Weekend Literary Supplement: "Digging Your Own Well", Part Eleven

Male Versus Female

People associate Daoism with the Yin Yang symbol. The idea is that there are two elements in life that balance each other. One way of applying this dualism is to see the world as being divided into male and female. Balance comes from accepting both equally. Even though Daoism accepts the necessity of both elements embodied in the Yin Yang, it suggests that we should have a preference for the feminine over the masculine. In contrast, Western society is profoundly sexist and anti-feminine. It has been this way for so for so long and so deeply that it can be very hard to recognize this as bias. Instead, it just seems “obviously true”.

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Men are supposedly more courageous than women. They are also more “stoic” and able to suffer pain. That's why only men have traditionally been soldiers. But if that is the case, consider this old European saying: “Women fight their battles on the birthing chair”. Even today giving birth is tremendously painful and still sometimes dangerous. Before modern medicine---and especially during the early industrial revolution---it was often fatal. Health issues aside, being a single mother is often a sentence to a lifetime of brutal poverty. Yet how often has anyone heard a woman say that they are too afraid to have a child? Men who fight in battles have to conquer their fears, but so do women when they get pregnant.

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Since 9/11 fire fighting has become our definition of a heroic job. Firemen run into burning buildings to save lives, which is something most of us would hesitate to do. But I'd like to offer another example that should be put alongside these men: nurses. If COVID, SARS, Ebola, or, Malberg virus hits you, there is probably going to be a woman wearing protective gear who is going to take your blood, and, wipe up your vomit and diarrhea, and maybe even hold your hand. She knows that no matter what precautions she takes, she might still get sick, and maybe even die. Yet, she still does it. Nurses are just as much heroes as firefighters! They can be soft, wear perfume, etc, but they sometimes have to be really brave to do their jobs.

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Men are big and strong. They work in construction and use big heavy tools, carry bags of concrete, throw around cement blocks and so on. Women just aren't strong enough to do that sort of thing. Well, elephants can carry weights that would crush a man. In the grand scheme of things, the average man is only slightly stronger than the average woman. A strong man can pick up an eighty pound bag of concrete to load a cement mixer---but he can't pick up a one hundred and eighty pound bag. So what if the average strong woman can only pick up a forty pound bag? She will just have to move two bags instead of one. The problem isn't that women are inherently the “weaker sex”, it's rather that the tools and materials of jobs like construction are designed around a specific, masculine idea of what a person can or cannot lift. Change the design criteria, and most women could work in male-dominated fields, like the trades.

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There is nothing at all wrong with being a man. But we live in a profoundly sexist culture. And in the process of putting women down, we have also created a stereotypical description of what it means to be a human being. We do this by putting down those particular attributes that we associate with femininity. Women are supposed to be subtle, nurturing, concerned about feelings, and, supportive. Men are supposed to be dynamic, creative, analytical, and, competitive. There is nothing inherently wrong with any of these ideals. But if any of them become over-emphasized, they can damage individuals and society.

If we favour action to the point of discouraging attention to subtleties we start doing things by brute force which is both destructive and wasteful. If we favour creating the new to the point of becoming indifferent to what we already have, we will eliminate many important and useful things---often before we even understand their value. If we reduce every decision to a simple rationalist calculus and ignore the concerns of people who cannot express themselves in that framework, we run the risk of making catastrophic mistakes simply because we refused to see the problem from a different perspective. And, if we reduce all human interaction to a competition, we will lose the opportunity to gain the advantages that accrue from co-operation.

Daoists emphasize feminine qualities because in a profoundly sexist society it is the only way to reassert balance.

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Moreover I say unto you, the Climate Emergency must be dealt with!