Transcript

Hello and welcome to the Being Human Podcast. I’m your host, Dr. Greg Bottaro, and today we’re going to carry on this theme over the last couple of episodes. I shared with you for our 200th episode a keynote that I delivered at the Franciscan University man and woman conference and followed that up with the last episode with my wife, a wonderful, my favorite guest, wonderful conversation about what it means to be masculine and feminine in a family as husband and wife and really untying some of the knots in culture and even in church culture in this disparity between man and woman and a misunderstanding of leadership and headship and hardship. If you haven’t listened to that episode, I just think it’s really important to engage this conversation at a deeper level.

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AI-Generated transcript of this episode:
And today, what I want to share with you is actually the first of the next two episodes. I’m actually gonna give you free access to two of the lectures within our CP map certification. And there’s four levels of anthropology that we study within our certification program. In the third level, we go deep into man and woman and what it means, and it’s a whole course. So, there’s 10 lectures total, but I’m gonna share two of them with you today. I’ll share one, and I lay out the foundations for discussing genius, what it means to have a masculine genius and a feminine genius. What is that framework and paradigm do for us? It’s also very much tied into the brain science.

And so, there’s all sorts of reasons that we act and feel and think the way we do as men and women. As I said in my keynote, we’ll never know what the other side thinks and feels, and all we have to go on are interpretations of what the other person does, but we always apply our interpretations in context of our own sexualized brains, either as a male or as a female. We’ll never really know what the other side is like, so it’s always been since the fall a point of tension and conflict. So how is this a pathway to holiness? It’s through the conflict, it’s through the tension. And so, you know, laying this foundation of a framework is really helpful for us to then build upon and really go deep to understand the gift, the beauty, the wonder of the other.

And you know, as a man, everything that the feminine genius represents is a gift from God to me, and everything that I am as a man is a gift to my wife. Everything that all of masculinity has to offer is as a gift to all women. And this echoes from Genesis when God created Adam and Eve, and he made us as helpmates for each other. And more, you know, it’s a real giftedness in that when God created for Adam his wife Eve, you know, there’s such a beautiful dimension of love, of gift, and Adam received her in that way, and we can say vice versa that he was the gift for her and she received him in that way before the fall. So we can work to go back towards an understanding, at least an appreciation, and this process of conversion of growing in the appreciation of the gift of the other. But let’s lay that foundation here first.

So, I hope you enjoy this free access to A302 Foundations of Genius, one of the lectures from the Catholic Psych Certification Program. God bless you.

I spent the last 10 years learning how to help people using the best techniques available in psychology, integrated with the Catholic faith. Now, we’ve figured out that there’s a better way to help people than just slapping a Catholic label on the same secular model of therapy you find anywhere else. The real question is how will we make this shift to a new model of truly Catholic accompaniment, keeping the psychological sciences in mind while opening up to a more human and more effective approach? This podcast is here to give you the answer. Join me and follow along as I take you behind the scenes of what this new model looks like, using recorded audio from sessions, working with my team, with colleagues, and even directly with clients. My name is Dr. Greg Bottaro, and I want to welcome you to the Being Human Podcast.

Here we are, ready to dive deeper into male and female, talking about integration and bringing the body into the conversation about the male and female genius. That’s what our initial plan is here for the beginning part of our course. And in order to really understand how men and women can be in communion with each other, we have to understand who a man and woman is in the first place. Obviously, there’s a lot of confusion around this question nowadays, and we are hopefully going to be proposing something that contributes to this conversation. And so as an aside, you know, I think in the world of media and what’s happening right now in pop culture, we are in trouble. And so you know, we have the documentary that came out, “What is a Woman?” and we see how preposterous the conflict of the issue is. But what I think we can do a lot better job of as a church is proposing an answer, is proposing a path forward, and something to understand, hold on to, to make sense of. So many people contact me and us as an organization to speak to this problem, to help out parents whose kids are suffering from this problem, to be present in school systems in ways that are not going to throw the school system under the bus. And priests and administrators and bishops and everybody else in between are bewildered at how to handle the situation. It’s gotten to that level; it’s so preposterous that the reasonable response almost is unclear. So obviously, the reasonable response is very simple: that we are a man and woman created by God in that way.

And one of the documents for the reading that goes along with this week is from the USCCB, which is very clear. It simply states, “This is what a man is, this is what a woman is, and this is where medicine appropriately enters into the picture.” And so the document is very clear about the mutilation of the body and how wrong that is, how it goes against the dignity of the person, how it can never help somebody to actually destroy their dignity. And whether that’s a physical surgery or hormonal intervention with trying to change the outward visible sign of the body to match something that is against who the person really is, would be a mutilation and will never be helpful or healing, not even following the basic tenets of the Hippocratic Oath to do no harm. So we know that part; that’s clear, and that’s coming from the church. It’s wonderful that we have something to stand on here.

But I think we can go deeper in answering the cultural cry that is happening right now. And so, what I’m proposing here and sort of an understanding of where the problem comes from, and then pulling out a direction based on biology and our personhood that’s observable because the visible makes visible the invisible. The body makes visible the invisible. We can go in some direction of making sense, but there’s a reason why the world is where it is right now. And so part of our anthropological drive is to do what John Paul II talks about in terms of being in community, where he talks about participation, where he talks about how to meet people where they are, and listen, and understand, and then hopefully offer Christ and a proposal that invites a new way of thinking about things. But we have to understand where the world is coming from in the first place, so that’s why we’re laying this out on a much deeper level.

So, in the first lecture, we were talking about the biological differences, reviewing once again the work from Brizendine, just really basic biology, looking at the brains and the hormonal, neurochemical, endocrinological system of the way that our bodies differ between men and women. Then, we are going to be looking at forward how these biological differences give rise to very specific characteristics and traits that differ between men and women, and these are the things that are part of what John Paul II titled the “Genius of the Person.” He talked about the genius of the woman and coining the “feminine genius.” So, we’re going to use that terminology and unpack what that really means.

What we don’t want to do is fall into a kind of strict compartmentalization and understanding what it is to be a man or a woman. This is where I think a lot of people are getting into trouble now. In response to the reality of the world saying we can be fluid in gender, we can change male to female and female to male, we are, in some ways, I think, responding, reacting a little bit too rigidly with a kind of compartmentalization that there are these very strict differences between men and women. And so, you know, even by saying that, you might be thinking, “Where are you going with this, Dr. Gray?” This is starting to sound a little bit loosey-goosey.

So, we want to be able to really pair this down and understand this. Now, in the reading, I also have from Jennifer Morel. She’s an amazing research PhD. Dr. Morel has traveled the world looking at different cultures through a very Catholic lens. She’s a very faithful Catholic but listening to and understanding different cultural expressions of masculinity and femininity, and what she’s seen around the world is that there are different roles, different manifestations of manhood and womanhood. And so, we have to take that into account if we’re going to be proposing a definition of what it is to be a man. So many times we end up saying, “Well, this is what a man is,” and then somebody says, “Well, that’s not the men in my life that I know. The way you’re describing masculinity and manhood is a better description of my mom, or the way you’re describing femininity and being a female is actually a better description of my dad in relation to my mom.” And so, if our definition is going to be universal and objective and philosophically true, it can’t have all these exceptions. 

That’s why we want to be able to go a little deeper here. We are maintaining the very clear reality that male and female are different, that God created us in these identities that are eternal. They will subsist within us as persons forever, and we can’t change one to the other. However, at the same time, there’s a little bit more nuance to this that we need to look at. What Morel says in her book is that there is an idea of complementarity, which is that the two are different and they fit together, and they can have equal dignity. That has been promoted over the years, and for good reason. But she is pointing out something that I’ve also seen, which is it’s too easy to keep that definitive defining line too separate between the two. And she coins the term “fractional complementarity,” and so we want to avoid fractional complementarity. Some of the great writings, even of Hildegard of Bingen, where she talks about male and female roles and responsibilities—which she would have understood very clearly as an abbess—or even Edith Stein, who we’re going to quote from here, can in some ways fall into what can be called now, through this lens, a fractional complementarity.

Now, going back 100 years, 300 years, 500 years, there wasn’t as much need for the nuance that we have today. And so when Edith Stein was writing even, it was right in the midst of the sort of initial onslaught of some feminist waves that we’re going to talk about here. So the initial proposals, the initial descriptions, the initial responses are pointing in the right direction. It doesn’t mean that they’re as nuanced and filled out as could be, which is our whole understanding of the theology of the body—that there is this continual development of unpacking and fleshing out the same timeless truths. So, we’re not saying Edith Stein was wrong, or that St. Hildegard was wrong, but there is a place to further unpack and nuance what those ideas are, and that’s what we’re going to try to do here in a really systematic and really sort of comprehensive way.

So, when we talk about genius, I want to give you this definition right up front. This is our proposal: it’s based on biology, and it’s gonna come from the fact that all men are created in their bodies to be fathers, and all women are created in their bodies to be mothers. And the biology of a man who’s created to be a father, even if they never become a father, their biology is still set up that way. It is giving them a sense of proclivity, or what Pope Benedict as Cardinal Ratzinger called a “privileged sign” of certain characteristics. So, we can define genius very simply and clearly as “A set of characteristics and proclivities that derive from the essential and mutually distinct capacities” of a man or woman. And so, there’s a lot of openness in that. We’re not saying that this is how men act, we’re not saying that this is how women act, we’re not saying this is what men must do or women must do. We’re saying there’s a female genius, a set of characteristics derived from their biology, and in our conceptualization, we’re going to point towards, in a few lectures, talking about complementarity, and specifically not fractional complementarity but complementarity ordered towards unity.

And if there’s a telos to the idea of being two, we are created to distinctly but ordered to become one flesh, to be ordered together in unity. And so, there’s going to be an understanding of where complementarity fits together, and that there’s a giving and receiving which—here’s the key—transforms each participant in the giving and receiving. This is not a static, fractional, definitive compartmentalization of all that it is to be masculine or all that it is to be feminine in a particular man. There has been formation in giving and receiving, even if it’s, if we go back to the relationship with one’s mom, there’s feminine genius that has been given through the motherhood of one’s mom and received by a son, and there is some formation that happens there.

So these are just ideas I’m planting a seed for now. We’re going to really unpack these things, but these are—I want to start you thinking about this in a different direction here than how most people are talking about it now. And this is gonna help us to make this proposal to the world because nowadays there’s so much rejection of saying definitively about a person—a person has to act this way, a person has to act that way. Well, you know what? There’s actually some truth to a reaction against those roles being proposed, and we want to separate ourselves from saying that. And that’s where Morel’s work comes in. Uh, so well, I also had a guest on my podcast, uh, that I’ll link here as well, uh, Simone Rizkallah, who has also done a lot of work in sociological anthropology and talking about culture. And she comes from an Armenian background, and there’s all different ways of approaching the roles of male and female in the Middle East and in all different parts of the world—different cultures, different tribes, different countries, and nationalities, ethnicities.

And I asked her about the Middle East. A lot of times, our perception in America is the sort of, you know, Muslim or sort of misogynistic conceptualization. And she said, “Well, if you ever saw ‘My Big Fat Greek Wedding,’ there’s a line in there where they’re talking about the husband being the head, and she says, ‘Well, if the husband might be the head, but the wife is the neck, and so she moves him around wherever she wants him to be.'” And Simone was talking about that and saying that’s very much her Egyptian Armenian background, that that’s the way family life would have been.

And the kinds of arguments that we have in America about the role of man and woman and who can work and who should, you know, quote-unquote, wear the pants, or literally allowed to wear pants or not—some of these things are absurd in other parts of the world. And there are pockets of Catholics who hold up these ideas as if this is objectively true about the way God created man and woman. And all we’re doing is shooting ourselves in the foot and being able to propose something beautiful to the world because it’s gonna be markedly untrue, and those ideas that are culturally based can’t possibly be the objective truth for all people and all time. It can’t be part of a human blueprint.

Whatever we say about the human blueprint has to be generalizable to any single human being. So what we propose here is that every single person with XX chromosomes in their genetic code, with a womb, and an endocrinological system that cycles every month with progesterone and estrogen—all of those physical realities give rise to certain characteristics. And those characteristics are what we are going to call the feminine genius. But it’s not even that those characteristics should only be manifest by women. In the final analysis, the idea here is that the genius describes the characteristics that a woman or a man, for the masculine genius, has a biological primary access to. And that means that they’re sharing the characteristics by being a man or being a woman, and then the opposite is receiving those characteristics.

So I’m gonna say this again, but again, I’m planting seeds here, and this is a lot that is very different from anything else that people are saying out there in the world, popularly anyways. I mean, you can—I’m giving you the book to read from Dr. Jen Morel, so it’s obviously been said in other places, but this is not how people are talking about this, and this is certainly not what people think Catholics think. So, if you are promoting or proposing a vision of the person based on Catholic anthropology and truth, I want us to all be on the same page here and be really clear about what this looks like.

Think about it like this: whatever is said about the feminine genius, and that’s what John Paul II did actually define, and he talked about a primary orderedness towards other persons that women have—a kind of orientation to persons. Now, what did he mean by that? Does he mean that men, therefore, don’t have an orientation to other persons? 

No, and my point to make this argument very simple is Jesus Christ cannot be said to have less orientation towards other persons than other women, even the Blessed Mother, who is a perfect woman. We cannot say that the Blessed Mother had more of the quality of being oriented towards other persons than Jesus Christ. What did Mary have that Jesus didn’t have? A primary access to biology that orients her towards other persons. And then therefore, in momming Jesus, and Jesus receiving not only the milk of her breast and the comfort of her nurturance physically, but her personality, her personality characteristics, her feminine genius was given to Jesus. And he received his mom physically but also emotionally and personally. And He was formed not only physically in the womb but, Jesus, who’s the integration of the body and spirit in our humanity, which is the true nature of our humanity that He took on, had a body and a spirit that were integrated. So, He was formed not only in the womb; He was formed in the heart, He was formed in the mind, He was formed personally.

So He received from Our Lady all that she had primary access to as a woman, and He received from St. Joseph all that Joseph had primary access to as a man. And both of these together formed Jesus in his humanity. He was perfect and fully formed in his divinity, but He was formed over space and time; He grew in wisdom and stature in the home of the Holy Family, which meant He was being formed by masculinity and femininity. And Mary’s feminine genius formed Jesus to have a proclivity and an orientation towards other persons, maybe not as a man born with a brain that is filled with testosterone and knows how to separate, and discover hierarchy and who’s bigger than who, and knows how to protect and provide by fighting and having aggression, all those things that would have been proper to His biological setup as a man. But He learned how to develop a balance in actual human relationships because He received from his mom’s feminine genius.

So the actual Jesus, the actual product of this particular man, was fully perfectly formed with the qualities of both the masculine and the feminine genius. This is the Catholic paradigm; this is what we are going to really understand and unpack, and this is the proposal that we can make to the world. As Cardinal Ratzinger said, before he was Pope, “Sexuality characterizes man and woman not only on the physical level, but also on the psychological and spiritual, making its mark on each of their expressions. It cannot be reduced to a pure and insignificant biological fact, but rather is a fundamental component of personality, one of its modes of being, of manifestation, of communicating with others, of feeling, of expressing, and of living human love.” So there is that dimension of personal reality and ability and experience in this world that is marked. But again, it’s not the end of the capacities of the man or the woman; it’s simply what we have primary access to as a man or a woman.

At the end of Cardinal Ratzinger’s document that we’re reading from here, he says this about the feminine genius: “Let us not forget that we are talking above all about human qualities.” And again, we’re going to come back to that and unpack that some more. So in Cardinal Ratzinger’s document on the collaboration of man and woman in the church and the world, this is an argument that he sort of alludes to that I want to really unpack a little bit more here. And we are going back to the Book of Genesis, we’re going back to “male and female He created them,” and we are going to draw a parallel—the same parallel that’s in the Theology of the Body—that man being made in God’s image between man and woman is a parallel between God and his Trinitarian dimension, and then also the relationship between mankind and God as Creator. And we can see that mankind enters into, is formed out of, and enters into a relationship with God the Father through the Son. So we have all these different dimensions that are sort of related to each other. “God created man in his own image; in the image of God, he created him; male and female, he created them.” From the very beginning, therefore, humanity is described as articulated in the male-female relationship. This is the humanity sexually differentiated, which is explicitly declared “the image of God.”

In this way, the human body marked with the sign of masculinity or femininity, “includes right from the beginning the nuptial attribute, that is, the capacity of expressing love, that love in which the person becomes a gift and – by means of this gift – fulfills the meaning of his being and his existence.” So, this is the whole point here—our bodily expression as male and female points to the giving and receiving of man and woman coming together, and then the fruitfulness that is possible is expressed bodily also.

But every male, female coming together is a giving and receiving when properly lined up with the qualities of God. Again, this is all Theology of the Body. It is fruitful in the sense of being one’s own transformation and conversion because it’s the gift of self, which is when a person fulfills the meaning of his being and his existence. So, doing the thing that we’re made to do makes us become who we are. John Paul II, “Become who you are.”

In the “unity of the two”, man and woman are called from the beginning not only to exist “side by side” or “together” but they are also called  to exist mutually “one for the other,” that’s from  Mulieris Dignitatem. Man cannot exist “alone,” he can only exist as a “unity of the two,” and, therefore, in relation to another person.

Then, it gets dark. Cardinal Ratzinger reminds us—he tells us, [However,] original sin changes the way in which the man and woman receive and live the word of God, as well as their relationship with the Creator. (…) The way in which they live their sexual differences is also upset (…) when humanity considers God its enemy, the relationship between man and woman becomes distorted.

And in Genesis, we read, “A new relationship between man and woman is now introduced: “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” This is so so so huge. This is the beginning of the end. This is where it all went sideways, right back in the beginning in Genesis. We hear this: “He shall rule over you.” And that brings us to today. Why would we want to stop the ‘he’ from being a ‘he’ and let a ‘he’ turn into a ‘she’? It’s because of this conflict and this tension that’s been there from the beginning.

And we’re going to open this up, but I want to sort of highlight this idea: So, man and woman, made in the image of God, think about what happened before and after the fall in the garden. In the garden before the fall, they saw each other, they were naked without shame. And if you think about what it was happening in that nakedness, man and woman, Adam and Eve, see each other fully with their differences.

Adam looks at Eve, he sees Eve’s body, and he sees very clearly, “You’re not like me; we are very different.” But there was no shame, there was no conflict, there was no tension—it was a beautiful difference. And the difference spoke of the communion that they were called to in original creation. Original man had no sin; there was no concupiscence, there was no drive to take and to use, there was no drive to diminish the dignity of the other. There was only the upholding of the beauty of the other, and this was an open freedom between man and woman.

So in seeing the differences in their bodies, there was an exaltation of the glory of God and His creation, and it all spoke of the difference within the communal of God and the communion that happens between the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. And it was precisely in the freedom to give to each other and receive that they were like God.

So, it was precisely in the relationship between man and woman that they were in relationship with God. It was through their creation in Christ that they were in communion with the Father, that God—they walked in the garden with God. God was with them, the way that they were with each other, seeing their differences, but it gave glory.

The difference between the Father and the Son opens up communal between the Father and the Son, and it speaks to the infinite divine everlasting love that is constantly, eternally, infinitely poured out from one to the other. And that was what was in the relationship between man and woman. And so, that’s where we can see this parallel.

But what happened with temptation? The serpent enters the garden and tempts Eve, and he tempts her specifically to doubt the goodness of the Father. And he tempts Eve to disregard the difference between her and the Father, between the creature and the Creator. You see, the Creator has the right to tell the creature what to eat or not to eat; that’s the difference between a Creator and a created. The created only exists contingent on the fact that they were created by the Creator. The creator doesn’t need the created; the Creator exists on its own. The created only exists because of the Creator.

So, of course, the Creator has the right to say, “Don’t eat this, and go eat that, and you can eat everything else but here’s where you stay away from. Here are the limits.” So, to be obedient to the rules was simply to give reference to the difference between: “You’re the Creator, I’m the creature; of course, I’m going to follow the rules. I wouldn’t even exist if it wasn’t for you. No problem.”

But then the serpent says, “Ah, wait a minute, let’s think about this.” And the temptation here is to go against the difference between the Creator and the created, to take a role of authority upon oneself that was not given by the Creator, to take the matter into one’s own hand. Eve was tempted specifically to disobey the rule of the garden and also she was tempted to disregard the proper differentiation between her as creature and God as Creator. And then she brought Adam into that with her.

So, as fellow creature, as fellow created, let’s reject the difference between us and Him. Let’s diminish it, let’s pretend like it doesn’t exist, let’s pretend that we can be creators just like Him. And then what happens? Then doubt enters in, and the consequence of that is the difference between God and the creature now brings fear and shame, also the difference between man and woman brings fear and shame.

What happens? God enters the garden. “Where are you guys? Where’s Adam and Eve?” Hiding behind trees. This is very interesting, and also Genesis makes a point to tell us that they are now hiding their differences from each other with fig leaves, part of a tree. So now they’re using the tree, which is supposed to bear life and give life, and they ate from the wrong tree. They disregarded the authority of God. Now they brought shame, fear, doubt, and confusion into the differences. And so now, they’re hiding from God, who is different from them, and they’re hiding from each other because of these differences. Now there is nakedness with shame. Now the nakedness, proclaiming the differences of man and woman, brings shame, and what that means is fear, and doubt, and suspicion, and a lot of self-protection and a lot of blame. That’s essentially all of history in a nutshell. That’s all we need to know about anything else that happened is what’s happening today. Preposterous, it’s actually not. I mean, it is kind of ludicrous that it got to this point, but at the end of the day, it’s actually really not that preposterous. It all makes sense. It started in the Book of Genesis and the battle of the sexes and the gender wars, and all of this stuff is as old as humanity, and it is the same story that’s been repeated over and over again in all sorts of ways.

So, Cardinal Ratzinger says, “It will be a relationship in which love will frequently be debased into pure self-seeking, and a relationship which ignores and kills love and replaces it with the yoke of domination of one sex over the other. Henceforth, history will be marked by this distorted relationship. “To the woman he also said, “I’ll multiply thy sorrows and thy conceptions; in sorrow, you shall bring forth children, and you shall be under your husband’s power, and he shall have dominion over you.” So, this is our story here. Something that John Paul II does point out in ‘Mulieris Dignitatum’, which is why he focused so much on the feminine genius and restoring a place of dignity for women, is he says “This threat is more serious for the woman since domination takes the place of “being a sincere gift” and therefore living “for” the other; So now “the man rules over you.” This “domination” indicates the disturbance of the loss of the stability of the fundamental equality which the man and the woman possess in the “unity of the two.” In the name of liberation from male “domination”, Pope John Paul II continued, “women must not appropriate themselves male characteristics contrary to their own feminine “originality”. So, what we’re saying here is the answer is not to become like the man who’s dominating because of original sin. That’s the initial inclination. 

Again, it makes sense, but we have to find a better way.

We’re going to revisit a little bit where we started in terms of unpacking how the ideas about Communist ideology, and especially through the writings of Marx, have sort of trickled out and developed and become a fundamental rallying kind of ideology that has drawn all of these societal movements together, and we can see this going far back but really coming into fruition in the 20th century. And that’s why our lady showed up, and she warned us about what was going to happen in the world. So, this is what’s really so amazing in terms of God being with us is that in 1917, he was already being with us and warning us about these things, not just World War II but the whole destruction of the family and the war for the family that was going to ensue, and these errors from the East that would be proliferated and taken on such a large scale and now to such absurd consequence. Carl Stern, in the book ‘The Flight from Woman’, says that, “Since the French Revolution and the rise of the feminist movement, the cry for equality has changed into an assertion of sameness. Any view of dissimilarity smacked suspiciously of injustice.”

Now I just want to say we’re gonna go through these sort of movements of Marxism, then we’re going to talk about the specific movements of feminism, and we’re going to end up to where we are today, which is called the fourth wave of feminism, and that’s where it’s taken on its almost absurd consequence.

Well, let’s call it absurd consequence, but I don’t want to lose sight of our overall project, which is why you’re here today, which is how to help people, and we’re talking about people that need help. So we’re not just talking about these absurdities in ways that demonize people. That’s actually part of the problem, is that people lost dignity in the garden. Adam and Eve lost the sense of each other’s dignity, their true call to greatness as humans, and lost the dignity of the greatness of God as Creator. And so as those differences were rejected, and our true identity was then rejected, we don’t want to lose a sense of how we got here in the first place. So let’s keep on trying to understand the other, trying to look at where the other is coming from. And if we go back to our own foundation in the American colonies, in the United States, when we left the colonizers—a dirty word today but but the colonists, the original American colonists left England they were in search of religious freedom, they were leaving power structures that were unjust. And our whole revolution was a fight against injustice and a cry for liberty and freedom—and these are good things. Even the cries of the French Revolution, even though the manifestations of these ideas happened in times and places that are terrible, but the ideas are not terrible. The idea of equality is not terrible when it’s grounded on a true equality of dignity; it becomes beautiful. But when it’s distorted by not being grounded, it becomes very ugly.

So, that’s what we want to keep in mind here that we’re always gonna be looking for the underlying premise of what’s understandable as we’re seeing these movements happening in culture and history. And then really individually in every person you’re working with, also by the way, within ourselves before we work with other people. This is how the parts theory makes sense: every part is understandable, even the ones that say and think really ugly, nasty things. When we enter into listening and understanding, we get a lot further than simply judging these things from the top.

I’ve said this before, but I’ll say it again: sometimes, when we’re talking about these ideas, it can sound really judgmental, and sort of crystallized, and solidified, and compartmentalized. But when we’re talking ideas, when we’re talking about an actual person, we’re always going to try to understand where they’re coming from with these ideas. Even Karl Marx, if we were having a conversation with Marx—Carrie Gress wrote in her book The Anti-Mary Exposed, and that’s how she talks about feminism as it is today. And it’s really interesting if we look at Mary as the model, as the fullness of perfection, as the restoration of everything that happened with Eve in the garden. Well, Mary is the proper answer.

What we have today is the anti-Mary. She says that “Marxism is behind most of the ideologies we face today, either openly or surreptitiously.” And Carl Stern again says that “There’s no doubt that the original Leninist doctrine of sexual sameness, was not only prompted by the motive of liberating woman but contained the hidden aim of depersonalization.” Depersonalization, says Gress, eventually leads to enslavement. “At the heart of Marxist ideology, says Gress, was the goal to remake human nature and human society in such a way that everyone was equal – or the same – by trying to erase every natural or societal difference.”

So, we don’t have to say that everybody is the same in order to maintain their dignity that’s equal. Equal dignity does not have to mean the same—hold that in mind. And the differences that occur between man and woman, which we also said earlier has to do with motherhood and fatherhood, can be eradicated by eradicating motherhood. Now we can see that whole movement through the 20th century, and then you bring in the birth control pill, and that lights the whole thing up and amplifies this whole problem.

Gress says that “The shackles of the family… still weigh heavily on the working woman. Divorce and abortion become readily available in a society in which religious freedom and personal property was outlawed.” You see these connections that are being made here. And she also says that “The Russian Revolution unleashed the idea that human nature is infinitely malleable and can be rearranged into perfect equality. It’s no accident that the ideology of Soviet communism blended comfortably with the egalitarianism of the sexual revolution.”

And even during the sexual revolution, there would be people sort of claiming to be communists, and that was a whole sort of movement, not even politically, even though it overlapped with political ideology, but just in the matter of a cultural revolution that was happening without getting into the whole movement of economics and political structures and all that. A lot of people—it was just cool to be communist, and it was just part of the sort of the music, and it was part of the way people talked and the clothing that they wore, with a hammer and sickle, and it was just kind of like a fad. It was connected very deeply to the sexual revolution. So these ideas to us seem like we have to connect the dots, but people living through that time, they saw the connections a lot more clearly.

Then we get into the actual movement of feminism throughout the last 150 years. So, very briefly, in the beginning, there was a sort of a movement towards giving women the same rights as men in the public square, so it had to do with the suffrage movement, which was the fight for the right to vote. Then, into the second wave of feminism, which was in the ’60s and ’70s after World War II, a lot of women were doing the work of men at home, and there was a sort of a discovery of how women were being looked down upon so badly. In the first wave, it happened after women and men started going west, and because of cultural necessity, things were not done in the Wild West the same way they were done on the East Coast, where there was already some sort of civilized society being established with cities and towns and town councils and all these kinds of things. Moving out west, it was like every man and woman for themselves, and they had to kind of figure it out. And when pushed into those experiences, they realized, of course, women have a say in what’s happening in this Wild West scenario, and they have a vote.

Well same thing happened in World War II. When the men leave to go fight a war, and women are doing all this work at home, there’s this sort of discovery like, wait a minute, women are capable. Why are we being put down and told that we’re not able to do some of these things? And so, they fight against that sort of indignity, and that was again—we’re gonna try to understand where this thread is coming from. 

It makes sense, and we can see there that there actually was a significant misogyny that was happening, and in dignity. That the dignity of women was being rejected. Now, whether or not people establish cultural norms based on dignity in which men and women are doing separate things, that’s an entirely separate conversation and reality. Again, that’s why it’s important to keep cultural norms at the subjective level of different cultures. But the objective norm that has to be the same across cultures, across time, across situations, is that these decisions are made out of reverence for the dignity of the other. That’s the only way to find the right answer forward.

So, in the second wave after World War II, there was the beginning of this idea of speaking out against sexual harassment and abuse, and the discrepancy in pay, and the work environments themselves. This is also where it enters this continuation of a rejection of difference. Remember Adam and Eve hiding their difference from each other as a result of the fall, because of doubt, and fear, and suspicion. Then we have Simone de Beauvoir, who was a feminist and writer, and she said, “The very sense of otherness usually expressed by men, implies alienation, even reification of woman, and with this loss of value” turning her into an object, not maintaining her as a person, a subject to whom the only proper disposition is one of love of self-gift, never to be used, which is what John Paul teaches us.

And so these ideas all come up from real problems that are understandable, but the solutions they come up with are not accurate and not the only way to come up with a solution. She’s one of the sort of seeds; she planted these seeds of these ideas that now today are held up, and she’s kind of a hero of the fourth-wave movement today, which is to disregard these differences and she says that, “We are not born woman, we become it.” That’s sort of her license plate or her bumper sticker, would be that during this time according to Carrie Gress, “Second-wave feminism made it clear that children were the enemy, preventing women from fulfilling their dreams.” Again, same time as the advent of the birth control pill now coming up.

De Beauvoir says again, “No woman should be authorized to stay at home and raise her children. Society should be different. Women should not have that choice, precisely because if there is that choice, too many women will make it.” Again, this is the hero of the transgender movement. So, then we have that sort of period of time moving up into the 90s, and that’s when we have the third wave of feminism, as the historians describe it, and is generally accepted. This is coming through a lot of political things are happening; this is some of the stuff that happened with Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas. He was being appointed, and she made this accusation against him for sexual harassment, and these different things are happening in the news, and so it just kind of takes on a new importance.

This movement was becoming more aggressive, and so through pop culture and media, and music, and some of these things, there was a lot more sort of violent sort of aggressive manifestations of fighting for the rights and maybe toppling patriarchy. And that’s when some of these things started to build up here. And so all of this leading up into the fourth wave, and again, that this is where it becomes a little murkier where we’re still kind of in it so people aren’t exactly saying where one began or the next one. But this is when we have like the MeToo movement, and some of that sparked some of these things that lead into now some of a total disregard of real delineation between man and woman.

And so the ultimate violence against men in retaliation against the violence towards woman is to destroy the idea of man, that man is not a thing that needs to be a thing, that a man could be changed into a woman. It’s the most brilliant articulation of how to protect oneself against the otherness of man is to make man disappear. If man can become a woman, man is gone. It’s the best defense in the culture war, in the gender wars. And so this is how we can see that we’ve really grown this to a place of its ultimate conclusion and really just almost watching masculinity and manhood poof disappear.

So it went from fighting against misogyny, by standing up for the rights of women, to then pointing the finger at masculinity for its misogyny, calling it toxic; all masculinity is toxic masculinity, masculinity is by definition toxic, and then finally, the fullest fruition of it is to say let’s make it go away entirely. We don’t need to name call, we don’t need to blame, we don’t need to prove against, we’re just gonna make it disappear and now it could be disappeared, it could be gone. Is there still masculinity? Sure, but it’s never really a threat because it could be transformed, it’s not really a thing.

So this is where we’re at today and what we realize here is that in order to preserve equality, there is this need to create a sameness, but the sameness is actually removing us from a system of objectivity. In other words, our biology is not objectively saying who we are even though our biology is objectively always really here and that’s the problem we can’t get around this. Now let’s go back psychologically, I’m gonna make another connection here that’s maybe a little bit more abstract but remember what’s the first compromise we make with reality, it’s the fact that we died. We’ve already compromised the reality that we die and our biology, which is crying out for survival for life. Life recognizes the biological reality of death, and we just ignore it. We turn the other cheek, we turn the other way, we don’t look at it, we turn a blind eye—we compromise with reality.

So, what is it to say our biology proclaims our maleness or our female maleness? What’s the point? So what’s your point? Ignore it—we’ve already compromised with it. Change it? No problem. We’re sort of already used to ignoring reality, but we’re suffering ourselves from reality. We’re suffering ourselves from objectivity, and we’re creating a world where only how I feel matters, which actually sabotages the possibility for meeting on an equal playing field, for actually being on the same field. You can’t play a game if you don’t even have agreed rules, so there’s no interaction, there’s no communion, there’s no interaction, there’s no place to even dignify another person when you’ve not had an objective playing field or system of framework that you can agree upon.

So what we’ve really done is really isolate ourselves from each other in cultural terms, and that’s the sort of cultural disease that everybody is suffering from now. People think that COVID—the pandemic—sort of created this problem of social isolation. I don’t think so. I think it maybe amplified it, but I also think actually it just went a certain direction because of the social isolation that we were already moving ourselves towards before the pandemic. We had all of the riots, we had all of the MeToo movement, and all that kind of stuff was already happening. There was also already this disregard of difference, there was already this way of dealing with the fear and suspicion of the other.

So, add to it pandemic and isolation, and it’s like, okay, this is how we deal with it: by becoming socially isolated. In other times and places in the world, in other cultures, and in a lot of families in the middle of the pandemic, people were more connected to each other. That’s the mental health story that they’re not telling right now. And I could see this happen all over the place. A lot of people were saddened when we had to come back out of our houses because we had so much time now to actually spend quality time with family life and with people that mattered, and connecting in ways that mattered. And so part of me felt that way in some ways, and I can really understand that perspective.

Obviously, there are a lot of things that were really difficult. And it was nice for the workforce, people losing jobs, and all sorts of things get back to work. But it’s not necessary that what happened leads to social isolation. There’s a lot of other things underlying that, and I think we’ve laid out here how these ideologies—which make sense where they’re coming from—lead to a place that’s really unhealthy.

All right, so what are we to do? What’s the better way? How are we going to find peace? We’re going to find peace by understanding the genius of the man and the genius of the woman as God created us in His image. So, what is this? I’m gonna give you this proposal again. I’m gonna make it really simple and then continue to unpack it.

But the masculine genius is that which a man has more easy access to because of his biology, and the feminine genius is that which a woman has easier access to because of her feminine biology. And again, we’re gonna see how these two are in relationship with each other and that we each can take on the characteristics of the other. That’s how we avoid this fractional complementarity and this very strict compartmentalization.

But first, we want to go through the layout of the argument for the masculine and the feminine genius. And we have, remember that we are healing this rift of Cartesian dualism. And you know we can see this rift played out in a lot of modern conceptualizations, as well as the person in movies like The Matrix or the movie Inception with Leonardo DiCaprio. His reality is fractured, and the same thing with Matrix. It’s like he’s in a world that he’s not really in, and he’s separated from his body. What’s his body doing? His body is really in the pod, but his experience, his life, and his world are all playing out in this other way. Whenever we have that separation of body and experience, it’s driving home the idea of what it is to be a person, what it is to be integrated as body and spirit.

And so, we want to continue to challenge ourselves to try to find where unity makes a lot of sense and how we make sense of that. So, USCCB says in the document we’ve linked here that “The soul does not come into existence on its own and somehow happen to be in this body, as if it could just as well be in a different body. A soul can never be in another body, much less be in the wrong body.” So, if man and woman don’t need to be created in a kind of sameness, if persons don’t have to be the same with their bodies and their sex as sort of secondary to what makes them who they are, then how do we maintain equality of dignity?

John Paul II tells us, what the Holy Church tells us, what Scripture tells us is that we already have equality in our very being—created in the image of God. “Being created in the image and likeness of God is what makes man and woman equal because both of them are equally capable of receiving the outpouring of divine truth and love in the Holy Spirit. Both receive His salvific and sanctifying visits.” What more could there be to our human dignity than that? And JP II says “This unity does not cancel diversity. The Holy Spirit, who brings about this unity in the supernatural order of sanctifying grace, contributes in equal measure to the fact that “your sons will prophesy” and that “your daughters will prophesy.” “To prophesy” means to express by one’s words and one’s life “the mighty works of God”, preserving the truth and originality of each person, whether woman or man.”

And he says, “To say that man is created in the image and likeness of God means that man is called to exist “for” others, to become a gift. This applies to every human being, whether woman or man, who live it out in accordance with the special qualities proper to each.” The fullness of the dignity of the person is that we are created to become who God created us to become—to become saints in union with God, made equal with God. We’re created to be made equal with God, the way that Christ is equal with God. This is a whole another dimension of our spirituality. There’s something called the divinization of the person, and this is what we’re called to through Christ.

Let’s be clear, it’s only through Christ, but it’s entering into real union with Christ to become like Him so that what is His is ours. And so we are made, and this is the language that the Church, the Saints, the doctors of the Church use this language to become gods that we are becoming. He becomes like us so that we can become like Him in it’s equality, likeness. We’re equal to God. That’s the fullness of our equality with each other. We’re both called to that same equal end to be equal to God. If we’re made to be equal with God, how could there be any distinction between who’s better, men or women? We’re both equally called to become the greatest equality of all equals. It’s the infinite equality, the infinite of any kind of comparison. It’s the best that can be; there’s no place to make one better or worse than the other.

If that is our foundation and our grounding, then all of this makes perfect sense. If we’re both called to that same end, then of course we don’t have to be the same to have equal dignity. And we can see here that we are called to a development. In Gaudium et Spes, it says, “Therefore it is necessary to develop the human faculties in such a way that there results a growth of the faculty of admiration, of intuition, of contemplation, of making personal judgment, of developing a religious, moral, and social sense.” In Gaudium et Spes, here it’s pointing ahead to developing human qualities in every one of us. These are human qualities; this is not talking about specifically masculine or feminine identification.

And yet it does talk about a faculty of intuition, and we’re gonna talk about that coming from the feminine genius. It’s in the feminine brain—a woman in her feminine genius has a primary orientation towards intuition. And so, we could use that as one example here, but it’s what we’re all called to. It’s part of all of us becoming equal like God through Jesus Christ in union with Him, that we’re developing that faculty. So how do men develop it if we don’t have primary access to it through our biology, through complementarity, through relationship with women? 

How did Jesus develop it if He doesn’t have it as a primary proclivity based on His biology because He received it from His mom?

That’s our humanity here. That’s what we’re made for. It’s, it’s deeply embedded, not only in our differences but in the orientation of the body being made as a gift for the other—giftedness to die, to go out of oneself, to be for the other. It’s written into our biology as man or woman, doing in different ways but receiving from the other and growing ultimately. Dr. Crosby says, “A body endowed with a nuptial meaning and a sacramental power of rendering invisible visible, is something far more and far richer than a merely biological body. It is a body endowed with rich personalist meaning, a body that mysteriously embodies the person.” So, we’re talking about bodies—man’s body, woman’s body—being man, being woman. 

What are we going to say then? What is it to be a man? What is it to be a woman? Again, it says that in Gaudium et Spes, “Though made of body and soul, man is one through his bodily composition. He gathers to himself the elements of the material world; thus, they reach their crown through him and through him raise their voice in free praise of the Creator. For this reason man is not allowed to despise his bodily life, rather he is obliged to regard his body as good and honorable since God has created it and will raise it up on the last day.” So we have this idea here that we’re going to go through the body to give praise to the Creator, and it’s the body that is making the invisible visible.

Gaudium et Spes says, “Scientific analysis fully confirms that the very physical constitution of women is naturally disposed to motherhood—conception, pregnancy, giving birth—which is a consequence of the marriage union with the man. At the same time, this also corresponds to the psycho-physical structure of women.” And we can of course say the same thing about men in regards to their masculinity.

Then Brizendine says, “Scientists have documented an astonishing array of structural, chemical, genetic, hormonal, and functional brain differences between women and men. We’ve learned that men and women have different brain sensitivities to stress and conflict. They use different brain areas and circuits to solve problems, process language, experience, and store the same strong emotions.” So we have a non-Catholic scientist giving voice on behalf of scientists, and we have John Paul II pointing to the sciences that proclaim these truths about the body. And the body makes visible qualities of the invisible person, so we can start to put this together now.

The biology is gonna point the way, and we’re gonna see that femininity is ordered towards making babies inside of one’s body and masculinity is ordered towards making babies outside of one’s body. All the stuff you learned about the hormones, the brain development, the psychosexual development of the person going through all the developmental stages—what’s the underlying theme here everything is moving towards copulation. Everything is moving towards making babies. It’s a pretty deeply ingrained biological reality inside of our humanity that that animal material substance that we’re starting to work from, that we work with and become fully human, it’s all ordered towards making babies for men and women very differently. For women, it’s ordered towards making a baby inside her body, and for men, it’s ordered towards making babies outside of his body. And that is going to be our foundation for understanding the masculine and feminine genius—the specific differences we’ve already talked about. These are characteristics that we have proclivities and primary access to, but what are they? That’s the big, that’s the million-dollar question. That’s the proposal, and we’re gonna start to refine these and define these now, moving forward in the next two lectures, and really unpack the feminine genius as having primary access to particular sets of qualities. We need to unpack that, and same thing for the masculine genius. This is our project here. This is what we need to continue to do.

And so we’re gonna look at the ways that the woman’s brain, because she’s making a baby inside of her body, is ordered towards intuition. That’s a feminine genius characteristic, and it’s very different from a man’s brain, which is ordered towards a kind of rational compartmentalization—something that Stern talks about in “The Flight from Woman.” He says that a woman’s brain is not irrational, but it’s actually, the way he talks about, intuition is transrational. And it’s very simple: a man doesn’t have to communicate with a baby who’s pre-rational. A woman does—a baby inside of a woman’s brain, a woman’s body is a part of her reality. She has to know what’s going on. She has intuition because she doesn’t need to wait for a baby to develop language, which is a rational communication structure. A man has a significant limitation to communicating with a baby who doesn’t know how to talk yet, one that a woman does not have biologically. And that’s a major difference between a man’s brain and a woman’s brain. And yet, men are called to develop intuition, and we do over time with practice by being in relationship with women and having these kinds of experiences, and we can get better at it. 

But we don’t have a biological proclivity or a primary access to it based on our biology. This is how we’re gonna really unpack the feminine genius and the masculine genius. We want to avoid two pitfalls: one is to go too much the way of the body, too much the way of science, the materialist world, and say that it’s all about making babies. And in fact, even in Church teaching, we can fall into these two pitfalls. If marriage was just about babies, then the procreative act—the procreative nature of marriage—becomes overemphasized. That’s what happened; that’s what the sexual revolution, in some ways, was revolting against. We’re not just baby-making machines. That was part of the second wave of feminism, and that’s true. So the unitive dimension is important. And yet, we also don’t want to avoid or ignore the body, and we end up falling into a pitfall that a lot of philosophers end up walking into, which is to only look at the unitive, the relational, the subjective, and the parts of the interaction of male and female.

And so I have linked here a really great philosopher, Maria Fedoryka, who gave a presentation on some considerations on the male-female differences and why they matter for the unitive dimension of marriage. And it’s brilliant; she’s a brilliant philosopher. But notice the limitations in the way she talks about it, and she recognizes them and talks about them. So we don’t need to do that. We’re bringing together the science and the psychology that comes from the science, along with the philosophy and the anthropology. We’re gonna look at, in a sense, the unitive and procreative dimensions of marriage—of the relationship between man and woman—at the same time because the body makes visible the invisible. So everything that’s happening that at least we have a capacity to happen procreatively is is speaking of the same things that are happening unitively. They’re actually one and the same, almost. We could look at it that way. The Church teaching does differentiate them as separate things, but we could almost see it as being one, manifesting the other.

So this is our challenge. This is our project, and ultimately, this is the proposal that we get to make is to really fully define the masculine genius and the feminine genius. Something that John Paul II started talking about way back in 1988 and it was a reaction to and response to the needs of women at the time and trying to give some course correction to these waves of feminism. But something that we’ve discovered we need even more now, and it will give us a pathway to peace when we start to understand more deeply how God created us and why.

Thanks for listening to the Being Human Podcast. If you’ve enjoyed this episode and wanna help us spread the word and hear more, please head over to iTunes, leave us a review, and subscribe, as it really helps us to get our content out to more people. Be sure to listen next time as I take you deeper into what it means to be human. If you want more free content and information about what we do at the Catholic Psych Institute, head on over to catholicpsych.com. God bless you.

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