By ARTHUR HIPPLER
(Editor’s Note: Arthur Hippler is chairman of the religion department and teaches religion in the Upper School at Providence Academy, Plymouth, Minn.)
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The language we use is a sign of how clear or how confused we are about reality. The more well-read and socially conscious of our young people will ask about “gender roles” and “gender norms.” They disparage the traditional outlook on sexual differences as a “social construct” that is the result of “religion” or worse “patriarchy.” More impressively, even young people who are sympathetic to the reality of sexual differences use the same terms. They do not realize that their very language they use has decided the debate before it starts.
When I was a child, there were no wetlands — only swamps. Likewise, there were no rainforests — only jungles. Conservationists changed the names of these things because they wanted to change public opinion about them. Who wants to save the swamp? Who wants to save the jungle? Likewise, “gender,” “role,” and “norm” reflect intentional changes in the language to change attitudes.
In the past, societies inculcated the respective duties or tasks of men and women, especially as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers. If gender is a cultural construct, all these duties no longer have a natural basis — they are created. Hence, our modern age borrows from the language of theatre to describe the roles of spouses and parents. No actor is naturally related to his role — he may play many characters, good or bad, young or old. Similarly, men and women are not seen as living out natural differences, but interpreting, even inventing, a culturally derived script.
Norm is a term borrowed from the realm of sociology. Norms are standards derived primarily from common practice. They are not prescriptive, establishing what people ought to do, but descriptive, stating what in fact most people choose to do. Hence, normal is not synonym for natural; indeed, cultures may create all manner of practices contrary to nature. And certainly, normal is not a synonym for moral, unless one believes that morality is mere opinion, free from a natural basis. Together, gender, role, and norm collectively undermine any natural basis for family life as various arrangements contrary to nature are considered equally choice-worthy.
When Alexis de Tocqueville visited America in the 1830s, he was impressed at the way that Americans aimed at equality between the sexes while appreciating their differences. On the contrary, “There are people in Europe who, confounding together the different characteristics of the sexes, would make of man and woman beings not only equal but alike. They would give to both the same functions, impose on both the same duties, and grant to both the same rights; they would mix them in all things — their occupations, their pleasures, their business. It may readily be conceived, that by thus attempting to make one sex equal to the other, both are degraded; and from so preposterous a medley of the works of nature nothing could ever result but weak men and disorderly women” (Democracy in America, book II, volume iii, chapter 12).
Times have changed. Especially among the educated, the quest for equality, if not a quest for sameness, is certainly a quest for “gender fluidity,” of making one’s own meaning about one’s own sexual identity in ways that others are then compelled to respect.
Men and women, however, even in our affluent high-tech society, still have differentiated expectations of each other. When I ask teenage girls, “Picture your ideal man — is he taller than you, your height, or shorter than you?” — unanimously, the answer is “taller.”
Why? After some embarrassed giggles and confusion, they come to the answer, “He should protect you.” “Why not get a gun or some martial arts training and protect him?” I ask. They merely laugh at the suggestion. I once asked girls, “Picture yourself ten years from now, upstairs in the bedroom with your husband getting ready to sleep, and now you hear a sound like someone breaking in downstairs. He turns to you and says, ‘Would you check that out dear?’ What would you say?” A girl raised her hand and said, crisply and evenly, “I would slap him.”
One finds this expectation at the beginning of Homer’s Odyssey, as Penelope is helpless in protecting her home against a swarm of suitors who are consuming her estate. The solution to Penelope’s plight is the return of her husband. Modern society often veils the dependence of women upon masculine strength, but even with the attempts to “gender norm” the tasks of police officer, firefighter, and soldier, these jobs are overwhelming taken on by men.
If men have the idea that there are tasks which are incumbent upon them as husbands and fathers, they have a standard to keep which fulfills them as men. It is noble to provide and protect the woman one loves, and the children which come from that love. But if men have no goals besides “affirming lifestyles” or “mutual empowerment” or some other such educated construct, they flounder.
Increasingly, as Helen Smith argues in Men on Strike and Kay Hymowitz says in Manning up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys, many young men today simply detach from maturing into family life and caring for the larger community (which family life often helps to bring about).
However irrational the traditional understanding of the sexes may seem, the strength of tradition is that we do not have to reinvent the wheel for our social arrangements. That does not mean that we accept traditions uncritically. But it does mean that we must consider changing them with great reluctance, and only with the conviction that the goods gained will be greater than the attendant evils.
The sexual revolution was carried out with none of these reservations. Indeed, its most vocal proponents are not really enemies of tradition, but enemies of nature. It would be truly a sad and tragic thing that we discover the natural basis of sexual differences after the disintegration of family simply passes the point of no return.
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