I’ve always been a bit bemused and sceptical about the twin ideas of “masculinity” and “femininity”. For a long time, it just seemed like so many gender stereotypes: Real Men go out into the wilderness to hunt bear with pointy stick; Ladies, on the other hand, like flowers, the colour pink, and fluffy things. And I get the impression that some Christian books merely repackage these stereotypes with a Christian veneer.
But as I’ve grown in my relationship with Beverley, certain patterns of relating to one another as man and woman have come naturally to us. It’s something more subtle than the crass stereotypes I mentioned above, but there is something wonderfully feminine about her. I don’t think we can extrapolate a universal scheme from our individual experience, of course, but it’s made me more receptive to the notion that masculinity and femininity aren’t just social constructs.
Various parts of the Bible also seems to say there’s more to gender than just human social categories. The only aspect of humanity that the Bible specifically identifies with being made “in the image of God” is that God made us “male and female” (Gen 1:27); maleness and femaleness are part of the very nature of what it means to be human.
In 1 Corinthians 11, Paul draws an analogy between the relationship of headship between Father and Son, Christ and the Church, and a husband and wife. The relationship between Father and Son is one of mutual love and giving, and both are equally God, but the relationship is not symmetrical: the Son is begotten of the Father, and not vice versa; the Son obeys the Father’s will, and not vice versa.
The cultural expression of our femininity and masculinity is likely to be distorted by sin, of course, and so we need to evaluate whether our social categories are good reflections of this order or not. But the above passages from the Bible seem to me to imply that there is a basic level of masculinity and femininity rooted in our human nature, in reflection of the divine nature.