Q&A: Women as readers, inquirers, and commenters on the Rabbi’s writings
Women as readers, inquirers, and commenters on the Rabbi’s writings
Question
Hello Rabbi Michi,
You mentioned on several occasions that, in your experience, women are much less involved with the things you publish — fewer read them, fewer contact you, and fewer respond to your publications.
Do you have any idea what the reason for that is? Is it merely a reflection of the gender divide in our world generally?
Thank you
Answer
I found two main reasons: 1. Women are less interested in abstract matters. They are more concrete and more down-to-earth. 2. They are more shy, and so they do not express themselves publicly (even if they do read).
These are, of course, generalizations, but the proportion of women who express themselves here on the site is so negligible (in my estimation, far less than half a percent of the comments) that the phenomenon cannot be ignored.
Discussion on Answer
Quite apart from my suggestions, I’d advise not taking all kinds of ridiculous apologetics like that seriously. What I’m saying comes from personal experience (which of course is never certain), not from slogans meant to explain laws that are hard to understand.
That is in fact true even without apologetics. They simply mean that women are less driven by impulse. But on the contrary, the impulse itself is the raw material from which true spiritual greatness is built (kabbalists, philosophers, or first-rate scientists—natural philosophers). Women are rather absent from those fields. Or perhaps the intention is that they are what people call more “spiritualistic” — they are more drawn than men, who tend to have a scientific bent, to things like alternative medicine, Far Eastern teachings, and the like, or astrology and magic (depending on the sector they come from).
The first idea is interesting, because the standard (apologetic) explanations go in the opposite direction — toward the claim of women’s greater spirituality: why women are exempt from positive commandments that are time-bound from one angle, and what is special about women’s Torah study from another angle.