Editorial: Man and woman, equal and complementary / “For Life” magazine no. 3 – Fall 2014

by Alexandra Nadane

I was still a pre-teen when I first heard the expression “woman issues”. With the enthusiasm one can only have when you are 12, I decided to devote my life – or at least part of it – to protecting women’s rights.

EQUALITY

A few years later I could see what physical and psychological abuse can do to a woman. And I’m not talking just about domestic violence or sexual abuse cases which are so abundantly covered by the media. Violence against the woman starts with sex-selective abortion, which accounts for hundreds of million women missing from India and China’s population  and ends with devaluing elderly women – either in the HR policy of a media giant such as BBC, or in the brief remark  one can hear now and then when the tramway doors fail to shut properly: “If you can’t move anymore, you might as well stay at home, old hag!”.

I shall not write now how I came to the conclusion that men are not the enemies of women and that women’s rights are not something to be seized from men’s hands. I shall only say that much: despite de fact that abortion usually is a result of the man’s decision, selective abortion is a choice made by a woman who wants to have boys! You will clearly understand this reality if you see the documentary film It’s a girl.

COMPLEMENTARITY

In fact, a man’s well-being is only guaranteed by his proximity to a woman, just as a woman’s well-being is only guaranteed by her proximity to a man. Therefore, what may seem at first like the enemy is actually the most important help one can get. Not only important, but quite irreplaceable, I’d say. A woman brings to a man’s life what he does not have and a man brings into a woman’s life what she does not have. Man and woman are physically and psychologically complementary. This is most clearly demonstrated by the fact that there is need for both a man and a woman for new human life to appear: without sperm and egg, there will be no conception.

The conclusion is that a man will become accomplished only next to a woman and a woman will become complete only next to a man.

We have chosen to feature on the cover a photo of newly-weds because they have prepared for this moment their whole life. Family is where equality and complementarity are fully experienced. But we live in the 21st Century, and postmodernism redefines or at least tries to redefine everything, including family. Some think it has already succeeded redefining it.

Why redefine family? If you try to change something, it means you are not satisfied with the current state of facts. Family has always been a landmark for the development of human person and human society. Therefore, solid families translate into more accomplished persons and a better society.

To this day, history has seen various models of life partnership. Of them all, the family made of a man, a woman and their natural children has always persisted in people’s conscience, regardless of historical age. Is this family model able to meet people’s expectations in the 21^st century? The answer is yes, because it relies on the natural complementarity between man and woman! In fact, the solution to all the family issues is not redefining family, but consolidating it. The man should be very mannish and the woman very womanly. Thus, each of them will offer to the other something unique, priceless and adequate. By doing so, each of them becomes complete and also completes the other.

It’s the nature of things. If we try to get out of nature’s order, on the long term there will be personal dramas and public tragedies. It’s the outcome of all things born of utopia. Being in harmony with the nature of things is the foundation of personal accomplishment and the public guarantee for stability and continuity.

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