Thoughts on Gender, Part III

(To make sense of this, be sure to read parts one and two first.)

I’m not sure how to transition here from female vulnerability to male vulnerability.  Part of the trouble is that up till now I have been concerned with physical differences, and now I need to turn to social norms.

Social norms are always difficult to deal with, not the least because they tend to be amorphous and variable.  However, again simply based on my recent life, let me offer two norms in our society: malefold ask out femalefolk; malefolk propose to femalefolk.  I propose merely that this is the way, by and large, that things are done – not the way things have to be done or should be done.

Now I not something interesting: asking another person to go on a date with or to marry you puts you in a position of vulnerability.  (This assertion assumes that the other person is reasonably free to answer in the negative.  If refusal is not a viable option, this, of course, changes the power dynamic.)  In asking a woman out, a man says, “See?  I am an interesting person.  Please consider investing some time in me.”  Rejection can’t help but be personal – it is, in a small way a rejection of his person.  A marriage proposal all the more so.  I heard a young man describe his proposal as offering “everything” of himself and, on one knee, waiting to find out if it was enough. 

(Incidentally, this scenario illustrates why I dislike the pre-engagement decision that “we should get engaged.”  It’s like showing someone his Christmas gift and proceeding to wrap it anyway.  You don’t half-give gifts or commitments.  Either you are committed to marrying each other (engaged) or you are discerning (dating).  If you are both done discerning,  you need to be either engaged or broken up.)

This scenario (before my parenthetical aside) assumes that the man is seeking an actual relationship and not just a hook-up.  A relationship says, “I want to give myself to you.”  A hook-up says, “You will be fun for me.”  It is also complicated by the idea of the “waiting woman” – a common complaint that women are trapped sitting around waiting desperately to get asked out.  Doesn’t this change the dynamic?  Only if we assume that women need men to be complete – and I offer as a counterpart men who ask out dozens of women in a short span of time, yet do not find that any of them stick it out beyond a second or third date.  

Simply a Pilgrim

I interrupt my regularly scheduled Gender Series to bring a brief Catholic sidebar.  As of yesterday, non habemus Papam.  Here is Papa Benedicto's farewell:



On a related note, I know the title is "Pope Emeritus," but that sounds too formal.  My vote is for "Grand Papa," and I intend upon calling him "Grand Papa Benedict."

Gendered Thoughts, Part II

If you haven't read Part I yet, go back and do that first.  It's short & I'll wait for you.  Ready...
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...Okay.  Here's the next piece!


The gender-vulnerability-based fears that women have are heightened by two factors: negative masculine gender norms and instructions given to women. The “male” behavior associated with the patriarchy/ hegemonic masculinity/ rape culture (also, read this blog and links from this post; all these are distinct, yet present similar concepts of masculinity) teaches men to act in a way so as to objectify and degrade women. This lesson should not happen. Women are taught a different lesson: how not to place themselves in danger. While this lessons are not, in themselves, bad, they teach women an awareness of vulnerability – so that it is difficult to tell what fear is a response to male behavior and what fear is learned from these instructions. Either way, the fear is there and it is real.

Because of this dynamic, a healthy male-female relationship must include the communication, “I am not a threat to you.” My guess is that we have tons of social cues mean to communicate this message and that it happens subconsciously. Small things: tone of voice, word choice, posture, gestures, and physical proximity – along with things less subtle, from choice of meeting location to explicit words. I read an article recently wherein the author attributed this meaning to chivalry (read to the middle of the article; you are looking for Christina Hoff Sommers, but the whole thing is a good read). Thus, its gestures assure a woman that the man, who physically could harm her, has no intention to. Like a handshake, they guarantee that he comes in peace and respect.

(I can hear the protests now: “But men did not actually respect women more in the days of chivalry! Those were the days of misogyny and chauvinism!” Or those just the voices in my own head? Either way, I am toying with the hypothesis that this exact hypocrisy led to the eventual demise of chivalry. Women killed it because they recognized its lie. Perhaps – perhaps – if it actually communicated this reassurance, women would not mind it.)

I feel a need to interrupt myself to offer a disclaimer. Learned helplessness is, for a very good reason, a concern for feminists. I am starting to feel that I might sound like I am feeding into it. Let me be clear: women do not need to rely on men to “rescue” them and are capable, in a variety of ways, of protecting themselves without male cooperation. They just should not have to.

Gendered Thoughts, Part I

I recently started writing out a brief synthesis of gender-related thoughts that have been bouncing through my head lately.  Six pages later, I realized it would have to be more than one blog post.  Bits will appear in manageable chunks over the next few days.  I hope at least one of my faithful three readers enjoys reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it.

I hope here to throw together into coherence some thoughts and ponderings I have had recently regarding gender relations and vulnerability. I will weave together several themes that have emerged in the past few months, in incidents, anecdotes, encounters, articles, and classes. It won’t be a fully developed system, but I hope it will be a consistent beginning of things. Please nitpick my assertions and my logic, so that I can see if this framework holds water and deserves to be developed.

Let me start with some initial premises, assumptions that will undergird my further thoughts.

1) First, I will be assuming that we all live gendered existences. I mean to leave out the question of which parts come from social constructs versus biological predispositions. No matter how gender is formed, we all live lives informed by how we do and experience gender. The vast majority of us live in the male-female/man-woman dichotomy and, although I recognize that exceptions exist, I will be working with a two gender system.

2) This gendered existence affects our daily lives and interpersonal interactions.

3) Women, based on their biological make-up, are physically more vulnerable in comparison to men and especially vis-à-vis men. This premise seems commonsensical to me, and I don’t have research to back it up, but if you want to challenge it, I will gladly go off questing for some. In other words, as a vast generalization, men pose more of a threat to women than women to men, physically.

4) Gender norms exist. I will be speaking about them in sweeping generalities. I realize that these generalities will have counter-examples; these examples do not prevent them from being norms. If I have misidentified or misrepresented a norm, please call me out on it. Just be sure you are certain of the definition of “norm” before you contest one. Then contest away.

Working with these basic ideas in mind, I propose: women, on a daily basis, experience a vulnerability that men do not. This particular experience informs how we live our lives and how we see the world. It colors our gendered interaction. This does not mean that women are, most of the time, in danger. (I leave that assessment to others to make.) It does mean that, as a rule, women experience a greater potentiality for being in danger than men do. Consider: a solitary female motorist stops to pick up a lone male hitch-hiker. For whom are you instinctively concerned? Why?

BXVI in Photos

The Washington Post has put together a lovely photo collection of Pope Benedict XVI's life.  If you ignore the editorializing in the captions, it is quite beautiful.  Have a look at our Papa.

A Short Story about Childbirth

Today I presented my research on the ethics of maternal elective cesarean deliveries to some other theology students.  I enjoy exchanging knowledge with other students (part of the reason I love school and hated distance learning classes).  My favorite part came outside the official presentation and Q&A.

One writer worried that as the number of c-sections rises women will stop exchanging stories of normal childbirth and only have surgical stories to tell, which will increase feelings of incompetence surrounding birth.  Tonight, people told birth stories.  Hard births, easy births, regular births, surgical births, heroic births.  ("The sonogram missed a baby!  She gave birth -- after a past c-section -- to surprise twins, breach, by the side of the road!")  We still have stories.  Beautiful, diverse, empowering stories that women share -- and, tonight, men too.