I disagree. The way I see it is that females conform more readily to familial and societal expectations. Because expectations are viewed as natural, female conformance is viewed as hardwiring, but it is actually not because when the expectations change, so does female behavior.
For example, some friends of ours have a son who spends freely and has trouble maintaining employment, thus requiring a continuous financial subsidy from his parents, who do so in order to keep a roof over their granddaughter and prevent her from going into an even worse situation if given into the custody of her birth mother. These friends also have a daughter who has been tremendously successful in her career and never fails to give the perfect gift for someone’s birthday, but she also married very late and managed to have one child with the assistance of who knows what reproductive technology and then put the baby immediately into the care of a nanny. According to the world, the son is foolish and a failure and the daughter is wise and praiseworthy, but I think from the perspective of the Bible, both son and daughter have greatly failed in their callings as man and woman. But how many Christians recognize that these days?
Here’s another example. Back some hundred years ago there was very strong social pressure for women to be chaste and strong shaming if they were not. Not surprisingly, women behaved much more chastely than men, and the perception arose that sexual restraint was a biological attribute of women. There was also the somewhat contradictory view that young women would often not choose the right sort of man if left to their own devices, so strong guidance was applied. However, in more recent decades, those social constraints have been thrown off, and we are now witnessing what happens when the female id is unleashed, and let me say, the results are not pretty. Except quite a few Christians are unable to see that, and fail to attribute widespread single-momery, years of unfruitful cohabitation, hooking up with bad men, and female sexual promiscuity to lack of wisdom on the part of women.
And so if we think young women are naturally on the track towards wisdom and maturity in a way that young men aren’t, I think it is because we are not seeing our present reality with biblical eyes.
Again, I disagree. My wife studied English Literature, and sometime back we had a discussion about the core elements of a movie appealing to men or a movie appealing to women. One of the core elements for a man’s movie is that the male protagonist receives training and equipment from an older mentor that helps him to victory over his enemy, and my wife and I rattled off a whole list of movies in which this happens. But in movies appealing to women, the female protagonist almost never has a relationship with an older female mentor. A prime example is the Star Wars movies. A central aspect of the original trilogy is the training of Luke by Obi Wan and Yoda and his becoming a Jedi Master only after much effort and repeated failure, but in the remake trilogy, I have heard that Rey (the Luke replacement) needs no training and is simply awesome from the beginning. I think men would not enjoy a movie in which the hero is simply awesome from the beginning with no need of growth and guidance from a master, but I think that such absence is not troubling to women. And beyond modern movies, I could cite fairy tales and examples from history to demonstrate that the mentor-disciple relationship is natural for men and less so for women.
I will grant, however, that the male mentor-disciple relationship is nearly absent from our current culture inside and outside the church, but I regard that as a sign of profound sickness rather than that women are more intrinsically disposed to the mentor-disciple relationship.
There is an old feminist gag to the effect that the difference between men and government bonds is that government bonds mature. It would not be funny if there were not a ring of truth to it.
More seriously, the church I go to runs a specific mentoring programme - and it seems to have much more uptake amongst women, married or single, than men, married or single. So I would agree with Joel’s comment above, that “… the male mentor-disciple relationship is nearly absent from our current culture inside and outside the church”.
That said, as a single man I saw a lot of examples of immaturity amongst young and not-so-young single women. Specifically - unrealistic expectations about marriage and family life, which coloured what they were then looking for in Christian men. More specifically: it’s not just Christian men who play the looks and body comparison game …
I must be misunderstanding what Fr. Bill means by wisdom. If women were more naturally inclined to develop wisdom, then why would God forbid them from teaching Wisdom, and instead require their husbands to teach them (1 Cor 14:35)?
