Delusions of gender -virtues, vices and Christian men

In her book  Delusions of Gender, Cordelia Fine took me back to something I had thought about a number of years back but had put aside. But seeing what she draws attention to about the way that our culture construes characteristics in some or many cases as being most appropriate to one or other gender, I have started to think that it is worth pursuing more wholeheartedly. Citing various research projects on gender and social/cultural perception, we read:

One gender was most commonly described as, among other adjectives, beautiful, frightened, worthy, sweet, weak and scared in the stories; the other gender as big, horrible, fierce, great, terrible, furious, brave and proud

And in another place:

 Social psychologists Laurie Rudman and Peter Glick pithily characterise the content of gender stereotypes as ‘bad but bold’ (with males being tough, competitive and assertive) versus ‘wonderful but weak’ (with females stereotyped as being gentle, kind and soft)

 These quotes draw our attention to characteristics of humans in society which relate to personality, character and how we value them as relating to virtue and vice.

My question arose first in the mid 1980's as a member of the peace movement and noting that the Greenham Common P.eace Camp -a women's protest- were articulating a lot of peace values as particularly 'feminine'. Now I don't think they were laying exclusive feminine claim to such virtuous habits as conciliation. I think they were saying that a set of helpful ways of thinking and behaving in the face of global militarisation and the threat of global annhilation tended, in our culture, to be associated with women and so women's concerns were/are vital to create social and political peace.

That alerted me to the way that many of the characteristics of peacemakers which were being identified as having particular resonance for women in wester contexts are also actually either Christian virtues or related strongly to them. Conversely, vices and related characteristics might often be things that are ostensibly valorised as 'masculine'.

What does that mean in relation to Christian values? Well, take Galatians 5:22-23. "the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, ²³ gentleness, and self-control." Impressionistically and using my own intuitions about connotations relating to masculinity and femininity in our society, I would associate those words with masculinity and femininity in the following way.

Those having fairly strong associations with western cultural constructions of femininity: love, peace, faithfulness, gentleness.
Those being fairly strongly on the masculine side in western cultural lore: generosity, self-control.
Those that could go either way: joy, patience, kindness.

Now, I recognise some possibility for contesting my division and I would welcome further conversation or even pointers to any research to throw light on the matter.
I would add a few further notes. 'Faithfulness' I've put with 'feminine' virtues mainly because I have a sense that in terms of romantic relationships, it is still somehow more 'expected' that infidelity would be the male's fault than the female, I judge. That said, I think that there is another strand of masculine culture where 'family guy' fidelity is important.

When we turn to Jesus' teaching, the matter becomes starker, I believe, particularly if we home in on the so-called 'Sermon on the Mount'.
It seems to me that the values Jesus articulates tend not to play as 'masculine' in our culture: turning the other cheek, meekness, even peace-making can very often be presented as "women's ways" whereas men assert, subdue, battle. Men who give ground for the sake of the common good, avoid battles or who don't retaliate ("let them get away with it") are easily portrayed and often taunted with being somehow less than fully 'men'. Phrases like 'man up', 'are you man enough?' and so forth tend to equate manliness (maleness) with being hard, being insensitive to the hurts (ones own or inflicted on others) or denying ones own empathetic responses.

So, we have a difficulty which may be related to the current gender imbalance in many of our churches where roughly 33% are male rather than something like 50%. The difficulty is that many Christian virtues are easy to frame as not being 'manly' or as being 'lady-like' rather than 'masculine'. It's probably a (major?) contributory factor to the gender imbalance. It may be why church men's groups seem to try too hard to do robust 'masculine' in the 'Tool Time' vein.

But if I'm right, then part of dealing with our lack of traction with our culture's men is not to encourage knuckle-dragging  among our menfolk but rather more to be challenging the cultural stereotypes around gender and as part of that finding ways to story the virtues of meekness, gentleness, turning the other cheek as credibly male, somehow: narratives showing men exercising such virtues in ways that are attractive, 'heroic' and not 'cowardly'. 

Challenging the stereotypes means making some common cause with feminism rather than denigrating it. And doing so allows the many men who in various ways don't fit or desire the masculine stereotypes to find that they can indeed express their own individuality and be free from the stultifying and narrow confines of 'manliness' to be real human beings.

Baptism Liturgy -changes for CofE

Certain usual suspects in the British press have made uninformed and inaccurate comments about a trial of a baptism liturgy. They did so in conformity with their mission to leave their readers more angry, more scared or both. In this case by painting the changes as trendy disposal of hallowed tradition. They also made out that it was at the personal initiative of the current Archbishop of Canterbury when in fact it was a response to a motion at General Synod before the current ABofC was appointed.

Statement on proposal to Synod on baptism service wording: A Church of England spokesman said:
"The report in the Mail on Sunday (Jan 5) is misleading in a number of respects. The story claims that "the baptism ceremony had not been altered for more than 400 years until it was changed in 1980". This is the third revision in 30 years.

 If you follow one of the links  (to a pdf) you'll be able to read the liturgy in parallel with the current 30 year-old provision (which, frankly, does need looking at).

Here's the current introductory paragraph:
Here's some salient bits.
Faith is the gift of God to his people.
In baptism the Lord is adding to our number who have come to be baptized.
those whom he is calling.
People of God, will you welcome these
children/candidates
and uphold them in their new life in Christ?
All With the help of God, we will.

And its proposed replacement:
Today we thank God for these children/candidates
Christ welcomes them into his Church.
Will you promise to support them
as they begin their journey of faith?
   All We will.

The charge to the parents is currently thus:
Parents and godparents, the Church receives these
children with joy.
Today we are trusting God for their growth in faith.
Will you pray for them,
draw them by your example into the community of
faith
and walk with them in the way of Christ?
With the help of God, we will.

In baptism these children begin their journey in faith.
You speak for them today.
Will you care for them,
and help them to take their place
within the life and worship of Christ‟s Church?
With the help of God, we will.


The proposed alternative:
Parents and godparents,
you have brought these children to baptism
and speak for them today.
As we trust God for their growth in faith,
will you promise to care for them,
pray for them,
and help them to follow Christ?
We will.

I think I prefer the brevity and directness of the newer 'charge'.

Now to the decision bit:

In baptism, God calls us out of darkness into his marvellous light. To follow Christ means dying to sin and rising to new
life with him. Therefore I ask:
Do you reject the devil and all rebellion against God?
I reject them.
Do you renounce the deceit and corruption of evil?
I renounce them.
Do you repent of the sins that separate us from God
and neighbour?
I repent of them.
In baptism God calls us to new life. We die with Christ to all that destroys, and rise to live with him for ever. Therefore I ask: Do you reject evil? I reject evil. And all its many forms? And all its many forms. And all its empty promises? And all its empty promises.

Do you turn to Christ as Saviour?
I turn to Christ.
Do you submit to Christ as Lord?
I submit to Christ.
Do you come to Christ, the way, the truth and the life?
I come to Christ.

And the newer version:

The candidates, together with their parents,  godparents and sponsors, may now turn to face the font, a cross, or the large candle.
Do you turn to Christ?
I turn to Christ.
And put your trust in him?
And put my trust in him.
And promise to follow him for ever?
And promise to follow him for ever

(I think I'd recommend that the response have the word 'I' in them -perhaps instead of all those 'and's)

And the signing with the sign of the cross:

Do not be ashamed to confess the faith of Christ crucified.
All Fight valiantly as a disciple of Christ
against sin, the world and the devil, 
and remain faithful to Christ to the end of your life.

Do not be ashamed of Christ. You are his for ever.
All Stand bravely with him.
Oppose the power of evil,
and remain his faithful disciple to the
end of your life.

Then the prayer of the water  and there are a handful of shorter alternatives in the proposed revision -which I welcome since the older version was deadly. For the profession of faith, the proposal is to use the shorter responses from Common worship Initiation Services p.178, which is great as these are more succinct than the broken up Apostles' Creed currently used and something of a return to the ASB approach.

Altogether the revision-proposals tend to shorten the service which I feel is good since the current service is overly wordy and ponderous. I also feel that the content is good. It still makes clear what it is to be a baptised disciple of Christ, it still makes clear that parents are to help children become Christ-followers. I like the simplicity of the language and I like the way the responses echo the questions which makes them easier to process. I'd found the medievalism of the current questions a bit embarrassing -not because I don't 'believe' but because I know the service gets used with people who tend not to be so au fait with the more theologically 'commited' language and in terms of helping them to understand and appropriate the responses the revised set seem to hold more pastoral potential, in my view.

So, overall, I'd have to say I like the look of the new stuff and I hope it broadly becomes commended and comes into use. For a pretty good comment explaining the background and offsetting the Mail's rabble-rousing, go here. A quote from which says nicely what I've alluded to above when I mention medievalism:

On paper, saying ‘I reject evil… in all its many forms.. and all its empty promises’ did indeed look as if it was going to be colourlessly vague and managerial. But said out loud by the parents and godparents, it had surprising weight and gravity, a surprising Augustinian sobriety about it, pointing to evil as a familiar and participatory thing that humans do, rather than to a remote abstraction; to someone else’s problem. It seemed, in fact, to name the darkness more successfully than talking about the devil or about sin would have done, given that both those names now carry an obscuring freight of associations from pop culture, almost all of which point away from what the church wants us to notice about ourselves.

Delusions of Gender

This is very helpful book. Cordelia Fine has made a clear riposte to ... well a quote will give an idea: "from the seeds of scientific speculation grow the monstrous fictions of popular writers" and in particular, as the title would hint, she's exposing the delusions of popular 'scientific' books on gender and neuroscience particularly using fMRI brain research. These books of the 'Men are from Mars, women are from Venus' ilk. Basically the book argues that the big hole in interpreting the brain-scan evidence and similar gender-related neuroscientific research is that so many of the popular gender-deluded popularisations fail to properly address the big issue: which came first? -the chicken of gender-related biological brain formation or the egg of gender-related culture which in turn forms the brain in gender-distinct ways. Fine makes the case for treating the latter hypothesis far more seriously. ("the critical idea that the psyche is ‘not a discrete entity packed in the brain. Rather, it is a structure of psychological processes that are shaped by and thus closely attuned to the culture that surrounds them")

The important thing to note, looking at research relating to brains and gender (either together or apart) is that one of the more assured results is that brains are 'plastic' that is they continue to change and to 're-wire' through our lives, so this gives a big question mark to the idea of biological determinism where the brain is concerned. The other thing that our attention is brought to (quite extensively) is research which shows how extensive is our ability to unconsciously take in and internalise clues and cues from our social environment and then have them informing attitudes and behaviours without us being really aware of where they've come from (so they 'feel' natural, somehow). Relatedly, much research shows how early the learning machines known as infants and young children take such things in.

She also shows how gender-marked is much of our daily life and language which would add to the unconscious incentive for young children to master the identity and social interactive behaviours that depend on gender. in other words, it is very likely that culture forms brains in regard to gender far more thoroughly and extensively than we are usually aware.

One of the other things this book does is to show how much of the popular gender-difference brain science is actually badly informed and/or running way ahead of the actual evidence which (when looked at more closely) is far less supportive of the men/women: Mars/Venus approach ("There’s something a little shocking about the discrepancy between the weakness of the scientific data on the one hand and the strength of the popular claims on the other"). And, where there are physiological differences between male and female brains, there is considerable overlap between the genders, meaning lots of men and women are actually pretty indistinguishable brainwise with only extreme outliers being clearly differentiated. Furthermore even where there are these statistical probabilities relating to (eg) brain size, the hypothesised effects of such differences as well as being inapplicable to very high proportions of the human population of both genders (because they are not 'outliers'), the effects of neuroplasticity seem well able to 'compensate' for whatever physical effects this might plausibly have -and that there is some evidence to suggest just such a thing happens.

The book goes through the most salient evidences in reasonable but not mind-numbing detail and is written with a lightness of touch and bigger-picture scope to keep a non-specialist engaged but with sufficient referencing to allow return to sources of research and primary interpretation.

I found it challenging to be shown just how much psychological priming and social framing goes on which feeds in to individuals unconsciously giving us quite extensive gender-scripting which we are barely aware of and which communicates to children in a myriad of subtle ways. None of the little primings are much in themselves, but so pervasive are they that every day they weave a tapestry of inference which builds a picture of difference which is based overwhelmingly on cultural attitudes rather than actual biology or innate psychology.

One of the other things that comes out of this book, though not a main strand, is also a bit of history about gender difference in western culture. This has the effect of supporting the main thesis by showing just how contingent some of the 'givens' about gender difference really are and just how viciously circular popular 'scientific' rationalisations about gender roles and biology and psychology have been and, by implication, are. For example: "Dresses for boys older than two years old began to fall out of favour towards the end of the nineteenth century. This was not mere whim, but seemed to be in response to concerns that masculinity and femininity might not, after all, inevitably unfurl from deep biological roots. At the same time that girls were being extended more parental licence to be physically active, child psychologists were warning that ‘gender distinctions could be taught and must be’. Some pants, please, for the boys. After the turn of the century, psychologists became more aware of just how sensitive even infants are to their environments. As a result, ‘[t] he same forces that had altered the clothing styles of preschoolers – anxiety about shifting gender roles and the emerging belief that gender could be taught – also transformed infantswear."

In short, a must-read book for anyone concerned with debates on gender where science, particularly neuroscience, is being called to the bar.

I also found some interesting passages that raise a missional issue for Christians in relation to gender, but I'll pick those up in another post, hopefully in the next day or two.

Some quotes with notes ...
talking about the pervasiveness of unconscious cues for attitudes: "Unlike explicitly held knowledge, where you can be reflective and picky about what you believe, associative memory seems to be fairly indiscriminate in what it takes on board. Most likely, it picks up and responds to cultural patterns in society, media and advertising, which may well be reinforcing implicit associations you don’t consciously endorse"
I found this interesting as it chimes with semiotics and connotative meanings.

On the same theme but relating it to our 'social outputs': "people socially ‘tune’ their self-evaluations to blend with the opinion of the self held by others. With a particular person in mind, or in anticipation of interacting with them, self-conception adjusts to create a shared reality"
And, of course, this is important to gender-based attitudes and behaviours: "we find that what is being chalked up to hardwiring on closer inspection starts to look more like the sensitive tuning of the self to the expectations lurking..."

And a lot of differences that we think we see between the sexes may actually be about attention and perception (including self-perception, upon which a lot of studies rely): "no gender difference was found for studies using unobtrusive physiological or facial/gestural measures as an index of empathy.) In other words, women and men may differ not so much in actual empathy but in ‘how empathetic they would like to appear to others (and, perhaps, to themselves)"

There've been quite a lot of studies into priming and the way this affects reported attitudes and behaviours. For Example: "[it is] remarkably easy to adjust the shine of a career path for one sex. A few words to the effect that a Y chromosome will serve in your favour, or a sprucing up of the interior design, is all that it takes to bring about surprisingly substantial changes in career interest" and even more sharply: "one study found that women given a journal article to read that claimed that men are better at maths because of innate, biological and genetic differences performed worse on a GRE-like maths test than women shown an essay saying that men’s greater effort underlies their superior performance" And slightly more generally (and with an educationalist implication): "Carol Dweck and her colleagues have discovered that what you believe about intellectual ability – whether you think it’s a fixed gift, or an earned quality that can be developed – makes a difference to your behaviour, persistence and performance. Students who see ability as fixed – a gift – are more vulnerable to setbacks and difficulties. And stereotypes, as Dweck rightly points out, ‘are stories about gifts – about who has them and who doesn’t."

And intriguing are studies that show that we often judge performance by who performs (and their characteristics) rather than their actual performance: "insights from the experiences of people who have lived on both sides of the gender divide offer an intriguing glimpse into the possibility that a person’s talents in the workplace are easier to recognise when that person is male"

Sometimes it is experimental design that is not well-enough thought-through and Fine passes on some instances when this has been addressed: "when the researchers divided up their stimuli in a different way – comparing amount of play with animate toys (the dog and the doll) with object toys (the pan, ball, car, and book) – they found no differences between the sexes"

And there is -outrageously- quite some doubt related to the interpretation of brain-imaging. I had to read this several times, it's written tongue-in-cheek: "some researchers recently scanned an Atlantic salmon while showing it emotionally charged photographs. The salmon – which, by the way, ‘was not alive at the time of scanning’ – was ‘asked to determine what emotion the individual in the photo must have been experiencing.’ Using standard statistical procedures, they found significant brain activity in one small region of the dead fish’s brain while it performed the empathising task, compared with brain activity during ‘rest’. The researchers conclude not that this particular region of the brain is involved in postmortem piscine empathising, but that the kind of statistical thresholds commonly used in neuroimaging studies (including Witelson’s emotion-matching study) are inadequate because they allow too many spurious results through the net"



Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences eBook: Cordelia Fine: Amazon.co.uk: Kindle Store

Slaughterhouses and violent crime -more reason to be vege

About three weeks ago at a staff "Christmas" do one of my colleagues -having observed my vegetarian option and exercised a modicum of curiosity about it, confessed to considering becoming vegetarian having come across research showing a link between factory-slaughterhouses and crimes involving lack of empathy in communities surrounding them. It has stayed in my mind and so I decided to do a web search on the matter
Perhaps the quickest and fullest way in is this article reporting the research: Probing the link between slaughterhouses and violent crime | Toronto Star. The basic finding is this:

Criminology professor Amy Fitzgerald says statistics show the link between slaughterhouses and brutal crime is empirical fact.

It seems that the correlation is rock solid. However, as often, the interpretation needs more work.Mainly the interpretive issue is whether working in slaughter houses causes an increase in the categories of crime studied, or whether the work itself attracts the kind of people most disposed to such crimes. The latter seems to me to be less likely given an aspect of the research itself:

“Some residents started to recognize that the crime rates were going up and started complaining, and the slaughterhouse companies were quick to blame the immigrant labour pool they were relying on,” Fitzgerald says. She found that abattoirs still seemed to raise the crime numbers when she controlled for these factors.

My suspicion is also that, taking into account framing and priming, there is a plausibility to work involving high levels of desensitisation to suffering tending to form people more likely to commit crimes where a lack of empathy is likely to be a significant factor. The desensitisation issue is problematised in the article:

"the correlation was not as strong for smaller farms where animals were killed. " Though I actually predicted that when I began to read the article - "“It seems like there’s something about the industrialization process,” says Fitzgerald. “you have people who are actually responsible for slaughtering thousands of animals a day.”

My reason for not eating meat is largely about environmental impact and sustainability: not eating meat reduces ones carbon footprint and there is not enough land to feed meat to the world's population at western rates of consumption. I can however, as something of a peace activist, begin to feel this reason gaining credibility for me.

Presence, space and relating mind

In a previous post, Presence, space and mind, I wrote about how presence need not always imply physical proximity but could be mediated by tokens such as letters, or electronic signals and that the crucial thing was that the tokens enabled and carried forward a relationship. At the end of that previous post I noted that there was still some exploration of the idea to be done:  

to think about the way that relationship can be mediated by tokens and the conditions for successful mediation of relationship which might be relevant to the Eucharist.

So it seems that presence need not be equated to physical proximity. However, we should note that this is not to imply that God is not present. Some of what we need to explore is that God is always and everywhere present so eucharistic presence is not a presence in distinction to absence, but it is rather the kind of presence being mediated. God's 'normal' or 'ordinary' ubiquity is supplemented or interpreted by the communicative tokens of bread and wine in the eucharist. God is present anyway and in the eucharist that presence is 'enhanced' by a collection of inter-related signifiers in a communicative economy based in narratives of Divine-human interaction.

So this is beyond merely 'physical' presence (that is presence alongside, over or through the physical universe rather than of a physical body). It is a storied presence invoked upon and by broken bread and outpoured wine and their place in the stories so invoked. So the presence is not only physical but it is collectively-mental; a presence within the minds and affectivities of disciples. This is a 'place' where the normal and ordinary presence of God does not automatically exist: it can only be there by some degree of welcome and acknowledgement. Which welcome and acknowledgement are called forth and substantiated by the rite. Perhaps, then, this gives a further credence to the notion of "transsignification" as a way of understanding the eucharist.

There is a real presence of Christ in the social-mindscape of the congregation. 'Real' in the sense that it is not merely a subjective construction of the human congregants but it is a presence-in-sign whereby the self-giving of Christ is appropriated subjectively within the social-mindscape as the physical rite is enacted. Just as word or gesture is needed to convey a personal and relational presence so is the rite important in conveying the Christ presence into the social-mindscape. The reality of the presence beyond the subjectivity of the congregants derives from the given-ness of the sign/s by God. As a letter conveys a real presence by virtue of it being sent by the author to renew or to keep alive a relationship, so this rite conveys a real presence by virtue of being 'sent' by God.

And what is communicated is particularly signified as not simply presence or availability but more precisely the given-ness-unto-death of the God-man Jesus. The tokens communicating the real presence-in-social-mindscape are more precisely communicating the self-donation of the Word of God through deathly passion and 'resurrascension'. This too goes beyond mere presence and interprets presence as 'for us' and solidary as well as committed and saving. This is God conveying commitment to relating positively to us by re-presenting to us what God has been doing to create a positive relationship with the implication of inviting us to respond in kind. The presentation and the response come together in the co-ordinating signs that make up the rite: the actions of taking, blessing, breaking and consuming the bread and the wine,

And such presence involves both time and space.It is in the rite that the communication takes place -as the rite is 'read' by the congregants, the relationship via the deathly passion and resurrascension is renewed as a real presence in the mindscape. a real presence that becomes us at the very least by changing and reinforcing our neuronal patterns and their connections with the various aspects of our lives over time.

I think there's a little more to unpack ... watch this space.

Angel wrestling

I love this image. I think it is a representation of Jacob wrestling with the angel ...

Community: Wounded and Blessed – a workshop for Idealists, Hypocrites and Wanna-be Disciples of Jesus | Empire Remixed: wnb2

Gingerism and its discontents

At school and watching films on telly as a primary-aged child, I got the impression that beautiful or handsome humans were either black haired or blonde women whereas people like me who were some variety of red-headed were not. I also got 'reverse' skin-colour racism: being picked on because I didn't tan and only had freckles. So I don't need convincing that there is something in 'gingerism'.  I'm not saying it's as bad or systematic as racism or sexism, but it does really exist and we shouldn't let it pass without challenge.
As the article says:

the whole gingerism thing is a stealth form of acceptable racism that goes on in boardrooms, in authors' minds.

But I don't entirely go with the choice of example up next:

Look at Harry Potter – the redheads are the poor, weak family, the buffoons. If Harry Potter had been ginger, that would have been a different story.

It's true that Rowling has rightly picked up the way that a ginger family would quite likely be the object of derisive and dismissive comments. But it's worth noting the heroic and sympathetic qualities of that family. Rowling has the underdogs turn out to be among the celebration-worthy: their compassion, self-sacrifice are key to the plot. They are heroes in the story. The main hero even ends up marrying one of them.

Would it have been a different story if HP had been ginger. Not sure it would: one more thing for him to be harassed for and a further reason for him to identify with his best friends the Weasleys. They may be buffoons in the eyes of the self-important muggle-haters, but in terms of authorial and readerly respect, quite the reverse. Harry Potter is no gingerist text. It witnesses to gingerism but it critiques it too.

Damian Lewis and the case of the missing redheads | Art and design | The Guardian: