Angelus News | July 12, 2024 | Vol. 9 No. 14

Heather King is an award-winning
author, speaker, and workshop leader.
by it, mortified for them, and forever
puzzled. They have gifts and strengths
we lack, achievement has been theirs,
almost all concrete accomplishment is
theirs, so why do they need to give us
this flick of pain at our very being, we
who are their mates and their mothers?”
She writes movingly and at depth, in
other words, of the age-old conflict —
the distance — between women and
men. For a woman to admit inferiority,
on any level, for any reason, in this
culture is to commit heresy.
But male-female paradigm aside,
isn’t the truth that we’re all inferior —
smaller, weaker, limited — in certain
ways? And shouldn’t our response be
rigorous honesty, a willingness to own
our faults, compassion, and in the
end, love?
“We do not often live with the superior
side of man — that is generally
expressed in his work — but more
habitually with his weak, tired, shadow
side. We indulge him, restore him,
and though we exploit him (this is a
mutual game) it often seems to us our
role and fate to deal with his inferiority,
and conceal it from him. We
may do it with wisdom and grace, but
usually we project our faults onto each
other, all can be beneath comment,
and there are times when only mutual
forgiveness makes us fit to face each
other once more.”
The overriding need and desire of the
age, she observes, is to create identity.
Great good, she notes, can obviously
come from “greater equality, less suffering,
a flowering of new talent, new
pride, increase in understanding.”
At the same time, the quest for an unreal
kind of equality carries a danger:
“It is the decrease of individuality on a
large scale.”
“Anyone who has become himself
will respect himself for his difference
and so be respected by all. But this
is not equality. Only identical things
are equal, and nature is incapable of
repeating herself, great artist that she
is, so what is the cry for equality, and
what will it bring?”
“Isn’t reality the rousing shock we
all need, and do we not lose ourselves
in pretence if the truth and tragedy
of inequality is not accepted? If we
could be equal, what would happen to
reverence and compassion? … [T]he
utter unreality of wishing for equality
… would mean that individuality
went, goals vanished, and you sank in
the static. … Who would be equal to
whom? Do we all go as low as we can
to prove we are above no one?”
This, of course, is exactly the state of
affairs in contemporary culture. Lest
someone’s feelings be hurt, we must
all participate in increasingly absurd
lies. “There is an element of despair
in this age, for many inequalities are
inherent in nature and cannot be
changed.”
As Scott-Maxwell so presciently observes,
this line of thinking only ends
in a new inequality: biological men
“competing” in women’s sports being
one glaring example.
“There is a special hate threatening
now, when a sameness is being enforced
on us, and we feel the impulse
to fight for our difference. Should we
fight this impulse and find a way of
conforming, or should we fight all the
rest in a refusal to conform?” she asks.
The answer is clear. It was true in
1968. It’s even truer now.
July 12, 2024 • ANGELUS • 31