My mood recently has strongly been tilted toward revisiting stuff, so I want to revisit a topic I talked about last year that had some questions still attached to it. Specifically I am referring to my Son of Man and Daughter of Woman posts from last year. The controversy seemed to be over the fact that I gendered the concepts of truth and love. I have my own thoughts about why, so maybe I can at least elaborate on my point of view to see if I paint reasonable pictures with my words.

Right off the bat, there is no question that both of these traits are undeniable virtues. We absolutely cannot live without either, and I would strongly advise against messing with them. Of course we are not perfect and we mess up sometimes. We tell lies or we don’t acknowledge good deeds. Whatever the case, we have varying capacities of both within us all.

Since I’ve been at home, I want to paint some pictures of these concepts within a home environment. So, what does a house that is full of love look like? Overflowing with praise and encouragement, comfortable, positive inspiration, beautiful. Growing up, that looked like all the snacks I could ever want to eat, video games I wanted to play, vehicles to get me where I physically wanted to go, friends I wanted to play with, family to interact with, music I wanted to listen to… The list goes on and on. In a lot of ways it was freedom to explore and expand myself in whatever direction was available.

Now, what does truth look like? I said in the son of man post that a lot of it is not pretty, and in many ways it is the opposite of love. It looks like hard work, restrictions, danger, pain, negative consequences. Growing up, that looked like competitive sports, difficult schoolwork, music lessons (I hated the piano when I was learning the basics and quit soon thereafter), and people telling me no for my own safety. A lot of those no’s were valid so I didn’t get run over by a car or die of diabetes by age 8, but of course no’s suck to a little kid that sees the world as a playground. It shrunk my world down to a reasonable size.

Hmmm… gender doesn’t seem to come in much actually. Ok, now let’s look at a household that is lacking both love and truth. It is a household that punishes for absolutely stupid reasons and never praises. It is a household that thrives on manipulation and lies. Hard work and restrictions are the norm, but they are not grounded in truth. Expansion into the world slowly becomes impossible.

With those pictures, it actually becomes clear that love and truth are by no means gendered. Historically they have been associated with the respective genders, but back then I think there was a more valid reason. Women physically bear the children and breastfeed them early on. They typically interact with the children more and praise them for good deeds. As a result, they tend to be much more sensitive to interpersonal relationships, and by spending time with other women in the same situations those patterns are reinforced. Men, on the other hand, did physical labor and other work to support the family.  Their worlds were entirely separate, and thus they exude such stark differences. Nowadays, they are definitely not as separate, but they seem to congregate disproportionally in different sectors.

With all that in mind, I still don’t agree with the claim that we are entirely the same. It took millennia for our bodies and minds to adapt the way they have and we can’t just throw all that out the window because we are suddenly “educated.” Hopefully that is a happy enough medium so we can get past some of the crazy conversations going on in the public sphere these days.