Theology of the Body Vs. Toxic Masculinity
How John Paul II equips us to respond to the crisis of male identity
There is a crisis around male identity in our culture. Men today are less likely to go to college, less likely to perform academically, more likely to be out of work, more likely to be incarcerated, more likely to be depressed or suicidal, and more likely to remain poor throughout their lives than their female counterparts. Simmering in the background of all of that is a general sense that men feel demoralized. The gains made for equality of women in the last fifty years have not been accompanied by any new understanding of manhood. Men do not know how to be men.
The Andrew Tate Approach: Take What You Can Get
In the absence of a clear direction, various champions of men have arisen to fill the gap. Some, like the self-proclaimed misogynist Andrew Tate, argue that men need to follow their natural instincts and become builders, takers, and warriors. “The masculine perspective is you have to understand that life is war,” says Tate. “It’s a war for the female you want. It’s a war for the car you want. It’s a war for the money you want. It’s a war for status. Masculine life is war.” He believes men have been softened by a culture that tells them to embrace their emotions rather than their ambitions. For Tate, the worst sin a man can commit is weakness. “If you could choose to build yourself from the ground up,” he says, “like from a video game—just tick characteristic boxes and build yourself—nobody would choose to be a liberal soy boy. Nobody would choose to be a small weak guy who has to cry when he gets upset.” This attitude has led Tate to such ignoble pursuits as pimping and online pornography, along with charges of human trafficking, all of which Tate justifies as natural outcomes for his willingness to be a man in a world that hates and suppresses masculinity.
The Jordan Peterson Approach: Be Dangerous, But in a Good Way
Though less vulgar, the philosophy of manhood offered by psychologist-turned-cultural-commentator Jordan Peterson is similar. “A harmless man is not a good man,” says Peterson. “A good man is a very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control.” Control is manly. Weakness is not. The enemy to true masculinity for both Tate and Peterson is feminism and its adoption by western culture which now demands that men give up their natural aggression. Peterson is heavily critical of the term “toxic masculinity,” a term originally invented by the men’s movement of the 1990s but which has come to be a pejorative term for any approach to manhood that thrives on violence and domination. “I see a backlash against masculinity and a sense that there’s something toxic about masculinity as such,” says Peterson, implying that the term is actually deployed as a way of pathologizing manhood itself.
Tate is only interested in male power for its own sake, but Peterson sees it as a tool for achieving virtue. He talks about the Bible a lot—he even has a new book all about the Bible—and he has become a darling in some Catholic circles (Bishop Barron, for example, has held three extensive interviews with him). Yet for all of that, Peterson is ostensibly an unbeliever. When he speaks of God, it is always as a metaphor. He describes masculinity as “an enacting of the logos” but he does not mean the logos incarnate, the Word who became flesh in Jesus Christ. Instead, he means something akin to what the ancient Greeks meant by logos before St. John adapted the term, a first principle of the human spirit that is only divine in a metaphorical sense. Peterson sees Scripture only as an unfolding morality play, and the heart of that play is a masculine willingness to show strength, to use your will to mold the world, and to never, ever be weak or dependent.
For this reason, Jesus is a confusing figure for Peterson. The whole Christian faith rests on a God-man who not only shows weakness but embraces it. That is complicating enough for the picture that Peterson wants to draw, but the teaching of Jesus makes the problem even more acute. Jesus tells us to be like little children and to embrace poverty. He says, “Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth” (Matthew 5:5). That last one particularly throws Peterson for a loop, as he admitted in an interview in 2018. His way around it is to assert that the word meek actually means “one who has a sword and knows how to use it, but keeps it sheathed.” This is, to put it mildly, nonsense. Meek means meek, whether in English or ancient Greek—mild-mannered, unassuming, and humble.
The Jason Evert Approach: Don’t Be Effeminate
While Peterson may not be a believer, the Petersonian viewpoint has gained traction among some Catholic influencers. Catholic chastity speaker Jason Evert says directly, “Toxic masculinity does not exist.” The real problem is “effeminacy.” He says, “Effeminacy, according to St. Thomas Aquinas, is when a man refuses to give up what is pleasurable in order to do what is arduous and difficult… It’s a softness in men… and men have been created, in my opinion, for hard things.” He is referring to the Summa Theologica II-II, Question 138, Article 1, in which Thomas argues that effeminacy is a hindrance to the virtue of perseverance. However, Evert pulls the term out of its context in several problematic ways.
Evert does not acknowledge that what Thomas says about effeminacy is built not on Scripture but on quotes from Aristotle, whose ancient Greek worldview perceived women as a kind of unfinished version of men. Evert draws a strong line between effeminacy and femininity, but neither Thomas nor Aristotle make any such distinction. For Thomas, effeminacy is being “womanish” and can also be associated with a certain kind of homosexuality, though Evert denies this as well. It is perhaps easy to forgive Thomas for his usage of effeminacy since it is relatively obscure and does not take away from the angelic doctor’s brilliance in other areas, but it is hard to understand why Evert would want to embrace this small part of Aquinas, especially since it requires so much re-definition on his part to do so. Moreover, describing perseverance and courage as uniquely male virtues is patently absurd. Any woman who has ever given birth to a child—the Blessed Mother of Our Lord included—has shown a rather striking example of natural perseverance and courage.
What Evert is reaching for is a way of describing masculinity that does not demonize or punish the natural instincts of boys, and on this he is right. Boys need a way of making meaning in their lives that includes understanding their maleness as a blessing. But rather than defining masculinity in a way that radically separates boys from anything deemed too feminine, a more Scriptural approach would have the masculine and the feminine acting in concert, producing human thriving that relies less on gender stereotypes and more on mutual self-giving. This is exactly what we see in John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.
The John Paul II Approach: Men and Women in Communion
Besides the possible exception of the Summa, I cannot think of a Catholic work that is referenced so often and read so little as Theology of the Body. In fact, it is incredibly difficult even to find a copy of Theology of the Body, or The Redemption of the Body and Sacramentality of Marriage, as the talks that have come to be known as Theology of the Body were originally titled. Instead, when searching for Theology of the Body, we find an almost endless array of books by other people claiming to interpret it for us. While some of these books are useful, they tend to focus on only one dimension of Theology of the Body, ignoring or downplaying the broad swath of what John Paul II was doing in those talks.
Theology of the Body is primarily a work of biblical exegesis. John Paul II moves painstakingly through the accounts of creation in Genesis, using them as a way of illuminating the bible’s testimony to the meaning of personhood. For John Paul, being a person is wrapped up not only in our being male and female, but in the communion that is meant to exist between the two:
There is a deep connection between the mystery of creation, as a gift springing from love, and that beatifying "beginning" of the existence of man as male and female, in the whole truth of their body and their sex, which is the pure and simple truth of communion between persons. When the first man exclaimed, at the sight of the woman: "This is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh" (Gn 2:23), he merely affirmed the human identity of both. Exclaiming in this way, he seems to say that here is a body that expresses the person.
The body is not just something we carry around with us. In our bodies, as men and women, we become persons when we enter into communion with one another.
Interestingly, John Paul emphasizes the things our bodies have in common more than what makes them different. He certainly notes the differences, for example the receptiveness of the female body or the generative faculty of the male body in the sexual act. But his prime concern is to show their oneness, their unity, and the incompleteness of the human person in the absence of one or the other. Male and female are “two ‘incarnations’ of the same metaphysical solitude before God and the world. They are two ways of ‘being a body’ and at the same time a man, which complete each other. They are two complementary dimensions of self-consciousness and self-determination and, at the same time, two complementary ways of being conscious of the meaning of the body.” The fullest revelation of God’s image and likeness found in humanity is male and female in communion, acting together as one. The greatest expression of that is marriage and sexual intimacy, but John Paul does not see that as exhaustive. In all walks of life, wherever men or women are, even in their solitude, they are made to be offering themselves as gifts to each other.
What does that self-gift look like? Sometimes it looks like being strong and protective, but often it also looks like accepting our weakness in a way that is open to God. This is counter-intuitive, but John Paul says that our fallenness is what makes male aggression seem natural to us. Examining the results of the fall in Genesis 3, he says, “The man seems to feel ashamed of his own body with particular intensity… for the man, shame united with lust will become an impulse to ‘dominate’ the woman (‘he shall rule over you.’).” While John Paul spends a great deal of time on Genesis, he is ultimately trying to lead us back to the Sermon on the Mount, because we find the richest explanation of our humanity in Christ’s call for us to offer ourselves as gifts to one another. Lust, shame, and domination are the enemies of that calling, reducing us to mere animals, and distorting the “nuptial meaning” of our bodies by rendering us simply objects for one another’s use.
What John Paul gives us is not a comprehensive definition of manhood, but it is a starting point for exploring varied models of masculinity. In the witness of his own life, we see how this can be lived out. John Paul II was healthy and athletic as a young man, but in his later years Parkinson’s Disease made him increasingly feeble. Yet he never retreated from the public eye. He made no apology for his drooling or his need for others to help him in basic ways. Even at his weakest moments, he offered himself as a gift to the Church and the world, and this has been an enduring witness even twenty years after his death. It is hard to see how his model of masculinity could possibly fit in with the models advocated by Tate, Peterson, or Evert. John Paul’s example is however consistent with the model offered by Jesus, who conquered sin and death not through tough guy bravado and unhindered ambition, not through the channeling of some kind of “inner monster” (in the words of Peterson) overcoming effeminacy, but through an absolute embrace of human weakness and a self-emptying gift of all He is for the sake of love.
Personally, I find John Paul’s example more compelling than any of the others, not only because I can see myself in it, but because I can see so many other men in it who are not normally thought about when discussions of sex, gender, and personhood are brought up. I am the father of boys with severe special needs. Whenever I am tempted to wax poetic about the human experience, my boys remind me that whatever I am tempted to say must be equally applicable to them as it is to everyone else. As their father, I am supposed to teach them how to be men, but what does that mean for boys who are mostly non-verbal and who rely on others to help them meet their most basic needs? I think John Paul II’s answer would be that I should show them through my own example that giving-yourself-even-in-weakness is what it means to be a man. That message may not have the immediate appeal to young men that the Tate/Peterson/Evert approach has, but it has the distinct advantage of being grounded in the truth of the Gospel. In a fallen world, in which we all face suffering, there will always be voices that push us to find our redemption in our most basic sinful impulses, while blaming others for ever making us think that such things were bad in the first place. But in the Kingdom of God, there is no room for self-justifying violence. Only love will finally conquer, and in the end only love will be able to show us how to be men.