Womanly virtues Friday

Why talk about womanly virtues at all?
I mean, why not just talk about virtue tout court? Is there some reason to divide out womanly virtue from manly virtue? Isn't that all rather old fashioned and, quite frankly, sexist?

Yesterday, I wrote about virtue in a sense that applies to both men and women. Why not do that all the time?

Well, I'm not going to answer all of the above questions at once and I may not get to some of them at all. But it seems to me that one reason for talking about womanly virtue is that their is a very important sense in which even the possibility of virtue has been denied to women. Virtue when applied to men has meant the ability to do something well. And a man is still regarded as virtuous even if his admitted skills lead to failure. If anything, the glorious failure is deeply admired in men. When applied to women it has too often meant the fact that she has not and will not do certain things.

You can see this right in the language when you consider the following word: virgin. It means, intact, untouched, unspoiled. And it means a woman. You can talk about male virgins of course but it is always a special qualification like saying a flying car. If you don't believe me, open any Catholic book of saints and count the female virgin martyrs. Then go back and count the male virgin martyrs.

Or we can look at a couple of perceptive comments of Cristina Nehring's:

To be respected as a thinker in our world, a woman must cease to be a lover. To pass for an intellectual of any distinction, she must either renounce romantic love altogether or box it into a space so small in her life that it attracts not attention.

And she goes on to show how women who have had extravagant romantic adventures are diminished in intellectual life as a consequence; perhaps most tellingly, they are diminished by by both men with oppressive attitudes towards women  and by feminists! But, as Nehring goes on to say, no such limitation applies to men:

Over the centuries, we find, in fact, almost the opposite assumptions shaping the valuation of male writers. From Ovid, Petrarch, and Dante, to Hemingway, Henry Miller, Norman Mailer, and Michel Houellbecq, literary men have been admired rather than punished for their active amorous lives—whether or not their overtures were crowned with success.

And even when men make complete fools of themselves or behave basely—even so far as to sexually exploit serfs as Tolstoy confessed in his diaries (he seems to have raped them for all intents and purposes) or used their power to sexually exploit teenage girls as Gandhi did—these men are never disqualified from consideration for their other qualities.

It's no accident that the sexual revolution begot feminism. Women took one look at Playboy and immediately recognized that there was nothing in this for them as women. For no matter how good the sex was, this sexual liberation was only going to diminish them. There was always a recognition in the sexual revolution that women should also allowed to do anything sexually that men are being allowed to do but that always seems to lead back to the same set of traps.

Nehring is on to something very profound and it is this: women will never really be allowed to be good at anything until they are allowed to be really good at love.