Doubt

I have been struck by a terrifying thought: How much of my morality is simply gender-socialization?

I can talk quite prettily about how love will save the world, about the need to build communities that care about each other by building individual connections between people who care about each other, about learning to care for your neighbor and your neighbor's neighbor and on and on and on. And all of that is without a doubt the basis of my moral understanding. Everyone is a human being, and simply by virtue of being a human being they are deserving of dignity and respect.

But the real world is messy, and real human beings are complicated, and you can't love someone punitively. Therefore the other underlying tenet of my moral understanding is a well of infinite forgiveness, side-by-side and co-mingled with that bottomless well of compassion I try to cultivate. Without question this is influenced by my Catholic upbrining; people make jokes about "Catholic guilt" because of confession and a whole host of other things, but what is missing from those pithy understandings of Catholicism is that the guilt is not the point. The point is forgiveness. God is infinitely forgiving if we are sincerely contrite, and He will go on forgiving no matter how many times we screw something up.

The process of institutionalization took this incredibly noble ideal and turned it into the doctrine of dispensation, which was the straw that broke Martin Luther's back. And we all know where that went. On the whole, the Lutherans and the Calvinists and their doctrinal brethren are far, far more into guilt than Catholics ever were, but that's neither here nor there.

The point is: Forgiveness. You cannot love punitively. You cannot love and fail to forgive. If you want to teach someone that they matter as a human being, love and forgiveness, not guilt and shame, is the way to go. Jesus was down with this. He spent most of his time wallowing in the gutter with all those poor people that broke all kinds of social and even legal conventions, because: forgiveness.

But the practical effects of my understanding of these moral imperatives have the interesting, terrifying side effect of making me sometimes indistinguishable from that most perfect feminine form, the doormat.

I can rant and rave and rail against instutionalized misogyny (and I do) but when it comes to individuals, I have a hard time condemning. Because, forgiveness.

I can talk a big game about the need for personal responsibility in relationships, but I have a hard time implementing it because my moral understanding always, always leads me to undervalue my own needs and desires and over-emphasize someone else's. Like any good helpmeet, I'm quite willing to submerse myself in someone else's goals. The Quiverfull people could probably brainwash me in about two days flat.

There's no answer. Now that I've come face-to-face with the realization, I am always going to be living in the tension between my desire to be recognized as a full human being despite my gender and my belief that it is my duty to recognize everyone else as such. As long as there are people willing to take advantage of others, I will be a ripe target. And worse than the gullible fool with the wool pulled over their eyes, I know what I'm walking into, at least some of the time. But if I don't walk into it, the guilt of having failed torments me. Rock, meet hard place. Let someone else hurt me, or inflict an equally painful wound on myself.

I wonder if men that have similar conceptions of moral good feel emmasculated? Or effeminate.

Worst of all, the tension makes me question my beliefs. It makes me wonder if I'm not just creating an elaborate rationalization for behaving in exactly those ways that society expects me to behave. Maybe I should just shut up and sit down and look pretty, too. I do that pretty often, anyway, because you can't change anyone's minds by yelling at them or forcing them to confront things they're not ready to confront. So why, exactly, am I bothering with anything, again?

I've been unable to abandon either my moral principles or my belief that I can make a difference, so I guess living in the tension is working out. But it's stressful, and I am full to bursting with doubt that's spilling out over every decision I make. I doubt everything these days, myself most of all.