I saw the following comment on social media this week:
To me this is importantly true, but in a particular way. It is a kind of higher truth, an aspect of Logos, or the divine order, the one that is available to our higher intelligence and that expresses a kind of ideal harmonising or fitting together of things.
It is not true in the sense that it is always present in the way people act in real life. To be present, there needs to be a polarity between the sexes. Men need to have a sense of what is required from them for women to relax into a feminine role. It helps if men project something like a masculine aura, and this is more likely to happen if men have a knowledge of their own role in creating the structures - including the religious and cultural structures - within which a woman might "feel" the masculine and respond to it. Men need to project their own masculine strengths and competencies for women to be receptive to and to allow their femininity to come into play.
Feminism, of course, rejects all this, seeking instead the aim of autonomous freedom in which we develop solo, through the efforts of our own independent will alone. Feminism has been around since the mid-nineteenth century. Even so, it's interesting to observe when the outward forms changed, i.e., when men stopped presenting masculine form and women feminine form. There was some change in the 1920s with the flappers - women who wore their hair short and who wore straight lined dresses which de-emphasised the contours of their bodies.
But I think men changed even more in the 1960s and 70s. Here, for instance, is a picture of street life in Perth in 1946:
The men are dressed to project a certain kind of masculine presence. In the 1970s there were still businessmen who wore suits, but nonetheless clothing for men had generally become more informal, i.e., lacking masculine form:
Notice as well that the woman in this photo is dressed much like the men. Again, you can still find examples of women dressing distinctly, but androgyny was becoming more common - there was a decline in outward polarity.
And women? I suspect that girls reach an age, sometime in their teens, when they have to choose whether to retain a feminine persona, or whether to pivot instead to a more masculine approach to life. Do they allow themselves to be enveloped by, and protected within, the masculine, while they themselves bring emotional warmth and care to those around them? Or do they become psychologically harder and self-protective and seek to control their environment?
Most women in modern life reject the feminine. Sometimes it's for personal reasons. Perhaps they had a poor relationship with their own father and so do not trust men. Sometimes it's for political reasons. They have been raised to be feminist and therefore an independent modern girl who does not need a man. Sometimes, it's spiritual. It is a non-serviam - I will not serve - response to God.
It can lead to an impasse in relationships. It is common now to hear women say that they can do everything themselves and so if a man is to have any chance with them he somehow has to figure out a way to "add value" otherwise "what is the point?".
Men, for their part, have started to ask women "What do you bring to the table?". The question itself betrays the underlying problem. If both men and women are the masculine part of the equation, then neither brings something that the other party does not already possess. What men would really like a woman to answer to their question is the answer to the polarity problem. They would like a woman to bring her "softness, emotion and warmth" to the table and to appreciate the masculine strengths that he provides.
It is unfortunate that today it is sometimes the least competent or even mentally unwell women who present to men as needing masculine support. It means that the masculine instincts in men can lead to a poor choice in a spouse. It would help if higher quality women could find a way to signal to men an openness to polarity, through some expression of the feminine.
This is an issue that will always need tending to, no matter the era. It is one of those human condition problems. It needs to be addressed both at the individual, personal level and more generally at the level of the wider culture. It is part of the need to create workable structures, a frame that can uphold human communities.
A big part of this is the issue of trust, which has been everywhere destroyed in (or by) modern life. Just by way of an unrelated example, the business world is currently a experiencing a breakdown for this reason — neither employers nor employees trust each other, which forces enormous new verification costs (this might manifest as employers attempting to intrusively surveil or micromanage employees or insisting on a top-heavy management structure with no delegation of authority and on the employee side might manifest as insistence on draconian bureaucratic oversight by the state to make sure the employer is “behaving”) and completely destroys other beneficial structures (it is, for example, basically impossible to build up institutional knowledge at anything more than small to mid size companies, as employees don’t trust their loyalty to be rewarded (rather the opposite, and this is rational) and employers don’t trust employees to stick around long enough to be worth investing in). Moreover, the destruction of trust forces constant bargaining and a sort of “refusal to extend credit” (many employees now will refuse to do any extra work they are not legally required to do, despite in many cases this being necessary for the business; a job and its requirements are, after all, like all real things, impossible to perfectly explicitly and formally define, such as would be required in a contract); constant nickle-and-diming employees for decades has now led to employees nickle-and-diming employers in turn, leading to phenomena such as “quiet quitting.”
ReplyDeleteThis extends to relationships between the sexes, which has been egregiously harmed by bad behavior on both sides. Women can no longer trust men to be men, whatever they signal, and vice versa. Even if a high quality woman could signal to men that she was open to polarity, as you put it, this would not necessarily mean much as there would be very few men willing to trust this. Even if she was sincere at the time (which to many men is doubtful given the state of modern women) it does not necessarily mean she will keep that openness for a lifetime. I suspect this problem is also not quite equally weighted, as in general a woman has more difficulty “keeping her word” (to a male perspective); women are likely to signal things they either do not mean or later renege on, more so than men. While women have trouble trusting men to be masculine — for good reason — this is not usually due to deception or false signaling on the part of men, while the opposite is not true.
As trust is the root and foundation of marriage, this is perhaps the most serious obstacle and danger to marriage today, especially because building up trust requires time that can’t be substituted for anything else. The only way to know a woman will honor her vows for a lifetime is to live that lifetime. The only way to know a generation of women is a good generation is many years, perhaps a lifetime, of good behavior. It also requires being part of a group that as a whole behaves well, so that one can infer, e.g., the lifetime behavior of a young prospective bride from others of her kind. This kind of signaling — of membership of a virtuous group — is probably more important than individual openness to virtue. (Incidentally, this was probably why it used to be considered so important to be from a good family).