Feminism III

9/23/06
No, that's actually not the same logic at all. The same logic would be "hmm. Slavery seems oppressive. It seems like having someone as your personal slave is degrading to their personhood. I know this is the way we've always done things and it's in the Bible and it seems to have worked in the past, but maybe we need a revisioning." I blame those things on patriarchy because they often spring from the patriarchal chain of command that goes God - man - woman. A man thinks he's more valuable or more powerful, so he abuses his wife. Women are told their realm of influence is the home, so they spend their whole lives there and find it in the end unfulfilling and futile. Not because raising a family and doing housework is worthless, of course not!, but because one sometimes wishes her life would affect more than 2-5 people in her lifetime. And from there springs a whole range of problems.

I am kind of offended by the way you're talking about my "personal experiences" having given me "distorted glasses" enabling me to see "nothing but negative," and find it pretty condescending, but I think you're trying to be sympathetic or something, so I'll let it slide. For future references, telling someone they have "distorted glasses" is pretty tactless and hurtful, especially when you have only heard brief snippets of the person's life, and only online.

But speaking of my experiences, yes, I had this idea that life was going to be good, and that people were generally happy, because I was happy. My childhood was happy and carefree, my parents loved each other and loved life and got along smiling through life. Then I started growing up, and people started changing and getting divorced, and their kids started telling me about what their homes were actually like. Most of my friends' parents are divorced. Most of their parents that aren't divorced are so emotionally distant that they are only married by name. I find it absolutely remarkable that you haven't encountered this living in America in the 21st century. Either you live in a really unusual little community, or else you're a hopeless optimist. Not that I've never seen a healthy marriage. Man, there are a few that still love each other and work together, and that is beautiful. Many of the ones that actually do function properly are the ones that have given up traditional roles and just learned to love each other in their particularity.

Did you see how you equated patriarchy with happy commitment and egalitarianism with "unbridled sex with multiple strangers and unprohibited fornication?" That is ridiculous. And please don't tell me about the stereotypical feminist or whatever and how that's how he/she lives his/her life. Stereotypes are never accurate, always overly negative, not understanding, and just quick tools to write off the people different than us. Stereotypes never tell the real story. I hope to have a happy and committed marriage, but one that lets me and my spouse love each other in our uniqueness, instead of just fulfilling some archetypal roles of man and woman.

I'm sorry, I'm getting off topic. That might have more to do with people changing and not knowing how to communicate than with traditional gender roles.

But yes, patriarchy is all about man-over-woman and power play between sexes. You can't make that untrue by just saying it's not true. As I've said before, the word patriarchy comes from "patros" (father) and archo (to rule or reign). That's the idea. In fact, power is the main thing, I think. Traditional gender roles often say women shouldn't be in leadership in churches. Hadassah and Candace, for instance, have said that multiple times on this site. (Although, I know they don't speak for you about a lot of things, maybe you feel differently. Nevertheless.) Guess what, it is the leadership of the church that determines the course the church takes, writes its theology and its history, teaches its people how to think and live in faith. That is a position of tremendous power in the shaping of our faith. If men and women are different (which I suppose is up for grabs, but something I would basically say), then they may think in different ways, find different aspects of Christianity appealing, read the Bible in different ways, etc. But if the church is only letting men occupy that role, and is saying that way is the "authoritative" way, the "God-ordered" way, then the woman's way becomes excluded. The male way of thinking is imposed upon her. She is not afforded the joy of playing a creative part in her tradition. She is only the receiver, not the shaper, of doctrine. Talk about a distorted vision. A tradition that only operates within the male-defined frameworks of understanding is untrue to the hollistic human experience, because it only consults half of it. The same sort of thing can be said of a marriage.

This is why the problem is bigger than "well, we value women now" or "women can have jobs." For the entire history of Christian thought, it has been dominated by male voices. The entire worldview we've inherited is wrapped up in this, and so if we want to really take equality seriously, we have to turn a critical eye to every step in the development of our thought and to every point of doctrine. Again, this doesn't mean "unbridled sex with multiple strangers," for goodness sake! But it might mean letting ourselves question the motivations of the generations of men who were slowly shaping the consructs of gender identity that have eventually landed in our laps. It might mean saying "hmm. I've been taught that women aren't supposed to be pastors. Why would someone say that? Have I found women to be less capable as leaders?" or "I wonder if having exclusively masculine imagery for God has caused us to think of good and evil and righteousness and sin in ways that actually don't represent the whole of human experience and may even harm me and others. Are there other ways to think of redemption and the human drama that might resonate more with women and other marginalized peoples?" A lot of it, also, is coming to understand the relativity of the conservative evangelical worldview, which American Christianity has tried to convince me is absolute. No worldview is absolute.

9/23/06
I've already yakked on enough on this board, so I'm not going to waste your time repeating the exact same things. So please refer to everything I've said thusfar, and consider it a response.

But, it's interesting how you keep drawing this divide between people's subjectively pursuing what they think is true, and the "objective" truth of "God's word." You don't have some objective resource to draw from. Any belief held is just a belief held in subjectivity. It doesn't have to be a bad thing. And, more importantly, it's all we have.

It's all we have because you can't see the world from anywhere but where you're sitting. And where you're sitting is a rather unique and limited space informed by only a few limited and unique perspectives on what the Bible means and which parts of it are important enough to determine the ways we interpret the rest of it. You want to think that you can transcend that space by holding on to something absolute, and that is good, but you can't hold on to that absolute except from where you're sitting, and that's going to make your view of the absolute just one view. This takes time to see, and is rather painful, not the sort of thing proven through argumentation, so I'm not expecting to convince you. I guess I offer it as more of an explanation of what I see than a persuasion.

And now, a couple disclaimers:

I started talking on here because I am beginning to see. Because the accumulation of the stories of women being hurt and abused is starting to get to me, and because looking at myself, I slowly over several years have begun to notice the ways I have come to believe that I don't matter, that I'm not enough, and that in some inexplicable and subtle way, I often think that men are more concrete than me. Not just men, other women too. But either way, I think of myself as small and powerless, just the accumulation of what other people put in me. Somewhere along the line, I started thinking maybe I don't think this because I actually am small and powerless. Maybe it's because something in the world has taught this to me, and maybe it has to do with being a woman, since other women I know seem to be finding the same things. And now that I've started seeing this way, the world is looking very different to me, and I am seeing so many things that need to be rethought, everything needs to be rethought. There is so much to do, and I really don't want to have to leave the church to do it. But since the church is often the source of these traditional ways of viewing things, it's going to take some conversation to get us all on the way toward a better society. That's why I entered into this discussion. I know the internet's not the best place to do it, and the internet isn't the only place I am having these discussions, but it is the only place I am going to talk to you folks, Nathan and Hadassah, and I see that we have much to talk about, and so I talk. I just wanted to get that out there.

Also, I wanted to clarify that I love men. This may have been questionable with the way I've been talking about male-dominated societies and all. The problem isn't males, it's hierarchy, really. It's having a society that is only driven by a certain select group of people, whether that's men or the upper class or the white people or whatever. Everyone deserves a voice, that's all.

Oh, and also, it was also people "passionately pursuing what YOU thought was truth" that led to the Reformation, the defeat of slavery in America, women's right to vote, the belief that the earth is round, biology, Christianity, and the civil rights movement in America. All of these things arose in controversy, as ideas that strongly challenged the church (or Judaism, in the case of Christianity) and led to great persecution by Christians (or various other religious people).

Just thought we should clarify. Progress never happens without people breaking out of their tradition to think in new ways. Fact.

10/4/06
Well, I appreciate your clarification, Anthony. And thanks for being so civil in all your comments.

Given that a very few people between Pythagoras and whoever it was that made it a popular idea might have believed that the earth was round, that doesn't change the fact that it wasn't the prevailing view, and that the church persecuted and even killed those who taught it. Why? Because they found it threatening to their reading of Scripture, with all its talk about "the ends of the earth" and such. As history unwound itself and brought about new discoveries, the church still clung to the Bible's way of seeing things, and (to be honest) as a result, made of a fool of herself and hurt lots of good folks in the process. big mess.

Analogously, a handful of people throughout history may have thought women and men could occupy roles suited to their strengths, which may or may not fit into the gender archetypes their society hands them. Some people throughout history have been egalitarian, and such people have also been strongly condemned and persecuted by the church. Or, subtly marginalized in silly facebook groups. And what has history taught us? That as much as we care about the Bible, we must also use our brains, for goodness sake. If women are people, which our enlightened age seems to have discovered, then all the things we've thought about them in the past need to be reevaluated in light of this new discovery, even if those things can trace their roots to our Bible.

10/17/06
I know you were responding to Casey, but I'm jumping in. Go figure.

Ok, so you're saying that men aren't better "in general," but that both men and women are better at some things than the other gender. We both have our strengths, and they complement each other.

It depends on what specifically you're talking about. It's funny that you chose not to specify, because these things are "subjective and different from person to person," yet in the next breath, you talk about being "purely feminine," as if it were some objective and obvious thing. But yes, if you're talking about raw hand-to-hand combat, then I would agree, the average man is probably better at this than the average woman. And if you're talking about emotional sensitivity, then yes, in this culture, the average woman is better at recognizing her own emotions and sensing those of others. But that by no means should dictate that a man can't have emotions, or that he is unmasculine for recognizing and valuing them. And it doesn't mean a woman is unfeminine for having physical strength. These things aren't so black and white as we make them out to be, and when we make them out to be that way, we arbitrarily create shame and guilt for those who don't fit into our categories, and we call absolute something which is by no means absolute, deceiving ourselves.

Also, there are all kinds of things in which gender in no way determines one's abilities. Leadership, for instance, or intelligence, or interpreting the Bible. I read the Bible differently and I lead differently because I am a woman in America in the 21st century who has generally identified herself with that culture's notion of femininity, it's true. But that does not mean that my way is less effective or just generally worse than a man's. If you ask me, the different perspective of a woman, from a position of authority, could do a lot to widen the church's understanding of God and human life. To say otherwise could only mean that the man's opinion is more valuable than the woman's. Please tell me how this isn't so.

Exclusively male leadership is not an issue of who is better suited for leading a group of people. It is an issue of power. who gets the power to determine how we read the Bible and how we should live and what is true. You give only men this power, and you are oppressing women.

This issue doesn't make any sense to you, because you don't think you're influenced by a certain person's idea of how to read the Bible and how to live and what is true. (Please don't think it's condescending for me to assume what you do and don't think and recognize. I'm basing this on all our prior discussion.) You think you are only influenced by "the truth" of "God's Word." Until you recognize that God's Word means nothing to you until put into human words by human mouths, mouths with their own particularities and cultural limitations, you won't see the ways our archetypal gender roles are marginalizing and oppressing both women and men.

How long do we have to talk about this before you quit calling all feminism extreme and all oppression past?