I Used to Be Kind of a Feminist

Well that’s…depressing.

Well, she only had about 2 minutes to give a highlight of what the program meant to her, and she was speaking to a “friendly” audience – the kind of parents who would send their kids to SCSL would be like mine, to whom “feminism” was code for what’s wrong with our society, a dirty word.

In any case, I would imagine the marriage class she referenced did tell her what to do in those kinds of situations, and while I can extrapolate from my own experience, I would be extrapolating the worst kinds of advice, since that’s what I learned, and I didn’t want to assume – it could be that she got some moderate advice. Not likely, but it could be.

Back when it was important to me, I looked up the famous quotation that “god hates divorce” and found that it also says in the same sentence that god hates violence from men. Malachi 2:16 NIV: “I hate divorce,” says the LORD God of Israel, “and I hate a man’s covering himself with violence as well as with his garment.”

On the other hand, what I’ve heard, from passages in the New Testament, is that the woman is supposed to submit and pray and let god change the man. It’s what I heard on radio programs and in church, and specifically given to my mother as advice. It’s what my mother uses as an excuse for not protecting my sister and I from my adoptive (her biological) father’s abuse. He has recently been diagnosed as bipolar with borderline personality disorder, so he’s one of those psychopaths you are talking about, and pastors trying to counsel them regularly told Mom that the problem in the relationship lay with her not submitting, or worse, with her having too close of a relationship with me which led him to natural jealousy. (Which leads an adult me to think pastoral counseling should be avoided if they don’t have real psychological training, because of that load of bs.)

I know many unhappy women who think this. I don’t blame a lot of them that live in India, because this is the easiest way for them to get and keep a mate, but the better educated ones just leave me baffled and sad. People have a long way to go before they start to be intelligent.

I think I would have booed, or yelled something. At the very least I would have loudly grumbled.

Just to make sure, my comment wasn’t intended as criticism.

Dom Camus: the human mind is a wonderfully flexible thing for manipulation by peers and social pressures; sadly, not so much with arguments. And I mean any human mind, though a knowledge of social pressures and their effect as well as a commitment to following the arguments can help you resist (but does not make you immune).

is that the woman is supposed to submit and pray and let god change the man.

I’ve also heard of this advice being given directly to abused children, too.

Makes me really happy that I don’t live in a religious country. Don’t get me wrong, I have nothing against Christianity or whatever, but it scares me how easy some people misuse religion to justify racism, sexism or like in this case teaching women to be slaves. It’s one thing if you’re into kinky sex, but submitting to someone for 24/7? That doesn’t sound kinky but unhealthy.

Originally Posted By RobinI have to wonder how that young woman feels about marriage in which there is no man…

I strongly suspect that this is the real reason for all the frothing opposition to same-sex relationships and marriage. They have so much cultural investment in a gendered hierarchy that relationships that completely sidestep that hierarchy are a much bigger threat than equal relationships between men and women.

You’re an order of magnitude off on your calculations. It’s 120 million people are sociopaths for your numbers. 1.2 billion is 20% of 6 billion

Sorry for the thread necro, but have you read ? It talks a lot about the damage these kinds of advice and teachings do to women and girls. Quiverfull is on the more extreme end, but it is all the same “submit to a man”
garbage.

See, my feeling is that if you can’t be egalitarian, then women should be in charge of the family, and given the stereotypes they believe about men and women, I don’t understand why *they* don’t see that.

In the real world, men are more violent than women by orders of magnitude (90% of all murderers are men), and men are more easily detached from their children than women (I think this is actually biological, personally, given that male mammals simply don’t father… but that it’s heavily mediated by culture. You can program a male human to be a good father or you can let nature take its course.) If you give money to people in developing nations, women spend it on their families and men spend it on themselves. And in nature, mammals exist in units of mother-child with males attached, not male-female with children attached. But I don’t expect these folks to look at the real world for their ideas.

However, I might expect that they would look at their *own* stereotypes. They believe “women are gentle” — well, gentle people are more likely to accept input from everyone under their leadership and seek a solution that benefits all than they are to self-aggrandize. “Women are emotional”, but “men are justified in getting angry when they are disobeyed because that is male nature” — well, anger is an emotion, and empathy is a better trait in a leader than anger, and Christianity *preaches* this. It’s not like this is a warrior religion that says it’s great to bash people’s heads in. “Women are better with children than men”, and “marriage exists for the sake of the children”… well, if marriage exists for children and women are better with children, why the *fuck* are you putting men in charge of the marriage? That’s like saying you’re going to put the IT guys in charge of a construction project. No matter how smart the guy who programs your computer is, he doesn’t know as much about building things as the guy who builds things for a living. If women are naturally better with children and marriage exists for children then WOMEN SHOULD BE IN CHARGE OF MARRIAGE.

I mean, it’s insane clown logic. “Men are ruled by their sexual desires, so women need to carefully control their behavior so as to avoid tempting men” really means “Men are weak, and think with their dicks. Women are intelligent and in control of their own actions all the time.” How does this not translate to “women should be in charge?” “Men are stronger than women.” Yes, physically, but since Christianity preaches that the meek shall inherit the Earth, physical strength needs to be counterbalanced with spiritual strength, and there’s no implication that men are spiritually stronger than women if women have to police their own behavior to allow men to control themselves. “Men should provide for women.” Yes, and sales and marketing should bring in customers for the business, but if the person running the business is a marketing guy who knows absolutely nothing about the widgets the company makes, the company will make crappy widgets that no one wants to buy. The person in charge of what the company actually *makes* has to be someone who understands what the company makes, and if the “company” makes healthy children, why is the person whose responsibility it is to provide funds to that project in charge, rather than the person who is actually doing the work? The fundraising department does not actually run most colleges, as much as it may seem so.

By all of their own stereotypes, proper “Christian headship” should involve the wife being in charge of all the family’s decisions, but being respectful of her husband’s input. And the husband should be willing to provide input and suggestions, but understand that the final decision will always be his wife’s, because she is closer to the children, and the children are the reason for the marriage. Thus, men will never get justifiably angry at being disobeyed, because wives cannot disobey their husbands, as wives are in charge; wives are thought to be empathic and gentle, and are physically weaker than their husbands, so they will not beat a disobedient husband, but will naturally seek to find a way to persuade him to obedience (of course, if he’s not obedient, in the end, then he is committing a crime against God because God plainly intended the woman to lead the marriage, since marriage is for children and women are better with children.) The decisions that the family makes will be based on empathy and love for children and the knowledge of what is good for the children and what they need, rather than the man’s sinful desire to increase his own social status. Hey, just the historical fact that women were a lot less likely to drink away the family’s money than men were, ever, should suggest that the natural way God intended things to work is that women were supposed to be in charge of the family! And you can tell this is true because God made women weaker than men, and thus intended to prevent physical abuse and domination by the leader of the family, because God is Love and Jesus Christ preached that if someone should strike you, you should turn the other cheek rather than strike them back. Women are better at nonviolence than men, therefore women are closer to the teachings of Jesus, therefore women should be in charge.

Of course, it doesn’t work that way. The religious beliefs serve to prop up patriarchy; patriarchy doesn’t evolve naturally from the religious beliefs. So the fact that nearly everything they think about men and women, and nearly everything their religion teaches that doesn’t directly pertain to men and women, should suggest that women should be in charge, doesn’t manage to contradict the direct teachings they have that women should be subservient to men, is because the religion *exists* to make women subservient to men. And given that this is pretty much the opposite of what Christ taught, if Christ was real and was really the Son of God, there are a lot of so-called followers of His who are seriously torquing Him off.

Now personally, I believe in egalitarian marriage, because I don’t actually believe women are better people than men (less violent people, on average, but this doesn’t stop individual women from being more violent than individual men, and violence is only a negative trait when it is not used in self-defense anyway, so being less violent doesn’t inherently make a person better than another.) But if someone’s gotta be in charge, the person who can’t do nearly as much harm by beating the “submissive” partner, who would have a *much* harder time raping the “submissive” partner, who is biologically more likely to be closer tied to the children and who by current cultural gender roles will almost certainly spend more time raising them, and who has been socially taught to consider the feelings of others before making decisions, is the one who ought to run things in a family. Hell, making the person who spends their time “making a home” subservient to the person who’s stereotypically supposed to spend most of their time out of the home would be like making a nation follow an ambassador to the UN as their leader, rather than the domestic leader who’s in the nation listening to the nation’s problems most of the time.

I have to disagree pretty profoundly with a biological reason for male humans to bond less well with their offspring, and the idea that mammal males as a rule don’t to any child rearing. Physiologically, men who spend enough time around infants get comparable levels of the bonding hormones associated with nursing mothers. And as far as mammal fathers, red foxes hunt while the mothers are trapped in the den nursing, bringing her back food. This sounds rather fifties, but they also play with and socialize their cubs, and later teach them to hunt as much as the mother does. Closer to home, marmoset males frequently take care of their infants, and assist the mother in giving birth. There are others, I’m just too lazy to look.

Now we as a culture are probably tapping into a biological mechanism that keeps men from bonding as closely with their kids; fathers who spend less physical time in the presence of their kids as our culture constantly teaches us is the right way, don’t produce those bonding hormones, but the same thing would happen if our culture traditionally had women leave their children home with the fathers. The mothers wouldn’t have that cozy bond.

I’m not a fan of when people use “feminism” as some sort of dirty word. However, more than getting into that, I wanted to comment on the girl’s use of the word “submissive” and how that’s often taken horribly out of context. I don’t know how this girl views it (i.e. is she more Quiverfull, or is her view slightly more accurate?), so this is more of a general commentary on and my interpretation of the subject of submission as seen in the Bible. All Bible passages are quoted from the English Standard Version.

Certain people like to equate “wives, submit to your husbands, as in the Lord” with “husbands, go ahead and beat the crap out of your wives!”, but that’s a gross misinterpretation of that particular passage of the Bible (Ephesians 5:21-33). There is a tendency to confuse Biblical submission with “subservience”. Subservience is akin to being a “doormat”. That’s not what Paul is talking about in this passage. Context is key, especially when reading a document that has been dated to the first century C.E., and it’s best to read the entire chapter to better understand the above-mentioned verse. Of course, there’s also the centuries of misogyny perpetuated by the church that needs to be worked through to even get to the original context, unfortunately.

First of all, Paul is writing to the church in Ephesus, and, before verse 22 (“wives, submit to your husbands, as in the Lord), he is addressing both men and women together. Verses 17-21 make up one sentence, and it is interesting to note that Paul ends this sentence with “giving thanks and for everything to God the Father in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, SUBMITTING TO ONE ANOTHER out of reverence for Christ (Ephesians 5:20-21, emphasis mine).” So, the idea of Biblical submission is not just a “wife thing”.

The passage immediately following the verses about wives submitting to their husbands (verses 22-24), is also extremely important, especially in response to the kind of misogyny-disguised-as-Christianity that turns wives into doormats. “Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave himself up for her…In the same way, husbands should love their wives as their own bodies. He who loves his wife loves himself (verses 25, 28…the entirety of Paul’s message to husbands is in verses 25-33).” I wonder what would happen if husbands stopped and REALLY thought about those verses and what they mean. Christ died for the church; that’s what Paul means by “as Christ loved the church”. That’s not some lip-service “love”, that’s the real thing. Because of this, I don’t buy that women are supposed to be the only ones sacrificing something in a marriage. Nor do I believe that this passage is saying that “husbands = God”. Jesus (God the Son) was doing the will of God the Father (Matthew 26:39b “My Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me; nevertheless, not as I will, but as You will.”).

Examples of women throughout the Bible also convince me that submission from a female perspective is NOT the same thing as being a repressed, subservient, or invisible. Eve, when she was created, was called “ezer” (the word usually translated as “helpmeet” or “companion” in Genesis 2:18) – a term used only a few times in the Old Testament; most of the time, “ezer” is used to refer to the type of help God brings to Israel! Esther, saved her people (Book of Esther); Ruth risked everything in order to provide for the mother of her dead husband (Book of Ruth; for good historical commentary, The Gospel of Ruth: Loving God Enough to Break the Rules by Carolyn Custis James is an excellent read); Deborah was a judge of Israel and went with her people into battle (and she was married while doing all of this, too) (Judges 4-5); Abigail went behind her husband’s back to make up for the insult he had given to David and to save her household from David’s foolish plan for revenge (1 Samuel 25); the wife of noble character described in Proverbs 31:10-31 “dresses herself with strength and makes her arms strong” (verse 17); Mary was chosen to be the mother of Christ (and was only the second person an angel of the Lord appeared to in several hundred years!); the last people at the crucifixion and the first Christ revealed his resurrection to were women (in a time when women were considered natural liars). So, I don’t think that submission in a Biblical context is “weak”; however, the way the girl in the article mentions being “feminist about relationships” gives me pause.

One last note, about the Quiverfull/Stay at Home Daughters movement: In everything I’ve read about it, the daughters always talk about how they want to be like their fathers and emulate their fathers and live to help their fathers, etc etc; all of the education they choose to receive (and education is really emphasized by this movement) is for this purpose. I’ve never heard their mothers mentioned as examples they want to strive to emulate, just their fathers. What this says to me is that these girls are being raised to value what, according to their subculture, are masculine traits, not feminine ones. What happens, then, when they get married and have to content themselves with the “female” (according to Quiverfull) role in the relationship?

If we do take it in context, we also have Paul telling women to sit down and shut up when men are talking, explaining that men have nothing to learn from women, and that women cannot have any kind of leadership roles. Paul’s misogyny is notable, and it requires a great deal of cherry picking to come up with a non-misogynistic viewpoint of the teachings of Paul regarding women. The bible, as a whole, teaches that women are less valuable than men, have fewer rights than men, and yes, should be subservient to men.