One of the classes I am taking in my 2nd year is Theology In The Contemporary World. One of the subjects we are studying is Feminist Theology, and this is also the subject on which I will hopefully be writing my dissertation in the third year.
I am now halfway through 'Controversies in Feminist Theology', one of the book review options which I chose, and wow, my mind is blown with the stupidity of the authors. Now obviously they are not academically stupid, but quite possibly in a similar way to the rocket scientist who cannot tie his own shoelaces. As I study and read more and more on the subject of Christian Feminism and Feminist Theology, I find I am becoming more and more anti-feminist. Some of my female friends on the course with me react to fundamental feminism with the same revulsion as many of the guys - hardcore feminism has strangely enough become the opposite equivalent of Male Chauvinism. The majority of women I know and have talked to about this stuff seem to cringe at it in the same way moderate, peaceful Muslims cringe when they hear about the latest fundamentalist nutter on the news.
Now before I go off on too much of a rant, I should make a quick distinction here; there are feminists and there are feminists. There are some feminists (sometimes called first wave and second wave) who are for equality. They are for equal rights, voting, opportunities and privileges equal to males, and if you're that kind of feminist, then so am I - equality all the way baby. However, there is also another breed of Feminist, a strange 'third wave', or 'post-feminist', who have come out with a set of troubling, non-sensical and (frankly) laughable statements concerning gender issues. Everything seems to come from the assumed position that all the world is dominated by oppressive, evil men, who intentionally keep women down, and have imprinted their poisonous opinions and perspective on everything, so that feminists become a small pocket of freedom-fighters trying to pursue liberty in a world full of monsters and bogey-men who make the world operate by such wicked tools as 'logic', 'reason', and 'objectivity'.
Crazy Statement 1 - 'Gender is a social construct'. One of the things that bowls me over about 3rd wave post-fem is this strange belief undergirding everything, that gender labels are obsolete, that they reflect only our bodies and not the inner-person, and that they are simply caused and perpetuated by society and culture. How then have different roles and behaviours become recognised between the sexes all throughout the different global cultures, all throughout history?
If gender is just an illusion, why then are human beings the only animals of which this is true? The other mammals we are aware of have no such 'social-conditioning', and yet their genders behave in different and distinctive ways from one another? You tell those swans to stop being slaves of their social conditioning. The lions of Africa are such a bunch of mindless sell-outs. The polar bears have such a sexist patristic male-dominated society - it's high time they broke free and became indistinct androgenous blobs.
Why do so many psychologists and sociologists point to the differences in our genders as being foundational to our personalities and our beings?
And how the hell can you say that there is no gender, and then base everything you do and say on the promotion of a specific gender??? It makes no objective sense at all. Which leads me nicely into the next point...
Crazy Statement 2 - 'The objective analytical reading of the Bible is a male reading and therefore sexist.' The argument that men use their minds and women use their bodies to understand Scripture is another one that has cropped up frequently. Surely we are meant to use our minds to understand, because that is the function of that organ. Even 'using the body to subjectively understand' is actually using the mind, because all those signals are sent through nerves to the mind. And to suggest that logic and objectivity are primarily male is an astoundingly sexist statement. I know plenty of women who are objective, rational and logical, and I respect them for it. There is very little explanation given to the comments about understanding truth through the body rather than the mind; so I wonder how that would work. I wonder how you would feel knowing your brain surgeon intends to be subjective and to follow the freeing impulses of her body when she decides where to stick her scalpel. How does the thought that your immigration officer is going to be subjective and impulsive instead of objective and rational when deciding your case make you feel? I would be fascinated to know how a militant hardcore ultra-feminist understands her shopping list primarily through her vagina.
OK that was a cheap shot, granted, but I think it illustrates the point - to suggest that subjectivity is more valuable than objectivity for discovering truth, is to ultimately assert that there is no solid, absolute truth, it's just what you happen to feel or decide in the moment. So really, in the eyes of a post-fem, someone could technically get a shopping list from her lesbian life partner, take it to the store, purchase whatever the hell she felt like and bring it back, and inform her partner that she interpreted the list through her subjectivity and her body, instead of her objectivity and her mind. She could claim that her interpretation of the shopping list was just as valid as a patristic, outdated colonial reading, and that the strength of their lesbian relationship was in their diversity of interpretations, feelings and opinions, and that there was beauty in the controversy. They would then embrace, and with a sense of contented sisterhood, sit down and try to figure out how they were going to eat when they had just purchased a rake, 300 rolls of toilet paper, a set of crayons, 5 copies of the Mail on Sunday, and a packet of baby wipes, when the shopping list clearly said they needed food.
Crazy Statement 3 - 'The love of Christ is primarily erotic love' - what the hell? This is straight out of one of the feminism books I have read. I don't have a great deal to say about this, other than how deeply and profoundly offensive it is to most Christians. It is on a level with releasing a live pig into a synagogue, posting a Danish cartoon of Mohammed in a mosque, or going on a shooting rampage in a Buddhist temple. Just awful. I think this one is a statement which is born out of spending too much time locked in your own head, and spending too much time ascribing scriptural authority to your own introverted feelings. Very dodgy and unpleasant ground indeed. This is an example of how elevating subjectivity and feelings to the level of 'divinely-inspired' can lead to a level of self-absorbed detatchment from reality on the level of Michael Jackson at his craziest.
Crazy Statement 4 - 'The Feminist Christian Theologian needs to expand the canon of scripture to include passages from the goddess cults and other religions'. OK, everyone is at liberty to believe whatever they want to, I concede that. However, if you reject the Biblical texts on the grounds that they are 'patristic' and corrupted by the 'male-dominated culture' in which they were written, then technically you can't really keep claiming the title Christian. This is because 'Christian' designates a person who believes in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Bible. If you reject the Bible, you cease to be a Christian, just in the same way as if you have a degree, you are a degree-holder, and if you don't, you are not. People without a degree do not have the inherent right to be called 'degree-holders' (unless they want to be sued for fraud), and people who do not accept Christian belief do not have the right to be called 'Christian'. They may, of course, believe in whatever they wish, but it is fundamentally fraud to claim the name of Christian if you are not one. The thing which scares me the most about the religious philosophy by which many of these post-fems arrive at their conclusions, is that the most important thing in their religious beliefs appears not to be the divine-revelation, it appears to be the question 'is this supportive of my feminist beliefs or not'? This leads post-fem theologians to reject scripture which clashes with their post-fem world-view, when surely, if you truly believe in the God of the scriptures, you should shange your attitude to conform to the scriptures, not reject the scriptures because they are incompatible with your attitude.
In being so exclusively female-oriented in their theology and philosophy, these post-fems have not ushered in the new age of tolerance and equality that their foremothers hoped for, they have simply become overwhelmingly exclusive in the opposite direction, with a level of bigotry and a demand that everyone agree with their point of view on a level with the most fanatical religious extremists out there. Post-feminism could be very accurately described as new-fascism.
More thoughts to come, definitely...
I am now halfway through 'Controversies in Feminist Theology', one of the book review options which I chose, and wow, my mind is blown with the stupidity of the authors. Now obviously they are not academically stupid, but quite possibly in a similar way to the rocket scientist who cannot tie his own shoelaces. As I study and read more and more on the subject of Christian Feminism and Feminist Theology, I find I am becoming more and more anti-feminist. Some of my female friends on the course with me react to fundamental feminism with the same revulsion as many of the guys - hardcore feminism has strangely enough become the opposite equivalent of Male Chauvinism. The majority of women I know and have talked to about this stuff seem to cringe at it in the same way moderate, peaceful Muslims cringe when they hear about the latest fundamentalist nutter on the news.
Now before I go off on too much of a rant, I should make a quick distinction here; there are feminists and there are feminists. There are some feminists (sometimes called first wave and second wave) who are for equality. They are for equal rights, voting, opportunities and privileges equal to males, and if you're that kind of feminist, then so am I - equality all the way baby. However, there is also another breed of Feminist, a strange 'third wave', or 'post-feminist', who have come out with a set of troubling, non-sensical and (frankly) laughable statements concerning gender issues. Everything seems to come from the assumed position that all the world is dominated by oppressive, evil men, who intentionally keep women down, and have imprinted their poisonous opinions and perspective on everything, so that feminists become a small pocket of freedom-fighters trying to pursue liberty in a world full of monsters and bogey-men who make the world operate by such wicked tools as 'logic', 'reason', and 'objectivity'.
Crazy Statement 1 - 'Gender is a social construct'. One of the things that bowls me over about 3rd wave post-fem is this strange belief undergirding everything, that gender labels are obsolete, that they reflect only our bodies and not the inner-person, and that they are simply caused and perpetuated by society and culture. How then have different roles and behaviours become recognised between the sexes all throughout the different global cultures, all throughout history?
If gender is just an illusion, why then are human beings the only animals of which this is true? The other mammals we are aware of have no such 'social-conditioning', and yet their genders behave in different and distinctive ways from one another? You tell those swans to stop being slaves of their social conditioning. The lions of Africa are such a bunch of mindless sell-outs. The polar bears have such a sexist patristic male-dominated society - it's high time they broke free and became indistinct androgenous blobs.
Why do so many psychologists and sociologists point to the differences in our genders as being foundational to our personalities and our beings?
And how the hell can you say that there is no gender, and then base everything you do and say on the promotion of a specific gender??? It makes no objective sense at all. Which leads me nicely into the next point...
Crazy Statement 2 - 'The objective analytical reading of the Bible is a male reading and therefore sexist.' The argument that men use their minds and women use their bodies to understand Scripture is another one that has cropped up frequently. Surely we are meant to use our minds to understand, because that is the function of that organ. Even 'using the body to subjectively understand' is actually using the mind, because all those signals are sent through nerves to the mind. And to suggest that logic and objectivity are primarily male is an astoundingly sexist statement. I know plenty of women who are objective, rational and logical, and I respect them for it. There is very little explanation given to the comments about understanding truth through the body rather than the mind; so I wonder how that would work. I wonder how you would feel knowing your brain surgeon intends to be subjective and to follow the freeing impulses of her body when she decides where to stick her scalpel. How does the thought that your immigration officer is going to be subjective and impulsive instead of objective and rational when deciding your case make you feel? I would be fascinated to know how a militant hardcore ultra-feminist understands her shopping list primarily through her vagina.
OK that was a cheap shot, granted, but I think it illustrates the point - to suggest that subjectivity is more valuable than objectivity for discovering truth, is to ultimately assert that there is no solid, absolute truth, it's just what you happen to feel or decide in the moment. So really, in the eyes of a post-fem, someone could technically get a shopping list from her lesbian life partner, take it to the store, purchase whatever the hell she felt like and bring it back, and inform her partner that she interpreted the list through her subjectivity and her body, instead of her objectivity and her mind. She could claim that her interpretation of the shopping list was just as valid as a patristic, outdated colonial reading, and that the strength of their lesbian relationship was in their diversity of interpretations, feelings and opinions, and that there was beauty in the controversy. They would then embrace, and with a sense of contented sisterhood, sit down and try to figure out how they were going to eat when they had just purchased a rake, 300 rolls of toilet paper, a set of crayons, 5 copies of the Mail on Sunday, and a packet of baby wipes, when the shopping list clearly said they needed food.
Crazy Statement 3 - 'The love of Christ is primarily erotic love' - what the hell? This is straight out of one of the feminism books I have read. I don't have a great deal to say about this, other than how deeply and profoundly offensive it is to most Christians. It is on a level with releasing a live pig into a synagogue, posting a Danish cartoon of Mohammed in a mosque, or going on a shooting rampage in a Buddhist temple. Just awful. I think this one is a statement which is born out of spending too much time locked in your own head, and spending too much time ascribing scriptural authority to your own introverted feelings. Very dodgy and unpleasant ground indeed. This is an example of how elevating subjectivity and feelings to the level of 'divinely-inspired' can lead to a level of self-absorbed detatchment from reality on the level of Michael Jackson at his craziest.
Crazy Statement 4 - 'The Feminist Christian Theologian needs to expand the canon of scripture to include passages from the goddess cults and other religions'. OK, everyone is at liberty to believe whatever they want to, I concede that. However, if you reject the Biblical texts on the grounds that they are 'patristic' and corrupted by the 'male-dominated culture' in which they were written, then technically you can't really keep claiming the title Christian. This is because 'Christian' designates a person who believes in Jesus Christ as revealed in the Bible. If you reject the Bible, you cease to be a Christian, just in the same way as if you have a degree, you are a degree-holder, and if you don't, you are not. People without a degree do not have the inherent right to be called 'degree-holders' (unless they want to be sued for fraud), and people who do not accept Christian belief do not have the right to be called 'Christian'. They may, of course, believe in whatever they wish, but it is fundamentally fraud to claim the name of Christian if you are not one. The thing which scares me the most about the religious philosophy by which many of these post-fems arrive at their conclusions, is that the most important thing in their religious beliefs appears not to be the divine-revelation, it appears to be the question 'is this supportive of my feminist beliefs or not'? This leads post-fem theologians to reject scripture which clashes with their post-fem world-view, when surely, if you truly believe in the God of the scriptures, you should shange your attitude to conform to the scriptures, not reject the scriptures because they are incompatible with your attitude.
In being so exclusively female-oriented in their theology and philosophy, these post-fems have not ushered in the new age of tolerance and equality that their foremothers hoped for, they have simply become overwhelmingly exclusive in the opposite direction, with a level of bigotry and a demand that everyone agree with their point of view on a level with the most fanatical religious extremists out there. Post-feminism could be very accurately described as new-fascism.
More thoughts to come, definitely...
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