Reading · "Eros and Essence: Embracing Sexual and Spiritual Wholeness"

Dr. Sorah Dubitsky · "Eros and Essence: Embracing Sexual and Spiritual Wholeness"

One of the questions I ask my students each term is this: How has the idea of manhood and womanhood changed in your lifetime?

The answers are always interesting.

Many students say that gender roles have changed dramatically. Women today can become almost anything they want to be. They can be doctors, professors, firefighters, soldiers, police officers, CEOs, athletes, pilots, political leaders, or single parents by choice. They can be financially independent, ambitious, powerful, and visible in the world.

And they are right.

The world my students are growing up in is not the world that I grew up in. When I was young, the rules were clearer. Men were supposed to be strong, protective, decisive, sexually confident, emotionally contained, and economically responsible. Women were supposed to be caring, attractive, modest, relational, emotionally expressive, and oriented toward marriage and motherhood.

Of course, real people have always been more complicated than the roles assigned to them. There have always been strong women and tender men, ambitious women and nurturing men. But culture has not always known what to do with them.

That is where psychologist Sandra Bem’s work still matters. In the 1970, she introduced the idea that gender is not only a set of roles imposed from the outside. Gender becomes a way of organizing perception. We learn to sort the world into masculine and feminine, male and female, appropriate and inappropriate. Then, more importantly, we learn to sort ourselves.

But something has shifted.

In the 21st century, we increasingly see men and women occupying the same public roles. Women firefighters run into burning buildings. Women perform surgery. Women lead teams. Women fight wars. Women make life-and-death decisions. Women provide for families.

At the same time, men are increasingly being shown as emotionally available. Men parent. Men listen. Men grieve. Men apologize. Men seek therapy. Men care for children. Men cry.

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Sandra Bem used the word androgyny to describe the ability to draw from both traditionally masculine and traditionally feminine traits. In this sense, androgyny does not mean confusion about gender. It means freedom from being trapped inside one half of human possibility.

The androgynous person can be both strong and tender. Assertive and receptive. Independent and connected. Courageous and compassionate. The point is not that men and women become identical. The point is that both are allowed to become whole.

But here is where the issue becomes more complicated.

Women’s roles have expanded. Men, however, are often still punished for moving too far into what culture has labeled feminine. A man who is emotionally vulnerable, dependent, uncertain, gentle, sexually hesitant, or economically struggling may feel that his very manhood is being questioned.

This is where the research on precarious manhood becomes useful. The idea is that womanhood is often treated as something more fixed, while manhood is treated as something that must be earned, displayed, defended, and repeatedly proven. A woman becomes a woman. A man has to prove he is a man.

That is a heavy burden.

We are living through a backlash against gender flexibility. The return of the “trad wife” ideal, the romanticizing of women’s domestic submission, and conservative policy agendas that emphasize the heterosexual nuclear family are all part of a larger attempt to turn the clock back.

On the surface, this may look like nostalgia. A simpler time. Men were men. Women were women. Families were intact. Everyone had a role.

But nostalgia is selective, and scripts can become cages.

What happens to the man who wants to nurture? What happens to the woman who wants to lead? What happens to the man who is tired of proving himself? What happens to the woman who does not want to shrink in order to be loved?

This is where gender roles become an intimacy issue.

If men are taught that tenderness threatens their masculinity, they lose access to part of their humanity. If women are taught that power threatens their femininity, they lose access to part of theirs. Then relationships become performances instead of encounters. Men perform strength. Women perform softness. Men hide fear. Women hide anger.

And then we wonder why intimacy is so difficult.

The answer to male anxiety cannot be female restriction. The answer is not to make women smaller so men can feel larger. The answer is a larger vision of humanity.

Maybe the 21st-century question is not, “Do gender roles still exist?” Of course they do. The better question is: Who benefits from keeping them rigid?

Strong Enough to Run Into the Fire

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