So with starting the semester, attending two conferences, finishing a major writing project, and having my laptop crash this blog has been a bit neglected the past couple of weeks. I’m still working on a follow-up post on Process Theology and will be launching a blog series in relation to a class project later this week, but today in honor of Valentine’s Day, I think a post on gender is called for.
Thankfully, being so busy recently has (mostly) shielded me from the latest sexism in the church controversy. Apparently John Piper once again said something offensive effectively denigrating women in the church; I haven’t bothered to pay that much attention to it. Then I attended the regional Popular Culture Association conference where I got to hear a bunch of talks on how we are living in a postfeminist world and so don’t need to bother with seeking gender egalitarianism anymore since that is just the air we breathe these days. The whole – women are strong independent individuals who don’t need to rely on anyone any longer, we are the stars of our own stories, how dare second and third wave feminism hold us back! Oh, the irony.
During one session on a postfeminist assessment on Hermione Granger, I had to speak up and challenge the assumed benefits of postfeminism. Just as the patriarchy kept women oppressed by telling us we need men to care for and or complete us, postfeminism holds women back by making us believe we can do it all on our own. This independent woman thing is actually backfiring for women. Instead of networking and relying on friends to help them advance in this world, women often think they must be self-made in order to be considered successful. Instead of surrounding ourselves with a community of support, we women often feel that we must be strong enough to manage by ourselves. To me this is just another ploy to resist the goals of the feminist movement and keep women powerless and vulnerable. Men take advantage of such things, but women sacrifice the strong support structure of community in an attempt to live up to this postfeminist lie that they don’t need help from no one.
I see just as many issues in telling women that they don’t need the support of community as I do in Piper saying that the church has a masculine feel. Both exclude women, cut women out of the core group. It has the feel of a predator stalking its prey – trying to separate it from the herd so it is more vulnerable and easier to take down. To reverse that metaphor, this seems to be based in a deep rooted fear of women. Fear that women – when strong in and of themselves and with the support of a network or community – are worthy and deserving of respect. For men who see having to acknowledge the worth of women as threat to their own positions of power and privilege (as opposed to those who see power as something the worthy should by nature share in service to all), strong women are to be feared and weakened by whatever means necessary.
One session I attended presented a historical overview of the idea of the Virago. In its original conception it was simply the female counterpart of the virtus – a person of strength, courage, and stature. Overtime it came to be a term for a woman who had transgressed her gender, become like a man and abandoned her female characteristics in order to succeed. So in dictionaries these days the terms is defined both as a woman who is strong and courageous as well as a woman who is loud, scolding, and domineering (the insults usually used to weaken smart or strong women). A term originally used to describe the strength of women was twisted into a term of insult that served to demean all women who showed signs of strength and courage. What was feared had to be brought down.
Even in this day and age as women (in some realms) are treated with greater respect than we have been historically, there is still an undercurrent of fear that needs to denigrate women. The sexual objectification of women is an obvious example of this, but even common parlance serves this function as well. Consider the ubiquity of the term “douchebag” as an insult these days. Even the most progressive self-labeling feminists I know use this term to describe the lowest, most despised jerks in our culture. This (to use Catherine Keller’s term) tehomophobia of the deep waters and funk of the womb, represents the underlying fear of women. Our sexuality, and especially our ability to bear children, becomes just another way for women to be redefined as weak or offensive. We are taught to despise our strengths, and even of late to call it sexist to list motherhood as a female strength. Fear runs so deep that even those that respect women are manipulated into twisting our strengths into negative qualities and therefore into keeping us weak.
I’m over that. I don’t care if it is a stereotypical sexist pastor or a postfeminist hipster, I’m tired of people trying to keep me weak. I have strengths and I do not fear them. So on this day devoted to showing love, I move that we start loving women instead of fearing them (that goes for us women too). That we stop separating women from the herd to make us vulnerable or use female sexuality as our preferred form of insult. Forget flowers and chocolate, let’s truly start to love women by celebrating instead of diminishing our strengths.