Gender Stereotypes: Should We Encourage Women to Be Strong and Courageous?

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Here's Pastor Tim. On this episode of Bible Bash, we will be answering the question, Should we encourage women to be strong and courageous?

Now, if you were to ask a question like this to a previous generation of men, all the men in the room would chuckle or smirk, and then we'd move on.

We wouldn't treat it as if it's a serious question. But because of the effects of feminism, one of the things that's happened is we've blurred all gender distinctions, and we've gone to war against all gender stereotypes.

And so now, when you ask a question like this, this is the kind of question that's treated with undue seriousness, or it's the kind of question that we really struggle to answer with because basically we reject the basic concept of masculinity at a pretty fundamental level.

Now, throughout most of human history, virtues like strength and courage have always been associated with men.

And if you want to read through the Bible, and you're going to look up a word like courage, one of the things you're going to find is this word courage is the type of word that is constantly being used in association with men and not naturally used in relationship to women.

So when you think about what it actually means to be a man, not only is this word being used in association with men itself, this is a word that is tied to the very nature of what masculinity actually is in the

Bible. So if you read through 1 Samuel 4, 9, you'll see that 1 Samuel 4, 9 says this, take courage and be men.

So notice how taking courage is associated with being a man. Take courage and be men, O Philistines, lest you become slaves to the

Hebrews as they have been to you. Be men and fight. So notice how courage is tied to masculinity.

But then this also happens in the New Testament. 1 Corinthians 6, 13, be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong.

So notice how strength is tied to masculinity, and then the woman is described as a weaker vessel because she's weaker physically.

So the idea of strength and the idea of courage in the Bible is going to be uniquely tied to men in a fairly direct way.

So Moses charges the men of Israel to be strong and to have courage and to conquer the promised land, essentially.

Moses charges Joshua to be strong and to be courageous. David charges Solomon to be strong and courageous and do all the things the

Lord commands them to do. Hezekiah commands his commanders to be strong, to have courage.

And as a sign of judgment on a society, courage will fail both kings and officials. So when you think about these ideas of courage and strength, they've always been associated with masculinity, courage and strength.

But then we're living in a time right now where we've basically blurred all these gender distinctions, and then we look at these words, and then we— our basic impulse is not to understand the obvious intention behind these gender stereotypes.

Our basic impulse is going to be to look to exceptions to these rules, or to ask the question, well, isn't there some sense in which women also should be encouraged to have— to be strong and courageous also?

And then that project, essentially, the goal of that project is if you can figure out any way in which a woman is encouraged in the

Bible to be strong and have courage, in particular like Proverbs 31 where the virtuous woman clothes herself with strength, then that means that we lose the unique application of courage and strength to men, and basically everyone is just told to be strong and courageous, and these have no unique application to men at all.

So what are we to make of these things? Why, when the Bible speaks to the nature of masculinity, does it single in on these virtues of courage and strength?

Why does the Bible typically associate that with masculinity, and these words are used in association with men?

And then, you know, how at the same time can you also have the Proverbs 31 woman be described as clothing herself with strength?

How do we understand these things? And we're going to talk about some of those things today. We're going to try to seek to harmonize these two kinds of passages in a way that past society knew how to do, and now we've lost the ability to do at this point.

Now, in order to do this, I do want to go back in time a little bit and be somewhat anecdotal and to maybe engage in a little bit of foolishness in order to prove a basic point.

Now, when I was in high school, one of the things that I did was I took a weightlifting class in high school, and I basically, you know, in our weightlifting class, we worked out several times a week, and I played sports in high school, and so I knew the standard level of strength that most men had at that age, or most young men had at that age, and I understand and am uniquely aware of the kind of strength that women have at that age as well.

So when I graduated from high school, I maybe was a bit of above average strength.

I was able to bench around 285 pounds, but then when I'm looking at the ladies in my weightlifting class, the standard average woman in the weightlifting class who worked out several times a week with weights, the standard girl in high school was basically able to lift a bar.

Now, bench pressing the bar is 45 pounds, and then the girls who really devoted themselves to it, they took weightlifting several years in a row, and maybe they played sports and everything else.

At most, maybe they were able to bench about 15 pounds on each side of the bar, which would basically get them up to about 75 pounds.

Now, when you think about the average standard girl benching 75 pounds of upper body strength in high school, my experience of that, and then you compare that to someone benching 285 pounds, and there was a lot of guys who benched way more than that.

So that was above average, but that wasn't significantly high, but you compare the level of strength with those two things, and one of the things that you're going to find is that by the obvious reality, the way that the world actually works is that women are substantially weaker than men when it comes to physical strength, and no amount of Marvel movies that we can watch is going to overturn this basic fact.

I mean, women are just significantly weaker than men are, and a woman can take a self -defense class all day long, and the sad reality is that if she ever comes up against terrifying man strength, she is going to be wholly outmatched.

That's just the way that the world works. Now, I don't say this in a way to put women down.

I'm just saying this to introduce reality into this kind of conversation. When I was benching 285 pounds, there is no way in the world that one of those girls who were benching 70 pounds would ever have even a remote chance of ever doing much of anything to me in terms of harming me physically.

Those girls, they literally didn't stand a chance. Now, it wouldn't even matter if they trained themselves in martial arts for years and devoted themselves to physical combat.

They would lose. That's just the sad reality of the way it works. There was a guy

I worked with when I was younger, and he was on the short side.

He was about 5 foot and he weighed about 100 pounds. He had been in martial arts for years because his parents knew that he was small, and they wanted him to be able to take care of himself, but he was in martial arts for years.

He had several black belts, and like a young man of my age,

I wanted to see how that translated into a real kind of fight. During that time,

I basically went up to him and tried to basically spar with him. He did his little punch, and then

I sidestepped it and I grabbed him. I picked him up on my shoulder, and I slowly lowered him down to the ground.

The reality was that I was used to wrestling around with guys who were 250 pounds, 6 foot 5, and he's 100 pounds, 5 foot tall.

He had no shot. Literally, he only had a prayer of winning. Any of those girls in my weightlifting class who were bench pressing 70 pounds, with any man who was in reasonable shape, who takes care of himself in any reasonable way, they literally stand no chance.

It would be an act of divine intervention for them to ever even remotely have a chance in physical combat.

That's just the way it works. That's why in a past generation, if I asked the question, should we encourage women to be strong and courageous, all the men would chuckle because they know that women have no prayer in a one -on -one fight with the standard man.

They're just woefully outclassed. They're woefully outmatched. They're smaller and they're weaker, and weight has a lot to do with it, and strength has a lot to do with it.

A strength differential of 280 -pound bench compared to a 70 -pound bench press, there's no hope there.

God would literally have to send his angels and do a miracle for that to ever work. Now, why do

I say this? Well, if we're going to ask this question, we'll first ask this question as it relates to strength.

Should women be encouraged to be strong? Well, there's a very real sense in which everyone, if you're trying to encourage a woman to be strong, any man who knows how these things actually work, who knows the strength differential between the standard woman and the standard man, every man is just going to kind of chuckle at that.

Should women be encouraged to be strong? Well, obviously not because they're engaging in an endeavor that's doomed to fail.

No matter how hard they try, they're not going to be able to compete with an average man and an average test of physical strength.

Why would you even remotely encourage them to do something that they are wholly unsuited and undesigned to do?

So when you think about something like that, what do you make of that? How do you relate that basic, brute reality with what's happening in Proverbs 31, where the virtuous woman clothes herself with strength?

Well, the virtuous woman is going to clothe herself with strength in comparison to her fellow females.

So there's a type of woman who will basically, if we're going to stay within the weightlifting kind of categories and try to think through this kind of thing, there is a kind of woman who is going to clothe herself with weakness and be unable to perform the basic housekeeping kind of responsibilities that she is responsible to perform and will basically clothe herself in weakness.

Instead of just being a normal, fit, standard girl who can bench press maybe 65, 70 pounds kind of thing, she's going to let her muscles atrophy.

She's going to spend a lot of time sitting on the couch, and she's going to let herself go physically.

So basically, the housewifing or homemaking in of itself isn't a job that's incredibly physically demanding, but then if you turn yourself into a couch potato, then it might be that instead of having average female strength of bench pressing 60, 70 pounds or something like that, you could barely even lift a bar.

In fact, you probably can't even lift a bar because you've let yourself go to such an extent. So the virtuous woman is going to not just be filled with sloth.

She's going to pursue strength in comparison to a woman, which may mean that she is average in terms of her physical strength, but then that will allow her to be diligent with the responsibilities she's given.

But in comparison to a man, she is always going to be woefully the weaker vessel.

That's just the way it's going to work. And so in an objective way compared to human adults, she is going to be considered weak, and you shouldn't encourage her to be strong.

And what you would never want to do is take women and put them in jobs that require objective adult human physical strength.

If you try to do that kind of thing, essentially you're going to need three or four women to do what one man could do, and maybe three or four women couldn't even do what one man could do.

That's just simply the way it works. So there's a sense in which when you're asking a question like this, should we encourage women to be strong and courageous?

If we're just talking about the strength part, should we encourage women to be strong? Well, obviously not strong like a man's strong because you're dooming that woman to a failed enterprise, and that's not how she's designed to be.

Should she be strong in comparison to another woman? Yes. Should she be strong in comparison to young children?

Yes. Should she be strong in comparison to a man? No. Or even a teenage boy?

No. That's just the way it works. No, we shouldn't be encouraging them to be strong in that way.

And the fact that we live in a society right now that's primary way that we encourage women or appraise women is we describe them in order to build their self -esteem as strong and powerful women.

It's a joke. It's something that's just absolutely ridiculously absurd, and no amount of Marvel movies is going to remove the absurdity of it all.

That's just not what women are designed to do. Now, how does this relate to the idea of being courageous?

Well, certainly there's a sense in which a woman needs to basically have moral or mental strength to persevere and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.

Certainly a woman needs to have a certain degree of courage in comparison to other women, but just like the idea of strength, women aren't naturally built for courage in the same sort of way, and this may get me in even more trouble than the last part.

Women aren't made for courage in the same way that a man is made for courage. They're not made for courage in terms of their constitution, and then they're not made for courage even mentally in terms of their constitution.

And this is why God's primary admonition to men is to be strong and to be courageous, because God's designed men to have strength and designed men with more courage than he's designed the standard woman.

Now, you can just look at the standard amount of courage that is present in most men, and most young men, you can just watch

YouTube videos, and one of the things you're going to find is the standard young man has significantly more courage than the standard young woman, and the reason why that's obvious is because of all the dangerous activities that the standard young man is going to engage in over and against the standard young woman who is much more cautious in the kind of activities that she's going to engage in.

So God has designed men uniquely to have courage, and the reason why God has designed men with an abundance of courage is because God has certain roles and responsibilities for men that are better fulfilled with the use of that courage and that strength.

Now, this will show up even in how we train young men and how we train young women.

So, if you think about just standard parental advice, if I'm trying to train up my sons to be men,

I'm going to train up my sons to have courage and to be strong, and that kind of courage and strength that I'm going to try to instill in them would be the kind of courage that would allow them to face difficult situations and dangerous situations.

And so, as you think about what it means to actually train a young boy, one of the things that you're going to realize is that there are certain situations that these young boys might find themselves in that you expect them to respond to and encourage.

So, if one of my sons were to ever see someone beating up a woman, one of the things that I would want to encourage and instill in them is a moral kind of responsibility to go and to face that danger and to not be afraid, but to help that girl who's in danger.

I would want my sons to think that they have some moral responsibility to have the kind of courage needed to go into that sort of situation and to protect that woman at the risk of their own personal safety.

If there is a shooter, an active shooter in a building, I would want to train my sons that once they get into their teenage years, maybe not when they're five years old, once they get into their teenage years,

I would want to train them with the kind of fearlessness and the kind of courage necessary to say that if you see someone pull out a gun, all of you charge that man at the same time and he may get one of you, but the rest of you are going to get him.

With young boys, with men, that's the kind of thing that you're trying to instill in them, this idea of facing danger, of having courage.

For the vast majority of human history, it has been the courage of men that has gone to war against the tyranny of other men.

Now, what I wouldn't want to encourage my daughter to do is I wouldn't want to encourage and try to instill in my daughter that same kind of impulse because she's made fundamentally different.

So if she sees a man beating up a woman,

I wouldn't necessarily try to encourage her in the same sort of way to go physically try to confront that man and to try to help in that same kind of situation because one of the things to realize is that one strong man can take out two women just as easily as he can take out one.

She's fundamentally made in a different way. I would encourage her to seek help in a different sort of way.

One of the things with my daughter, if someone were to try to kidnap her, I wouldn't encourage her to try to fend that person off.

I would encourage her to first take the option of running. So I wouldn't encourage her to have that kind of courage, that kind of courage or strength to stand up to physical danger.

I bring all this up to essentially say when you think about the issue of courage, there's certainly

God has designed men to have courage in a different way than women. Now instantaneously when you say something like that, the reaction to that is going to be that isn't there situations though where women are responsible to have some kind of courage, right?

So you're saying that you wouldn't want to train them to have courage like a man kind of courage but isn't there a female kind of courage that they need to have as well?

Well sure there's a female kind of courage they should have just like there's a female kind of strength that they have. But then if you consider the weightlifting metaphor, one of the things that you want to encourage the woman to do in her pursuit of strength is you don't want her to pursue being able to bench press 285 pounds kind of strength and you shouldn't have that expectation put on her or she's going to ultimately be doomed to fail.

Now you want to encourage her to pursue like a 70 pound bench press kind of strength that's what you want her or something around that range.

So you want her to encourage that kind of strength but then in the same way you want to encourage her to pursue that kind of courage meaning you want her to be courageous for a woman but you don't want her to be courageous for a man and so you have different expectations of man courage than you do of woman courage.

So just like you might expect a man to pursue significantly more strength than 70 pound bench press strength you might also encourage a man to have significantly more courage than 70 pound bench press woman kind of courage just to do the metaphor as far as that goes.

So certainly there are some situations in life where women are going to have to have courage and they're going to have to stand firm in the faith and they're going to have to refuse to deny the

Lord even if they're subject to torture or martyrdom. Sure there's a situation where you can back a woman into a corner and she has no way out and there's no escape and you need her to be strong mentally you need her to not fall apart you need her to not deny the faith but then it's not men's job just to throw women into the front line into situations that require courage and strength.

What you want to do is as men, men are uniquely designed to fulfill those roles and that's why

God's designed men to be leaders and women to be followers. And so certainly if you back a woman into a corner and there's no escape she's going to have to have some kind of courage but it's men's job to take the lead and to have initiative and to have much more courage than the standard woman is going to have and then these lowered expectations for strength and courage actually show up in how a man and a woman relate to each other.

So there are times in the month where a woman is not going to have the mental fortitude and is not going to have the mental courage that a man is going to have.

And so there's a kind of man who basically is going to look at a woman who doesn't have the same kind of emotional fortitude and doesn't have the same kind of emotional strength and he's just going to look at her in some kind of harsh and unloving way and basically say to her, hey you need to man up.

That isn't a helpful response. The opposite might be that when that man lives with his wife in an understanding way and says that she's built differently and that doesn't mean to give her a complete and total pass to have zero courage and zero strength but he is going to encourage her to have the kind of strength appropriate to a woman and the kind of courage appropriate to a woman and he's going to make certain allowances as far as that goes.

And there might be plenty of times where the man looks at a woman who is having an emotional breakdown that doesn't make a whole lot of sense to him and his response to that is not just to berate her for being emotional and not having courage and not having it all together but his response may be just to go give her a hug.

And that's the kind of thing that a good husband might do but he's only going to do that if he understands that women and men are fundamentally different and that God's made us in different ways and the strength and courage that is required of a man is going to be the expectations for strength and courage for a man are significantly higher than for a woman.

So the point there is just to say should we encourage women to be strong and courageous? Well certainly we should encourage women to be strong and courageous but not in the same way that a man should be encouraged to be strong and courageous.

These virtues of strength and courage are predominantly associated with masculinity and we used to be able to tell the difference and make these simple basic moral calculations and as a result of feminism we've lost the ability to do that anymore.

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