A Challenge Accepted!

After reading this post on The Art of Manliness I felt like accepting his challenge to do for womanliness what he has done for manliness. Anyone who knows me knows how much I think, talk, and read about this topic. I'm not the first person to write about femininity, and I am not aiming to be the best at it. I hope, however, to at least add insight from a different angle that maybe a few people will be able to understand. I have some experience of femininity, considering I am a woman. Also, I was raised by a very feminine woman who had five daughters, and I am my daddy's little girl!  Other that that and my Classical Liberal Arts degree I have zero credentials in this realm of gender psychology and who knows what other credentials I might need to be able to write a real book on the topic.

Women practicing the old art of talking 

while trying to make it appear as though they are being productive, 

hence the spools of thread

The very first step one must make on the journey to discovering the difference between men and women is to accept the fact that they are different. Without this initial discovery, which usually comes through some experience that feels at lot like an unbearably painful crisis, there can be no coming to understand the opposite sex or even your own sex.  When I was younger, back before I was told by others that there is no real difference between men and women, that there was a difference between boys and girls was obvious to me, Obviously there is no essential difference (I mean "essential" in the Aristotelian sense), but there is a difference and it feels pretty essential; perhaps we could call it a significant difference. This first step boils down to trusting your own perception of reality regardless of whether that perception is agreed upon by others. More on this later...

While the first step is fundamentally philosophical, the second step is essentially Christian: one must believe with his whole heart and soul that the other person over there who is causing him so much grief or pain or loneliness is actually trying to love him. This is the part that requires faith, faith that feels a lot like Faith with a capital F because ultimately this must be our attitude towards life and God himself.  God is a Father; he chose to reveal himself to us as masculine, so our understanding of masculinity and femininity as it pertains to the mundane things of life is directly related to our eternal happiness! But I digress... the little faith comes before that. So take a moment to accept the notion that no one is essentially evil , but that everyone, men and women, want to be good and are motivated by that more than any other desire. 

Once you have done these two things you will have a foundation for understanding, but it is not going to be easy. As Christ said, "O Father, Lord of heaven and earth,... thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them to the little ones."

God Himself became one of those little ones for this very reason.

Now before I lose you because I just revealed my blatantly Catholic bias, let me say one thing: Love is not the result of division but of unity. You were brought to this site out of a desire to love, to understand another so that you could love and be loved in return.  We all have the same desire to love and to be loved and that is what unites us. Masculinity and femininity are natural divisions and they exist for a reason, namely: to inspire attraction in order to create unity. Whether it makes you feel good or not, this is a truth heartily embraced by the Catholic Church, and this is the mode through which I have come to understand the truth about love that I strive to practice more perfectly everyday, in my own imperfect little way. 

Furthermore, I cannot use modernist language to explain this, not because I am not fluent in modern language, but because the language of True Love does not translate into modern, politically correct, androgynous, atheistic language. To become a believer in True Love, in the romance of knights in shining armor and damsels in distress, one must take off the glasses of modernism and cover your face with the bridal veil of Catholic Medieval simplicity. The middle ages were not Catholic by chance but by necessity. The archetypal virtuous medieval knight and beautiful gentle princess are the natural and necessary conclusion to the belief in the One True Sacrifice of Christ on the cross and the Fiat of his Blessed Mother.