The Heresies of the Manosphere: Part 4

How to Be the Man (or Woman) God Made You to Be

This is the fourth and final installment, in an ongoing series. Before diving in, you may want to read Part 1” (Print) (Audio), Part 2 (Print) (Audio), and Part 3 (Print) (Audio)

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I can’t stop thinking about the rich young man from the Gospel of Matthew. Whenever I sit down to write about our cultural confusion over masculinity and femininity, it’s him who comes to mind. He thought attaining eternal life involved some complicated task. He also thought that if he knew what that task involved, he would do it. So, he asked Jesus about it. He believed Jesus had the answer. And he was right.

“Keep the commandments,” Jesus told him.

But that seemed too simple, too straightforward for the young man. Surely entering into eternal live had to involve something less basic than that. So, he pressed the Lord once more, asking, “Which commandments?”

Again, though, Jesus’ answer was simple and straightforward. You know the commandments. Don’t murder, steal, or lie. Be faithful to your wife. Honor your father and mother. Love your neighbor as yourself.

That answer still wasn’t good enough, though. The rich young man thought there had to be more. So, he continued to press, saying, “But I already do all these things. Isn’t there anything else?”

And there was.  

“Go sell what you possess, give to the poor, and come and follow me,” Jesus answered.

That was the more. Give up your idols. Face your fears. Be generous. And follow Jesus. It was still simple. But it wasn’t easy. It was hard, so hard that the rich young man walked away.

Right now, living in a culture that has turned sex and gender inside out and upside down, we can fall into the same trap as that rich young man. We’re trying to figure out what it means to be a man or a woman. We want to order our lives and our family’s lives in a way that will get us out of the mess we’re in as a culture, not keep making it worse. And so, like the rich young man, many of us find ourselves hunting through Scripture, Tradition, and Instagram (or YouTube) for a to-do list of gender specific tasks with strictly delineated parameters: parameters that tell us how we should arrange our work lives and home lives, how we should dress and wear our hair, how we should educate our children and how many children we should have at all.           

But the Church doesn’t give us those kinds of answers. Her answer to the question—"What does it mean to be a man and a woman?”—is as simple and straightforward as Jesus’ admonition to the rich young man. It’s the answer God wrote into our bodies in the Garden of Eden: fatherhood and motherhood.

As we talked about last week, the body is the sign of the person. It makes visible the invisible truth of who we are, revealing us to the world. And what our bodies reveal about us is fatherhood and motherhood. The male body reveals that to be a man is to be a father—always in spirit, often in body. Likewise, the female body reveals that to be a woman is to be a mother—always in spirit, often in body. That’s the Church’s answer to “What does it mean to be a man and a woman?” That’s the meaning of masculinity and femininity. Fatherhood and motherhood. They are, the Catechism says, the “respective perfections” of man and woman (CCC 370).

And this brings us to where we left off last week, pressing for more, just like the rich young man, asking, “But what does it mean to a father? What does it mean to be a mother?”

Here’s the bad news: I don’t have one simple answer for you. If you were hoping I’d unlock the secret of masculinity (and femininity) by the end of this series, I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed. Fatherhood and motherhood are mysteries. They’re reflections of the infinite perfections of God, whose nature is the greatest mystery of all. This doesn’t mean that the nature of fatherhood and motherhood is completely unknowable. We can know a lot about both. But I could spend a lifetime writing about these mysteries without ever fully plumbing their depths. We all could. One essay—or four (and a half) essays—just can’t cut it.

But I do need to wrap this series up. So, I’m going to give you two answers to the question “What does it mean to be a father and what does it mean to be a mother.” The first answer is speculative, but concrete. The second answer is objective, but vague. I find both helpful. Your mileage may vary.

Fatherhood and Motherhood at the Beginning

First, the speculative, which is an answer rooted in the sacramental worldview and the theology of the body.

Throughout the theology of the body, Pope Saint John Paul II reminds us that the body speaks a language all its own. Through gestures and expressions, actions and appearance, constitution and design, our bodies communicate the truth about us to the world.

Physical fatherhood and motherhood are no different. Each is a visible sign of an invisible truth. They are physical signs that point beyond themselves to spiritual realities. They are, in fact, fulfilled by those spiritual realities. In spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, physical fatherhood and motherhood are fully realized.

John Paul II writes:

“Spousal love that finds its expression in ‘continence for the kingdom’ must lead in its normal development to ‘fatherhood’ and ‘motherhood’ in the spiritual sense…in a way analogous to conjugal love, which matures in physical fatherhood and motherhood…On its part, physical generation also fully corresponds to its meaning only if it is completed by fatherhood and motherhood in the spirit…” (TOB, 78:5).

Given that, it follows that if we want to better understand the most central spiritual realities of motherhood and fatherhood, the best place to look is at the origin point of physical fatherhood and motherhood: the creation of new life, which is where sexual difference doesn’t simply matter, but is fundamental, essential, and inescapable.

So, let’s do that, starting with fatherhood.

As I said last week, at the most basic biological level, fatherhood is “generative.” It requires that the man actively engage with another, reaching out beyond himself and entering his wife. That engagement needs to be full and complete, from start to finish. You don’t become a father of a child by following the way of Onan. You finish what you start.

When a man does engage with a woman that way, he literally gives of himself, providing the sperm which fertilizes an egg and supplies half of a unique person’s DNA. That act of self-gift requires health and strength. A man must be strong enough to perform the marital act and healthy enough to send forth sufficient quantities of fast-swimming sperm, two factors essential to achieving pregnancy. At the same time, the man’s strength must be controlled. He must be gentle. If he’s not, what God designed to be an experience of loving pleasure can become, for the woman, an experience of pain, which in turn, can cause her body to tighten rather than relax and—sometimes, not always—make conception more difficult.

So, from the body, we see that physical fatherhood starts with engagement. The man must be actively and completely engaged, from first to last. He must give of himself. He must be healthy and strong. And he must be gentle.

Motherhood, in many ways, is the same. It too, requires self-gift. Like the man, the woman provides half the raw material for new life. She also provides nourishment for the child, first with her blood, later with her milk, helping new life to grow and flourish. Like the man, she too must be healthy and strong. She is the child’s first protector. She is its first home. If the woman is weak or unhealthy, either conception doesn’t take place, or the child conceived can’t grow as it should. New life will not be safe. Finally, like the man, she must be gentle. Not so much in the performance of the marital act, but with herself, as she carries the child, and with the child once born, who remains, for a time, almost an extension of herself.

What is fundamentally different about motherhood, though, is that it’s not “generative.” It is “creative.” It doesn’t begin with engagement, but with receptivity. In other words, the mother doesn’t go out of herself to conceive a child. Rather, she welcomes another in, first the man, then the child. That welcoming is not over in a moment. A man generates a child in the blink of an eye. The woman creates and grows a child within her over nine months, then nourishes that life outside her for months, even years, more. Her motherhood requires that she make space for another in a fundamental and sustained way. Her whole body must reorient itself around the life growing within it, as her pelvic bones expand and her organs shift and a placenta forms to provide the baby with oxygen and nutrients from her blood, and then later as her breasts fill with milk to feed the child.  

 That’s parenthood in the body. That’s fatherhood and motherhood in the flesh, at the very beginning. And if that does indeed chart a course for us, showing us what true fatherhood and motherhood in the spirit are, then what we see is that in many ways, the fundamentals are the same.

Fatherhood and Motherhood in the Spirit

With physical parenthood, both fathers and mothers are called to give of themselves. Physical parenting requires giving the raw material for starting and sustaining life, while spiritual parenthood requires giving what’s needed for life to flourish. As fathers and mothers in the home and in the world, we are called to give our time, our energy, our gifts, our talents, our knowledge, our wisdom, and our hearts, as we seek to form and care for those the Lord has entrusted to us. Fathers and mothers are both called to sacrifice and both called to provide, putting our very selves, all that we have and are, at the service of our children.

Second, fatherhood and motherhood in the body both require health and strength. So does fatherhood and motherhood in spirit. Fathers and mothers need to be healthy in mind and soul, free from disordered attachments, at peace with others, aware of our own weaknesses, and determined to overcome them. Both fathers and mothers also need to be strong—strong in faith, strong in virtue, and strong in prayer, so that we can protect those in our care and defend them from harm in mind and spirit.

Finally, both fathers and mothers—in body and soul—are called to be gentle, to control our strength, and not dominate, overpower, or crush those we serve. If we want to be good fathers and mothers, we cannot use our power or authority to secure our own prerogatives, preferences, and personal well-being over the good of others. In the Kingdom, those who lead do so by serving. The first shall be last. So as leaders, as fathers and mothers, we have to orient our hearts to caring for the little and the least, tending to them as the Good Shepherd does, gently, knowing that each and every person we meet and serve is precious to Him.

Men and women are different, and individuals are different, so how each man and each woman carries out those tasks will be different, as well. Men will do them as men, and women will do them as women, and each person will bring their own unique self to the doing. But still, those are the shared tasks of parenthood in the body and in the spirit: provision and protection, carried out with gentleness and love.

But what about where the tasks of fatherhood and motherhood differ? What about generation and creation, engagement and receptivity?

Again, I said this part was speculative. This is me meditating on John Paul II’s meditations. But it seems that those tasks, in a sense, are the most fundamental tasks of fatherhood and motherhood. On men’s healthy, full, and active engagement, the rest of his fatherhood depends. Likewise, on woman’s healthy, full, and active receptivity, the rest of her motherhood depends. If a man doesn’t engage—if he doesn’t reach out of himself, enter his wife, and complete the marital act—he’ll never become a father. And if a woman doesn’t receive—if she doesn’t open herself to receive her husband and a child—she’ll never become a mother.

What’s true for the body is true for the spirit. If a man isn’t engaging in his home and the world, if he’s not entering deeply into the life of his family, the life of faith, and the life of the work to which he’s been called, from initiation to completion, all in a healthy way, his fatherhood is compromised at the root. His provision, his protection, his gentleness—they’re all weakened by his lack of engagement. And if a woman isn’t receiving—welcoming people into her heart and home and life, seeing the uniqueness of the persons before her, and making space for them grow, mature, and be who God made them to be—than her motherhood is compromised at the root, too. Whatever else she has to offer—provision, protection, gentleness—accomplishes so much less.

Which perhaps is why so many of us struggle more with that work than with any other. Maybe that’s why either in the home, at work, in the pursuit of holiness, or some combination of the three, so many men struggle to engage in a healthy way, falling so often into passivity—through absence, abandonment, detachment, or sloth—or alternately into what John Paul II calls machismo—through dominating others rather than engaging them. Maybe that’s also why women are prone to envying others and judging others, to manipulating people and controlling situations, to excluding friends and strangers alike instead of welcoming everyone in and receiving them as the gift they are, with no comparison or competition. Maybe men and women struggle so profoundly with engagement and receptivity because that’s where Satan tempts us the most. Because he knows that if he cripples us at the very root, pulling us away from the most fundamental tasks, then he can prevent us from being the fathers and mothers God made us to be.

Which, of course, is exactly what Satan wants to do. Satan does not want and never has wanted men to be fathers or women to be mothers. He absolutely wants passivity and machismo. He absolutely wants envy and grasping control. He absolutely wants us engaged in the age-old struggle of domination and manipulation because when we do that, we’re not doing the work God made us to do, we’re not loving as God made us to love, and we’re not imaging the infinite perfections of God to all those whose paths we cross. And that means brokenness remains the order of the day, for us and for the whole blessed world.

C. S. Lewis writes about this foundational struggle in one of his collections of letters (Letters to an American Lady) There, he describes purgatory as a chaotic kitchen, where pots are boiling over and pans are burning in the oven and a million tasks need doing before dinner can get on the table. In this purgatorial kitchen, the job of the men is to do the work: to take the pots out of the stove and the pans out of the oven, to chop the vegetables, stir the sauces, baste the bird, and do whatever else needs doing. The women’s job is to simply sit there and let them do it.

Lewis doesn’t elaborate beyond that, but I suspect he would agree with me that, in addition to doing the work in the kitchen, the men need to do it without complaining, without blaming others for not doing it, and without running roughshod over the other men in the kitchen. Likewise, the women need to sit there and watch without sideline quarterbacking—offering up comments and judgement about what the men aren’t doing or how the work should be done or how they would do it better—and instead just be grateful that the work is being done.

Lewis’ point isn’t that men must do all the work in the world, and women should do none. Nor is my point that men are the only sex which should be engaging, and women are the only sex which should be receiving. Both sexes need to and will engage and receive as we go about life in this world. And yet, there remains something fundamentally important about men engaging as men and women receiving as women. It’s why the image of Lewis’ purgatorial kitchen always rings true. Healthy engagement and healthy receptivity are lessons men and women must learn and tasks we must perform if we want to become the fathers and mothers—the men and women—that God made us to be.

So, if you want Emily Chapman’s personal thoughts, based on the theology of the body (and Edith Stein…and Gertrude von Lefort…and Prudence Allen…and C.S. Lewis), about what makes a man a man and a woman a woman, about what ultimately defines fatherhood and motherhood, then there you have it. I think it’s engagement and receptivity. I think it’s our job, as we grow in holiness, for men to learn how to engage deeply and for women to learn to receive widely, so that we can follow John Paul II’s advice in Familiaris Consortio and become who we are.

That’s not easy—not for me, not for most of us. The world, concupiscence, and the devil are all set against us, and just because it’s what we were made to do doesn’t mean it will come naturally to us. But we still have to do it. If we want to become saints, help heal the world, and reflect God’s love to others in space and time, there is no getting around it.

Which again, as the Catechism says, is what fatherhood and motherhood are. They are an icon of the love of God: a God who provides and protects; a God who is stronger than death, but so gentle that He won’t break a bruised reed; and above all, a God who has entered deeply into every moment of Salvation History, faithfully carrying out His plan of redemption, so that He can welcome His beloved children into His life and into His heavenly home forever.

“Love, and Do What You Will”

So, that’s one answer to the question, “What does it mean to be a mother and father?” And I think it’s a good one. But it’s not one you’re going to find in the Catechism. You can find saints, theologians, philosophers, and writers—including John Paul II—meditating on those concepts, but nowhere in any magisterial document does it say, men must engage and women must receive in order to not fail at being reflections of the perfections of God.

It’s also not the kind of answer for which so many in our culture, especially those drawn to influencers within the Christian Manosphere, are looking. Engagement and receptivity are not prescriptives for the day to day ordering of life and society. They’re prescriptives for the soul. They tell us what kind of interior dispositions we need to cultivate, what lies we need to reject, what virtues we need to develop. But they don’t tell us who should be working where, doing the dishes, or changing the diapers.

But neither does the Church. The Church today just doesn’t give those kinds of answers.

Rather, what the Church says to all our pressing demands for more specifics is basically the same thing that Jesus said to the rich young man when he continued to press for more details about how to enter eternal life. Sell everything you have. Give to the poor. And follow Jesus.

Okay. Maybe the Church doesn’t say to sell everything. Not literally at least. But we do need to let go of things. We need to surrender our idols and face our fears as we follow Jesus wherever He leads. We need to obey His commandments, receive Him in the sacraments, and let Him transform us by the renewing of our minds. That’s how we learn who we are. That’s how we come to see how broken we are and how beloved we are. That’s also how we come to see what parts of us must die and what parts of us must grow for us to become the man or woman God made us to be. Not who He made our neighbor to be. Not who He made our best friend or the influencer we follow on Instagram to be. But us. You. Me.

That’s also how we learn to listen to the Holy Spirit, discern God’s will, and exercise prudence as we make good decisions about how God wants us (and our spouse) to order our lives. Again, not our neighbor’s life. Not our best friend’s or the Instagram influencer’s life. Our life. Yours. Mine.  

No one—not a priest, not a podcast host, and certainly not me—can tell you how to arrange every moment of your day or your family’s life. The Church doesn’t do that, so why anyone else even tries is beyond me. The majority of decisions we need to make in this life—who we marry, when we marry, where we live, what work we do, the number of children we welcome, how we educate them, how we spend our days together, how we wear our hair and do (or not do) our makeup—are decisions that no one can make but us. And that’s how it’s supposed to be. The Church leaves those decisions to us. She gives us the moral law to obey, holds up virtues to cultivate, and provides us with the grace we need to integrate law and virtue with love and action. Then, like Saint Augustine, she says, “Love and do what you will.”

For a lot of us, this sounds terrifying—not just the freedom God gives us, but the whole thing: giving up our idols, facing our fears, and following Jesus into the unknown, as He transforms us into (literally) God knows what. Nothing about that process sounds certain or clear or controlled. Nothing about that process sounds safe. So, most of us don’t want to do it. The rich young man didn’t. He walked away sad. He loved his money too much. He didn’t know who he would be without it. And most of us don’t know who we would be without our idols, wounds, and fears either. It can sound much easier to just assert our authority as head of the household or start making sourdough bread than to journey with Christ into the unknown. (Actually, the sour dough part sounds way harder to me, but I digress).

Either way, the journey into the unknown is scary. What if we mess up? What if we make things worse?

We might. But Jesus will still be there, ready to make something beautiful out of whatever mess we make. We just have to let Him. We’re also not completely without guidance. The moral law, the virtues, and grace are not nothing. A clear understanding of right and wrong, paired with strong habits of virtue, an abhorrence of vice, and the abiding presence of God’s life in our soul go a long way towards helping us live a faithful, well-ordered, grace-filled life that is a powerful witness to truth in an upside-down world.

And of course, the guidance found in the theology of the body helps, too. No man who learns to deeply engage with God, his family, his work, and the world will find himself less a man, less himself for doing that. And no woman who learns to receive—who learns to welcome in life and love and healing and grace—will find herself less a woman or less herself for doing that. Nobody regrets learning to love more like God loves us. There are plenty of paths of regret in this world. That is not one of them.

Traditional versus Tradition

One final thought before I wrap this whole series up.

Last week, a young man tried to sum up what I’m doing with these essays by saying, “Emily Chapman is trying to do away with traditional gender roles.”

When I heard this, the first thought that popped into my head was, “Well, he missed the point.”

The second thought was, “Only if by ‘traditional’ you mean the gender roles which emerged in the wake of the Industrial Revolution, separating fathers from their families, and turning homes into places of consumption rather than production.”

The third, thought, was, “‘Traditional’ is the wrong word. I’m not trying to do away with traditional gender roles. I’m trying to do away with false, dangerous, and unbiblical ones.”

I said it at the outset of this series, and I will say it again. The world is a mess, for men and for women. Radical feminism, secularism, consumerism, hedonism, and post-modernism have done wrong by all of us. It is right and good that people are trying to find a way out of this mess. It’s also understandable why some people are trying to find that way out by looking to the past, to a time when the world was less confused. But unless we look all the way back, to the Garden before the Fall, we’re still going to find a broken world. The world was definitely less confused about some things 75 or 150 years ago. But it was more confused about other things. And whether more confused or less, it was still cracked to its core.

Which is why we need to be less focused on what’s traditional and more focused on what’s true, right, and loving. In the end, it’s God’s design for men, woman, and the family that matters. It’s God’s plan that matters. Not one age’s or culture’s plan. Because no matter what age and culture we find ourselves pining for, it still screwed up God’s plan. Every age and culture has screwed up God’s plan. Lamech took two wives. Solomon took 500 more. Tamar manipulated and used Judah. Jezebel dominated and abused Ahab. It’s been a mess ever since Eden, when Adam and Eve listened to the snake and the relationship that was made to be an icon of the self-giving love within the Trinity became a power struggle instead.

The break that occurred between man and woman when our first parents fell was as deep as the break in each individual soul. It went right down to the core of who we are and how we love. It’s part of what defines the human condition. Every history ever told tells of it. It’s always there, as constant as the sun, moon, and stars.

This is one of the reasons why Jesus came. Jesus suffered, died, and rose again to restore what had been lost, including the original unity between man and woman. But just like we all keep sinning, even with the help of grace, the break between men and women keeps popping up in every new age, even with the help of grace.

The Church sees this as a problem. She knows it’s not supposed to be this way. This fracture between the sexes was not part of God’s original design. It was a consequence of sin. And in Christ, we’re supposed to strive against it. “The woman cannot become the ‘object’ of ‘domination’ and male ‘possession,’” she teaches (Mulieris Dignitatem, 10).

The Church is also wise enough to recognize that the sinful urge to dominate women is so deeply rooted in man’s soul, that being Catholic does not make one immune to it. Being a priest, bishop, or even a pope doesn’t make one immune to it either. John Paul II writes:

Unfortunately, we are heirs to a history which has conditioned us to a remarkable extent. In every time and place, this conditioning has been an obstacle to the progress of women. Women's dignity has often been unacknowledged and their prerogatives misrepresented; they have often been relegated to the margins of society and even reduced to servitude. This has prevented women from truly being themselves and it has resulted in a spiritual impoverishment of humanity. Certainly it is no easy task to assign the blame for this, considering the many kinds of cultural conditioning which down the centuries have shaped ways of thinking and acting. And if objective blame, especially in particular historical contexts, has belonged to not just a few members of the Church, for this I am truly sorry,” (Letter to Women, 3).

This is why I’m not particularly interested in what’s “traditional.” Nor is the Church. Tradition she cares about. She cares about it deeply. “Traditional” is a different matter. Because “traditional” has often meant “sinful.” It’s often meant “what serves man, but not God.” Accordingly, when it comes to the relationship between man and woman, the Church does not call us to recommit ourselves to what is simply “traditional.” Rather, she calls us to recommit ourselves to “fidelity to the Gospel vision,” (Letter to Women, 3). She calls us to seek what is true and order our lives in accord with that.

This is what I have been trying to do in these essays. And this is one of the reasons why I spent so much time on John Paul II’s theology of the body. It is a meditation on the beginning, on what the Book of Genesis tells us about man and woman before the Fall. In that, I believe, it offers us some of the surest guidance we can find, guidance that is rooted in the objective witness of the body, bodies created male and female.

In the end, though, the only real corrective for the heresies of the Manosphere … and the heresies of the culture … is Jesus. The closer we grow to Him, the more His grace heals us and transforms us, the more capable we become of seeing like Him and loving like Him. And the more capable we become of that, the more we can look at the person in front of us, whether man or woman, and see what makes them beautiful—what makes them good, strong, capable, and unlike any other person who ever was or ever will be—and respond rightly to them.

It's that right seeing and right response, which brings our marriages, friendships, and partnerships in the world closer to that Gospel vision. That’s what allows for men and women to flourish and for our relationships to flourish. That’s also, in time, what will allow for society to flourish. The answer to our cultural crisis over masculinity, femininity, and a thousand other things is not strictly delineated gender roles lifted from a 1950s sitcom. It’s whole, healthy men and women, who are alive in Christ, formed by the Word, rooted in Tradition, and whose every decision is guided both by the virtue of prudence and by the wisdom of the Spirit. The answer is people who are truly free, free from slavery to sin and free to be fully who God made them to be.

The end.

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