Myopia and Hyperopia

What could the world look like if we better understood femininity?

If we consider the concept of an archetypal heroic feminine, we’re left to try and identify the social, cultural, and political structures built on top of it, or could be. Let’s start with with the familiar institutions of marriage and careers and see how society might be different with a fuller understanding of the archetypal feminine.

The most well-understood feminine pattern is the maiden-mother-matriarch triad but it’s really a quartet. What’s missing is the “wife” as distinct from mother. This is a dual-role, whereas husband-father is largely a singular role (yes, it has a duality to it as the roles are not identical, but it is more singular than the feminine role of wife) defined by masculine authority.

For the first year or so of a child’s life, a mother is basically a servant. A child that young can’t be reasoned with. It must be responded to, immediately. It must be fed when hungry, comforted when upset. After that, she transitions into an authority or she has another child and repeats this period as a servant. Eventually though, she must make the transformation into an authority. To her husband, she is a complement (in most traditional cultures, she’s largely considered a helper) and he is the authority. A problem emerges if a woman becomes a servant to her child and her husband, rather than a “helper” to him. Her relationship becomes motherly to the wrong person, which encourages masculine regression into boyhood. This is a real problem later-life divorces. Women fear becoming old mothers to old babies.

This is where the archetypal feminine becomes critical. The feminine is the more ambitious and it is her role to challenge the archetypal masculine. Thus, it is a critical role of a wife to challenge her husband sufficient to discourage his potential regression. Now, if the man is himself sufficiently ambitious then this dynamic may not be necessary at all. Still, this is a very real fear of modern women and the cause of a very large percentage of divorces.

Historically, we see many model mothers but not many wives. A good early example is Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who contrives to maintain hope for the return of her husband, thus avoiding remarriage. In so doing, she embodies classical feminine traits such as cleverness but also the principle wifely virtue: loyalty.

More so, women have been expected to possess a curious diversity of skills. Consider stereotypically “homemaker” skills. This would include child psychology, medicine, cooking, cleaning, basic repairs, in addition to social aptitude, and maintaining aesthetics. It’s quite the list and similar lists show up in every culture at every time in history. In Pride & Prejudice, Mr. Darcy infamously lists his expectations of a woman he imagines as “accomplished,” and Elizabeth Bennet ridicules it as excessive. This diversity of knowledge is largely embodied in the concept of the wise old woman who can create medicine or potions and so on. Wise old men are often presented as teachers but old women as resources of practical knowledge. The old sage teaches you what you need to mature but the old woman saves you from the disasters that befall you. The old man teaches you combat but when you’re wounded, it’s the old woman who saves your life (this mirrors Moses and Miriam).

My proposition is that marriage functions as a domain of mastery, i.e., a transformational institution that turn knight into king and maiden into queen. Husband and wife are the terms to denote someone engaging in the pursuit of mastery.

In the modern marriages, this is often illustrated by career progression. For the masculine, marriage enables mastery through specialization. For the feminine, it’s the opposite. The feminine must learn about the world… not necessarily in immense depth but in great breadth. The feminine must have answers to the widest range of potential things (most critically about staving off disaster. Recall the whales and menopause). Think of the endless questioning of children (why is the sky blue? Why aren’t there dinosaurs? And so on). In other words, having kids isn’t the purpose of marriage; developing mastery is. It just so happens that having children is a good facilitator of this function.

If we look at masculine traits, obsessiveness appears to be one of them. Autism can even be considered an extreme masculine trait. There’s reason to think that men, being more masculine, overperform their IQs due to obsessiveness whereas women, being more feminine, overperform theirs due to being more agreeable. This might be why women overperform in school but underperform in outlier intellectual achievements such scientific discoveries. Men, being more disagreeable, are more likely to push their discoveries (even when wrong) and there’s ample evidence to support that we defer to the most assertive and not the most correct. We do see evidence of women making discoveries but not pushing aggressively for them. This is, from a feminist perspective, a sign of oppression but it appears to be a product of trait agreeableness.

If we look at feminine traits, we don’t see the same myopia. Rather, we see diversity or multi-tasking and similar. It appears as if women, generally more feminine, are more broadly capable. If you see someone who is smart, socially competent, fit, and so on… that’s probably a woman. If you see someone who is exceptionally competent at one thing but can’t comb their hair, that’s probably a man. This has given rise to the “super woman” who is expected to have breadth and depth, which is taxing the feminine figures (primarily women) into exhaustion.

We can assert that masculinity is myopic and femininity is hyperopic. In this sense, I’m using a looser metaphorical definition of the words, imagining myopic as possessing narrow, focused, or obsessed vision (interest) and hyperopia possessing broad, varied vision. Again, depth versus breadth.

So what does this mean for marriage? The masculine role (usually the husband) is to gain mastery through specialization. The feminine role (usually a wife) is to gain mastery through breadth of aptitude. Curiously, there is no antonym for this kind of specialization in English. The entire concept is poorly expressed (though not absent as the “jack of all trades, master of none” is the best description - the missing concept seems to be “master of none.”). Perhaps this is why the role of the wife isn’t fully understood, and is often truncated. Regardless, it would make sense for the hyperopia-myopia dichotomy to be a relevant factor in selecting a romantic partner for marriage.

But people today don’t select for marriage. They select for dating or friendship. More so, having an underdeveloped understanding of the feminine means that both partners are acting out primarily masculine patterns. This has radically increased the “fail rate” of marriages, which in turn have diminished cultural respect for it. So much so in fact that marriage itself is not understood as a dynamic and transformational institution but instead as a retirement home for sex, romance, and fun.

But what could marriage look like with a proper understanding of masculinity and femininity? Consider: having children for women is easiest when they’re 16-30, approximately. That’s a biological reality. Yes, you can push it beyond that but it’s often difficult and expensive. Today though, most people are having children in their 30’s, many of which are discovering the problems of fertility. A teenager can get pregnant almost instantly but a 30-year-old has to work at. We’re delaying marriage and thus procreation. Why? Primarily for careers. By pushing women into prioritizing careers, we’re discouraging families. However, careers help women mitigate risk by not making them so vulnerable to their husbands (relying on them for financial security). Later marriages means fewer children and distorted selection criteria (people often select for social and professional peers instead of for institutional success, i.e., a complement). Thus, women’s security comes at the expense of the needs of society (more people).

Well, if we consider the masculine/feminine dynamic, we can imagine an alternative (though I’m not suggesting this a good idea but as a thought experiment). Consider: what if women married at a younger age (we’ll say 18 on average) and had families and then started careers later (feminine men could do this instead, while acting as a primary caregiver)? Well, we’d need businesses and schools willing to accommodate this. Schools would need to provide different schedules and services. Businesses would need to be willing to hire women in their thirties (or men taking the feminine role) and promote them faster, which would make sense.

There are reasons to think this might be a good pattern. Evidence suggests that most people don’t have careers in their field of college study (or go to college at all). Interests and competencies take time to develop. If we imagine an early marriage having a masculine (myopic) and feminine (hyperopic) then one partner can focus on early career and then slow down into a second career (teaching would be a good example of a career that most anyone can transition into) and the other partner can prioritize children with a career coming later. The problem is… the social and cultural institutions don’t support this. As mentioned, businesses don’t hire 35-year-old mothers and fast-track them.

Additionally, businesses tend to encourage hyper-specialization (in pursuit of efficiency). This limits input from external disciplines or functions. The peril of specialization is the problem of myopia: tunnel vision, and it shows up in how businesses are organized, how they hire, and how they’re managed. Blind spots emerge such that they reward highly competent individual performers by promoting them into jobs that they’re not good at. This is the infamous “Peter Principle,” leaving organizations littered with incompetent performers in managerial positions. One can imagine the opposite extreme and the problems that correspond to it but the optimal balance is rewarding the right amount of myopia versus hyperopia. This, however, proves tricky.

Consider a school exam. By their nature, they’re specialized. They test for a specific range of information from a specific subject. We can roughly measure how much you know about “x.” How do we measure how many subjects you know a little about? What if you know a little about baseball but the tests doesn’t ask about that specific piece of information? Organizations that hire people who are primarily myopic will miss the contributions of the hyperopic but because the latter is harder to identify, this is precisely what happens. Perhaps businesses hiring 35-year-old mothers can more reliably populate their organizations with people who have a breadth of experience.

In conclusion, if we recognize the myopia-hyperopia dichotomy as aspects of masculine and feminine (again, not necessarily male and female) then we can more properly understand the kinds of roles they play in marriage, business, and society more broadly, and thus we can more readily identify the kinds of structures and politics necessary to support those roles.