Femininity: Fact of Life or Social Fiction?

Readers, scroll down for my comments on "Ruby Slippers," a great book which provides a roomier definition of femininity than you'll find in most Christian circles. You might also enjoy the author's blog, here.

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I’ve written a few times about the questions I have about what it mean to be feminine.

I especially have questions about what it means for Christians – those of us who are seeking ways to get the tarnish rubbed off and uncover the image of God underneath, to find the signs of the Creator’s fingerprints on stuff like our bodies and souls – to deal with the fact that some of us are male, and some of us are female.

Besides the whole bit about having sex and babies – which is all very well and good - rather appealing - but not part of my life and possibly never will be – I’m not sure what’s really behind all this gender business, and where to go with it.

You wouldn’t have to be Christian to have these questions, I know. But I’m just saying I’m asking them from that perspective. I think that if I were a straight-out humanist – as I was before this journey I’m on began sometime back in the 80’s – I probably wouldn’t have the same questions. Maybe I’d just say: Hey, you’re you, I’m me, deal with it. Everything else is societal and cultural, and we can each decide how much we want to go along with the expectations of others or not: femininity is just a popular fiction. I’ll decide how much of it I want to embrace, and how much of it I want to reject, and take the consequences as they come.

Well, I suppose I could still take that line. But I do believe there is a better way… not that things are supposed to be all black and white but that there is probably some intelligent design in this whole thing. I don’t think femininity and masculinity are just myths. I think there’s something to them. But the question is, what?

Unfortunately, the intelligent design of this gender business is buried in (among other kinds of refuse) centuries of pretty inadequate philosophy and theology, often dressed up with bad science or faulty exegesis. So, as an intellectual, I rebel.

And as someone who doesn’t seem to fit most of the molds of what women “are” like, I find the whole thing pretty darn upsetting at times. The jokes, assumptions, expectations, or Christian teachings about what women are supposed to want, or care about, or how our minds work, or what our needs are, or what we bring to the world, well, it just doesn’t hold up very well. You don’t have to look far for examples of women who DO seem to fit into the various molds but nor do you have to look far for women who don’t. Sometimes just in the mirror.

Very, very few of the women in my church, for example, go to “women’s ministry” groups or retreats – they just don’t care for that sort of thing. Not that they don’t like being women, or being with women, but most attempts to find a “common denominator” for what women need or prefer result in something that many, many of us look at and say: not me.

Apparently I have some unhealed wounds in this area, or I would not react as strongly as I do. But I’d like to start with some solid thinking about masculinity and femininity – Christian thinking, but the real kind, not all wrapped up in the nonsense that, not surprisingly, creeps into Christian practice just as much as it does into anything else.

New Book

I’m reading a book that has a refreshing take on all this stuff. Ruby Slippers suggests there’s a different way for Christians to look at femininity. Remember how one of the stepsisters in Cinderella cut off her toe, another her heel, to fit into shoes that were not made for them? Trying to be “feminine” and fit into “women’s roles” can be like that. There’s a better way, a pair of shoes (if you’re one of those women who’s into shoes…) that is actually a good fit, actually right for your feet – troublesome as they may still be, they are the shoes that will take you home (like Dorothy’s ruby slippers, hence the title).

Yes, Jonalyn does produce a (short, flexible) list of characteristics that she regards as “feminine,” but she spends 100 pages laying a foundation before she’ll tell you what they are, and then she calls them “family resemblances,” not some kind of a checklist. (Just because you don’t have the cheekbones your mother did doesn’t make you less part of the family... Not all women are going to demonstrate all of the “resemblances,” and some men will demonstrate some of them as well.)

And before she gets to that, she includes a good, meaty chapter on how men and women really not so different as some would say, in fact, actually from the same planet:

“After the fall, people began to forget that Man and Woman were created to work together in harmony. Instead of focusing on all the ways that men and women are the same – both created in the image of God, and both created to bear the image of God in the world – people began to focus on all the ways we’re different.” (p. 68)

Later, she cites a psychological analysis that summarized the results of thousands of psychological gender studies that look at gender differences in all the areas one might expect to find them, like verbal skills, or levels of aggression.

“Men and women don’t, in fact, differ very much, even in areas of presumed, stereotypical difference. … But these differences are often degreed, depending on each person. The way all women differ from all men is less predictive, provocative, and universal than we might think… in statistical terms, 85% of the areas overlap… The difference is actually so slight, that knowing a person’s gender has little to no predictive power in nearly 80% of psychological matters. And indeed, areas of difference, such as self-esteem, may be due to family culture, environment, or personality, not to an essential difference in our souls.” (pp. 72-73)