Like / Opposite

(Obscure christian issue follows.)
My problem with a lot of complementarian / 'equal but different' language is that it ends up being what Hegel would deride as 'one-sided': complementarian means there's men, and then women complement them. It's bush-league.  And then it gets backed up by a lot of generalisations about what men and women on average are like, which helps no one, because even granting they are true, who wants to be in a community where averages are enforced*? There should rather be a mutually interpreting dialectic of male and female to give the whole, but since even I felt my eyes roll back in my head at the word dialectic, we may never get there.  What follows is a speculative attempt. It is probably just me talking words, just a whole stream of words, right out of my mouth**.  But on the off-chance that its true, I have got up at 4 o'clock in the morning to jot it down, because I want to see some progress.

I heard a wedding sermon once, where the text of the creation of Eve in Genesis was preached.  The speaker drew out the exact Hebrew translated 'counter-part' or 'one suitable for'.  Hebrew did not use a large vocabulary and little words would often be joined to express a more jointed concept.  The original word is literally 'like-opposite'.  Now you can't have a single like-opposite - the man is like-opposite the woman, the woman is like-opposite the man. Last bit of Bible to draw out, is the summary statement 'In the beginning God created Man, male and female he created them.  The word 'man' here is made the inclusive language, defining both male and female.

As I've previously noted (almost exactly a year ago), there is something funny going on in research on men and women - some people find substantial differences, other people minimise them.  It often seems that women will stress Like-ness when male researchers stress Opposite-ness. As I noted a year ago, the blog wife responded to this by suggesting that probably a proper study would show no difference on how difference-conscious men and women are.

So I'm suggesting we take individual humans as like-opposites, defined by the other***, and find expressed in human male-female-ness a larger like-oppositeness, in which women (the image and glory of man****) express Like, and men (a bunch of jerks*****) express Opposite.  I think this faculty of being Opposite is tied to the relationship of men to violence, to force. ('Your desire will be for your husband but he will dominate you'). The Opposite says No, sets boundaries, governs, and is Love expressed.  The Like is life and union and community, Love accomplished.  While every individual human being is  a complete like-opposite, when in community these emphases allow the whole to express ourselves more truly.

Now that I've written it, it still seems essentialist stereotyping, but I think keeping the stereotypes close to violence and community will limit the romancing of this.

The next thing I would like to do is get away from the legalism that causes large groups of evangelical men to go huddle together, fondling their masculinity, so that they feel better about the legalism of walking out if a woman speaking from the front of the congregation strays into 'teaching'. I think the like-opposite articulation explains the stereotypes we live with.  Being challenged (nagged) by your partner is an affront because you thought you had like, but got opposite.  Similarly, a woman speaking to me (maybe not to all men, but certainly to me) sets up some hackles so that I have to consciously force myself not to retreat into Opposite-ing, just going 'Nuh-uh' resentfully in my pew.

* I/ESTJs.
**Peep Show reference.
*** Hegel says your Essence is the Other.
**** Fragment of actual bible verse
*****More just the vibe.