August 11, 2008

• Masculine and Feminine Ideals?

  The argument is actually really old.  Used to be people were arguing against single parent households.  I always thought it was sort of odd back then arguing against something that most people didn’t have much of a choice about, in the first place. Arguments against single parent households sounded an awful lot like arguments for loveless marriages of convenience to my ears. Only it sounds much less virtuous when you say it that way doesn’t it?

  I first heard the argument twisted to a new controversy in a Church. Now I don’t go to church very often and I gotta tell you this experience didn’t make me any more gung-ho about attending them. It was either a funeral or a marriage. I can’t remember which. Probably a funeral since I’ve attended far more of those than weddings. But I remember being rather annoyed that the preacher chose this sacred occasion to insinuate his own social beliefs in the discussion. Yeah… I wanted to walk out in disgust. Loyalty prevented me. I tuned him out.

  But before I did, I heard the argument. He was talking about gay marriage. Though he didn’t use that phrase, it was clear by the words he was using what he was talking about the recent controversies revolving around gay marriage. He talked about how marriage was under attack as an institution, how it was being corrupted, and on the verge of turning into something else.  And then he gave the argument.

  I’ve since heard the argument numerous times. On television. In the news. From relatives. In emails.  And most recently I read it in a comment reply to something I wrote on Xanga.

  The argument it goes something like this:

  Children need to be raised with both a Mother and a Father in order to support the ideals of Masculinity and Femininity in the world.

  That’s it. That’s the whole of the argument.

  And you know most arguments against gay marriage are easily shot down as being suggestive of arrogance or bigotry. Most people, I think, by this time are willing to admit that being gay doesn’t make you somehow less capable of parenting or less deserving of raising children if you should so choose to do so. Most people now I think are pretty sold on the idea that being homosexual should afford you exactly the same opportunity to receive exactly the same advantages and disadvantages afforded through the institution of marriage by the state if they so choose.

  Oh sure there are people who still disagree, but I think or hope we’ve gotten to the point where people are ashamed to admit that level or prejudice in public. That’s a good thing.

  And yet this argument remains as one of the last bastions of the people who, in spite of all that, still claim that gay marriage needs to be outlawed and the constitution should be amended to strike the possibility of gay marriage ever becoming a staple part of American life. They cling to this idea of “civil unions” as their salvation, a way to prove they are not *really* being prejudiced biggoted idiots about the whole thing while still singling out homosexuals as the “other” and treating them differently from everyone else. What are you complaining about? They argue. You’ve got your civil unions.

  It reminds me of people saying “What are you complaining about black people? You’ve got your black schools and your black bathrooms and your black busses and your black restaurants! Why do you need in on *ours*?”

  I should hope we had learned our lesson about that. But we clearly haven’t.  I wonder if we ever will?

  But back to the argument at hand. Why does that idea of masculine and feminine ideals carry so much weight with people? Why does it carry on when most other arguments are broken against the cold hard rock of basic logic?

  Perhaps it’s just that we, and by we I mean liberals and progressives like me, are arguing against it in the wrong way. Sometimes we do that. In our urge to reject something that immediately sounds stupid to our ears we don’t take the time to really reason out *why* it is so stupid.

  The classical argument against this “ideals” argument is to basically laugh at it. You say to the person: do you *really* think ideals of masculinity and feminity are threatened in the slightest bit by the existence of Gay Marriages? I mean come on, it’s not like EVERY child will be raised in same sex households. The vast majority will still have a mother and a father whom they know and interact with. Chances are not even every child will know of a child who was raised in a household with two parents of the same gender.

  So quit worrying. That’s our clasiscal argument.

  But you know what? Worry doesn’t disappear nearly that easily.

  I’ve always felt the argument against this assertion should be very different. We shouldn’t say “it’s not going to happen”. Rather, we should say: “so what if it does!”

  Ad that’s really been my feelings about it all along. I say, if so called ideals of masculinity and feminiity vanish thanks to a prevalence of children raised in single parent households or same sex households, then GOOD RIDDANCE!

  I mean what exactly *are* these ideals we are trying to protect? They aren’t real physical differences between men and women caused by genetics or hormones or anything like that, because if they were, there’d BE no possibility of a threat to them due to changes in the way we are raised. So basica reasoning tells me that what we are talking about is social constructed standards of behavior. To put it simply, the idea that Guys “ought” to behave in a certain way and girls “ought” to behave in a different way.

  And you know… I think that’s bullshit.  Who decided? Who said guys shouldn’t do this or that or this other thing? Who decreed that if a girl acts in this way or that way that she’s a failure as a woman? These are traditions that run back thousands of years. But they aren’t necessarily rational traditions. There’s no reason to support them at all really if modern sensibilities determine that they are of no real use.

  And these so called ideals cause harm. I mean real measurable psychological harm in numerous children who are raised to think badly of themselves because they don’t act in accordance with the ideals. A boy who is passive is ridiculed for being too “girly”. A girl who is more aggressive is attacked as a “tomboy”.  There are hundreds of thousands of examples. It’s been a problem long before the current controversy over gay marriage reached the public eye.

  There’s a more general principle at stake here too. The question is to what extent should we cling to the way things are, hold traditions steady and static and demand that they go unchanged? Should we try to force masculine and feminine ideals remain exactly as they were when we were growing up? Why? Because that’s what makes us feel the most comfortable?

  Maybe instead of that we should try letting society develop organically. Things will change. People will change. And what is considered feminine and what is considered masculine will evolve over time too. Actually it always does. It always has been. If you could go back and ask your great grandparents what constituted the feminine or masculine ideal it would be unrecognizable to you. Time changes regardless of what you want it to be. Forcing children to get raised in households with both a  mother and a father won’t really change that. Your children will still perceive things radically differently than you do and their children radically different still.

  You’re fighting the impossible. You’re trying to stand in front of a land slide and hold it back with your two hands. Give it up. The world is changing whether you want it to or not. Instead of trying to make things the way you want, why not try and figure out what’s good in the way things are becoming and try to support those things.Try to teach universal values like tolerance, honesty, virtue, and altruism to your children so that no matter what lifestyle they choose to live they’ll carry with them these principles and use them to create a Just society.

  We can all just be however we want to be, act however we want to act. We don’t need any stupid meaningless ideals to futiley yearn for. Instead let’s make ourselves our model and learn from one another and grow along side one another no matter how we were raised and no matter how we turn out.   And we can through harnessing the knoweldge and experiences of one another all become better people as a result.

  • 1:00 pm
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