So again, last week thinking somewhat about womanhood, and then this week kind of drawn to a little balance thereof, although succumbing I guess in my aspirations to that eternal temptation of the new minister, which is to conceive of a sermon topic which actually needs a two hundred page book to cover. The differences between men and women: there's just a simple little topic! I'm sure that over the next 20 minutes or so, we'll be able to come to a comfortable resolution on that!
So, by way of channeling this a little bit: My inspiration for this service first came when I was talking with a couple of facilitators of a small group ministry here at the congregation, our Together In Exploration (TIE) groups. In the case of these two folks, the woman is in a women's group and the man is in a men's group. During our conversation, a comparison was being made between the kind of communication that took place just in the men's group or just in the women's group or in a setting where men and women were communicating together. These small group ministry groups are meant to be real deep sharing and deep conversation. You've heard me speak about them before. Interestingly, both people named the quality of the shared gender group as being a little different. That there was something about the communication there that was a little harder to achieve. Interestingly, both the man and the woman said, "I think it has something to do with the men."
Each said that as tenderly and as graciously as they could, but they were just trying to be realistic about what the dynamic was there. I really believe our practice toward the world of equality and loving differences that we're aiming toward is made in conversation together, so maybe we had better spend some time looking at what the difference might be. And so just slightly, I will say, this sermon leans a little bit toward men or toward the male aspect of this dynamic, but, since we all live in the midst of this dynamic, it will hopefully be of interest to each of us.
We can think pretty readily about some of the standard societal assumptions that are made about the differences between men and women. We know that these change over time. I can say a word about that. We've made incredible advances in the last 50 years, and in the last 150 years. It's my experience, nevertheless, that most of the world still functions under certain presumptions about men and women. Some of these are rooted in our biology. Some are totally rooted in our culture. There's a complex dynamic that we'll try and get at a little bit.
Right now, please holler out at me what, if any, gender stereotypes do you think we as a society still function under — not necessarily we ourselves as individuals, but when we look at modern life in America and this goal we have of equality. What are some of the differences that most get readily put out there that between men and women? And again your caveat is you don't necessarily believe it.
(Taking suggestions from the audience:)
"Men's work is more valuable."
A presumption based on the fact that men often get higher pay for equal work.
"Men must be the provider, the achiever, in order to have value."
"Men love to fix things."
"The higher power is a male."
That is a societal presumption we're going to labor on. Let's hear from a few women….
"Men don't cry."
"Homemakers are only women."
Yeah. Any of these differences that we're going to lift up, you could say the corollary which is something about women. That's an interesting point.
"Men have a problem getting in touch with and expressing their feelings."
We'll have to spend some time with that.
"White male privilege is systematic in our society."
OK, that is so. We'll do just a couple more.
"Men are the less important parent".
That relates also to the presumption that's made about homemakers always being women.
"Women want an alpha male".
OK, we definitely have to tread lightly on those waters about the ways that the stereotypes we labor under serve everybody in different ways. It's one thing to say stuff about men, but again there is that corollary. One last one please—
"Men start wars."
We'll get more into that as well this biological perhaps relationship to aggression, and the presumptions that we make of that. Some of these are going to be proved to be rooted in some kind of reality and some are not. It's not the differences that we're going to be trying to play with and loosen, it's the attitude that's taken to those differences. We have to be wary of that. I think this song may illustrate the point for me:
I hate men I can't abide 'em even now and then. Than ever marry one of them, I'd rest a virgin rather, For husbands are a boring lot and only give you bother Of course, I'm awfully glad that Mother had to marry Father, But I hate men. Of all the types I've ever met within our democracy, I hate the most the athlete with his manner bold and brassy, He may have hair upon his chest, but, sister, so has Lassie Oh, I hate men!"I Hate Men", by Cole Porter
So, clearly these differences have been a bone of contention, over time, we could say. That's a Cole Porter song, so it was written by a gay man, sung in the musical "Kiss Me Kate". I found that song by putting "I hate men" into the iTunes search engine and seeing what kinds of songs are out there, in that regard. You'll be happy to know that there are a number of songs with the words, "I love men." I thought of playing one in particular, but it was a little bit too risqué, actually. That points back here toward what I want to say about gender difference and what its origins maybe are: we have on the one hand, biology; we have on the other hand, all of the social and cultural forms that come out of that.
It's just a fact that here on earth the main way that mother nature has chosen to make life move forward in new generations is to get pairs of oh-so-very similar but just slightly different critters together to make a new one of those. Sexual reproduction is the most common way of advancing the species. And so we have this interesting kind of dualism and the need to resolve that dualism built right into nature. There are exceptions of course — it's not necessarily the only possibility. I suppose we could have evolved like mushrooms and send off spores or something like that, but that's not how it has played out. Nor like certain species of fish can we change our sex midway through our lives and just pick up the other side of the obligation.
The actual biological differences though, between men and women, can get so spun out of whack, in terms of the values and interpretations that are put on those things. The main difference really seems to be, we have a Y chromosome instead of the X chromosome and the physical processes that flow out of that: the main one being that males have more androgen in them when they're young and developing and growing when they're in the womb, and that we have a greater amount of testosterone in our bodies for the course of our lives. Now that's just going to be the plain fact of human existence until anything that we can conceive of as human existence comes and goes. So we're always going to be living in this system where we just are compelled to in some ways respond to a member of our own dear human family as different. And it's going to be there as long as men grow beards and get a little taller and can throw baseballs in that way that they can. We have to acknowledge that there are going to be these raw physical differences, and yet, so much gets attributed to it and valued on it and so forth.
We acknowledge that there are some subtle physical differences and some incredibly plain ones like where the baby comes from, that we're always going to have to live with as a human species. The danger is that we might say that biology is then some kind of destiny. Sometimes people have said:
"Oh, well men have testosterone in them. They have more testosterone. That's the way it's always going to be on some level then, all of that violence that seems to be related to it, or aggression or these other things that are correlated to it, that that's somehow inherently natural."
You know, like, "Well, we can't escape the testosterone". That is making a huge mistake. It's assuming that the testosterone in men that defines our differences is the cause of all of those characteristics that are often most associated with men:
- That tight control;
- That inability to be emotional;
- That rough and tumble play;
- That greater predilection for aggression in many forms, that allowed to go unchecked really spins out of control.
So we don't want to justify a social order that is unfair to women and unhealthy to men, by rooting ourselves too much in the body, but we nevertheless have to root ourselves in the body to some extent. Just another side piece that I want to be clear about : there's also the whole reality of gay people and of transgender people. So these differences, these body differences, are very kind of fluid. For the vast majority of folks, though, we seem to just treat each other as recognizably men and women, and we have to live in the midst of that dyad there. I guess I would argue that everyone — whether you're gay or you're straight, or you're a man or a woman, whether you are feeling between genders or feeling caught in the wrong one — we're dealing with what seems to be the root human dualism.
Some have argued that the oppression of women, by men, is sort of the root oppression: it's the first place we kind of went wrong in treating each other as wholly equal and valuing each of our contributions and the whole history of the patriarchy comes out of that. That's a topic for another day, obviously. But just a brief description of it of course, is the religious expressions that we've received, where for generations and generations the power of the universe is perceived as male. Another example is where Eve was said to come from Adam, when actually our biology's quite the opposite. Left unchecked any human being will be a female. It's in order to be a male that things have to be different, that the Y chromosome has to do its work — so that kind of flips things on its head.
I'd like to suggest that there are better ways of viewing the balance of male and female in our world, if you will. The ☯ is a lovely symbol that many people like, where we have these differing energies that flow together and compliment each other in different ways. I was thinking about the chalice in this way as well: this particular one that we have which I love so much. The two circles originally represented Unitarian and Universalist. Maybe we can, though, even imagine them as representing men and women. What the image does for me there, is that those differences between us, as real as they are, that's the sliver on either side. The part that we want to live in and celebrate and raise up is that part of our humanity — that huge vast shared piece in the center.
Alright, so we have these basic differences. That's the biology of the matter, and then the history of humankind is in some ways the history of the way men and women have tried to navigate that. For a really long time, it's men who've done more of the navigating. A beautiful change is underway, with the whole rise of women's liberation and so forth.
Even today, men continue to labor under what I think are really outmoded versions of masculinity. In preparation for this sermon, I watched this fine little documentary film called Tough Guise, referring to the face of masculinity and toughness that men still have to put on. This is a piece about the differences that we named earlier, that we see particularly in movies and video games and TV and so forth. It looked at how heroes over the last 50 years have gone from being basically skinny kind of normal looking guys to these just giant, gargantuan men. You look at pro wresters of the '50s, if you would want to do such a thing, go back and watch stock footage of '50s era pro wrestling. One fascinating thing is they just looked like kind of normal guys and now they're immense bulked up kind of monsters, almost. The film pointed out how this way of giving value to a certain expression of those physical differences is all out of whack, and how harmful it is when violence and strength and dominance becomes a big piece of how men identify themselves as men. The most heartbreaking part of the movie was these high school kids who were asked: give a word for what a real man is like. Because their words were "tough", "strong", "independent", "in control". Even "a little bit mean" was one of those words. Then there were the words they used for those males who don't fulfill that vision of masculinity: words like "sissy" and "wuss" and "wimp" and "fag". That last one was the most common. So, there's a way in which some of these conceptions of the differences, even though men have crafted them largely, can be very harmful to men as well.
I want to take a minute and share another song with you to show some of the ambiguity of this and then I'll wrap things up. This is a song called "Men" by Louden Wainwright III.
When a ship is sinking and they lower the lifeboats And hand out the life jackets, The men keep on their coats The women and the children are the ones Who must go first And the men who try to save their skins Are cowards and are cursed Every man's a captain, men know how to drown Man the lifeboats if there's room, otherwise go down And it's the same when there's a war on: It's the men who go to fight Women and children are civilians, When they're killed it's not right Men kill men in uniform, it's the way war goes When they run they're cowards, When they stay they are heroes Every man's a general, men go off to war The battlefields a man's world, Cannon fodders what they're for It's the men who have the power, It's the men who have the might And the world's a place of horror Because each man thinks he's right A man's home is his castle so the family let him in But what's important in that kingdom Is the women and the children A husband and a father, every man's a king But he's really just a drone, Gathers no honey, has no sting Have pity on the general, the king, and the captain They know they're expendable, after all they're men
You get the idea. I don't want to belabor that point, but it was fascinating to me to hear that expression of the complex relationship that men have to their own expectations of themselves, because of their maleness. And this is the tricky territory of: how do we live in the midst of our differences? How do we navigate the fact that we've inherited these powerful, powerful structures of what it means to be a man or a woman, and acknowledge that they've both harmed and helped each of us as men and women? It's really tricky, territory if you try and talk about the differences. Each of us has had such an individual experience that our sense of who a man is, which may be related so much to our own father, or of who a woman is to our own mother, that it makes it potential really difficult to cross those barriers.
Rita and I certainly, in the beginning of our marriage made a strong and intentional effort to cross those barriers. We were going to set down the differences between men and women and live a very egalitarian marriage, which I believe we've largely done. We put it to the test early on, right in the beginning of our relationship, by taking a traditional social dancing class. Each still fierce and strong at our feminist understanding of the world, my consciousness regularly being raised by a brilliant and insightful woman, and there we were. Okay. You know… (He takes the posture of the male role in social dancing. Then the posture transforms into motions of struggle.)
"You're supposed to let me lead!"
"No man is going to lead me, you know!"
And I laugh, but I've got to tell you, it was very difficult, and it cast a shadow on things for a little while. It took to a number of years to say, "Okay, when we're trying to do the fox trot, and I'm oh so gently saying, 'Would you like to spin over there?', I'm not saying: 'And men should rule the church!'"
And then, very interestingly, years down the line, one day I came in from having removed brush or buried a dead animal or something like that, and Rita was doing the laundry, and we gave each other a look like, "What the hell happened here?" But part of that change was that we were beginning to grow in appreciation for the differences; for the fact that the roles, though not necessarily innate, had a place in our own psyches, and to be able to accept that.
And that's really the message here, that's our message I think: as men, as women, we are different but we're equal at the same time. Living in that weird beautiful tension and relationship is what we're up to here. One of the reasons I'm so proud to be a Unitarian Universalist is that we've been among the first to ordain women. In terms of the proportion of our leadership, we are probably the most women-run religious organization in the country. (The audience applauds) All right! There you go! Yeah. It's long overdue. I intend to call God "She" for about 3000 years until the balance is redressed a little bit. What we're trying to do is celebrate our differences, but affirm our equal value. And here's the thing: if women are going to go off and do a little bit of that work themselves, then the men have to do the same thing.
Now this is the last bit where I really need to speak to just the fellows which is to say: if we're in charge of defining masculinity and we want to overcome the harmful images that lead to violence in the world, then for our boys — for our future, for the children — we have to get together and we have to practice overcoming this stereotypical barrier to honest deep communication. One thing that I think is a stumbling block, is that one of the first things that men need to talk about, actually, is being men. What that means — to be men. Men have to have that conversation with men about men, and then from there, we can begin to grow into the other, deeper conversations. That's work that straight people and gay people can do together and I hope that you're going to heed this call.
Since I've been here various folk have stepped forward and said, "There should be a men's group that's organized like the women's group" who we know are so well organized that they're off at their annual retreat today. I noticed in the first couple of months that the main people who said that to me were women. "Those men need a men's group like the women's group." Now if these are women and men who are encountering communication difficulties in their interactions and so forth, I can understand where that urging may have come from, but it just can't work that way. This is work that's for ourselves — for the future of this congregation — for the future of the world. I ask you men out there, if you are interested in stepping forward and being the leader of a new men's group, sharing with me your visions of how men can be active and full participants of the congregation — if you want to join me in planning a retreat or even just getting the fellows together to talk, when we can really be vulnerable with each other, then there can be real breakthroughs. I think nothing but good will flow out of that. If we don't share in that project, if we don't actively engage in the project of divining maleness and femaleness for ourselves and for the future, then we give that over to the people who think manhood equals gunning somebody down or torturing them, and I don't want that to play anymore.
We will always have maybe a slight rough and tumble play about us, a stronger urge toward competition. Some of these things that may be tied to our bodies, but that doesn't mean televised ultimate fighting isn't obscene, you know. It's up to us to say, "That's not what manhood is anymore." I would hope that the gals would support us in that. So talk about that, and think about it.