Androgyny: The Ugly Truth Behind Flattening Gender Differences
Hello, my friends; another week has passed, and I am here to share with you again what I have learned. Though I was not able to listen to the amount of podcasts I would have liked while driving, I was able to find new times and opportunities to do some learning. Currently, at church, our Young Adults group is going through the book of Exodus, so in an attempt to dig in and make the most of this, I decided I would check out what study resources I could find and as if by divine appointment I learned that Hillsdale College recently released a free online course on Exodus, and so I eagerly began this course!
This morning, as I sit in my favorite coffee shop, with the light piter-pater of the rain outside, I bring the thoughts and ideas bouncing around in my head. In addition to the online course I started this week, I also decided to finally begin my journey of trying to understand the feminist mind and the ideas to which they subscribe. I have been vocally opposed to this ideology among my friends, and much of my opposition has come from listening to the opinions of authors and podcasters whom I trust. Yet I did not want to continue to speak on this subject without first hearing it from those who birthed it. In this effort, I have decided to begin with Betty Friedan’s “The Feminine Mystique,” as of yet, I am not into the book far enough to feel comfortable giving a concrete opinion on it. Upon finishing this book, I hope to read Kate Millet’s “Sexual Politics.” I then intend to finish my education in feminism with “The Second Sex” by Simone de Beauvoir. I suspect this journey will take me a few months to complete as each book is fourteen-plus hours, but I am committed to it as I have purchased this trinity of feminist literature.
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The Ugly Truth of Androgyny
As I continue to educate myself on the ideas that inform our culture and rule the minds of its youth, I find myself reminded of the word “Androgyny.”
The quality or state of being neither specifically feminine nor masculine; the combination of feminine and masculine characteristics.
Our culture has become increasingly androgynous, and we have tried to flatten the differences between the sexes. Things have, in my eyes, become uglier and more confusing. I believe this is the case both psychologically and aesthetically. Before I dig in, I want to be clear: I believe all people should be free to do as they wish as long as it is within the bounds of the law and God’s design. All people have been created differently and have differing interest levels in fields that may traditionally be considered masculine or feminine. I have always found myself less interested in guns and firearms than most men and instead a greater interest in writing and creativity. This would historically have been seen as more feminine in recent history. So, I want to be clear: I believe a range of interests overlap between the realm of the feminine and masculine.
With all that said, I find myself disgusted with our culture’s obsessive flattening of our gendered differences. I genuinely feel it has made our culture definitively uglier. Our media and entertainment industries continue to try to reinvent gender roles or abolish them entirely. A few examples of this come to mind for me. Many Hollywood men are ever more feminine as some will show up in a dress and painted nails. Gone are the days of John Wayne, and though there are still some manly men within Hollywood who I would say are traditionally masculine, often they receive little attention. On the flip side, we see Hollywood obsessed with portraying women as lone wolf warriors capable of single-handedly defeating a small army of men, often with the intent of humiliating these men in the process. Some recent examples are 2019’s “Charlie’s Angels” and “The Woman King.” Some might not see this as a problem and think me silly for thinking this is anything but mindless entertainment, but it is far from that; these films are intended to pervert the mind. Rather than embrace the beauty and complementarity between the sexes, they seek to make us look the same. 2023 was a year filled with flop upon flop in Hollywood as they continued to seek to entertain the masses by continuously insulting half the human population and portraying them as evil, villainous creatures, inept and helpless, unable to achieve anything good. Rather than show both sexes as virtuous and flawed in their own ways, today’s entertainment insists that there is only one villain, and it is the men, and most often, it is the white men.
Yet here is what I find most interesting: it is not that Hollywood is seeking to show the sins of the white man as a sin; more often that it is only a sin if a white man commits these actions if a woman commits these same actions, it is now seen as empowering. So it is not that the deeds are evil it is dependant on who commits the deed. We have abandoned “Objective mortality” and instead choose to say that right and wrong are subjective and depend entirely on who the perpetrator is. This could be an entire post in itself. Last thought as I seek to stay on topic: If we were to take many of our modern films and shows and do a gender swap of their characters, we would see an uproar. If I took Louis from Family Guy and made her the bumbling buffoon who can’t do anything right, we would have seen the show canceled a long time ago. A new movie called “Challengers” with actress Zendaya is coming out. According to the trailer, the premise of this film is that Zendaya suffers a tennis injury that renders her incapable of competing. So, instead, she begins to coach these two young men at their request to help them become as good as she was or could have been. In the process, a love triangle is formed between these three characters. Both young men are aware of this, and so seek to compete for both her affection and to become tennis champions. I don’t know the film's ultimate message, and it could be a good film with a wholesome message, though I highly doubt it. I want us to imagine for a moment if the genders were swapped. I wonder what reaction would be to a film with such a premise? It would not be called empowering; I can assure you of that.
I want to return to my primary aim here and focus on the ugliness of androgyny. As we flatten the differences between the genders, things become increasingly ugly. There is beauty in polarity and how we are so very different from one another as human creatures. I truly believe much of the reason for the spike in singleness amongst the modern young adult is that many young women do not find the men they see as truly attractive. So, too many of today’s young men do not find many of its young women as attractive. Modern media and entertainment tell both sexes they should adopt the characteristics of the other, and through this, they often abandon their God-given design. There is variation; there are young men who are more interested in things generally seen as feminine, and there are women who are interested in things generally seen as more masculine, which is a good thing. Praise God for this variety. My chief concern is that we have chosen to do in our modern world is villainize one and worship the other. We have taken the vices of the men of old, and they have become the virtues of today's empowered women. We have twisted virtue and made it vice, and vice has become virtue.
