Mondays with Eugene

I've been tossing around in my head lately this thought that maybe the importance of gender isn't so that we can clearly define and separate into masculine and feminine roles, but so we can bring both together to acheive a balance of the masculine and the feminine within ourselves. I've been chewing on gender a lot lately and I'm not sure where I'm at. I think gender is important, but I don't think we've arrived at a satisfactory and holistic understanding of why and how it is. In the mean time, here's a little tidbit from Eugene England that explores the idea of exploring and cultivating both the masculine and the feminine as he experienced it:

In the past ten years, I have become increasingly unsure about the value and satisfactions of my traditional male role as aggressive achiever, doer, decider, spokesman—which, for all my achievements, has left me lonely and defensive, in some ways emotionally immature. I have become uneasy about what our culture has traditionally designated the “masculine” virtues of courage, pride, self-confidence, rational assertion, generalization, decisiveness—which, for all their apparent value, seem to leave individuals and societies in constant, unsatisfied desire, engaged in endless envy, rivalry, and imitative violence. I have found inadequate, for my own needs as a poet and essayist, the traditional male style of straight forward narration, logical conclusiveness—which, for all it says, leaves much of what is most important to me unsaid. Instead, I find myself, though I’m still not very good at it, wanting to listen, cooperate, nurture with presence, learn rather than teach. I yearn to be more than to do, to give mercy more and seek justice less, to heal rather than to help, to be meek. I want to hear my inner voices, record their circling presence, trust my unconscious mind as it moves upon silence, as it responds to the unpredictable, uncapturable breeze of the Holy Ghost. I do not want to be thesorcerer, to hold power that changes women into something else. My best piece of writing so far, I believe (and more objective critics have agreed), is a personal essay called “Easter Weekend” (1988). In writing it, I began to discover the “woman” in myself, a voice that hovered and circled rather than thrusting to conclusions, that combined narratives like a mosaic to get at emotional patterns rather than moving through logical exposition to a rational conclusion. With increasing assurance, I listened for and finally heard and expressed new voices, different from my own but part of me. No, I don’t believe women naturally write that way or that all men should. I only know that I discovered important things, things I am excitedly exploring, that cultural male modes and models had not provided me. To paraphrase Dustin Hoffman in Tootsie, “I was a better man when Iwas a woman than I was when I was a man.”

I'm picking up what he's laying down. When I was going through my Evergreen phase, I remember thinking that I needed to model the roles of masculinity that I saw around me. In my own limited world view, to me that meant I needed to be less emotional. I needed to be more logical and decisive. I needed to develop a love for sports and learn aggression. I needed to associate less with women, because I was way too comfortable with them and it was preventing me from being attracted to them.

I was depending on a construct that I now believe is broken to try and fix myself, without realizing that I really actually wasn't broken in the way that I thought I was. I was trying to shut down a part of myself that was hungering for expression and in the process needlessly breaking myself, even though at the time I thought it was part of the fixing process. Eventually though, I learned that I just need to let the wholeness that is already in me unfold instead of trying to be something I wasn't.

What are your thoughts on gender?