Identity and Doing Versus Being

It’s been said that men are socialized to do, and women are socialized to be.

Boys are asked what they want to be when they grow up. Girls are told they look pretty. Boys are given trucks to drive and erector sets to build with. Girls are given Barbies to dress. Men are invited to act, to speak, to earn. Women are invited to primp, to marry, to impress. Granted, women are also invited to put on makeup, fix hair, follow fashion trends. A small amount of unimportant doing in the service of being.

This is a problem, because doing is more important than being. In fact, there is no real being that isn’t the result of repeated doing. You become an athlete by doing sports. You become a painter by painting.

As a young person raised with fundamentalist religion, I noticed a lot of casual talk about Good People and Bad People.

My former religion held that people were “saved by grace, not by works.” This should have, on its surface, prevented the above categorization. You’re not good or bad, you’re just saved or unsaved.

In practice, it simply permitted a different sorting algorithm. People who had confessed their sins and received God’s grace were Good People. People who hadn’t could go either way. It was possible for someone to be good—perhaps they lived soberly and gave to charity—yet still be bound for hell.

I found that thinking of people as inherently good or bad was damaging to the souls of both. One of the Good People I knew was addicted to pornography. He felt bad about it, and made intermittent and ineffectual attempts to stop it, but in the end, he knew he was a child of God, bound for heaven, a Good Person. This limited his motivation to really address the problem. After all, taking steps to change is hard, and asking for forgiveness is easy. And the bible doesn’t explicitly mention pornography, anyway. If God wasn’t mad, who else mattered?

I was still entrenched in religion at the time, and I worried about forgiveness and heaven, too. But I believed actions also mattered. Actions had consequences.

The pornography trade victimizes women, I said to my friend. He agreed. Though it’s fashionable to dispute that now, people understood it then. Most women in the sex trade want out. Some are there because of human trafficking. Others are kept drugged and abused. None would choose to have their bodies slapped and probed by strangers if they felt they had a better choice.

Shouldn’t you make it a priority to stop, then, I asked? To reduce the demand, and thus the number of women who are victimized? He shrugged. He was already half-ass trying. Why should he worry? He was a Good Person.

Then there were the Bad People. They had internalized that they were Bad People, so they had even less incentive to fix anything. Maybe you were arrested as a teen for shoplifting. Might as well rob your grandma, too, the thinking seemed to go.

You might think that’s just a side effect of grace-based religion, but it goes deeper than that. It’s a problem of privileging “being” over “doing.” Other ideologies do it, too.

Like identity politics. Therein, you are oppressed or oppressor. You are a stain upon society or a golden child. And by the way, you can move from the former to the latter. You don’t have to join the Red Cross or pick up trash or adopt a blind dog. You don’t even have to give up on homophobia or murder. All you have to do is choose a label.

“Queer, pansexual, neurodivergent, bipoc, socialist, pagan, fat, bigender, aromantic demigirl,” reads many a Twitter profile. This is a list of titles, not actions. Being is easy. What are you doing?

What if identity mattered less? What if your actions add up to who you are? Maybe donating your time at a soup kitchen makes a hungry person’s day a little better, whether or not you get called a philanthropist. Maybe exercising every day brings you strength and health, whether or not you get called an athlete. Maybe life is about doing what’s good for yourself and others, not about acquiring a label.

“We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” ―Aristotle