Even so, when we attempt to say that a man and a woman share a particular characteristic, there will usually be found a subtle difference in the mode of approach. These things are understood best by the imagination rather than the intellect, I think; masculine and feminine characteristics have such an entirely different flavor, even when they seem to be the same type of thing.
Chesterton, writing toward the beginning of the political upheavals of his day concerning the relations of the sexes, said that no issue had any importance at all compared to the supreme importance of men continuing to be men, and women continuing to be women; in our day, we have difficulty understanding this. After all, how could men and women cease to be Men and Women? Sex is, after all, only a matter of biology, isn't it? The problem is that we have largely lost the knowledge of what Gender is in its essence; it is possible for a woman to become unfeminine, and thereby loose one of the most valuable characteristics of her soul as it was created to be. A man may become unmasculine, thereby becoming a psychological gelding, fit only to be a slave of the modern industrial complex.
