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Nothing
could seem more extraordinary to any age but our own than the need to
defend the significance of women’s embodiment—their physical being
as women. But then, it is
surely a disturbing indication of our times that the organizers of the
World Congress of Families should invite me to speak on “gender as a
natural construct.” Today,
furious debates rage over the meaning and status of gender, but those
who insist that we refer to gender rather than sex, favor gender
precisely because it is not a natural construct.
Gender in their view signals the socially constructed or
artificial quality of any allegedly natural differences between women
and men, and they impatiently dismiss the evocation of natural
differences as evidence of essentialism.
In this cultural universe, essentialism ranks as the cardinal sin
against women’s possibilities for personal development, fulfillment,
and freedom. And the
substitution of gender for sex on the part of those who defend the
natural difference between women and men dramatically, if
unintentionally, testifies to the pervasive influence of feminism upon
the late twentieth century, especially American and West-European
culture.
Not
long ago, we, like the members of virtually every other culture or
civilization, would have referred to women as members of the female sex.
Indeed one may plausibly argue that sexual difference has
constituted the cornerstone of the practical and symbolic life of all
cultures and civilizations. Throughout
history peoples have understood sexual difference as the guarantee and
custodian of reproduction and have honored it accordingly.
History confirms that men and women’s specific social,
political, and economic roles have varied widely across time and space.
But even when different societies have demonstrated surprising
variety in their allocation of male and female roles, most—if not
all—have persisted in emphasizing the significance of the difference
between women and men. Throughout
history, moralists, pundits, and other custodians of community wisdom
have insisted that nature has ordained women for one or another specific
role, frequently—although not always—in obedience and subservience
to the men of their families. Cross-culturally,
however, the constant is not so much the specific roles as the
difference between the roles of women and those of men.
This
distinction is central to any understanding of our contemporary
situation and especially to the broadside attack on women’s
“natural” roles within families. It has been child’s play for feminists and others to attack
the attitudes and customs that have restricted women to specific roles.
In our time, it has become possible for women to pursue countless
occupations from which they were excluded in previous generations, often
for good or apparently natural reasons.
Few today maintain that women cannot become doctors or lawyers or
computer technicians or even law enforcement officers.
Few believe that nature bars women from a broad range of
employments and activities. Playing
upon this growing acceptance of women’s rights and opportunities,
feminists and other radicals have tried to conflate the belief that
women can successfully pursue occupations and activities previously
reserved to men on the premise that there is no natural difference
between the sexes. The
sleight of hand is worthy of an accomplished magician, and like the best
feats of a Houdini, it has successfully displaced public attention from
what is really happening.
During
recent decades, feminism has been able to capitalize on the growing
sense in the developed countries that women should enjoy many, if not
all, of the same opportunities as men, especially with respect to
education and employment. Feminists,
however, also demand that women enjoy sexual equality with men, by which
they apparently mean that women must be liberated from the consequences
of their bodies, notably the ability to bear children.
Indeed, much feminist rhetoric makes little distinction between
pregnancy and rape: Both constitute a brutal invasion of a woman’s
body. For if
women’s equality with men requires that they be able to do everything
that men do, it follows that their power and success in the world must
not be compromised by a special tie to children and the family.
In this respect, feminists have declared war on the notion of
sexual difference itself. For
they know that the acknowledgment that men and women differ opens the
possibility that each sex may have distinct responsibilities.
In
a world in which science sends people to Mars and clones sheep, many are
tempted to view sexual difference as a relic of the dark ages—just
another remnant of women’s enforced subordination to children and men.
Those, notably radical feminists, who most stridently rebel
against the tyranny of sexual difference correctly recognize it as one
of the few remaining signs of divine and natural authority, and they are
quick to present it as another instance of the oppression under which
women have traditionally suffered. Many others, who do not consider
themselves radical, take a more agnostic or laissez-faire
attitude, and assume that tolerance requires that others be allowed to
do as they please. Such
people may well adhere to traditional values themselves, but,
increasingly, they feel that they have no right to judge the values of
others who find themselves in different situations.
These attitudes merit a moment’s attention, if only because
they challenge those of us who defend the nuclear family grounded in
heterosexual marriage to reflect upon the precisely what we hope to
defend.
Recent
history should, if nothing else, have
taught us that the prospects for simply restoring the past are not good.
Few today—except perhaps those born since 1980—fail to
recognize that the twentieth century has brought a whirlwind of changes.
Yet even those who have been living through this constellation of
changes may not grasp their magnitude, which arguably has catapulted
this century further from any of its predecessors than any of them moved
beyond its predecessors. By
almost any quantitative measure, this century has doubled the totals of
all of the others combined: population, speed of travel, material
production, technological capabilities.
Today
there are three times as many human beings on the globe at the
century’s close than at its start.
In 1900, the majority of the world’s population lived on the
land and worked at producing food, usually with hand tools that had
changed little for centuries. Only in Britain did more than half the
population live in cities; by 2000, more than half of the globe’s
population probably will. During
the same period, human life expectancy has risen from forty-five to
seventy-five years, and the risk of dying in childbirth is at least
forty times less than a mere fifty years ago.
This increase of population has more to do with the medical
progress against death than a dramatic increase in births, although in
parts of the world live births have increased.
Yet the fears of a population explosion are unwarranted because
birth rates in the most highly developed countries continue to decline
and because each year brings new viruses and epidemics that resist
existing drugs.
These
changes have included a vast uprooting of peoples from their traditional
communities, and today something between ten and thirty percent of the
world’s population has fallen into an underclass that has “lost
touch with the labour market, with the political community, and with
social participation more generally.”[1] The mushrooming global
economy, which is binding all peoples more tightly together, can grow
with declining numbers of workers, and its very material success may
produce growing social, political, and moral disfranchisement.
More ominous yet, the very tendencies that are relegating the
poorest among us to the scrap heap of crime, drugs, disease, and early
death are seducing the wealthiest into the moral bankruptcy that
inexorably derives from the repudiation of responsibility for others.
In
the most highly developed nations, secularism has besieged traditional
belief in any form of divine or natural authority, thereby undermining
the very notion that any authority may legitimately limit the freedom of
individuals. Also within
the developed nations and, more intensely, beyond their borders,
religious fundamentalism has been strengthening its hold upon peoples
who vehemently reject what they view as the social and cultural
corruption of modernity. In
different ways and at different rates, both secularism and
fundamentalism have contributed to what Pope John Paul II has designated
the culture of death—a culture that holds human life cheaper and
cheaper until it drains it of all intrinsic value, a culture that
transforms people into objects or even obstacles. This
is not a self-portrait that appeals to the affluent denizens of the
developed world, who reject the very notion of the culture of death, and
even more the view of themselves as its purveyors.
Caught up in a world overflowing with commodities and armed with
a science that promises to extend and even create human life, they find
it easy to take their unprecedented material prosperity as the standard
for human fulfillment.
Amidst
this kaleidoscope of changes, one may overshadow all of the others, at
least with respect to the persistence of families and the quality of our
culture, which depends upon their vitality.
In contrast to every other society known to human history (with
the possible exception of Soviet Russia in the early 1920s),
contemporary American society, seconded in varying degrees by other
parts of the world, has declared the sexuality of nubile women a matter
of indifference. Primary
responsibility for this unprecedented development belongs to the sexual
revolution of the 1960s and 1970s, although feminists and gay and
lesbian activists have enthusiastically promoted it.
The advocates of this revolution may not have foreseen that its
primary beneficiaries would be men, but their campaign to secure the
sexual freedom of women has inescapably liberated men from
responsibility to the women whom they impregnate, thereby, with the snap
of the fingers, undoing the work of millennia.
From the days of the Old Testament until our own, societies had
waged a continuing struggle to hold men accountable for the women whom
they impregnated and the children they fathered.
The sexual freedom of women has made a mockery of those efforts
and is effectively abandoning men to their own (frequently destructive
and self-destructive) devices.
In
this climate, sexual relations have shed even the pretense of communion
or covenant, becoming nothing more than the gratification of individual
desire, and sexual identities have become nothing more than the
temporary products of choice or construction.
Many, perhaps most, of those who embrace the tenets of radical
sexual liberation find any notion of a sexual nature—a sexuality
grounded in nature—offensive, or at least unacceptably constraining.
To be endowed from birth with a sexually specific nature, they
insist, is the equivalent of imprisonment, especially if that nature
includes the ability to bear children and the predisposition to form
binding attachments to them. It
seems more than likely that the determination to free sexual pleasure
from the possibility of reproduction, whether by artificial birth
control or abortion, had an effect exactly opposite to the one intended.
The intention had been to protect and extend the pursuit of
sexual pleasure, frequently with the professed intent of fostering
intimacy between spouses. The
result, however, seems to have been a growing tendency to objectify
sexual partners, viewed as temporary sources of gratification.
When the possibility that the woman may become pregnant—the
sign of her unique nature as a woman—is excluded from consideration,
an essential aspect of the intimacy between the sexes is lost.
Cultures
of all times and places abound with local versions of “the war between
the sexes,” and the unreflective might be tempted to take them as
evidence that the differences that arise from the specific physical
embodiment of women and men necessarily lead to antagonism between them.
In fact, as often as not, evocations of the antagonism between
the sexes are humorous, and they focus upon the ways in which sexual
difference may foil understanding of the other: “It’s a guy thing”
or “It’s a girl thing.” But beneath the sense of playful jockeying
for position lies the deeper recognition that the difference that
divides is the difference that cements women and men into the covenant
of marital love and the shared commitment to the children that result
from it.
The
rebellion against the idea that women are, in an essential aspect of
their natures, women and not men strikes at the very foundation of
civilized society and portends tragic consequences.
We all know that the cost to children is high, sometimes
disastrously so. We may,
however, be slower to recognize that the recognition and union of sexual
difference in marriage constitutes the cornerstone of freedom.
In this regard, the words of Pope John Paul II in On
the Dignity and Vocation of Women, merit attention: “both
man and woman are human beings to an equal degree, both are created
in God’s image”.
Neither, however, can exist alone, but only “as a ‘unity of
the two,’ and therefore in
relation to another human person.” For both women and men,
“being a person in the image and likeness of God also involves existing
in a relationship, in relation to the other ‘I’”.
Our
century has included significant changes in the status and opportunities
of women, and most of them have been long overdue.
Nowhere is it written that men and women’s specific natures
entitle men to beat, enslave, exploit, or otherwise abuse women.
Our understanding of women’s talents and capabilities has
changed radically during the past century, as has our understanding of
the employments for which women are suited.
Today we confront a dangerous polarization that pits
traditionalists, who condemn all change in women’s situation, against
radicals, who insist that the very notion of a distinct female nature is
a repressive fiction. The worst consequence of this confrontation is that it has
drowned out the voices of those who regard most of the changes in
women’s situation as beneficial while continuing to accept the
significance of women’s embodied being with the unique capacity to
bear and nurture new life.
Endnotes
[1] The
Oxford History of the Twentieth Century, ed. Michael Howard
and WM. Roger Lewis (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 337.
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