The comment thread to the previous post has brought up some interesting points that I’ve been pondering. La Lubu thinks I’m ceding to much to nature and should pay more attention to the role of nurture.

This reminds me of a realization I came to in college in the middle of one of these nature/nurture debates. I thought, basically I have a choice between saying that male chauvinism is true, and women are such weaklings that the old patriarchal order was correct, or women are so weak-minded that men invented the idea of female inferiority out of whole cloth, and somehow, nearly uniformly the world over, persuaded women to believe untrue things about themselves. I wasn’t sure which was actually worse. Nowadays I think it’s more complicated than that, but that’s also why saying “It’s all just culture!” doesn’t particularly reassure me.

Progressive Christian made a similar point when he conceded the idea that probably modern technology makes sexual equality possible, but hey, nature is full of nasty things like germs and predatory animals, so who wants to be a slave to it anyway? He has a point, but I like to think that sexual equality is something more profound to our selves and our identities than antibiotics or indoor plumbing. Like I said, it just doesn’t seem real if it all depends on technology.

However, I do see how changes in our society, which are not strictly technological, may have made certain gender institutions obselete. Job segregation, for instance. When I think about how that must have formed, I think the most important point is actually how early people used to start their life’s work. Nowadays we take 18 years or so to decide what we want to be when we grow up, but before the industrial era most people started their “careers” while still children. So they tended to have their jobs selected for them by factors that were evident from birth, such as their sex and what their parents did.

In such a system, it’s easy to see how even small differences between the sexes could lead to the total gendering of jobs. If male hunters, for instance, take home an average of 5% more game than female, that means that there are plenty of great female hunters and bad male ones. But the group as a whole is going to thrive more in the long run if men do all the hunting than if women do it or if they divvy it up equally. Hence that most ancient of sex-role divisions, male hunting and female gathering.

But I don’t think that job segregation is really the essence of male chauvinism. As I said in my rundown of gender theories here, the whole yin/yang theory of gender complementarity is oppressive to individuals who don’t fit the scheme, but it doesn’t inherently place one gender beneath the other. The problem, as Margaret Mead pointed out, is that while different cultures divide the labor in different ways, whatever men are doing always seems to be regarded as more important and prestigious than what women are doing.

That’s the main point I was trying to make in the last post: we should be cautious about accepting what our society values as important or worthwhile things to do, because that value system very likely favors men. When I look at the white-collar work world, for instance, I see a system that basically wants people to be sexless worker bees, who don’t have personal attachments that interfere with their work. And because men don’t get pregnant, I think it’s easier for them to pretend to be that. I don’t think that’s an entirely natural mode to men either, as CEOs who find themselves with divorced wives and estranged children tend to find out. But men have that little edge — maybe just the little 5% edge that I gave in my hunting example — but in a highly competitive environment, that’s enough.

Of course, what I’m bringing up here is a popular conservative lament: our society doesn’t value childbearing, so women feel they have to be like men! That’s true, although I would add a couple of important caveats. One, I feel that the male role in our society is disordered as well as the female, in the way it removes a man from his family to the degree it does, so we shouldn’t act like restoring the traditional wife/mother role is going to take care of things. I like to say that the breakdown of the family didn’t start when women started working outside the home — it started when men did!

I think it’s also worth pointing out that societies that highly valued childbearing — such as in the Old Testament of the Bible — also weren’t geat shakes for women. I believe that the reason for this is that when you value having a great quantity of children, women are at an even more obvious biological disadvantage than if you value having no children. That is why clans in those societies want as many of their own sons and as many of other people’s daughters as possible.

This whole thing reminds me of what that Episcopal priest said: the kingdom of the world values you for what you do, while the kingdom of heaven values you for what you are. And that, I think, is at the root of this whole problem. If you’re going to evaluate people by their comparative achievements, women are going to be found wanting a lot of the time. Our big natural gendered ability is getting pregnant, but that’s not exactly an “achievement”, and there’s no way to measure it against anything men can do since they have no remote equivalent. You can keep score of the number of children you have, the amount of money you make, the nations you conquer, and all kinds of things, but how can you score pregnancy? Like the kingdom of heaven itself, it defies scorekeeping. It just is.

Maybe that is where the answer to this dilemma really lies.

A Catholic blogger recently wrote an anti-contraception post, which led a commenter to accuse him of thinking women are “reproductive cattle.” Now, since Mr. Eric Williams is new to me I have no idea of what his opinion of women actually is, and as readers know, I’m not Catholic, have no problem with birth control and am ambivalent about abortion. Still, there’s something about the commenter’s attitude, which I’ve encountered a lot from various people, that irritates me. It’s this idea that women NEED these modern medical technologies in order to be something other than livestock. Yeah yeah, in our society people have a right to avail themselves of technologies that are available, but that’s not really a gendered right. The obvious reason why so many women are so terrified of losing their right to abortion is that they’re afraid their equality with men will go with it.

But what does this say about women’s inherent worth? It makes it seem like our equality is an artifice, make-believe almost, the way high heels make us seem like we’re as tall as men without actually being so. That if we were stranded on an island like the Bounty mutineers and had to build a society from scratch without our weapons of self-determination, we’d just have to throw up our hands and accept male rule.

This actually is another reason why the theology of nature interests me: for those of us interested in women’s equality, nature often seems like the enemy. There’s a faction of eco-pagan feminists out there, but in the more conventional career-oriented feminism in which I’ve lived, there’s this unspoken feeling that nature screwed us. It made us smaller and weaker than men, it makes us get pregnant and nurse, and if it were up to nature we’d do nothing else all our adult lives. Little wonder, I suppose, that worshipping God as Creator has always been the hardest part for me.

It’s certainly true that when I look at societies that are closer to nature than we are, it’s clear how gender roles get formed in certain ways. I was thinking about this just last Saturday when I went with some church folks to help out at a Habitat for Humanity site. For much of the day, we filled in various holes and depressions around the lot with dirt. Whenever we did this, I noticed an entirely spontaneous gender division of labor developed: the men shoveled and hauled the dirt, the women spread it and tamped it down. I tried a bit of shoveling myself, but without the male shoulders I wore out quickly. That isn’t much in itself, but I can imagine how day after day, task after task, that sort of experience would yield a somewhat different attitude towards gender than working in an office.

Still, there’s a long way between saying that the sexes are naturally better suited to certain roles, and having one actually dominate the other. One encouraging datum for nature’s side of things is that while going back to pre-industrial agrarian societies finds the sexes a lot more stratified, going even farther back to hunter-gatherer societies finds the genders rather more equal. Not perfectly so, but it does imply that some “traditional” values are themselves products of human artifice.

I don’t mean to say that it should make no difference to women (and men) if medical technologies are available or not. Obviously, there are a lot of modern technologies that people need and depend on. It just bothers me how many women seem to have wrapped their identity and value around abilities that are basically external to them. I think that any concept that values women for who we are would have to account for what we naturally cannot do, as well as what we can.

One more point that came up in the cult-of-Eros discussion was about the balance between love owed to intimates and love owed to humanity in general. Alex Tsai put it well:

Would a simplistic reading of this account discard the moral complexities of the “order of beneficence”? (Stephen Post used that term in a paper he wrote entitled “Love and the Order of Beneficence”, published in I-Forget-Which-Obscure-Journal.) We tend to care more about our husbands and wives more than our college roommates, and we tend to care more about our drinking buddies more than the random bum on the street. Christ’s preaching of love for enemies was (and is) a radical teaching — a radical expansion of love from mere blood ties and friendships to include “neighbor” (i.e., everyone). But does it set aside as unworthy the concentric spheres of love that we have all been culturally conditioned to accept?

I don’t know for sure, but my own feeling is that it doesn’t. Or more precisely, it doesn’t regard them as unworthy but it does regard them as temporary. Jesus said there is no marriage in heaven, but that didn’t stop him from opining on marital morality on earth; clearly God is interested in the married state even though it is not destined to last forever. If you follow Yoder’s take on the household instructions in the Epistles, Christians are to be subject to those basic structures but wear them lightly, as it were, because the old world is passing away.

Another point that might be relevant here is another theory I learned about in my Family Sociology class, about the “feminization of love.” A couple of researchers who studied married couples noticed that men and women tended to have somewhat different ideas about how to show your love for someone: men lean toward “instrumental help” (doing things for people, in other words), while women tend toward “verbal self-disclosure” (talking about intimate matters). The authors argued that society in general thinks of love more in the “female” terms of emotive intimacy, which means women are regarded as being better at love, which has negative consequences for both sexes.

Now, I’m sure sociologists and psychologists and whatnot can argue about whether this is an innate difference between the sexes or not, but another thing that strikes me about the two forms of love is this: only one of them can really be scaled up successfully. That is, emotional intimacy is necessarily limited to a close group, while instrumental help can be raised to a mass level. That is probably why the love that Jesus talked about most of the time was of the “male” variety — his famous love-your-neighbor example of the Good Samaritan, for instance.

So it seems likely to me that the feminization of love happened along with the privatization of love that I described before, where love belongs to the family but social Darwinism reigns outside it. Historically there was a tendency to err the other way — to understand intimate relations like marriage entirely instrumentally, in terms of reproduction and what it gains the family or tribe, and ignore people’s emotions. So while I’ve been speaking in broad strokes here in critiquing society’s attitudes toward love, I do think a balance is necessary.

Finally (and this is the last I’ll say on this subject — then back to Yoder) Lee and Christopher both pointed out that the divide between the classic “three loves” — eros, agape and philia — may not be as tidy as all that. Dwight, in fact, made the same point recently in an unrelated post. That’s an interesting point, and it’s also worth pointing out that the classic Greek definition of Eros was “desiring love,” which may or may not mean sexually desiring.

Still, when it comes to human love, sex is a pretty clear dividing point: either you’re going to have it, or you aren’t. And of course while sex may express love, it is also a thing unto itself, the biological process by which human beings reproduce. As such, I understand why heterosexual unions have a special place in society, and however much celibacy or gay unions may be accepted, they probably always will.

So my proposition here isn’t so much that romantic love should be melted away in some undifferentiated good will toward humanity, but that it should be put in its place. It is not the whole of love or the main guiding force in human relationships; it exists within an “order of beneficence” and within a larger realm of love of which it is but one manifestation.

In the comments to my last post, both Lee and Christopher suggested that perhaps the problem isn’t that people worship Eros so much as they worship their own self-fulfillment, which they sometimes aim to achieve through relationships. This is a good point, and in fact not long after I wrote that post I saw this article (via Eve) by a Unitarian about how consumerism plays a role in this:

During the go-go economic years of the 1980s and 1990s, when market economies triumphed over socialist economies all over the world, the consumer culture captured the hearts of Americans in new ways. To be married well in the consumer era meant to make sure that one’s needs were being met and that one’s options were always open. The emergence of this consumer ethic of relationships was the culmination of the spirit of individualism that has been growing gradually for more than a century. Mid–twentieth-century marriage, which featured high expectations for personal satisfaction, mutated into consumer marriage, with the same high psychological expectations but now spiced with a sense of entitlement and impermanence. (Lizabeth Cohen’s book, A Consumers’ Republic, documents how the consumer mentality and metaphor captured other American institutions during the last third of the twentieth century.)

While the consumer attitude toward marriage is all around, like global warming, we can detect it most readily when we are bothered by something in our mate or our marriage, and hear ourselves thinking or saying things like, “What am I getting out of this marriage, anyway?” or “I deserve better!” or “What’s in this for me?” Not that these thoughts are altogether inappropriate; if your spouse is having an affair or hitting you, then focusing on self-interest is quite appropriate. But when your mate is not the lover you had hoped for, or nags you more than you want, or is not emotionally expressive enough for you, then consumer thinking suggests that you have not cut the best possible bargain in marrying this person. As one of my therapy clients recently put it, “This is not the deal I thought I was signing up for.” Therapists now use the term “deal breaker” to describe reasons for divorce, as in asking a client, “Is this a deal breaker for you?”

It’s become an axiom among social conservatives that the sexual revolution “won,” and yet the actual sexual revolutionaries I know feel very much like they lost. And the article describes well the reason: love’s liberation from religion and tradition mostly just left it vulnerable to being snatched by consumerism. Neither the True Love nor the Free Love ideals that I described earlier have really come to fruition.

This probably doesn’t seem like a very controversial point because anti-consumerism is probably the most unifying issue in this neck of the blogosphere. Yet I do think that the consumer mentality sneaks into mating in ways that people may not notice. I’ve observed, for instance, that while some people take marital vows about sickness and health and so on very seriously, this leads them to choose a mate rather the way I’d choose a car: since I can’t afford to buy a new one very often, I need one that’ll need as few repairs as possible. Which brings me to a remark at Evangelical Outpost about National Public Radio, of all things:

Listening to NPR is like dating a charming and beautiful woman that has a semi-serious personality disorder; you’re enchanted by her yet know you can’t commit to someone so troubled.

Yep, emotionally troubled women are fine to fool around with, but heaven forbid you should actually marry one. Why, that could be hard work!

I also noticed, coming from the other side of the political spectrum, that in my last post La Lubu said that we need to be less individualist and more communitarian and then lamented how Christian tradition doesn’t give women enough agency. I’ve observed that a lot of leftists don’t seem to realize that community and personal agency, to some degree, have to be traded off. I realize that women have generally borne the expectation of Christian obedience more heavily than men, but is the problem that women don’t have enough agency, or that men are allowed to be little gods of their domains?

Another thing that article got me thinking about was how, in our society, we have an unprecedented ability to simply avoid people we don’t want to deal with. So when we break up with a lover or a spouse, or fall out with a family member or friend, or even just drift away from people, you can usually just “erase” the relationship, and go on as if it had never happened.

Yet perhaps that is really an illusion. One way of reading the Gospel is this: all people are God’s children, he loves them as well as you, and they’re not going away. So even if you avoid touching them, talking to them or even thinking about them in this life, at the end of days they’ll get in your face and say things like, “I was hungry, and you gave me no food …” And if you’re lucky, you’ll spend forever in the New Jerusalem with them. So maybe Jesus’ critique of us is not that we fail to form permanent relationships but that we fail to realize that we’re already in them.

When I think of it that way it puts a rather different cast on all my relations to others, from a random Bangladeshi peasant to my boyfriend in high school. How would dating and marriage be different if you realized that you could never, in the cosmic sense, break up? That even if someone abuses or seduces you, you can’t make them disappear?

There’s more I could say about free will, but frankly I’m getting tired of the subject, so I’ll give it a rest. But before I move back to book blogging I wanted to address something that came up in the comments to this post. Christopher said that the gay-marriage argument has gotten so out of hand because “we’ve made an idol of sexuality in our culture, and a lot of the blame falls on the Church and our appointed leaders.” To which some more conservative commenters answered that it’s gay-marriage advocates who’ve made sex into an idol, because they’ve made a change in the traditional teaching such a church-splitting issue.

Well, here’s my position: I think they’re both right. I think that both the “traditional family values” people and their sexual-revolutionary opponents have made an idol of Eros, but they’ve done it in different ways.

As I’ve said before, the initial sex-related cult the church had to deal with was the cult of family. Celibacy, Hauerwas has pointed out, was not just a control of fleshly urges but a statement of trust in God and the Church, because in those pre-Social Security days not having children was taking a major risk with your future. However, as time wore on and the Second Coming failed to happen, the need to propagate once again reasserted itself. There was, of course, always a place for celibate communities in the Church, but their original meaning was increasingly lost. Once the Church became its own political hierarchy, powerful families placed their children in it regardless of whether they felt a calling; and monastic communities became convenient places to dump undesirables such as old mistresses, unmarriageable offspring and illegitimate children. So when the Reformation came along, one of the few things that nearly all the new churches had in common was their lack of celibate roles.

But in the modern era the urgent need to reproduce has receded and a new god has appeared, that of romantic love. As I mentioned before, it’s only in the last century or so that this became a birthright, and became the main theme of song and story. And part of the mythology of True Love was that following it would lead you naturally to a Christian-approved relationship, i.e. lifelong monogamous heterosexual marriage. If it doesn’t lead to that, it must not be True Love.

Of course, this has the little problem of not really being true. Not only does it underestimate the difficulties of marriage, it also underestimates the extent to which love in illicit relationships, such as homosexual or adulterous ones, can actually resemble married love. I think that’s why so many conservative Christians have argued so strenuously that gay love is inherently hugely different from straight love, to the point of using bogus statistics to paint gay people as perenially promiscuous and self-destructive, and producing warped children.

The more sophisticated conservatives out there know that you can’t make a real argument for the sinfulness of homosexuality without challenging these blithe assumptions about romantic love. Eve Tushnet, for instance, remarked:

He spoke movingly about 50-year-long loving homosexual relationships that have lasted through thick and thin. I found myself wondering whether Guerrerro really thinks that nobody is ever really in love with his mistress. IOW “but they love each other” is not really the end of the argument, you know?

My own problem with the cult of Eros isn’t really that it allows non-traditional relationships. It’s that it hogs all of love to itself. When I read about the attributes of marriage — love, sharing, self-giving, commitment, duty — I often think to myself, “But aren’t Christians supposed to do that with everybody?” Especially since I’ve been immersed in Anabaptist ecclesiology lately, I can’t help noticing that describing those as special features of marriage tacitly assumes that no other relationships have them.

Back in my college Family Sociology course, one point we discussed was how in the industrial era, the family came to be viewed as a “haven in a heartless world.” Previously most families had doubled as economic units, running the family farm or the family shop. But from the 19th century onward the husband would go out into the competitive, impersonal capitalist machine and then want to come back to a haven of love and peace overseen by a domestic angel of a wife. Interestingly, this view continued in a much more recent study of female abortion activists. Many pro-life women felt they were defending nurturant motherhood against a ruthless achievement culture — the very culture pro-choice women usually wanted the right to participate in.

But both those viewpoints tacitly accept the “heartless world.” Surely Christians should not do that. The call to love neighbor and enemy alike was a call to love beyond the bounds of family. Isn’t Jesus supposed to transform the cruel world, and not just create a hideout from it?

This is what I think the sexual revolution, in its muddle-headed way, was saying. For one, it pointed out that love doesn’t really follow those neat socially approved pathways that the mythology would have you believe. More to the point, it criticized the clannishness and selfishness that monogamy had come to defend, by withholding the highest love for your romantic partner. Therefore, it followed the logic of the age that a social-justice movement was also a sexual-promiscuity movement.

But the sexual revolution failed partly because it was still beholden to the cult of Eros. It still held to the old belief that wherever True Love leads you must be all right. And it also accepted the feminine, emotive and sexual definition of love that had emerged in the Victorian era. So the flower children tried to haul into the public sphere a love that by definition fit only in the private realm, and liberally spread it all over.

So the reason I can’t get on the “gay marriage is a social-justice issue” bandwagon is that it accepts pretty much unquestioningly the idea that the most just way to decide who should marry whom is to let Eros sort it out. And in my admittedly rather jaded experience, Eros isn’t particularly just. While Jesus preached that the last shall be first, sexual attraction has a way of advantaging the already advantaged: the young, beautiful, healthy, successful etc. I mean, obviously that doesn’t apply to every single person, but if you look at the averages it’s impossible to miss the trend. There’s a reason why arrogant high-school jocks tend to get laid early, while my good, Christian, but extremely geeky friend John couldn’t get a girlfriend until he was 36.

So I tend to agree with the conservative Catholic faction that out erotic desires are tainted with sin, even if they are not inherently bad. What I’m less in agreement about is where sin is measured by how far it strays from reproduction. In fact, during our discussion about how the Darwinian struggle for survival compels sin, I recalled that natural selection actually favors not the survival of a particular organism, but of its gene pool. The whole family-values thing always smelled a bit too much like the old Darwinian imperative in the guise of sanctity.

For that reason, I don’t think that it helps to ridicule celibacy as warped. It’s worth remembering that the high esteem for celibates in the early church inverted the older order in which celibates were mostly society’s losers. (Think of Solomon and his gazillion wives, and the lame beggars who were left alone.) I have to admit I take this somewhat personally because I’m an unmarried 33-year-old, and I may never marry even though I’m “allowed” to. What does it mean that Eros has passed me by?

I don’t really know how to resolve all this. But maybe rather than trying to figure whether marrieds are better than celibates or vice versa, we should consider that both of them are shadows of what is to come. One of the more interesting articles I’ve read about celibacy was one by a Byzantine monk explaining that in Eastern Christianity all believers are called to celibacy — not as a physical thing so much as an attitude:

Celibacy in Eastern Christianity is viewed primarily as a form of asceticism. Asceticism means, in essence, to live at the same time on earth and in heaven. It means to understand that everything we see in this life, everything we touch, taste, think, and feel, is in some way a revelation of the life to come. This means far more than an understanding that this life will come to an end and be replaced by another one. It means that the life we live right now and the life we will live for eternity are in some mysterious way one and the same. …

For an ascetic, all human relationships—even the sexual act itself—reveal divine love. Hidden beneath the surface of all smaller loves lies the immeasurable abyss of God’s love. The ascetic realizes that what other people give him by way of love finds its true and deeper meaning in the One who is the source of all love. Celibacy is the practical recognition of the reality that lies behind the image, of the prototype behind the icon. Human love without celibacy is at best mere sentiment, at worst a form of idolatry. …

The tragedy of love and death can only be overcome by the communion of humanity and divinity in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Only when two become three, when a couple becomes a trinity, the third being God, only then can the triumph of death be trampled down in the resurrection.