On the Difference Between Young Men and Women in Their Approach to Hindu-ism
Too Long; Didn't Read
For some young men, Hindu-ism and related things provides identity, distinctiveness, intellectual mastery, moral certainty, status, and an arena for striving. For some young women, the same things are more likely to be entangled with memories or expectations of restriction, servitude, ritual exclusion, and awkwardness. They thus may approach Hindu-ism with different enough priors to effect a difference in uptake of personal religion.
Edits I Haven't Made Yet
Right now I mostly compare the benefits to boys and restraints to girls with small exception and a larger analysis seems worth it. I also don't include any reference to studies on this or cross-religious analysis. I also have a stinking feeling the "male" experience I claim here is too over-indexed on my own, but would be interested to see more counter-examples.
Main Points
Men are more likely to stubbornly stick to big leaps of faith
In my own experience, I became more devoted sometime around ~15-16, where I became more engrossed in the religion of ShrI-vaiSNavam and read incessantly about it. This has been the foundation for the shape that my personal religion has taken, providing tools like philosophical contentions, mantras, and faith. However, I am able to notice the following feelings associated with my rising interest in devotion that may be signals of other common human feelings which correspond or co-relate to a "rise in devotion".
These are:
- In-group benefits: Knowing that I am more part of an in-group because of the words I use and arguments I make helps me feel more secure about myself. It makes me feel more unique and without it I noticed a small distaste for religion. Examples: referring to the third person as svAmi, wearing of the sacred thirumaN and ShrIchUrnam, saying to others that I have performed the twilight rituals. These benefits are material in the feeling of satisfaction that I receive upon being perceived a certain, positive way. They may also, although I have not observed a clear instance nor pattern of this, be material in a physical sense.
- Ease of Deontology: Many people, myself included, yearn for some absolute moral truth, to be told what is right and what is wrong and to infallibly listen. In this sense, the Deontologist is a weaker curious of the moral truth than their counterparts. To be clear, the Deontologist has incredible will and drive to satisfy their moral requirements, and in that sense also possesses immense strength (cf. the exegesis of apauruSeyatvam in the vedAnta sUtras). The Deontologist therein submits large intellectual curiosity to establish why their truths are deserving of truth.
- Intellectual competitiveness and superiority: Occasionally I can sense that my brain wants to look down on others, especially those born into the same faith as me, because of their ignorance with respect to Hindu-ism. I suspect that this feeling is both innate to humans due to evolutionary pressures and reinforced in our society, with the influence of the latter being the important one. I assume this extends to other pursuance of intellectual labor.
Gendered Associations
When I say this, I mean the effects that societal pressures have on girls which impact their behaviors in a salient or trackable manner. I mean this and this only.
Most of the problems associated with the patriarchy as I describe them are "seed problems", or problems which by themselves may not explain the full phenomenon. However, these seed problems seem to have a strong tendency to generate strong negative mental associations in girls, and these associations serve as a main driver for the phenomenon I am trying to describe.
Finally, the underpinnings of these points are the value shifts associated with growing up in krau~nchadvIpa. Quantifying this is notably nontrivial.
Woman serving Man: In many households, children experience their mothers performing some sort of service to their fathers, such as being chiefly responsible for making food, serving tea, and generally things which fall under this servitorship dynamic. The idea of following customs, tradition, and thus religion in these households may be naturally linked to this dynamic. In addition, since the idea of marriage is inextricably linked to this mild servitorship, it's plausible that marriage-talk also suffers from this negative mental association. Traditional customs like these have clear differences with the values of krau~nchadvIpa, which I contend is more salient for girls than it is for boys.
A sub-point of this is that girls are raised differently than boys, afforded less average freedom, restricted on average more heavily, and the effects of this may manifest in these negative associations with customs and traditions which naturally extend to religion and philosophy. It is not so easy to make principled differentiations between two highly co-related things, especially when one of them has strong emotional associations with it. An example of this is separating nationalism from pride.
Ritual exclusion: Since there are persistent (but not all-encompassing or necessarily wide) Hindu egregores that forbid women from parts of Hindu rituals, it's likely that this forbiddance fosters a feeling of non-belonging. This includes things like the upanayana samskAra and exclusion from the sabarimalai temple. In fact, the mental image of a purohit as a balding, larger man may itself trigger subtle negative associations with respect to female belonging. This falls into a larger bucket of there being a preference for religious authority to be male.
Societal pressure on women: The amount of effort it requires for most girls to make, maintain, and cultivate friendships throughout upper grade school and college is likely measurably larger than for boys. This is for many reasons, such as wildly different expectations and the popular media, but regardless has the effect of developing a dichotomy between inward and outward facing personalities. I suspect I am not covering this section well. I contend that boys in public do not have to perform in the way I am gesturing that girls must. Where I think this matters is that these generated personalities are, in most cases, not clearly reckon-able with religion. To be specific, I contend that a group of similarly aged students is more likely to look at a girl differently than a boy, were both to claim that they were moderately or strictly religious. Outward markers of religiosity may be more likely to be perceived as intellectuality in boys whereas the same may be subjugation for girls. This is the stronger factor for this section than the outward facing personality.
Female Devotion
I do think there are clear benefits to women for religion, and that these benefits are realized. In addition, there are many ways girls interact with the religion that are not common for boys, and which in many ways maintain the praxis of the religion. Examples of these are more common adoption of traditional clothing, higher participation in festivals, temple visits (dubious), bharatanATyam (dance), music (ablating the qualms of the first section), and more. Although these things certainly exist and are widespread, the phenomenon I am trying to gesture at is slightly different.
Result
The phenomenon I observe is not easy to pin down exactly, but it looks something like: caring deeply about hindu culture and learning pursuant to that, developing a strong sense of bhakti, going to the temple, and praying. The girls seem to diverge into the ones who get it and the ones who don't much earlier. Boys may be more likely to tolerate ostensibly objectionable traditional doctrine because the tradition as a whole is more rewarding for them. I don't think this affects retaining cultural practice nearly as much as it does the uptake of personal religion, although I am not sure.