This essay is the last in a four-part exchange between Catholic theologian Rachel Coleman and radical feminist philosopher Kate Phelan. Click here to see all four installments.
Coleman is right: one cannot assert the reality of sex-class without asserting the reality of sex. That is, without acknowledging that sex is real, that two distinct groups of people—male and female—exist, one can hardly claim that the sexes are turned into political classes, that male people become masters and female people subjects.
I did not mean to suggest that radical feminism denies the reality of sex. Rather, my point was that the reality that radical feminism is concerned to assert is that of sex-class. In other words, for radical feminism, the question is not “is sex real or is it not?” It is “does sex have a political status or does it not?” Radical feminism answers that question in the affirmative.
Radical feminism’s view that the sexes are classes does, however, complicate its understanding of sex. Once one discovers that members of the male sex are identified and raised as fit for mastery, while members of the female sex are identified and raised as fit for subjection, one sees the sexes through new eyes. Might certain sex differences be attributable to the political conditions of patriarchy? How might the sexes, and thus our understanding of them, change under different conditions? Once men do not have sex-right, will they remain predatory toward women, and will women remain vulnerable to men? If women cease to be vulnerable, will we continue to see the female body as penetrable and weak, as we do now? How might men’s relationship to women’s bodies, and women’s relationship to their own bodies, change? How might this alter female comportment and morphology? In short, how might the apparently transcendental reality of sex emerge as contingent?
Of course, we cannot answer these questions with any confidence until we have changed the political conditions. Radical feminists therefore acknowledge the reality of sex, but cautiously. They do not affirm it as transcendental.
Coleman worries that understanding “man” and “woman” as names of sex-classes will allow trans women to identify as women. But class is precisely not the sort of thing that one can identify into (or out of). One can no more identify into the position of sexual subject than one can identify into the position of worker.
Woman as Help-Meet
Coleman objects to my reading of Adam and Eve as human being and subject respectively. I found her discussion of the meaning of the Genesis creation stories fascinating, and I am grateful to her for challenging me to think more carefully.
Having done so, I now have some thoughts and questions—for myself and for Coleman.
First, I think it is not so clear whose—mine or Tikva Frymer-Kensky’s or John Paul II’s—is the anachronistic reading. Is it I who am reading the text in the light of the patriarchal denial of women’s humanity? Or is it Frymer-Kensky or John Paul II who are reading it in the light of the feminist insistence on women’s humanity?
Second, there is one sense in which patriarchal society has always recognised women as human beings, as referents of the term “man.” Marilyn Frye articulates this sense in her book, The Politics of Reality (a lovely title, in the context of Rachel and my discussion about reality, sex, and sex-class). She distinguishes between two senses of “human being:” a member of the species homo sapiens; and a full person. A member of the species homo sapiens has certain biological capacities and is worthy of certain treatment—humane treatment, in contrast to the treatment that nonhuman animals deserve (a member of the species homo sapiens ought not be penned up, neglected, whipped, starved, taken from its mother, put down). A full person is instead one who partakes of the “radical superiority” of the species homo sapiens, one who “may approach all other creatures with humanist arrogance,” one who is worthy of respect. Frye observes that while women have always been recognised as human beings in the first—the more minimal—sense, they have not—they are not—so recognised in the second sense.
So, how are we to understand this line from Genesis 1? “So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” How should we interpret John Paul II when he writes that “the human race, which takes its origin from the calling into existence of man and woman, crowns the whole work of creation; both man and woman are human beings to an equal degree, both are created in God’s image” or that “Man is a person, man and woman equally so, since both were created in the image and likeness of the personal God”?
Is there some equivocation in these lines? Is it the second sense of “human being’ that is intended with respect to men but the first sense with respect to women? Why does ‘man’ precede ‘woman’? – “God created he him; male and female created he them”; “both man and woman are human beings to an equal degree”; “Man is a person, man and woman equally so.” Why is woman both existentially (“And the rib, which the Lord God had taken from man, made he a woman, and brought her unto the man”) and etymologically (“And Adam said, This is now bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man”) derivative of man? What does Coleman make of this, I wonder. She quotes Frymer-Kensky: “[m]ale and female are created at the same time.” Initially, this struck me as patently false. Adam is the male and Eve is the female, and it is irrefutable that Adam precedes Eve. But Coleman explains that in Hebrew “adam” means humanity, and she also observes that the Hebrew term for male does not appear until the Hebrew term for female appears. Taken together, this would allow us to read the Adam who precedes Eve as a sexually unspecified human being, and to claim that male and female are created at the same time.
But, to speak frankly, I feel that interpretation is starting to border on the absurd. For it cannot be denied: Adam is the male to Eve’s female. So, it appears that we are being asked to read “Adam” as male at one (convenient) moment and as not male at another (convenient) moment. And are we to ignore the coincidence of the term for humanity naming the male person, and not the female? And, given that Catholicism rejects (rightly) the liberal myth of the sexually neutral human being, how are we to understand a sexually unspecified Adam?
Third, let us regain clarity on what is at issue between Coleman and I, which I take to be this: my suggestion that, like liberalism, Catholicism lacks the resources to achieve feminist ends. The question then is: how to understand “Catholicism”? As scripture? Or as practice? Or as both? On the one hand, I balk at the suggestion that Catholicism is scripture, even when the practice of Catholicism systematically and consistently defies it. Coleman acknowledges that “[t]here are . . . those (emphasis added) who read the Genesis creation stories as giving men license to dominate women or as asserting that women are somehow unequal to men,” but insists that “the Catholic tradition (emphasis added) has never subscribed to such a reading.” Does Coleman mean that there are those in the Catholic Church who read Genesis patriarchally? If so, on what grounds can they be discounted as part of the Catholic tradition?
As evidence that the Catholic tradition has never subscribed to a patriarchal reading of Genesis, Coleman offers Augustine’s De Bono Coniugali. It is true that Augustine writes, “For they are joined one to another side by side, who walk together, and look together whither they walk.” But he continues, “Then follows the connection of fellowship in children, which is the one alone worthy fruit, not of the union of male and female, but of the sexual intercourse. For it were possible that there should exist in either sex, even without such intercourse, a certain friendly and true union of the one ruling, and the other obeying” (emphasis added). The relationship between man and wife is at once a companionship and a hierarchy. (Why is it “man and wife,” not “man and woman” or “husband and wife”? What is the nature of a unity in which the man exists unto himself, while the woman exists only in relation to the man—as his wife? Is it “they [who] shall be one flesh” or is it she who shall be his flesh?)
As feminists have remarked, the relationship between men and women is unlike other oppressive relationships (capitalist and worker, slaveholder and slave, coloniser and colonised) in that it is conceived as a relationship of love. A relationship of love is one of “affection,” “tenderness,” “concern for,” “devotion to.” It is in all aspects the antithesis of an oppressive relationship. Frymer-Kensky is therefore right: Adam and Eve are companions. Feminism’s claim is the revolutionary one—namely, that sexual companionship is sexual oppression.
When I first read Kate Millett, I saw sexual relations through new eyes. I saw conquest degradation, humiliation, subjection, possession, mastery where previously I had seen love. I saw master and subject where previously I had seen two complements. For better or worse, I cannot unsee that. Consequently, I find it difficult to hear assurances of “companionship,” “unity,” “mutuality,” “equality” as much other than false flattery.
I can think of almost no better way to describe radical feminism’s dream than as one of a world in which—as John Paul II writes—“the woman is another ‘I’ in a common humanity.” But, in radical feminism’s view, Catholicism cannot deliver us to that world. For in the final analysis woman cannot become an I in a humanity that is named after the male—Adam.
