Recently in Gender Category

The Catholic writer and scholar Tony Esolen has some wise and astonishingly un-p.c. words about sexuality, the abuse scandal, and masculinity (thanks to reader John for sending them along). Excerpts:

To burn a man's house is to sin against his property, perhaps his posterity. To burn his house out of hatred is to sin against his person. But to seduce a boy, to corrupt his manhood while it is yet in the bud, is to sin against his nature, his essential created being.

We have ignored the boys. And we ignored them, as we have been ignoring them, these many years. Governments and foundations shovel money into programs to teach math and science specifically to girls, but not a penny, not for any subject, devoted specifically to boys. Why is that? Nowadays in some places a boy growing up with a father is as rare as an orphan used to be. These boys need more than ever the male discipline of sports -- so what do we do about it? We cut their rosters. Sometimes, against common sense, against plain decency and charity, we force the boys to play on the same teams with girls, even when there are girls' teams available. Why that happy cruelty? We know that these same boys -- often fatherless -- are less likely to go to church than are their sisters. That's all right by us; we set up committees to study women's participation in the Church. We stock up on female lectors and female directors of religious education. We showcase our altar girls. Why?

Young men are strong enough and aggressive enough to commit -- but also vulnerable enough to suffer -- the bulk of violent crime in our country. Everyone knows the former; does anyone care to consider the latter? One in ten black men aged 20 to 30 is currently in prison. Do we sponsor any initiatives to reach the boys before they fall into that abyss? Boys are now far outnumbered by girls in college. Exactly how this state of affairs is to be a boon to the civilization, the country, the family, and the Church, no one has bothered to examine. I think it heralds the onset of catastrophe. But is there a single program anywhere designed to address the issue? Boys find school detestable -- I found it so, and I have met few young men, even those I teach in college, and most especially the brightest, who say that they loved high school, and few young women who say they hated it. Does anyone care?

Esolen goes on to argue that the Church, like society, is failing to give boys what they need. He concludes in part:

What we need now are men like St. John Bosco, who won the attention of the homeless boys of Turin by impressing them with boyish tricks and athletics, and who then taught them chastity and temperance and courage and the unalterable truths of the Faith. We are not likely to see such men. If we speak about St. John Bosco, we say that he had a ministry to children. No such thing! His ministry, the peculiar grace he was given to preach the Word of God, was to boys. Now of all times, when fatherhood itself is under siege from no-fault divorce, from feminism, from a sneeringly misandrist educational system, from popular culture, and from our chase of the almighty dollar at the cost of sanity and order at home, in short from the manifold sins of men and women, now of all times we need a St. John Bosco. We need a man to slap a boy's back and say, "Son, your name is Smoke, because that's what you're throwing." We need it, and barring an extraordinary gift of grace, the need will not be met.

For how can it be met? The boys are invisible, and now that our Church has caved in ever so slightly but ever so noticeably on the issue of homosexuality, it has helped ensure that men with vocations to work with boys will not be able to fulfill them. Did it never occur to our soft-minded leaders that one of the reasons why we cordon off male homosexuality as unnatural is to give boys the breathing room to develop such friendships as Jesus Himself enjoyed? In poisoned air the most salutary meal will smell sour.

And the poison lingers. The original evil was perpetrated by a few of our priests, allowed by some of our bishops, and unwittingly encouraged by all of us Catholics who have found it a bit too comfortable to condone the kissing cousins of androgyny and sexual license. But that evil has not ended with the corrupted youths of the boys who were abused. Because of that abuse, now when ministry to boys is needed most, ministry to boys is all but unthinkable. What man now dare play the part of John Bosco? When in some places you cannot utter the word "mankind" without being scolded, who would even think it worth his time to propose to the bishop a new effort to help boys see what true manliness and true Christianity look like?

Tony hits on something that to me, was one of the most astonishing mysteries about the whole foul business: why almost nobody, when learning what molester priests were doing to boys, acted like a real man, and stopped it. Not bishops, not brother priests (for the most part), and not laymen. You may hate me for saying this, but if some men of the parish had taken Father Pederast out back and beat the hell out of him, and run him out of the parish, a lot of this evil wouldn't have happened. But rightful Church authority was deployed to neuter healthy masculine instincts at every level. And now look.

Paging Leon Podles! Excerpt:

In our country, half of all marriages end in divorce. Most children grow up for at least part of their lives in single-parent households, that is, in homes headed by mothers. In huge sections of our cities fathers are simply not to be seen. Crime and violence are the inevitable result. The same thing is happening in South America because men do not take religion or the family very seriously.

There are far worse things that can happen and that have happened because of this alienation of men from Christianity. Men need religion as much as women. If they do not find it in Christianity, they may well look elsewhere. The totalitarian ideologies of our century, especially fascism and nazism, provided a male religion. The Italian Futurists trumpeted their disdain for Christianity, women and peace, and sang of the glories of war and adventure. The Futurist Manifesto proclaimed, "We will glorify war--the world's only hygiene--militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchist, beautiful ideas worth dying for, and scorn for women." The Futurists became fascists. The Nazis organized Germany as a Männerbund, a society that understood men's inner life and provided for it. Hitler and the rituals of the Nazi party provided a substitute for the generation of fathers that had been lost in the First World War.

I'm not sure why, but every Orthodox parish I've been to, especially the one I'm involved in, has men involved with church life to a far greater extent than I've seen elsewhere. And Orthodoxy, at least as I've seen it practiced, manages to pull this off without marginalizing women.

UPDATE: Sorry, I forgot to put the link to the entire Esolen piece in my original posting. Here it is.

The BBC's ace economics blogger Robert Peston says the economic crisis is partly the result of testosterone poisoning. Consider, he says, that it's impossible to find a single woman at the top of the banks and other institutions that failed so badly. There's more:

But I think there may be a sense (and here I'm on very dangerous territory) in which masculine vices played a dominant role in fomenting the crunch.

And, I suppose, the simplest way of putting this is that I know very few women who measure their success in life by the size of their respective bank balances, whereas I know an astonishing number of men for whom the only thing that matters is "the score", as determined by the heft of their salaries, or bonuses or capital gain.

We've descended into the uncomfortable realm of hack psychology, so we're not going to stay here long.

But I would observe that - in my experience - men are more prone than women to simply run like a train at the goal, and never mind who's flattened along the way.

And the kind of complex mathematical modelling that underpinned so many of the toxic financial products - and of flawed systems for controlling risk - is also a peculiarly male practice. It's the equivalent of an obsession with computer games, or cricket scores or railway timetables: little worlds detached from the real world.

Anything to this? What do you think? I suspect there's more truth to it than I would be comfortable admitting. But if we accept that personality traits related to masculinity, either biologically or culturally based, are responsible to some degree for the catastrophic failure of these businesses, then we must logically accept that it is theoretically possible to blame business failures in particular circumstances on biological and/or cultural factors on the role women took in the business, or minorities. It's easy to float this kind of explanation when the people being cracked on are white males, and the person doing the cracking is also a white male. I, a white male, think that Peston is onto something. But if he is, then we cannot avoid the possibility that in the future, someone can justifiably point to a genetic or cultural factor related to other businesses failing (or succeeding). That's not something anybody will be able to talk about in public.

Andrew Sullivan writes:

Dreher says he's "not trying to start a fight" and that he "really wants to know what people think" when he compares transgender people to those who want to needlessly have limbs amputated to feel "whole." Sigh.

I get sick of this kind of juvenile fusspot response whenever anyone tries to discuss the moral aspects of issues having to do with sexuality. You know, the "How dare you compare [thing I approve of] to [thing you disapprove of]!?!" As if how dare you were any sort of argument. It was clear to anyone who took the trouble to read my post that it was someone here on the Templeton fellowship who raised the question in a discussion about transgenderism, the body and personal autonomy. And it's a perfectly legitimate question, because it raises issues of the lines society draws around the individual's ability to alter his or her body. I asked for Celtic Dragon Critter, one of this blog's readers who is a transgendered person, to weigh in with her views, and intended by the tone I took to caution readers to discuss this stuff respectfully.

In fact, it appears we got a pretty interesting discussion going; I particularly like the points people made about cosmetic surgery. So it's discouraging to see somebody like Andrew try to make a discussion like this illegitimate by imputing bigotry to raising the question in the first place. I would say it's a pretty safe bet that nearly all the journalists and academics in the room when the question was raised today are pro-gay rights, and sympathetic to transsexuals. In fact, one of the journalists who followed up this question with a remark about how cultural politics makes honest discussion about this issue impossible is a married heterosexual who has several times during this course strongly defended gay rights in conversations. But we are grown-ups here who can talk about these things without getting all mad and saying that someone is a moral defective for asking, "How is this thing like or not like, that thing?"

Andrew likes to say that gay people should stand up for the free-speech rights of those who oppose gay rights. But surely he must understand that How Dare You, even when put to people who mean no apparent harm by asking a particular question, or who want to spark a civil discussion about something like the meaning of personal autonomy when it comes to surgically altering the human body, is a strategy to shut down inquiry. Does it really help the cause of transgender acceptance to try to shame people who don't understand what it's about into keeping quiet about their questions, their anxiety, even their disapproval?

Anyway, I appreciate that the overwhelming majority of this blog's readers who participated in that discussion, on both sides, went at it in a way that brought light, not heat, to an issue that is quite confusing for most of us.

Meanwhile, speaking of things particular to gender, my eldest son is getting to the age when he needs to be studying for his Nerd Bar Mitzvah. I refer, of course, to the ceremony common to all male nerdlings, in which they cross the threshold into nerd manhood by reciting from memory a key scene of his choosing from "Monty Python and the Holy Grail." His mother and I will be so proud of him.

(What is wrong with most -- not all -- women, in that they don't understand the transcendent magnificence of all things Python? If you are a nerd woman who gets Python, God bless you -- and please, step up your efforts to convert the sisterhood.)

My Nora, who is almost three, is anxious about my leaving tonight for England. Last night in bed, she was asking me about England, and I was searching for things to tell her about the place.

"Did you know England has a queen?" I asked.

"A queen? What's she called?"

"Elizabeth is her name," I said, then tried to explain what a queen is, and does, in terms a three-year-old American girl could understand.

Eventually we crawled out of bed and went to the computer, where I found on YouTube a clip of Elizabeth II's coronation. Nora sat in my lap, and I fast-forwarded to the four minute bit surrounding the actual crowning. I explained to Nora what was going on as the ceremony unfolded.

"Is she getting married?" Nora asked.

"No, not exactly, but kind of," I said. "She's marrying her country."

The clip was wrapping up when Julie came in out of the shower in her bathrobe. Nora looked up and said breathlessly, in an astonished whisper: "Mom! I love the Queen!"

It was so sweet, and so sincere. The pageantry had utterly captivated my little girl's imagination. I could have promised my boys each a $500 gift certificate to the Lego store in exchange for a credible attempt to fake enthusiasm over royal ceremonies, and they wouldn't have been able to pull it off in ten thousand lifetimes. Not so with Nora.

I've blogged about this before, but I am captivated by how much of gender is inborn in our natures. When we were in a tourist gift shop in Colorado recently, confronted by a vast selection of t-shirts, Lucas chose one that had to do with snakes and bats and cave-dwelling creatures. Nora zeroed in with laser-guided precision on what was by far the girliest shirt in the joint: a pink one with a super-goopy image of a pastel-colored bear riding a rainbow, surrounded by butterflies, and the word "Colorado."

"That one, Daddy. That's the one I want," she said, in a veni, vidi, vici tone of voice.

Anyway, suffice it to say that Nora will have exactly zero sympathy for the blighter below the jump: