Fully confidant that Scripture had little future, Votaire predicted that “In a hundred years the Bible will be a forgotten book found only in museums.”2 When those hundred years had elapsed, the very home in which he had made his fearless prediction was occupied by the Geneva Bible Society. The word of God endures, while the words of men become grist for comedy.

Nature, God’s handiwork, also endures while political correctness quietly passes into irrelevancy. In the words of Cicero, “Custom will never conquer nature, for she remains unconquerable” (Numquam naturam mos vinceret; et enim ea semper.). Nonetheless, it has become most fashionable in recent decades to assert that the natural differences between the sexes are largely, if not entirely, the result of social conditioning.

Steven Goldberg, a sociology professor at City College in New York, produced a reasonable and well-researched study on the natural differences between the sexes. Although it was ultimately received with wide acclaim, 55 publishers saw fit to reject the manuscript a total of 69 times, an unparalleled number of rejections that won The Inevitability of Patriarchy a privileged place in the Guinness Book of Records.

According to Goldberg, “Sex is the single most decisive determinant of personal identity; it is the first thing we notice about another person and the last thing we forget.”3 Yet, when he examined introductory sociology books, he found that thirty-six of thirty-eight began their treatment on sex-roles with a discussion of Margaret Mead’s work as having demonstrated that the distinction between the sexes has a cultural basis. This is a curious claim since Mead herself denies that her research has disproved the natural differences between the sexes.4 In fact, she is most emphatic about the unconquerable and deeply significant natural differences that do distinguish the sexes. In Male and Female (which shares the same publisher with Goldberg’s book), she states: “If any human society—large or small, simple or complex, based on the most rudimentary hunting and fishing, or on the whole elaborate interchange of manufactured products—is to survive, it must have a pattern of social life that comes to terms with the differences between the sexes.” 5

Despite what Dr. Mead states, she is nonetheless a paradigm for egregious misinterpretation. In Sex and Temperament in Three Primitive Societies, Mead describes three New Guinea tribes, all of which displayed variations on the traditional sex roles. Two feminist writers, Scanzoni and Hardesty, find this remarkably convincing proof that sex roles are based entirely on cultural conditioning. What they fail to acknowledge, however, is that all three tribes were completely ineffectual in dealing with their environment and were on the verge of extinction when Mead studied them. Her own conclusion was that their decline was directly related to the loss of the definitive masculine role, a point that the feminist authors conveniently omitted.6

“The differences between the sexes,” writes sociologist George Gilder, “are the single most important fact of human society. The drive to deny them—in the name of women’s liberation, marital openness, sexual equality—must be one of the most quixotic crusades in the history of the species.”7 It is a misguided attempt to politicize nature and turn “incarnate humanity” into “metaphysical ‘humanism’.”8 Individual men and women, however, despite the prevailing ideologies that deny real sexual differences, will not find much comfort in dealing with each other, not as incarnate realities, but as political fictions.

Every society, no matter how primitive, throughout human history has recognized the natural difference between the sexes and has accorded that recognition a high degree of significance. There are cultural influences that are brought to bear on the men and women, to be sure. But one of the clearest manifestations of such cultural conditioning, ironically, is the view that culture is the primary determinant of the differences between the sexes. It is this very “intellectual” or “ideological” notion that is formed largely by cultural conditioning, rather than sexual differences themselves.

St. Thomas Aquinas once remarked that he made prudent use of his study time by learning from two sources that could not lie: Scripture and nature. In the contemporary world, both of these time-honored and reliable sources have been placed under deep suspicion. In their place, reign the fragile and ephemeral contrivances of politics and ideology.

John Paul II’s Theology of the Body is a concerted attempt to return the discussion of the differences between the sexes to a solid and authoritative basis. He uses Genesis as his primary text to explain four fundamental points:

1. that masculinity and femininity are constituent features of the person;
2. that the human body has a nuptial significance and is created by God with the loving union of man and woman in mind;
3. that man and woman enter upon this union freely and offer themselves to each other as mutual gifts;
4. that sin can subvert the authentic relationship of the sexes, which was intended to be a gift, reducing it to a form of exploitation or dominance.

By honoring this incarnate realism of the sexes, their complementary unity, their procreative involvement in the mystery of creation, and the loving gift of themselves that they offer each other, the Pope has provided a rich, balanced, and profound treatment of the sexes that the world urgently needs, though it lacks the insight to provide by itself. The Theology of the Body, therefore, is a gift in the highest sense, one that is vitally needed yet could not be obtained by the beneficiary himself.