Can
men any longer write about women? Will our discourse
always fallaciously subjectivize the male, as the
Lacanian digit to the feminine zero? Andrea Dworkin and
many others are insistent here. And yet the theologian
must oppose such a closure no less stridently. No one
should claim a monological right to instruct the other
sex concerning moral thought and conduct. Moreover, and
no less seriously, we must object to that
anti-dialogical aspect of the prevailing academic
feminism which, supported by biometric footnotes,
proposes that men have nothing to say here because truly
“female thought” is on every level categorically
different from the thought of males. On this view,
sexual difference not only creates a predisposition to
be interested in certain kinds of issues, but
fundamentally affects every way in which we handle
concepts. Knowledge is sexualized: We are told, “the
very way in which we decide what is true and false is a
function of sexual difference.”
One
reaction against this view is voiced in detail by Jean
Curthoys in her new book Feminist Amnesia. She
applies a kind of Friedanite fundamentalism, lamenting
the recent decline of ’60s and ’70s radical feminist
theory, which was grounded in assurances of identity
between the sexes rather than mere equality.
Conventional academic feminism today, she avers, draws
on recent biology to posit a total epistemic
discontinuity between male and female, so that all
scholarship, and all conclusions about reality, are
bifurcated accordingly, excluding all possibility of
dialogue across the gender abyss. This aporetic
cessation, she insists, is intolerable.
Clearly
there is force to her complaint, but equally clearly,
both she and her antagonists go too far. Biologists and
philosophers now converge on a median position that
suggests that men and women do indeed think differently,
but not so differently that they can form no judgment on
each other’s conclusions. It is not just the practical
implications that make this inference inescapable; could
we tolerate, for instance, separate encyclopedias for
each sex? More seriously, the claim to aporia is to be
rejected as forming part of a recent feminist turn away
from rationality itself as an oppressive product and
tool of “male linearity.” On this view, women’s
discourse, skeptical about attempts to deduce any
intrinsically true facts about reality, is hence
pre-eminently responsive to the project of
postmodernism, while men languish amid the rationalizing
games of late modernity. This thesis of male
backwardness is intriguing and has appealed to many, yet
remains without persuasive proof. Is this scruple a
“linear male objectification?” Surely it is just
objectification: to claim that women have a
categorically more indirect, empathetic, spontaneous
approach to reality may be tantamount to affirming that
they are less capable of sustained argument based on
fact.
Such
a conclusion is far from universal among feminists,
converging as it does with a certain masculine
stereotype. Of course, it is almost certainly true, as
Professor Carol Gilligan has argued, that ethical
responses differ markedly between the sexes. For her,
women “make moral decisions in a framework of
relationships more than in a framework of rights.”
Women’s “moral processing is contextually
oriented.” This is uncontroversial, but value
judgments amid the hurly-burly of lived reality are one
thing; large generalizations about the nature of the
world are quite another. And in the latter field,
neither revelation nor reason persuades us that the two
styles of argument, the male and female, cannot overlap.
What
follows, therefore, is not an androcentric apologia,
although a deliberate or even unwilled male discourse is
inescapable and is not inherently improper. It claims to
be factual, not a self-authenticating view from within a
particular “gendered” language-game.
A
second preliminary point raises the entire problem of
gendered approaches to spirituality. The British
religious philosopher John Hick, in a recent moment of
feministic reflection, proposed that “because of the
effects upon them of patriarchal cultures, many women
have ‘weak’ egos, suffer from an ingrained
inferiority complex, and are tempted to diffusion and
triviality.” He thus suggests that women experience
greater difficulties in becoming saints because the
spiritual struggle can only be undertaken by a coherent,
confident personality. On this view, women must pass
through two stages in achieving sainthood, while men
require only one.
A
little reflection will reveal that this position suffers
from two sharp problems. For a start, it deploys an
unexamined stereotype of traditional women as shallow
and easily distracted; whereas any observation of
women’s attendance at, say, salah [ritual
prayer], or a Turkish mevlud [poetic verses given
in celebrations], suggests that women’s devotional
behavior tends to be not palpably less sober, or focused
or directed than that of men. Often it is women rather
then men who retain a more serious faith under
secularizing conditions, although this may flower in the
privacy of the home rather than under public scrutiny in
the mosque.
Secondly,
it implies that spiritual growth is a primarily
mechanical, discursive procedure where the will
overcomes passion, leading to detachment from the world,
which is the precondition for sainthood. This begs some
fundamental questions about the spiritual life; Hick’s
image may hold good for some forms of Christianity and
Hinduism, but cannot be applied to many other varieties
of religious development, where the conscious,
calculating will is deliberately pushed into the
background. Specifically, what is characteristically
male about love-based mysticism? The insistence that the
mind is a prison, and that emotion and spontaneous love
of God, triggered by relatively informal practices of
the dhikr (remembrance of Allah) type, is a commonplace
even of “male” spirituality. Here, for instance, is
a poem by Rumi:
In
the screaming gale of Love, the intellect is a gnat.
How
can intellects find space to wander there?
And
again:
Do
not remain a man of intellect among the lovers,
especially if you love that sweet-faced Beloved.
May
the men of intellect stay far from the lovers, may the
smell of dung stay far from the east wind!
If
a man of intellect should enter, tell him the way is
blocked, but if a lover should come, extend him a
hundred welcomes!
By
the time intellect has deliberated and reflected, love
has flown to the seventh heaven.
By
the time intellect has found a camel for the Hajj, love
has circled the Ka`bah
Love
has come and covered my mouth.
It
says, “Throw away your poetry, and come to the
stars!”
Perhaps
a modern Protestant theologian will have problems with
this; but most traditional religions assume that the way
to God is through the heart, not the mind. So Hick’s
idea that “patriarchy” slams the door to God in the
face of traditional women simply because they are
(supposedly) less cerebral than men, seems distinctly
unpersuasive. He is simply a victim of his own cultural
and denominational limitations.
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