Two Axes, Not One | No Grasp of Your Reality

Most people, Christians included, picture masculinity and femininity as two ends of a single line. Slide one way and you’re more of a man; slide the other way and you’re more of a woman. On this model, every trait a man picks up that looks “feminine” costs him something on the masculine side, and every “masculine” trait a woman shows makes her a little less of a woman.

I think this picture is wrong, and I think it does real damage. Masculinity and femininity aren’t two points on one continuum. They’re two separate measures. One runs from masculine to anti-masculine. The other runs from feminine to anti-feminine. Once you see them as two axes instead of one line, a lot of confusion goes away.

Start with the feminine

Take something nearly everyone would call a feminine skill: nurturing children. A mother nursing her baby, a woman sitting up through the night with a feverish child. God Himself uses this picture when He wants to describe His own faithfulness:

Can a woman forget her nursing child, and not have compassion on the son of her womb? Surely they may forget, yet I will not forget you. (Isaiah 49:15)

Now ask what the opposite of nurturing a child is. On the single-line model, the opposite of a feminine trait should be a masculine one. But the opposite of nurturing a child is neglecting, abandoning, or killing a child. Nobody thinks that’s masculine. Nobody looks at a woman who abandons her baby and thinks she has become manly.

Scripture describes the worst of it. In the siege of Jerusalem, Jeremiah writes:

The hands of the compassionate women have cooked their own children; they became food for them in the destruction of the daughter of my people. (Lamentations 4:10)

That isn’t women becoming men. It’s femininity turned inside out, the very hands made to nurture used to destroy. It’s anti-feminine. It sits at the bottom of the feminine axis and tells us nothing about where anyone sits on the masculine one.

Now the masculine

The same is true going the other way. Sacrificially protecting one’s family is about as clearly masculine as anything gets. When Nehemiah’s men were rebuilding the wall with enemies all around, he told them:

Do not be afraid of them. Remember the Lord, great and awesome, and fight for your brethren, your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses. (Nehemiah 4:14)

What’s the opposite of that? Abandoning your family when danger comes. Jesus describes this man too:

But a hireling, he who is not the shepherd, one who does not own the sheep, sees the wolf coming and leaves the sheep and flees; and the wolf catches the sheep and scatters them. (John 10:12)

The hireling who runs is not being feminine. There’s nothing womanly about leaving your wife and children to the wolves. He’s being anti-masculine. He’s failed as a man, and that failure doesn’t move him one inch toward being a woman.

Conquering and domesticating

If these are two different axes, what does each one measure? Here’s the rule of thumb I’ve found most useful: masculine traits are aimed at conquering, and feminine traits are aimed at domesticating.

Go back to the beginning. God told the man and the woman together to “be fruitful and multiply; fill the earth and subdue it; have dominion” (Genesis 1:28). That one commission has two halves. Somebody has to push back the frontier: clear the land, drive out the wolves, build the walls, earn the money, stand in the gate. And somebody has to take the ground that’s been won and turn it into a home: a place where children are born and raised, where the table is set, where the garden grows.

Men are specifically called to the first job and women are caled to the second. And the two jobs need each other.

A woman can’t domesticate ground that isn’t safe. You can’t plant a garden on a battlefield or raise children in a house the wolves can get into. Her work depends on his.

And a man can’t really conquer if he has nothing to come home to. A frontier with no homestead behind it is just wandering. A man with no wife, no children, no hearth, and no town has no reason to fight and nothing to fight for. Nehemiah’s men weren’t fighting for the wall itself. They were fighting for “your sons, your daughters, your wives, and your houses.” His work depends on hers.

That’s why this isn’t a contest. The two axes aren’t rivals for the same space. They’re two halves of one commission.

What this means for men (and women)

Here’s where the two-axis view really earns its keep. If masculinity and femininity are separate measures, then a man who shows a feminine trait hasn’t given up anything of his manhood. He’s just showing a feminine trait.

When a father rocks his newborn to sleep, cooks dinner, or tends tomatoes in the back yard, he isn’t sliding down the masculine scale. He’s doing something good that happens to sit on the feminine axis. His masculinity is measured separately, by whether he protects, provides, builds, and leads. A man can be fully masculine and still be tender with his children. In fact, the best men usually are.

The same holds in reverse. A woman who stands between her children and a threat hasn’t become less of a woman. She’s showing a masculine trait, and her femininity is measured on its own terms.

This also means we should be careful about which activities we file under which axis. Business, for example, isn’t masculine or feminine in itself. What matters is what the business is aimed at. A business aimed at the home, one that feeds, clothes, and enriches a household, is a feminine enterprise. A business aimed at the frontier, one that pushes into the unknown and takes ground no one has held before, is a masculine one. SpaceX exists to conquer space. That’s a masculine venture if there ever was one.

This frees us from two errors. The first is the man who thinks he has to be harsh, cold, and incapable of gentleness in order to prove he’s a man, as though any softness would cost him. The second is the culture that tells us that since men can do “feminine” things and women can do “masculine” things, the categories mean nothing at all. Both errors come from the same mistake: treating masculinity and femininity as one line.

Fostering what God gave you

None of this means the categories are interchangeable or that it doesn’t matter which ones we pursue. God made us male and female (Genesis 1:27), and that was deliberate. The fact that a man can show feminine traits without losing his masculinity doesn’t mean that’s where he ought to put most of his effort.

Each of us is responsible to primarily cultivate the traits that belong to our sex.

For men, that means building up the conquering traits: physical strength, so you can actually protect the people in your care. Building and maintaining a home. Ventures that push out into the unknown, building what hasn’t been built and going where no one has gone. Work that provides, because “if anyone does not provide for his own, and especially for those of his household, he has denied the faith and is worse than an unbeliever” (1 Timothy 5:8). And civic participation: showing up, taking responsibility in your church and your town, sitting in the gate.

For women, that means building up the domesticating traits: raising children, making a home, gardening, turning the ground that’s been secured into a place where life can flourish.

Proverbs 31

If you want to see what a fully feminine woman looks like, the best picture in Scripture is the virtuous wife of Proverbs 31. Look at what she spends herself on:

Her household. “She also rises while it is yet night, and provides food for her household” (v. 15). “She watches over the ways of her household, and does not eat the bread of idleness” (v. 27).
Her garden. “She considers a field and buys it; from her profits she plants a vineyard” (v. 16).
Her trade. “She perceives that her merchandise is good” (v. 18). “She makes linen garments and sells them, and supplies sashes for the merchants” (v. 24).
Her family’s good. “The heart of her husband safely trusts her … She does him good and not evil all the days of her life” (vv. 11–12).
Her neighbors. “She extends her hand to the poor, yes, she reaches out her hands to the needy” (v. 20).

She’s not idle and she’s not timid. She’s industrious, capable, shrewd, and strong (“she girds herself with strength,” v. 17). She’s a businesswoman, buying land and selling goods at a profit. But every bit of that strength and enterprise is aimed at making a home flourish. Her business doesn’t go out to conquer new territory; it turns what she has into abundance for her household. “She is not afraid of snow for her household, for all her household is clothed with scarlet” (v. 21). That’s what makes it feminine.

And notice where her husband is: “Her husband is known in the gates, when he sits among the elders of the land” (v. 23). He’s out in the town, taking his place in civic life, and he can be there because she has made their home secure and fruitful. Her domesticating frees him to conquer, and his conquering gives her ground to domesticate. Two axes, one household.

The result is exactly what you’d hope for: “Her children rise up and call her blessed; her husband also, and he praises her” (v. 28).

Conclusion

Stop thinking of manhood and womanhood as a tug-of-war on a single rope. They’re two separate callings, each with its own direction of growth and its own way of failing. A man should aim to be strongly masculine, and being gentle with a child won’t cost him a thing. A woman should aim to be strongly feminine, and fighting for her children won’t cost her a thing either. What actually costs us is moving down our own axis: the man who runs from the wolf, the woman who forgets her nursing child.

God gave each of us a half of the commission. Let’s get to work on ours.