The Power Of Men And Women

One does not have to venture far into an examination of Western norms and attitudes to see that each gender is widely thought to hold exclusive forms of power over the other that are complementary in nature.  Women are taught that they have a specific power over men, and men are taught that they have a specific power over women.  The most visible religious and secular beliefs about the matter easily overlap.  They may not always be explicitly taught by words, but, when they are, they are clearly communicated in passing conversations, church services, and entertainment alike.  It might actually be difficult for some people to go an entire day without hearing them reiterated in some way.

Even when it is not stated directly, the shared secular and Christian complementarianism in Western culture plainly teaches that both genders have inverse powers over each other.  Women are taught that they have a kind of sensual power over men because of their bodies, with men supposedly becoming nothing but simple-mindedly fixated on sex at the sight of the female body (even though men are not attracted to all women to begin with).  Meanwhile, men are taught that they have power over women that comes from physical strength, with women being helplessly resigned to the fear of being sexually assaulted by men (even though many women have committed sexual assault and many women are never victimized in this way).

These twin ideas are used to encourage everything from a perpetual, gratuitous fear of male sexuality on the part of women to the expectation on the part of men that they must make themselves human beasts of burden for women.  It should be apparent to any thinker that these results are deeply harmful to individual men and women and to the societies they contribute to, and yet they are verbally and nonverbally enforced by the imbeciles who think God or "natural law" is behind them.  Beyond their relational destructiveness, these consequences are simply rooted in ideas that are demonstrably false.

The male body is not an unattractive thing that has only minimal influence on women in general, nor is it a vessel of inherent strength that cannot be abused by women; inversely, the female body is not an inherently weak vessel that is incapable of harming or protecting itself from abusive men.  The complementarian ideas surrounding the power that men and women have over each other are not only entirely false, but also incredibly damaging to both genders.  Some women may have a "visual" power over some men and some men may have physical power over some women, but the opposite is also true in many cases.

Whatever power a person might have over others is not tied to their gender.   Instead, it is tied to social and physical factors that vary from individual to individual.  Physical male beauty and physical female strength can be quite powerful, even if they are not acknowledged anywhere nearly as often their opposites--physical female beauty and physical male strength--are accepted.  As with all truths, of course, the faulty perceptions of the majority does not dictate reality.  Power is easily found outside of the places those who submit to complementarian traditions expect it to reside in.