WHAT IS masculinity? What is femininity?
Here is a description with perfect clarity from the Catholic Encyclopedia in its entry for “Woman”:
The same essentially identical human nature appears in the male and female sex in two-fold personal form; there are, consequently, male and female persons. On the other hand, there is no neutral human person without distinction of sex. Hence follows in the first place, woman’s claim to the possession of full and complete human nature, and thus, to complete equality in moral value and position as compared with man before the Creator. It is, therefore, not permissible to take one sex as the one absolutely perfect and as the standard of value for the other. Aristotle’s designation of woman as an incomplete or mutilated man (“De animal. gennerat.”, II, 3d ed. Berol., 773a) must, therefore, be rejected. The untenable medieval definition, “Femina est mas occasionatus”, also arose under Aristotelian influence. The same view is to be found in the “last Scholastic”, Dionysius Ryckel (“Opera minora”, ed. Tournay, 1907, II, 161a).
Notice how feminism, like ancient paganism and this medieval error, does take masculinity as the standard of value, i.e., a woman is not complete unless she can compete equally with man in all spheres of life.
The entry continues:
The female sex is in some respects inferior to the male sex, both as regards body and soul. On the other hand, woman has qualities which man lacks. With truth does the writer on education, Lorenz Kellner, say: “I call the female sex neither the beautiful nor the weak sex (in the absolute sense). The one designation is the invention equally of sensuality and of flattery; the other owes its currency to masculine arrogance. In its way the female sex is as strong as the male, namely in endurance and patience, in quiet long-suffering, in short, in all that concerns its real sphere, viz., the inner life” (Lose Blätter”, Collected by von Görgen; Freiburg, 1895, 50). Read More »