Earlier this year I reflected at Her.meneutics on lessons learned in anticipating my upcoming marriage. I continue to learn new lessons, for marriage is an ever-present schoolmaster. You see, I married relatively late (39), and through those single years, I had far fewer positive relationships with males than I would like to admit, not to mention a couple extremely negative ones. I’ve been tempted to attribute the failings of a few to the larger group, at times wielding what C. S. Lewis called the “hidden or flaunted […] sword between the sexes,” which Lewis himself thought could be removed by what he called an “entire marriage.”
For me, marriage has indeed dispelled certain prejudices against men. I realize now how I had drawn big conclusions from small, unrepresentative samples. Such fallacious patterns writ large are exactly what generate gender stereotypes, in both directions. Women, so the stereotype trumpets, are passive followers, emotional, relational—the feelers. Men, in contrast, are assertive and rational—the leaders and problem solvers, the thinkers. Or worse: aggressive, exploitative, predatory.
As a philosophy professor, my husband has taught many business ethics classes, and he’s told me that those students who are the staunchest defenders of the most cutthroat and unscrupulous business practices, almost without exception, are men. He admits with chagrin that sometimes, because of such anecdotal evidence, he’s tempted to believe that women in general and on average (with plenty of room for exceptions) just “get” ethics better than men. Why are 90 percent of people in jails male? Why are the majority of violent sociopaths in our society men, and why is the number so high?
Some even attempt to formalize theories supporting this claim about men’s lacking morality. Feminist Carol Gilligan, for example, is well known for arguing in her influential book In a Different Voice that women deal differently with moral dilemmas than men. Women, she claims, are more caring, less competitive, less abstract, and more sensitive than men in making moral decisions. Because they speak in this “different voice,” their culture of nurturing, caring, and peaceful accommodation could cure the world governed by hyper-competitive males and their habits of abstract, less interpersonal moral reasoning.
If women are more in touch with their feelings, they may be more likely to think in relational and empathetic terms. In light of the vital importance morality attaches to imaginatively and empathetically putting yourself into the shoes of another and seeing from their perspective, perhaps it makes sense that those more in touch with their feelings and sentiments would be the more proficient at the moral task. But is there enough evidence and research to back up such an explanation?
Not according to Lawrence Walker of the University of British Columbia. Walker has reviewed 80 studies on gender difference in solving moral dilemmas and determines that “[s]ex differences in moral reasoning in late adolescence and youth are rare.” Additionally, three researchers at Oberlin College attempted to test Gilligan’s hypothesis, administering a moral reasoning test to one hundred male and female students. Their conclusion: “There were no reliable sex differences […] in the directions predicted by Gilligan.” Other findings by Wendy Wood, a specialist in women’s psychology at Texas A&M, and William Damon (Brown University) and Anne Colby (Radcliffe College) further undermine these negative stereotypes.
Talk of masculinity as essentially predatory, ultra-competitive, or lacking in empathy can be harmful to boys, an issue to which I’m particularly sensitive as the mother of one. As citation>Christina Hoff Sommers has chronicled, ample evidence suggests that boys are already lagging behind educationally and socially in our society in ever so many ways, from delinquency rates to diagnoses with ADD, to plummeting percentages of boys attending college. The message that masculinity per se is largely the culprit removes the focus from where it needs to be: healthy homes, moral training, better education.
Beyond all the empirical reasons to eschew such stereotypes, Christians also have theological ones. As we are created in the image of God, our human nature reflects the source of our being. Empathy is a human trait, not a feminine one, and to insist otherwise plays into the old stereotypes. Men are no less capable of empathy than women are of analytical and logical reasoning. We make a mistake when we exaggerate the differences between the sexes, resorting to rhetoric increasingly polarizing and divisive, tendentious and demeaning.
Men’s and women’s voices may well differ, but what they hold in common is more important than their differences. It’s the fully human voice that together we can articulate. Lewis concludes the passage cited earlier like this: “It is arrogance in us [men] to call frankness, fairness, and chivalry ‘masculine’ when we see them in a woman; it is arrogance in them [women] to describe a man’s sensitivities or tact or tenderness as ‘feminine.’” A fully human, rational, and moral perspective will draw men and women more closely together in the common enterprise of finding and articulating the human voice rather than driving them into respective corners and the contentious stance of adversaries.
Marybeth Davis Baggett is assistant professor of English and modern languages at Liberty University. David Baggett is professor of philosophy at Liberty University and coauthor most recently of Good God: The Theistic Foundations of Morality (with Jerry Walls), which won Christianity Today‘s 2012 Best Book Award in the apologetics/evangelism category.
Laura Waters Hinson’s excellent documentary, As We Forgive, examines radical forgiveness and reconciliation in Rwanda, a nation still healing from the 1994 ethnic genocide that took the lives of as many as 1 million of its citizens. (I heard several amazing stories of forgiveness in my own trip to Rwanda last year.)
For Lent, Hinson and her team have launched a 40 Days of Forgiveness campaign, encouraging people to “join us this Easter season to build a village of reconciliation” in Rwanda – through hosting a screening of the film, buying the DVD or other merchandise, and/or making a contribution to Living Bricks, a partner with Prison Fellowship in building homes for those Rwandans who have reconciled . . . and encouraging others to do likewise.
They’ve also launched a 40 Days blog, where various artists and writers are weighing in with their thoughts on forgiveness and reconciliation. (So far, myself and musician Sara Groves are the first bloggers, but more are to come in the weeks ahead.)
