I recently read a collection

I recently read a collection of work by Erik Erikson, the famous American psychologist. Towards the end of the book, there’s an essay which was originally given as a speech before students in India, and in it Erikson speaks approvingly about what he calls the “unimpaired femininity” of the modern women of India as opposed to the modern women of the west. (And I cringed, for several reasons.)

But it struck me as I read this essay that, in several earlier pieces collected in this same volume, from his book on the young Martin Luther and another on Gandhi, Erikson had spoken on multiple occasions, very approvingly, about both of these men’s deliberate adoption of “feminine” qualities: Luther’s desire to enter Erikson’s ‘generative’ stage of life, which Luther specifically speaks of in terms of being ‘pregnant’ with an idea; what Erikson describes as Gandhi’s desire to become perfectly motherly; etc. But neither of these men’s efforts does Erikson describe as endangering or ‘impairing’ the masculinity of the persons in question; disapproval or even ambivalence are not so much as vaguely implied—both men are in Erikson’s mind trailblazers and geniuses who expanded human (male) capacities and opened new realms of possibility to succeeding generations (of men). Indeed, Erikson insisted that these “feminine” qualities were simply “human” qualities, that any man who was fully human might be expected to develop these qualities too—there was nothing unmanly about it, of course not! So it would seem that Erikson’s idea of masculinity could appropriate to itself (a Marxist might say something here about ‘colonizing’ or ‘primitive accumulation’) at least some qualities of the ‘feminine’ without being diminished in its essence, while his idea of femininity couldn’t do the reverse without being hopelessly compromised.

On the other hand, there’s Peter Brown’s work on sexuality in late antiquity, The Body and Society, which I also recently finished, which talks about how the meaning given to sex changed from a predominantly ‘pagan’ to a predominantly Christian culture. The ancient Romans’ idea of women was, more or less, that a woman was an incomplete or failed man. Women in the classical Roman imagination were simply human beings without enough vital energy in their bodies to make them fully male (or simply, fully human). Hence, men who didn’t constantly demonstrate their vitality and command of themselves and others through self-denial, self-discipline, and various acts of sanctioned violence, were always in danger of being considered not fully male either. The masculine was an idea that stood at the summit of a slippery slope, the female was simply thought of as its lack. And so at that time in history, there was a constant danger of being seen as ‘impaired’ in your masculinity, and no positive idea of ‘the feminine’ at all. (Kierkegaard in Either/Or refers to the difference between love in antiquity and love in the present (his present) day as that between loving ‘the beautiful individual’, and loving ‘the feminine’—hence his version of the Symposium in Stages on Life’s Way turns not on the question of love in general, but of women in particular.)

I’m sure there is some sort of comprehensive history of ‘the construction of the feminine’/‘the construction of the masculine’ out there somewhere; there’s probably a whole field of study and a whole canon of relevant works on the subject, tracing the history of both ideas. But it strikes me at least at a first glance, not having specifically studied the subject, that at present, what ‘male’ is is still allowed to be far broader, more flexible, to change and to have changed with history—without somehow being thought in danger of evaporating into thin air or vanishing altogether—in a way that ‘female’ isn’t.

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I think it boils down to a

I think it boils down to a culture that conflates general human desire for things like worthiness, self respect, self efficacy, and so on with “manhood”.

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Hmm, in some western

Hmm, in some western cultures, ‘becoming a woman’ is having your first period. Or at least that’s how my mother interpreted it in my case (we’re French). Is it not the case at all in English?

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