Awkward! Why I Don’t Look for Ways to be Led by Every Man I Meet.

I’ve been interviewing painters. These days it seems so difficult to find someone who will do any work for a decent price – I mean someone who will do good work for a fair price. But we need the house painted, so I’ve been talking to a few men who claim they know how to wield a brush. The bids have been all over the map – anywhere from sky-high to lunar-high. Until the last guy, who we hired.

After our lucky painter left, I was thinking about something I read in a recent book arguing for distinct roles for men and women in the church. More of a practical how-to than a detailed biblical defense, I imagine that even if I agreed with the premise, numerous ideas would give me pause. One, in particular, came to mind after the departure of our competent and reasonable painter.

The idea is basically that we need to go around looking for ways to be “masculine” or “feminine.” And how do we do that? Well, the author explained, since the essence of femininity is “helping” and the core of masculinity is “leading,” a woman can demonstrate that she is a woman by helping and a man can show that he is a man is by leading. To embrace who God created us to be as men and women, it is important to find opportunities to either lead or help in ways appropriate to our differing relationships. Yet this applies across the board, so that even a woman boss should look for ways to be feminine by helping. Presumably, those she ought to help are men.

Reading this, I wondered what it would look like for me to live this out in real life. Should I regularly look for ways to help men and be led by them? And by acting on these opportunities, could I demonstrate my femininity and align my behavior with the biological reality that I am, in fact, a woman?

And then it occurred to me, what if I had decided to “embrace my femininity” while interviewing my painter?

Well, I suppose I could have tried to find ways to help him and subtly encourage him to lead. But I wouldn’t want to come across as manipulative. So that might have been tricky, as I was the one who took the lead by calling him in the first place, and he was the one who was there to help me get my house painted. So maybe, instead of informing him what I wanted painted, I could have let him lead and tell me what he most wanted to do.

Or, perhaps, rather than communicating what color I want where and that I want the bricks painted as well as the siding, I could have asked him what color he liked and whether he wanted to paint the brick. Or, as an alternative, maybe I could have expressed my femininity by offering to help him put the bid together. But he might not have liked that, as it might represent a certain conflict of interest. 

What, then? I suppose I could have asked the man in painter’s whites for advice related to my personal life, maybe even my marriage. That way he could feel more like a man in my presence. But to be honest, I don’t need help with my marriage. After 43 years, it’s better than ever. Then again, I could have let him make the decision about whether to hire him or some other painter. Perhaps that would have been a more effective way for us to embrace our male and female identities. 

Or maybe not. Maybe all of that would have been, well, ridiculously awkward.

Honestly, no matter how hard I try, I can’t come up with a single option that would not have been weird. Even when I remind myself of the important caveat – that we are to embrace our femininity and masculinity in appropriate ways, depending on the relationship – every idea I land upon still feels highly inappropriate. I could be overly dense, but I can’t think of any way I could have expressed my feminine essence to my painter that wouldn’t have come across as just plain strange.

Am I being obstinate and unfeminine if I can’t figure out how to “help” or “follow” every Tom, Dick, and Harry that I meet? To be sure, I am absolutely on board with being respectful and honoring to all, men and women alike, and with helping my neighbors and strangers and brothers and sisters in Christ when I can. I’m also on board with people in leadership positions leading, as that is their job. People like bosses and police sergeants and lead pastors and school board presidents and swim team captains. I’m even good with following the grocery clerk’s leadership in how to load my groceries on the belt. And I’m completely in sync with helping my husband when he needs help and letting him take the initiative when he should. Of course, he helps me when I need help and lets me take the initiative when I ought.

Frankly, the thought of female helping and male leading as key to every relationship makes me highly uncomfortable. As I was pondering why, my mind skipped back to a women’s Bible study I once attended. The woman author suggested that women are “helpers” not only because that’s just what we most naturally do, but also because men need help and are attracted to women who help them. It’s the leading-helping dynamic that underlies the male-female spark. This, she continued, explains workplace affairs where a man has a liaison with an assistant who is less attractive than his wife. The reason, she explained, is simply that she helps him.

I don’t know about all that. It feels a bit insulting, not least of all to men. But maybe men truly are attracted to women who help them and maybe that plays into workplace affairs. I just don’t know. 

However, I do know that behaving in certain ways can introduce an unhelpful and inappropriate dynamic into a relationship that should not be all about one person being a man and the other being a woman. Long ago I learned the importance of comporting myself in a professional way in these situations. I also learned that a failure to do so could send the wrong message and lead to attention I was not seeking. To me, scoping for ways for the man on the street to lead me feels like a come-on.

And that, I might add, would be highly inappropriate.

Then my mind leapt to the importance many people still place upon the Billy Graham rule. You know, the idea that a man should never meet one-on-one with a woman other than his wife. And I thought, Huh. Maybe this overemphasis on being “masculine” and “feminine” in every interaction explains why that rule remains so important in some circles.^[3] I mean, let’s say I’m meeting one-on-one with my pastor, something I have done in my various leadership roles over the years, and I go out of my way to act in a way that he reads as “feminine.” At the same time, he extends great effort to behave in a manner that I comprehend as “masculine.” 

What impact, I ask you, does that have? 

Truly, I can’t think of anything good.

And then my cerebral home screen blipped to the age-old advice otherwise known as how-to-snag-a-man. I remembered a friend who was interested in a brilliant yet shy family friend. When she confided this to her mother, the older and wiser woman made a suggestion. Figure out where the lonely bachelor needs help, then do something about it. The young lady took these words to heart, sweetening her helping hand with homemade cookies. Lo and behold, before long the starry-eyed couple were married. 

On the other hand, perhaps I can sympathize with the motivation behind the find-a-way-to-lead-or-help-in-every-situation advice. Mostly I read it as an attempt to maintain distinctions between the sexes. That is, if there is no difference between men and women, then what’s wrong with a boy growing up with two mothers, or a girl raised by two dads? If there’s no difference, why not?

The deal is, we don’t need to overemphasize our differences or artificially enact them to protect the distinctions between women and men. Nor do we need to enjoin stereotypes to make the case that it would be best if every child were raised by a loving mother and a loving father. 

Why? Simply because the differences are real, they are natural, and they are observable. And while women and men are mostly the same – with eyes and arms and kidneys and bones and brains and toes and personalities and gifts and predispositions and interests – the differences are what make me a woman and you a man. Contrary to much current thinking, I could no more become a man than my dog could become a cat. I don’t have to work at being a woman and I don’t have to pretend that I’m not a natural leader in order to paint myself as “feminine.”

Which is exactly why we don’t need to adopt some artificial role when we interact with the opposite sex. It’s obvious to anyone with eyes or ears that I’m a woman, it’s just as obvious that my painter is a man, and it’s patently obvious that the best trajectory is to keep things professional. And though I don’t believe we should suppress our differences, denying they exist, making too much of them is unhelpful. While I love being a woman and love doing some stereotypically “feminine” things, like getting all the children and grandchildren together for a family barbecue, I fully dislike others.

But the biggest danger with this emphasis on going out of our way to act out our “masculinity” or “femininity” is that it only serves to undermine the confidence of children who don’t fit the stereotypes. In some places schoolchildren are handed questionnaires designed to help them determine whether they really are that boy they always thought they were or that girl they always believed themselves to be. And what do these surveys consist of? Stereotypical gender traits that the child either identifies with or not.^[4]

So, say, a boy who doesn’t care much for sports, who is more cooperative and creative than independent and dominant, would score higher on “feminine” traits. Thus he might begin to doubt who he is, wondering whether he’s really a girl on the inside. Or how about a girl who is naturally dominant and a risk-taker? She might score more like a boy than a girl and, with the encouragement of her teacher, wonder if she should consider transitioning.^[5]

Do you see how harmful this is? This trying to protect the differences between women and men by squeezing everyone into gender-boxes? The more we emphasize that men must behave like so and women like thus, the more we abandon our children to shifting sand, casting doubt on the very core of their identity.

But what about the high school girl who confided to me that, due to a congenital physical anomaly, she had never really felt feminine?^[6] What do you think? Should I have encouraged her to go around helping others, and thereby enact her femininity? Like, Maybe your body is not formed like a normal female body, but if you help people, you can be feminine? To me, that would have added insult to injury. Of course I said no such thing. In the end, this young woman managed it on her own. Noting the way wisdom is personified as feminine in the book of Proverbs, she made a connection with the importance she personally placed on wisdom. Through this association, she forged her own path to believing in herself as feminine.

What we need are principles that do not catapult us into awkward situations and that help all our children grow in confidence about who they are, whether they are the tree-climbing, hang-from-the-upper-branches boys or the sensitive, quiet, artistic ones, the decked-only-ever-in-pink girly girls or the tomboyish, athletic, take-charge types, or those children who struggle with the very real conditions that cause them to doubt their identity and their worth. 

Seriously, we can do better than this.

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Image by Ralph from Pixabay

^[3] Not all complementarians follow the Billy Graham rule. See Eric Schumacher’s comment on p. 273 of Worthy: Celebrating the Value of Women (Bloomington, Minn.: Bethany House, 2020), cowritten with Elyse Fitzpatrick.

^[4] See especially Helen Joyce, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality (London: Oneworld, 2021/2022), 116-118.  

^[5] On school involvement supporting the transitioning of children, particularly girls, see especially Abigail Shrier, Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (Washington: Regnery, 2020).

^[6] Though she didn’t divulge details, it may have been an intersex condition. This conversation took place some 20 years ago.