I, no doubt like you, couldn’t wait to see the photographs of Brad and Angelina’s baby in Hello magazine, if only to see what special qualities this child might have which make a picture of her worth 4 million dollars. When they were eventually released, the expectant public was relieved to find that little Shiloh has inherited her mother’s rather full lips, so it is unlikely that there was a mix-up in the maternity room. I haven’t bought my copy of the magazine yet (!), but I did see the pictures on television, and I was struck by a rather beautiful shot of Brad holding his daughter at arm’s length and gazing lovingly at her. This was an iconic photograph of Brad Pitt as a ‘new man’, the handsome but gentle hunk, the fearless macho sex-symbol who is also nurturing care-giver.
The picture is iconic because it presents an image of fatherhood which is very much of our time. It is genuinely a modern concept. When I was growing up, in the middle of the 20th century, men did not attend the birth of their children; they sat in the pub, or paced the hospital corridors smoking cigarettes. And men would never be seen pushing a pram; this was woman’s work. Nor was there such a thing as ‘quality time’ with one’s father. Your father was a somewhat remote figure whose role was outside, and who appeared from time to time to disrupt the cosy little relationship you had with your mother. Billy Connolly tells a story which sums this up rather well. In the Glasgow street where Billy grew up, big families were the norm, but care-giving was almost entirely a job for the female. One man, the father of twelve children, was given an ultimatum by his exasperated wife: ‘Either your put the children to bed tonight before you go to the pub, or I’m leaving.’ At seven o’clock, the man dashed out into the street, gathered up the first dozen children he could find, washed their faces with a flannel, and put them all in bed. Billy and his sister were among them. This man, it seems, had so little contact with his children that he couldn’t distinguish his own from anybody else’s. Kids were kids, the natural if unfortunate outcome of sexual activity. Whether or not they had their mother’s lips was not something that concerned him over much.
As the twentieth century wore on, the ‘new man’ was born. It is difficult to say precisely when this occurred. He was embryonic in the late sixties, and came to full term sometime in the seventies. Women started to say, ‘We are pregnant’; men began to attend ante-natal classes, and to hold their wife’s hand as she gave birth; men would even learn to change nappies – almost unheard of in my childhood. This was called ‘learning to show one’s feminine side’, and it extended beyond childcare. Men were now permitted – and eventually expected – to display emotion publicly, and tears, which Shakespeare had called ‘these unmanly drops’ were now no longer a cause for shame.
While this is undoubtedly a very real phenomenon, it is by no means a universal one. Women are still the primary care givers. According to a recent survey, men spend four times as much time with their children now than they did fifty years ago, but it is still only 48 minutes per day (Guardian, 10/6/06), and one suspects that this may owe as much to changes in work, leisure, and education patterns as it does to a genuine transformation of male attitudes.
Nor must we assume that men getting showered every day, donning an apron to cook on the barbecue, or wearing moisturiser, has actually reduced the aggressive, macho character of society. If anything, the last fifty years has seen an increase in it, for the simple reason that feminism has opened the door for women to participate, too. This is not meant as an attack on feminism, which has brought obvious benefits, but it has done so at a cost. Equality with men has come to mean operating as men have traditionally operated. So, for example, we see young women participating in the drinking culture which was originally an all-male preserve; now women have the same opportunity to ruin their liver as men, in fact they have more of an opportunity, because the female body cannot tolerate alcohol as well as a man’s can. ‘Ladette’ culture – women drinking, smoking, swearing, and behaving as sexual predators – is not feminism: it is masculinism. It is a tacit but mistaken assumption that the way of the male is superior and more desirable, and copying it. The ubiquitous, all-purpose insult of our time – used by young women as well as young men, is ‘loser’. Everybody competes now; co-operation is for wimps – another all-purpose term of abuse. When Homer and Marj Simpson go to the races, Homer asks Marj which horse she wants to win. ‘Why can’t we just hope that the horses and jockeys have a good time,’ replies Marj. Now there’s an intriguing counterbalancing attitude, but it’s old fashioned.
It’s not just old fashioned among the young. We witness the same phenomenon among other age groups. Women who are deemed to be successful often achieve that success because they demonstrate more aggression than their male counterparts. Mrs Thatcher is the obvious example. Whatever one thinks of her politics – and I deplore them – there can be no doubt that she played the men at their own game and won hands down. She epitomised what for obvious reasons has come to be called the ‘ballsy’ woman, but the very expression shows that the concept is the exact opposite of feminism. Some women have simply embraced masculine values wholesale.
At the General Assembly meetings of the denomination in April this year, a woman made a passionate plea for more childcare provision in society. She received thunderous applause. And she’s right; there should be sharing of childcare at all levels and by all people, male and female. But what this plea means currently is, ‘I want some woman with less power and money than I have to look after my children for eight hours per day’. Is shunting the responsibility on to another woman feminism? Isn’t this what men do? Isn’t it masculinism? Similarly with housecleaning. Getting another woman to do it for you while you get on with something more lucrative and more rewarding is the male way.
Let me add a word of explanation here for those of you who don’t know me or my situation well, and before you clamour for me to be drummed out as a reactionary. My wife Morag has worked since she was sixteen – she retired yesterday in fact, after thirty-nine years in the work-force. For three years she worked in America and I kept house – I didn’t have a work-permit. When I am here in Dublin on my own – and that has been most of the time over the past ten years – I cook, clean, wash, iron, and shop for myself. I have steadfastly refused to employ a cleaner to do these jobs for me. I do not speak as a chauvinist. My mother took a job in a liquorice factory when I was sixteen; not to pay the bills – although she did appreciate the financial independence it brought her – but simply to get out of the house, to have some workplace camaraderie. When she had to retire at sixty, she did so very reluctantly. Those ten years were among the happiest years of her life. So, I am fully committed to women working, and I do not believe in a clear demarcation of roles on gender lines.
In fact, there is no clear demarcation. Male and female have separate reproductive roles, but the other gender attributes are distributed on a spectrum. In addition, Carl Jung, in the middle of the twentieth century said that, ‘Every man carries within him the eternal image of a woman, not the image of this or that woman, but a definite feminine image’. Jung called this image the anima. ‘Woman is compensated by a masculine element and therefore her unconscious, too, has, so to speak, a masculine imprint’. Jung called this the animus. What we do with this image differs with the individual. The more unconscious we are of it, though, the more we will tend to project it outwards, and seek it in a member of the opposite sex. Falling in love, according to Jung, is the feeling that one has encountered one’s anima or animus in another human being. If we don’t project it, we may suppress it, ignore it, deny it, but like all these powerful aspects of the psyche, if it is not acknowledged and integrated it will inevitably prove troublesome.
Along with other strands of Jung’s thinking, this particular notion has its roots in very ancient concepts. In the Tao Te Ching, some of which we heard earlier, and which precedes the Christian scriptures by at least five hundred years, we read about the eternal interplay between the opposites, yin and yang. Yin refers to the characteristics of softness, passivity, femininity, darkness, the valley, the moon, the negative polarity; yang refers to characteristics such as hardness, masculinity, brightness, the mountain, the sun, the positive polarity. All reality is based upon these two opposing forces, say the Taoists. Neither is superior; both are necessary, and each contains the seed of the other. The Taoist attempts to see these forces at work in the world and in himself, and to act in harmony with them, uniting the opposite forces within himself.
At about the same time that Lao Tzu was compiling the Tao Te Ching in China, Plato was writing in Greece. In his Symposium, he makes reference to a myth that was probably very ancient even then, that at one time male and female were joined together, and the human being had four legs not two, but because in that state they were considered to present a threat to the gods, Zeus cut them in two, and now the separated halves are doomed to spend their time seeking each other. There was also a warning that, if the two legged creatures misbehave, Zeus would cut them again! At the heart of this myth lies the notion that male and female constitute a unity, a unity that has been lost, but which can and must be re-established within the individual.
We find the same idea within Christian mysticism. We have tended to see marriage as the union of a man with a woman in mutually rewarding partnership with, traditionally, a clear demarcation of duties and responsibilities. This indeed is so, and has its place, but there is another dimension to this teaching which we find in the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas:
When you make the two one, and when you make the outside like the inside, and the above like the below, and when you make the male and the female one and the same so that the male be not male nor the female female, then you will enter the kingdom.
The ‘sacred marriage’ is not the public jamboree, complete with white dress, bridesmaids, posh food and an exotic honeymoon. The sacred marriage occurs when the spiritually mature individual is able to balance male and female, yang and yin, activity and passivity, spirit and matter, science and mystery, striving and yielding, adventure and repose, and a whole host of other complementary forces, within him or her self. This is not something that happens overnight. It is a life-long process – some would say that it takes many lifetimes – but the conscious pursuit of it is an important and necessary part of the spiritual life, and should be reflected in all aspects of our experience, including the experience of worship, which should epitomise the quest and so should contain both yang and yin elements – wordy, explanatory yang stuff, like this sermon, and contemplative, imaginative yin stuff, like meditation.
The reward – personally and socially – for finding the balance is immense. As Plato’s myth intimates, when the male and female principles are joined in harmony within an individual, she attains a state in which she could almost challenge the gods.
Bill Darlison
Dublin Unitarian Church 11th June 2006