Man symbolizes heaven and woman symbolizes earth. Man and woman are to come together and realize harmony. —Sun Myung Moon
This tendency of masculinity and femininity to find and balance each other is an expression of complementarity—a principle running throughout all existence. Indeed, the harmony and vibrant tension of these polarities fills the universe with energy, structure, life, beauty and joy. Frosty mountain peaks overlook green, verdant valleys. The peacock carries around his heavy tail feathers to make the colorful display that will attract a peahen, who will in turn bear his young. An electron weighs less than a thousandth of a proton, yet they precisely balance to comprise an atom.
Implications of the Reproductive Organs
But perhaps the design most revealing—in a metaphoric way—about masculinity and femininity are the reproductive organs themselves.
The female organ receives the male organ, so masculinity is active and initiating while femininity is receptive and responsive. The male organ angles upward and away from the body when erect. It is often aroused by inspiration solely within the mind. This is symbolic of the masculine propensity towards “heaven,” the world of ideals and vision. In contrast, the female organ is like “earth” in that it opens deep into the body and is subject to monthly cycles.
This represents the feminine concern for immediate, practical matters. The internal structure of the female organs represents the feminine tendency to emphasize the world of feelings and human relations and to solve problems by changing something within herself.
In contrast, the outward thrust of the male organ symbolizes the natural inclination of masculinity to focus on manipulating things in the outer world. In communication, masculinity tends to be direct and assertive, as the male genitals symbolize, while femininity is apt to be more indirect and round-about, like the female organs.
In contrast, the outward thrust of the male organ symbolizes the natural inclination of masculinity to focus on manipulating things in the outer world. In communication, masculinity tends to be direct and assertive, as the male genitals symbolize, while femininity is apt to be more indirect and round-about, like the female organs.
Apart from physical design, observation of the tendencies of men and women suggest other distinctions between masculinity and femininity. Femininity is concerned with context; masculinity is focused on content. Masculinity emphasizes rules and standards; femininity is mindful of individual differences.
Femininity is egalitarian and cooperative; masculinity is hierarchical and competitive.
Femininity is egalitarian and cooperative; masculinity is hierarchical and competitive.
It must be said in the end that differences notwithstanding, men and women are far more similar than not, of course. Both genders have personality, the fruit of the interaction of mind and body. Both are spiritual and material beings. Both have heart and conscience. What masculinity and femininity do is to impart a certain slant to these universal human components, creating only a difference of style and emphasis.
The diverse characteristics of masculinity and femininity can be reduced to certain strengths or virtues. These are reflected in the qualities that are universally prized in men and women. In all the various family roles of men—son, brother, husband, father— and their social counterparts, among the key virtues celebrated are strength, leadership, courage, justice, discipline, self-sufficiency and providing. In their roles as daughter, sister, wife, mother and the like, there are also certain qualities that are celebrated in women.
These include beauty, support, surrender, mercy, modesty, nurturance, and resourcefulness. The Bible provides a succinct description of the virtuous woman when St. Paul says, “train the young women to love their husbands and children, to be sensible, chaste, domestic, kind, and submissive to their husbands, that the word of God may not be discredited” (Titus 2.4-5). These various virtues are complementary to one another, paired in subject and object partnership.
One stimulates or inspires the other and either can be much more difficult to generate or maintain without the other. Frequently the virtues are masculine and feminine dimensions of the same quality. In any case, the masculine dimension tends to be intrapersonal, that is, related to vertical mind and body unity.
For example, chastity in men traditionally is a testament to self-control, for the purpose of being single-minded, able to serve God or otherwise realize a worthy purpose. In contrast, feminine virtue is more often than not an interpersonal quality, related to horizontal, person-to-person unity. Chastity for women has more connotations of fidelity, keeping love undivided for the sake of its fulfillment.
Complementary Virtues
Masculine Feminine
Strength Beauty
Leadership Support
Courage Surrender
Justice Mercy
Discipline Modesty
Self-Sufficiency Nurturance
Strength and beauty
Strength encompasses physical power, stamina and the ability to endure physical and emotional pain to provide for and protect others. It means keeping one’s own counsel when necessary and eschewing easy comfort.
Strength is “beauty” in a man, as reflected in a recent song defining manhood as being as “swift as the coursing river, with all the force of a great typhoon, with all the strength of a raging fire, mysterious as the dark side of the moon.”
In the same way, what we call beauty—being a source of pleasure and inspiration—is an important feminine “strength.” Beauty encompasses grace and graciousness, creating comfort and harmony. A woman’s beauty stimulates love in her husband even as it cheers and encourages her children. Beauty also involves creating splendor around oneself, drawing out the attractiveness of other people and things and harmonizing them.
Both of these virtues are often distorted in the world, interpreted in exaggerated, external terms that become oppressive. The truth of Francis Bacon’s words, “The best part of beauty is that which no picture can express,” is readily forgotten. Women are prone to obsessively focus on their appearance. Likewise, men are likely to forget that real strength is a character quality, as the saying goes:
“The strength of a man isn’t in the weight he can lift. It’s in the burdens he can carry.”
In their true meaning, strength and beauty encapsulate all the good qualities that distinguish masculinity and femininity. That is, all masculine virtues are regarded as enhancing a man’s strength while the feminine virtues are seen as making a woman more beautiful.
Leadership and support
Leadership involves taking command of a situation, being assertive and taking initiative to get something done. Leadership demands sacrificing oneself to protect and provide for others. It means making decisions in spite of uncertainty and others’ disapproval. It sometimes requires taking a stand that disturbs the peace.
Support, on the other hand, is the ability to facilitate leadership, to respond to what is required, fill in what the leader lacks and influence the situation indirectly. Just as leadership is a kind of support, giving support often involves taking leadership, rallying others and harmonizing them with the leader’s purpose and direction.
The male capacity to zero in on the root of a problem and detach from feelings to make more impartial decisions suits many men to be like the CEO and public affairs director of their families, accountable for their direction, protection and overall function.
At the same time, the female sensitivity to relationships and capacity for detail makes most women the ideal person in charge of day-today family matters and connections to the neighborhood—the director of personnel and head of public relations, the one to oversee the health and happiness of the home.
Courage and surrender are counterparts to one another. Courage is acting despite fear, which means to surrender to what needs to be done regardless of risk. Its close cousin is heroism. A prerequisite to courage is confidence, the trust in oneself and in one’s God-given strengths.
Conversely, surrender is the willingness to trust in others and in life, to be vulnerable and yield oneself to a person or situation. This also demands considerable courage to put one’s fate in the hands of someone or something that is as yet unproven. Women are called to surrender in countless ways, just as men need to be courageous to exhibit leadership and other qualities.
Conversely, surrender is the willingness to trust in others and in life, to be vulnerable and yield oneself to a person or situation. This also demands considerable courage to put one’s fate in the hands of someone or something that is as yet unproven. Women are called to surrender in countless ways, just as men need to be courageous to exhibit leadership and other qualities.
Justice and Mercy
Justice is promoting fairness through establishing and enforcing standards, rules and boundaries. It involves making distinctions, passing judgment and discerning right from wrong. Justice is to be impartial, “blind.” Mercy, on the other hand, bends rules and permits special consideration for individual cases.
It softens the dictates of justice to allow for the complexities of the heart. Of course both are vital and depend upon one another for balance: “And what does the Lord require of you,” says the prophet Micah, “but to do justice, and to love mercy and to walk humbly with your God”.
These virtues represent restraints upon both strength and beauty, respectively. Discipline involves self-control and moderating one’s passions. It also includes the humility to submit to a superior’s correction and direction. Both are essential if a man would exercise authority over others. St. Paul bids older men to “be temperate, serious, sensible” and younger men to “control themselves” (Titus 2.2, 6). Modesty is the feminine form of self-restraint. It is reserving one’s beauty and sexuality for one’s spouse alone, guarding what God has entrusted. Both are encompassed in chastity, as mentioned above.
Self-sufficiency and Nurturance
Self-sufficiency is the ability to handle one’s own needs and solve one’s own problems so as to be available to be of service. This is related to independence; men are expected to be strong in themselves so others can depend upon them. The complementary virtue of nurturance means to actively attend to that which is young and undeveloped, believing in its potential and patiently awaiting its full unfolding. It includes relieving distress and providing comfort.
Patience and gentleness make this possible. Nurturance also connotes an acceptance of a measure of dependence; generally women are more willing to admit their needs and be cared for.
Providing and Resourcefulness
These virtues relate to dealing with things. Providing refers to the masculine trait of acquiring what is needed for the people causes ones loves.
“The best of men are those who are useful to others,” reads a hadithm, The traditional requirement for a boy of the indigenous peoples of the arctic North was to slay a seal as a feast for his community, representing this male virtue. Resourcefulness on the other hand involves carefulness in dealing with what has been entrusted, shrewdly conserving resources to meet the needs of those under one’s care.
Traditional recipes and quilts are but two examples of the ingenuity of women to make utility and beauty out of limited resources.
Men and Women Combine Both Principles
Masculinity and femininity as principles or archetypes are one thing; real men and women are another. It must be remembered that all people have both masculine and feminine sides to them. This common base allows women to understand men and vice versa. Real people are a blend of masculine and feminine traits—the virtues just described are celebrated in individuals of either sex.
Men may have their feminine side quite developed, just as women may have ready access to their masculine traits. The roles that individuals play will demand sometimes more masculine traits and sometimes more feminine ones. For example, a male kindergarten teacher will require qualities that may come more naturally to most women, while a policewoman will need to draw upon dispositions that probably are easier for most men to access.
Yet at the same time, the greater masculinity within men means that they have certain natural strengths as well as limitations that suit them for certain tasks, just as the greater femininity of women gives them certain advantages and disadvantages. Either gender can take on just about any role, but the fit may not be as perfect.
Author Patsy Rae Dawson offers an analogy:
A six-inch brush is better for painting large surfaces and a two-inch brush is ideal for trim. Either can be used for either task, but it may take more effort to do so, such as painting trim with the larger brush.
So it is with the sexes. Either can fill in for each other’s duties but it may take more exertion to do so.
So it is with the sexes. Either can fill in for each other’s duties but it may take more exertion to do so.
Men and Women Need Each Other
Thus for every male or female gift, we can understand there is also a corresponding weakness or shadow. The male penchant for achievement sometimes leads to neglect of relationships; the female
sensitivity to feelings can spell difficulty in overlooking negative experiences. Thus, boys and girls, men and women need each other’s companionship and support. One side of this is humorously expressed by Rogers and Hammerstein in the musical “South Pacific”:
“There isn’t one thing wrong with any man here that wouldn’t be cured by putting him near a real live, womanly, female, feminine dame!”
The needs—or “weaknesses”—of a man only serve to draw out and accentuate the strengths of a woman, just as a husband’s unique assets are revealed and highlighted by the needs of his wife. By investing their strengths into each other as a team, the sexes create a powerful and beautiful whole greater than the sum of its parts.
This is symbolized in mythology by androgynous figures that combine masculinity and femininity and as a result have extraordinary abilities, like the blind Tiresias in Greek mythology who can foresee the future.
Submit to One Another
This is why the marriage partnership, though tradition speaks of well-defined roles, comes down to the interplay of the husband and wife augmenting each other’s strengths and compensating for one another’s weaknesses.
The spouses’ horizontal subject and object partnership means that though there is a certain stable nature to their positions, there is also dynamic movement in which roles stretch and switch according to shifting conditions. A husband’s masculine way of living for the sake of his spouse will naturally define his role and likewise with the wife’s feminine way of serving.
"In true love, both spouses must be obedient to each other and be willing to be united with each other. We may say, “Why do I have to obey my husband or wife? I want to be free.” But in true love, obedience, loyalty, surrender— everything is possible, and you are not humiliated by it.
"You want to be controlled by your love. In true love then, there is a heavenly dictatorship of one to the other, and you want to live that way throughout eternity."
The New Testament asserts both spouses are to “Submit to one another” out of respect for God (Ephesians 5.21). The husband submits to his conscience and the needs of his family as a true servant leader, especially to respect and care for his wife. The wife surrenders to the needs of her husband and family.
The man’s heartfelt care for his partner will tend to elicit the response he desires, just as the woman’s wholehearted support will tend to elicit the qualities she wants from her mate. Thus there is the call for each husband to “love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband” (Ephesians 5.33).
The man’s heartfelt care for his partner will tend to elicit the response he desires, just as the woman’s wholehearted support will tend to elicit the qualities she wants from her mate. Thus there is the call for each husband to “love his wife as he loves himself, and the wife must respect her husband” (Ephesians 5.33).
Web designer Peter Brown says of he and his wife Kim, “We just tell ourselves that, ‘True love is the boss.’ Although it sounds simple, it has a very real impact in our lives ...
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Photos Courtesy of: freedigitalphotos.net
Today's text taken from Textbook: Educating for True Love, Explaining Rev. Moon's Thought on Morality, Family, and Society.
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