Masculinity and the Domination of Nature
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The summer after my freshman year of college, I worked in Glacier National Park. Having grown up in Northern Arizona, I was used to living among the mountains, rocks, and uneven terrain--but Glacier’s geology was something else entirely: dramatic, monumental, and surreal.
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Glacier is a paradise for hikers, bikers, and adventurers looking to test their limits among some of the world’s most difficult and dangerous terrain.
In settings like these, alive with the promise of adventure, people—often men--talk about “conquering” nature, “dominating” a trail, or “overcoming” a mountain. This language reveals more than a thirst for challenges; it reflects a deeper cultural script where nature is something to be subdued, consumed, and controlled. That same script has also long justified the domination of women, who, like the natural world, are often characterized as fickle, unpredictable, and in need of mastery. The logic of conquest links them both (1).
These metaphors are so widespread in the English language that we often forget they are not simply figures of speech, but powerful and pervasive frameworks that shape how we see, value, and act upon the natural world. Language, ideas, and action are inextricably connected for human beings (2).
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Better language makes possible a better world.
If the language of domination is failing us—and it is—then how should we understand our relationship to the natural world, to what Christians call, “creation.”
The book of Job provides a way forward. The divine speeches near the end of the book (Chapters 38-41) describe the natural world in ways that stand in significant contrast to other biblical texts in which notions of domination and subjugation are prominent and even prescribed (e.g., Gen 1:28). Instead, Job rejects a theology of control and offers one of humility, wonder, and justice. These astounding elements of Job have been brilliantly expounded in the work of Hebrew Bible scholar, Kathryn Schifferdecker, whose insights will light our path in the coming paragraphs (3).
Before diving into the divine speeches, a brief summary is in order. Job is the embodiment of ancient Near Eastern masculinity—marked by wealth, family, status, and the admiration of others. He appears to be a man who has chosen the path of wisdom and arrived at its rewards. Yet even in his wisdom, Job reveals a quiet attempt to control the uncontrollable, offering sacrifices on behalf of his children to guard against their potential wrongdoing (Job 1:5). Despite these anxious efforts, his world collapses—his children, health, wealth, and social standing all stripped away, leaving behind none of the external signs of masculine achievement. Every shoe drops--and all at once.
In the aftermath, Job is met by friends who insist he is to blame, while he maintains his innocence. Their back-and-forth, preserved in a lengthy sequence of wisdom poetry (Ch. 3–37), ends in silence—until God speaks from the whirlwind (38:1). But instead of explanation or defense, Job is swept into a cosmic tour of creation, drawn beyond argument and into humility, awe, and wonder.
Job gains some important, if painful, insights into humanity’s role in the cosmos.
Human beings are neither the center nor the pinnacle of the cosmos.
The natural world does not exist to be consumed and dominated by humans. The natural world’s value goes far beyond that of, “resource.”
Humanity is one part of a deeply complex and interconnected world (4).
There are forces within creation that are profoundly dangerous and cannot be controlled by human effort, ingenuity, or willpower (Job 41:7-8).
Upshot: control is an illusion, and believing in it comes with great risks.
Kathryn Schifferdecker summarizes the divine speeches this way:
To that culture, the speeches proclaim that the world is not created for the sake of humanity, that there exist creatures and places that have an intrinsic value quite apart from their usefulness to human beings . . . in the whirlwind speeches, Job learns his place, and it is a place radically different from the position he occupied in the prologue (Job 1–2). In that world, Job was at the center, surrounded by concentric circles of society: first his family and household (29:1–5), then civic society—his companions and peers (29:7–10), and finally, the poor and the needy to whom Job owed benevolence (29:11–16), and to whom Job showed compassion. (5)
Job learns the hard and painful lesson that the natural world is not something to be controlled or dominated, but rather regarded with awe, wonder, and humility. Cole Arthur Riley captures this insight in her illuminating book, This Here Flesh:
When people or groups become too enamored with mountaintops, we should ask ourselves whether their euphoria comes from love or from the experience of supremacy . . . There is nothing wrong with climbing mountains, but bravado tends to drown out the sound of wonder. (6)
And what is true of the natural world is also true of how men live in relationship with other human beings, especially the women around them. Every human being is deserving of awe, respect, and wonder.
The modern masculinity myth (what I have elsewhere called a “mirage”) thrives on stories in which men act upon things--what we might call, subject-object thinking. The world is full of enemies to be vanquished, trails to be blazed, resources to be extracted, opportunities to be seized, wealth to be accumulated, power to be wielded, technology to be invented, problems to be solved, ideas to be disseminated, and wildness to be tamed. These narratives damage the natural world, women, and men themselves. Nobody escapes the carnage.
These stories of dominance are persistent, crossing boundaries of race, class, education, space, and time. Our calling in this moment is to offer counter-narratives—ones that not only challenge the allure of control, but also elevate humility, awe, and wonder as worthy and necessary ways of being in the world.
Gwen Hunnicutt uses the language of a “logic of domination” in Gender Violence in Ecofeminist Perspective : Intersections of Animal Oppression, Patriarchy and Domination of the Earth (London: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2020)
There is a complex linkage between the usage of violent language among men and violence visited by them against women. See, for instance, Eisikovits Z, Buchbinder E. “Talking Violent: A Phenomenological Study of Metaphors Battering Men Use.” Violence Against Women Oct 3(5) (1997) :482-98. doi: 10.1177/1077801297003005003. PMID: 12322015. There are also deep linkages between men's cultural frameworks, for instance in cultures of honor, and their propensity toward violence. See Cohen D, Nisbett RE, Bowdle BF, Schwarz N. Insult, “Aggression, and the Southern Culture of Honor: an ‘Experimental Ethnography’". J Pers Soc Psychol May;70(5) (1996): 945-59. doi: 10.1037//0022-3514.70.5.945. PMID: 8656339; Parrott, Dominic J., and Amos Zeichner. "Effects of Hypermasculinity on Physical Aggression against Women." Psychology of Men & Masculinity 4:1 (2003): 70.
See her, “The Book of Job,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible and Ecology (eds. Hilary Marlow (ed.), Mark Harris; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), 184-196. See also her groundbreaking reading of Job in Kathryn Schifferdecker, Out of the Whirlwind: Creation Theology in the Book of Job (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008).
Schifferdecker, “The Book of Job,” 185.
Ibid. 188
Cole Arthur Riley, This Here Flesh: Spirituality, Liberation, and the Stories That Make Us (New York: Convergent Books, 2022, 32, Kindle edition.
