In this society, morality is gender-specific. Good and evil (or good and bad, which are the words actually used) have different flavors and dynamics, as well as different manifestations, depending on sex.
You see, for little girls, good is an active state, a condition of maintaining self-control and being true to one's primal nice nature. Bad is passive, relaxing sinfully into a weak uncontrolled state, like wetting your pants instead of keeping a tight grip on things. Thus, the bad girl is remonstrated and told in one way or another to discipline herself or else lose social approval and be held in contempt.
Meanwhile, for little boys, good is a passive state, where one refrains from this or that, does not do those things that little boys are inclined by nature to do, and bad is actively taking control of the situation, insisting on being true to your nasty little-boy nature, like reaching down, unzipping your fly, and taking a piss against the side of the building. Bad boys are intimidated into acquiescence and told, in essence, to surrender or be punished with considerable wrath.
— from The Amazon's Brother, my 1982-vintage attempt to put these thoughts in writing. (unpublished)
It is not necessary, if you happen to be male, to think of yourself as a girl, or as someone who is like the girls, etc, in order to develop and maintain a sense of yourself as actively, affirmatively good. After all, that's not the chronological order in which it happened for me! But if you do so, you would tend to find that you've largely joined the company of girls, as far as this attitude and outlook are concerned, while differentiating yourself from the majority of boys.
But even that is not necessarily going to provoke you into identifying with the girls, although I did. It is not necessarily going to cause you to react with defiant pride if taunted about behaving like a girl or for holding viewpoints and priorities that they hear the girls giving voice to. Maybe instead you will get defensive and angry and toss back a litany of things you've said or done that girls don't, or recite a list of masculine traits and accomplishments.
But that doesn't mean it isn't gender-polarized territory. It is.
As a student in the early elementary grades, I was taunted by the other boys for apparently being afraid of the authorities, the teachers and parents whose rules and approval were the operating definition of "good". They were wrong about it being driven by fear, but it was certainly true that "good", at that time in my life, mostly had to do with allegiance to adult standards and definitions of what is desirable and approval-worthy.
That didn't last. I outgrew the blind loyalty to the system and its authorities soon enough, but instead of discarding all interest in the "good", I began to question what was good, continuing to take it all quite seriously, pondering moral and ethical and spiritual matters, seeking insights and answers.
Does doing, this, does pursing "good" make a person a better kind of person that someone who doesn't? Well, if I'd remained at the level of blind loyalty to the established powers that be and the people who were nominally in charge of things, continuing to define "good" in terms of obedience to them, I would like to think that most of you reading this would say "no, in fact it could make you a dangerous person, an obedient little Nazi who never questions what you're told". So, given that, does the entire situation get fully rescued by abandoning that blind loyalty and becoming invested in discerning a sense of what is "good" for one's self? Does pursuing "good" mostly equate to putting a lot of energy into formulating an excuse to think of one's self as better than others? It's undeniably wrapped up in wanting to think of ourselves as good; do we end up with a vested interest in thinking of ourselves as better people than others?
If it's worth our time to contemplate what "good" actually is, it seems worthwhile to also ask whether going around being one of the "actively good" is itself an intrinsically good thing. I would like to think it is at least an "OK thing", since I have a lifelong sense of identity wrapped up in it, but I do agree that we're a mixed bag and often do socially destructive things, and at a minimum we should abandon any attitudes that we as "actively good" individuals may still harbor about being better than others, and just accept that it's our way of being in the world and, if it makes us happy, it is its own reward.
Yes, obviously this whole business of pursing the "good" is a preoccupation that has an occupation—the clergy—associated with it.
To what extent is there a tie-in between sissy femme girlish males, on the one hand, and males of the clergy, on the other? Well, the clergy is not exactly a repository for males who identify openly and specifically as being "like the women and girls", as feminine people, that's obvious too. But by this point you should be wondering why it isn't, or why it isn't more of one than it is.
• Other males who aspired to being actively good in this fashion may have juxtaposed themselves against what other males were doing or what they were like, and not compared themselves to girls and women, even if they did perceive that a lot of girls and women had the same interest in being actively good.
• I've encountered a widespread attitude in theological and philosophical thinking that girls' and women's goodness somehow does not "count". Sometimes this is expressed in terms of lack of temptation or lack of opportunity and power; sometimes it is expressed more as women having a "nature" that automatically makes them good, as if female people were on moral autopilot and that this kind of goodness doesn't quality as a character attribute. And there's a somewhat dismissive lack of interest in what they do anyhow.
• Surrounding the clergy is the church, of course, and the congregation of our churches tends to have a strong female spine, with more enthusiastic female participation. It would be a rather thin church if the female people all dropped out. But the official church leadership has generally been male.
I should confess something from childhood days: in aspiring to exhibit the characteristics that adults valued and to constrain my own behavior to be in accordance with the rules that the adults set, I was expecting to get ahead. I was demonstrating maturity, I was being a good citizen, and it was implicitly promised if not quite spelled out in writing that the reins of society would be placed in our hands, whereas the kids who misbehaved and were disruptive and who constituted a discipline problem, they'd be left behind. I bring this up here because I think the same implicit promise was held out to the girls. But long before adulthood, girls and women may come to perceive themselves as having been sold a bill of goods on this whole "being good" thing, and hence they are no longer expecting a payoff. (If and when they end up "in charge" and "holding the reins", it tends to taste and feel a lot more like responsibility and duty than power and privilege). But the males may be more inclined to still be expecting a reward for their goodness, and the clergy offers some social prestige and stature.
• Masculinizing the good. Picture Mel Gibson being all self-righteous and oozing as much divine testosterone as possible, being authoritarian and aggressive as he embodies the active good. The allegiance of the males who get to the point of exercising some authority as clergy is harnessed to the conventional male world, with a lot of reward made available for throwing the girls, women, and feminine traits themselves under the bus and ignoring female people's conventional and loyal orientation towards the active good.
• Vindictiveness! I've seen strong strands of this poison too, actively retaliatory attitudes towards women from male clergy. A lot of it has the same contours as bitterness of the Nice Guys™, and I can't help but suspect that the accusations of being evil temptresses and vile oozing soul-sucking repositories of wickedness and all that tie back to the heterosexual sissy-femme dismay at discovering that the actively good girls often prefer the actively bad boys.
Hence, when we think of males in the clergy, we're often more likely to think first of Cotton Mather condemning witches than to conjure up an image of a gentle male who is trying to be good and whose personality and behaviors are diametrically offset from masculinity.
But I suspect a lot of us end up there, although damn few are inclined to speak from the pulpit about gender, masculinity, and their personal trajectories that took them there.
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