Gender Roles as a Gender Toll
To the woman (God) said,
“I will surely multiply your pain in childbearing;
in pain you shall bring forth children.
Your desire shall be contrary to your husband,
but he shall rule over you.”
And to Adam he said,
“Because you have listened to the voice of your wife
and have eaten of the tree
of which I commanded you,
‘You shall not eat of it,’
cursed is the ground because of you;
in pain you shall eat of it all the days of your life;
thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you;
and you shall eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your face
you shall eat bread,
till you return to the ground,
for out of it you were taken;
for you are dust,
and to dust you shall return.”
I saw Adam over a Zoom call this morning. It had been a little over a month since I had seen the little boy who has helped foster more character development in me than almost any other mentor, brother, or teacher I’ve ever had.
He showed me Pokemon cards for fifteen minutes. The enthusiasm and joy it brought me I borrowed from him and will probably accrue spiritual interest on.
Boys are passionate. When they like something, they love something. They want to know everything. Why a card does that, why this dribble move works like that, why this book ends like this instead of like that. Before the cost of masculinity falls suddenly on their shoulders in pubescence, they are enthralled. They want to play with Pokemon cards, be Pokemon monsters, dream Pokemon dreams. This is how God intended it to be. This is what Jesus meant when He said the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
Yet Adam is “girly” too. He cries. Deeply and frequently. When he does not understand a lesson or that science experiment requires him to wear those gloves, he hates it. Complains about it. Weeps about it. When he is upset, when he is frustrated, when all is not right in his head or in his heart, he communicates it. This, too, is how God intended it to be. This, too, is what Jesus meant when He said the kingdom of God belongs to such as these.
My jam wasn’t Pokemon when I was his age, but the Fellowship of the Ring released when I was 10 so you could take a wild guess about what I played, what I watched, what I dreamed. I was Legolas shooting down orcs, Gimli swinging my axe, Aragorn fending off dozens of incoming Uruk-hai. The world was Middle-earth, and my fantasy and imagination ran wild on the playground, free from the incoming ring to rule all rings of pubescence, masculinity, and the heaviness of life.
I wept for forty-five minutes every time my mom dropped me off at school when I was in 4th grade. For a week straight. Sure, I had been homeschooled all my life up to that point and going to “school” school was wildly different, but still, a 10 year old boy couldn’t find a way to hide all the strife inside. How I managed to find friends, how I wasn’t the running joke amongst my peers for years afterward is a mystery of me. Then again, none of the cool, popular kids of the time ever wanted to be around me. Correlation isn’t causation, but trying telling my 10 year old soul that.
On the table now I have two books in front of me. One of them, a book I got from a man I trust and was recommended to read by a woman I trust too, entitled Wild at Heart. The other book, a book I got because the man whose manliness I respect the most, loves the author deeply. It’s called The Rose That Grew from Concrete.
One from a famous Christian author, another from a notorious, spiritual rapper. One resonates deeply in the marrow of my bones, sings to my tired and aching soul, one connects to me in a way I connect with the closest of friends even though the author and me have almost nothing in common. The other had me swallow my angst early, gave me a visceral reaction in my gut, so deeply spoke to the wound I’ve carried for so much of my life with a lot of vinegar but also some profound sugar.
I’m a man. But I’ve been told to be a man in a way that I’ve never felt as manly and never experienced as such either. I have a deep, rich passion for life. I love taking dropstep shots while playing basketball and looking cool while doing so. I scream at sports games and shout during Star Wars premieres. I love throwing balls around, over roofs, under tables, to the side of the street on the sidewalk. I’ve clenched my fists when I’ve sensed potential predators approach the kids in my care on the playground.
So, too, do I have a deep compassion for life. I see the poor in my city; the people of color pushed out of the trendy and hipster neighborhoods, the kids stuck in traumatic cycles of violence and drugs, the women repeatedly battered and exploited by boys playing as men who were never taught to be men because their fathers were boys too. I’ve placed my hand on my heart when I see children scrape their knees on the pavement or when I hear brothers tell stories of when they lost their innocent boyhood in exchange for compartmentalized manhood. While I’ve seen other men shout at kids to toughen up, get over it, and, to the boys, to “man up,” I’ve stooped down to the eye line of a child and to the boys in my caseload and whispered that I see them for who they are and not told them who they ought to be instead.
I am both/and. Masculine and feminine. Fiercely passionate and tenderly compassionate.
Yet I’m a man, and not a woman.
This is my attempt to reconline this.
I don’t think Eldredge is right about men. Not completely anyway. Maybe I ought to have a Zoom call with him to clear things up though. Because on some points, he's’ really, really right.
He contends that boys, that men, are, as the title states, “wild at heart.” On paper I absolutely agree. We are more than profit margins, more than suits, more than go getters and achievers and our bodies and our minds. We are heart and soul too. Robert Smith mocked the notion that “Boys Don’t Cry” because culture tells boys not to cry and perpetuate that myth while grown men are, in fact, not afraid to shed tears because tears prove a humanity that is whole and not scattered. Eldredge also told his boys to, when other kids at school were picking on them and other students, to punch right back. He contends that Jesus didn’t really mean to turn the other cheek.
Now there’s something I agree with him on. Jesus didn’t intend for us to think that we just sit back and take oppression when He told a marginalized group to “enable” an imperial group to slap us again. Rather, He taught them (and us) to sidestep violence by resisting it with trained intelligence, proven and tested Godly character, and bold, stubborn confidence that though Rome or America or toxic masculinity might bring harm to your body or your mind, they can never touch your heart because God has it on lock. You are in the Beloved, and you aren’t going anywhere from that place.
But… Eldredge is right about fathers. About father’s fathers not blessing their sons so that fathers don’t bring direct blessing to their sons. It’s a vicious, horrible, rarely ever discussed fault in our society. He is right that men crave affirmation from other men. That my masculinity is contingent on shared brotherhood from other men who show each other unwavering loyalty, love, trust, and respect. I might even feel differently about the lesson Eldredge taught to his sons if he contended to “fight back” but on the behalf of others. Now that’s deep, deep manhood. That is for the sake of a brother, and not for the sake of an ego.
Now, what about the other guy? The front of the book has his charismatic and soulful gaze peering right at me so I better get it right. Tupac Shakur is a polarizing figure. Likely, actually one hundred percent confirmed, less moral than Eldredge. He was polarizing, antagonistic, and openly violent on several occasions.
And I don’t agree with many of his violent encounters. But I do, actually, agree with some. Here’s a poem of his:
“Did u hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete
Proving nature’s laws wrong it learned 2 walk without having feet
Funny it seems but by keeping its dreams it learned 2 breathe fresh air
Long live the rose that grew from concrete when no one else even cared!
So much here to dig up. A rose in the concrete… a wildly talented star emerging from the heaviest kind of poverty. By keeping his dreams… he continued to live in spite of all the setbacks, misunderstandings, bullets, and, lastly, his own death. The legacy is sealed forever even if the rose has been gone for twenty-four years. A lot of other MCs took the mantle and continued to give us the fragrance of the truth.
But where Pac and John agree, where I think I now have understanding and am on the path of healing, is the incredible toll of the gender role of masculinity. The caricature of it, anyway. And while I won’t go on in length about femininity because I am not a woman, the struggle is real for the other side too.
So much of what we endure in life is not, actually, seen by others. Let me rephrase that; what we go through on the daily is never felt to the precise degree it is felt by us. Even the grimmest cases of trauma and addiction and abuse show only external scars and bruises. But the internal fractures, the heart strains, the soul tremors are universal, all experienced by all of us though the severity between us may vary. Men might be afraid they aren’t manly enough and women that they aren’t womanly enough, but we are united in our deepest shames, fears, and angers that we, as people, aren’t enough. We got lost in the semantics or variations of our specific wounds, but what severed Adam and Eve from God was more similar than it was different.
I’ve strained to arrive at a third, more inclusive understanding of gender. What I mean is that I don’t believe the more (pardon the stereotyping here) liberal understanding that it is socially constructed and therefore able to be socially deconstructed, and I also do not believe the conservative view where it is so fiercely fixed and established upon birth that a woman can’t preach a sermon and a man can’t enjoy romantic comedies. Yet, it is true men are, generally, more likely interested in fixing a flat tire than women. Women are, often, intrigued about attempting new baking recipes more than men. But the following two stereotypes are less important than the true fact that we both need love from a good God. Both need support and nurture from the loved ones around us. Both need to be respected and valued, specifically, for what we provide to the contexts we are in.
Talking to some close friends, it is maybe not too much of a stretch to say 80% of men and women have issues, strengths, and callings in life that closely connect to gender role stereotypes of their own sex. I don’t have issue with this. Where I have had pushback, frustration, and sometimes outright anger is when the 80 percenters try to push the 20 who don’t fit these molds that, if only they conformed to the 80’s standards, they wouldn’t have their specific “20” issues. Said differently, while I don’t push back against an entrepreneur who is emotionally unavailable to his family by scolding him to just “be empathic and compassionate with their problems because it’s easy” like it might be for me, I often feel pressure from culture that reinforces the same 80 percenter to be emotionally distant to then become like him in order to have a wife and have a family or to have this specific “male” problem.
Even more simply put, I don’t like that some people’s issues are somehow more acceptable, or, perhaps, more excusable than others simply because more people have that issue. Variance from the whole isn’t grounds to be excluded from the whole. The moral majority have no right to speak so harshly to such wounded minorities.
The gender toll that our gender roles bring are egregious and brutal, whether your issues lie within the norm or whether they don’t. If anything, maybe empathic, illogical men can learn from dispassionate, objective men. Perhaps stoic, self-assured women can coach needy, warm women how to be more self-reliant.
Maybe these roles are built on a lie that our false self’s foundation rests on. Maybe the deeper truth of our existence is our place in the Beloved embrace of our God as Father. Maybe “soft” men can learn strength from “tough” men without tearing down each other’s essence (yet, perhaps, a tearing down of the ego). Maybe compassionate women can foster sensitivity and kindness in fiercer, feisty women through shared struggle rather than implicit competition regarding beauty.
I love how Tupac describes his manhood. When asked how he could be a “killer” in one song and a “kind brother” in the next, he answered “because I’m so sensitive. And that’s why I’m so harsh… because I’m so sensitive.”
Can I confess something? I wrote this piece with unmerited angst at what I thought were unfair masculine caricatures I couldn’t measure up to in the first few chapters of Wild at Heart. Several chapters in, many tears freely flowing, and more than a handful of fist clenches later, I can see that this guy gets it too.
There is something especially manly about if you are a man reading this. There’s something God has for you that I could never speak to, neither could a rapper and neither could a theologian. There’s a cause, a calling, a curse you have to overcome which God is calling you to that His fellow kids are spurring you to pursue, to fight, to scrap for. On this Eldredge is totally right; boys will be boys in that in order to become men they need a battle worth dying for.
So too is there something particularly feminine about you if you are a woman reading this. So too could I never speak to, and neither could a rapper and neither could a theologian (often because the latter two or generally men anyway). There’s a people you can speak to, an issue you have words for that no one else has which God’s kids are pushing you to follow, to yearn toward, to risk your heart for. As an educator who’s been privileged to work with many young little ladies, you do tend to see the other side, the other issue, and the one who is overlooked while everyone continues to play on the playground.
But rest assured in this and die on this hill with me; God tells you who you are. Nobody else’s voice even comes close. Especially the monsters who tell you aren’t manly or womanly enough. Especially when it’s because you cry too much as a man or cry too little as a woman. So especially too when it’s because you aren’t strong enough as a man or aren’t pretty enough as a woman.
I’ve never said this word in a blog, but I think it fits well with this: fuck that. Fuck the enmy saying that to you. Fuck any trauma, any pain, any hardship that “confirms” your worth as lacking.
You were made exactly as was intended. Your beauty knows no bounds, your strength is entirely without limit. When, and only when, it is found first, last, and always in Our Father in heaven.
He’s the only one who can fix the toll of our gender role. He’s the only one who calls a woman woman and a man man. He understands the difference between us better than any culture, any political persuasion, any romantic comedy trope.
For within God’s image humans were made. Male and female He created, male and female, He sustains us, male and female, He loves us.
You are enough because He is enough.