It’s hard for me to think clearly with the gray morning sky pressing in and clouding out all happiness. It seems truly to be the fall. Leaves are really changing, although I can see that they are not as bright and clear as I always pray they will be. I know I should be praying for the world, for an end to all suffering or something, but in autumn, I cannot push aside an obsessive preoccupation with the color of the leaves, and end up using all my moments of prayer begging God for red and orange rather than brown and brown.
Anyway, apparently I was unclear on Friday, about whatever it was I was saying about Trump. And I do apologize, because I should have written the thought all the way out, instead of jumping from the particulars of Trump and Fiorina straight into a general consideration of men and women culturally. I’m sorry you misunderstood me, cough.
No really the issues roiling together in gender and feminism hold a great interest for me, unfolding as they are before my eyes both in real life and all over the Internet. The fact is, the relationship between men and women has been broken and troubled since the moment of the fall, and every gendered dysfunction that plays out, both now and forever more, is only a small and complete recapitulation of that original moment. Carly and Trump, or should I say Donald, in order to be completely fair, cannot do other than broken human nature permits. Donald cannot cease to be a boob and a knave, and he should be castigated for it. But Carly is no fair princess either. She must grind the competition under her heel, and indeed we want her to. She is running for president. It would be extremely disappointing if she didn’t. But I think what happened in the debate and the days following illustrated something crucial about the complete and total failure of feminism. And in the church, feminism is called Egalitarianism, which is why I bashed at it on Friday. It is just a broken ideal of the world, all dressed up and resuscitated for the church. However in the church, unlike in the world, the Christian can appeal to scripture, and so more can be said, more than, “this has failed and it is awful.”
Obviously, my thoughts on this subject are way way too big for me to articulate in one single blog post. I had started, in a quiet way, to write about men and women under the category Men Are Human which you can find in my archives. We do an awful lot of marriage counseling, both pre and troubled, and I’ve fallen into the way of pleading with young brides, and angry wives, “Try to think of your husband as a human being.” It is interesting to me that I should have to say this. The question preoccupying everyone of the former generation was, Are Women Human? Are they? Dorothy Sayers concludes yes and you should go read her clever little book. Women are, indeed, human. And that has been firmly and completely established in the west, but a lot of women are trying to act like it’s not. They are trying to still convince people who already agree with them. They aren’t going over to Saudi Arabia to have this conversation, the place where you can visually see that women aren’t believed to be human. They are having it here, loudly. And so, as the conversation carries on interminably, I have come all the way to the point of wondering if men are human. We say they are, but more and more it is difficult to find traces of it being so in practice.
It is my studied belief–and go on, disagree with me, but, O All Of You In Hysteria In The Comments, deal with the substance of the argument. If you get personal, I will continue to delete your comments–it is my studied belief that if once a person has announced that She Will Be Equal, she almost immediately falls into the hole of setting about to dehumanize and de-equalize the other. It’s not the fact of her declaration–it is good to be equal, indeed, God makes us equal, both in creating us in the image of the triune God, and, in salvation, refashioning us into the image of his Son–but the fact that she is insisting on equality, means that equality is not her true purpose. She was ontologically equal already, God made her so, but she is not satisfied to know this in herself. She must live it out in the margins of her life, taking for herself the domain and properties of a man. As she moves in to share, he must make room by getting out of her way.
And this should not surprise us. Because the person who demands anything at all, least of all equality, is fundamentally misunderstanding the gospel. Do not, says Jesus, take the highest place. Do not put yourself first. No, rather, take the lowest place, the place of a slave. Because the last will be first and the first will be last. I am riffing off Philippians 2 here. It’s in the bible and I highly and desperately recommend it to the person who is thinking of Christianity. You are not put in the lowest place, you willingly take the lowest place, because Jesus.
Which leads me back to Carly and Donald. See how fair and feminist I can be. We are not in the Christian realm here, and so in some way I suppose the rules don’t apply. The contest is for First, not second. A man and a woman are competing to be ruler of the free world. And see, they should be equal. We expect them to be equal. But see how they could not arrive at the point of equality. Donald made a stupid and belittling comment about Carly’s appearance. He should have not done that. This is not a beauty competition, it is to direct and rule the fast fading and decadent West. Having once made the comment, he should have just said sorry. I’m sorry, he could have said, I shouldn’t have said you were ugly. But he didn’t say that. So there they are on the debate stage. She is asked about it. If she wanted to be equal, she could have said, I wish we’d stop talking about my appearance and discuss the issues. Instead she, and I do think this was brilliantly carried off, belittled him. She said, with an arch of the brow, and a tone in the voice calculated to put him in his place, ‘the whole world understands your meaning Mr. Trump’. And they did. First he belittled her, then she belittled him. And that was the critical moment. In former times, Mr. Trump might have doubled down. But he can’t do that any more, because we have moved beyond our terrible misogynistic past. Now he has to accept the humiliation. Which he did, most cringingly.
Don’t worry, I’m going to keep blogging about this until you’re all completely exhausted. Just kidding. I will keep blogging about it, but not to the death. I have a lot of gorgeous food to make, and I wanted to say something about the true delights of my Friday Reading Day. And maybe some other stuff. Have a lovely day! And remember, keep it friendly in the comments, or I will go through and summarily delete them all. Maybe we could all try being human for the day.
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