Men vs. women: do they sin differently?

There's no doubt that men and women sin, her biggest sin may be his saving grace, and vice versa.

To many contemporary people, men appear much more sinful than women. One recent Christmas at a reunion of the families of six or seven of my siblings, we debated this issue.

One of my sisters-in-law maintained that, in general, women are more virtuous - "After all, aren't men much more likely to beat their wives and children, commit murder, embezzle, drive drunk, and be criminals of all types? Men think they have a right to be angry - especially when they drink - and that anger excuses their behavior." And then she added, "People expect that men will divorce their middle-aged wives and marry young girls, or abandon their children and leave the wife to support and raise the kids. But when women do this, they are considered monsters." Various brothers and sisters more or less supported that view - some more reluctantly than others.

But my father pointed out that he represented a different generation and that between my mother and him, he had a lot more opportunities to sin. Most of my mother's life had been spent taking care of home and children, and even when she did work outside of the home, it was an extension of her home duties - she taught junior high.

Her biggest temptations were to little sins, many of them sins of omission: not doing all her ironing, not giving enough attention to this child or that one, losing her temper and shouting at an innocent child. Just in terms of temptations to adultery, my father pointed out, she had it easy because she had lots of child chaperones and no men either at home or the school she taught.

My mother didn't work in an office with a staff of the opposite sex and never had to go away to medical conventions, where it would have been easy to cheat. "Lots of areas of life she never made decisions about. But I had a medical practice, employees, financial planning for my family," asserted my father.

Even aside from making life-and-death decisions about the treatment of patients and the medical needs of the mountain community whose hospital staff my father chaired, my father was the one who made the "big" decisions in the family - the appropriateness of activities such as summer camps, colleges, permissions and payments for class trips, sleep-overs, and sports teams. He was the one who kept the financial records and paid the taxes, who decided how to invest their old-age savings. He was the doer and decider; she was the supporter and implementer. And so, he argued, she had fewer opportunities for sin, especially for serious sin.

Despite women's higher levels of freedom and responsibility today and men's greater visibility in "public" sin, many people, both women and men, are uncomfortable with any new understanding of women as more virtuous than men. It is true enough that in terms of public sinfulness - domestic violence, violent crime, crimes of larceny, adultery, and other public sins - men lead by large majorities. But men and women now share so many roles and live in such close proximity on the job and in the home that it is hard for us not to notice both the tremendous variations among men and women, and the many ways, moral as well as emotional, in which men and women are alike.

Furthermore, while the women's movement has shed some much needed light on many of the areas in which women are victimized, the harmful tendency of the media to suggest simplistic explanations and focus on sex, violence, and victimization often obscures the many areas of life in which women are neither seductive Jezebels nor helpless victims and men are neither vicious brutes nor chivalrous knights. Examining different ways in which men and women use power can be a helpful way to examine sex differences in temptation to sin.

Power plays

The gospels are a good place to look for connections between power and temptation - beginning with the accounts of the temptation of Jesus. Matthew 4 tells us that Jesus' three temptations were to turn stones into bread, to avoid the suffering and death looming in his path, and accept dominion over the world.

All three of these temptations are variations on the same theme - the misuse of power. Of course, one reason for the close relationship of the three temptations is that they all stem from the situation in which Jesus found himself: under great pressure to conform to the expectations of both the masses who wanted a strong figure to lead and save them and the apostles and disciples who wanted their share of power under his reign.

But the more basic reason for the relationship of the three temptations is that all sin involves a misuse, by omission or commission, of power. Power is energy. It is the capacity to do, to act, to create, to decide. To have no power is to be dead.

When the power of individuals or groups is stolen or is diminished by age or disability, their ability to sin, including their responsibility for sinful acts, is also diminished. We do not understand a laid-off accountant as sinful for not supporting his family by the sweat of his brow, just as we do not hold young children responsible when they are coerced into sexual acts with adults. The more power we have, the freer we are to act and create, the more responsibility we have to love and practice justice.

Jesus resisted the temptation to perform the miraculous signs the Pharisees demanded of the Messiah and continued instead to use his powers in compassionate demonstrations of God's love for the needy - though his followers continued to construe those demonstrations as the miraculous signs of the expected conqueror.

Jesus resisted the temptation to avoid his own suffering and death when, instead of fleeing or recanting his subversive message, he came to Jerusalem, the center of the powers and principalities raging against him, knowing that the Temple officials were conspiring his death (Mark 10:32-34). Jesus' rebuke of Peter for denying Jesus' statement of his coming suffering and death (Matt. 16:22-23: "Get you behind me, Satan!") was a further instance of his resisting this temptation to avoid suffering and death.

Lastly, Jesus resisted the temptation to kingship, to dominion over others, not only when Satan offered it in the desert but most pointedly when the 5,000 men came out to the far side of the Sea of Galilee and wanted to make him king (John 6:15), and the apostles insisted on treating him as a king whose favor must be curried (Mark 10: 35-45). To this temptation he responded with one clear final image: he insisted his followers imitate his washing of their feet at John's Last Supper.

Many commentators have noticed that, because human nature has been largely interpreted in masculine terms in Christian theological tradition, both sin and the remedy for sin - love - have tended to be defined as they affect men and masculine life. This is reflected in the understanding of pride as the root of all sin and in the treatment of sin as ambition, greed, and a refusal to accept one's creatureliness and dependence upon God.

It is also reflected in the understanding of love as inherently self-sacrificial rather than mutual. This understanding of love acts as a check on excesses in the pride, ambition, and competition our society socializes into males.

All human beings use power in various ways, but because in every society lives are organized into roles that are to some extent determined by sex, in any given society one sex will use power in a particular way more often than the other, and vice versa.

In general, men are more inclined to sins of domination, which take both physical and nonphysical forms, while women are more inclined to sinful manipulation of personal power.

King David manipulated his power as commander in chief to have Uriah killed in battle so that David could have Bathsheba, Uriah's wife (2 Sam. 11:14-17). Rebekah, Isaac's wife, schemed to use lies and impersonation to obtain for her favorite son, Jacob, the blessing her husband intended to give to Jacob's twin, Esau, the firstborn (Gen. 27). Had David been a female he would not have had the power of kingship to use as he wanted. Had Rebekah been a man, she could have given the blessing to the son she preferred.

Make my day

There can be little doubt that the socialization of men tempts them to dominion, but that temptation can have radically different roots and manifestations. Some men fall into patterns of dominion because they are born into, modeled on, educated by, and heirs of elite ruling classes accustomed to the exercise of power. The experience of such men has not prepared them to accept situations of personal powerlessness. This can lead to a wide variety of sins that range from a lack of courtesy toward those considered inferiors to a willingness to economically exploit or deny basic human rights of whole classes of people over whom one has economic or political power.

While any failure to love is sinful, most of us tend to see violent abuse of others as the most heinous. Violent exercise of dominion takes many forms, from interpersonal offenses such as conjugal battery, sexual abuse of children, rape, or assault to more social forms, such as terror campaigns against minorities, genocide, exploitation of workers, mob violence, national use of torture, assassination, disappearance, or mass imprisonment without trial.

Male temptation to violent dominion is not merely a matter of socialization - though it is clear that socialization of males to peaceful cooperation in some other cultures does eliminate the tendency toward violence. The male temptation to violence seems to be hormonally supported in that levels of aggressive or violent behavior increase in populations with increasing levels of the male hormone androgen. But since androgen levels peak in men between the ages of 15 to 30 and then slowly decrease into the mid 60s, even this physiologically supported tendency moderates with age.

The use of violence in interpersonal relationships is not limited by class or race in our society, though often the motivations for such behavior are influenced by such factors. In the working class and the unstable lower levels of the middle class, men who batter women and children are often attempting to demonstrate the power that male socialization says should belong to them as men - but which eludes them in their work and social status.

Many violent social movements, such as Nazism, the Ku Klux Klan, and the contemporary American militias featured in the news after the Oklahoma City bombing, arose within a class of men experiencing a sudden sociopolitical and economic powerlessness that prompts violent reactions. In the upper class the use of violence can be an extension of men's "normal" social role of controller, especially when faced with challenges to that control from women, children, or groups whom they have traditionally commanded.

There is nothing that brings strong men to their knees like having someone they care about deeply seriously ill in the hospital. Many men have serious aversions to sickbeds, doctors, or anything that hints of human mortality.

My father had no trouble dealing with hospitals so long as he was the doctor in charge of curing a patient, but whenever a member of his family was iii and the only role for him was patiently waiting and praying, he was absent. He could not stand to be reminded of his powerlessness.

Despite similar feelings, my husband has always forced himself to keep vigil with me during surgeries on our kids, though once the worst crises were over, his role was reduced to being my "relief" when I needed a shower, a nap, or a change of clothes. He, and many other men, would have been willing and eager to take all the pain and suffering on themselves if that were possible, but they struggle and often lose to temptation when the loving thing requires receiving constant reminders of one's own lack of control.

Womanly wiles 

The socialization of women, on the other hand, tempts them to sin through the manipulation of relationships. This should not be surprising since patriarchal history tended to deny women any other kind of power. For example, when Sarah became jealous of her maid Hagar for being pregnant with Abraham's child - even though she herself had given Hagar to Abraham - she had to complain to Abraham and get his permission before she could beat Hagar.

For most of recorded history a woman had power - even over her own body or the welfare of her children - only to the extent that she gained the favor of her husband or father.

Traditional methods of manipulation by women have included flirting, flattery, seduction, sexual compliance or refusal, nagging, special culinary or housekeeping attentions, or combinations of the above. Just as it is difficult for men who have always exercised power not to take it for granted - and for men who have felt lacking without it to resist even inappropriate forms of power - so it is difficult for many women socialized to be powerless to directly and openly claim power and use it responsibly.

While some women do hold power directly in socially sanctioned roles as heads of corporations, elected officeholders, and professionals, most women exercise social power indirectly - as, for example, one of many voters in an election or through their roles in personal relationships.

Most women, in fact, exercise power principally in personal relationships, where their power is based on the needs and expectations that others have of them. Within the family in particular, women exercise a great deal of power. Some of that power is easy to see.

One of my brothers always knows when he is in trouble with his wife because his clean shirts disappear, his meals become TV dinners, and his preschoolers haven't had naps when he gets home in the evening. His wife doesn't have to claim a headache; he gets the message. Women in most families have a great deal of power over the comfort level of others. That power can be used for good or for ill.

If a wife withdraws comfort to coerce a spouse into buying her expensive jewelry, she has used her power in the service of greed and selfishness. But the same actions, if undertaken in outspoken protest of an angry spouse's unilateral decision that an older teenage child be disowned and evicted, can be virtuous when other forms of dissent have failed. I do not recommend this indirect way of expressing one's feelings, but if a mother says, "I don't want a child of mine thrown onto the streets," and the father responds, "I don't care what you want; this is what I am doing," then this is one way a wife could fulfill her obligation to her child to oppose the husband's decision.

Be angry, but sin not

One prominent area in which men and women often demonstrate different ways of abusing power in sin relates to the ways in which we handle anger. Many women have a difficult time expressing anger. (Some of us, on the other hand, have no trouble at all!)

Women who have difficulty expressing or admitting to anger - and abhor any situation of conflict where anger may erupt - were often trained to see anger as a male prerogative for which women were severely punished and see women as peacemakers who mollify angry men or distract them from their anger. But anger is a normal emotion for all people.

Anger is the appropriate response to injustice done to us or to people we care about, but anger must be properly channeled. We have many examples in the Old Testament of God handling anger against injustice.

When initially confronted with the evil in Sodom and Gomorrah, God is ready to totally destroy the cities. But Abraham is permitted to persuade God into eventually sparing the cities if even ten just persons could be located (Gen. 18:23-32), giving us an example of moderating anger with compassion.

On the other hand, when the descendants of Adam and Eve persisted in sin and God destroyed everything living in the world save for those on Noah's ark, God made a promise to never again "destroy every living creature as I have done" (Gen. 8:21), which suggests that destruction is not an appropriate response to even just anger.

When women taught to fear anger feel their own, they either swallow it or express it in subtle ways that allow them to deny that they are angry. Sometimes these responses become so habitual that eventually women no longer recognize their anger, they have disguised it so well. But this anger is often recognizable to others.

The catty kinds of conversation and gossip attributed to women - "Oh, Laura, I just love that clever collar - it almost hides that ugly birthmark!" - is one outlet for women's disguised anger.

But disguised anger is perhaps most dangerous within the circle of family. The self-sacrificing martyr mother is a familiar image in our society - she disguises her anger in service to others. She uses her self-sacrifice (of a career, time, effort, health) to extract guilt and compliance from the children and spouse indebted to her so that her self-sacrifice actually serves to separate her from them instead of uniting her with them. In such a woman, a tear can be a weapon.

Many children have learned to conform to a mother's (or a father's) aspirations and desires rather than to develop and explore their own out of devotion demanded by a self-sacrificing parent.

Because a major part of a woman's role in the U.S. family is to provide emotional intimacy, women tend to know the emotional secrets, the vulnerable places, in spouses and children and are able to exploit them much more adeptly than most men or children.

For some women this emotional manipulation seems the only source of power, even self-protection, available to them. A wife who is having a hard time balancing home and work responsibilities and envies her husband's recent promotion may be tempted to use her knowledge that his deepest childhood insecurity centers on uncertainty of his mother's love. She may casually inflict a cutting wound: "Your sister Mary called this afternoon. Did you know that your mother spent a week baby-sitting her kids so she and Doug could go camping in Yosemite? Was Mary always her favorite? She's never wanted to stay with our kids."

Personally I found the temptations to inflict such cutting wounds especially strong in relation to my sons when they were in their mid teens. They were so full of themselves, strutting and affecting super deep voices and contemptuous attitudes toward parents and "chicks."

I was often furious with them. I missed my affectionate little boys and wanted them back under my guidance. Who knows better than a mother the vulnerable points of an adolescent? This one is afraid he is starting the receding hairline that signals his uncles' mid-20s baldness; that one is terrified that girls think he is not tall enough. One worries that his problems in math mean he is dumb and will never get a good job. They all desperately need the approval of their father and are accustomed to having their father interpreted by their mother, who is jealous of their feelings for their father.

What a perfect setup for mothers to cut their sons (or daughters) down to size and inflict wounds that may fester for a lifetime. While men are also irritated by teens who are testing the limits and can wound just as well as mothers, they tend to be more direct: "Shape up and stow the attitude, kiddo, or you'll find yourself on your butt," or "Who do you think you are? This is my house, and what I say goes."

Because parenting is traditionally a relationship, perhaps even the relationship open to direct exercise of women's power, many women do act with similar directness, though the older the child, the more likely women are to revert to models of indirect exercise of power learned for interaction with adults.

Stick up for yourself

Our society has recently become very critical of the stereotypical bullying angry father familiar to so many families but has yet to become aware that many sick families center on an angry bullying father and also a cowardly mother, who prefers the seeming virtue of pacifying an angry husband to fulfilling her responsibility to others.

While the recent focus on violent and controlling men who beat, stalk, and even kill their wives, ex-wives, and former lovers has alerted the nation to a serious problem, it is not the case that every loud irritable husband is a murderer in waiting. While it is not possible to give simple guidelines for separating angry men into grades of dangerously violent, potentially violent, and relatively nonviolent, courage - not foolhardiness - is a legitimate Christian virtue.

Women have obligations to defend their own dignity against verbal, emotional, or physical attacks. Women have obligations to protect the dignity and welfare of their children, and the dignity and welfare of the rest of creation, also. The anger of men does not justify ignoring these obligations, except very temporarily when there is clear and immediate danger to human life and well-being, and then only until that danger can be removed - for example, by legal or geographical separation or incarceration.

While the victimization of women physically, sexually, and emotionally is common and severe in our society, many women who are not personally at risk have responded with cowardice by interpreting all male anger as evidence of imminent violence that justifies women's failure to fulfill their obligations.

The strongest argument for the necessity of women braving men's anger more often is that so long as men's expression of anger creates situations in which others conform to the wishes of men instead of insisting on mutual self-respect, there is no incentive for men to alter their expressions of anger. At the same time it is necessary to remember that the obligation to risk the possibility of violence in the defense of human dignity and welfare does and will continue to martyr some women and that individuals and society have serious obligations to support and protect women at risk of violence.

Christian teachings on sin and love have challenged men who are already encouraged by male socialization toward pride, arrogance, and domination of others by calling them to humility and respectful, self-sacrificing love of others. But those same Christian teachings on sin and love have encouraged women to accept the passivity, cowardice, and subordination socialized into women, even to the point of teaching women that the more they sacrifice themselves, the more they are loving others.

Many persons who work with abused women find it helpful to point out to these women that their willingness to accept their own abuse predisposes their daughters to accept abuse and their sons to dole it out as adults. They can, in fact, only protect their children from the pattern of abuse by defending their own dignity and welfare. Their willingness to accept suffering does not ultimately protect their children, but their willingness to take risks in order to end their own suffering can ultimately protect them.

Much of the domestic violence in our society today builds not only on the example that abusive fathers gave their children but also on the example of mothers who embraced that violence as evidence of men's love, excused it as men's nature, or cast themselves in the religious role of sacrificial victim participating in Christ's ongoing passion, as if the Resurrection had not yet occurred.

But the Resurrection did occur; Christ led the way for humans in the victory over suffering and death. Since the Resurrection, following Jesus must mean overcoming sin and suffering, not embracing them.

This has implications not just for the wife faced with a husband who regularly beats her after his bowling team's parties, but also for the woman whose spouse routinely comes home from work irritable, spoiling for a verbal fight and looking for a reason to complain about the kids, the house, the dinner.

Because the anger of men has been tolerated and even excused in our society, men have been more or less encouraged to display anger. This is not only true of the men who beat their wives or stalk their ex-wives and former lovers, it is true of millions of good, responsible family men who think it is perfectly acceptable to curse and shout at practically any behavior on the part of the driver ahead of them.

My husband has thought for 30 years that I am unreasonable to object to his shouting and swearing when other drivers have annoyed him. He insists this abuse is not aimed at me, though I am the only person who could possibly hear it, and it is frequently stated in the second person: "You SOB! Can't you read signs/find a turn signal/see green?" This behavior seems to him acceptable because he learned it at his sainted father's side and has taught it to our sons.

In fact, displays of anger are so acceptable for men in our society that for some men other emotions that society does not see as "masculine," such as fear, insecurity, or dependence, often get expressed as anger.

Many a man who beats his wife is really prompted by feelings of insecurity and dependence, which, because seen as unmanly, arouse anger at himself, which is vented on her as the cause of his insecurity and dependence.

Perhaps in 1995 our society has come to a point where we can agree that this tolerance and encouragement of the expression of anger is dangerous, and that both men and women have obligations to end it. Direct and indirect expressions of anger in men and women should be analyzed, and the identity of the underlying emotion exposed. The expression of anger is only therapeutic when that expression is aimed not just at venting steam or passing the anger on to another but at resolving the injustice that gave rise to the anger in the first place.

If I am angry at my mother's forgetting my birthday, expressing that anger at my husband after he ate my last yogurt bar or at my son because he forgot to cut the grass only increases the amount of anger and hurt in our house. Only if I express that hurt and anger to my mother can she apologize, explain how she came to forget my birthday, and reassure me that she loves me, which is, of course, what I want to hear.

Sometimes women who fear anger and are married to habitually angry men become so focused on mollifying that anger that they fail to defend the interests of children. In some circumstances mollifying an angry husband can serve to protect the children from his wrath, but when the father's wrath has already been unjustly vented on a child or children, mollifying tactics from the mother serve neither to protect nor support children but can be an abdication of parental responsibility.

Many mothers in these circumstances see themselves and their children as equally threatened by a husband's anger and reason that children have to therefore expect to share the abuse. They fail to understand that mothers are adults, with adult responsibilities to children, even when that means facing a husband's wrath.

Equally important, some women (and some men who fear anger, as well) need to distinguish different ways of facing another's anger. When I was young, I was, as the oldest child, often delegated to face Dad's wrath, either to persuade him that there was no real wrongdoing involved in the appearance of the hole in the screen door or to cajole him into a better mood before the CYO chaperones called for his permission for us to go on an excursion.

This kind of "facing" Dad's anger was very different from going to him and challenging his right to make the whole family miserable by taking his anger out on us at his lack of sleep during a long, busy week of being the on-call doctor in his practice. Both kinds of facing anger are sometimes appropriate. But women are often tempted to appease anger in others, even when it should be challenged.

Rage mellows with age

One of the most encouraging parts of age is the effect that it has on anger in both men and women. Most differences in our culture between men and women are much more pronounced in young adults than in older ones, and sex-typical responses to anger are no exception. In part because of the decrease in androgen that affects tendencies to aggression and violence, most men tend to become less angry and irritable as they age. This is probably why virtually all of the hotheads on urban expressways who kill people who cut them off or fail to signal are young men.

Social scientists tell us that in the average American marriage there is a gradual shift in power over the years. Men tend to exercise a great deal more power than women in the early years of a marriage, but with middle age, women begin to become more confident of their role and status in the marriage and gradually claim the right to share power with men.

For some couples retirement can sometimes even shift the balance of power disproportionately toward the wife by shifting the location of their lives to what has been the wife's turf - the home. (Of course, an increasing number of men, possibly thinking ahead to this eventuality, begin to take some responsibilities for the home before retirement in preparation for claiming joint control of the home.)

Many married couples notice that after 10 or 15 years there are some attitudes or behaviors around which the spouses have actually switched sides. When my husband and I were first married, he was much more likely to withdraw and sulk when upset, to my deep unease.

Now I am embarrassed to realize that even though I suffered for many years from his withdrawals - interpreting them as a lack of love for and interest in me - I have now become somewhat more prone to withdraw when upset, especially over minor matters, while he has learned both to be more conscious of and to communicate the subject of his upsets.

In the course of our experience, most of us learn to moderate the stereotypic behaviors our society taught us were appropriately "masculine" or "feminine" and to adopt behaviors that facilitate better communication, intimacy, and cooperation between us and those with whom we are in relationship. This is not just a morally neutral accommodation on our part. It is a part of learning to love each other well and of avoiding the ongoing opportunities to sin against each other by not loving well.

Both men and women who want to love well, and not sin against God and neighbor, must come to know God and each individual neighbor well enough to know how to love them. Differences in how men and women handle anger, or in any other type of sin, are just one of the many variations that exist within humanity and in the whole of creation.

Human societies from the beginning of time have created many roles and institutions and variously interpreted existing physical differences. It would be a much duller place if we all thought and acted the same without varieties of sex, race, history, ethnicity, geography, climate, and culture. Yet all of these differences in human groups and individuals result in differences in the way humans sin, and in the way humans love. At the same time, we all have an obligation not to let the differences between us become obstacles to love. Variety in creation, Saint Thomas Aquinas wrote, serves to glorify the Creator; sin - failure to love as God wills - cannot glorify the Creator.

RELATED ARTICLE: "Do unto others" only as they'd like you to do

For many years in my marriage, I made a big deal out of my husband's birthday, regularly having birthday parties - a couple of them large and successful surprise parties - saving my pennies for months to get him some significant gift, serving him breakfast in bed, and exempting him from any household work.

On my birthday he would make me an angel food cake with fresh strawberries and whipped cream, the same great cake that he has made every year since my 17th birthday - but that was it.

Birthdays were not a big deal when he was growing up, but I always assumed he must be thrilled with an additional celebration of his birthday I arranged. It took me more than 20 years to realize he was just as embarrassed at and unappreciative of birthday hoopla as I was disappointed at the lack of it on my birthday. Each of us was giving the other what we ourselves wanted to receive - a common fault among the well-intentioned.

This is not what "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you" really means. Who would argue that the appropriate gift for little boys to give their mothers for Mother's Day is pet frogs or comic books? And my teenage nieces don't appreciate symphony tickets as Christmas gifts. - Christine E. Gudorf

Christine E. Gudorf, theology professor at Florida International University in Miami.