What It Means to be Male and Female

A New Series of Reflections

Over the years, we have discussed and developed a lot of thoughts on what it means for human persons to be male and female. This has been both an intellectual and a personal endeavor for the two of us as we have tried both to understand our manhood and womanhood, and to live more perfectly as a married couple. We have found it to be deeply confusing to live in our current society, which tells us so many differing things about what it means to be sexed persons. And while we have not yet fully worked out our thoughts, we would like to share what we are learning about being made in the image of God, created either male or female.

To this end, we are going to create a series which will run once a month of posts for our paid subscribers in which we share and develop our ideas on manhood and womanhood.

In this series, we will share personal stories of our experiences in order to show how we came to our ideas. We will also reflect on ideas from thinkers whom we have found helpful over the years in thinking about this question, such as St. Paul, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Edith Stein, Pope St. John Paul II, Gertrude von le Fort, and Dietrich and Alice von Hildebrand. We will also present ideas we’ve learned from our friends and colleagues’ conversations and writings, and lessons we’ve learned from how men and women we respect have lived out their manhood and womanhood.

If you would like to join in the conversation through reading these posts and joining in the comments, please consider becoming a paid subscriber. We would love to hear your own ideas, and your comments and criticisms of ours, as we all strive to understand this crucial issue better together. What follows here is our first post in this series.

The authors of this post on their wedding day in 2008. Photo by Jen Pagano.

Man and Woman as Co-Creators with God and With Each Other

God created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo), and we human persons image Him in His creativity by also creating, using the abilities and material things that were first created by God. Nearly everything we use in everyday life has been touched by humanity’s co-creation with God. The clothes we wear, the bread we eat, the cars we drive, the houses we live in, the books we read (including both the ideas in books and the physical books themselves), and, most importantly, our very selves have all been made by us human persons exercising our creative powers.

There are certainly ways in which we create things individually, from particular material things we make by ourselves to the way in which we co-create ourselves with God by developing our own characters and habits. In our own lives, Mark bears individual fruit in his teaching and writing of philosophical works and Susanna bears individual fruit in her writing and editing. Any group of persons can also co-create with God. But there is a deeper level of co-creation when a man and a woman co-create with each other. The clearest and most beautiful example of this is in the conception of a new human person through wedded love in the marital act. We have borne this kind of fruit in our four living children, beginning with our honeymoon baby, and in raising and educating them, first homeschooling them and now cooperating with their teachers while they are in school. The procreation of children is a life-long commitment!

Because of how beautiful it is for a husband and wife to co-create children with God, there is a particular kind of suffering that comes when a married couple experiences infertility. While we have four living children, we have been living through secondary infertility—the condition of being unable to conceive a child or carry conceived children to term, after having had some of one’s children make it to birth. It is among the fruits of our marriage that we have co-created five children who died while still in the first trimester of pregnancy. Still, there is a real suffering is being unable to currently have more living children.