When the leader of His Majesty's loyal opposition in the United Kingdom, one Sir Keir Starmer (a tricky lawyer by profession) was unable to define what a woman is he was rightly mocked. It also seemed to be revelatory of a joke played upon all of us by the woke lobby, A woman can be defined by biology and the woke postmodernists would have us deny scientific reality for the purposes of their political and cultural agenda of destroying the West.
In reality though, we cannot answer the question of a woman through biology alone. Human beings, male and female, while rooted in their biology are more than mere biological and material beings. The feminine as much as the masculine is only fulfilled if we achieve our cultural, even our spiritual telos. Just as we are not fully human until we are transfigured through a life of faith, so we are not fully Man or Woman until we fulfil our higher purpose. In this sense the postmodernists actually help us. They differentiate between sex and gender, dismissing gender as a social construct. And in a sense they are right.
Except it is not always just a social construct. We cannot be completely understood as biological and material beings alone. We are social, cultural and spiritual. The trouble with the post-modernists is they have not escaped the empirical Enlightenment paradigm, where things are understood from the bottom rather than the highest point. Reality begins in the divine, as real as the earth is in the hierarchy.
The story of the West since the Reformation onwards has been a project to erase the feminine from the world. First with the removal of the Mother of God by the more radical Reformers as the Reformation progressed, then with the rejection of the feminine attribute of intuition in favour of pure rationalism during the Enlightenment. Today this persists with Anglo-Saxon feminism, whereby a woman is understood to have reached her potential only if she behaves and works like a man in late capitalist democracy.
We remain thinking in an upside-down paradigm. Instead of understanding the world from the heavenly, we dismiss the heavenly and try to understand by material facts alone. If men and women are merely biological and have no spiritual side then we reduce them to mere male and female, determined by base natural urges. In this way we have the 1950s housewife as part of the economic system, motivated by her biological, material and pecuniary needs and preferences alone The answer from the feminists is not to rediscover the traditional feminine, but to turn women into men ( and a particular type of man at that - the office worker in global capitalism, the proverbial pen-pusher, the tech obsessive or the banker).
There is a more genuinely traditional understanding of Men and Women and it rests in complementarity and the erotic. Eve came from Adam's side. We are parted to be reunited in our complementary difference. Just as the monastic represents in a sense the feminine in his relationship with the masculine Christ or just as the Church is understood as the feminine in relationship with her head - Christ, so Man and Woman reflect the pattern of the divine. With this comes man's headship, the woman's fundamental support of the man and the full expression of our purpose and telos as a reflection of the cosmic pattern of Christ and the Church.
This does not mean reducing men and women to economic functionaries as attacked by feminism, but neither does it mean equality in the sense of identical interchangeability. It means rather divine vocation in marriage and even in every other interaction between the genders.
It means to be fully human we need to reach our potential as imago dei and as Man and Woman. In that sense we have the ultimate archetype in the Mother of God, who supplicates and protects with her veil over Constantinople. A figure of maternal care, but also feminine strength.
One saw this Marian strength in the babushkas of the USSR as they saved the Church, organising the baptism by priests of their grandchildren secretly. This was participation in the transfigured feminine in the mould of the Theotokos it seems.
At a lower level, and with care not to return them to an idolatrous status above the Theotokos, we even have the pagan pantheon, where the feminine attributes were understood in goddesses as different as Hera or Hestia, Athene or Demeter, Artemis or Aphrodite. These goddesses or daemons do tell us something about the feminine just as Hephaestus or Ares about the masculine - as long as we remember all these attributes are gathered up and transfigured in Christ and His Mother.
The 1950s housewife, infatuated with technology making bourgeois domesticity more convenient, or the radical feminist keen to become a wage slave are a false dichotomy and simply different faces of secular modernity that we must overcome if we are to be fully human. While in one sense there is neither male nor female in Christ, identity is only ever transfigured, never annihilated.
In answer to the question, what is a woman? an Enlightenment scientific answer on biology alone will not do. Yes gender encompasses biological sex and the two are essentially linked, but it is far more and is fully realised through the telos of the feminine or the masculine.
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