Gender Stereotypes: Should We Encourage Men To Be Sensitive And Caring?

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Listen and enjoy this installment of Iron Sharpening Iron as Pastor Tim answers your sincere questions.

Here's Pastor Tim. On this episode of Bible Bash, we will be answering the question, should we encourage men to be sensitive and caring?

Now we've gone from the type of society that was trying to produce strong and courageous men and sensitive and caring women to the type of society that is predominantly looking for the character traits of strength and courage in women and the character traits of sensitivity and compassion we are looking for those in men.

And the net result of this project essentially is that we're producing the kind of society that is neither characterized by sensitivity or compassion or strength and courage.

So the more that we try to encourage women to be strong and courageous, one of the things that we find is that the type of strength and courage that is actually present in our society doesn't really seem to be what might be described as real strength and courage.

But then the same thing is happening as it relates to the idea of sensitivity and compassion. Now when we put forward men as models of sensitivity and compassion, the net result is that your society itself doesn't look very sensitive and doesn't look very compassionate.

So we talk about these things a lot. We talk about strength and courage. We'll describe women as being strong and courageous.

We'll describe men as being sensitive and compassionate. But these things seem to be distorted and these things seem to be fundamentally twisted.

Now when you ask the question should we encourage men to be sensitive and compassionate, one of the things to realize is that men are not naturally oriented to be sensitive and compassionate, just like women are not naturally oriented to be strong and courageous.

God has made men and women to be fundamentally different and then he's given us different roles that he expects us to perform.

The roles that he has given us are going to be fulfilled on the basis of these traits that we naturally have.

Now if you think about the way that marriage works in general, one of the things that you're going to find is that in marriage in general, one of the things that a man is trying to do in the course of his marriage or raising children is he's trying to encourage his wife to be strong and courageous to some degree.

So because men are made with an abundance of strength and courage, one of the things that actually happens in the course of a relationship is a man is going to be pushing his wife and he's going to be pushing his children to have more strength and courage than they naturally might have.

And part of the problem with this is that if a man is not careful, one of the things that he's going to do is he's going to treat his wife and he's going to treat his children as if they are exactly the same as him and have the exact same disposition as he actually has in many ways.

So the man is going to be pushing his family to have more strength and courage than they might naturally have.

But then at the same time, a woman is going to be pushing her family in her own way to have more sensitivity and compassion than they might naturally have.

And part of the conflict that happens within the course of any marriage is going to be that you have these two basic impulses that are colliding at various points.

And so the stereotypical man, if he sees one of his kids fall down on the ground, fall off a bike and has a scrape on his knee, the standard man is going to look at his son if his son falls off the bike or even his daughter if his daughter falls off the bike and scrapes her knee.

The standard guy is just going to look at that and say, Hey, it's a flesh wound. Get over it. Keep on going.

Quit crying and move on. The standard woman at that point is going to see this scrape and then she's going to essentially try to comfort the child and say,

Oh, poor baby, and then kiss it and make it feel better and put a mandate on it and everything else. And so as you think about the way that a man might relate to his children and a woman might relate to her children, one of the things to realize is that the woman is going to be oriented towards compassion and the man is going to be oriented towards strength.

And this is the way it works. And a lot of conflicts can actually happen as it relates to these two basic impulses, which are colliding and clashing.

And so the man looks at the child who just got hurt and essentially says, Hey, did the limb fall off?

No, you're okay. Maybe the limb did fall off. Get some duct tape and tape it back on.

You'll be fine. It'll reattach. But then the lady, as far as that goes, she's going to look at a man who has that kind of response and she might be tempted to resent him for having that kind of response and to scowl at him and to be irritated at him and frustrated with him and wish that he had a little bit more sensitivity and a little bit more compassion.

And the man essentially is going to look at his wife and say, Hey, I'm not trying to, you know, the stereotypical man is going to look at her and say,

We're not trying to raise sissies here. We're not trying to raise pansies here. We need everyone to man up and have strength and have courage.

And part of the difference there that's actually happening in those moments is the man is trying to encourage strength and courage.

And the woman is trying to encourage sensitivity and compassion. And there's some kind of place for both of these impulses.

And what actually needs to happen is that one of the things that we need to realize is that men and women are fundamentally different as far as these things are concerned.

And we have different kinds of strength. So if you put a man by himself, you know, and this is part of the way that God's designed things to be.

God says it's not good for a man to be alone, so he's going to need a helper fit for him. But then the same thing could happen with a woman.

You put a woman by herself alone, you could say the same kind of thing. It's not good for a woman to be alone. So they both have corresponding strengths.

But then if you push these corresponding strengths to the limit, one of the things that's going to happen is you're going to end up with a distorted view of reality.

So one of the things you need is you need both of these things. That's what you need. So you need the man to be encouraging the strength and the courage.

You need the woman to be encouraging sensitivity and compassion. And if all you have is just the masculine impulse to encourage strength and compassion at every single scenario, then what might happen in that kind of arrangement is that there is no place to be found for sadness.

There is no place to be found for grief. There is no place to be found for any sort of rejoicing with those who rejoice and weeping with those who weep.

There's no place for any of that because essentially any hint or display of emotion might be viewed by the man.

If there's no female check on that at all, there's tendencies along those lines that every single display of emotion is going to be essentially viewed as inappropriate and out of place and a sign of weakness that needs to be stamped out.

Now obviously if you want to produce in your society the type of men who are going to be able to storm the beaches of Normandy, you're going to have to instill in them a great degree of sensitivity and courage.

One of the things you find when you look in the society that we actually live in right now, we're living in a matriarchal society and so a lot of the sensitivity impulses there are being amplified in the kind of society we live in.

Then none of the strength and courage impulses are being amplified. Part of this has to do with the fact that single motherhood is on the rise and there are no father figures to mitigate against these sensitivity and compassion.

Then you're living in the kind of society where there's no check on the sensitivity and compassion. One of the things that happened is that we're living in a society right now that seems to be unable to face risk at a fundamental and primary level.

You don't have that masculine impulse pushing on that sensitivity and compassion, which is a good thing, but you don't have that masculine kind of impulse that's pushing on it.

Growing up for me, it was sticks and stones can break my bones, but words can never hurt me. We were trained to be strong.

We were trained to be courageous. We were trained to not care what other people think about us, but then the standard kind of millennial and on at this point seems to be unable to handle any kind of criticism.

If he's not universally praised by his peers or by his loved ones, the standard man and the standard woman are going to be reduced to tears and not know how to move on and not know how to ever bear to be around people anymore who ever dared to possibly suggest that they may have anything that they could perhaps be doing that was even remotely wrong.

We're living in a society right now that has magnified these virtues of sensitivity and compassion to the neglect of the virtues of strength and courage.

As you think about this broader question, should we be encouraging men to be sensitive and compassionate?

Yes, we should be encouraging men to be sensitive and compassionate, but we need to retain the weightlifting metaphor that I used in our last podcast relating to should we be encouraging women to be strong and courageous.

If you think about these things as it relates to strengths and weaknesses and gender differences, one of the things

I said in the last episode is that your standard man is going to be able to bench press significantly more than your standard woman.

As I took weightlifting class in high school, one of the things to realize is that your standard teenage girl in high school was bench pressing the bar.

That's about 45 pounds. Then if she worked really hard, maybe she can put a 10 and a 15 on each side and get up to about 75 pounds or something like that.

But that was just the way things worked. But then your standard guy, he was going to be benching 135.

He's going to be benching 185 pounds, 150 pounds.

If you say 150 pounds on your average guy, then you have guys who are significantly stronger than that. But the net result is a man is going to have significantly more upper body strength than standard female, particularly if he tries and particularly if he works at it.

One of the things that I said was in high school, I was bench pressing around 285 pounds when

I got out of high school. The standard woman bench pressing 60 pounds or so.

There's a big difference in there. If you just think about those kind of numbers as it relates to strength, then one of the things you're going to realize is that men are going to have significantly more strength than women.

Then the kind of strength that we're encouraging in women is going to be significant. We have lowered expectations for the amount of strength that we're encouraging.

What you don't want, you don't want to create a woman who is benching 250 pounds. Because if you create a woman who is benching 250 pounds and has 250 pounds strength and 250 pounds in comparison as metaphor works, courage, that kind of woman is one of the things.

That's not really possible in the main. But if you could get the woman to be that, then she's going to be rejecting her design at a fundamental level.

Women are not geared towards strength in that same sort of way. You don't want to create a monster that is basically repulsive to everyone.

But then in the same way, you can imagine that the standard girl has 250 pounds of in comparison sensitivity and compassion as compared to the man who has his 45 pounds sensitivity and compassion.

So the thing is we're living in a society right now that thinks that the way to have a good relationship between men and women is to somehow get the men to have the same level of sensitivity and compassion as a woman.

But the problem is that that's never going to happen for one. You're never going to get men to have as much sensitivity and compassion as women because we're not designed to have that amount of sensitivity and compassion.

And when you do, the net result of that is going to be you're going to have a weaker society. You're going to emasculate men in the eyes of women.

And so if you could get your man to be as emotional and sensitive and compassionate as you are as a female, you're not going to be attracted to him.

You're not going to desire him physically. You're going to be repelled by him, and not only are you going to be repelled by him, he's not even going to be able to pull it off in the same kind of way.

He's just going to be a pitiful picture of a man trying to fundamentally – the picture of a man that way, he might as well be wearing a dress.

So you look at a man wearing a dress, he's going to be attractive to no one, and it's going to be a caricature.

And so should we encourage men to be sensitive and compassionate? Yes, but in relationship to other men.

So you don't want a man who has – to follow the metaphor – 20 pounds of sensitivity and compassion, and mostly he's just a brick wall of strength and courage.

You don't want that. But then neither do you want a man who has no strength and courage and is just sensitivity and compassion on crack to where essentially he's reduced to a weeping mess of tears any time he doesn't get his way.

And no one validates him or affirms him or encourages him in the way that he wants to be encouraged.

And so certainly the standard man needs to grow in sensitivity and compassion. And you put a standard man in a relationship with a woman, and she's going to push on him in certain ways and cause him to grow in that.

But then in the same way, the standard man is going to push on the standard woman to help her to grow in strength and courage.

But then the net result is not that you have two individuals who are going to essentially have the same levels of strength and courage.

The net result is that the woman is still going to have the abundance of sensitivity and compassion, and the man is still going to have overwhelmingly more strength and courage than the woman.

But you put them together, and these strengths that they have are going to counterbalance each other and provide a fuller picture of what it means to be in the image of God.

And part of the reason why many kids are not being successful in life and resorting to crime and everything else is because they don't have these two different types of impulses that are pushing against them in different directions to help them to be more complete people in general.

And so as you think about the way that society actually works, what you want is you want men to be significantly stronger and significantly more courageous than women, and you want women to be significantly more sensitive and significantly more compassionate.

But you don't want either one of these kinds of virtues to be pushed to the extreme, and if you don't have the mitigating effect of the opposite gender, what might happen is that each one of these are going to tend to be distorted.

And so the man's strength and courage can end up in being foolhardy or reckless or stoic or completely insensitive, and then on the other end, the woman's sensitivity and compassion can be unrealistic in certain ways and turn into tyrannical

Karens and that kind of thing. And so what you want is you want both of those things to happen.

Now, what happens in this society is that once you begin to make females who objectively do not have the strength and courage as a standard male is going to have, when you make them the standard and then you think about what's actually happening in society at a broader societal level, you make them in all the movies.

They're the examples of being the strong and the courageous and the backbone of the family and the rock and everything else.

One of the things that happens is that you lose what these actual virtues actually mean because you're defining strength and courage as a female equivalent of strength and courage.

And so essentially what's happening is you're looking to a weakened, sickly kind of strength and courage as your example of strength and courage.

And then the same thing. When the predominant trait you're looking for is not a strong man, you're looking for a sensitive and compassionate man.

Like you're looking fundamentally for sensitivity and compassion in men. What you're going to find is you're not going to find a very accurate picture of sensitivity and compassion because you're going to be looking to someone who that's not their natural strength to find that kind of virtue.

And then what happens in society is when you pick the wrong role models in these ways, women become the role models of strength and courage.

Men become the role models for sensitivity and compassion. You look around at society and you say, hey,

I don't even know what these words mean anymore because we've locked ourselves in our houses for a year because we're so strong and courageous.

We're so strong and courageous that we can't bear the thought of being criticized ever, and we're so strong and courageous that if you don't affirm who

I think myself to be, I'm going to sue you and take your business.

And we're so sensitive and compassionate as a society that essentially – and we're so caring as a society that anytime you say something that we don't like, we're going to try to destroy you and cancel you and basically destroy your reputation, destroy your ability to make a business.

What ends up happening when you mix up these things is that sensitivity and compassion no longer look like sensitivity and compassion, and strength and courage no longer look like strength and courage.

So as you think about these kind of things, certainly you want to encourage the man to have sensitivity and compassion for a man, and certainly you want to encourage the woman to have strength and courage for a woman.

But what you don't want to do is you want to remember that these traits in themselves are better embodied by different genders than what our society is currently telling us.

Now, as you think through these things, then you want to ask yourself, well, how does this relate to spiritual issues?

So as you think through some of the things that the Bible says, as it relates to the brute physical realities, men are naturally made to have more strength than women.

And then there's a kind of courage that men actually have in abundance, much more so than women, the kind of courage that is dependent upon physical strength.

And then in the same way, women naturally, in terms of their disposition and composition, they have more sensitivity and more compassion than the standard man does.

And these are physical realities, but how do these relate to spiritual things? Because men are told to rejoice those who rejoice and weep with those who weep.

And the wife who's married to a husband who is not obedient to the Word, she's told to not fear anything that is frightening.

We're all told to stand firm in the faith, to be strong, to be courageous. So what do we make of these things as it relates to spiritual battles?

We're not waging war uniquely in the flesh, but we're waging war against principalities and powers.

And we have enemies and we're supposed to take every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.

We're supposed to declare war on our sin. We're in a take -no -prisoner kind of way. Both men and women are uniquely told to battle in this kind of way and to have strength and courage in this kind of way and everything else.

And so how do you relate the broader discussion of gender stereotypes with pursuing spiritual growth or sanctification?

What do we do with these kind of things? Well, one of the things to realize is that as you lose the gender stereotypes, what ends up happening is that these gender stereotypes were meant to give us physical pictures to help us with spiritual battles.

So if you undermine strength at every single level, then you lose these pictures that were meant to draw on as it relates to us even engaging in these spiritual battles that we're supposed to fight.

So if you can uphold these gender stereotypes, then one of the things you realize is that if you want to know what it means to be strong and courageous in your faith, then what you need to be looking to is the example of strength and courage in reality.

Look to men as examples of strength and courage in reality. But then if you're looking to examples of women to be your predominant examples of actual strength and courage, then it seems to me that you're distorting the picture of the kind of fighting that we should actually be fighting.

So one of the things to realize is that the same thing is happening with sensitivity and compassion.

If you are looking to men to be examples of sensitivity and compassion and to be other -centered and to be caring and to lay down your life for other people, one of the things that you're going to find is that you want to look to individuals who have these things in abundant supply in the physical realm so that you can make those kind of applications for the spiritual realm.

So the last thing that we would be wanting to say is that strength and courage are the unique province of men and sensitivity and compassion are the unique province of women.

It's just to say that God's created us different, and He's given us different gifts, and He's given us different abilities. And one of the things that we want to do is we don't want to go to war against these gender stereotypes.

But we do want to encourage men to be uniquely strong and courageous, and women we want to encourage to be uniquely sensitive and compassionate.

And then we need to make adjustments related to our genders at that point in order to have a fuller picture of what these virtues actually mean and in order to help us to fight the spiritual battles that God has us to fight.

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