Don't Confuse Masculinity with Maturity
Men and women are both called to full adult maturity
Fairer Disputations recently published this excellent article by Elizabeth Grace Matthew, who argues that it’s a mistake to conflate masculinity with maturity. I thought I’d interact a little with this piece because it gets at some things I’ve been thinking about for a while, and I also have some disagreements with Matthew.
Matthew says:
But if we are going to get to the source of our current ills, we must first resist framing as the de-masculinization of men what is in fact the infantilization (or, de-adultification, if you will) of all Americans—male and female alike. The issue is not one of sex, but of human maturation—or the lack thereof.
An expectation of physical and psychological fragility dominates the mainstream vision of American childhood today. This does boys and men no favors. But it hurts young women too. Rather than seeking to cultivate a character of perseverance in the face of emotional, logistical, or intellectual difficulty, parents and teachers increasingly teach both boys and girls to expect convenience and to seek comfort.
Growing from a boy into a man is a universal male experience of physical maturation. A woman is quite simply an “adult human female,” and a man is equally simply an “adult human male.” Such a definition of manhood is morally neutral: war heroes are usually men, but so are violent criminals. What makes the former different from the latter is not his masculinity. It is his character.
Making both men and women more like small children is at the core of today’s veneration of fragility and marginalization of grit. Making men less masculine has nothing to do with it.
I heartily agree that it’s a big problem to use gender specific language to describe character issues applicable to men and women alike.
Where I disagree with Matthew is the idea that “masculinity is a neutral reality that is nothing more than being ‘an adult human male’”. I would argue that masculinity and femininity are not separable from maleness and femaleness (that’s part of the problem with modern gender theory), but that doesn’t mean they express nothing more than biological reality. I’m also not convinced of the “cosmic gender symbolism” of CS Lewis, beautifully and competently explicated by Anne Crawford here. I am willing to be persuaded otherwise, but to my mind, this is putting too much stock in pagan mythology; this way of thinking (men as representing the “cosmic divine” and women representing creation) attempts to baptize ancient pagan cosmology and then project it onto a faith whose own cosmology is explicitly anti-pagan. Much more could be said on this, but for now I’d like to throw out a first attempt at defining some terms. A man is an adult male human; a woman is an adult female human. Both are made in the image of God, and equally but differently display his character and creativity. If maleness and femaleness describe physical, biological reality, masculinity and femininity could be described as the outward manifestation—you could even say the outer glory—that reinforces and beautifies the biological reality.
As much as we have attempted to live as if it were the case, we do not live in a mechanistic world, where we are so many marbles bouncing off each other. In reality, everything exists because God made it a certain way, for a reason (its telos), and everything also has a certain glory to it. We are not individual nodes in the matrix, we are God’s image-bearers, set into interdependent, entangled networks of relationships and communities located in time and place. Nothing can just be in itself. Everything that is is surrounded by a kind of glory cloud as that being interacts with other beings and the world around it.
Without wanting to draw too close an analogy between God’s glory and anything human, I think the idea of glory helps us understand several different ways an inward goodness is displayed outwardly. For example, hygiene signals health. Deodorant, lipstick, and shampoo are products we use to amplify our “glory”: to signal that we are not rotting inside, that we have a certain measure of inner vitality and health. Similarly, manners could be seen as an outward display of inward character. The handshake supposedly began as a way to demonstrate an absence of weapons, and therefore a lack of hostile intent. The original meaning might be lost to us, but the meaning of the manners remains: a person willing to shake your hand is signaling that they do not harbor ill-intent or ill-will. When a man opens a door for a woman, that is the “glory” version—the outward display—of some reality (perhaps that, if called upon, he could and would defend her from a wild animal or malicious man).
Humans just will be signaling, whether or not the particular signal is warranted or helpful. If a society decides that because manners are not the substance itself they are therefore fake and even offensive, we should not be surprised when that society quickly produces a parallel system of pseudo-manners. As far as I can tell, this is what virtue signaling is. If you dismantle social norms, the result is not blissful free thought and action. The vacuum will simply invite a different system, in all likelihood one that is more strict and barbaric than the one it replaced. This is why I think conservatives use the wrong tactic when they criticize virtue signaling as such.
Similarly, I believe it’s incorrect to say that masculinity is neutral, that it describes nothing more than just the maleness of a person. Humans will have some kind of glory; we will outwardly signal who we are internally. We might do it well or badly, we might do it with hair dye or gym selfies or Instagram or by dressing like Laura Ingalls Wilder. But one way or another, we will demonstrate either who we are, or who we think we are (or who we think we should be). Ideally as a man or woman matures, the disparity between who they are and the way they display that being will become less and less until their glory is simply an overfilling of their very being.
It seems to me that there are good social reasons for the necessity not just of being oneself, but of demonstrating and displaying that self. If humans are to work together and trust each other, they must be legible to one another. Manners, hygiene, public piety, masculinity, and femininity are all different ways we become legible to one another so that together, we can build communities and civilizations.
Masculinity then, can be seen as the collection of aesthetics, social norms and manners, speech patterns, clothing, physical competence, and much more, that signals outwardly the soundness, the goodness of the inward male reality. (The converse, of course, being true for women and femininity). The biological reality of maleness informs, but does not contain, the full reality of masculinity. Masculinity is something, and essential to masculinity are the traits that signal the goodness of the individual man.
But we shouldn’t mistake the outer traits, the outer signaling, for the inner reality, and we shouldn’t over-realize sexual differences so that we are defining maturity as equivalent to either masculinity or femininity. I couldn’t agree more with Matthew’s statement that “using ‘masculine’ as though it is a synonym for ‘adult’ implicitly equates what is feminine with what is infantile.” In their attempt to regain lost ground and emphasize the reality and goodness of masculinity, many on the Right have done exactly this.
Ultimately I think at least two things are happening at once: there is a cultural push toward safety-ism, fragility, and conformity, and away from initiative, creativity, and agency, and there is a cultural squeamishness toward any acknowledgement of sexual differences. There is a broad infantilization of both men and women and also a push toward androgyny. That both phenomena are happening simultaneously make it exceedingly difficult to see clearly, or say true things about what exactly is going on.
Affirming and celebrating sexual difference is good, but it’s not enough. If we continue to infantilize women by equating human virtues with masculine virtues, we won’t move any closer to reality. Aaron Renn and others on the Right have recently pointed out that evangelical pastors and leaders have a tendency to castigate men from the stage, while largely ignoring women’s sin. As unhelpful as this is for men, this is also the perfect example of how women are subtly infantilized. Why isn’t women’s sin worth addressing? Women are often left wondering if they have any personal agency against their sin, or whether anyone even sees their sins.
Matthew says:
Women are capable of the same moral growth and accountability that those who praise the “masculine virtues” seek to reestablish as a norm for men. All adults, regardless of sex, should aspire to emotional and intellectual strength. What’s more, working to reestablish this norm for both men and women is a project in line with the best of our American heritage.
The mystery at the heart of the Christian faith is that the Bride of Christ is made up of the Sons of God. Male and female, if you have been baptized into Christ’s body, then you are both Christ’s bride, and a Son of God. There is complexity here, but no contradiction.
Men can learn from women how to be the Bride of Christ. Women can learn from men how to be Sons of God. But we should never act as if one sex, while called to image and display the glory of that particular spiritual reality in a particular way, therefore has a corner on all the traits associated with that spiritual reality. Even though women are called to image the spiritual reality of the Bride of Christ in a way men are not, it is not the case that an individual woman is only ever called to be in the posture of a loving and receptive bride. Even though men are called to image the spiritual reality of the Sons of God, that does not mean that an individual man is called to only ever be in a posture of initiative and dominion. All adults of both sexes are called to be both bride and son. Spiritual reality is refracted out through the particulars of each person, through their sex, their personality, their history, their spiritual gifts. Adult maturity has less to do with inhabiting some liminal, “neutral” androgynous reality, and more to do with working out our personhood along the lines God has called us to: as son, as bride, as mature adults.