In his book Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Cornell University Press, 1981), the published version of his 1979 Messenger Lectures at Cornell University, Ong claims that boys and men tend to be more insecure than girls and women. To be sure, he recognizes that girls and women tend to be insecure, because this is part of our human condition. But according to him, boys and men tend to be more insecure than girls and women.
Now, if he is right about the greater insecurity of men, then we should note how the church's practice of reserving ordination to the priesthood only to men provides the men who are ordained priests, including of course all those super stubborn bishops, a measure of distinctiveness that sets them apart from women who are banned from ordination to the priesthood.
But back to Ong. He also claims that boys and men, as a result of their greater insecurity, need to work out a distinctively masculine sense of identity. In addition, he sees boys and men needing to do this in the company, and through the company, of other boys and men. So for Ong, the sense of a distinctively masculine identity requires recognition and acknowledgment by other boys and men -- but not so much by girls and women, although recognition and acknowledgment by girls and women might not be rejected.
Oftentimes, according to Ong, the male drive to work out a distinctively masculine sense of identity may be accompanied by tendencies to denigrate girls and women.
Sounds like Donald J. Trump, the Republican Party's 2016 presidential candidate. No doubt many of Trump fervent white male supporters are experiencing an identity crisis -- that is, an identity crisis involving their specifically masculine sense of identity. The feminist writer Jill Filipovic calls attention to their identity crisis in her op-ed piece titled "The Men Feminists Left Behind" in the New York Times online (dated November 5, 2016):
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/06/opinion/campaign-stops/the-men-feminists-left-behind.html
No doubt a certain number of Trump's fervent white male supporters are practicing Catholics. (But many Latinos are also practicing Catholics, and I find it hard to imagine that they would vote for Trump.)
You're guess is as good as mine as to how many people read Ong's important 1981 book. However, the American Jesuit David S. Toolan read it and wrote about it in his article "The Male Agony: According to Walter J. Ong" in Commonweal Magazine, volume 119 (1992): pages 8-14.
Next, I want to turn to a book by David Bakan, a Jewish faculty member in psychology at the University of Chicago, The Duality of Human Existence: An Essay on Psychology and Religion (Rand McNally, 1966).
In a nutshell, he posits two basic tendencies in human nature that he refers to as agency and communion. Agency is involved in all decision making, including all the ways in which boys and men decide to work out their distinctive masculine identity.
But Bakan argues that we can over-develop agency in our lives at the expense of communion, and vice versa -- we can over-develop communion at the expense of agency.
For Bakan, the optimal development of agency and communion would be the optimal way of life. In theory, the optimal development of both would be psychological androgyny.
Now, we might think of agency as stereotypically masculine and therefore as associated with boys and men, and of communion as stereotypically feminine and therefore associated with girls and women.
As a matter of fact, these two ways of thinking strike me as permeating Roman Catholic thinking and leading Catholic boys and men to over-develop their agency, and leading Catholic girls and women to under-develop their agency -- and vice versa, leading Catholic boys and men to under-develop their communion, and leading Catholic girls and women to over-develop their communion.
Vicki S. Helgeson in psychology at Carnegie Mellon University works with Bakan's conceptual constructs about agency and communion in her research, which she reports in her textbook The Psychology of Gender, 5th ed. (Pearson/ Prentice-Hall, 2016).
Now, I have to admit that Bakan's terminology about communion has extraordinary resonance when we return to considering the Roman Catholic Church. The church's central sacrament at the Mass is known formally as the Holy Eucharist, but informally as Holy Communion.
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