May I remind everyone that plants have gender, nouns have gender, but people have sex.

Stuart,

I would agree if you would have said people are identified by sex...

Hah. I have to remember that one.

It's important. He who controls the terminology controls the argument. Radical egalitarians have elevated "gender" in place of sex, because they believe all differences between the sexes are social constructs. Sex is biological and immutable; gender is socially conditioned and fluid. But if you believe "man and woman He created them", then all differences between the sexes are intentional, God's way of incarnating the masculine and feminine aspects of his nature in human nature; and of course, man and woman must unite as man and wife in order that the fullness of those aspects can be integrated in "one flesh".

A very good article on marriage from an Eastern Christian perspective can be found in "Let No Man Join Together: An Orthodox Christian View of a Beseiged Sacrament", by Vigen Guroian, in the January/February issue of Touchstone Magazine.

In the orthodox church there's also intelectual nuns

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICIabpF-4GY

Mother Vassa is not at all atypical.