Discussing gender issues requires a delicate touch these days. If not treated deftly, they can quickly get out of hand.
Gender today is a subject where even angels fear to tread. In the interests of full disclosure I must tell you straight out that I often call my spouse, “the little woman.” Before retiring (at night, I mean) I give her a kiss along with this endearment; “G’night, little woman.”
The term is hardly descriptive. My wife, Jo, is in fact taller than I am. She’s considerably more adept at being factually informed and has no trouble expressing her opinion. She has a better mechanical sense of how thingamajigs work than I do. I’m klutzy. She is, in most of our domestic affairs, for more organized and, unlike me can, without ever asking, always finds the pen she put down only minutes ago or the keys she laid on the counter the night before. I cook and clean well enough, but I hate making the bed and particularly loath putting away silverware from the dishwasher into the drawer. I draw the line there and refuse to do either. A man does what a man’s got to do.
The issue of gender today, already the subject of a roiling national debate, has grown incendiary by the presence of Donald Trump. His male chauvinism (most agree on this) and the fact that he is running for president against a woman who doesn’t fit the stereotype of the traditional American woman, disturbs him. She doesn’t fit a stereotype of an American president. We’ve never had a woman president.
The world I grew up in – as Trump and Clinton did, – was a binary world, a universe made up of two’s. There was heaven and earth; there were men and women, blacks and whites, and winners and losers. Each was implicitly assigned a place in our global matrix: the pairs were typically hierarchical; heaven above earth, whites above blacks, men above women and winners over losers. The growing awareness of diverse racial and ethnic peoples living in the states, the surfeit of human potential now being uncovered, as well as new emerging gender configurations, has left our binary world far behind. We’re into a lot more numbers now.
For many, Hilary Clinton is not the maternal warm-fuzzy that men have found so attractive in women or who they’ve historically idolized. I’m talking here of companions, not sex objects. I’m not being critical when I say Hillary Clinton is not that compliant, agreeable, deferring woman that men have traditionally felt safe with. Those who don’t like her describe her as shrewd, secretive and manipulative. Oddly, the world is less forgiving of strong women who are skillful in exercising power, than of men with the same proclivities. Exercising power was always a guy thing. Nice girls didn’t do it.
History has etched a male presidency in the American psyche. Time has fused the presidential image with testosterone, giving little encouragement to the feeling that a woman could be a commander in chief, make tough calls, set limits, gain cooperation, knock heads, face down adversaries and otherwise demonstrate the qualities of leadership needed to govern a country. The saying for years, indeed the belief for years has been, when seeking strong leadership, it’s a man’s job.
Years ago, my wife was co-director of a project for Habitat for Humanity called the Woman’s House. The house was constructed – hammer and nails, roofing, siding, flooring, doors etc. entirely by women (except where codes required the use of licensed tradesmen like electricians.) Jo already had some woodworking skills although many women who volunteered may never have held a hammer. When specific skill knowledge was needed, “qualified” persons, sometimes men, would be asked to consult with them. The women, learning what they needed to know, thanked their male consultants, sent them off, and took over the task with their newly acquired skills. They built a house from bottom to top.
In the evening Jo and I talked about her day. I became fascinated with how differently women and men worked together as a team.
Any team effort involves dealing with individuals who are difficult, obstructionist, know-it-all, imperious, and so on. Women’s groups are hardly exempt from this. As Jo’s stories unfolded I saw a dramatic difference in how the leadership women exercised in group efforts differed from men’s. Women didn’t try forcing difficult people out of the system, as men often do; “You’re fired.” Instead they’d surround them psychologically, in a way that I do not fully understand, which made the offenders less toxic to the whole operation while still including them. I have imagined the dynamic in the way our bodies treat toxic antigens; they surround antigens with sufficient antibodies so that they minimize any power the antigens have to cripple the functioning of the body.
I asked Jo whether she thought I was describing this phenomenon accurately from her experience. She said yes, but offered that she too was at a loss to say exactly how they did it.
This led us to talking about how boys and girls generally behave. Put boys in a room filled with blocks and they’ll scramble to build towers, making them as high as possible. They’ll knock them down with glee and start again. Girls, on the other hand, are inclined to build enveloping structures, the kind that embrace and include and are less vulnerable to collapsing. Boys are concerned about “how big” something is. Girls build around the idea of inclusion.
We concluded that women give as much consideration to the people involved in the task as to performing it. It’s a great way to build a house and to govern a country.
A gender bend may well be in the making.
Columnist George Merrill is an Episcopal Church priest and pastoral psychotherapist. A writer and photographer, he’s authored two books on spirituality: Reflections: Psychological and Spiritual Images of the Heart and The Bay of the Mother of God: A Yankee Discovers the Chesapeake Bay. He is a native New Yorker, previously directing counseling services in Hartford, Connecticut, and in Baltimore. George’s essays, some award winning, have appeared in regional magazines and are broadcast twice monthly on Delmarva Public Radio.
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