The Divine Dance of Genders

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, God 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.

Different by design

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

This difference goes back to how God designed women as an “addition” to men. From birth, women are wired with an implicit meaning that men don’t have toward raising an infant.

There are many subtle differences between men and women, but one major difference 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, will periodically and without provocation reconsider the wisdom in making a decision.

By design, men are “seekers” and women are “receivers”. It creates a complement with each other, when done right.

Women serve an invaluable and irreplaceable support role to men.

  • Starting from infancy, men find implicit meaning when they have women who support them.
  • They provide analysis and consideration that men wouldn’t be able to infer.
  • Without a woman’s hidden guidance, most men are helplessly lost.

Not good enough

Unfortunately, our fallen world has changed these conditions.

All leaders, gender-irrespective, have several requirements for the role:

  1. Single-mindedness in decision-making, especially as a system scales.
  2. Single-mindedness in messaging for everyone.
  3. The decisions require undistracted focus on the best interests of the group.
  4. Once the group has committed to a decision, they must persist in that decision without making dramatic changes.
  5. The leader is held accountable for the group’s failures, and receives glory for its success.

In this, we have a deep primal need for leaders to make slow, decisive movement.

    And, if we focus strictly on raw power, men are stronger and women are smarter.

    • In the contrast of indirect power, men can endure more hardship while women must rely on their community.
    • In a contest of direct power, men can subdue while women can outsmart.
    • The extra intelligence from women actually makes them less able to stick with something when things become difficult.

    And, to that end, that’s why all leadership and power drifts toward men. Not all men, and not all power, but the cycle is non-negotiable in the lens of history.

    Cursed

    In a loving society under God’s authority, the entire power structure would work effortlessly. Men would lead with pure and selfless love up to and including death, and women would submit to his authority as part of the hierarchy going back to God Himself (Ephesians 5:22-23).

    However, because we rebelled against God, He has given us curses to teach us what we otherwise don’t want to learn (Genesis 3:16-17).

    Men must to work endlessly just to survive and provide for their family:

    • This curse was brought on by man’s dissatisfaction with what God gave (i.e., command over the Garden of Eden with his wife).
    • This role fits man’s simple-minded nature. It is physically demanding, brutal, tiring, and tedious.
    • At the same time, it fits their simple-minded nature. It teaches men to be patient, find peace in His sufficiency, and accept unpleasant realities.
    • His authority gives him the responsibility to work harder than his wife, then go home to work further with his wife and children.

    The woman’s curse, by contrast, is far more mentally demanding:

    • If we parse it, it has a series of elements:
      1. More pain around the experience of having children, which goes beyond pregnancy into emotionally releasing them into adulthood.
      2. A desire to rule over men, which includes “man-dominating” roles like management and HR.
      3. By not respecting men, they end up having men dominate them at the end.
    • This role comes through God designing a world that addresses the self-deception women are prone to conducting (1 Timothy 2:14).

    God’s reasons for the roles

    While this is taboo to discuss in a feminist society, our roles were designed for God’s informal, eternal dominance hierarchy.

    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.

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

    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 often have a harder time with early childhood caretaking.

    To put it another way, the word-for-word description of Genesis 2:24 precisely defines this relationship:

    The logical consequences

    Unfortunately, a woman’s desire for male dominance creates a particular, predictable pattern:

    1. She desires the man to do more.
    2. Her desire becomes so strong that she departs from her femininity to assert dominance.
    3. 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.
    4. If the man asserts dominance, he will be seen as a bully. Therefore, he dials back his intensity for her sake.
    5. She does less in that role than a comparable man, but demands the men respect her the same.
    6. This submission role is demoralizing to men, so he naturally backs away to let her run everything, and it all falls apart.
    7. Eventually, women bitterly blame the men, but also move lower in the dominance hierarchy.

    While it becomes increasingly rarer in modern society, if a man does assert dominance:

    1. The man’s dominance utterly humbles her.
    2. She either submits to her role as the weaker vessel, or gives in to bitterness.
    3. In that bitterness, she finds community with other embittered women (e.g., social media).

    Therefore, men become socialized in many parts of female-run society to avoid the confrontation. Eventually, most modern contexts require men to submit to women, at least in pretext.

    And, when a man submits to a woman, she will adopt man’s curse. From the outside feminists often imagine a world of entitled oppressors, but they will assume a new bondage of slavery they weren’t designed to carry.

    Since this curse wasn’t designed for her to bear it, she will eventually fail spectacularly.

    Further, when men depart from the leadership role, they are forced to adopt an alternate reason to live. This can be a needlessly antagonistic purpose, or for the wrong cause. Sometimes, they consider suicide as a better option.

    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.

    In the end, the relationship between a woman’s and man’s curse is unique because it always brings back the social hierarchy of men over women, whether she wants it or not:

    • Men who decide to rise up to become better men will outperform women.
    • Women who decide to submit to their husbands will create better results through their family than women who try to take the man’s role.

    The entire debate

    From a more practical perspective, this is a debate is because of a broad term among leftward circles called “toxic masculinity”.

    • The general idea is that men in power can abuse that power, and women should have to endure that abuse.
    • Further, there’s the added leftist reasoning that patriarchal societies are inherently oppressive toward women, and women need reparations for this injustice.

    Obviously, though, men can misuse their power and authority.

    • When a man misuses their power, he must be held accountable.
    • For abusive contexts, the Bible already gives a simple-enough solution that she has the right to leave (1 Corinthians 7:10-11).

    The answer, though, is not to swap roles.

    • Another adequate-enough male will do the job of a male better than a highly qualified female can, and vice versa.
    • The role reversal harms more than it helps, since it brings about the above-stated “women doing the man’s curse”.
    • Even breaching conventional family roles, single fathers are statistically much better for children than single mothers.

    Ironically, most contentions about this arrangement arise through dysfunctions around the curse:

    1. Many women want to rule over men, so they demand that power.
    2. Many men don’t want to work because they’re lazy.

    Getting men to work is challenging enough to do without a woman constantly trying to take away his results (1 Timothy 5:18). This unpleasant arrangement is similar to how an uncaring female must learn to be affectionate (1 Timothy 2:9-15).

    And, for the most part, the answer should be clear:

    Mutual dependence

    Even beyond the vague spiritual side, men and women are a type of “salvation” that fixes their inherent defect:

    • A society of nothing but men will travel the stars within a few centuries, but have an average lifespan of about 20. Men require women to civilize them.
    • A society of nothing but women would live very long lives, but for millennia would never explore more than 10 miles around their domicile. Women require men to learn to be more efficient.

    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. That love will provoke both sides to transform or, by our own power, it’s guaranteed to fail.

    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 and wants us to connect with our own. 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.