Complementarity and Creation
It should not be surprising that men and women are strikingly different in all sorts of ways that transcend cultural variations. Not only do these differences not disappear in purportedly sex-neutral societies; there is evidence to suggest that some of them actually increase, as people are freed to do what they actually want. (To take one widely reported example, differences in mental rotation between men and women are higher in countries with greater sexual equality.) The bell curves for men and women are centered in different places, and not just for obvious physical traits (height, strength, hair, and so on) but also for hormonal, psychological, and interpersonal traits.
Men are typically more aggressive, competitive, fearless, likely to take risks, promiscuous, and prone to violence, and testosterone is aligned with higher levels of confidence, sex drive, and status assertion. Women are, on average, more prone to neuroticism and agreeableness. Consequently, men are generally clustered at the upper and lower extremes of society: men are not just more likely to be very rich or very powerful (which prompts all sorts of public debate), but also far more likely to be criminals, killers, homeless, excluded, or imprisoned (which doesn’t).
Male groups are more characterized by sparring, fighting, power structures, and banter, while female groups are typically smaller, more indirect in confrontation, egalitarian in structure, verbally dexterous, and oriented around people rather than things. Gendered trends can be noticed before children are particularly aware of which sex they are (to take a tragic example, 40 of 43 serious shootings by toddlers in 2015 were by boys) ...
Julia Turner, an editor of Slate, commented recently that the boyishness of her twin sons had provided a significant challenge to her commitment to gender as a social construct, offering the fascinating remark that, despite her egalitarian bona fides, “There’s a there there.” To which ethicist Christina Hoff Sommers mischievously responded in The Federalist: “Indeed there is. And it takes a liberal-arts degree not to see it.”
I mention all this not to validate any or all of these differences, as if science somehow renders them virtuous, let alone to excuse the male propensity to promiscuity and violence. I mention it for four reasons:
1. Complementarity appears to be hardwired into us as human beings, even from the perspective of mainstream secular scientific and sociological research. The vast majority of human societies have known this intuitively, but in a culture like ours, where most of us have never fought for our homeland, died in childbirth, gone down the mines, or settled a frontier, it has become forgotten. Facts, however, are stubborn things.
2. There is an interesting correspondence between many of these traits and the sorts of things we would expect to find if Genesis 1–4 was true, and the man (adamah = “earth”) had been given the task of guarding the garden against attack, and the woman (havah = “life”) had been identified as the mother of all living.
3. At a pastoral level, it can be reassuring to hear that we’re not imagining it when we observe that men and women are generally predisposed to different sorts of sins or weaknesses (#MeToo, #ToxicMasculinity, #HeForShe), and that we should disciple people accordingly.
4. It also sheds interesting light on the (very obvious) biological differences between men and women, and their significance. Imagine an alien visiting earth and discovering that one sex was taller, stronger, and hairier than the other, with sexual organs that were external and faced outward; while the smaller partner’s sexual organs were internal, and served as the location of both sexual intercourse and pregnancy. Then imagine them discovering that, generally speaking, one was better at forming relationships, holding small groups together, and working with people; while the other was more suited to external agency, risk-taking, and working with things. Finally, imagine them being introduced to biblical categories for describing the sexes: towers and cities, warriors and gardens, priests and temples, the blood-spattered groom and the pure spotless bride. Which would our alien think was which?
