Of Gender and Loyalty

In which I endeavor to tip a sacred cow…

Around a month ago I dropped my wife off in the rain at the entrance to a local big-box store. I parked the car and, heading for the entrance, found myself following a very young couple who were holding hands and chatting and generally enjoying being together. He was tall and a bit gangly; she was a bouncy girl with a ponytail, half-skipping to keep up with him. As they approached the entrance a middle-aged female killjoy emerged ahead of a group that was obviously waiting to meet them. She smiled broadly at the girl but waved imperiously at their clasped hands.

“No. No. No holding hands today. You’re one of The Girls this morning, honey!”

Following a few steps behind them, I saw the young man stiffen, almost flinch. His shoulders tightened; his entire posture instantly changed from that free-swinging Narnian air to self-conscious tension. He drew his hand back almost imperceptibly, but the girl held on to it and pressed it firmly against her hip. Her head tilted up as she glanced sideways at him and then looked the bossy woman full in the face.

“Guess I’m playing for the other team today.”

The woman stared in disbelief - one could tell she was unaccustomed to having her demands ignored. She looked harder at the young woman, then the guy, then back again, as if the force of her gaze would surely unlock those offending hands. But as the couple walked right past her and into the store, she pasted a socially acceptable smile over her irritation and followed them, only muttering at the back of the bouncy girl’s head, “You would.”

I never saw the girl’s face, but her ponytail had a defiant swing as the couple turned left out of sight, still holding hands. I thought to myself, “You go, girl;” and then, mentally addressing the young man, “Better put a ring on her hand, my friend.”

For some time now I’ve been reflecting on this little scene, and particularly on the unspoken assumptions that made possible what would have been a genuinely bewildering exchange to all of our ancestors. Why was the older woman provoked - or threatened, or bothered, whatever - by a modest physical expression of love and unity between this young man and woman? What taboo lurked behind her emphatic prohibition of clasped hands? What consequences might she have feared from their assertion of “coupled-ness” as they entered the ugly temple of Individualism?

Obviously I’m speculating; I know nothing of these people beyond observing one ninety-second interaction. Assuming that the couple were unmarried, there’s nothing especially unique about an older person objecting to their holding hands, on the grounds that it implied a degree of mutual possession which they had not yet earned. But such is not the culture we live in, and this woman expressed no such concern. Rather, she appealed to the gender of the young woman - “you’re one of the girls” - as if her feminine nature was somehow compromised by an expression of solidarity with her man. It’s as if a mother might say to her boy, “No climbing trees right now; you’re a mammal this morning.” Or, “Don’t pet the dog; you’re one of the humans today.” Except, of course, that these categorical distinctions are far more profound than male and female.

Taken at face value, the objection amounts to “Don’t hold his hand because you’re a girl”; to which the young lady might well have replied, “That’s why I’m holding his hand; it’s because he’s my guy and I’m his girl!” The objection makes no sense.

But her reply likewise makes no sense on its face: “playing for the other team”? What team? The men’s team? Obviously she wasn’t passing as a guy. And are men and women on opposing teams?

Aye; there’s the rub. It seems so; or at least society is full of meddling feminist killjoys who think they ought to be.

The fundamental problem in this exchange, I think, is an absence of sane and clear categories for thinking about gender relations - an absence that is not accidental, but rather the consequence of decades of academic gaslighting, intentional confusion, and vocal denial. As a result, neither the bouncy young lady nor the officious boss-babe were saying what they really meant. The real issue over which they disagreed appears to be a question of loyalty.

The idea that women owe some sort of loyalty or allegiance to other women, merely by virtue of their shared chromosomes, strikes me as one of the oddest and yet most pervasive conceits of the modern world. I’m not talking about the friendship or affection that naturally flows from shared experience. Gender makes a difference in so many ways, and it’s perfectly understandable for one to feel an affinity for others who know one’s own experience from the inside, as it were. But loyalty is something else.

Rebekah Merkle makes this point well in her thought-provoking little book Eve in Exile, where she remarks on the way in which a wife’s prioritization of her family and home over career is often framed as a betrayal of women:

The feminists tell us that our first duty is supposed to be to ourselves—and that is how we show solidarity with women. After that, we can think about our husband and kids—and if we don’t do things in that order, we are letting down the rest of womankind. They want us to have a deep clan loyalty, but they want to redraw the lines of what our clans are. And the way feminists want to draw tribal lines insists on splitting each and every family in half [emphasis mine]. Of course we should have a deep loyalty to our people—but our people are the husbands we promised to love until the grave takes us, and the little faces staring up at us, depending on us, loving us, needing us—not a nameless blob of humans who lack a Y chromosome and to whom we have never been introduced.¹

Who are my people? There are certainly many angles from which to consider that question. I’m a husband and a father; in the most intimate sense my wife and my children are “my people”; but the question could be answered in a spiritual, familial, ethnic, political, or even vocational sense. But I can’t imagine answering it in a gendered sense. I cannot even make sense of the idea that one owes loyalty to a “tribe” comprising half of the human race, merely because they all share one’s own side of human procreative potential.

But that’s identity politics for you. And it is a significant cause of the gender wars, broken homes, declining interest in commitment and marriage, and general chaos in our society today. For proponents of this view, everything is seen as a competitive, zero-sum game, and for women to succeed against men they need to stick together. Give your loyalty to a man and you’ve committed treason.²

The young couple I followed into the store were making a public statement by holding hands: “We belong to each other.” It may seem trite and it may often fall flat, but it represents the seed of a life-giving fruit. When a man and a woman back that declaration with genuine commitment in action, it makes incredible, miraculous, beautiful things possible: marriages where two become one; homes where new lives are born and grow, actual “safe spaces” where the weak and vulnerable can be protected and gain strength; strong, lasting, and coherent communities. For a man and a woman to give themselves to each other, exclusively and permanently, is both a picture of Paradise and a step toward it.

The woman who objected was also making a statement: “You belong to Team XX, girl, not to any man.” This too may seem trite, but it represents the same old play that Lucifer has been running since he first met Eve under the Tree of Knowledge. “The universe has conspired to keep you down, but if you’ll just look out for yourself first you can have it all. Don’t give yourself away; split the family in half (and make sure the halves are divided fairly); make everything about yourself, and you deserve the best so fight for it!”

That mindset – which, you might remember, led to the first couple’s eviction from Paradise – is a profoundly destructive mentality. It turns every relationship into a tug-of-war when it should be a team effort. Tug-of war can be fun, but it ends one of two ways: either someone is getting dragged, or the connection breaks. We’ve all seen both outcomes too often.

For a fuller discussion of this topic I cannot recommend enough

Ross Byrd

’s beautiful essay on partnership vs. compromise:

… relational incongruities are not meant simply to be neutralized or eternally re-balanced in the scales of compromise and equality. Rather, they set the stage for the dance of love. Husband and wife, parent and child, are not the same and are not meant to be. You may have valid reasons in our cultural moment to distrust the term “complementarianism” (I do too), but the fact remains: throughout Scripture and throughout life, God made asymmetrical relationships to be complementary, not merely flattened into sameness. Where I am weak, you are strong and vice versa. Love does not destroy nature, but perfects it.

Someday I’ll write an essay on how Galadriel and Celeborn exemplify the kind of partnership Ross recommends. For now, though, I leave you with the question that faces every couple as they consider the possibility of life together: What game are we playing, and which team are we on? Are we dividing up (and fighting over) our resources or combining them to make something that neither of us could ever accomplish alone? Tug-of-war or teamwork; competition or mutual sacrifice? Shall we each say “mine” or both say “ours”? Should we tear down traditions or build something good together?

Do we begin by touching gloves or holding hands?

Ferdinand Georg Waldmueller, The Lovers at the Crossroads

1. Rebekah Merkle, Eve in Exile and the Restoration of Femininity (Canon Press, 2016), 136.

2. I’m “picking on” women because the exchange I witnessed involved women, and because their exchange reflects an ascendant mentality in our society. A similar, and equally destructive, mindset is growing rapidly among men online, but for men to openly focus on “men’s interests” to the detriment of women is not yet socially acceptable, nor should it be. (It is likely to become more so precisely because of the reaction modern feminism is provoking.)