The "typical" Traditionalist young woman, is, of course, a saint.
That's off topic for this thread, but you can certainly start a discussion on that if you like. Just start a new thread, maybe in the men's forum.
I was just saying that to make a point, not to slight women. Traditional gender roles (like everything else) in our society have been thrust into confusion, so it is only natural that those of us sympathetic to age before the upheaval should want to impose, even to the point of absurdity, harsh, categorical thinking and generalizations. This isn't restricted to one sex, and it isn't a problem confined to gender, either, but we see it in our understandings of politics, wealth, race, and nearly everything else before us.
No man is "man" in the general, and no woman is "woman" in the general. Traditionalists seem to like to talk about the proper roles and attitudes of men and women, and generally regurgitate the same old "active versus passive," "logic versus emotion." ("Boys don't cry," etc.) To take these simplistic, binary formulae such as this and derive generalizations and idealizations is nothing short of oppressive, and the cynicism towards this sort of thought, I have to admit, makes the liberal approach to religion attractive in some respects.
In the Zohar, the phrase
עולם קטן is used to describe human nature, and it appears in the Midrash as well. It means "little world," and is the source of the famous phrase "To kill a single person is to destroy the entire world." That is to say the totality of creation is contained within the soul of man; man is the microcosm and the world, visible and invisible, is the macrocosm. We would do better, I think, to experience people as individuals, as distinct totalities, beyond the grasp of generalization and abstraction, than to regress into categorical thinking.
