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XX, XY

Better Than the Boys

A confession: I'll do just about anything to get someone to like me, especially if that someone is male. My freshman year in college, I knew a guy who desperately wanted to go to a Joy Electric concert and needed a ride. I, of course, was more than happy to offer up my car.

The concert was held in a sort of offbeat venue, a former something in a part of town I didn't know very well. Struggling with the directions (which were wrong, by the way), I said something I thought would win my male passengers over, something mean: "I think a girl wrote these directions." I sold out my fellow women in an effort to get in good with these guys — "Aren't girls stupid?" For some reason, I thought that would make them like me.

I know I'm not the first woman in history to think she can compete for acceptability against other women by mocking all things traditionally feminine, and I won't be the last. Last year, I caught the end of an episode of MTV's Made in which a girly girl had been "made" into a varsity football player, exulting, "The guys on the team don't see me as a girl anymore. They see me as a football player, an equal."

She didn't want a jersey. She wanted to be as good as the guys at something, to compete on a guy's playing field — literally.

Fighting the Power

I think what the MTV girl and I experience is more than just feeling like we need to prove ourselves. Somewhere, there's also a belief — even if only half held — that being different equals being inferior or less important. It's an idea that's been around for years, causing some people to reject gender difference altogether.

Frederica Mathewes-Green writes that early feminism, bent on raising "respect for women" in tangible ways, sought among other things to give women increased access to the workplace: "If men thought the workplace was more important than the home, women must think the same. … If men thought that housewives were dumb, that staying home was mindless drudgery, it was so."¹ In other words, at some point, women traditionally defined and holding traditional roles came to be seen not as important or beautiful but as inferior, and as a corrective measure, feminists insisted that women be more like men.

About a decade earlier, Playboy hit magazine racks for the first time and encouraged men to spurn the banality of their homes and escape into the fantasy life of a carefree, sophisticated bachelor, thereby delivering a disturbing message: "Your wives are frumpy and boring." Little wonder that with radicalism and emancipatory thought reaching a head in the 60s and 70s, women sought to unshackle themselves from traditional femininity and their boring lives by becoming what was evidently most valuable: men, replete with masculine ambitions and sexual habits.

And thus was born the quest to debunk la difference, driven by — and driving — an ideology that men and women are not in essence different at all, an ideology to which many feminists adhere to this day.

Searching for Progress

What would make someone staunchly resist a doctrine of gender difference, even while many in the medical and scientific community see gender differences as biological and inescapable? I think it's about more than just a 20th-century snubbing of domesticity. I think some women have rejected femininity because they see their femaleness as a hardship.

During World War II, hundreds of thousands of Korean women were abducted for use as "comfort women" for Japanese soldiers, performing acts of sexual slavery up to 70 times a day. When the war ended, most were murdered en masse or hidden away to die slowly. World history isn't exactly short on examples of similar, if a bit downgraded, gender-based horrors. I have to think these kinds of atrocities can only stem from a deep denigration of the feminine half of the population, a definition of women that accords them little respect.

But a negative view of women isn't always so violent, so obvious. Where sex has been worshiped, women have become icons of sin or implements of sexual pleasure. Where achievement and material wealth have been prized above values and relatedness, femininity has become matronly and irrelevant.

So maybe some people hoped that homogenizing the genders would do away with denigrating women. Unfortunately, it hasn't seemed to turn out that way. Plenty of people have argued — rightly, I think — that the push to portray women more often as overtly sexual in an attempt to "empower" women sexually has actually fostered the sexual objectification of women.

In Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, Chuck Klosterman comments on the proliferation of Internet porn, noting the "cartoonish misogyny" of sex acts which have "about as much to do with sex as hitting someone in the face with a frying pan."² Apparently, whether or not the culture at large holds to a high doctrine of gender difference, in terms of elevating women, we're largely nowhere.

A Rebirth

Every once in a while, I remember that I've "back-burnered" my high school questions about whether or not being a girl means being valued and valuable. And so, panicked, I go on one of these kicks where I desperately search library books and my college Bible textbooks, thumbing the dry pages in search of some word that will save my soul. I have to be honest: I've never found it. Usually I get tired and cry and eat cookies, retreating into the perfect girl world of Hilary Duff movies to save my questions for another day.

But there's hope, I think, in the form of a move toward thinking of masculinity and femininity in distinct, celebrative terms, allowing for a femininity not spurned as weakness and passivity, but embraced as a kind, creative, noble force.

There's the Eldredge phenomenon, of course — Wild at Heart by John Eldredge and Captivating by John and Stasi Eldredge explore masculinity and femininity, respectively, celebrating and affirming both. Similarly, in Hating Women: America's Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex, Rabbi Shmuley Boteach writes, "Women are naturally nobler, their softness, far from being a signal of weakness, is part of their lofty character, and we deny this reality to our own peril."³

Those are the kind of words that crackle and spark in our consciousness, or at least my consciousness. Determining the identity and value of guys and girls is deeply felt, deeply personal — and sometimes deeply terrifying.

C O F F E E  S H O P

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We women have made progress in equal rights over the years, but does that progress mean we should ignore the important differences between men
and women?

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All of this is why I react so strongly and find my heart so softened by books that reawaken a sense of valuing femininity. Of course, I'm told this isn't a new idea, that it was born in God's heart at creation and has long been attested to by Scripture. I love hearing that girl-ness, aside from being just acceptable or functional or necessary, is something potentially awesome.

A disclaimer: As much as I believe men and women are different and equally, distinctly valuable, I don't believe we have nothing in common, or that certain traits (or jobs) should be off limits to guys or girls. Some things are just human, like the need for redemption, and the need for love and respect. All of us need a sense of esteem and value — and I think, especially these days, we could all use a little more love.