Furthermore, I want to argue that developing a distinctively feminine identity usually does not involve girls and women in expressing their feelings in face-to-face friendships, as Wade uses this term.
Now, to use Wade's other term, shoulder-to-shoulder friendships are both necessary and sufficient for developing these needed dimensions in one's life. The closer the shoulder-to-shoulder friendships come to being optimal experiences for the participants, the better.
WALTER J. ONG ON DISTINCTIVELY MASCULINE IDENTITY
I am borrowing the idea that boys and men need to develop a distinctively masculine sense of identity from Walter J. Ong's book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at
However, because he focuses sharply on male agonistic behavior, Ong does not happen to discuss the need for girls and women to develop a distinctively feminine sense of identity. But this idea is consistent with his thinking about the need for boys and men to develop a distinctively masculine sense of identity.
For Ong, a distinctively masculine sense of identity is needed to allow boys and men to separate themselves psychologically for the feminine forces in their psyches.
Because all human persons are born of women, the mother looms large in the psyches of all humans. Our experiences of our mothers and of mother-figures in our lives activate the feminine archetypes in our psyches when we are young boys and girls. As a result, ego-consciousness in all boys and all girls develops in the human psyche over against the feminine archetypal images in our psyches.
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