Day 29: The Feminine Genius

My first exposure to contemporary art was as a teenager, through a textbook my mom brought home from the community college where she worked. I remember studying the pages for hours...iconic work from artists of the past hundred years or so leaving their impressions in my visual memory. There was the detailed lithography of Albrecht Dürer, the hexing intensity pen and ink of Khäthe Kollwitz's "Fettered Man", Picasso's blue series, as well as work by Pollock, Monet, Van Gogh, and others.

One piece I remember etched in my mind was Willem de Kooning's "Woman" series. It is a jarring abstract series of portraits--the female subject is consistently portrayed with a fangy smile, massively oversized breasts, and slashing swipes of paint. I am not a seasoned art critic by any means, but the general consensus of his work in this series is that there is an underlying expression of hostility and anger towards the female subject. Jackson Pollock's wife, Lee Krasner (a fellow abstract expressionist) described these works as vessels of de Kooning's "hatred and hostility towards the female," "offensive in every possible sense."

The degradation of the female form in de Kooning's "Woman" finds a contemporary equivalent in the "artistic expression" (I use the term tongue in cheek) of pornography. Pornography cares nothing about nuance, beauty, form--it is animalistic and reductionist. It isolates body parts for "money shots" and quickly discards the 'object' when gratification is complete.

When Ted Bundy, the notorious serial killer, was interviewed in 1989 by Dr. James Dobson, he noted that while he was in prison, without exception every man he came in contact with who was in prison for violent crime was deeply consumed by pornography. It was also the common thread among serial killers. For Bundy, it started innocuous enough with soft-core magazines, but in time escalated to hard-core and sexualized violent exposure. There is something about it that harbors great anger and resentment towards women, that seeks to dominate and exploit.

Sexual violence is by no means a new phenomenon. We even see it in the bible, with the rape of Tamar by her half-brother Amnon, son of King David. Amnon was so frustrated because of his sister Tamar that he made himself ill, for she was a virgin, and it seemed hard to Amnon to do anything to her" (2 Sam 13:2). He was consumed with a perverted passion, and once he obtained the object of his lust, "he hated her with a very great hatred." (v 15).

Some might argue that pornography gives men an outlet so that rape and sexual violence against women might be lessened, but anecdotally I'm not sure that is really the case, especially on college campuses. When pornography is the aquifer from which young men are drawing their sexual information and ways of relating to women, even if it doesn't directly increase direct violence against women, it indirectly poisons the well with sexual disfunction, impotence in relating emotionally with women in relationships, and healthy, integrated sexual expression in marriage later down the road. The eyes through which women are viewed have become cloudy, the view distorted.

Saint Pope John Paul II was a huge proponent of the unique and privileged place of women in history, that there is something unique and special about women by their very nature that should be upheld and celebrated. He wrote in his encyclical Mulieris Dignitatem about the "feminine genius." The qualities of such feminine genius in women--receptivity, emphasis on the person, empathy, protection of life, sanctity, and modesty--hold the antidote to the culture of death we currently live in.

Nowhere are such qualities more divinely embodied and perfected than in that of the Blessed Virgin Mary. She holds such an esteemed place in the Church because she is the mother of God and the mother to all. She was receptive to her calling--"I am the handmaid of the Lord; let it be done to be according to thy word"; she emphasized the person of Christ himself; she was empathetic, making the long journey to visit her pregnant cousin Elizabeth while pregnant herself; she protected the fruit of her womb with her very self; she was a model of sanctity by her obedience and docility, and modest in her perpetual virginity. Men can look to her as a model of faith and obedience, but women especially can find in her the embodiment of what it means to be a woman, the feminine genius.

When Bruce Jenner was voted "woman of the year", the age of confusion and ideology we are living in was driven home. Women everywhere should be offended that a man would receive such an "honor." What a sham. No man can ever take the place of a woman, and no woman can ever substitute for a man. God did not make us this way. He created us in his image and likeness, male and female.

The characteristics of what makes men men and what makes women women can hold a kind of fascination for young men and women who are growing up in age of so-called 'gender fluidity'. Something is definitely lost when we abandon order for confusion, that which is natural to man for that which is unnatural, and debase our sexual functions to that of animals. But it can be regained by refocusing on those models of perfection for what it means to be a man, what it means to be a woman--not in truncated caricatures of masculinity that reduce manhood to growing a beard or dominating a woman, nor in contemporary deficient models of feminism that seek to minimize, discount, or trade the feminine genius, but to celebrate and elevate that which makes women women, especially that most unique ability to bring forth life and regeneration into the world. The antidote to the culture of death is life itself.


"God has assigned as a duty to every man the dignity of every woman."

--Saint John Paul II

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