God clearly created both man and woman in His image (Genesis 1:27).

However, for many reasons, He defines Himself constantly throughout the Bible as a “He”, and there’s a reason for that.

First, God could have used an “it”. But, He’s a personal God, and chose to associate to a gender to appear more “human” to us.

He certainly could have used a “third gender” if He wanted, and we could call God as a Zhe or something. But, he probably didn’t because He wanted to be far more relatable to us, especially as a Father.

In many ways, God has designed the masculine to begin and the feminine to complete. We can see this in how women, by their essence, come after men:

The woman was made from man’s rib (Genesis 2:18-23)
Women build homes from men’s houses
Women finesse what men craft
Men pioneer, then women settle
Women make the form where men make the function

One major difference among the genders comes through how they reconsider decisions:

Both of them will research as needed, then make their choice.
Men only reconsider actions with an outside event justifying it.
Women, on the other hand, are disposed to periodically reconsider a decision’s wisdom without any outside provocation.

Power

Leadership has several requirements:

Single-mindedness in messaging to everyone.
Single-mindedness in decision-making, especially as it scales.
The decisions require sole focus on the best interests of the organization.
Once a decision has been made, it may have to persist to prevent too much change from causing chaos.
We have a deep primal need for leaders to make slow, decisive movement.

Further, if we focus strictly on raw power, men are stronger and women are smarter. In a contest of direct power, men can subdue while women can outsmart.

And, to that end, that’s why all leadership and power draws toward men.

However, women serve an invaluable and irreplaceable support role to men. They provide analysis and consideration that men wouldn’t be able to infer. Without a woman’s hidden guidance, most men are helplessly lost.

Cursed

In a loving society under God’s authority, the entire power structure would work effortlessly. However, because we rebelled against God, He has given us curses to teach us what we otherwise don’t want to learn.

Men are cursed to work endlessly just to survive (Genesis 3:17). This curse fits their simple-minded nature. It is brutal, tiring, tedious, but teaches men to find peace in the moment and in His sufficiency.

The woman’s curse (Genesis 3:16) comes through two angles:

At least a partial desire to rule over men, with his authority taking final dominance.
More pain around the experience of having children.

Man’s punishment leans more toward the physical, while woman’s is a stronger mental burden.

Specialized

This is taboo to talk about in a feminist society, but is only a natural part of the dominance hierarchy God built for us.

Men and women are designed from birth with predefined specializations, and we must stay within how we’ve been designed to find the most meaning for our lives.

Women in men’s roles

A woman desiring a man’s role is, in effect, desiring leadership. Unfortunately, since leadership requires conviction and openness to others more than raw intellectual power, they’re too smart for the role.

When women are in a leadership role, the general closed-off thinking of men renders the entire dynamic relatively ineffective.

Unfortunately, a woman’s desire (as part of her curse), creates a particular, predictable pattern:

She desires the man to do more.
Her desire becomes so strong that she departs from her femininity to assert dominance.
From there, the man is forced into an ultimatum: assert dominance as if she were another man, or behave graciously toward her and submit to her.

If he submits to her, she will adopt man’s curse of endless work, up until she fails spectacularly.

If he asserts dominance:

The man’s dominance utterly humbles her.
She either submits to her role as the weaker vessel, or gives in to bitterness.
If she doesn’t return to her role, she will adopt man’s curse of endless work, up until she fails spectacularly.

Broken roles

Women who can succeed in leadership are working well outside their natural design, and they must learn the practical, straightforward burden of leading. This almost guarantees bitterness as they normalize working outside the design God made for them.

By contrast, when a man’s is forced to be in a helper role to women, he tends to become silly and impotent. Men aren’t disposed to gentleness or sensitivity, so they must learn it, and men would utterly fail if they became solely caretakers.

This inversion of specializations creates a complete lack of strong leadership, mixed with a lack of sufficiently perceptive emotional support or nurture to empower them.

The answer to “toxic masculinity”

Obviously, though, men can misuse their power and authority. When a man misuses their power, they must be held accountable, similarly to how an uncaring female must learn to be affectionate.

The answer is not to swap roles, since another adequate-enough male will do the job of a male better than a highly qualified female can, and vice versa. Most contentions about this arrangement arise through dysfunctions around the curse: either the woman’s (because she wants to rule over men) or the man’s (because he’s lazy).

Dependence

Men and women need each other. A society of nothing but men will travel the stars within a few centuries, but have an average lifespan of about 20. A society of nothing but women would live very long lives, but for millennia would never explore more than 10 miles around their domicile.

Men require challenges, and women require security. Men must learn compassion, while women must learn respect. This can only be reconciled through love for one another, and that love only comes in Christ through the Holy Spirit. Otherwise, by our own power, it’s guaranteed to fail.

From another perspective, men and women need each other as a type of “salvation” to fix the defects of the gender:

Men require women to civilize them.
Women require men to learn to be more efficient.

To see what we’re missing, we must consult the God who made us. God is a spiritual being, so He has no “gender“, but He still made genders. The patriarchal dominance came with the curse we brought on ourselves, and it’s not the way God wants to see us live.

It’s reasonably possible to speculate that we may transcend genders someday (Mark 12:25), but they’re a significant part of our identity as long as we have our present bodies.

the curse of women

man’s curse is straightforward: you will work like a dog until the day you die

this is an intrisic test in both patience and finding satisfaction in an unpleasant state
it is a curse brought on by dissatisfaction with what God gave (i.e., Eden), so it’s what we need

the curse of women is very unique:

their desire is over men
they take on “man-running” roles like [management] and [HR]
they suck at their job comparatively because they can’t respect men, nor can they edge out as statistically far as men, as well as more infighting
they therefore get edged out at the top, no matter how much they scream for DEI treatment

of course, the curse of women is ALSO unique on the other side:

their childbearing pain is magnified

– this transcends individual experiences tied to birth, and moves to everything

and, in all of this, their desire over a man means they effectively take on man’s curse (to work like a dog)

a woman’s curse is unique because it brings back the social hierarchy of men over women, whether she wants it or not

no amount of [leftist] thinking ever removes this either: single [parents] who are dads are MUCH better statistically for children than single parents who are moms