In this section of Made for Each Other, Josh and Carrie explore what sexual difference may look like in a given couple. Men and women are, as Carrie puts it, “different in ways that will always matter.” Biology is important, but the body and the person are not reducible to biology. Sexual difference involves the whole person, body and soul.
The body reveals the person. We’re not souls trapped in bodies. We’re “body-persons.” We don’t just have a body. We are our bodies. (We even have words for people who are without one or the other—a corpse is a body that is missing a soul; a ghost is (perhaps) a soul missing a body.) The body of a man and the body of a woman are distinct, personal realities. In addition, as Pope St. John Paul II taught, these bodies have a “spousal meaning.”[i] The body, in its masculinity or femininity, reveals that we are persons who are made to be a gift to others and to be received as a gift by others.
Every human person shares the same nature (human) and the same dignity, made in the image of God. Our sexual identity as a man or a woman is the way in which that humanity is manifested. This identity is meant to be acknowledged and accepted as a gift from God.[ii] It has significance for all the various ways we relate to others: we are a daughter or a son, a sister or a brother, a mother or a father.
While some play down the reality of sexual difference or limit it to the differences between female and male anatomy, sciences such as neurobiology, evolutionary psychology, endocrinology, histology, and reproductive physiology—to name a few—point to the intricate, unique, and complementary physiologies of women and men. We may have conversations differently; take risks differently; form and process relationships differently; respond to threats differently. These differences do not imply that one sex is superior to the other. Men and women are just different. Admitting this does not diminish either sex but serves to enhance the possibility of their unity in love.
Of course, men and women differ among themselves, as well as differing from each other. Sex differences in each and every trait need not be present in each and every individual woman or man. But the way a trait is lived out will always be distinct, whichever person, man or woman, is exhibiting it. For example, the way that St. Joan of Arc was a soldier was not the same as a man’s way.
Our gender, which can be distinguished but not separated from our sex,[1] is a fundamental “given” in our lives. Male and female are two different ways of being human, body and soul.
Discussion questions:
- What does it mean to say that “the body reveals the person”?
- How do equality and difference go together when speaking of man and woman? How does complementarity depend upon difference?
[1] See Amoris Laetitia, no. 56.
[i] See TOB, 13:1–16:2. See also Pope John Paul II’s Familiaris Consortio, no. 37, and Veritatis Splendor, no. 15.
[ii] See CCC, nos. 2332-2333.
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