A Healer’s Geste

Destroying Your Child’s Imagination, Method Eight: Homogenize Humanity

Book Club

Follow the discussion of this book at Ordo Amoris.

Ok, so we’ve already commented upon Esolen’s need of a stricter proofreading, but this time it grated me primarily because of his overuse of “[sic]” in the previous chapters. If only he had been so observant with his own writing.

Method Eight: Spay & Geld

…But don’t bid the geldings be fruitful. They might then realize their problem.

Yet we human beings wherever we go will always have one frontier right before us, one source of wonder, precisely for the fascinating strangeness of the land. Women will have men, and men will have women.

Men and women are mysterious beings, especially mysterious to one another. The mysterious, the distinct otherness, will spark in the soul — where imagination most lives and flourishes — interest and awe and desire. These things are counterproductive to efficient Economies. Even to perpetuate the species, it would be best if we perfect our scientific procedures rather than rely upon “the old-fashioned and mysterious way, the mingling of bodies giving rise to, as Scripture quaintly puts it, a new “living soul.” While we must still depend upon it, however, let it at least be done “as the result of the life-career decisions of the modestly contented couple.”

We don’t want a women to look at a man with any kind of wonder and reverence and say to herself, “He is the one whose child I want to bear.” We don’t want a man to look at a women in the same way, saying, “She is the one I wish to bear my child.”

The best way to inoculate against mystery, against wonder, against curiosity, against awe, is to make what would be so inspiring instead banally familiar. Coed education, coed sports, coed choirs, coed dorms — teaching the children that though there might be biological differences that we can’t for the life of us figure out how to paper over, still, those differences are of no importance. There is no difference in the essence of girls and boys. We weaken and stomp down the boys and harden the girls so that the girls can tromp the boys. This makes them both more manageable “citizens.”

Esolen points out that even given the same setting and same material, boys and girls will naturally group themselves into like cliques (with a few natural exceptions here and there) and do different things:

This is all pretty normal. But we don’t want it. We want to stifle their spirits. So we compel them all to do the same things, and that usually means we will choose something so banal as to interest nobody in particular. It will be the artistic equivalent of a doctored ball-yard game that boys and girls will play equally well, because it will be equally dull to both.

However, Esolen believes that one of the most imagination-killing consequences of all our coed practices is that it makes true friendships, brotherhoods & sisterhoods, very difficult to develop:

If it is objected that herding the sexes together will not entirely obliterate the opportunities for friendship, I agree. It won’t, by itself. It will, though, severely hinder those friendships, both in their number and their kind. [...] For whenever boys and girls are together, the thing most prominent in their minds will not be [on the subject or task at hand], but on who is eying whom, who is attending whose party, and so forth — it will be those things that males and females do together, rather than those things they can more easily do apart.

Distinctions

Through examples, Esolen seems to pull out these primary distinctions between men and women:

• Men tend to focus outward, while women focus inward.
• Men love action, and women’s admiration and goading motivates them.
• Women are drawn to beauty and service.
• Boys need to be initiated not into adulthood, but into manhood — initiation is generally through deeds of strength and bravery, which earn him an equal standing with the men.
• Girls need to be initiated not into adulthood, but into womanhood — initiation has traditionally been through learning skills and collecting objects for the beautification of her own home.
• Men work hard, taming a land. Women work hard, taming a home and a people.
• Women create “place.”
• Men build; women beautify.

My Rant

Esolen is understandably deficient when it comes to the essence of girls and women. Unfortunately, it seems that in a backlash against modern women-as-men feminism, the “conservative” option is too saccharine and cringing. Lace, puffed sleeves, and bonnets are offered. Vision Forum’s toy section offers boys all sorts of tools and gadgets, and promotes tea sets, aprons, and dress-up for girls. The little sisters are pictured hiding and scared behind their brave, wonderful big brothers. But we should not make our men stronger by weakening our women. I want a Jael, not a scaredy cat. I want a Miriam or a Deborah or an Anna or a Rahab or a Ruth or an Esther or a Mary or an Abigail — not an Elsie Dinsmore. Wisdom in the Proverbs is a lady. The word ‘helper’ used for Eve’s role is the same word used to describe the Holy Spirit. There must be more strength and dignity due to women than either a man’s strength and dignity (which the world wants women to co-opt) or the faux honor of being kept purposefully weak, ignorant, sappy, and barefoot-in-the-kitchen.

Ma Ingalls and Mrs. Wilder are good examples of domestic strength and glory — they are a partner alongside their husbands and they fulfill a dominion-taking role. Galadriel is the epitome of strength and glory in beauty-wielding. After Eowyn’s rebellion in seeking a man’s glory (driven to that mad envy by the lies of Wormtongue), she repents and dons the glory that is hers: “I shall be a healer, and love all things that grow and are not barren.” Only then is she able to be a suitable helpmeet for Faramir. In Narnia, Lucy and Susan do not lead the army in battle, but neither do they cringe and shake and hide. They fight from afar and they heal.

When I had a daughter 3 years ago, I had a small crises. I realized that I had invested a lot of energy into reading about and thinking about raising boys. Now I have a girl. We talk a lot about how modern society is against boys, but really it is just as against true girls as well. I only got into the issue of “womanhood” enough to be satisfied that there was depth there as well, that women were not made simply to prop up men and take care of their laundry and meals so they can do all the important stuff. My husband has said that he believes it is my work that is the important work, and he is the one working to enable it.

Much groundwork has been done and is being done so that we can raise our boys into true men. That is good and necessary. But do girls simply become women without all that effort and purpose? Is “womanhood” reducible to being able to clean and cook? Is keeping them home all we have to do?