The False “Feminine”
Thought: All of these talks and programs teaching the faithful how to be properly feminine or masculine are wolves in sheep’s clothing. On the surface it seems innocent, holy, appropriately conservative; it seems to be a necessary corrective. But if someone is telling you how to be feminine or masculine, you must first accept this claim: that at present, you are not feminine, you are not masculine.
What a strange claim. How can someone tell that about you? Based on what you are wearing? Based on your marital status? Based on worldly markers of financial success?
Is that how God wishes us to understand ourselves and others as men and women? People in seriously broken marriages are presently teaching other faithful how to enter into relationships, how to understand their spouses; this is the blind leading the blind.
If you understand your spouse (or anyone at all) first as man or woman, before understanding them as Tim or Jenny or Charlie — that is to say, before understanding and encountering and loving them as who they are in their specificity — then you are setting your relationship up for a fall.
We are saved and save others in our saintly specificity. We do not enter into communion with others from categorical identities. Oh, how the Devil is working overtime in the present age to corner us into our categories, and there to harangue us endlessly…
Are you feminine enough? Are you black enough? Are you Republican enough? Are you patriotic enough? Are you man enough?
Enough with the enough!
Focus simply on: am I the saint God created me, and no one else, to be? Am I on that path? Am I every day more and more who I was made to be? Am I relying utterly on God’s grace and affection and providence? Am I falling out of love with my idea of me and falling more in love with His dream of me?
If you become the saint you are supposed to be, you will of necessity be fully the woman or man you are supposed to be. You will of necessity attain the highest expression of femininity or masculinity because you will have attained to the highest expression of your own self.
But when you focus on being more masculine or feminine, rather than on being more truly yourself, you run a very high risk of not becoming who you are supposed to be. This is simple logic. It is possible to be “feminine” or “masculine” and not to be a saint. It is not possible to be a saint, and to not be “feminine” or “masculine”, or, more precisely — it is not possible to be a saint, and not to be fully woman or fully man.
The Devil wants us to focus on the pursuit of false identity ideals, rather than actual ideals of holiness. Identity ideals promise (and never deliver) the fulfillment of self according to ever-shifting categorical goalposts; holiness shatters all categories even as it apotheosizes and fulfills them.
When we seek after identity ideals we are never enough, we are always lacking, and the solution is always, ultimately, performative. Identity is like a slave-driver.
Holiness is like a father. When we seek after ideals of holiness, we are loved and eagerly desired, we are filled and nourished. Having tasted such sweetness and experienced such loving kindness, we want more, and so work for our thirst to be reawakened, so that we can drink again and again of so good a spring. And this is not performative; this is so deeply real.
Thought: The faithful being told they aren’t masculine or feminine enough calls to mind Genesis. Who told you you were naked? In this case, Who told you you were not masculine? You were not feminine?
Thought: This is how sin rewires us — to make us take seriously the Accuser, and dismiss the Advocate. This is why abusive “insights” about femininity have such a hold — we think they must be true because they confirm and reify our worst, meanest thoughts about ourselves — it’s all my fault, I’m not really a woman — I’m bad at being a woman, and that’s why I am unloved.
(Or, for men: it’s all my fault, I’m not really a man — I’m bad at being a man and that’s why I am a failure.)