Welcome gentle readers.  Today I ask of thee but a kernel of patience whilst I set up the topic at hand.

Submission-Pat-Robertson

Teh Role of teh Female in the Religious Stuff.

Religion and Patriarchy actively conspire against the female half of humanity.  We have to look no further than Christian Patriarchy over here and Islamic Fundamentalism over there to see the corrosive effects of religion on females (and everyone else).  We’ve missed talking about a segment of the world religious community that, despite a different set of ooga-booga beliefs, shockingly manages to codify and practice misogyny with great aplomb.

Orthodox Judaism.  And behold yet another  goldmine of misogyny in which to revel in! (?)  Let’s take a peek at a small sample of what we are talking about:

“During the 1970s feminist critics began to expose the absence of women’s voices within the male-dominated structures promoted by Judaism’s exclusively male-authored texts. Feminists also strove to reconstruct the lost voices of women, trying to recover evidence of women’s history and self-understanding that would allow a more diversified picture of the multiple Judaisms that have flourished throughout the Jewish past. While Judaism traditionally defines itself as a divinely revealed religion, its beliefs and practices have been interpreted and regulated almost exclusively by male authorities until the modern period. Feminist analysis has pointed out that men have created the legal systems articulated in the Mishnah, Talmud, and codes of Jewish law, and acted as supreme arbiters of its interpretation by reserving the rabbinate for men. Courts of Jewish law were historically run by male rabbis, and women were excluded as witnesses in most court cases. In rabbinic law, men may contract a marriage or divorce a wife, but women can neither acquire a husband nor divorce him. Women enter into rabbinic discourse as objects of discussion, when their ritual purity, sexual control, or marital status impinges upon men’s lives.

Many Jewish feminists have suggested that the insistence on overwhelmingly male imagery for God was a deliberate effort to strengthen the male-dominated institutional arrangements of Jewish life and undergird male authority over women in the religious and societal realms. As a result, feminist analysis views Jewish texts with suspicion for their collusion with societal patriarchy in silencing women’s voices, or, even worse, as creating patriarchal oppression and endowing it with the aura of divine sanction. At the same time, some feminists have culled biblical and rabbinic texts to find counter-patriarchal traditions that support principles of justice and equality, or voices of trickster women seeking to correct halakhic inequities (Pardes; Adler). Even as D. Setel argued that the prophet Hosea’s metaphor of Israel as God’s adulterous wife was pornographic, R. Adler noted that God’s reunion with the adulterous Israel, which violates Deuteronomic law (20:4) mandating a husband’s divorce of an adulterous wife, might be understood as a “constructive violation” of Jewish law – “the metaphor that preserves the covenant breaks the law” (Adler, 163–64).”

   I gave up with the highlighting and bolding after the whole “objects of discussion” malarkey (lobe blown).  Anyhow, now with a little background established we can talk about the Hunger Games.

    What?

     Well, I prefer not to (any movie that sells camouflaging oneself as tree-bark, justified by your cake decorating skillz, is just inane [No, really]), but the blatant misogyny at play over, of all things, the movie posters is too much to stomach.

“The final installment in the Hunger Games franchise, Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 2, was released Friday, and the posters of a bow-wielding Jennifer Lawrence are all over buildings and on billboards — unless you live in Israel.

In the largely Orthodox Jewish city of Bnei Brak and in some neighbourhoods in Jerusalem, images of the Oscar-winner have been replaced by a Mockingjay to avoid offending the locals. 

In some Orthodox communities certain images of women are considered salacious, and are routinely vandalized, reports the Jerusalem Post.”

And whoops…  Thus, we get this:

Female Protagonist - No Thank You!

Female Protagonist – No Thank You! – No Salacious Females for us!

 

This sort of pointless bullcookery is not just reserved for the Hunger Games.

“Unfortunately we are subject to unofficial coercion that forces us to be more careful,” Liron Suissa, vice president of marketing at Nur Star Media, told Haaretz. “We have had endless vandalisation and clients prefer not to take the chance.”

Fascinating stuff.  Larger society has to suffer because men with stupid hats and divine beliefs have got their knickers in a twist over seeing images of women.  They see it has their ‘holy duty’ to deface images of women because their magic book says so.  Wouldn’t be nice just for once for the status-quo to get it right at least *some* of the time.

How many axes of oppression can you count in this movie advertising misadventure?  The answer: Too damn many, it is 2015 and we should begin acting like it.

 

I’m sure a healthy dose of equality would fix things up in jiffy,  because honestly, what problem doesn’t get better with more equality(tm).

[Source: CBC.ca]

[Source: Jewish Virtual Library]