The Manly Art of Self-Defence

From Women Priests: Yes or No?
By Emily C. Hewitt & Suzanne R. Hiatt, pp. 32-44,

Published by the Seabury Press, New York, 1973.

In the preceding chapter we have been probing some of the possible reasons why Christians might consider the priesthood “different” and therefore not open to women as other professions are. Here we will explore some unarticulated attitudes about women and their “difference” that might make them unsuitable for priesthood. The first of these is that woman’s nature is basically different from man’sthat she is not and cannot be a female human being, but is rather of a different order altogether from man and properly subordinate to him.

Theologically, the basis for this position is held to be in the creation narratives of Genesis 1-3. We will deal with those narratives in another chapter. At this point we will examine not the theological, but the anthropological and psychological basis for man’s age-old contention that woman is more different from him than she is like him.

It is with some hesitancy that we delve into this area at all, for the dynamics of the man-woman relation are complex. The danger of oversimplification, misrepresentation, and misunderstanding of these dynamics is enormous and probably unavoidable

Our experience as women clergy and our human intuition give us every reason to believe that man’s deepest feelings about woman may well be basic to the discussion of women in the priesthood. Many objections to women priests are not rational, hence for either side to “win” the debate by means of rational argument changes few minds and fewer hearts. Perhaps Anglicans’ inability to deal decisively with the question over such a protracted period of time has been rooted in our reluctance to broaden the inquiry to more basic problems of man-woman relations.

We will concentrate on male rather than female attitudes for two reasons. First, we suspect that female attitudes are apt to be derivative from male attitudes-that women tend to view life as men would like them to. Second, it is men who at present control the church’s policy and practice and it is therefore men who prevent and delay fuller participation by women. Why they should feel it necessary or advisable to do so is the central question of this chapter.

Woman as a Necessary Evil WOMAN AS A NECESSARY EVIL

Anthropologists and psychiatrists have observed that men are attracted to and repelled by women at the same time. These simultaneous feelings lead to confusion and ambivalence. Sigmund Freud expressed his confusion about women when he wrote in a private letter to a woman colleague: “ ...the great question . . which I have not been able to .answer despite my thirty years of research into the feminine soul, is ‘What does a woman want?’ ” (1)

Man’s confusion about woman and how he relates to her has been the theme of much of the world’s great literature. Women are adored as angels and denounced as demons, often within the same play or poem. D. H. Lawrence describes the variety of ways in which man sees woman:

Man is willing to accept woman as an equal, as a man in skirts, as an angel, a devil, a baby-face, a machine, an instrument, a bosom, a womb, a pair of legs, a servant, an encyclopaedia, an p ideal or an obscenity; the one thing he won’t accept her as is a human being, a real human being of the feminine sex. (2)

Man’s ambivalence toward woman is complicated, but running through it is a strain of antipathy. Dislike is expressed both in man’s most lavish praise of woman and in his most savage attacks on her character. The noted psychiatrist Karen Hornet’, in an essay devoted to this topic, has said: Is it not really remarkable . . . that so little recognition and attention are paid to the fact of men’s secret dread of women? It is almost more remarkable that women themselves have so long been able to overlook it . . . .The man on his side has in the first place very obvious strategic reasons for keeping his dread quiet. But he also tries by every means to deny it even to himself . . . . We may conjecture that even his glorification of women has its source not only in his cravings for love, but also in his desire to conceal his dread. A similar relief, however, is also sought and found in the disparagement of women that men often display . . . .The attitude of love and adoration signifies: “There is no need for me to dread a being so wonderful, so beautiful, nay, so saintly.” That of disparagement implies: “It would be too ridiculous to dread a creature who, if you take her all round, is such a poor thing.” (3)

It is remarkable that American society, which is more than 50 percent female, is so accepting of misogyny. In the church especially we have observed that clergy who clearly do not like women are not only fully accepted both socially and professionally, but their blatant distaste for women is regarded as an amusing quirk of personality. “Father So-and-so never comes to the ECW meetings. He says he has enough trouble without having to keep the hens from pecking each other." If a person were to speak of blacks or Indians with the same disdain many men show for women, others would be seriously alarmed at his racism. But misogyny is not regaded by society as pathological.*

Once we have observed that man is ambivalent toward woman, we can begin to suggest some possible roots for his anxiety. Why do men sometimes, even often, simply not like women?

The Two Faces of Mother

Psychiatrists tell us that our earliest experiences in life are the most important, since the way in which our emotions are dealt with at the earliest stages of development sets the tone for the rest of our lives. For this reason the first place to look in examining the way we feel about women is into our relationship as infants to our mothers. Cultures all over the world have extolled that relationship in their art forms with sensitive portrayals of mother and child. Our own Christian heritage and the veneration of Mary, the mother of God, throughout the centuries springs immediately to mind. Mother and child is such a universal expression of human love that it is no wonder so much great art centers on this theme.

For men and women alike, our first love was our infant love for our mothers. But alas for mother, our first experience of rejection, however gentle and well meant, was also at her hands, or more accurately at her breast. Erik Erikson suggests that sin first enters an infant’s world when, with the advent of teething, he inadvertently bites his mother and she reacts by starting to wean him. (Apparently even for bottle-fed babies, teething and weaning come close together, and the baby conflates the emotional pain of weaning with the physical pain of teething.)

Erikson further suggests that “This earliest catastrophe.; in the individual’s relation to himself and to the world is probably the ontogenetic contribution to the biblical saga , of paradise, where the first people on earth forfeited forever the right to pluck without effort what had been put at their disposal; they bit into the forbidden apple, and made God angry.” Though a mother who is aware .of these dynamics can help make the process less frustrating for a child than it might otherwise be, nevertheless, Erikson continues, “. . even under the most favorable circumstances, this stage leaves a residue of a primary sense of evil and doom and of a universal nostalgia for a lost paradise.” (4)

It is no accident that Eve, “the mother of all living,” takes the rap for the fatal bite in the Genesis story. In our unconscious all of us blame our mothers for betraying our love by insisting we face the larger and more hostile world. Thus everyone-man and woman-both loves and hates his mother. Since she was our earliest experience with woman we tend to project our ambivalence onto all the women we subsequently meet. In the case of women, this ambivalence is turned inward.

Of course the dislike we feel toward mother is unconscious, and we try to compensate by honoring motherhood and assuring girl children that the highest calling for a woman is to be a mother. But we can’t quite bring it off, for we don’t totally admire mother, but also fear and resent her. Thus while we pay lip service to our admiration of the state of motherhood, mother is the most maligned person in our society.

One of the most biting attacks on mother ever written is Philip Wylie’s Generation o f Vipers. It is a denunciation of the American “Mom,” blaming all the country’s ills on her and the way she raises her sons. Wylie’s vicious rantings about Mom strike a responsive chord in the American heart because he says things we’d all vaguely felt but had never dared say.

Society’s hostility to mother is also seen in the impossible role she is expected to fill. Psychiatrists and educators tell her repeatedly how important to the infant’s entire future life is the way she cares for him. Yet she is offered little concrete help or information in the dynamics of infant psychology, due to the naive assumption that good mothering ability comes naturally to women, and especially to new mothers.

Mother is often blamed for her children’s failures in later life. If she lives for her children she is “overprotective,” to their ruination. If she pursues a life of her own she is “neglectful,” with the same result. If, when her children are grown, she pursues the volunteer interests open to her she becomes a figure of fun, a cartoon club-lady. If she pursues or revives a second career in later life, she is seldom

taken seriously (and probably is accused of neglecting her husband as well). Society continues to Jet little girls know that the justification for women is that they are needed to be mothers. But everywhere except on Christmas and Mother’s Day cards, “mother” is treated as a bad and sometimes vicious joke.

From infancy, both men and women have misgivings about women that are rooted in their ambivalence about mother. In addition to this, however, the boy child as he grows discovers new exasperations about women which tend to confirm his earlier suspicions about them. He discovers that girls are allowed to cry while he is not, and that they are allowed to run away from danger rather than being obliged to “face it like a man.” Most infuriating of all, girls are permitted to tease him, but under no circumstances is he allowed to retaliate in the only way he knows-by hitting them. Many a man recalls suppressing his rage when he was told as a boy, “I don’t care what she did, boys do not hit girls." As a result of such experiences, by the time he reaches his teens the average American boy is not well-disposed toward women.

Manhood Must Be Won

There is another possible reason why men grow up to dislike women. While men and women share the struggle to-, come to terms with mother, men alone must face a related; struggle-the widely discussed fragility of the male ego ands how to live with it.

Margaret Mead has suggested, not entirely facetiously, that the architect of man’s ego is woman and that she has designed it for her own purposes. Dr. Mead tells a story of a society of primitive people who live near a snake- and crocodile-infested swamp and who depend for their food on what they can hunt there. She postulates, sensibly enough, that nobody, male or female, enjoys venturing into the swamp with all its terrors, but that in order to maintain the group and feed the children someone must do so. Women, being always concerned about the welfare of the children, have stumbled upon an ingenious method for getting food from the swamp without risking a trip there themselves. Somehow, according to this scenario, the women have figured out that they can get the men to go by flattering them about their courage and then taunting them about their lack of “manliness” when they balk at proving that courage on the hunt. In time, the women establish a pattern of developing fragile and easily wounded egos in their sons so that they can shame them into doing the necessary but distinctly unpleasant task of providing for a family.(5)

Intriguing as this scheme is, Dr. Mead does not upon sober reflection assert that women have been either clever or diabolical enough to deliberately attempt to control men in this way. Yet every woman knows from girlhood that men are easily-hurt, proud creatures who must be treated with the greatest tact and delicacy. If not a feminine conspiracy, what is behind this fragile pride that will cause a man to fight when common sense says he should run?

H. R. Hays, in summing up his entertaining survey of misogyny through the ages, The Dangerous Sex, makes a point that others often skirt, namely that man’s insecurity about his relationship with woman has its root in his nagging insecurity about his ability to perform sexually.

All the material we have been discussing indicates that men have always been fragile in their sex life. Women can fulfill their sexual role in society without effort, by mere acceptance; their need for orgasmic experience has varied with the culture’s expectations. Men, however, must be capable of erection and discharge or they are not performing their duty in carrying on the race .... Thus men have worried about their potency from the beginning of history......(6)

The notebooks of analysts are filled with cases of men whose anxiety about real or imagined impotence has caused them deep distress. The pain of adolescence for boys is tied up with the struggle for self-respect in manhood. Sexual experimentation becomes central at this time because a young man’s feeling of self-worth and the respect peers are closely related to his sexual prowess.

A man’s ability to perform sexually becomes crucial to his self-esteem. Though women too can fail to achieve sexual satisfaction, they can pretend to have done so. Man’s failure is both involuntary and obvious, a source of humiliation. Worst of all, woman is witness to his failure.

Silencing The Witness

To be humiliated in the presence of a peer is far more painful than to have an inferior see you at your worst. Hence, if woman can be kept in a state of subjugation that is acknowledged by everyone, sexual failure in her presence is less important. If woman is man’s inferior or subordinate she has no cause to complain of his failure. Even a failed man is more than a woman.

Another way to deal with humiliation is to blame it on someone else. We can all recall occasions when in bitter disappointment we have discovered reasons outside ourselves (and usually in other people) for our failures. The classical biblical example of this is Adam’s lame excuse: “the woman whom thou gayest to be with me” (your fault, God) “she gave me the fruit of the tree” (her fault) “and I did eat” ( naturally ) .’

When man fails sexually the easiest way to handle it is to blame the only other person involved. If she were more skilled in the art of love, if she were more attractive, if she were more responsive, everything would be all right. (“Want him to be more of a man? Try being more of a woman.”)

The message that man’s sexual failure is woman’s problem and not his is all around us. It’s not that men are impotent, it’s that women are frigid. When woman begins to accept the responsibility for man’s sexual prowess, she takes on his insecurity and anxiety about sex and makes them her own.

Sex and Religion

But even if we acknowledge man’s sexual insecurity, what does it have to do with our subject, women in the priesthood? Curiously enough, some of the arguments advanced for keeping women out of the priesthood deal with exactly the dynamics we have been discussing. It is strongly implied by some that since man properly takes the initiative in the sex act only male priests may take initiative in the life of the church." We also find that the New Testament image of the church as the bride of Christ is used to justify an all male clergy, apparently on the assumption that the priest represents Christ and the laity his bride.’

Humankind’s two most basic needs are to be fed and to be loved. Religions throughout the world and throughout history have centered on ritual feeding or ritual love-making, sometimes combining the two. That the need to be loved and the need to be fed are deep and interrelated can readily be drawn from the experience of any of us, and reminds us again of our earlier discussion of that lost paradise of mother love. It is little wonder then that our Christian sacrament of feeding becomes so conflated with our need to be loved that sexual considerations are seen as important to the proper performance of sacramental acts.

The Eucharist is not a sexual sacrament. It is a sacrament of feeding. All humans of whatever age or condition share the need to be fed. Though there are people who do not engage in sexual activity, no one lives who does not eat. Hence the sacramental bread and wine recall for Christians how basic are God’s gifts to our very existence. We give thanks that we continue to be fed, both physically and spiritually.

Manhood and the World of Work

There are still other possible explanations of man’s dread of woman as it manifests itself in his reluctance to have her join him as a peer in the world of work. The possibility that men envy women their ability to create life itself has often been cited to explain male genius in the arts and sciences and female lack of such genius. We are told that men compensate for their inability to give birth by writing symphonies and building cathedrals, and there may well be some truth in that assertion. The corollary is that women are not geniuses because they don’t have to be. What edifice or poem could rival a new-born infant?

As long as women create babies and men create everything else, our world, if not perfect, appears at least to be balanced. However, when women decide that they would like to exercise their abilities in a variety of ways, the system of compensations is altered and men feel threatened. Women should stick to their own realm and give birth. It is simply not fair that they should want to compete with men as well. Men do not attempt to compete with women as mothers, why should women be permitted to compete with men as artists and writers?

Increasingly, our society is coming to recognize that talent and ability are not sex-linked. Furthermore, we are living in a time when pregnancy and motherhood need not be involuntary and can in most cases be freely chosen. Large families, rather than being desperately needed as in past ages, are beginning to be viewed as an ecological liability. The logic of all these factors is that women should now be free to share the tasks and joys of all kinds of work.

However, women who aspire to use their talents in pursuits other than motherhood run into masculine resentment. It’s not fair that women can function in two realms, motherhood and work, and men cannot. In addition, woman’s encroachment on man’s territory infringes on his first defense against sexual impotence-his failure in sex is minimized as long as he remains superior to woman in other realms. Again in Hays’s view: “The man in a highly developed society equates his work and his achievement with his potency . . . . Women not only make frightening physical demands upon him . . . but castrate him creatively by possibly doing his work better.” (10)

Manhood and Priesthood

Clergy have a special problem in admitting women to their profession. In our society many of the things that priests do and the manner in which they are done connote femininity.

Margaretta K. Bowers, an American psychiatrist and Episcopal laywoman who specializes in treating clergy and especially Episcopal priests, points this out clearly in relation to clerical fondness for vestments and ceremony:

There is a definite insistence in our culture that the enjoyment of walking in the rustlings of silk and satins, lace petticoats, and magnificent cloth of gold, is an expression of femininity. The fact that men throughout the ages, throughout the world, have enjoyed these luxuries and considered them masculine, seems to have little weight in the argument. In our culture, a man in a cassock is wearing a skirt, and therefore is getting away with something which he could not do in civilian clothes. There is a certain pleasure in the flaunting of a special privilege; there is a special conceit in doing what the ordinary man cannot do.(11)

If there is a special privilege, there is also a special danger that the man in the cassock/skirt will be seen as effeminate. As long as it is axiomatic that priests may do these things because they are priests and that women are never priests, the specter of effeminacy does not rise. But once women become priests it will be clear to all that many of the duties of a priest are duties which this society happens to consider as belonging in woman’s realm.

When a woman dons vestments we suddenly recognize that in this society they resemble more what women wear than they do the garb of men. ( Historically, of course, they are the everyday dress of males of another age.) When a woman breaks bread and serves wine, then cleans the vessels when all have been fed, we suddenly recognize that she has served a meal and done the dishes, just as women do at home. When a woman hears confession or gives absolution we recognize that women are the listeners and comforters at home, too.

The world in which many clergy move is also a feminine world. Women outnumber men in church not only on Sunday but throughout the week as well. The suburban communities in which many clergy work are also predominantly female during weekday business hours. As long as his very costume (the clerical collar) assures him that he is a man, the priest can move freely and without embarrassment in these women’s worlds. But once women start wearing that costume and doing his work, doubts and questions about the “manliness” of his profession may arise.

"Difference and the Gospel"

Woman is seen as “different” and therefore unsuited to priesthood for a host of reasons. The most important of these is that man does not choose to see her otherwise. He is, at a deep level of his being, fearful of woman and has constructed an elaborate system of defenses to keep her at bay.

As Christians we are bound to ask seriously whether woman’s “difference” is part of God’s revelation and the divine order, or whether it is an accommodation to male ambivalence. If it is the former, Christians should deplore the changing role of women in society and reject any thought of women clergy. If it is the latter, Christians should be in the forefront of the people working to shape a new life for both women and men based on their common humanity.

Notes

* Misandry, a dread of and aversion to men on the part of women, is less well known. It is considered pathological.

1. Sigmund Freud, quoted in Kate Millett, Sexual Politics (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1970 ) , p. 178.

2. D. H. Lawrence, quoted in Sayers, Are Women Human? p. 33.

3. Karen Homey, Feminine Psychology (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1967 ) , p. 136.

4. Erik H. Erikson, Childhood and Society, 2nd ed. (New York: W. W. Norton and Co., 1963 ) , pp. 79-80.

5. Dr. Mead used this illustration in a talk given during a conference on women in the church, Synod House, Diocese of New York, April 24, 1971.

6. Hays, The Dangerous Sex, p. 271.

7. Biblical quotations here and throughout the book are from the Revised Standard Version.

8. This is the apparent implication in C. Kilmer Myer’s assertion that “The Father begets the Son. This is essential to the givingness of the Christian Faith. . . : ‘ Myers goes on to state that ”Initiative is, in itself, a male rather than a female attribute." Though he does not say directly that he is speaking of initiative in the sex act, his emphasis on the Father’s “begetting” of the Son leads one to conclude that Myers has sexual initiative in mind. See “Should Women Be Ordained? No,” The Episcopalian, vol. 137, no. 2 (February, 1972), p. 8.

In fact, the (commonly-held) view that initiative in sexual relations is explicitly “male” ignores the wide range of sexual techniques and arrangements that people have employed in different times and places. In testimony to this range there is an extensive literature, from the Kama Sutra to anthropological studies to the more clinical observations of Kinsey and Masters and Johnson. Indeed, except in the case of rape, sexual initiative is never entirely male, for the female gives assent, at least. Folk wisdom knows well that sexual initiative is not wholly male, hence the time-worn joke about the bridegroom who says, “I chased her until she caught me.”

9. The Gospel analogies to Christ as the bridegroom do not cast the disciples in the role of the bride, but rather in the role of wedding guests (e.g., Mark 2:19; Luke 5:34-35). In the Epistles, wedding imagery does cast the Church as bride (e.g., Ephesians 5:31-32 ) .

Sally Cunneen quotes the Dutch theologian R. J. Bunnik, who reminds us that the bridegroom imagery is properly reserved for Christ and should not be extended to the priest: “The minister cannot be identified with the bridegroom of the Church. He belongs also to the female side of the comparison: as a member of the Church he is no less than any other Christian the bride.”

See Sally Cunneen, Sex: Female; Religion: Catholic (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968), p. 142.

10. Hays, p. 271.

11. Margaretta K. Bowers, Conflicts of the Clergy: A Psychodynamic Study with Case Histories (New York: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1964), p. 35.

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