Are Men and Women Equal?
Are men and women equal?
If by equal one means that men and women are created in God’s image with equal measure of dignity and worth, then the Christian answer is obviously yes, men and women are equal!
But are men and women equal in every respect? What about physical strength? Or testosterone levels? Or in the ability to bear children? Here we brush up against an ideology that alarmed C. S. Lewis almost a century ago. He saw that the belief that men and women were completely interchangeable threatened the natural order and the foundations of civilization, including the church, marriage and family, and even what it means to be human.
When asked if men and women are interchangeable, the cultured impulse is to answer with an unequivocal, “Yes!” Annie with her gun has been teaching us as much since the ‘50’s, and feminists long before that: not only can a woman do anything a man can, but she can do it better!
But if we were to come at it from a slightly different angle and ask if men and women are different, then surely only the most zealous LGBTQ activist would answer an unqualified, “No.” However, the project of many generations of feminists and Marxist gender revisionists has been to downplay and erase differences between the sexes. Such a progressive concept defies Nature, and Nature’s God, and runs up against the most foundational principles of creation.
Spot the Difference worksheets are a staple in many elementary classrooms. Anyone who attended public school or spent any time in children’s Sunday School is probably familiar with the concept. Given two very similar, but slightly different pictures, can you find and circle all the differences? At first glance, the pictures appear identical, but a closer study reveals several dissimilarities. Elementary students are assigned these exercises because they encourage and hone the development of the basic ability to compare and contrast.
Have we forgotten, or are we actively trying to forget how to spot the differences between men and women?
One of the most basic, natural differences we can observe between men and women is the way sex is manifested in male and female biological organization. Simply put, to be a woman is to have sexed genetics that develop internal sex organs, including a womb. And to be a man is to have sexed genetics that develop external sex organs. They have different forms.
And we must not miss why such a simple observation matters: in the form is rooted a function.
Returning to our original consideration, in order for two objects to be interchangeable, they have to be identical in both form and function. For example, a car can do much of what a truck can do, but not everything a truck can. In order for a car to be able to do what a truck can — to have the function of a truck — it has to acquire a truck bed, perhaps a trailer hitch, a lift, and four-wheel drive — or it needs the form of a truck. But then the car is no longer a car. It is a truck.
The relationship between form and function is not always immediately apparent. But when we consider why some objects have a certain form, this often reveals their intended function, and vice versa. A car has the form it does as distinguished from a truck because of its different, yet overlapping, function.
If this is true, attending to the form of the sexes would better inform their functions. And if you were unhappy with the different functions, what would you do? You would attempt to alter the form.
In the introduction to her book Adam and Eve After the Pill, Mary Eberstadt writes, “No single event since Eve took the apple has been as consequential for relations between the sexes as the arrival of modern contraception.” How can this be true? Consider the fundamental differences between men and women — especially the womb. For men and women to seem interchangeable in society, the function of the womb would have to be neutralized. This makes the fiction of male and female interchangeability begin to seem plausible. Have you ever wondered why feminists focus so much on contraception and abortion?
By pursuing male-female interchangeability, the progressive feminist project has severed form from function and, as a result, has left both form and function up for redefinition.
I am convinced that this concept of interchangeability explains the gender confusion we see all around us. Beginning around the turn of the twentieth century, feminists began to advocate for male-female equality in terms of male-female interchangeability: a woman can do anything a man can do, after all! So women pushed into what were previously male-only spheres: the military, the pastorate, the football field. And this functional interchange paved the way for a formal one.
If a woman can do anything a man can do in the home, why the need for a man in the home at all? Would not two women suffice? Why not two men? The fallacy of functional interchangeability leads to sexual interchangeability, and with it nothing less than the redefinition of society. The great upheaval Lewis rightly feared in his context is just the beginning. The natural bonds of family are not immune to such radical redefinition.
We are now facing a crisis of what it means to be a person, a being with a soul and with a gender. Intersectional activists are not content with the triumph of the legalization of same-sex marriage. If men and women are interchangeable in both form and function,then for a man to become a woman is no great feat. It is really no feat at all. After all, they are interchangeable.
We have arrived at the ultimate Marxist goal: man as woman, woman as man, androgynous bliss. The state is pleased! More workers participating in the workforce (ironically, our society’s ultimate definition of liberation), laboring side by side, the natural bonds of family dissolved to oblivion, the state raising its gender-neutral citizens with no natural devotion to any individual in particular.
Simone de Beauvoir, who influenced generations of feminist activists in the twentieth century, takes us to the doorstep of sex erasure, making the connection between functional and formal interchangeability eminently clear:
In itself, homosexuality is as limiting as heterosexuality: the ideal should be to be capable of loving a woman or a man; either, a human being, without feeling fear, restraint, or obligation.⁷
It is perhaps no historical accident that Beauvoir had a relationally open romance with existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who in one of his lectures famously quipped,
Dostoevsky once wrote: “If God did not exist, everything would be permitted;” and that, for existentialism, is the starting point. Everything is indeed permitted if God does not exist, and man is in consequence forlorn.⁸
If God does not exist, then everything is permitted for the man or woman, even interchangeability. But if God does exist, then men and women are who he says they are, and they are created for his purposes, in both form and function. This is our starting point as Christians, for “it is God who made us, and not we ourselves.” (Ps. 100:3, NASB).
Editor’s note: This article is adapted from a longer form version that appeared in Eikon: A Journal for Biblical Anthropology. The original essay can be read online here.