White Lady Feminism, Christian Blogging, and the Worst of Both Possible Worlds

Meta discussions about discussions are the worst. I know. So I’m warning you ahead of time, this is kind of one of those posts. But I think there’s also something more important here, so, please, bear with me.

My hypothesis: Much of modern, online feminism suffers from the same pathologies and problematic issues that plague modern day evangelicalism.

As someone who straddles both the worlds of feminist activism and the evangelical/post-evangelical/churchy sphere, I’ve been put in a unique position of trying to work out two ideologies at once and reconcile them to each other.

When I can get the two to reconcile and work together well, I find a vibrant, healthy, awesome community of support that pushes me to be a better person while simultaneously loving me as I am. I don’t view “you can do better” and “you are a person worthy of love” as contradictory messages, due in large part to this reconciliation between two schools of thoughts previously believed disparate. There’s a lot to love in both feminism and Christian theology. The first helps me to fight for my rights, to see myself as a person, to understand the world and the socializations within which I function. The second helps me with the why of things, gives me a steady hope for deeper change, and grounds my love within a theology of community.

But, when either of these two goes wrong, they go really, really wrong. And, remarkably, I’ve noticed that they tend to go wrong in almost exactly the same ways. It’s a disturbing confluence of the problematic nature of ideology embraced above hearing opposition and it is, in many ways, a perpetuation of marginalization and oppression.

It goes like this: prominent person says something controversial or promotes a problematic idea. Criticism comes in – some just downright mean, some hard to hear, and some spot on. Flurries of typing, tweets, and comments result in a sometimes overwhelming response. People post blogs in response, in defense of, in offense of. After about a week, or maybe longer, the meta discussions begin, and almost all of them have the same tune: “We’re broken, we’re bickering, the infighting is killing us, why can’t we all just get aloooong.”

See, for example, Jill Filipovic’s response to criticism of both Sheryl Sandberg and the #femfuture report, in which she accuses critics of going forth in “kneejerk critic” mode, and admonishes them for attacking “successful feminists.”

See, for example, Matt Appling’s post in defense of Emily Wierenga after she posted an “open letter to feminist sisters” and Wierenga’s own posts portraying herself as a persecuted martyr.

Feminism, indeed, offered me affirmation of my questioning that I hadn’t found in evangelicalism. But then I started to notice the same, uncomfortable pattern. “Successful” feminists – including both male and female feminists – would respond to criticism of their movements by appealing to their marginalization, saying that “we need to present a united front! Stop dragging down successful women! No wonder we can’t get anything done.” It didn’t matter what the criticism was – legitimate or not – the criticism itself was a problem. Christians, likewise, play this card, picturing themselves a persecuted minority in a world unfriendly to Christians, and that we therefore must be united as much as possible. It feels, in many ways, like I’ve traded one bad system of thought for another.

This is a problem for feminism in the exact same way it is for evangelicalism – critiquing the tenets or the output of popular persons within the faith is infighting, bickering, failure to present a united front to The World Out There Because They Are Watching.

This rhetoric was incredibly useful for shutting up dissenters when I was a conservative Christian. After all, if I’m a perpetual witness for the faith and I’m not getting along with my Christian brothers and sisters, what impression does that leave of the faith itself? How will we get converts?

But the same thing happens in feminism – we need to be united as sisters because if we don’t, we show the world that Feminists Are Catty and Eat Their Own and Look at Those Terrible Women. If we cannot be a good witness and keep our disagreements quiet, how are we going to get converts?

It’s no coincidence that the person who first made big-f Feminism okay for me was a woman who self-describes as a “feminist evangelist.” The rhetoric of such a movement is remarkably similar to the right-wing Christian rhetoric within which I was raised – it’s all about winning people to the cause, changing hearts and minds, and presenting the best image of feminism we can.

And, in a way, I’m all for that. Making feminism palatable for people who have grown up with distaste for it is part of my motivation in blogging.

BUT, when we prioritize being witnesses for the ideology over being good feminists (or Christians), we end up in a place where we quash discourse, where the appearance of presenting a united front is more important than actually sorting out what it means to be alive. We end up prizing conversion to the ideology over and above a discussion of what that ideology looks like. We end up prioritizing the appearance of being good people over being actual good people.

And these calls for unity tend to follow lines of power. Those spouting these ideologies tend to match the status quo of capitalist power; they end up supporting (even unknowingly) white institutionalized power structures and patriarchy. These calls also tend to flatten all criticism into one furious strain, as though all people offering criticism are simply “haters.” They contain within them a sense of martyrdom, of persecution, of marginalization within a marginalized movement, despite being the one who either started the discussion or who benefits most from the promotion of existing power structures.

Take, for example, the reaction to critiques of Sheryl Sandberg’s ”Lean In” campaign. Many feminist women of color have pointed out that Sandberg’s Lean In really only works for white feminists who work well within masculinized power structures. For Latina feminists, for example, Sandberg’s advice does not quite work as it does nothing to disabuse people of stereotypes of Latina women. It is also only applicable to middle class women who have the means and access to a job that has a corporate ladder. This is an important intersectional critique, because a feminism that is only applicable to women willing to work within white male power structures is a very limited feminism.

Filipovic, however, characterizes the criticism this way:

No one would be expected to speak for all of womankind. Sheryl Sandberg could write a book about gender in the business world without facing attacks from other feminists, criticizing her for having a nanny, for talking to male CEOs more than female domestic laborers, or for not representing working-class women – the takeaway being that Sandberg isn't enough of a caretaker, and therefore not sufficiently feminine. And in a more perfect world (or movement), a feminist book written by a female domestic laborer would get as much traction as one penned by the COO of Facebook.

The solution to those imperfections, though, is not to attack the women who do succeed or stand out. That only creates a movement of knee-jerk critics, who, when presented with a piece of feminist work, engage the "find what's wrong with it" mode.

Similarly, almost any time something problematic by Mark Driscoll or John Piper gets bandied about in the evangelical/post-evangelical blogging world, we get told that we’re ignoring the good things this Man of God does in favor of nitpicking, and that we shouldn’t criticize our brothers. Criticism that is legitimate is conflated “bashing” and “divisiveness.”

The similarities between the two spheres are remarkable. The similarities also mean that a solution is similar: stop caring about unity.

A good movement isn’t built from making sure that marginalized voices wait their turn while the successful white men and women move on and through. A good space for exploring what we think isn’t built from everyone either agreeing or shutting up or even phrasing their criticism in the nicest way possible. You aren’t going to win people over simply by being nice or by getting dissenters to play nice.

Embrace the questioning, embrace the criticism, embrace the messy. The messiness of discussion in both feminism and the Church is important. It is life changing. And trying to quell that by playing the martyr or implying critics are simply jealous simply perpetuates the movements of power we claim to be fighting. Quashing criticism – especially criticism from marginalized voices – in the name of “unity” is just another way to reinforce existing kyriarchy.

Every Christian and every feminist needs to be wary of perpetuating power structures which marginalize. Every Christian and every feminist does not need to agree on every little thing – the spaces between, the gaps and disagreements: that’s where life is.

If our feminism, if our theology, is not going to be bullshit, we need to understand that disagreement, criticism, discussions, and getting called to the carpet are all part of the growing pains that will help us be better. Better as feminists, better as Christians, better as people. But only if we don't throw up our hands and cry "persecution" at the first sign of dissent.

Not a Prize: The Language of Pursuit in Dating

(Many thanks to Emily Maynard, Antonia Terrazas, and Preston Yancey for the discussion that led to this post)

My brothers and me with Aladdin and Jasmine in Disney World.

If you follow me on twitter (and please do, even though I tweet a lot!), you know that I'm actively dating right now. In the past 20 months, I've had my first boyfriend, got dumped, gone out on multiple dates with other guys, kissed a few of them, been stood up, canceled dates, had dates cancel, joined meet up groups (and gotten hit on because I was the only single woman there, subsequently leaving said meet up groups) and shamelessly flirted my way into more than one movie-based make out session.

All that say, I have had a year and a half of "yeah, sure!," agreeing to many dates to see what was out there, to meet new people in this new city, to try and make a connection. I've done everything short of speed-dating and signing up for Christian Mingle. I'm what you might call "actively looking."

But, in the process, I have also refused to let my career or my education fall to the side - I have a Master's degree, I've traveled a lot, and I've got a book contract. The fact that I am looking does not detract from the fact that I am living life to the fullest while I am single. Marriage, for me, is not a prize, it is not a crown jewel, it is not something I can call into existence by being "good enough" or "having the right interest." The very language I use to discuss marriage is at odds with much of the way the Christian world discusses it.

I have heard, since I hit puberty, of pursuit, of chase, of tracking down a spouse. The very language we use to describe a relationship of marriage, especially within the Christian world, is often quite violent. John Eldredge takes of men pursuing women, of true manliness being caught up in rescuing a damsel in distress. And his wife, Stasi, discusses the flip side of that coin in the book Captivating, how it is our duty as women to be rescued.

Gary Thomas, on Ally Vesterfelt's blog this week, attempts to redeem some of that language by - I'm guessing this is the intended meaning - giving women license to pursue. He talks of pursuing a spouse as one would a job, putting as much effort into it as one would a post-college job or even a college degree. He also brings forward shopping analogies, talking about how shopping for a spouse and shopping for the right dress are similar.

But all of that still buys into the pursuit and prize, hunter and hunted language. And that very language is problematic. That language sets up marriage as a race, with a spouse, a partner bound to you for life, as your prize. It praises the value of marriage but functions to commodify it in the same breath. If I do the right work, I'll get a man as a prize - it doesn't matter which man, just a man.

I don't like that metaphor. I don't like that language. In the words of Jasmine, one of my favorite Disney princesses: "I am not a prize to be won!" When we turn marriage into a pursuit, into a life goal, into an achievement, a stepping stone to happiness, we set ourselves up for objectification of our spouse, for a poor understanding of what a life together means, and for many, many problems. Because when you're pursuing a spouse, it doesn't matter who it is as long as it is a spouse.

I'm not here for that. I'm not dating around for that. I'm looking, but I'm not looking in pursuit of some prize. I'm not interested in being married simply for the sake of being married.

I don't think it's idolatry to say that I would like to be married. I also don't think we should swing the pendulum the other direction and uproot ourselves and our lives in pursuit of an ethereal other that we don't even know how to find them or even, really, what we're looking for. We can actively look without pursuing blindly; we can date around without shame; and we can be still and know that time will come when and if it is supposed to.

In the meantime, I am not some prize for some dudebro looking for a knighthood. I'm just a person, enjoying my life, hoping that one day, I'll have a partner - the right partner - to join me.

Elephant in the Dock: The White Male As Neutral and Objective

“I don’t know anything about truth but I know falsehood when I see it and it looks like this whole world you’ve made.” – “Elephant in the Dock”* by mewithoutYou

When I first registered for college classes, I declared a political science and communication studies double major. I had a dream of being a political pundit on CNN, which, for some reason, I thought was based out of Chicago. Then I went to church camp. During that time, I felt like God was calling me to do something different, to change lives not by becoming a pundit on CNN, but by delving into theology and learning all I could from it. I knew, then, that I should change my major to theology/philosophy.**

I called the school the Monday after I got home and switched my major.

Later that week, I was talking to a friend from high school – the son of the local Southern Baptist pastor (we only had one Southern Baptist church in the city at the time). He replied that I couldn’t go into ministry with that degree because I’m a woman.

As a woman inclined toward philosophy, theology, and social justice issues, I’ve had my share of being dismissed or questioned within those spheres. I’m expected to exist apart from and without my womanhood in order to participate in those abstract discussions.

Let me explain.

If I point out that we need to talk about Jesus’ maleness when we discuss theories of the Incarnation because his maleness has an impact on the time and place in which he became incarnate, I’m told that such theology is niche identity politics, too specialized to be applicable to general, abstract, objective discussions. By my very existence as a woman in theological studies, I insert gender into a discussion that has been previously dominated by a homogenous group of straight, white, cisgender men – men for whom questions of gender and patriarchy were not relevant or pressing in their lives. I, by the very act of being a woman existing in the theological realm, frequently bring to the table a different perspective that is colored by my gendered existence.

Unfortunately, by allowing this experience to play a part in how I approach theology, I am told that I am playing identity politics, that I am failing to participate in the abstract, that I am inserting subjectivity into a previously objective realm.

This is precisely what happened in the comment section of Jennifer Luitwieler’s post on male theology bloggers and the lack of women in their theology circles. The comments turned into a benevolently sexist discussion (and I quote the man, Alastair Roberts, directly here):

“…women just don’t participate as much in the sort of conversations that dominate male blogs, conversations that aren’t so firmly rooted in a particular context or identity. We don’t purposefully exclude women from our blog rolls at all: they just aren’t participating in the general conversation to the same degree. By not including them, we aren’t denying that they have value in their own place, just that they aren’t speaking into the conversations with which we are engaged.”

I don’t fault Alastair for repeating an argument that seems quite reasonable to him. But he is also blinded by his privilege as a white male person. Notice, first, his use of the word “we.” “We” is meant to be theology bloggers, but within the context, “we” quite clearly means white male theologians who speak about “abstractions.” There is no way for I, as a feminist theologian, to be included within his “we” because “abstract” here is a moving goal post. Inserting gendered ideas into a discussion means I am no longer functioning within the abstract. If I do not sublimate my womanhood so that I may talk as a man, I will forever be the Other in this discussion.

This is benevolent sexism. It is the sexism that says “it’s not that we don’t listen to women! It’s just that they don’t write the stuff we’re interested in!” It becomes dangerous when “the stuff we’re interested in” is labeled as “objective,” and “abstract” and that this objectivity and abstractness are held up as “good." We see this over and over again in media and in excuses given for why women aren't CEOs of more Fortune 500 companies or visibly participating in the sciences. Because minority groups are somehow, as a monolith, disinterested in "objectivity," white males pawn off the blame for lack of inclusiveness on the excluded groups.

We really like to think, especially in America, the country built on Enlightenment philosophy, that “objectivity” is a thing that can be grasped and held. But we do humanity a disservice when we believe that this means the discussions we have are rooted in some world of “abstract objectivity.”

Here’s the rub: “objectivity” isn’t a thing. It doesn’t exist.

No one – not even white men – can fully separate their identity from what they are talking about. So when a white man tells me that women are not participating in the “abstract” conversation that white men are having, what I hear is that women are not willing to set aside their womanliness in order to behave as men (and people say that’s what feminists want!).

Take this for an example: what does a heart attack look like?

If you said pain radiating in the left arm, constriction in the chest, rapid or irregular heartbeat, fainting, you’re basically right...if you're describing the symptoms for heart attacks in cis men. Women experience nausea, back and jaw pain, shortness of breath, and vomiting.

You would think heart attack symptoms would be an objective science. That’s the narrative we’ve received for years and years – because the narrative has been dominated by supposedly “objective” white men. And because women were kept out of the sciences for centuries, and only relatively recently started becoming specialized doctors, study of female heart attack symptoms never really mattered because the men in charge of the studying didn’t think of how it might be different.

This is the danger – literal and figurative – of equating a white, male dominated discourse with “objectivity” and “abstractness,” even if you’re not trying to set it up as a hierarchy. Because of the patriarchal strictures within which we live and move, equating maleness with objectivity (or implying so by saying that women simply aren’t “attracted” to these “objective” discussions) demands that minorities drop their identities at the door and learn how to converse and discuss as white men in order to participate in “objective” discussion.

It is not that white men are magically more interested in objectivity, but that white men seem interested in sharing ideas with those who look and act like them, with those who share the identifiers of “white” and “male.” If a woman refuses to drop her identification and take a new one upon herself, she is dismissed as “subjective” and “uninteresting” – because she doesn’t look, act, or talk like a white male.***

We are all speaking within cultural contexts. We are all speaking from specific life experiences. No one is capable of being “objective” or participating in the “abstract.” Not even white men. If you notice, white guys, that your “abstract, objective” discussion is lacking the opinions of women, it’s not because women are somehow uninterested or incapable of abstraction. It’s because women aren’t interested in hearing the dominating white male perspective again. Come to our table. Don’t ask us to lose our selves in order to join yours.

*This song is based on the story of Mary the Elephant, a circus elephant who was hanged after killing her trainer. Disturbing image at the link, just so you know.

**I realize for many of my readers think this is silly, and I don’t know that I believe God has such specific callings for people anymore, but at the time, this is what I was convinced of.

***Note that this is referring to cisgender men. Trans* people encounter this "burden" of proving objectivity as well.

On Entitlement, Privilege and Feeling Bad: The Importance of the Icky Feelings

[Last week was a lot, and I’m still recovering, so my apologies that posting is light this week. That said, let’s dive into the issue of the week.]

Creative Commons.

I want to talk to you about entitlement. No, not “entitlement programs” that are actually necessary social safety nets, but rather the sense of entitlement to another’s person space, time, breathing room, conversation. And specifically, male entitlement to female social spaces.

An example of this recently surfaced in my regular blog reading. Over on the Green State blog, Lauren explicated a Facebook discussion she had with a few men who objected to the idea of women’s only hours at a gym.

The idea behind women’s only hours is simple – it’s much like the women’s only cars on trains in Tokyo. Harassment while at the gym (or on the train) is so bad that the company offered women’s only spaces so as to make it impossible for men to harass women. While this solution is only a bandaid in a culture of entitlement leading to harassment, the marking out of a place that is safe for women and for women only is important.

The men didn’t see it that way. It’s “reverse sexism,” they cried. It’s “punishing all men for the actions of a few!” It “violates my right to use the gym when I want!”

The punishment line struck me.

What, exactly, is the punishment here? How, exactly, are men being punished by women creating a safe space that is only for women* to access?

The only way that creating a safe space is a punishment to those not allowed in the space is if those excluded people feel somehow entitled to it. If you feel that you necessarily have a right to be in women’s spaces and to have conversations with women regardless of women’s feelings or safety, then a space where you are cut off from that would, indeed, seem like punishment.

But it seeming like punishment and it actually being punishment are two different things.

What seems to be happening in the conversation here and in similar discussions when street harassment, creeper behavior and the like are brought up is the distress of the privileged.

Realizing that you are part of a group that participates in oppression sucks. I get it. It’s hard when you’ve spent your entire life feeling happily oblivious to ways you and your group have been quietly or not so quietly oppressing marginalized peoples. Waking up to that hurts.

Sometimes, people manifest their unnamed discomfort by blaming the marginalized group. These are the gym guys – the guys who, rather than asking their fellow men to knock it off with the harassment, cast women as the evil villains in their play, women who simply want to go to the gym without getting approached by strange, sweaty men (seriously, least romantic environment ever, second only to a visit to the gynecologist).

This unabashed entitlement to women’s spaces and to women’s bodies is a symptom of privilege. And it’s hard to talk some folks through that. Many will react poorly when you try to set a boundary around your space and around your body. This, of course, only reinforces that safe spaces are necessary and boundaries are important.

But, sometimes, you get through. They finally realize that “holy crap, [marginalized groups] live in a different world!” And you feel a tiny bit relieved. Finally, they’re trying to get it. They’re willing to listen to you as a human being! As a person! We’re real people! But that relief is often short-lived, as the next hiccup inevitably comes: “Now that I know my privilege, I feel bad about my privilege. Help me to feel better. Make this bad icky go away!”

And there’s the thing: my job as a marginalized person is not to coddle the privileged. Their job (and my job as an intersectionally privileged person) is to steer into the skid, lean in to the icky. Because discomfort over an awareness of the other person’s feelings and how I might make them feel? That’s what living an intersectional existence of privilege creates. I am going to feel bad. You are going to feel bad. We should feel bad.

We want to be coddled through. We want to be told that it’s okay that we accidentally did that racist/sexist/homophobic/cissexist thing, that we’re understood and we are okay!

But here’s the thing: we’re not supposed to feel okay because what we did was not okay.

If recognizing privilege and our own complicity in oppression was easy happy fluffy unicorns and kittens, the world would look way different. But as it is, it does create discomfort. It does create distress. It feels, sometimes, that you’re being punished merely for having these privileges, like you're being told you're a bad person for being male, middle class, and white. You’re supposed to feel bad when you hurt people because that’s what unchecked privilege does.

Keep in mind, I speak of this from experience. As a white, heterosexual, cisgender woman from a middle class background, I mess up a lot. I say/do things that are privileged. And it is my responsibility, when my privilege is called out, to own up to it, to recognize that what I did was Not Okay. And I must also own my feelings of feeling bad about it, because feeling bad when you hurt someone is what happens.

I can make things worse by feeling entitled to a person’s space and feelings and comfort. Requesting that a woman comfort you because realizing that you might make women uncomfortable? That’s still entitlement to our space and our feelings. Portraying attempts to fix the balance and to correct sexist behavior as women punishing men? That’s entitlement and unchecked privilege. Complaining that affirmative action is punishment to white students? Entitlement out the wazoo.

Feeling icky about your privilege is part of being privileged. It is up to us to own that, understand it, experience it. Then we help make things better.

__________

*I’m presuming that men and women here means cisgender men and women, and it’s worth remembering that, often, spaces that are created as safe for cis-men and women are often still unsafe for non-binary people.

We Need to Talk About Kermit (Gosnell)

[Trigger Warning: brief descriptions of Gosnell’s crimes]

Last week, a tweet came across my feed announcing that the grand jury proceedings had been released and that Kermit Gosnell had gone to trial. I knew who Gosnell is, and why he was on trial. I read the tweet as nothing more than an update on a story that was a few years old – there was no doubt that Gosnell was going to go to prison for a very long time.

Then the internet decided that because they hadn't been paying attention, the media was engaged in some sort of cover up by not talking about Gosnell every day.

It seems silly to even address the idea of a media cover up in this story. Those who are going to believe that there’s a vast conspiracy here aren’t the type of people who are going to be reading my blog. And frankly, I’m uninterested in that narrative as it’s, well, entirely asinine. What I am interested in is what the Gosnell case has to say about the interplay and intersections between poverty, education, sexual health, and the State.

To be absolutely, totally, clear: I’m pro-choice. Have been for a while. I think access to safe and legal abortion is an important part of reproductive health and that the stories anti-abortion folks tell about women who get abortions are often naïve and self-serving (she’s a slut who just doesn’t understand what she’s doing!). I think allowing these narratives to dictate the abortion conversation on a policy level is a miscarriage of both mercy and justice. This is the framework with which I approach the Gosnell situation.

Here’s what we need to keep in mind:

Gosnell is a butcher, not a doctor. He was an abortion doctor in the same way a man who punches you in the mouth is a dentist. He was allowed to do what he did for so long because of a collective failure of the community government – the health department did not check in on him, despite numerous reports from other abortion doctors in the area. What he was doing – delivering live, viable infants and then killing them – is already absolutely, fundamentally illegal.

The intersectionality of this issue cannot be ignored. It is vastly important that most of his patients were poor people of color, that they were already in impoverished circumstances and that an unintended pregnancy, for many of them, meant losing their job, their housing, their social safety net. And that the tenuous position they were in also meant that it was impossible to raise funds for legal abortions or to access a clinic in their area without having to travel. To have a conversation about Gosnell’s actions is to have a conversation about race, poverty, and education.

To change the conversation into one of how “the media” aren’t talking about abortion and are purposefully covering up Gosnell is to once again ignore and erase the already marginalized. It is to take the easy road of partisan bickering rather than looking at the hard facts of the case, the institutional structures that put these people in a position where Gosnell seemed like a viable option.

That is the story here. That is what is important. The trial of Kermit Gosnell brings forward this one truth: that making abortion harder to get does not solve the problems facing a person who finds themselves pregnant when they do not want to or cannot afford to be.

Abortion is not an isolated issue. It does not happen in a vacuum. It is nonsensical to ignore the myriad reasons people get abortions and it is nonsensical to pretend that there is a singular narrative. A conversation about Kermit Gosnell is necessarily a conversation about poverty, justice, and health care.

Guest Post: When God Is Man, But You Are a Woman

(My apologies for this post being a couple days late this week. There was a scheduling hiccup on my end. But this post is definitely worth the wait.)

Danielle L. Vermeer is a social impact consultant by day and blogger on the intersections of marriage, faith, and feminism by night. A Christian feminist and longtime advocate in the anti-trafficking sector, she is passionate about amplifying the voices of women and girls and sharing stories of hope and healing. She and her husband are on a journey of two becoming one and live in the Chicago suburbs with their adorable baby-dog. Connect with her at www.fromtwotoone.com or on Twitter at @fromtwotoone.

They told me that God must be a man because men are more powerful.

I was six-years-old in the middle of playing basketball in my driveway with my next door neighbors – two boys a year older than I – when they confidently asserted their theological conclusion. Frizzy-haired, lanky, and stubborn as an ox, I retorted that God isn’t a man because God isn’t a person. God is God. They scoffed at me for not knowing what I was talking about and then we proceeded to go on with our game.

They told me that God must be a man because Jesus came to Earth as a man.

Growing up in the Catholic Church, I was taught that only men could be pope and bishops and priests and deacons and even altar servers.* Contrary to the evangelical debates on women in church leadership, the Catholic Church basically taught us that since Jesus was a man, only men could represent Him on earth in the sacraments and other important functions of religious life.

They told me that God must be a man because God calls Himself Father and Jesus calls Himself Son.

In the Catholic Church, we made the sign of the cross in the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit, not in the name of the Mother, and the Daughter, and the Holy Spirit. In some evangelical churches I attended, contemplating the (traditionally/stereotypically) feminine characteristics of the Divine was akin to heresy. God was Father. Jesus was Son. Period. No questions asked. Since the parts of Scripture that characterized God and Jesus in more feminine terms were exceptions to the rule, the rule was upheld in a remarkably literal fashion.

They told me that God must be a man because as husband is to wife, Jesus is to His Bride the Church.

When I splintered off from the Catholic Church during my preteen and teen years, the evangelical churches and camps I attended stressed the complementary relationship between men and women. They derived much of their theology from Genesis in which God created mankind in His image, male and female He created them. And since the male was created first and the female sinned first, they contrived that the man was to be the leader and protector of the more easily-deceived woman.

***

From my girlhood to my womanhood, I got the impression from both the secular world and my church traditions that all people were created equal, but men were just a bit more equal. Because if men are associated with power, salvation (Jesus), authority (God), and leadership (Church), then where does that leave me as a woman?

When they said that God must be a man because men are more powerful, they were implying that women were less powerful and inherently more vulnerable. While female people around the world are more vulnerable to abuses of power precisely because they are female, this is not a system ordained by God. Patriarchy is the not the result of men being made in the image of God, but rather of men wanting to be gods in power and authority.

When they said that God must be a man because Jesus came in male form, they were implying that the female form was not worthy of the Incarnate God. They were, of course, forgetting that Jesus incubated and was birthed through the body of a female, that God’s choice of a young, unmarried woman to bring forth the Messiah was not only a slap in the face of patriarchal norms about women, but also completely defiant of human logic.

When they said that God must be a man because God calls Himself father and Jesus calls Himself Son, they are ignoring the intensely patriarchal context of the time in which protection and inheritance passed exclusively through men. But they also are downplaying how Jesus consistently subverted the prevailing norms of the day when relating to those considered less than – women, the disabled, foreigners, children – basically anyone who who do not fit into their narrow definition of person.

When they said that God must be a man because of those verses in Genesis and Ephesians, they are literalizing metaphors – communicating truth through symbolism – that ultimately are profound mysteries to us. Paul even says so explicitly after the analogy of husbands and wives being like Christ and the Church. And as for Genesis, the Hebrew word for “female” – in some cases meaning to be perforated, punctured, bored through, or screwed – is an anatomical description from a contextualized era in which women were not considered fully human, not an ontological truth about women’s role in all places and in all times to be (passive) receivers of “something bigger than ourselves.” Elevating literal interpretations of the intended figurative translation results in false theology that says women are held accountable for their submission to their husbands while men are held accountable for their submission to God.

That’s not who I know God to be.

God is not powerful or authoritative or protective or a leader because He is like a man. God is the Father who passes on inheritance of eternal life through the Son Jesus. God is also the Mother hen who gathers her chicks under her wings.

God is all of these things and more because God is above and beyond and encompassing gender of all kinds.

Growing up, I essentially learned that if God is male, then the male is God. But as I’ve grown in wisdom and stature as a Christian and a feminist, I’ve come to rest on a profound truth: that I am made in the image of God both irrespective of and precisely because I am made female.

Why I Write About Rape Culture (And Believe It Exists)

Age 12. The waves were beating against my legs as they hung off the back of the inner tube. My arms hurt from gripping the handles as I bounced over the rough waters of the Mississippi. And my face hurt from smiling.

I wasn’t actually that happy, but I felt like I should probably look like I was having a good time – after all, this was summer, and I was out with my cousins in their boat on the Mississippi River. I figured I should be grateful. Somehow, I managed to keep a smile plastered on my face for a good 20 minutes, finally being pulled into the boat when the person driving got tired.

“Gee, Dianna, I thought you were out there for a long time, but you just kept smiling, so I figured everything was okay!”

Age 15. I’m sitting in the chair at the hairdresser’s, something my mom and I did as a mommy-daughter date every 6 weeks. My hair was short at that time, so it needed the upkeep. I didn’t know the hairdresser very well, and wasn’t particularly versed in the ways of hairdresser-client conversation. But, I felt I should be polite and nice, and that meant smiling from ear to ear the entire time as she cut my hair, right?

It was awkward and weird, but by this point, I’d been pretty well trained that a smile from a woman was disarming, was read as “polite” and that if I smiled to show that I was “enjoying” something, it didn’t matter what my actual feelings about the matter were.

Age 21. I’m in Oxford, England, and walking home by myself through city center at about 9:00 at night. I’ve just been out to an improv club for a fun night with my friend Scott, but unfortunately have to walk the 20 minutes back to my house by myself. As I’m walking through Cornmarket street, a homeless man yells something unintelligible at me.

“No, thank you!” I yell back and start walking hurriedly, wondering why I thanked the man for yelling at me.

Age 25. I’m home on Christmas break and having the worst day. My ex boyfriend is refusing to speak to me, I’m having severe anxiety issues, and I feel sick to my stomach most of the time. I realize that I’m supposed to stop at the local grocery store for something on my way home, and pull into the parking lot. As I’m marching inside, thinking about everything that’s going wrong in my life and all the stress that’s piling up to nearly unmanageable levels, the Salvation Army bell ringer – a man – notices my frown and yells, “Hey, smile, pretty lady.”

I have to resist flipping him off.

Women are conditioned, from birth, to be as unassuming and unresisting as possible, not to show displeasure and only to respond in the nicest of ways. In these tiny, subtle ways, our culture has invested itself in the public ownership of women’s bodies, to the point that they prioritize other people’s feelings over their own safety and their own perfectly valid reactions.

We all know how it looks. That female coworker who sends emails with emoticons to soften the blow: “I’m sorry but that report needs to be redone. :)” Women fret over how to let down nicely the boy who didn't bother to call for three hours even though you were dressed up nicely for your date. The simpering, groveling obeisance, the responses that put the feelings of the person hurting us over our own feeling of being hurt. The invalidation of our own pain out of some odd deference to that of everyone else.

Women are trained to act and see themselves as as receptacles for the feelings of others. Once you begin noticing it, you see everywhere. We wonder why women have trouble saying “no” directly when women who fiercely stand up to street harassers are met with yells of “bitch!” We wonder why women don’t take control of their own body when someone violates their boundaries after we’ve been instructing them their entire lives that their bodies are meant to be saved for their future husbands and that the men in their lives get say-so over what clothing women put on their body.

We condition and socialize and punish, and then claim that demure niceness and prioritizing sympathy for their abusers are central traits to what it means to be a woman. We lecture that “no means no,” and then we pick up toddlers who don’t want to be picked up and punish them for not giving their relatives a hug.

We spend our lives teaching women to take responsibility for every pain, hurt, and feeling they might cause others – an unhappy woman is cause for concern, just as an unabashedly and happily ambitious one is cause for ridicule.

And then we wonder at rape culture? We say that talking about the enforcement of boundary crossing, the policing of female behavior and clothing and connecting it to the ultimate crossing of boundaries is “sensational”? As though rape is some sort of revered thing that must only be discussed in hush tones behind closed doors?

We discount women’s words and women’s emotions in the smallest things, in the littlest interactions. When we tell women that they’re oversensitive, over-reacting, and, perhaps, sensationalizing their abuse for profit, we reinforce an attitude that pervades juries, judges, prosecutors, police forces. We reinforce attitudes that justify rape in the minds of the rapist, that result in victims living in hell.

I don’t write about rape culture because it’s sensational. I write about it because it is the stuff of my life, of the lives of people around me. I write about it because I think the way we talk about women’s bodies and the way we discuss our value matters in the larger scheme of violence against women.

How we talk about our culture matters. How we participate in relationships with the women around us matters. Because all lives matter. Rape isn't some sacred thing that we must only discuss "when appropriate" which is often code for never. Rape needs to be talked about, discussed, and seen for the horror it is. Talking about culture that condones and endorses rape, then, is the act of bringing light into darkness, of making it harder for evil to hide, of setting our foot down and saying "no, that's not okay because that is the mindset of the rapist."

It is not sensational. It is necessary.

The Case For Getting Married Whenever You Damn Well Please

This piece of satire was inspired by yet another “The Case for Marrying Young” article, this time appearing in The Atlantic.

A compelling case can be made for the advantages, particularly for women, of marrying just after you graduated high school. As a lazy writer and radio producer*, I’m disinclined to wrestle with the statistics right now though I’m perfectly capable of doing the math, but I believe a good case can be made, alternatively, for marrying whenever you damn well please.

There are costs to marrying at a very young age, a tradition the institutional Church seems intent on recommending, with articles consistently bemoaning the increasing ages of first marriage and dissecting all the causes. New research declares that I no longer give a damn what “new research” has to say about my life as a single woman. While marrying your first serious romantic partner does have benefits like having someone else on hand to open that jar of spaghetti sauce, the news isn’t all good.

While men and women are waiting longer to marry, some people are having kids outside of wedlock. While I can’t for the life of me think of why “out of wedlock mothers” became synonymous with “single mothers” even though linguistics and statistics don’t bear that out, I suppose I could allow for some concern over that idea. Because apparently single parents can’t provide stable homes for people who might grow up to become, oh, I don’t know, The President.

Also, there’s something to be said about seeing surveys about “satisfaction” and selectively reporting them as referendums about single and married life in general. And that something is “nuh-uh no way these self-reported surveys often have known biases that skew the results toward marriage as a symbol of ‘adulthood.’”

Of course, marriage has changed considerably over the course of history. In Bible times, women were married off pretty much right after their first period and didn’t really have a choice in whom they married. This was probably even the case for Mary and Joseph, the folks who raised Jesus – I mean, the whole problem of that thing was that Mary was *gasp* an unwed mother! OH NOES.

...where was I?

Oh, yeah. We’ve agreed basically by consensus of our changing culture that maybe having people with uteruses (uteri?) start spitting out babies shortly after they’ve started their monthly bleeding cycles is a Bad Idea. So we can probably adjust our culture to the shifting ideas of what marriage and family look like now without rending our clothes and grieving in sackcloth over the demise of an idealized image of the American Family That Never Was.** And it doesn’t necessarily matter if/when a woman gets married because autonomy, y’know?

Of course, the idea of autonomy seems mightily offensive to some folk. But see, when they long for the good ol' days when women and men married at 20 and settled down, what they're actually saying is that they'd like to see marriage returned to the time when women were encouraged not to educate themselves but rather to depend solely upon a man. This frequently trapped young women in abusive or just plain unhappy marriages because women weren’t educationally or vocationally equipped to leave.*** But now apparently cishet women choosing career and financial stability before (not instead of, but before) a husband, asserting their autonomy and taking the right choice instead of the first choice is hedonism. Or something. That argument is really unclear, because you'd think hedonists wouldn't get married.

Let’s insert a completely unnecessary personal anecdote, because the plural of anecdote is TOTALLY data, right?

I’m twenty seven years old. I’m single. I have two higher education degrees that have enabled me to find a stable job to support myself and pay back my educational debt, and find a fulfilling life doing what I love. I have a cat, and yes, I drink about a bottle of wine every couple of weeks, because I enjoy having a glass of wine now and then and White Zinfandel tastes good.****

What’s more is that I am happy. I am satisfied with my life. I’ve had the opportunity to travel – I’ve lived in England and Japan and travel internationally on a yearly basis for my day job. I also have the freedom to take off for a weekend if I want and an open schedule that only I dictate. I am also responsible – I pay my bills on time – and I am successful – I have a steady job, a blog with good stats, and friends I dearly love and am incredibly grateful for. I have a number of people who are my chosen family who would go to bat for me in a heartbeat (and frequently do). I know people of all different walks of life and I love that being single in my 20s has afforded me the opportunity to know them. My life that would be entirely different had I married at 19. Not bad, just different.

And you know what? I know people who got married at 19 who are happy with that decision - fewer of them than these older Christians who keep urging us to marry young. And I think the high divorce rate that correlates (but is not necessarily caused by because, gee, social trends are complex!) with an earlier age of marriage is something to be concerned about - a trend that these people who urge for early marriage seem unconcerned about or intent at sweeping under the rug.

 What's important here though is this: my life decisions are not a referendum on anyone else’s and they are not an invitation for white American Christians to pearl clutch and whine about how “times have changed” and “demographics are different.”

My life is my life, married, singled, divorced, widowed, or otherwise affiliated. Marriage, if it happens, will be the icing on the cake of a life well lived and that does not make it any less valid or any less awesome OR any less of a cornerstone that will change and alter my life.

End of discussion.

_______________

*Note that this has nothing to do with the subject at hand. I just thought I’d brag about my TOTALLY AWESOME job.

**I mean, read The Feminine Mystique, people.

***Again, read the research, people.

****Shut up, Preston.

Announcing the Faith and Feminism Book Club: SPEAK

[trigger warning: rape]

"I have never heard a more eloquent silence."

Melinda can't talk about what happened at the party. All she cares about now is getting through the ninth grade. Outcast, cut off from her friends, having trouble making new ones, Melinda lives day to day, barely able to open her mouth, barely able to even say to herself what happened.

This is the story of author Laurie Halse Anderson's SPEAK, an award-winning Young Adult novel. It is one of my favorite books, and in light of the Steubenville verdict this past Sunday, the parallels between the two cases are undeniable. So I've decided to re-read it. And I would like you to join me. This is a simple, low-key, online only book club, a chance for us to dive in to the same feminist literature, discuss the story and the ideas and the shortcomings and work out what these things mean for us.

And just so it's clear, this book has triggers for rape, eating disorders, verbal abuse, and emotional abuse. Don't try to go beyond limits if this book would be hard for you; self-care is important.

If you want to participate, I'll give you two weeks to find and read the book (this one moves quickly), and on Wednesday, April 3rd, we'll come back together for an open thread of discussion and thoughts and sharing.

If this first one is successful, we can start doing them once a month, eh? It would certainly help me be accountable with the reading I've been neglecting. Leave your suggestions for future books in the comments and click "like" on the suggestions you support so I can get an idea of which ones are popular.

The book is available at every major book store/online retailer, though I'd heartily suggest supporting your local, independently owned bookshops if you have them. Now let's get reading!

Carrying the Banner: In Which I Am Brutually Honest

The Church of the Spilled Blood - St. Petersburg

[Trigger warnings: depression, potentially triggering discussion of food, child abuse, corruption]

Working in social justice and feminism can be a bad place to be if you are prone to depression. I’ve learned the gospel of self-care over the past couple of years as an effort to keep myself from slipping into depressive funks that make it hard for me to think or write or do pretty much anything. I’ve written previously about my anxiety issues and their relationship to my need for birth control, but anxiety, unfortunately, is often coupled with depression.

My depression is not at a point where I need medication. This is not the case for everyone who suffers from depression, and I appreciate the good that medication has done for my friends.

I do have to steel myself some days and decide that I won’t be involved in certain discussions because simply dealing with the response takes everything out of me and takes all the wind out of my sails. Working in the social justice realm is hard, taxing, emotional work. Empathy can be incredibly draining and this work often has a high rate of burnout. This post is not a confession of that – I’m actually doing quite well – but rather an opportunity to talk about why this work becomes so taxing and emotionally draining. I also want to offer my solidarity with my brothers and sisters in the fight who are dealing with much worse hardships than I – in the face of the systemic and systematic institutional problems, this work often drains every emotional reserve we have and my fellow fighters have all my love and grace and I hope they remember and know that self-care is necessary.

Here’s why this sort of thing is so emotionally taxing.

I don’t pay a lot of attention to how the Reformed Christian blogging world works or how it connects back to churches. I take ideas as they come, challenge them, and respond as I can and am able. I am much more concerned with advocating for rape victims and empowering women on an individual, personal level than I am with grasping the entire narrative of the institution. Don’t get me wrong here – I am interested in the institutional and systemic injustices and involve myself in rebuking institutions insofar as I see the effects of institutionalized injustice. But studying the functions of the institution itself takes more energy and time than I can often muster.

Looking at the institutional corruption drains me of all activist energy I would have. So I concentrate on empowerment, on helping women find the words they need to understand themselves and to place themselves in context. I understand the institution insofar as it provides context, but part of the brilliance of the institutional injustice is that it is so large, so unwieldy, so incredible that looking at it, to me, is the emotional equivalent of looking at the sun. I can’t do it for too long or I am blinded.

This all shifted with Tim Challies’ post about SGM a couple weeks ago. I knew there was an institutional background that made his post even more hurtful than what it was on the surface, so I started digging. I’ve only scratched the surface, but the mass of money and financial investment SGM has in keeping these events quiet extends well beyond SGM. Tim Challies himself has a business relationship that stands to make money off of SGM continuing to have a good reputation. John Piper and Al Mohler have been either silent or actively throwing their support behind SGM’s efforts, likely because of business relationships. The Gospel Coalition has several SGM people on their board.

It feels like I’m a conspiracy theorist, like I should be writing for The Smoking Gun and appearing in an episode of X Files.

But it’s not. It’s all very real, and it’s all very disheartening.

Ignorance I can handle. Ignorance has the ability to change. Ignorance can be dispelled with the tools at my disposal  - words, a blog, the Internet, and social media. I am, after all, just a writer in Chicago, IL, sitting at my desk with a cat on my knee. Words are what I have.

But malevolent corruption? The voice that says “I know this is bad, but I don’t care because it benefits me”? The institutional protection that says vested financial interests are more important than the lives of children?

That terrifies me. That drags me into despair. That makes it hard for me to even think about cooking myself a meal.

Such is the enormity of the problem before us.

I have come to expect this large scale corruption from such entities as banks and large corporations. I have been primed for those narratives ever since Michael Douglas intoned that “greed is good” in the early 90s. The devil in the marketplace is less enormous. It is expected, and smaller.

The corruption that has caused men of God to ignore abuse, to ignore the cries of children, to claim secular authority and laws as their guides and protectors? The corruption that leads men to “protect their ministry,” even at the cost of children they are supposed to be protecting? The devil of the marketplace that tempts ministers of God to abandon their flock even while they claim they are fighting for their flock’s protection?

I’m floored by it. I cannot comprehend it. I cannot move past it. I cannot align myself with an institutional church because of it.*

But this is why I am a Christian feminist. Not simply because I was raised in the church, but because I believe in the holy justice of God. There are writers and advocates better equipped than I to discuss these institutional issues – men and women to take up the torch when I stumble, world-weary from the exhaustion and the enormity of the journey before me. Men and women taking on States, institutions, and devils in their own worlds. Men and women who bravely speak up when I – even I, who is never at a loss for words – lose my voice.

This is the church I know. The church that preaches justice for the marginalized. The church that does not let anyone fall behind. The church that pushes us to be better people but that understands the enormity of the takes before us. This is the image of God that carries me through the rough patches and the hard times – the Trinitarian God of love who is community in Themselves, the God in whose image we are made. We, the church, are the Imago Dei. We, the people, are his banner carriers. And when one of us falls, someone else will carry the banner while others help the fallen.

Institutions, principalities, powers of darkness fall before us, even as we scrabble for a foothold. Even when these institutions are the church itself. Iconoclasts all, we proclaim justice, enact mercy, and fiercely defend those trampled by the institution. This, this, is the image of God. This, this, is the glory.

_____________________

*My day job is with a large Reformed denomination that is, to my knowledge, not associated with Piper’s denomination. To be clear – I do not work for the same organization. And I need to eat. [To reiterate: I do not speak for my company in any capacity].