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.