Some years ago, Gilbert Meilaender wrote in First Things about the phenomenon of "gay marriage," by which he did not mean same-sex pseudogamy, but a sort of heterosexual pseudogamy wherein each of the partners to the marriage views the sex of the other as at best an interesting set of hardware for physical pleasure, but implying nothing about duties, strengths, weaknesses, or any of the particularities of one's being that mark a man as manly or a woman as womanly. Now even in the days, twenty years ago, when I supported same-sex pseudogamy, I was never so blind as to believe that masculinity and femininity were merely socially constructed; I wish I could say that I'd grown up on a farm and seen too many cows and bulls, but really I found the politically correct view tremendously naive, in every conceivable way.
Let me explain. Masculinity and femininity are like languages, each with a certain noticeable character, with delimiting features that are ineradicable from that character. As with a language, you never know what a culture will "say" with its men or women, or what any particular man or woman will "say" with the physical and mental makeup, not to mention the cultural expectations based upon those, which he or she is provided with. There is, literally, an infinite number of possible things to say; but there is also an infinite number of things that will not be said or that cannot conceivably be said. There will, for instance, never be a culture wherein the men all stay home and the women all fight. It isn't simply that such a culture would not last long, but that the men and women within it would find that situation as absurd as a sentence about the Jabberwock and the frumious bandersnatch. It would make "sense," as a theoretical possibility, so that one could imagine for instance a land of the Amazons, but outside of the imagination it would make as much sense as cutting off your breast to shoot arrows straighter.
Masculinity and femininity are for artists to reveal to us most clearly, not because it is hard to find them somewhere or other, but precisely because they are to be found everywhere, and in endless guises. We see it in the man who tells tales on himself, figuring as the hero-buffoon, or in the woman who remembers the grown child's favorite treat; I could go on in this vein, and be accused of sentimentality, but instead I should like to issue a challenge. Pick a moment at random from your day, keeping everything exactly the same, but changing the sex of everyone in the scene. "Suddenly I saw that all the materialists were hypocrites!" I cried, lunching with a priest-friend of mine, and two male students, roommates. "They can't live the philosophy they propound. And even to speak the (expletive deleted) sentence 'I see the dog' embroils them in metaphysical contradictions at every step!" After which I and the lunch companions proceeded to deny materialists the right, with logical consistency, to speak the words "I," "see," "the," and "dog." Change the sex of everyone in that scene -- sorry, the scene becomes only theoretically possible. Women don't behave in that way, thanks be to God.
Nor have I ever understood why one would want to ignore or tamp down the lively and lovely differences between men and women. It would be like dressing in drab prison uniforms and chopping the hair off at the neck, everyone dumpy and nondescript. What is the fun of that? Where, O Christians, is the gratitude to God who made us male and female? Might I ask, as a man -- of course, it is the sex I know from within -- what is my abstracting, hierarchy-making, systematizing mind for? Nothing? How about the baritone? Or the broad shoulders? Or the hand grip? I am long past the age when any man should think of fighting, but I can do more pushups, several times over, than is required of the typical female recruit for the army. Why is that? Why does my adrenal system kick on by a hair-trigger, but almost always under my control? Why is my skin thick? What is the point of all this elaborate beauty of men and women? Is it all only for decoration?
If not, what do I owe my wife? and not simply as one person to another person -- because no one meets "persons"; we only meet men and women. Sex is the first thing you notice about someone, and the last thing you forget; it is almost impossible to abstract from it some vague notion of "that one over there". What do I as a man owe her as a woman? What does she as a woman owe me as a man? How can I as a man affirm her in her womanhood, and how can she as a woman affirm me in my manhood? How can I make her a more virtuous woman, and how can she make me a more virtuous man? If we cannot answer such simple questions, asked and answered by all cultures everywhere, then we have what I'd call a drabbing-down of marriage, diluting it, so that pseudogamy becomes possible for men and men, or for women and women, because the categories of "man" and "woman" have become too vague for us. Or rather our souls have become too bleary to appreciate their bright beauty.
Saint Paul and Saint Peter had a few things to say about this, too, which I'll defer to the next post.
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