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Thank you to Slender Means for posting this, everything below this disclaimer is hers:
This is a very long post (linked below) but it is worth reading to see what some Christians still want to teach and believe about gender roles and norms, men’s rights to women’s bodies, and women and sex. Further down the post, racist beliefs are also discussed.
When Church teaching is about rape apology and white supremacy. You want to believe that it’s delusion and that we can all laugh at it and him but he has his followers and they believe every word of it. If you have time, I suggest you go to the link at the very bottom of this post and read all of it.
The following is a quote by Douglas (Doug) Wilson, a complementarian pastor, from his book Fidelity: What It Means to be a One-Woman Man:
The sexual act cannot be made into an egalitarian pleasuring party. A man penetrates, conquers, colonizes, plants. A woman receives, surrenders, accepts. This is of course offensive to all egalitarians, and so our culture has rebelled against the concept of authority and submission in marriage. This means that we have sought to suppress the concepts of authority and submission as they relate to the marriage bed.
We cannot make gravity disappear just because we dislike it, and in the same way we find that our banished authority and submission comes back to us in pathological forms. This is what lies behind sexual “bondage and submission games,” along with very common rape fantasies. Men dream of being rapists, and women find themselves wistfully reading novels in which someone ravishes the “soon to be made willing” heroine. Those who deny they have any need for water at all will soon find themselves lusting after polluted water, but water nonetheless.
The quote is part of an excerpt posted by Jared Wilson (no relation as far as I know) to The Gospel Coalition blog, with an approving note that explains the popularity of 50 Shades of Grey and “other modern celebrations of perverted sexual authority/submission.” (h/t Rachel Held Evans.)
[via arewomenhuman]
It is one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever read. Maybe I shouldn’t be so shocked. It’s not wildly different from from things John Piper or Doug Wilson’s wife Nancy have said about submission and authority in sex.
But Wilson goes much farther than any rape apologist Christian writer I’ve ever read, and that’s a lot of people. His notion of godly sex is little more than sanctified rape. In the name of Jesus.
He also says (as Jared Wilson states in a comment defending this filth) that “rape is judgment upon a culture that does not cherish and protect women.” We should be OK with this, according to Jared, because Doug Wilson isn’t blaming rape survivors for being raped. He’s only blaming all women who want to be treated equally and all of our allies. That’s all.
[…]
A second point: Doug Wilson is not only a rape apologist; he’s also a slavery apologist. And contrary to Jared Wilson’s dismissal of commenters who repeatedly tried to point this out, this is absolutely relevant to Wilson’s teachings about obligatory female submission in sex.
Wilson is the co-author with Steve Wilkins, a white supremacist, of a pamphlet called Southern Slavery as it Was, which claims that Southern slavery “was not an adversarial relationship with pervasive racial animosity” but a relationship between “friends and often intimates”:
Because of its dominantly patriarchal character, [slavery] was a relationship based upon mutual affection and confidence. There has never been a multi-racial society which has existed with such mutual intimacy and harmony in the history of the world. The credit for this must go to the predominance of Christianity. The gospel enabled men who were distinct in nearly every way, to live and work together, to be friends and often intimates…
[WPA Slave] Narratives consistently portray an amazingly benign picture of Southern plantation life. Affection for former masters and mistresses is expressed in terms of unmistakable devotion. Testimony to the good treatment, kindness, and gentleness of many so-called “heartless slave holders” abounds. Many of the old slaves express a wistful desire to be back at the plantation.
Slave life was to them a life of plenty, of simple pleasures, of food, clothes, and good medical care. In the narratives taken as a whole, there is no pervasive cry of rage and anguish..abuses came from a distinct and very small minority. [emphasis mine]
If you can stomach any more: video [on link] of Wilson on why he’s a Paleoconfederate, why the post Civil War Reconstruction Amendments – you know, the ones that abolished slavery (in theory) and established black citizenship and voting rights (in theory) – “inverted the meaning of the Constitution,” and why the Civil War wasn’t God’s way of ending slavery and is to blame for racial animosity today.
[…]
What does this have to do with rape apologism? Firstly, both Wilson’s rape and slavery apologism hinge on that little word ”patriarchal.” He’s trying to sell a vision in which white male patriarchy rules benevolently over the rest of us, for our own good and protection.
[…]
Wilson means for us to accept a theology that revolves around authoritarian hierarchy, with white, straight, cis, Western men at the top, and everyone else knowing our proper place. We’re meant to accept that movements for racial and gender equality are actually the causes of racist and misogynist abuse and violence, and that the real root of such violence – white male patriarchy – is actually its remedy.
This isn’t just about Doug Wilson. It’s about an entire culture of white Christians who promote his teaching of sanctified rape and domineering patriarchy as godly theology. It’s about a culture that conveniently ignores his vile racism when it suits them, thinking they are remaining “neutral.” In fact they implicitly endorse his racism by promoting him as “sound and compelling” while refusing to acknowledge, much less condemn his defense of slavery. This is about an entire culture that majors in perpetuating rape culture and racism by looking the other way.
[via arewomenhuman]
Linked posts:
- Doug Wilson on The Gospel Coalition: How Christian Patriarchy Turns Sex into Rape and Pregnancy into Slavery (barefootchristianfaith.wordpress.com)
- The ‘Gospel’ Coalition? Maybe They Should Call Themselves the ‘Haunt of the Reprobate Rapist’ (zwingliusredivivus.wordpress.com)
- If This is What Christian Sex Is Like, No Thank You (patheos.com)
- Rape: A Punishment for Egalitarians? (sarahoverthemoon.com)
Yep, she is just asking for trouble isn’t she? What is her crime you ask? Going outside while female. Guilty as charged.
Ophelia Benson’s ironic comment on said video: “Tut. They’re just playing victim. They should pull their socks up and get on with it.”
It is a test of sorts. If you cannot seem to find the irony in the statement, please look at the sidebar of this blog. Under the feminist links category, please select Feminism 101.
Every once and awhile I feel the need to put information that is important into a blog post for easy reference. Today’s post is an amalgamation of the concept of Mansplaining, what it involves and how and why it happens.
Let’s start of with a definition:
Mansplaining isn’t just the act of explaining while male, of course; many men manage to explain things every day without in the least insulting their listeners.
Mansplaining is when a dude tells you, a woman, how to do something you already know how to do, or how you are wrong about something you are actually right about, or miscellaneous and inaccurate “facts” about something you know a hell of a lot more about than he does.
Bonus points if he is explaining how you are wrong about something being sexist!
Think about the men you know. Do any of them display that delightful mixture of privilege and ignorance that leads to condescending, inaccurate explanations, delivered with the rock-solid conviction of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course he is right, because he is the man in this conversation?
That dude is a mansplainer.”
Another definition: Mansplaining — you know mansplaining, right? It’s that loud, annoying, repetitive alarm call that men emit whenever they perceive a lower-status person challenging their authority — isn’t really so goddam hilarious in and of itself. This is because it is a hallmark of domination culture, because it is comprised primarily of meaningless noise (whether taken in or out of context), and because it is obfuscatory, oppressive, denigrating, sexist, and rude. It can only achieve comic status when openly mocked. Preferably by an angry mob.
More definition goodness from the comment thread:
“This is clearly a form of taxonomy, where we are classifying a form of speech. Specifically:
“the use of male privilege to justify condescending and unnecessary explanation to an equally or more knowledgeable female.”
Note 1: This applies even when the speaker has no clue that the recipient is female, and indeed when the genders of all participants are completely indeterminate.
Note 2: There is apparently some sort of “male privilege” concept which holds between two anonymous bloggers of no discernible gender.
Note 3: Some feel that this phenomenon can occur between men, though others disagree. Both sides agree that the concept that is inherently about minz talking down to wimminz because they are wimminz – even when the recipients are minz or presumed to be minz. It’s unclear whether the reverse holds true, ie, whether a valid charge of mansplaining can be upheld when the anonymous speaker is actually and/or presumed to be a wimminz – more testing in this area may be required.
Note 4: Questioning why anyone feels the need to inject sexism as an explanation into a situation completely devoid of gender roles or identity is sexist, and a form of mansplaining.
Note 5: On balance, mansplaining seems to be more of a convenient label which describes the *response* to dialog rather than the dialog itself. Overall, it seems to be a specific solution of the “why can’t [subgroup] just shut up and realize how right I am all of the time?” for cases where [subgroup] == men and [speaker] = female. Of course, many such solutions exist, including the converse for [subgroup] == women, [subgroup] == foreigners, [subgroup] == [members of hated political party], etc.
Recommend further testing to validate this hypothesis.”
Of course we need a heartwarming anecdote:
“And, as perhaps one of my all-time favorite examples of mansplaining, one time, my girlfriend and I were eating dinner with a white male human. During the course of this meal, I recounted a true story about a high school in the Midwest whose mascot used to be a racial slur for a Chinese person. This mascot was changed sometime in the early 1980s, due to members of this racial minority group protesting. After I told this story, at which many members of the dinner party were quite horrified, the white male human dinner companion misread what, exactly, everyone else was horrified about. Instead, he replied, with perfect certainty, “That is what you call Political Correctness Gone Awry,” and then proceeded to continue eating his Man Food, assuming that the conversation was over now that he had sufficiently mansplained the travesty that had occurred.
His lack of empathy aside, it was that deadly combo of dead certainty that his point of view was completely objective coupled with that incompetent assumption that he was automatically more In The Know About Things than all women present that pretty much defines the art of mansplanation. Yet, the privilege of his race cannot be discounted here, either. Oftentimes, whiteness and maleness work together to exponentially increase a man’s propensity to mansplain.
And so this instance, was also a classic case of whitesplaining, whereby a white person whitesplains how a person of color is “wrong” about something being racist against people of color. It’s the same basic idea as mansplaining- as both are grounded in the privilege of one’s identity being considered society’s default and, therefore, more objective than the experiences of Other identities.
Whereas whitesplaining is the result of the white experience being “normed,” mansplaining, is the logical result of males possessing the privilege whereby they are largely assumed to be both default human beings and automatically competent at life. If white people and men, and especially white males, are not aware of this, they are incredibly likely to wrongly assume themselves to be more competent than women and people of color at pretty much everything, up to and including what it means to live as a female or person of color in society.”
Not a bad start, and for the record if you get referred here please take the time to read and understand the concepts mentioned above, it will save everyone a lot of time.
Oh the legions of butthurt MRA’s and Nice Guys are trolling the comments on this particular video. “Dear God!,”they say,”what about the men?” can be heard reverberating the intertubes. Wednesday is going to be an examination of the series on video games from a feminist perspective. Enjoy the ride.
Short, sweet and to the point –
“Pornography is the graphic representation, not just of violence against women, but of male supremacy. It degrades all women. It erodes the humanity of all women. Porn use fetishizes violence and supports male supremacy. Porn is the expression of patriarchy. Porn use is the practice of patriarchy.”
-Twisty, from I Blame the Patriarchy.
Discuss in the comments section.
The binary view of gender is a regressive patriarchal notion that needs to be abolished and the sooner the better. The gender binary hurts women and men as people are shoehorned into roles that they are not suited for and then judged as being deficient by society according to these normative values. Gender, in fact, lies along a continuum rather than any artificial divide.
So, what explains actions like this?
“Today’s award for bigotry and intolerance goes to one Richard Floyd, a GOP State Rep. from Tennessee who has introduced legislation that would ban transgender individuals from using public restrooms and dressing rooms that are not designated for the gender listed on their birth certificates. What’s more, Rep. Floyd said in a recent interview that if he “was standing at a dressing room and my wife or one of my daughters was in the dressing room and a man tried to go in there” (by which he means a transgender person), he would “stomp a mudhole” in that person.”
Ah, here is where what sociologists and psychologists talk about when they say that gender roles are enforced by society. Here we have a supposedly sane elected individual saying on public record that he would beat someone up if they dared use the bathroom that did not match the meat-parts they were born with.
It gets worse… Richard Floyd the lawmaker in question continues with this (emphasis mine):
“Don’t ask me to adjust to their perverted way of thinking and put my family at risk. We cannot continue to let these people dominate how society acts and reacts.”
Respecting the gender your brain is programmed with is a perversion? Really? Dick, what makes you think that your conception of gender is the correct one? I mean, did someone make you president/godhead of the gender division institute and that your word IS the law? Oh wait, he is a white male and thus what he spake can only be considered “truth“.
Traditional conceptions of gender have a corrosive effect in our society with regards to tolerance and understanding people who are different than ourselves. Gender norms are in desperate need of a overhaul.
This clip is about the acceptance of same sex couples making out in public spaces. Why is it okay for hetero couples to mash face, but not when of the same sex. Gauge your reactions and how you feel about the situations presented. Examine your feelings and ask where do they come from, and are they based on rationality or just what someone told you was OK and what was NOT OK. Question those assumptions as authority has a nasty habit of being wrong.
The clip ends with a similar situation only this time the same sex couple is female. Do you think the reaction will be the same? If I can find the clip we’ll watch and see, but I can already guess the result. It is much more OK for two women to be making out because women as members of the sex class, happen to be doing sexy things appeals to patriarchal norms in society and thus is far more acceptable then two men (clearly violating patriarchal norms) engaged in the same activity.
So, when you hear people talking about sexism and patriarchy and feminism do not rationalize it away as “some topic that does not apply to you” or “those battles were won years ago.” The struggle for a genuinely decent society is still ongoing and could always use more people who are aware of the problems and their privilege and most importantly how they can make a positive difference.
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