Stick figure of a caveman, from wikimedia commons.

Trigger warning: I’m fighting back against a rape apologist’s claim, and some of this material may be triggering.

Inevitably, when you write about patriarchy, you get “schooled” by some asshat who informs you that society itself is founded on the threat of rape. That men are bigger and stronger and have always been able to coerce women into sex, and that fact is the simple biological root of patriarchy that cannot be expunged by a bunch of PC feminist mumbo-jumbo. It’s an argument that persists because I think a lot of people, even feminists, find it depressingly believable. But there are a number of flaws to this argument, and I want to bring up a few of them.

Flaw #1: The assumption that society is reducible to The Average Man and The Average Woman.

This is problem for multiple reasons. First of all, the fact that human beings exist in social groups. Human survival has depended on our ability to form extra-familial groups and defend ourselves against other groups. The codes of behavior that govern interpersonal relationships within groups generally involve not abusing one another. Rape is not conducive to social cohesion. If a woman is raped, chances are she has friends and family who are capable of beating up and killing the rapist. The idea that prehistoric men could rape women without consequence is absurd. No matter how strong an individual man is, he can always be overpowered by greater numbers.

For that matter, there are plenty of individual women who are bigger and stronger than plenty of individual men.

Flaw #2: The assumption that rape is about sex and procreation.

Rape is not an efficient way to father children. If you have a consensual sex partner, and you live in a group with that partner (or more than one, if you will), you’re more likely to father more children than men who rape and risk being shunned. Which is what matters in this imagined evolutionary world we’re talking about.

And now that I’m done appealing to the raw numbers that assume the worst of human nature, let me point out that most human beings eschew violence unless it’s necessary. There’s no reason for violence to be necessary for procreation.

Most men now are not rapists. To assume that most men in the past were rapists is to project a rapist’s mentality onto the past. As for the argument that society has “wussified” men who would otherwise be rapists, I’d like to point out that you’re describing social construction and conditioning. Which is exactly what you’re trying to debunk by arguing that biology makes rape and patriarchy inevitable.

Rape is a violent crime, and it’s about domination, not sex.

Flaw #3: The assumption that physical strength is the only meaningful threat.

The reason I call this argument the “fistfight fallacy” is that it assumes a direct physical confrontation is the only form of power in human society, which is laughably simplistic. “Men have always been able to coerce women into having sex because they’re bigger and stronger, therefore patriarchy is natural” can be rebutted with a number of counter-claims:

• Women have always been able to poison men, therefore matriarchy is natural.
• Women have always been able to stab or club men to death while they are asleep, therefore matriarchy is natural.
• Women have always been able to make ropes and strangle men, therefore matriarchy is natural.
• Women have always been able to persuade men to kill other men, therefore matriarchy is natural.
• Women have always been able to kill the offspring of rapists, therefore rape is a bad evolutionary strategy.
• Women’s families and friends have always been able to kill rapists, therefore rape is dangerous.

Flaw #5: The assumption that women are sexually passive and must be coerced into sex.

This is a Victorian cultural premise projected onto prehistoric societies. This idea has a history, and the reverse was believed to be true in the Middle Ages. There has not been a continuous social consensus that males are more sexually ambitious than females since prehistoric times. It is a socially constructed idea that we inherited from the 19th century. Not even that old.

Flaw #6: The assumption that human beings are all motivated by simple evolutionary arithmetic.

Human beings have survived because we are good at organizing, banding together and communicating. We don’t have particularly threatening physical characteristics. We survive because, more or less, we get along with each other. At least, we try to focus the violence of our societies outwards (in wars with other groups) rather than inwards, because that’s how we avoid killing each other in a massive apocalyptic bloodbath. With social behavior comes a host of potential motivations: to be liked, to be popular, to be powerful, to be included, to be protected. Human societies, because they are bigger than simple family packs, are necessarily more complex. Our behaviors are not all determined by what will result in the most children. This is to say nothing of the immense complexity of human sexual attraction and behavior.

Moreover, all societies have histories of a sort, oral or written. That contributes to the complexity of our motivations: we want to be remembered well, or avenge a wrong, or improve upon the past. The best known men in history weren’t the most prolific fathers; they had influence over people who weren’t directly related to them.

It’s easy to justify patriarchy if you reduce people to the most simplistic motivations and impute to them instincts that have long been considered criminal. Despite the fact that rape has often been wrongly viewed as an injury to a woman’s father rather than to herself, it has nonetheless been considered a crime. There are enough potential pitfalls when you ascribe the norms of today to the past, especially the prehistoric past, but to ascribe aberrant, criminal, antisocial behavior of today to the past and call it a norm requires a special kind of mental gymnastics. You might as well say that society is founded on murder and theft – which, by the way, I don’t see a lot of people doing.

Patriarchy is not a biological imperative, it’s a learned ideology. Rape is also a culturally conditioned form of violence.

I don’t plan to engage with this absurd argument in the future, but I address it now because it has an unfortunate currency on the internet. Let’s not forget, though, that rape is a tool of domination and is a violent gender-based hate crime, not a tool for procreation. It is a weapon used against LGBTQ people, not just cis women, to intimidate them. The argument I’ve fought back against here is ultimately a tool used by rape apologists who want to undermine efforts to end rape by naturalizing it. That’s why I don’t plan to talk about it again. Rape apology doesn’t deserve the space. However, I want this post to exist so that the people who are tempted to believe such tripe have a few extra reasons not to buy it.

William Blake, Day of Judgment.

I’ve long practiced deliberate forgetting as a survival strategy. When something sexist happens to me, I try to recondition my mind by actively calming my body and telling myself that it’s not worth remembering. If I remember every instance of sexism, it will kill me, I reason. I might be right.

I think what’s most disempowering about sexism is not that it happens, but that it happens like a drive by shooting. There’s no way to respond before something inside you is already lying on the ground, bleeding to death. Street harassment is not a public forum, it’s a shooting gallery. I’m the duck. If you’re a woman, or genderqueer, or a minority, you’re the duck.

“I get knocked down and I get up again…” The story of the duck.

This litany of memories I don’t want and can’t train away makes me understand why doctrines about Judgment Day are so appealing. Maybe that’s how they got started to begin with. You face enough injustice in your lifetime and you start to hope there’s somebody else watching. If I could believe there was a deity paying attention to all the abuse, keeping the same list that my memory keeps despite my will, I might succeed a little more in my constant efforts to let it all go. Believe that it would all be avenged.

I don’t believe there’s a Hell waiting for the people who have wronged me, partly because I don’t believe I matter that much. I’ve hurt people myself. Perhaps the only thing that makes sense to me about the doctrine of Hell is that everybody’s supposedly going there unless they get help. Of course, that requires the great Judge of humanity to have the consciousness of the aggrieved victims. Believing that there’s a Hell and that I’m not on the bad side of it requires handing that list of grievances to a deity and trusting him to sentence them to my satisfaction. And to ignore the people who put my name on that list.

If that’s not hubris, I don’t know what is.

I’m glad there isn’t a Hell, really. Most days, when the litany runs through my head, it’s more satisfying to imagine the perpetrators set on fire, but if there was a real-world tribunal for sexism, I’d push for leniency. What I want out of my attackers and oppressors isn’t death, it’s education. I want them to know how badly they’ve screwed up, apologize, and educate other screw-ups like themselves.

I’m never going to see it happen, but maybe it does, sometimes.

Tomorrow morning, I’ll have gone back to forgetting. My church had one thing right: dwell on pain and it’ll drive you mad. So I don’t dwell. I just get sidelined every once in a while by the morbid realization that sexism – that is to say, discrimination, harassment, verbal abuse and the threat of physical attack – is going to follow me to my grave. Living with that reality is too much, so I don’t. I forget it… when I can. And other times, I talk about it.

This is the house that patriarchy built. Christian patriarchy keeps putting up scaffolds and repairing the edifices, plastering over the more offensive parts. This is why it matters that we make the very concept of women’s submission as odious to defend as slavery, acknowledge rape as a violent hate crime rather than a youthful “mistake”, prosecute domestic violence to the extent we’d prosecute an assault by a stranger on a celebrity, and silence those who would use religion as a platform for gender-based hatred. This is not the world little girls deserve to inherit.

…I get knocked down.

From wikimedia commons.

I want to recommend this recent post on A Sober Second Look:

A Sober Second Look: On othering and “feeling sick”

Posters and commenters in particular in some of these [fundamentalist survivor] blogs (and others like them) sometimes use a sort of short-hand that expresses that certain ideas, practices and institutions are oppressive:

• a fundamentalist, controlling Christian community is a “fundystan”
• any oppressive, hyper-controlling church or group is a “taliban”
• conservative Christian teachings (especially on women’s roles) are a “mental burka”
• to question and reject said teachings is to “throw off the mental burka”
• Hepzihah House is “Hezbollah House”
• and so on

Basically, any media word/part of a word that is associated in one way or another with Muslims is equated with oppression, violence, cruelty, or danger, regardless of what the word means in the language(s) or community(ies) that it originally comes from.

A lot of ex-fundamentalists struggle with finding the language to express what happened to them. I certainly had no idea that there was such a thing as a community of ex-fundamentalists – maybe there wasn’t – until I found No Longer Quivering in 2009. Up until that point, I figured I had basically invented leaving, because I’d never met another person who talked about going from a faith like mine to life outside the bubble.

Christian fundamentalism is a strange thing. It’s simultaneously visible and loud – like the Duggars, or conservatives calling for religious exemptions for birth control coverage – and hidden and dismissed. Many Americans can’t begin to imagine Christians being violent, dangerous, oppressive or cruel. Christianity has a privileged place in the US (and probably in many European countries, Canada and other predominantly Christian areas) in that its violence is seen as the exception, whereas the violence in Islam is seen as the default. (For example, the shooting of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller has not been framed by the media as “Christian terrorism” but as a “lone wolf” tragedy, despite the Christian anti-abortion ideological engine that regularly churns out rhetoric calling abortion providers mass murderers and inciting violence against them.) The fact that Muslims are obliged to describe their faith as “peaceful” illustrates that disparity.

But it’s an error to refer to all things oppressive in Christianity in relation to Islam, when we do not also refer to the positive aspects of Christianity in relation to Islam. The two faiths do bear similarities, but they are not cheap facsimiles of one another. To understand veiling, you have to listen to veiled women. You have to accept that you don’t know why they veil until they tell you, and even then you might be listening with prejudices that distort what you’re hearing.

I’ve written against veiling before as part of my writing against the modesty doctrine. I don’t claim that it’s necessary to avoid making judgments at all about the rightness of a gendered clothing practice. But I have tried to start by listening, to see if there is a rationale to Muslim veiling that is different from the rationale of the Christian fundamentalist group that demanded I never cut my hair (as a form of veil), never wear pants or makeup, etc. So far, the main problem I have with veiling/covering across both religions is that it’s typically linked with sexuality and “modesty,” and isn’t required of men. But as a Christian fundamentalist woman, I never had to worry about someone judging me racially (the way Islam has acquired a quasi-race status in discrimination) and I never had anyone consider me dangerous. Nobody ever questioned my right to assert myself as a Christian. I was assumed to be a Pentecostal fundamentalist, and I won’t for a moment pretend that’s anything like being assumed to be a Muslim fundamentalist. So I can understand that wearing hijab has meanings that Christian covering does not. And I can understand the desire to reclaim veiling as a statement of religious freedom, even if I disagree with it on a gender basis.

I would also like to acknowledge that Vyckie at No Longer Quivering and Cindy, who was referenced in the post, have spoken up about the need for the spiritual abuse survivor network as a whole to re-examine the messages they’ve received about Islam. I’m sure my own thinking on matters of Islam isn’t perfect yet, either. I want to help promote the message A Sober Second Look brought up, and I also want to help create a culture of mutual and perpetual learning and improvement. Cindy is not a “bad person” for the statements she made – indeed, I respect her and her work a great deal. We all have work to do in order to think and speak more fairly and accurately, and it takes time and effort to find our blind spots and deal with them. I’d like to give kudos to A Sober Second Look both for speaking up and for being gracious with her audience as they learn from her post, and to everyone whose world got a little bigger by reading.

From wikimedia commons.

Occasionally, I get asked whether or not I ever actually left my old fundamentalist church. My story on No Longer Quivering followed my journey up to the first year of college. I’ve wrestled with how to explain what happened in a proper narrative form, because the circumstances that led to my cutting ties completely with the church ranged from financial to emotional to practical to ideological. There’s not a clear, linear story from here on out, just a constellation. But I’ve decided that it’s high time to tie up the loose ends and explain how, exactly, I cut and run.

When I first went to college, my mother still picked me up for our weekly drive to church. In fact, the first semester I was at college, I had to petition my professors for special permission to go on a trip to Sabino Canyon, AZ, a “holy place” (I use the term loosely) for believers of the Message of the Hour. It was the site at which William Branham claimed to receive important revelations from God, and my whole church was renting a plane and going to see it. I may yet write about this experience in the future. Suffice it to say that, for the first semester of college, I was living peacefully in the dorm six days a week and then being wrenched out for an hour-long drive to hear about the end of the world from my pastor, just like I had been hearing for years.

Something happened, though. Moving out of my parents’ house made a huge difference in how I perceived church relative to the rest of my life. Since we attended church weekly and my mother listened to Branham’s sermons all week, I had been up to this point immersed in the Message. It was always on the brain, either from hearing sermons my mother played or looking at the Hoffman’s Head of Christ on our wall or just seeing the Message books scattered about and feeling guilty if I hadn’t read one recently.

Until college, I only experienced normal, mundane life occasionally, like when snowstorms canceled church and I was out of touch with church people for more than a few days at a time. I fell in love with everyday life every time, because it was so rare to stop thinking about the end of the world, my own guilty conscience, and the perils of the Rapture. Moving away to college removed that constant anxiety, allowed me to immerse myself in mundane life completely. Coming out of that state of relaxation to go to church was suddenly even more jarring than it was on those rare occasions when I let myself forget before. I was effectively living in two different worlds, and the college world was full of nice people who weren’t worried about whether nuclear bombs would drop the next morning.

I started to realize that going to church made me sick, so I dealt with the problem with the best passive aggressive tools in my collection. When final exams started to bear down and my workload got intense, I told my mother I couldn’t spare the time to go to church. Gradually, the pattern we had established (where going to church was the default and I had to ask to be left behind) reversed (so my mother would call to ask if I was coming to church) and I stopped altogether. I did this so slowly that I didn’t think of myself as “leaving” for another six months, at least. I was too afraid to even imagine “leaving” as an option yet.

While I was away, the song leader began mailing me CDs of the sermons I was missing. I stacked them in the bottom drawer of my desk in the dorm and felt enormously guilty whenever I looked at them. But I realized that I had no desire to hear them. They were threatening, somehow. Then, over spring break, I sneaked them all into my mom’s house and left them there. I told myself I was getting some space to think about what I really believed, because I wasn’t feeling the convictions so strongly anymore and I was absolutely possessed with the idea of living an authentic life, being honest with myself. I told myself I was just thinking it over because the alternative was too scary: I had heard the horror stories about youths leaving the church and winding up addicted to drugs, or with cancer, or in some other dire spot that was the spiritual consequence of blaspheming the prophet of God.

During this time, I made friends with a Catholic and an atheist. The Catholic was determined to get me to talk about my faith, which was the last thing in the world I wanted to do. All I wanted to do was hide. I was careful to say that I respected the beliefs of my church despite how unsure I was about my own relationship to it, because to say anything critical would mean to blaspheme the Holy Spirit by speaking ill of God’s modern work. Every time my Catholic friend insisted on questioning me, I emotionally curled up like an armadillo and tried to avoid dealing with the implications of what we were talking about. My Catholic friend did me a world of good, as much grief as I gave him for trying. I needed to be challenged, as much as I didn’t want to be. His simple curiosity was not meant to tear down the pillars of my faith at all, but that’s what happens when you shine a flashlight through swiss cheese. It became impossible to ignore the holes.

In the meantime, I began to realize that the kindest people in my life were at college, not church. I experienced love and acceptance at college, not church. I was respected at college, not church. And so on. I wondered why the spirit of God seemed to be everywhere except his house.

After a full academic year spent nursing these questions against my will, I took the hardest step. I decided not to go back. That week, I went to the mall and bought a pair of jeans – they were the wrong color and about four inches too long, but they were my jeans. The first pair of pants I had worn since I was six years old. Pants were liberation. I saw the pants as a radical statement of honesty: Hey, God, I don’t believe wearing skirts is spiritually necessary. If I’m wrong, it’s up to you to convince me, not anybody else.

A financial crisis set in that spring that threatened to keep me from continuing my degree. Then both of my parents became grievously ill. This compounded stress caused me to turn to my one “best” friend, the person I was sure was in my corner: Sven. The boy I’d sworn I loved despite not being allowed to love, according to the emotional purity doctrine that says you can’t form attachments to the opposite sex unless you’re getting married to that person.

He let me down.

That strange, deep, driving force that had been pushing me to live authentically bubbled up and said, with the clarity of a real human voice, He does not care about you.

Driving that revelation home was the statement one of my roommate’s friends made to me earlier in the academic year, as I fumbled to explain how I could be emotionally committed to someone without actually dating them. We’re not allowed to date, I had said, knowing I made no sense, but we’re sort of understood as together. “No, you’re not,” said the friend candidly. “If he was your boyfriend, he would call himself your boyfriend. He would call you his girlfriend. You’re single.”

This reality check, just like the curious poking of my Catholic friend, made me very angry. It tore down the fantasy I had built to protect myself from a harsh truth: that I didn’t really have the support I thought I had in church. People cared about me, but not that much. I was dispensible. I had wanted to believe in a love that didn’t exist, because the alternative was too scary: before college, I’d had nowhere to turn.

A card drifted in on the mail from a girl I had never gotten along with, telling me she sent her love and was concerned about my spiritual health because she hadn’t seen me at church in a few months. I didn’t answer. It was becoming clear that my value to the people I had grown up with was in my conformity, in my continued presence as part of the flock. Only one person reached out with a genuine, “I miss you,” to which I responded as best I could. The rest just watched me go.

The farther I got away from the regular dosage of fear I received over the pulpit every Sunday, the more contrived and illogical my old faith seemed to be. Not the presence of God – I was sure I felt that more at college and alone in the woods than I ever had at church or listening to sermons – but the doctrinal contraption that had been built to contain it.

I realized that I only believed the Message of the Hour because I was scared out of my wits. I was told the world was ending, that it was nigh impossible to make the Rapture, and that the only other way to avoid Hell was to give my life as a martyr in the Great Tribulation. I had consented to everything else – skirts-only, courtship, purity culture, the modesty doctrine – as a bargain to save my life. Once I realized that my life wasn’t actually in danger, the whole structure fell apart.

And that’s how I left, without realizing I was leaving until I was gone.

From wikimedia commons.

I have been teaching as part of my graduate school career for more than a year now. It’s intense work. Some find it invigorating and exciting; I find it grueling. Teaching engages the same part of my brain that writing about the Religious Right does; it forces me to listen carefully to ideas I find distasteful, to be willing to poke around in the nuts and bolts of those ideas until I’ve found the root of the problem, and then point others at that root and ask them to think about how to extract it. Teaching is about unsettling things and making people uncomfortable with their own assumptions.

Teaching and activism were areas that felt immediately connected to me the moment I pushed open a classroom door and awkwardly looked around at my students. The first course I taught was a “race and ethnicity” credit for my university’s liberal arts system, and one of the first weeks was about gender. Incidentally, that week was the hardest, and remains the hardest for me to handle in every course since. To my students, I probably appeared a bit hyper. Maybe they chalked it up to the coffee I always brought to class. Inwardly, I was bracing for every sexist comment I’ve ever heard and desperately afraid of losing my cool. I imagined myself bursting into tears, because yelling at students isn’t typically the kind of breakdown I have to fear from myself. (Fundamentalist girls – like most girls, really – aren’t allowed to be angry, so we learn to turn it inward.)

This past fall, the fatigue of teaching and the fatigue of online activism (discussions, debates, and general “awareness”) dovetailed perfectly, and I started to realize why I was feeling that the social justice networks I was reading had become somehow toxic. The reason is overexposure and the absence of a visible result.

A commenter on my previous post wrote about the term “mansplaining”:

Its analgous to concepts like “white privilige”–in fact I’d like to coin a word that would reflect the way white people (I am white) are often eager to explain racism or not racism to non white people, or eager to share newfound historical discoveries to people who are still living this reality in their present. After you’ve had several dissussion with someone–and they happen prety frequently on the internet–where some idiot demands you go back to first principles and re-argue something like equality, or labor pains, with him you need a convenient short hand for why you aren’t going to bother.

I can relate to this. My posts on modesty last year drew months of commentary like, “But shouldn’t women dress to respect themselves?” (See these posts for my answer.) When you’ve been thinking about a concept for a long time, and even more so when you’ve been engaged in deeper and deeper conversations about the root of the problem, coming back to the surface is a jolt. And it becomes harder and harder to distinguish between innocent curiosity, proud ignorance, or open hostility. You’re just suddenly dealing with someone who has no idea (or doesn’t care) that he or she is repeating an extremely offensive cliche. Everyone who’s ever said that discriminatory line melds together with this person into a big shadowy Enemy who can’t be taught. “Women are just naturally more sensitive,” said Every Man Ever!

But Every Man Ever never said that, because Every Man Ever doesn’t exist. He, like Every White Person Ever, is a construction that we activists inevitably make when we start recognizing the same discourses reiterated over and over. But it’s not a construction that’s helpful. I don’t think “mansplaining” is useful, and I don’t think a similar term for people demonstrating their white privilege and ignorance would be useful, because these words target something that isn’t the problem. Being white isn’t a problem, nor is being a man. The problems are arrogance and ignorant, inconsiderate behavior, not the identity of the speaker.

I recently saw this roll across one of my newsfeeds:

“If your activism makes your oppressor feel comfortable than maybe you should reevaluate your activism”

My badass professor Dr. Zwissler 

We were talking about Slutwalks, when she dropped that truth bomb. “Don’t get my wrong, I want to dance at the revolution, but I don’t want my oppressors dancing with me”. 

It’s a strange thing to observe in social justice media, because I had thought that we were all more or less on the same page about what the Enemy and the Oppressor are. They aren’t people. We know we can’t win the war against sexism or racism by rounding up and killing white men, so why do we still act like people with privileged identities are the oppressors rather than privilege itself and the discriminatory ideas that unexamined privilege produces?

I much prefer the logic here, attributed to Abraham Lincoln (probably erroneously):

“Do I not destroy my enemies when I make them my friends?”

And, for that matter, the Bible:

“For we wrestle not against flesh and blood, but against principalities, against powers, against the rulers of the darkness of this world, against spiritual wickedness in high places…” Ephesians 6:12

This probably sounds like smarmy, spineless, kindergarten stuff to a lot of people. It’s not like these aren’t cliches, too. But I’d argue it’s the more accurate and optimistic of the two views. Unless we have converted at least some of those who first approached us as oppressors, I don’t think there will be a revolution where we’ll have to choose dancing partners.

When your oppressor is a set of ideas or discourses, changing people’s minds is how you know you’re making progress.

Which brings me back to the problems with internet activism: overexposure and the inability to see a result.

On the internet, you deal with people superficially. Typically you make a statement and people respond to it. You don’t stop and learn about who they are. You interact only with their opinions, and opinions are one-dimensional. They either agree or disagree with your own opinions. And sometimes they have really bad reasons for disagreeing, like ignorance and privilege. You get one shot, basically, at saying The Right Thing that will check their privilege and make them see the light. At least, that’s what it seems like. Realistically, though, you have a 50/50 chance of getting through to them, and it has nothing to do with what you say. It has everything to do with whether or not they’re willing to learn.

As a teacher, you spend whole semesters with people, seeing them at least once a week. You establish a rapport. There are people, even then, who aren’t willing to learn, but you stand a greater chance of reaching students because you have a relationship with them. You also approach them with professionalism and goodwill, and they (hopefully) approach you the same way. This is not true of internet activism, where you have to deal with trolls and with people who clicked by having never heard of you and having no intention of learning anything. So it’s easy for online activists to get fed up, and start building walls:

• “I don’t have to explain this to you. It’s not the duty of the oppressed to explain their suffering to the oppressor.”
• “You have no right to be offended. You have to be selfless when the underprivileged are talking, and not take it personally when they attack your identity.”
• “No one cares about your pitiful white/male/first world problems.”
• “No, I don’t have to be ‘nice.’ You have no right to expect me to be nice when I’m dealing with your ignorance.”

I won’t dispute that some of these are valid points, but they aren’t terribly useful, either. I’ve seen requests for further reading met with “I don’t owe you an education,” which only alienates people who are genuinely trying to learn and might turn out to be allies. (Yeah, I know that “ally” is a disputed term, but I have yet to see a better one for someone who helps a cause that isn’t “theirs” by birth.) What this spells to me is burnout. Burnout is what I feel every time I encounter the modesty debate, when I feel the need to respond to the same old assumptions and find myself repeating what I’ve already said thousands of times. It doesn’t matter if my interlocutors are strangers; the debate is so well-worn that it feels like intellectual trench warfare.

On the internet, because people blend together into an unwashed sea of opinions, you just keep seeing the same sexist or racist cliches popping up over and over again with different names. They become The Unteachable Oppressor, and you get sick of engaging with them. And you’re right: you don’t have to engage with them. You don’t owe them anything. Owning that right to silence is an important part of your activism, after all. My commenter above said of “mansplaining” that “you need a convenient short hand for why you aren’t going to bother.” I disagree. You don’t need an excuse. You can just walk away, close the window, really write off that encounter and say, I am not going to teach this person anything right now. That’s entirely within your rights as an individual.

It’s okay not to make a difference in every encounter. One activist cannot do it all. But it helps to remember that people’s minds are changing. Just because the supply of ignorant comments seems endless does not mean that there is no change taking place. When you teach, you sometimes get to see minds change. You start to see people grappling with their own privilege, coming to more nuanced perspectives. You don’t get to see that on the internet, because most of the time, you never hear from that person again. But sometimes they do change. Sometimes they disappear after you’ve explained something, or sent them a link, or told them a phrase to google, and they do that reading on their own and change their minds. But you’re none the wiser, so all you remember is that ignorant comment they made and how many times you’ve heard it before. Overexposure.

But the right reaction to that overexposure isn’t to respond with another set of cliches and condemnations. Because that’s where activism and teaching are supposed to intersect: if you consider yourself an activist, you’ve voluntarily taken on the job of fighting ignorance. Let’s not underestimate how exhausting, irritating and frustrating that job is. Let’s not expect immediate results. And let’s pause to think about whether our responses are coming from a creative, constructive place, or from burnout.

For my own part, I’ve had to turn off some channels for sanity’s sake, because getting caught up in the ever-rolling waves of anger wasn’t making me a better teacher, just a tired person.

As a daughter of the Christian Patriarchy movement, raised on baldfaced messages of female inferiority, I was starting several decades behind most proto-feminist girls. I had no idea what to do with sex workers’ rights or fluidity in sexuality and gender identity, and those were the things that most often featured on Feministing, the only place I knew to look for definitions of feminism. I had to start at a much more rudimentary point: the basic equality of men and women. Mary Wollstonecraft. John Stuart Mill. Abigail Adams.

Having no theoretical understanding of the internalization of oppression, I hardly knew how to refute arguments that women are inherently nurturing and maternal, when the messages came more often from other women than from men. I’m not even entirely sure mainstream culture has figured this out yet. My experience told me they were wrong, but my empathy told me I didn’t know everything. I was inclined to believe the other women when they told me that they were nurturing and maternal, and doubted myself instead. How could I know I wasn’t just some sort of demon-possessed freak?

As I grew more familiar with different strands of feminist thought, I grasped onto anti-essentialism as the first piece that made sense. That women and men aren’t just one thing because they happen to be women or men. I had never wanted to be identified as a woman first. I wanted people to listen to my words, not look at my body. I won’t for a moment claim that this didn’t result from constant assessments of my breeding potential and reminders that being sexually attractive to men was the excuse for keeping me subordinate. But there it is.

The real revelation was that this wasn’t a consensus in feminism. That there were people who claimed to be feminists who actually believed in things like female superiority, female pride, and some kind of essential divine femininity or mother goddess. It’s not my job or my interest to defend the bounds of feminism against them, although their message didn’t appeal to me at all. Now, though, at least in my corners of the internet, we seem to be stuck in a moment of simple identity assertion as political activism. Something that’s useful, I’m sure, in some circumstances, is some kind of default to which everything must return. And I find this hugely problematic. Because when I was growing up in some of the most patriarchal circumstances Christian North America has to offer, that kind of labeling was what reinforced the hierarchy of inequality.

The women who took the most pride in being feminine, who boasted the most about the special role women play in society and how their gifts are the most unique, were the women who had the least power. They were the most aggressive social police toward nonconforming women like me. They were also the ones who said the most cutting things about men behind their backs. Things so nasty and dismissive that they shocked me, the daughter of an abuser who certainly had no charitable illusions toward the roles of husband or father. The things they said about their baby boys were the most horrifying, because it was obvious they’d emotionally withdrawn from their sons, marked them as enemies before they had even left their bodies.

I never understood the impulse to be proud of being a woman. It was a fact of my life. It was the position from which I operated in the world. I didn’t choose it. I had a hard time wrapping my mind around patriotism, too, for the same reason – wasn’t your nationality just something you were born into? Why all these emotions about it? Wasn’t it a neutral fact? Maybe every naive child thinks this. But I think there’s still a grain of truth there. Unexamined love of place or identity is clannish, tribal, whatever you want to call it. It’s the kind of the thing that makes you fight people you may not need to fight.

So maybe I haven’t moved away from anti-essentialism. Maybe that’s outdated these days. In that case, leave me right here in the past where at least I feel ideologically consistent. Because I know that the world I grew up in isn’t fair and never was. And every single person there contributed to it continuing to be unfair. But if I pretend that I’m locked in some kind of battle against the men in my church – even that one sad, deluded man who founded my church and spoke the hateful misogynist rhetoric in the first place – if I allow myself to make cruel, essentialist claims about men, then I have lost my feminism and become a reactionary bigot myself.

Which brings me to that atrocious word, “mansplaining.”

I get what it means. I don’t get how people can use it in good conscience.

There are other words for the experience. I’ve been describing it all my life, as it’s happened all my life. Just in case someone reading doesn’t know, “mansplaining” is what some feminists call it when Person A (usually a man, apparently, though this hasn’t been my experience) explains something to Person B that Person B already knows extremely well, as though they’d never heard of it before. Sometimes the definition is as short as “explaining someone else’s experience to them like you’re the real expert in the room.” For instance, if you’re a veteran feminist, this very explanation could be construed as “mansplaining,” because I’ve assumed that someone reading this won’t know what it is.

I’ve heard the term “mansplaining” defended because the “history” makes it okay. That men are supposed to intuit that it’s not about them unless they’re actually doing the mansplaining. I call bullshit. And here’s why:

History can only take you so far. As social justice activists, as feminists, we are supposed to be creating the culture that the next generation inherits, shaping the default consciousness of the future as we dismantle the bad parts of the consciousness we inherited. I say that a feminism that uses – nay, creates - words like “mansplaining,” reducing all men to the worst qualities some of them display, is a feminism that no longer believes it can win. It’s a feminism without hope. Because “mansplaining” requires an assumption of male privilege to make sense. And using “mainsplaining” on some level seems to be an admission that you don’t expect male privilege to go away. You expect that word to continue to make sense.

When you coin a new word, you create something that has a life beyond the present moment. And if you coin a word like “mansplaining,” make it common parlance, you’ve ceased to describe and started to prescribe the way that people will think about gender relations in the future. You’ve dug a trench that virtually ensures that men in the future will react to a perceived attack and then be told they’ve no right to react, because of “context” and “history.” When the truth is, that word is an essentialist attack. You’ve also ensured that women will continue to expect that treatment from men, because it’s “mansplaining,” not “male-privilege-splaining” or “patriarchsplaining.” It’s no different from words and phrases we’ve worked so hard to dismantle, like “women’s work” and “effeminate.” Or the assumption that women will just “understand” than there’s such a thing as a generic “man” or “mankind” that includes them.

I really believe that the world can be made more equal. That male privilege – and white privilege, and other privileges – can be equalized. But I don’t think we can do it with a vocabulary that includes things like “mansplaining.”

Besides all that, it just sounds bloody awful. Whatever happened to plain old “condescension”?

Further reading, if you want it:

Here’s another suggestion – that we use “downsplaining” as a less gendered alternative – and a different argument supporting the change. It’s worth your time if you’re interested in this sort of thing:

Why We Need to Change “Mansplain”

From wikimedia commons.

I’ve spent the past few years very plugged in to social justice media. When I get my news, for good or ill, it’s about the progress or regress of the social issues I care about. The rest of the time, I don’t pay attention. Issues that don’t elicit an intellectual or emotional response in me don’t rise to the surface, because they don’t show up on the blogs I read or the pages of friends with similar interests. This model for receiving news has taken a bit of a toll on me lately. I’m tired; tired of reacting, of imagining, and of trying to solve the problems that stream in unceasingly from all sorts of media. And because my sources are so similar, when there’s an issue, I hear about it approximately 347 times before the next thing takes its place.

In an effort to remedy this emotional fatigue, I’ve been looking for sources of affirmation and hope. I’ve been trying to figure out where people go for healing. But I’ve found that when I look for inspirational messages, what I get are thinly veiled guilt trips and commandments. These things do not heal.

Here are the so-called affirming messages I find floating around in society:

-Give until it hurts, then give more.
-Be selfless.
-Practice random acts of kindness.
-People have it worse than you do, so be grateful.
-You heal yourself by forgetting yourself and taking care of others.
-Impress God by being kind to others.
-”Kill them with kindness”.

There are grains of truth in some of them, but not all. Some are downright destructive. Some are as harmful to others as they are to the doer. I could pick them each apart, but I’ve had enough of dissecting ideas. Instead, here is what I wish I could see in inspirational messages about kindness:

-Give of your abundance and share in your need.
-Care for yourself so that you have more of yourself to offer.
-Be kind first to those around you, even if it means confronting your fear of intimacy.
-Do what you can to make the world fairer, but don’t blame yourself when it does not eliminate unfairness.
-Care for others and yourself together; you’ll find that you have more of the same needs than you think.
-Be kind to others for their sake, not the sake of an external observer (or the observer in your own mind).
-Do not use your kindness as a weapon; then it ceases to be kindness and becomes manipulation.

I fundamentally do not believe in effacing yourself for the good of others. The world is not divided into the selfish and the selfless – perpetuating that myth only gives power to those who manipulate. We aren’t the enemies of our better selves; preserving our dignity does not hinder our ability to empathize and to help. Selflessness is not a virtue, it’s a trap. It’s designed to take away your power, and without your power you can do no good for others.

Women protest against rape in Delhi.

E.J. Graff at The American Prospect writes, in Purity Culture is Rape Culture:

Too many people still conceive of rape as a man’s overwhelming urge to enjoy the body of a woman who has provoked him by being attractive and within reach. As is true in many “traditional” cultures, much of India still imagines that the violation was one against her chastity…. But conceiving it as primarily a sexual violation places the burden on women to protect their bodies’ purity. But seen from a woman’s own point of view, rape is quite different: It’s punishment for daring to exist as an independent being, for one’s own purposes, not for others’ use. Sexual assault is a form of brutalization based, quite simply, on the idea that women have no place in the world except the place that a man assigns them—and that men should be free to patrol women’s lives, threatening them if they dare step into view.

Readers here will find Graff’s argument familiar. I’ve made it before. So has Sarah Moon. So has Libby Anne, more than once. Simply put, in cultures that glorify female chastity, a woman’s sexual “purity” is considered of greater value than her right to an independent existence. This attitude creates a culture of victim-blaming, which is the definition of rape culture: a culture that excuses rapists and blames women for their own victimization.

This is precisely why it’s dangerous to argue that women ought to dress modestly to avoid male temptation. Doing so perpetuates the lie than men can be tempted beyond their ability to resist, and frames their acts of violence and depravity as inevitable results of forces beyond their control. Doing so creates an environment in which rapists can operate.

Nun of That (2009) – “A blast for you and a blasphemy!” movie poster. This picture has nothing to do with anything. I just found it hilarious.

*Trigger warning: Personal talk about fasting with a (mostly controlled) eating disorder to follow. Please don’t read if you think this could harm you. I do not recommend fasting as a healthy habit for eating-disordered people as a category. The work I’ve done over the years to know my triggers means I’m assured that fasting itself won’t become an addiction or compulsion for me, but it might have done in years past. If you find something of value in fasting or what I’ve said about it, please use it in love and knowledge of – and respect for – your own body.

I never fasted for religious purposes as an evangelical-fundamentalist kid. Gluttony, along with sloth and arguably greed, had fallen off the list of deadly sins before my church got started. I was familiar with the concept of fasting, however, and had seen several adults practice it.

Fasting occupied a strange place in the spiritual cosmos of my church. It seemed exotic, a remnant of Judaism from our roots – not that any of us understood Judaism beyond the level of Charlton Heston’s Ten Commandments. When adults in my church fasted, they did so in part to remember that they were under the covenant of grace, not law. Fasting was therefore important because it was optional.

As an apostate, it would be typical for me to highlight the potential hocus-pocus dimension of the practice. For example, people fasted in my church during periods of mourning and distress. Some said it was a way to get God’s attention, to tell him that you meant business. On one occasion, a member of my church fasted explicitly in a “hunger strike” against God until her prayers were answered. Needless to say, this kind of attitude wasn’t orthodox.

I’m fasting today, but not religiously. I’m not chaining myself to a metaphorical pillar in front of God, nor am I meditating on gratitude for grace. I’m doing it for the most banal of secular reasons: I’m trying out intermittent fasting as a means of cutting down my bodyfat level.

That’s pretty much the least spiritual thing I could have said. Right?

Still, the practice of fasting occupies a place in all three of the world’s major religions. They all incorporate bodily discipline at some point in their history or the calendar year. They all think it means something more than simply not eating; none of them would tell you that it’s just a leftover practice from days of famine. They would mostly tell you that it’s about singleminded focus, dedication, commitment and discipline.

I don’t have much of a personal religion these days. I’m a member of a Unitarian Universalist church, which I love, but I’ve deliberately left a crater where my doctrinal core used to be. I don’t want to be one of those deadly certain people anymore. I’d rather be surprised at the afterlife than go in with a dog-eared map and a headlamp. So what does a secular person like me, fasting for totally shallow, cosmetic reasons, have to do with religious fasting?

Well, it’s an opportunity to put into practice one thing I do believe: that spirituality is nature. What I do with my body is always a spiritual practice, whether I’m conscious of it or not. When I left my fundamentalist church, I made a commitment to this life, to be aware of living it rather than waiting for it to end. So the fact that I’m fasting has got me thinking: what could it mean, spiritually, to withdraw from food for a while?

Here are a few things that it could mean for me, personally.

I’m an eating disorder survivor. Food and I have an abusive-codependent relationship. If I could divorce food without dying, things would be a lot easier on me. Because of that whole “starving to death” thing, though, I can only take temporary breaks from the fights, the bickering, the humiliation and the decadent make-up sex – err, binges. Normally, I manage this state of affairs pretty well by building boundaries: focusing on what my body can do (weight lifting), getting angry about the injustice of beauty standards that tell women they don’t have the right to take up space (thanks, feminism!), just eating the damn cookie and then doing something else to distract myself (compromise).

But those boundaries are electrified fences, and sometimes I run out of juice. Enter fasting. By deciding ahead of time that I’m not going to think about food for a set period of time, I’m effectively locking the door behind myself and leaving the food demons in their prison. Fasting is a chance to experience life without compulsion, obsession and anxiety about food. I can feel hungry without going into a panic about what to eat that will satisfy but not overindulge; I know I’m going to eat later, and I’m going to return to electrifying those fences. I’ll eat something reasonably healthy, I’ll probably throw in a dessert, and then I’ll go push some iron around and feel powerful. But for now, I don’t have to worry about it. This strange state of affairs – the emptiness of that part of my brain that’s usually reserved for food anxiety – can only be healing. It’s like procrastination that actually helps. I’m putting off food, literally, so I can handle it better later. 

As a result of this lessened anxiety, I have time to think philosophically about what I’m doing. Why am I interested in cutting bodyfat? Well,if I’m honest, it’s mostly about conforming to a beauty ideal. How do I feel about that? What makes me want to do that? Why do I want my body to be smaller?

As a feminist, I ask myself these questions all the time, but usually with guilt: I shouldn’t be ashamed of my body! I should be embracing my curves! Fighting the system! Being the change I want to see in the world! … Blech, I don’t want to embrace this. I’m a bloody tool of the patriarchy.

Asking those questions spiritually, though, means coming at them from a different angle. It means taking a break from judging myself and asking the deeper questions: What is my body for? What are my goals for it? How does this thing I’m doing right now help me feel better satisfied with my body? How does it help me advance those goals? Does it help me connect or push me farther away from the web of life of which my body is living proof?

Could I ask those questions without fasting? Sure. I tend not to, though, because I’m so caught up drawing my boundaries and worrying about fortifying them.

As a matter of principle, I resist spiritualizing weight loss as a goal. I’ve only seen it before as an excuse for Christian patriarchs to use words like “discipline” and “duty” and “sin” (sometimes they do drag out the gluttony for their own greedy purposes) to bully their wives into looking like models. I utterly reject this. Weight loss isn’t a spiritual goal. It’s not that important for most people. It doesn’t determine character or prove spiritual fortitude. Attempts to make it so are often exploitative, even abusive.

My aim here, therefore, isn’t to spiritualize the goal. It’s a secular goal, a small one, an unimportant one – both my spirituality and my politics demand that weight loss not have any relationship to character. What I am doing, though, is making use of this religious tool I’ve picked up – the stillness and discipline of fasting and meditating – to get to know my own mind and body better. To get to know myself outside of my constant struggle to eat. Dude, I didn’t know I could do that.

Pants for Progress!

On December 16, 2012, Mormon feminists declared Wear Pants to Church Day, inviting participants to, well, wear pants to church, ‘in solidarity with those of us who seek gender equality everywhere, including the LDS church. And when somebody asks you why you are dressed a little differently, take a moment to tell them. This is our opportunity to make it known: “We are here! We are here! We are here! We are here!”’

The common reaction from the unchurched (or those in mainstream or liberal churches) might be “How can this possibly be controversial? It’s 2012!” But it was controversial. Some women received death threats.

Pants are often pivotal in narratives of feminists escaping patriarchy. Buying my first pair of jeans (in 2006) marked the birth of my new life. Owning a pair of pants made it impossible to pretend I was anything like the girl I’d been raised to be.

Now, Simi Lampert tells a similar story of liberation, this time from the perspective of an Orthodox Jewish woman:

I tried on pair after pair, discarding all of them in indecision, until I was left with one pair that I couldn’t seem to get rid of. Snug but soft, comfortable but flattering, they were the type of faded jeans that seemed like a staple for every other woman’s wardrobe—and now, apparently, mine. So, I threw them on the pile and paid for them. They were mine, and I was a step closer to actually wearing pants in public. It felt thrilling and normal all at the same time. I looked good. I felt good. And I was buying jeans. I felt so … normal.

Jeans, beyond pants, are the essence of comfort, the symbol of the average American. Male or female—it doesn’t matter. If you’re American, you probably have jeans. You wear them to your family football cookouts, or whatever typical Americans do in their free time. When I wore them, I knew I wouldn’t stand out as different from everyone else, as I had for most of my life. I would be like any American girl, wearing her jeans.

When I got home, I suddenly felt nervous all over again, like a teenager afraid to come home smelling of alcohol. I hesitated, then told my mom, “I bought pants.” She turned to my sister and joked, “You corrupted her!” And that was it. Nothing more was said. Once again, I was reminded that I’m 23 and can make my own decisions, something that takes longer to sink in than it should. That step over with, I proudly showed them off to my fiancé, whose only real question was why it had taken me so long to come to the decision he knew I’d wanted for so long.

That feeling of normalcy, and the sudden sense of scandal that normalcy brings, rings true for most daughters of conservative, patriarchal religion who rethink their upbringing. Pants have significance because their absence has significance. Lampert writes:

When I would spot a man with a kippa or a woman in a skirt and long sleeves, there was an implicit understanding, an invisible head nod of recognition that only we could perceive. This social aspect, more than anything, made me appreciate the strict bindings of modesty laws, especially as my social circles grew and I began working outside the strictly Orthodox community.

Not wearing pants was a means of broadcasting group identity, and of finding allies in the sea of human bodies. Evangelical Christian women have set up a “Jean Skirt Girls” facebook page that’s clearly about far more than a simple affinity for the garments. They’re a brand. I wrote about the flip side – the exhaustion of being a walking billboard – in this installment of my story on No Longer Quivering:

Every day, I worked an eight-hour shift at Wal-Mart, and despite my best efforts to vary my wardrobe and to solicit comments on being overdressed rather than appearing strange, inevitably somebody noticed that I didn’t wear pants. “It’s Biblical,” I sighed. It was a shortcut other women had taught me to say when I didn’t want to have a long conversation about my dress. “If they’re thirsty, they’ll keep asking,” my mother and her friends had instructed. Inwardly, I was sick of inspiring thirst.

I felt as though the Holy Bible were plastered to my chest. There was nothing I could do to avoid mentioning it. I began to obfuscate when strangers and friends confronted me. “It’s religious,” I said sometimes. Other times, “I just like skirts.” As I looked around at my coworkers in cute jeans and tank tops, I felt less and less inclined to “witness” and wanted desperately just to go about my business without incurring questions from strangers.

A Sober Second Look also comments on a similar setting-apart phenomenon when she began to wear hijab as a white convert to Islam in Canada:

You could almost see the wheels going around: White woman, with white parents, from here, wearing a Muslim thingummy on her head. This does not compute. What could be the reason for this? Hmmmm…. Oh, ok, I’ve got it!

And then they would ask, “Where is your husband from?”

When I told them, then the puzzlement would immediately vanish from their faces. They thought that they had solved the mystery. My husband must be making me dress this way. Some of them would actually say, “Oh… so you wear this because your husband wants you to.” … I had become a stranger in the land of my birth. I was constantly reminded of this fact every time I stepped out of the house. I didn’t belong here any more. This was not my home now, even though it was the only home that I had ever known.

Simi Lampert has not left behind Orthodoxy; she continues to cover her hair as a sign of her marriage, she writes. Moreover, pants have become her new tzniut, her own personal symbols of modesty. The Mormon women, too, see wearing pants as a statement of equality within their faith rather than a symbolic rejection of it. So I think there’s a deeper truth here. Pants aren’t a symbol of rebellion, but of revolution (as Lampert’s article suggests). They’re about women making their lives and their faith their own.

For me, it meant leaving behind my church – because my church did not fit me. Could I imagine myself as a Christian woman, though, wearing pants to church without discarding the cross around my neck? Certainly, I can. I wear pants to my Unitarian Universalist church – and no, I’m not entirely over feeling surprised that I can. Pants aren’t about rubbing anything in the face of religion. They’re about throwing off patriarchy and owning your beliefs – religious or otherwise – for yourself.

Pants are still symbolic of power in Western culture. Not just power, but personal power. The kind women aren’t supposed to have in patriarchal religion.

Walk on, sisters.